As its aura of normality falls away, and its actuality becomes more widely exposed, police brutality against Black and colored minorities in the United States and elsewhere is coming into view as a form of white domestic terrorism. In contrast to the militias that dot the nation—which are rag tag until, on occasions such as January 6, 2021, they are not—this concentrated violence is organized, institutionalized, and, in principle and by community consent, regulated. Until it is not.

The images of violence unleashed on African American men and women that we have been considering may well be records of moments in an ongoing race war within the United States. If so, is a time of reckoning coming up soon, or is it already here? The intense politicization of the national iconomy charted in the preceding chapters seem to signal an acceleration in other long-standing social divisions, those based on class, geography, and ideology. But not evenly in each of these domains, and not along traditional lines. This is evident in the widespread support for Republicans by displaced industrial workers and by the divisions within the Democratic party between well-heeled elites and the working poor. Reckoning seems on the near horizon through whichever lens one looks. We have seen that imagery of all kinds has played several crucial roles within these scenarios. In this chapter, I will continue to track developments in the three image regimes we have been following, preparatory to offering some concluding remarks, necessarily provisional, on political iconomy today.

Judgement in Minnesota

Earlier I asked whether, when the cases against the officers who attended the incident at Powderhorn got to the courts in Minneapolis, the sheer force of the indexical presence in Frazier's video, its unfolding for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, along with its subsequent ubiquity on all communicative media, would make it less vulnerable to the kind of degradation that was visited upon George Holliday's video of the beating of Rodney King. Even today, the Federal Rules of Evidence, a document reviewed each year by the Supreme Court of the United States, offers no explicit statement about the ways in which courts should treat the visual evidence that comes before them.