From a Duty to Retreat to Stand Your Ground

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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.