One Book One Diocese Lenten Study

The Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis is reading the same book together for Lent. Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God by Kelly Brown Douglas. We’re gathering in local communities to discuss the book or reading independently.

As part of my own discipline of reading the book and preparing for discussion, I’m summarizing each chapter in fewer than 300 words.

2. Born Guilty

Douglas begins the second chapter with a new question:

“Why are black murder victims put on trial?”

At the root of this question is the impact of whiteness as cherished property and its necessary corollary: blackness as chattel. Because they are based on a logic that leaps before we think about it.

For America (and its Anglo-Saxon roots) to be exceptional, it must mean everyone else is not. This view requires a lens on the world which justifies such imbalance. Enter: Natural law.

Natural law acts like the glue to justify the difference between white and black. In the hands of white supremacy, it distorts the natural order to define the difference as it exists and then impresses that difference upon how things are to be. Here, natural law is used to make a Theo-ideology of white supremacy ordained by God and chattel slavery as its natural component.

But to turn this justification of inferior into guilt, the black body must be stripped of its very humanity.

“The black body as chattel is the core element in the construction of the inherently guilty black body.”

Slavery turns black bodies into commodities. But it is the “inspecting,” the rape, and the forcing of “property” to have children (to beget new property for the slaveowner), which fully dehumanizes the whole.

Then it hypersexualizes the black body and calls it dangerous.

The core argument of white supremacy then, is not inherent inferiority, but inherent, God-ordained chattel status. It cannot tolerate any narrative which grants freedom or equality to any who they believe God has made to be dominated.

Media saturation of a link between blackness and criminal behavior has further built up our implicit bias.

“And like chattel, a criminal does not belong in free space.”

Further Thoughts—

The example of Rachel Jeantel

Douglas refers to the tragic figure of Rachel Jeantel, who was a witness for Trayvon Martin at trial.

While Douglas doesn’t write directly about this, the treatment of Rachel Jeantel is doubly troubling — it certainly trades on the racist stereotypes of the ignorant angry black woman — but it also demonstrates other truly disturbing biases on the part of the state.

Their ignorance of Black English led them to think she was stupid and treated her incomprehensibly cruelly. And their utter refusal to recognize their impact in specifically refusing to understand her or grant her equal status as a witness to even be heard and understood.

Imagine what Midwestern middle-class whites would do if our speech was rendered as stupid and incomprehensible and our testimony was entirely dismissed because nobody in the court bothered to figure that out?

Or if stereotypes rather than facts ran the system for white defendants and witnesses?

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In chapter 3, we’ll explore what happens when an ideology of Manifest Destiny creates a perpetual justification for war.