This essay prompts us to explore how dominant temporalities work to contain racialized experiences. Engaging Say Her Name (SHN) as an archive of anti-Black policing, this essay illustrates the dis/continuous temporalities of living in (white) times of anti-Blackness. I theorize the rhetorical phenomenon of temporal containment as a specific modality of white linear time that serves to deny, ignore, or relegate racial harms to the past. I argue that discourses created and inspired by SHN are temporally contained through the “freezing” of stories about police brutality against Black women and a cultural fixation with “singular” discrete moments of anti-Blackness rather than an overlapping and unfolding singularity of violence. These two modalities lead us toward a linear politics of Black death that is both a result and form of temporal containment working to temporally erase the lived experiences of Black women and girls in and across time.

Bryan J. McCann asks us to think about the history of Gangsta Rap as instructive for engaging rhetorics of identity and embodied performances embedded in the politics of “the mark of criminality,” ...