Stand Your Ground: Protecting Para-Agents of the Racial State

Stand Your Grounds (SYG) laws, which have been spreading across the states in the past decade, protect an individual’s right to use force, including deadly force, in self-defense in any situation in which they feel reasonably threatened. Specifically, SYG laws remove the duty to retreat, so that deadly force can be used as a first line of defense. Research has shown that SYG laws not only increase gun violence but specifically increase white on Black gun violence, and the acquittal of its perpetrators. I thus argue that SYG laws are one of the mechanisms by which a “colorblind” racial state maintains and perpetuates control over Black bodies through its monopoly on the processes of legitimating violence. This article uses textual analysis of the oral arguments in George Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhouse’s murder trials and evinces that these SYG trials establish three primary narratives (1) that the perpetrator of violence acted out of fear and that that fear was reasonable; (2) that the perpetrator of violence was a legitimate agent for the violence they committed; and (3) that race was not a factor in establishing either (1) or (2).