Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God

Kelly Brown Douglas has never shied away from engaging the intersections of womanist thought and Black bodies as significant source materials for theological reflection. This was evident in her groundbreaking text, Sexuality and the Black Church (1999) and the more recent Black Bodies and the Black Church: A Blues Slant (2012). Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God provides a theological interpretation of Black bodies and Black religious faith within the context of American “social-cultural narratives and religious canopies” that cultivate what Douglas coins as “stand-your-ground” culture (xiii). Douglas’s central argument is that racialized anti-Black violence is premised upon an insidious interplay of larger metanarratives regarding the supremacy of Whiteness and White bodies that diminish and devalue Black life. These narratives serve to legitimate the deaths of Black men and women – a grim effect that is compounded when one also considers the rise of an increasingly violent, gun-centric culture and militaristic police force. The book is divided into two parts. The first analyzes and interprets stand-your-ground culture as responsible for the tragedy surrounding the death of Trayvon Martin. The second part of the book addresses the meaning of God within stand-your-ground culture. American stand-your-ground culture, says Douglas, can be traced to the development of a racialized notion of American exceptionalism, and the resulting construction of the Black body as a perpetually guilty body. American exceptionalism is rooted particularly in the perceived purity of Anglo-Saxon racial and religious identity. Drawing upon the writings of the Roman historian Tacitus on the supposed cultural superiority of the “Germanic” tribes who were unmixed and “free from taint” (6), Douglas links the racial chauvinism of Tacitus’ philosophy to the establishment of Anglo-Saxon identity in American culture, which was inaugurated with the arrival of the Puritans from England. As descendants of the Germanic tribes, the Puritans saw themselves as embodiments of a divine charge to establish a Protestant, Christian nation for whites. The establishment of the white nation-state furthermore necessitated the creation of laws, customs, and “legal” maneuvering meant to clearly stipulate the boundaries of race and space. Douglas goes on to attend to the construction of Whiteness as both the marker of Americanness (Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism) (39), and Whiteness as cherished property (40–44). Douglas’s attention to the juxtaposition of Whiteness and Americanism in the creation of White propertied space and place is perhaps the most critical component of the first half of the book. In Douglas’s view, Whiteness as cherished property is particularly responsible for stand-your-ground culture in that it has functioned as a social buffer meant to “insure that nothing non-white intrudes on white space” (44). Douglas therefore illustrates how Whiteness functions as a demarcation of space which not only yields deadly consequences for Black and brown bodies, but also provides insight into how Black and brown bodies are always already criminalized.