This nigger's broken: Hyper-masculinity, the buck, and the role of physical disability in white anxiety toward the black male body

On September 23, 2015, Mr. Jeremy McDole was executed by Wilmington, Delaware police officers. Mr. McDole was allegedly a threat to himself and suicidal. The police were responding to a “911 call reporting that [Mr. McDole] had shot himself.”1 The 911 caller can be heard yelling: “A man just shot himself in the AutoZone parking lot … he's fallen out of a wheelchair.”2 Mr. McDole was reported to the police as a victim, not a criminal. He was described as a disabled man with injury. A man who was suicidal; in need of help. His need, his victimhood, was not seen. He was not recognized by the police as a vulnerable person. He was seen as a Black man; a threat—a body marked for death by the danger he posed to others. This stereotype applied to his body, despite him being confined to a wheelchair. Like the deaths of hundreds of other Black males in America, his execution was recorded and subsequently released to the American public for summary judgment—just or unjust killing of a Black man