Abstract
In Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God, Kelly Brown Douglas is a scholar, priest, and mother who is seeking answers to stand-your-ground laws, which allow the indiscriminate killing of young black boys and girls by police officers and white vigilantes. Douglas wants to be clear that her desire to reflect theologically on stand-your-ground laws is not merely an intellectual exercise; it is born out of a black mother's grief and the need to see her children avoid being lynched by an American law enforcement system. She wants to probe one particular question: What is the meaning of God for these stand-your-ground times? She asserts that we must seek to “understand the message of black faith in the wake of the deaths of Trayvon, Jordan, Renisha, and Jonathan” (xiv).
A central premise of this book is that the focus cannot be on who is killing black children with impunity. Instead, the focus must be on what is killing them. Douglas notes that individual police officers are not the root of police brutality against black and brown bodies in this country. It is an entire set of laws undergirded by a cultural way of life. For Douglas, stand-your-ground laws create a stand-your-ground culture that justifies and legitimizes the killing of black flesh for the sake of law and order, for the sake of the common good. Stand-your-ground laws merely emerge from the culture of whiteness that creates them. Douglas points out that the myth of American exceptionalism has led to the centering of Anglo-Saxon identity as the definition of what it means to be human. The long history of American racism (expressed, for instance, in slavery and Jim Crow) and the creation of whiteness as the epitome of the human have led to the dehumanization and even criminalization of nonwhite bodies. Therefore, stand-your-ground laws must be seen within this historical context as another hegemonic tool employed toward white supremacist domination.
I appreciate Douglas’s rehearsal of how theories of natural law, science, and religion contributed to Manifest Destiny, a doctrine that equated early Anglo Puritans with the New Israel chosen to inherit the Promised Land (America), which justified heinous crimes against Native Americans and Africans. I also think that Douglas’s rehearsal of the theological contradictions and complexities of the Exodus narrative and motif that liberation theologies foreground is critical, an important echoing of womanist scholar Delores Williams’s work on troubling the “liberative” character of the Exodus narrative. For Douglas, it is the work of Jesus’ message and ministry that provides the greatest liberative possibilities for the black faith tradition in response to radical injustices due to stand-your-ground laws and stand-your-ground culture. Douglas argues that the “Jesus narrative” serves as a “New Exodus” for black people that can engage the absurdities of black faith in light of the persistence of radical injustice. Moreover, her discussion of prophetic testimony attempts to remind black Christians that God provides an eschatological vision of hope, as human history is ultimately subject to God’s time in reconciling the world back to God.
Douglas’s text is a valuable contribution in the field of Christian theology to the question of police brutality and stand-your-ground laws. In terms of the format of the book, I found it very compelling. Within each chapter, Douglas offered an intellectual argument followed by personal reflection at the end of the chapter, which demonstrated the profound importance of connecting theory to practice, ideas to everyday living. One can sense the urgency in how she writes about this issue, reminding the reader that her grief as a black mother pushes her to reflect theologically on how black Christians might morally and politically engage to avoid despair.
One limitation of this text is Douglas’s general statement that the “Jesus narrative” can constitute a “New Exodus” motif in the black Christian faith tradition. However, a number of African feminist and postcolonial feminist scholars such as Musa Dube and Kwok-Pui-lan have deeply critiqued the Jesus narrative as essentially “liberative.” For instance, some narratives in relation to Jesus’ interaction with non-Hebrew women might be interpreted as non-liberative, in which these women risk themselves to morally engage Jesus’ tribal views. I think Douglas could have benefitted from the insights of these scholars who complicate interpretations of the Gospel texts as simply liberatory. Perhaps narratives of Jesus share the same complex, contradictory character as the Exodus story. Overall, this is an invaluable text for theological and social ethics on one of the most pressing social issues of our times.