Trayvon Martin and the Dystopian Turn in US Self‐defense Doctrine

Abstract

The February 2012 shooting death in Florida of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, by George Zimmerman, an Hispanic neighborhood watch captain ‐ and the police’s immediate release of the shooter ‐ drew widespread outrage at racial disparities in law enforcement of violent crimes in the United States. It also drew attention to a fundamental shift in the doctrine of self-defense as legislated in Florida and 24 other US states since 2005. The social production of multiple spaces shaped this tragedy, and this intervention reflects on the intersection of ghettoization, gated communities, and spaces of the home (read, castle) as they contributed to these events. Lefebvre’s (1991 [1974]) articulation in The Production of Space of space as a social product shaped by values, meanings and power relations is well trodden ground in human geography. The Stand Your Ground law used to justify the initial release of the boy’s killer adds a frightening new twist to how we should understand the play of power in spaces, and the way that space can be used to reproduce overtly violent social dominance. The history of ghettoization of non-whites in American cities, and most virulently, of African Americans is, of course, a textbook example of the use of space to reproduce and deepen social dominance. Over the course of the twentieth century, government agendas articulated with private economic interests to produce ghettoes using racial zoning, restrictive covenants, and mortgage redlining against a wide swath of non-Anglo-Saxon citizens and immigrants. While dark-skinned “new immigrants” from southern and eastern Europe were eventually able to negotiate their way into whiteness (Frye 1998; Roediger 2005), African-Americans remained the racial Other (Said 1994), and were increasingly corralled into urban areas that were being systematically bled of material and financial resources (Wilson 1996). To the problems of overcrowding, disinvestment and blight enabled by systemic racial discrimination, add sectoral changes in the American economy, and the ensuing joblessness wreaked havoc on the families and the social fabric of urban blacks, and contributed to rising crime rates in structurally stripped-down districts (Wilson 1996). The shadow of ghettoization extends across society in the pervasive stereotyping of African-American men and boys in urban,rural and suburban settings.Stereotypes are a particularly insidious form of ecological fallacy. Pervasively linked in much of the collective (white) imagination with ghettoes and criminal behaviors, black boys and men can unwittingly and without warrant provoke fear and consternation when encountered in spaces in which they are viewed by others as not belonging. Black families try to protect their children from the harm that might follow, but can never