From a Duty to Retreat to Stand Your Ground

The Sanctity of a White Man’s Castle

The 21st century’s proliferation of SYG laws represents an extreme departure from the nation’s English common law roots, which mandated retreat in the face of an attack. The Crown possessed exclusive rights to lethal violence, effectively criminalizing most forms of homicide, and citizens were obligated to “retreat, to the wall behind their back” before meeting force with force (Brown, 1991; Ross, 2007; Suk, 2009). The principal exemption to the duty to retreat was the “Castle Doctrine,” which allowed a man to use lethal force if attacked in his home. This “defense of habitation” was originally distinct from contemporary notions of self-defense, because it was grounded in a right to defend one’s home and property, as separate from one’s person (Catalfamo, 2007). And yet the doctrine of coverture, under which a woman’s legal rights were “incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband,” confirmed that wives as well as children were included in the category of property to be protected (Blackstone, 1765; Hoff-Wilson, 1991; Suk, 2009). Under English common law, the masculine self remained distinct from the home, his private property, and feminized dependents, and a good citizen tried at all costs to avoid violent conflict, even if he found himself under attack.

Given the Castle Doctrine’s long-standing exception to the duty to retreat, what accounts for the recent proliferation of SYG laws, which appear—on the surface—as appeals to citizens’ rights to personal safety and home protection? Although proponents of the laws appeal to the historical legacy of “a man’s castle”—often by referring to SYG laws as “Castle Laws”—SYG laws actually expand the militarized boundaries of home into public spaces while placing armed policing into the hands of individual citizens. ³ Rhetorical slippage equating SYG laws with Castle Doctrine helps justify the protection of property while criminalizing those whose mere presence in spaces of white dominion conjures a “reasonable” suspicion of threat. ⁴

Nineteenth-century transitions from the “duty to retreat” to “stand your ground” took place in the context of shifting racialized gender ideals, specifically anxieties around white masculine vulnerability in the wake of formerly enslaved men’s citizenship and enfranchisement. Post-Reconstruction cultural and legal shifts, based upon racialized invocations of “stranger danger,” fortified the concept of self-defense as a white man’s legal right and moral obligation. The imminent threat of the stranger—a familiarized figure of alienation and danger—has had a recurring impact on our legal terrain, providing the ideological roots of our contemporary zeal for home(land) security while obfuscating racialized regimes of exclusion and power (Ahmed, 2000).

Retreat from confrontation was a value incompatible with rugged independence, masculine honor, and the nation’s early investment in armed self-defense. The Constitutional codification of a citizen’s obligation to “keep and bear arms” in the service of a “well-regulated Militia” emerged at the intersection of anti-Federalist suspicions of big government and anxieties about the unique dangers of an American frontier, populated by “hostile” aboriginal peoples (Faludi, 2007; Malcolm, 1994). Suspicions of non-citizen strangers, who haunted the boundaries of the young nation’s appeals to sovereignty, helped legitimize the need for the Second Amendment’s call for armed collective self-defense (Waldman, 2014).

Throughout most of the 19th century, the departure from the duty to retreat was gradual, as individual states, particularly in the South and Midwest, excused from criminal prosecution white men who defended themselves and their honor with violence, even outside the formal boundaries of home. Nineteenth-century gender ideals valorized a white man’s obligation to defend himself, his dependents, and his honor, and the legal terrain shifted to characterize a man’s “castle” and the dependents residing therein as an extension of the white masculine self (Bederman, 1995; Catalfamo, 2007; Suk, 2009). By the 1870s, the command that self-defense require one’s “retreat to the wall” was incompatible with the belief in a “true man’s” natural right to “stand his ground” and to meet violence with violence.

The Simultaneous Demise of Reconstruction and the Duty to Retreat

The most precipitous challenge to the duty to retreat coincided with the demise of Reconstruction. In the wake of Civil War devastation and widespread economic turmoil, intensified by the depression of 1873, the state Supreme Courts of Ohio and Indiana delivered decisions that championed self-defense over retreat (Brown, 1991). Jeannie Suk (2009) has shown how these two landmark cases eradicated the obligation to retreat by codifying the ideology of the “true man” and the tendency of the “American mind” to perceive masculine retreat as cowardice. The decisions reveal a shifting legal terrain that gradually accommodated racialized ideals of chivalric manhood that held honor at a premium and safeguarded a white man’s capacity to engage in armed self-defense. Although the state courts did not explicitly engage questions of race, both decisions reflect prevailing concerns over perceived assaults on white masculinity and property. In each case, a white man found himself in a position of vulnerability, to which he was obliged to respond with lethal violence.

The 1876 case, Erwin v. State of Ohio, established that a “true man,” one who was without fault in starting a conflict, had no duty to retreat from an attacker, even if the attack took place outside the walls of his home. Erwin, a white man, killed his son-in-law in a squabble over the use of a storage shed on the former’s property and was convicted of murder. The state Supreme Court’s decision to remand his case for a retrial rested on his faultlessness in starting the conflict. According to the decision, “a true man, who is without fault, is not obliged to fly from an assailant, who by violence or surprise maliciously seeks to take his life, or to do him enormous bodily harm” (Suk, 2009). Implicit in the decision was the concern that Erwin’s advanced age placed him at a disadvantage when faced with the younger man’s brawn. On retrial, the lower court determined that Erwin should not be prosecuted for murder as he acted as a faultless “true man” should, by defending himself against the threat of grave bodily harm.

The following year, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled on Runyan v. State, which similarly turned on presumptions of white masculine vulnerability, shifting the weight of the law to defend the man whose need to protect life and limb against a more powerful attacker superseded the duty to retreat. The case placed John Runyan on trial for the murder of his neighbor in a fight at their polling place during the turbulent Presidential election of 1876. Indiana was a critical battleground in this hotly contested race between Democrat Samuel J. Tilden and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. Runyan had fought for the Union in the Civil War, but he was a staunch Democrat voting in a Republican-dominated county. He was hassled and taunted for supporting Tilden, and when the threats turned physical, he shot one of his attackers dead in the street. Like Erwin, Runyan was tried and convicted of murder, in part because he failed to retreat.

On appeal, the Indiana Supreme Court remanded his case for a retrial, echoing prevailing beliefs in violent self-defense as natural to masculinity. The court observed that “the law of self-defense is founded on the law of nature; and is not, nor can be, superseded by any law of society.” Furthermore, argued the judge “the tendency of the American mind seems to be very strongly against the enforcement of any rule which requires a person to flee when assailed” (Runyan v. State, 1877). In this watershed moment, Indiana’s highest court declared that a man’s “natural” inclination toward violent self-defense could not be “superseded by law” and that the “American mind” would not tolerate laws mandating that men retreat from attack (Brown, 1994; Hafetz, 2002). Taken together, these two state decisions legitimated a “true man’s” right to use lethal violence in self-defense, even beyond the boundaries of his “castle.”

Although the legal documentation contains no explicit reference to the race of the men involved, these pivotal appeals to self-defense must be considered in the context of the post-war nation’s pursuit of regional reconciliation at the expense of black citizenship and the accompanying system of racialized gender policing that emerged in emancipation’s wake. The Reconstruction Amendments promised state-mandated redistributive justice by ending slavery, providing formerly enslaved people with citizenship, and enfranchising all male citizens, regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” But such precipitous juridical expansion of the rights of citizenship triggered white anxieties, investing the African American man with the menace and indeterminacy of the fetishized stranger. Crystal Feimster (2009, pp. 4-5) argues that “a convergent set of racial and sexual fantasies” framed the black man as a perpetual sexual threat to white women (Hall, 1984; Hodes, 2011). As African Americans exercised their civil and political rights and experienced a limited degree of economic independence, the association of black masculinity with sexual threat legitimated race violence as vital to white home defense. This “rape/lynch mythology” operationalized an urgent need to protect white women from black male lust, thereby validating the creation of an extralegal system for providing immediate justice to white victims of rape, avenging the property theft that such intrusions represented (Wiegman, 1995).

The chivalric protection of white women’s virtue was at the ideological core of post-Civil War national reconciliation, and the “true man” ideal served the interests of white supremacy while effacing both the violences of slavery and the ethical implications of regional conflict. David Blight (2002) observes that “sectional reunion . . . was a political triumph by the late 19th century, but it could not have been achieved without the resubjugation of many of those people whom the war had freed from centuries of bondage” (p. 3). The contested 1876 election and the “great compromise” of 1877, which installed Republican Rutherford B. Hayes as president in spite of Samuel Tilden’s popular victory, demanded government withdrawal of military oversight along with the redistributive and legal redress services originally intended to support formerly enslaved citizens. The compromise not only resulted in the stark disavowal of “40 Acres and a Mule” and any reparative promise of black property but also reinscribed the whiteness of the American “true man.”

The “true man” doctrine was forged in the fire of willful collective amnesia: he epitomized the honorable citizen—“without fault” in the Erwin decision—who by necessity must protect his home and feminized dependents from the figure of the newly enfranchised black male intruder and potential rapist. The end of Reconstruction and the simultaneous elimination of the rule of retreat had an immediate impact on homicide rates, which intensified dramatically, especially in the states of the former Confederacy (Messner, Baller, & Zevenbergen, 2005; Redfield, 1880). And between 1880 and 1930, whites lynched approximately 3,220 African Americans (Brundage, 1993, p. 8). Hegemonic masculine ideals of self-defense were therefore inextricable from the white supremacist logic of violent exclusionary citizenship that concentrated political and economic power securely into the hands of white men.

During the early 20th century, the right to armed self-defense transformed into nothing less than a divine right, expanding through the states and extinguishing the obligation to retreat. The whiteness of the “true man” was made explicit in the 1895 Supreme Court decision, Beard v. U.S., which codified a man’s right to “stand his ground” nationwide. Describing the plaintiff as “a white man, and not an Indian” who had killed another white man in Arkansas “Indian country,” the case cited both Runyan and Erwin to determine that Beard had acted in justifiable self-defense (Beard v. U.S., 1895). A white man’s duty to defend his person and his property (in this case, a cow) was unassailable, even if the lethal act took place outside the walls of his home, and the states followed suit with their own offensives against the duty to retreat. For example, in 1909, the state of Wisconsin cited Beard in challenging the “ancient rule of flight,” upholding “a doctrine in harmony with the divine right of self-defense; the doctrine that when one is where he has a right to be and does not create the danger by his own wrongful conduct, he may stand his ground” (Miller v. State, 1909).

The early logic of standing one’s ground held that retreat from attack was incompatible with the lethal existence of firearms capable of inflicting great bodily injury. Robust federal and state restrictions on the possession and carrying of firearms initially received strong support from the NRA, which was founded in 1871 to “promote and encourage rifle shooting on a scientific basis.” ⁵ In 1939, the Supreme Court upheld the National Firearms Act, requiring registration for firearm possession and restricting the use of certain kinds of weaponry, with the NRA’s blessing. It was not until the 1970s that the NRA began its aggressive crusade against gun control, appropriated the language of the Second Amendment in support of citizens’ individual “right to keep and bear arms” (Lepore, 2012; Waldman, 2014).

The Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Security State

It was partly in response to the variation among state self-defense laws that the NRA launched its recent campaign to make SYG the law of the land and to normalize the relationship between good citizenship, white warrior-style masculinity, and the DIY armed defense of white property. The NRA’s lobbyists began by proposing SYG laws in “red” states and have continued by appealing to “blue” states. Capitalizing on widespread security panic and anxieties over “stranger danger,” proponents appealed to the legacy of “Castle Law” as the guarantor of home(front) protection. According to Susan Faludi (2007),

the intrusions of September 11 broke the dead bolt on our protective myth, the illusion that we are masters of our security [and] . . . the events of that morning told us that we could not depend on our protectors. (p. 12)

The NRA’s call for DIY security successfully tapped into citizens’ anxiety about an inept and underprepared state’s inability to protect its citizenry against the pervasive threat of strangers, according to Sara Ahmed (2000, p. 15), “some-bodies . . . who are, in their very proximity, already recognized as not belonging, as being out of place.” The ethic of do-it-yourself-defense runs high among those whose anger at the redistributive effects of globalization is channeled into a heightened fear of boundary transgressions by a knowable, perpetually out-of-place, and racialized “some-body,” whether embodied in the figure of the terrorist, the undocumented immigrant, or the suspected “criminal.” ⁶

The failure of the neoliberal state to protect its citizens completes the security vacuum in which armed do-it-yourself-defense comes to seem necessary. In 2005, Bobby Bright, the mayor of Montgomery, Alabama, warned that he could no longer protect his citizens and their property from harm. Bright urged his constituents to “get a gun [and learn] how to use [it] and shoot [it]” (Travers, 2005). For Bright, a good citizen was active in providing for his own self-defense. His rhetoric found fertile soil in the anxiety of “law abiding citizens” beset by criminalized strangers whom the understaffed, underfunded local police force could not deter.

That same year, Florida became the first state to pass a SYG law. Notwithstanding its gender inclusive language, the law echoes the 1876 Ohio case’s language of the faultless “true man”:

a person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force, if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony. (Florida code § 776.013, 2005)

The law depends on the logic of a “reasonable” perception of threat from an ever-present, racialized stranger. Such a figure remains “‘cut off’ . . . from the social and material relations which over-determine his existence, and the consequent perception [is] that [the figure of the stranger has] a ‘life of its own’” (Ahmed, 2000, p. 5). Indeed, the figure of the criminalized stranger mobilizes a machinery of legalized homicide, wherein the elasticized boundaries of home may be stretched to accommodate implicitly raced characterizations of “stranger danger.”

By the end of 2013, 26 states had expanded the boundaries of justifiable homicide by eliminating the duty to retreat from an attacker in any place in which one is lawfully present. The figure of that attacker and what counts as “reasonable belief” take shape within both the state’s retreat from social welfare and the protection of its citizens and a simultaneous valorization of do-it-yourself-policing. Under neoliberalism, technically race-neutral conceptions of “reasonable threat” empower the DIY armed citizen with broad justification for immediate lethal responses to perceived intrusions into spaces considered white. That which the law takes for granted—a color blind adjudication of justice—provides the engine through which racially minoritized people are prefigured as perpetrators, endlessly justified as “reasonable” targets of DIY violence. Race continues to inform hegemonic notions of where one may legally be, but the legal fiction of “reasonableness” allows for the very denial of racist domination that substantiates a cherished regime of (do-it-your)self-care.

SYG laws effect a selective transformation of public space into private as some citizens assume the form of legitimately armed police endowed with a right to use lethal violence in defense of their “castles” and beyond. The proliferation of armed citizen-police—guarding our borders, patrolling white and middle-class neighborhoods, and investing in personal arsenals in their homes—takes shape as a rational response to the threat of “stranger danger.” And their targets are among the racially “fetishized figures of unassimilability,” Sara Ahmed (2000) describes, strangers transformed into “reasonable threats” when they stray into spaces of white dominion (p. 4). The selective fungibility and simultaneous militarization of home’s boundaries fuels a racialized semiotics of criminality where the fetishized stranger, reduced to a sign of generalized threat, shape-shifts to exude the features of home invader.

The fall of 2013 witnessed the death of Renisha McBride, a 19-year-old black woman shot and killed by a white man defending his “castle” in Detroit. It was late at night and McBride was disoriented after wrecking her car. Seeking help, she knocked on the door of Theodore Wafer, who shot her as she stood on his front porch. The Michigan SYG law allows for the use of “deadly force [if one] honestly and reasonably believes that the individual is engaging in . . . the process of breaking and entering a dwelling” (Michigan code § 311, 2006). In this case, the jury rejected Wafer’s claim that he “honestly and reasonably” perceived McBride as a violent threat, and he was convicted of second-degree murder. This decision stands out as exceptional, and racialized notions of “reasonableness” continue to fetishize black bodies, interpreting them through the “distorting prism” of racism (Lubiano, 1997, p. vii).

“Another black body lynched is not unique to us,” rap artist Jasiri X laments in “Strange Fruit (Class of 2013),” dedicated to McBride, as well as Kendrick Johnson and Jonathan Farrell, all young African Americans killed in 2013. Legally sanctioned murder of black citizens is on the rise, and the ordinary-ness of the violence conjures lynching, both as symptom and source of state disavowal. More than half of our nation’s states provide legal validation for implicitly racialized claims of “reasonable” suspicion of threat as grounds for lethal violence, but such legally sanctioned wrongs do not exist in isolation, and the genealogy of our nation’s love affair with deadly self-defense provides a view onto the intersecting complicity of state withdrawal, dispossession, and historical amnesia.

In the georacial politics of our contemporary version of the Castle Doctrine, the white castle might potentially be anywhere, including a public street. That DIY security rests on white masculine ideals of self-defense where a “true man” is he who “stands his ground” and protects the vulnerable is more readily apparent than their investment in racialized notions of criminality and vulnerability. The laws providing a right to “Stand Your Ground” collapse not only white subject and white home but also the putatively white public sphere, responding to waning faith in the state’s capacity to protect. SYG laws are the nation’s new system of legalized homicide by which the sanctity of white property can remain self-possessed. Their instantiation in the wake of the state’s withdrawal from the provision of public safety and welfare parallels the late-19th-century moment when laws against extralegal violence were selectively enforced, allowing new means of disciplining and containing African American citizens when national reconciliation depended on the maintenance of white supremacy. The eradication of the duty to retreat, alongside the retraction of federal protection, served the interests of national reunion with the end result a collective willful blindness, in David Blight’s (2002) words, “a depoliticized memory, cleansed of any lessons of the war’s unresolved legacy of racial strife” (p. 389).

Just as interregional white reconciliation was achieved at the expense of social justice, we witness a similarly amnesiac racial politics in operation in the proliferation of SYG laws, and a growing faith in “self-defense” among white and honorary white populations for whom the violences of neoliberalism have fueled increasing outrage. The state’s failure to address the racial disparities of SYG laws as a betrayal of equal protection rests in new forms of forgetting and disavowal. Collective memories of security panic obfuscate historical legacies of race violence in the interest of perpetuating celebratory idealizations of home. It is in this context that Jordan Davis’s white killer could compare himself with a rape victim, according to Rebecca Traister (2014), “summoning the specter of black-on-white sexual assault as a justification for white-on-black violence.” ⁷

The contemporary carceral–juridical regime of DIY self-defense depends on the disavowal of racist violence, allowing our courts off the hook for faithfully and “reasonably” following the letter of the law in the adjudication of justice. Michael Kimmel (2013) has shown how pervasive “race blindness” prohibits the formation of interracial common cause, channeling angry young men into “armies of rage that have sprung up around the world.” Their fury and anxiety over the failings of the “security state” fuel the seductive promise that DIY self-defense can and will protect their cherished spaces of safety from a growing army of hostility knowable only as strangers. Young people like Trayvon Martin, Renisha McBride, and Jordan Davis—each prefigured by their killer as a stranger whose mis-placement in a “white” space made them “reasonable” targets—became expendable collateral damage in a war on crime that privileges the right of a white man to “shoot first” over the rights of citizens to live free of violence. And yet, the celebration of Stand Your Ground armed citizenry extends beyond the disfranchised angry white man, for neoliberal valorization of self-care and radical sovereignty fortifies the walls of the white castle, and dismantling it will require new, innovative, perhaps undisciplined tools that reframe partial histories of justice and shift the epistemological grounds on which we define citizenship itself.