Since the genesis of films and television, disabled individuals have been marred by inaccurate and stereotypical representations (Darke 200:100). Haunting visuals of a pirate with a missing eye, hand or leg and the archetypical anti-hero with prosthetic arms and legs have been associated with malevolence and sin, perpetuating the notion that their disability is the tragic outcome of their moral depravity (Donnelly 2016). Television and media have a significant impact on societal representation, as they perpetuate stereotypes with far-fetched consequences, causing serious problems when observers are only exposed to these biased discourses (Ross 2019). These crude and one-dimensional images largely affect how society views disability. Shakespeare states,

“The use of disability as a character trait, plot device, or atmosphere is a lazy shortcut. These representations are not accurate or fair reflections of the experience of disabled people. Such stereotypes reinforce negative attitudes towards disabled people and ignorance about the nature of the disability” (1999:165).

Although disability affects people of all backgrounds, persons with additional marginalised identities or those at the intersection, such as women, people of colour, or those from specific classes, experience intersecting forms of discrimination (Tina et al. 2015:77-78) (Hill Collins and Bilge 2016) (Kowitz 2022). For the black disabled community, this means confronting both racism and ableism. A notable example of this is the eugenics programme, which “promoted themselves openly and proudly in terms of a twinned racist and ableist imaginary” (Reynolds 2022:59). Chris Bell states that there is a dearth of representation of coloured people within the disability community, and he acknowledges the white nature of disability studies. Thus, whiteness becomes an essential prerequisite for a disability identity. Chris Bell, in his Introducing White Disability Studies, says,

“White Disability Studies, while not wholeheartedly excluding people of colour from its critique, by and large focuses on the work of white individuals and is itself largely produced by a corps of white scholars and activists. White Disability Studies envisions nothing ill-advised with this leaning because it is innocently done and far too difficult to remedy” (2006:275).

Since disability has always assumed a white identity, the only place to draw comparisons between the separate categories of race and disability is from a white (disabled) person’s perspective (Grillo and Wildman 1991). This historical focus on the experiences of white individuals within the disability rights movements has led to a whitewashed field that neglects the way people of colour experience disability. This whitewashing “actively re/make(s) oppression and inequality” (Gillborn 2015:280). Viewing disability through a black lens, shows that black disabled individuals experience a double minority identity stemming from both their race and disability. Some black individuals choose to conceal their disability due to fear of further discrimination because being black and visibly disabled may instigate a moral panic among both disabled and non-disabled individuals across different racial backgrounds (Templeton 2024). By not acknowledging the presence of black disability, an impression is formed that only white disability exists and only they need to be empowered. Thus, it is necessary to implement effective strategies that consider the intersecting challenges faced by black individuals with disabilities and disseminate their stories and experiences. The paper aims to expound on the dehumanisation of black individuals with disabilities through the practice of necropolitics—a form of power that determines who may live and who is subjected to conditions of death (2003). In wielding such power, the state ultimately reduces the lives of black disabled individuals to zoē, bare life that is stripped of political and social value (1998).

Agamben, in his Sovereign Power and Bare Life, draws a distinction between two categories of recognition of life within society: bios and zoē. Bios refers to the ‘qualified form of life’ (1998:109), while zoē refers to individuals excluded from the domain of political being and only recognised as biological beings (1998:8). Any demonisation and ostracization means reducing individuals from bios to the level of zoē. Agamben draws the concept of unworthy, politically irrelevant life or the zoē, from debates on euthanasia and the treatment of people with mental and physical disabilities (1998:140-142). However, the politically irrelevant zoē can be perpetually extended in the contemporary context. Several critical disability theorists attribute the exclusion of these groups to capitalist production that doesn’t deem them useful for labour (Russell and Rosenthal 2019), resulting in their marginalisation and elimination. Additionally, in society, people decide who is valuable and worthy based on an individual’s appearance or their capacity to effectively “produce, excel and behave” (Lewis 2019). Here, the state’s impulse to not merely allow for a natural death but to actively facilitate it is evident in the two films.

Mbembe builds upon Foucault’s concept of Biopolitics to introduce Necropolitics, which is the state’s “capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not” (2019:80). Necropolitics, unlike bio and thanatopolitics, deals with “subjugation of life to the power of death” and has been instrumental in some of the most terrible atrocities of the twentieth century (2019:92). It begins with the creation of a ‘society of enmity’ through hate movements, separation, hostility and struggle against an enemy (2019:42) culminating in the desire for their extermination. Racism (and Ableism), operate as mechanisms that determine and regulate the necropolitical order and “make possible the murderous functions of the state” (2003:17). The anti-black racists devise a plethora of industrialised and dehumanising methods of inflicting death, including economic deprivation, domestic police brutality, military intervention and prisons, with minimal resistance from the victims (Mbembe 2003:17). He explains ‘death-in-life’ as the phenomenon in which a zoē is kept alive but in an injured state due to “triple loss: loss of a ‘home’, loss of rights over his or her body and loss of political status. This triple loss is identical with absolute domination, natal alienation, and social death” (2003:21). These groups are reduced to a state of bare life, with their labour and life as tools for optimising others’ livelihoods. To Mbembe, “the calculus of life passes through the death of the Other,” where the demise of a vulnerable individual becomes the cost of another’s survival (2003:18).

The concept of necropolitics prompts a revaluation of modern democracy, which, on the surface, espouses values of freedom and equality but, in reality, is blatant political calculus (2019:16). Mbembe argues that the legal system shields a few of its citizens and is weaponised against the rest (2019:). In such instances, the value ascribed to an individual’s life is often influenced by their proximity to dominant power centres. Those closer to axes of privilege are usually perceived to have greater worth, while those situated further away may find their existence more precarious (Bourdieu 1986). Subsequently, migrants, refugees, and the lives of brown, black, indigenous, and disabled people are in a ‘state of exception,’ which signifies a temporary suspension of the law, allowing the state to hold unquestioned authority (Agamben 2000:38). Necropower opens up the possibility of ‘death-worlds,’ which is “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead” (2019:92). In essence, modern democracy is no different from the tyrants of the past; it merely gives rise to novel forms of injustice.

In the contemporary discourse, a necropolitical exploration provides a real-world dimension of active necropolitics within modern power structures. Systems such as neo-colonialism, capitalism, ableism, racism, and more dictate the parameters of disposability within a society (Mbembe 2019). Such an exploration not only identifies death-worlds but also highlights their normalisation within social frameworks. Eventually, it reveals forms of resistance, survival, and care for those rendered disposable (2019:176). Paul Farmer (2015), a medical anthropologist, elaborates on a biopolitical and necropolitical continuum, stating that certain necropolitical manifestations don’t necessitate overt violence; rather, they are perpetuated through inaction, which allows certain individuals to die. While Mbembe elaborates on the forms of death in necropolitics, Lauren Berlant (2007) has examined on the concept of slow death, which is deliberate, slow, and cumulative. In the field of black disability studies, necropolitics serves as a critical lens to investigate how systems of power, namely racism and ableism, converge to mark the black disabled individual as disposable through systemic and active neglect. This framework is essential for identifying the life-and-death experiences of black disabled individuals to understand their complex reality.

In recent times, the intersection of race and disability has been highlighted in academic discourses. Ato Quayson (2007) says that the different equity-seeking groups like women, disabled people, aboriginals, dalits, and coloured people’s struggle for representation coincide. Such people gain their identity only through the gaze of the white, able-bodied, posing a problem to the aesthetic reception. Khalil Gibran Muhammad (2010) notes that budding social scientists associated racist claims that high tendencies for criminality among black people are due to their mental, moral and physical (in)capacities. During the eugenics period, Du Bois (2014) identifies how race and disability are linked in white supremacist ideologies, which generates a scientific basis that justifies the social subordination of black people. Harris (2021) adds a new dimension to the study of race and disability by framing aesthetic theories of discrimination, which provide a valuable framework for examining race and disability as intersecting areas of study and as diagnostic tools to understand how society constructs and exploits disability and racial markers. Harris emphasises the importance and necessity of collecting and sharing intersectional public data. Morgan (2023) argues that both race and disability are social constructions, and the social meanings of race have a significant impact on influencing the social meanings of disability and vice versa. Similarly, Friedman (2023) says that BIPOC with intellectual and developmental disabilities, living in more ableist and racist regions of the United States, have a lower quality of life, irrespective of their demographics. Templeton (2024) introduces the black disability threat theory, in which individuals who are visibly black and disabled cause a moral panic among both disabled and nondisabled white individuals.

In the necropolitical context, Threadcraft (2017) examines how necropolitics operates within the scope of black femicide, critically analysing how gender intersects with state-sanctioned violence. Threadcraft emphasises activists’ strategies to systematically confront official narratives that devalue black lives. Moving further away from black femicide is Caesar et al. (2022), who engage with the concept of black maternal necropolitics and examine the narratives of black mothers: the loss of their children to police brutality, their grief and loss into political action, and the continual affirmation of the worth of their child’s life. Ajari (2022) focuses on the habituation to loss and premature death as a prerequisite feature of black experience. He discusses the concept of dignity within black radicalism and its significance in resisting necropolitical structures. In a similar vein, Procknow (2024) critiques the state’s role in medically assisted dying for individuals with mental disorders. By using Mbembe’s necropolitics framework, Procknow argues that these policies entangle psychiatric individuals in death-making practices, underscoring the ethical complexities inherent in psychiatric euthanasia. Nevertheless, there has been little consideration of the susceptibility of black individuals with disability as victims of necropolitics and the resulting state-inflicted violence on them.

The discrimination due to issues related to race, disability, and their intersections persists despite growing awareness in American society and government (Friedman 2023). The paper sheds light on the depiction of black individuals with disabilities as a monstrous “other” and their violent erasure within film narratives. While there has been significant research on the oppression of individuals with disabilities, the specific oppression faced by people of colour with disabilities has been largely overlooked, particularly within the context of film representations. This raises the following questions: How do the films depict black disabled bodies as scapegoats in the justice system? At what point does an individual’s life become politically irrelevant and consequently eradicated? How is blackness weaponized in the films to justify state-sanctioned violence against disabled individuals? In addressing these questions, this article focuses on how necropolitics causes modern nation-states to render some of their people expendable by analysing John Coffey and Herbert Richardson in the films The Green Mile and Just Mercy. However, this paper is limited as it solely examines blackness in conjunction with male disability while neglecting individuals who are marginalised further by factors such as gender or class in addition to their disability.