Book Review: Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies And The Justice Of God
by Kelly Brown Douglas
Publication Date: May 01, 2015
List Price: $26.00
Format: Paperback
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9781626981096
Imprint: Orbis Books
Publisher: Orbis Books
Parent Company: Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers
Read a Description of Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies And The Justice Of God
Book Reviewed by Kam Williams
“Why is it becoming increasingly acceptable to kill unarmed black children? Why are they so easily perceived as a threat? How are we to keep our black children safe?
As the mother of a black male child, I find these to be urgent questions. The slaying of Trayvon [Martin] struck a nerve deep within me. After Jordan [Davis], then Jonathan [Ferrell], then Renisha [McBride], I was practically unnerved.
I knew I had to seek answers. This book reflects my search for those answers.”
—Excerpted from the Prologue (page ix)
It seems that once a month or so, with painful regularity, another
unarmed black person is gunned down by a white civilian or white police
officer. What is the reason for this escalating epidemic? Is it really a
recent development or merely a long-hidden aspect of America's social
structure that's come to light because of the profusion of cell phones in
circulation among the population?
That's what Dr. Kelly Brown
Douglas, as the mother of a black boy, found herself wondering in the wake
of the shooting of Trayvon Martin. She also heard President Obama say that,
if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon.
That made Kelly think, “I
DO have a son, and he DOES look like Trayvon.” So, for her, the crisis was
more than a matter of mere rhetorical speculation. Not wanting her son to
become the next statistic, she heeded an urgent inner call to action.
As a Professor of Religion at Goucher College, she decided her skills
could best be put to use researching the burgeoning phenomenon. And the
upshot of her research efforts is Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the
Justice of God, an enlightening examination of the deep-seated roots of the
racist reasoning relied upon in the course of snuffing out African-Americans
lives so cavalierly.
The author opens the opus with a history
lesson, tracing the source of the problem back hundreds of years to the
birth of “Exceptionalism” in Anglo-Saxon England. Reserved for whites, that
notion enabled caucasians to adopt the concept of “Manifest Destiny” that
led to the extermination of Native Americans (relying on the rallying cry
“The only good Indian is a dead Indian”) and to the wholesale subjugation of
Africans as property.
She sees today’s Stand Your Ground law as a
logical extension of the supremacist philosophy that sustained slavery, Jim
Crow segregation, lynching and other institutionalized forms of color-coded
oppression. Apparently, part and parcel of that shameful scheme was a
“natural law theo-ideology” hyper-valuing whiteness while denigrating the
black body as “perpetually-guilty chattel.”
An iconoclastic cultural
critique indicting the doctrine of Manifest Destiny for the rationalization
of a perpetual war on African-American males.