Jordan Russell Davis

Abstract Chapter 6 closes the book with an extended investigation into how musical judgments can kill—how someone can be killed while listening to music he loves, and for refusing to turn it down when asked. In 2012, a forty-seven-year-old white man named Michael Dunn heard loud rap music coming from a nearby red car containing four black youths. He approached. Words were exchanged. A couple of minutes later, Dunn fired ten bullets at the car and killed one of its passengers, seventeen-year-old high school student Jordan Davis. Dunn claimed Davis had threatened him with a shotgun. No such gun was ever found. During the murder trial, Dunn’s lawyer, Cory Strolla, leveraged racist stereotypes of rap to paint dehumanizing (uncivilized, savage, criminal) and superhumanizing (formidable, fearsome, brawny) portraits of these youths. By contrast, Strolla depicted Dunn as someone who himself loved music, including “any type of hip-hop,” the stuff “that the kids listen to.” The chapter taps into various materials that were either purposely excluded from or inadvertently overlooked by media coverage: Michael Dunn’s jailhouse letters and phone calls, transcriptions of courtroom sidebars, pretrial documents, evidence technicians’ reports, and 911 records.