Stand Your Ground; Black Bodies and the Justice of God by Kelly Douglas Brown

Author:Kelly Douglas Brown [Brown, Kelly Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Theology, Non-fiction, Religion
ISBN: 9781626981096
Amazon: 1626981094
Goodreads: 25315735
Publisher: Orbis Books
Published: 2015-05-04T06:00:00+00:00

Stand-Your-Ground War and the Black Body

“[B]lacks and whites will sooner or later end by entering into conflict.”51 This is the conclusion de Tocqueville reached as he contemplated the significance of slavery in determining the limits of a relationship between white and black people. He says that slavery marked the “Negro” as inferior and essentially the “property” of the white man. Using the experience of “free” blacks in the North as an example, he says the “abolition of slavery, therefore does not allow the slave to arrive at freedom….”52 Even though in this particular comment he was referring to the reality of free Northern blacks ultimately being passed over into the hands of Southern masters, he later broadens its reference. He says, “As for freed Negroes…they remain half-civilized and deprived of rights…they come up against the tyranny of laws and the intolerance of mores.”53 To emphasize the dire predicament of “freed Negroes,” he compares their situation to that of Native Americans. He says, “More unfortunate in a certain respect than the Indians, they have the remembrance of slavery [working] against them, and they cannot claim the possession of a single spot on the soil…they lead a precarious and miserable existence.”54 De Tocqueville goes on to describe the white “fear” of free blacks. He suggests that the greatest fear is that of sexual “intermingling,” resulting in a mulatto population. He said what a white person fears most is “resembling the Negro, his former slave, and descending below his white neighbor.”55 He says that as the separation between whites and Negroes are lessened legally there is a sense of “danger” that overcomes whites in both the South and the North. The fear is so great, he suggests that “the abolition of slavery…will increase the repugnance for blacks felt by the white population.”56 It is because of this understanding that de Tocqueville concludes conflict is inevitable.

De Tocqueville's observations are incredibly prescient. He accurately described the reality of a free black body. The moment the black body steps out of its chattel space, it is an imminent threat to cherished white property. While de Tocqueville described the fear of “intermingling” in terms of sexual interaction (and as we noted in Chapter 2 this was an expressed fear, even if imaginary), he could have just as well been describing the fear of blacks “intermingling” into the free space of white people. To do such a thing suggested an equality that was intolerable. Indeed, as we have argued, it is a threat to Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism. De Tocqueville essentially describes an inveterate fear of free black bodies that consumes the “white population.” The “tyranny of laws” and eventual “conflict” that de Tocqueville describes is nothing less than the enactment of stand-your-ground culture. In essence, de Tocqueville describes the war that is declared on the black body the moment it experiences any form of social-political freedom.

It is no accident that stand-your-ground culture has been most aggressively if not fatally executed after every period in which certain “rights” are extended

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