From a Duty to Retreat to Stand Your Ground

This article explores the historical and ideological roots of the recent proliferation of Stand Your Ground laws (through more than half the states) and their disproportionately devastating effects on non-whites. I trace the precipitous erosion of the duty to retreat to the post-Reconstruction era, when post-war political and economic turmoil and the enfranchisement of African American men fed late-19th-century gender panic, and the legal terrain shifted to characterize a man’s “castle” and the dependents residing therein as an extension of the white masculine self. Currently, the neoliberal state’s retreat from the protection of its citizens creates a perceived need for (do-it-your)self-defense, and the technically race-neutral conception of “reasonable threat” empowers the armed citizen with justification for an immediate lethal response to black intrusions into spaces considered white.