Open AccessThe “Vigilante Spirit”: Surveillance and Racial Violence in 1980s New York
Author(s) -
Justin Louis Mann
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
surveillance and society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.781
H-Index - 46
ISSN - 1477-7487
DOI - 10.24908/ss.v15i1.5666
Subject(s) - knight , governor , politics , power (physics) , miller , state (computer science) , sociology , criminology , law , racial profiling , feeling , political science , race (biology) , gender studies , psychology , social psychology , engineering , computer science , ecology , physics , algorithm , quantum mechanics , astronomy , biology , aerospace engineering
This article details the "vigilante spirit", a term used by New York Governor Maria Cuomo to describe the seizure and execuation of state power by Bernhard Goetz in his attack on four black teenagers in December of 1984. It argues that the vigilante spirit is an expression of thoughts, feelings, and practices that produce threats and then assemble the tools it deems necessary to combat them. It further argues that the vigilante spirit, expressed by Goetz in his attack, was also encoded in various cultural texts produced in the 1980s and uses Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns as an example. By reading these two case studies together, it seeks to explain the cultural politics that underpinned racial violence in the 1980s.