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Tuesday, February 18, 2014

The You in "Stand Your Ground" is White, the Ground is America, and the legal standing of White Fears over Black Lives is clearly the Stand

I still agree with what I said last year, namely:
"Stand Your Ground" Laws treat the simple attachment of a gun to your bodily person as a kind of en-castlement of the citizen-self into a permanent exception to the rule of law, a permanently prostheticized anarch and agency of a kind of counter-law or alter-law. Under the regime of "Stand Your Ground" the gun functions as a prosthetic augmentation of a paranoid-defensive sovereignty that substitutes itself for and so subverts the sovereignty of the state (a sovereignty no less prone to paranoid defensiveness whenever it is not accountable to enfranchised and educated citizens). Wherever "Stand Your Ground" laws are on the books, the ground on which a gun-toting self stands is transformed for as long as the gun-holder stands on it from the land of the country its law-abiding citizens share to mere ground occupied by those who would be laws-unto-themselves... "Stand Your Ground" laws are transforming gun-owners, whatever their own feelings on the matter, into nodes in a network of anti-civilizational lawlessness, into avatars of anarchy wherever they happen to stand with a gun at hand, into secessionists from the country of laws many of them profess so loudly to love and which at least some of them actually do.
But it also true that American Libertarianism Is Racist Through and Through, and I think that earlier piece of mine in de-emphasizing that racism and foregrounding a kind of formal anarchism of the irrational rationality of Stand Your Ground missed too much of the point. Anarchy as a real, living, effective force in American public life always drives Movement Republican organizing and policy-making in the service of elite-incumbency, even if a handful of anarcho-identified socialist, anti-racist, queer intellectuals declare themselves the "thought-leaders" of Occupy or noisily throng the comments sections of some lefty websites (mostly to complain about the impurity of Democrats actually striving imperfectly to accomplish things). And it is not only in the explicitness of the Southern Strategy that "liberty-loving" Movement Republicanism has been driven by white-racism: the reactionary imaginary of Republicanism, populated with Welfare Queens and Willy Hortons and Food Stamp Presidents and Makers Versus Takers (you know) is the white racist ignorance that enables ignoring and the white racist terror that rationalizes terrorism (Jim Crow and Stop and Frisk and Stand Your Ground represent a white racist terrorist continuum). The white racism of American reactionary libertarianism is blatant not only in its awful embeddedness in neo-confederate States Rights discourse but no less in its ecstatic embrace of the paranoid vigilantism of open-carry "warriors" (you know) of "Real America" (you know) who "want 'our' country back" (you know).

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