A Critical Phenomenology of Racialized Vulnerability: Judith Butler and the Rodney King Trial

This article examines the problem of racialized vulnerability to systemic violence by engaging with the works of Judith Butler and discussing police brutality. Butler has been criticized for presupposing vulnerability as an ontological condition inherent in embodied life and obscuring the distinctive characteristics of racialized vulnerability. Wrestling with these criticisms, the article reads this presupposition as a “contingent foundation,” and it turns to Butler’s longstanding engagements with phenomenology to foreground the norms and frames that inform the ways in which vulnerability is always perceived, interpreted, and adjudicated. Expanding on Butler’s analysis of the 1992 Rodney King trial with the help of Frantz Fanon’s concept of “sociogeny” and working with the trial archives, jurors’ statements, media coverage, and King’s memoir, it outlines a critical phenomenology inquiring into the sociohistorical constitution of racial schemas that turn Black bodies into phobic objects and disproportionately expose them to violence carried out with impunity.