This book offers a critical survey of film and media representations of black masculinity in the early twenty-first-century United States, between President George W. Bush's 2001 announcement of the War on Terror and President Barack Obama's 2009 acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize. It argues that images of black masculine authority have become increasingly important to the legitimization of contemporary policing and its leading role in the maintenance of an antiblack social order forged by racial slavery and segregation. It examines a constellation of film and television productions from Antoine Fuqua's Training Day to John Lee Hancock's The Blind Side to Barry Jenkin's Moonlight to illuminate the contradictory dynamics at work in attempts to reconcile the promotion of black male patriarchal empowerment and the preservation of gendered antiblackness within political and popular culture. The title examines contemporary film and television representations of black men and boys as surrogate figures of state authority, unwanted wards of state welfare, and principal targets of state violence. It argues that depictions of black masculinity in film and television are inseparable from the reproduction of the structural conditions of racial domination, and situates commercial film and television production within the broader cultural politics of a post-civil rights era United States.