Neither Ground on Which to Stand, nor Self to Defend: The Structural Denial (and Radical Histories) of Black Self-Defense

Abstract

This article examines self-defense as an inherently spatial phenomenon that evidences an assumed right to the individual self and the creation and occupation of space. I argue that self-defense and its claims to space are conceptually and historically denied to Black diasporic populations, as gratuitous violence and the assumption of Black aspatiality void Black claims to self and space. I draw on U.S. laws and legal decisions from the antebellum era through the present to show how anti-Blackness has manifested itself in the legal realm through repeated legal denials of Black self-defense. I argue that at the core of this prohibition of Black self-defense is a societal need to preserve gratuitous violence and aspatiality as tenets of modern humanity. I further argue that, despite this long-standing prohibition, organized Black self-defense has remained important to Black social and political movements throughout the history of the United States. Examining Black movements from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I show how different movements have used self-defense to realize larger goals and establish and protect spaces in which Black life is fostered.

本文将自卫视为一种内在空间现象, 证实了自我的权力、创造和占有空间的权力。我认为, 由于无端暴力和黑人不具备空间性的假设, 黑人无法实现对自我和空间的索求。因此, 黑人流散人口在概念上和历史上被剥夺了自卫和占有空间的权力。我借鉴了战前到当今的美国法律和法律判决, 展示了法律领域如何通过在法律上反复否认黑人自卫而展现出反黑人。我认为, 禁止黑人自卫的核心, 是将无端暴力和非空间性作为现代人类信条的社会需要。我进一步指出, 尽管这一禁令由来已久, 但在美国历史上, 有组织的黑人自卫对黑人社会和政治运动一直都很重要。通过考察十九世纪和二十世纪的黑人运动, 我展示了黑人运动如何利用自卫来实现更大的目标、建立和保护黑人赖以生存的空间。

Este artículo examina la defensa propia como un fenómeno inherentemente espacial que evidencia un supuesto derecho del yo individual, y la creación y ocupación de espacio. Yo arguyo que la defensa propia y sus reivindicaciones del espacio han sido negadas conceptual e históricamente a las poblaciones diaspóricas negras, en cuanto que la violencia gratuita y el supuesto de la aespacialidad negra anulan las pretensiones negras sobre el yo y el espacio. Me fundamento en las leyes de los EE. UU. y en decisiones legales desde el antebellum [era de la preguerra] hasta la actualidad, para mostrar cómo la anti-negritud se ha puesto de manifiesto en el reino de lo legal a través de reiteradas denegaciones jurídicas a la defensa propia negra. Yo sostengo que en el núcleo de esta prohibición de la defensa propia negra se encuentra una presión social por preservar la violencia gratuita y la aespacialidad como principios de la humanidad moderna. Por otra parte, arguyo que, a pesar de esta prohibición de vieja data, la defensa propia negra organizada ha permanecido importante para los movimientos sociales y políticos a través de toda la historia de Estados Unidos. Examinando los movimientos negros de los siglos XIX y XX, muestro cómo los diferentes movimientos han usado la defensa propia para alcanzar más amplios objetivos y para crear y proteger espacios donde la vida negra sea enaltecida.

Key Words:

• anti-Blackness
• Black geographies
• Black social movements
• self-defense

关键词:

• 反黑人
• 黑人地理
• 黑人社会运动
• 自卫。

Palabras clave:

• anti-negritud
• defensa propia
• geografías negras
• movimientos sociales negros

This article argues that Blackness exists as a limit concept for modern humanity, space, and legitimate practices of self-defense. Self-defense exists as proof of a multiscalar human right to the personal self, the creation of space, and the occupation of that space free from violence. Anti-Blackness works to conceptually and concretely deny Black diasporic populations’ claims to self or space, making Black self-defense conceptually impossible in the modern world. Importantly, the societal denial of Black claims to self and space and, thus, self-defense is not a question of a generic “racism” experienced coequally with other populations around the world. Rather, anti-Blackness persists as a unique logic in society, underpinned by principles of gratuitous violence and aspatiality—a dyad specific to the Black diasporic experience. As such, the conceptual prohibition of self-defense remains distinct to Black populations.

I use examples from the United States to show how, from the colonial era through the present, laws and legal decisions have consistently denied the prospect of Black self-defense. Spatial relations shape, and take shape from, the law, meaning that societal disavowals of Black claims to self and space become codified in laws that reinforce such disavowals. The legal denial of Black self-defense has taken various forms over time; however, the persistence of such legal proscriptions evidence the structural nature of anti-Blackness in society. In short, the legal realm has prohibited Black self-defense, in a variety of ways, for centuries and thereby helped anchor the assumption of Black inhumanity in society. The societal injunction against Black self-defense notwithstanding, Black populations in the United States have demonstrated the importance of employing self-defense in pursuit of a variety of freedom dreams. Indeed, whether pursuing ultimately reformist agendas of inclusion or radical projects of autonomy, Black movements have consistently used armed self-defense in attempts to create spaces not defined by anti-Blackness. These acts of Black self-defense have not only served to protect specific Black political projects but have also pushed Black actors and their Human antagonists to recognize and reconsider the ontological tenets of the modern world.

The first section of this article offers a reflection on self-defense, its multiscalar spatial implications, and how anti-Blackness nullifies a legible Black claim to self-defense. The second section looks at how the legal sphere has denied Black populations in the United States the right to self-defense for centuries, including in the present. The third section argues that Black self-defense has nonetheless remained present in, and vital to, Black struggles of significantly different persuasions. I close by reflecting on the prospects of Black self-defense for the present, also calling for an examination of diasporic populations’ relationship to self-defense outside the U.S. context.

Spaces of Self-Defense vis-à-vis Anti-Blackness

In this section I reflect on self-defense’s centrality to modern notions of humanity and space; how law codifies the right to self-defense and thus props up dominant notions of the modern Human and space; and how anti-Blackness, in its denial of Black humanity, forecloses the possibility of Black self-defense. Whereas recourse to self-defense is a central component of Human claims to self and space in modernity, the long history of the legal prohibition of Black self-defense evidences a societal assumption of, and commitment to, Black inhumanity. More specifically, anti-Black gratuitous violence and the assumption of aspatiality both set the boundaries for dominant ideas and practices of humanity and space and also preclude the possibility for legitimate Black self-defense. The section closes by noting that Black resistance to anti-Black violence can work to trouble the tenets of modern humanity by preventing concrete acts of gratuitous violence and insisting on a Black right to create and occupy space.

Self-Defense in Modernity

Self-defense, as “action taken to prevent or reduce harm to oneself … [when] threatened by another” (Coons and Weber 2016, 1), is a fundamental aspect of modern notions of being. The importance of self-defense lies in the modern sanctity of the individual, Human subject. In the modern epoch, the “human person … is considered as sacred” and has a kind of “transcendental majesty”; thus, the protection of Human life is paramount to notions and practices of being in society (Durkheim 1969, 21). This “sanctity-of-life principle” means that life is valued preeminently and “any society must place a high value on preserving it” because “life … is the necessary condition for the enjoyment of all other goods” (Kadish 1976, 871, 878). Thus, there “should be no limit on the right to resist threats to the person of [an] actor” (Kadish 1976, 886). Lacking recourse to self-defense would mean ceding personal autonomy, depriving one of “the right to life of meaning” and ultimately threatening “social dissolution” (Durkheim 1969, 27; Kates 2006, 317; Levin 2010, 539). The protection of Human life is thus not just a question of individual sanctity but societal coherence. Self-defense is necessary to preserve society as we know it.

The sanctity of the modern human and the subsequent right to self-defense are conjoined ordering principles of the modern epoch and define the spatial and political norms of society. Laws codify these principles because, in modernity, spatial orderliness hinges on laws that work to guarantee world-constituting rules (Delaney 2010). As the most “fundamental of all rights,” every legal system in the world recognizes the right of self-defense, such that “the fundamental ‘general principle’ of international law is the personal right of self-defense” (Lund 1987, 118; Kates 2006, 311; Kopel, Gallant, and Eisen 2007, 58, 137). Although the right to self-defense is a phenomenon that spans continents and centuries (if not millennia), from Judaic, Christian, and Islamic legal spheres, among others (Kopel, Gallant, and Eisen 2007), for brevity’s sake, the remainder of this article addresses self-defense as it pertains to the United States historically and currently.

In the United States, as elsewhere, “self-defense is taken as the uncontested baseline” of the law, to the extent that “the liberty to use defensive force” plays “a central role in explaining the shape of the law” in the country (Kadish 1976, 897; N. Johnson 2006, 201). Indeed, “self-defense [is] an essentially universal value that the [United States Supreme] Court and commentators have used as a foundational principle to ground and illuminate other constitutional rights” (N. Johnson 2006, 187). U.S. law not only helps identify the importance of self-defense to modern notions of human rights but also evidences how self-defense is, at its core, a question of a multiscalar right to space.

Space and Self-Defense

Self-defense has spatial implications. Defending oneself highlights individual sovereignty of self and the right to occupy a location free from harm. Self-defense acts to protect the personal, physical presence necessary to enact spatial relations. Put another way, self-defense is a multiscalar claim of rights to one’s own body, the creation of space, and spatial occupation. The spatial imaginary elaborating the right to self and space conditions legal performances—such as laws sanctioning self-defense—and such legal performances in turn condition how people understand, and relate to, the spaces they have a hand in creating and occupying (Delaney 2010). The presumed right of self-defense remains tied to commonsense notions and practices of space at a variety of scales. In the context of U.S. law, self-defense remains overtly tied to the right to secure one’s body from imminent harm, locating the human body as a “sanctified” space. For centuries, U.S. laws have acknowledged the acceptability of deadly force when used “to avoid either the imminent loss of … life or the imminent infliction of serious bodily injury” (Kadish 1976, 875). Current penal codes and self-defense doctrines permit defense against “actual danger of life or great harm” (J. Light 2012, 227; see also Neyland 2008). Although the sanctified, individual body is often the space most easily identified in questions of self-defense, the spaces through which the individual body moves, and helps to create, are also central to practices and ideas of self-defense.

The home has existed as a space (nominally) associated with safety for centuries. In the United States, “there is no duty to retreat if the one attacked is in his [sic] own dwelling or ‘castle’” (J. Light 2012, 226). Even in locations in the United States where the law requires people to retreat before using self-defense, “the No Retreat principle applies in the important setting of the home” (Ward 2015, 94). For centuries, U.S. court rulings have also stated that people could defend themselves with force when they were violently assaulted in a place where they had a right to be and had committed no wrongdoing (Neyland 2008; Ward 2015). In the present day, this right to safely occupy space is perhaps most overtly demonstrated in stand your ground (SYG) laws, discussed in more detail later. SYG laws allow for use of defensive force when a person is not engaging in unlawful activity and is in a space in which they have a right to be when they are assaulted. Even in non-SYG states, forceful self-defense is acceptable, provided that one is lawfully, peacefully occupying space and has no ability to retreat (Neyland 2008; Levin 2010; J. Light 2012; Ward 2015).

In short, the modern sanctity of the individual entails a right to the protection of the individual’s body and a right to create and occupy space, both inside and outside the home. These rights are defensible via the individual use of force. Self-defense is thereby a multiscalar phenomenon that traces the boundaries of modern spatial rights. In the context of the United States, the sanctity of the modern individual, the right to create and occupy space, and the right to defend one’s body inform legal statutes at the same time that laws reinforce these presumed Human rights. Self-defense thus plays an important role in the relations, discourses, and practices that give rise to space. Blackness, however, troubles the assumed universality of self-sovereignty, the right to space, and thus notions and practices of self-defense. Moreover, Black geographies help us take stock of the multiscalar realities of modern notions of being and humanity, presenting important caveats to who has a right to self, spatial occupation, and the defense of either.

Blackness and the Structural Untenability of Self-Defense

Anti-Blackness makes the prospect of legitimate Black self-defense structurally impossible. Although there exist various forms of racialized violence, anti-Blackness is unique among forms of racialized oppression and places Black populations in a distinctive ontological position that precludes legible self-defense. Colonized populations, for instance, while experiencing racial violence, retain recourse to self-defense due to their legible claims of sovereignty and nativity. Indeed, anticolonial discourses and struggles evidence an ability to legitimately claim and enact a right to self-defense via claims of prior spatial occupancy and freedom, as well as indigenous cultural, religious, and political matrices (see Ho 1968; Cabral 1979; V. Johnson 1993; Sajed 2019).¹ Black diasporic populations do not conceptually have access to such rights. Indeed, multiple characteristics constitutive of anti-Blackness make Black claims to self-defense conceptually and structurally impossible.

A central component of anti-Blackness is gratuitous violence. Anti-Black gratuitous violence is a “relationship to violence [that] is open-ended, gratuitous, without reason or constraint, triggered by prelogical catalysts which are unmoored from [one’s] transgressions and unaccountable to historical shifts” (Wilderson 2014, 27). Gratuitous violence has roots in chattel slavery. The lack of self-ownership of the enslaved meant that non-Black populations treated Black bodies as spaces open to non-Black displays of mastery, precluding any legitimate Black action beyond willful submission (Hartman 1996, 1997; McKittrick 2011). The violence typical of chattel slavery anticipates present-day forms of anti-Black violence, as the position of Black populations in the world has changed in ways that are important historically but nonetheless still determined by assumptions of Black inhumanity (Wilderson 2014; McKittrick 2016).

Gratuitous violence remains central to establishing the boundaries of what it means to be in society (Douglass 2018). Whereas modern humans experience violence for specific reasons and transgressions, anti-Black violence exists as a structural necessity, a “life force,” securing “the order of life itself” while also offering a human sense of well-being (Douglass and Wilderson 2013, 117; Wilderson 2015, 147–48; Wilderson 2020, 92). Gratuitous violence distinguishes the assumedly inhuman Black subject from the modern Human subject, as modern humanity roots its sense of self in not experiencing the vertiginous effects of gratuitous violence, simultaneously bearing witness to and participating in such violence (Wilderson 2015). The unfree, constrained Black subject remains the ontological counterpoint to the autonomous, self-possessed Human subject (Hartman 1996). Anti-Blackness, then, entails the societal insistence of a lack of Black self, resulting in Black populations retaining no right to their own physical being (Sexton 2020). Denying the right of Black self-defense, historically and currently, is thus an effect of repetitive and always-sanctioned violent expressions of power that locate Black bodies as, first and foremost, spaces subjected to Human authority (Bogues 2010). Aspatiality also plays a fundamental role in the structural position of Black populations and the conceptual impossibility of Black self-defense.

The assumed aspatiality of Black populations and gratuitous violence go hand in hand, as the marking of Black populations as “without land or home,” like gratuitous violence, was central to chattel slavery and its present-day afterlives (McKittrick 2011, 948). Labeling Black populations as “ungeographic” and deeming the locations associated with those same populations as “invisible/forgettable” or “unknowable and unseeable” worked to erase Black senses of place in dominant modern spatial imaginaries (McKittrick 2006, x; McKittrick 2011, 948; McKittrick and Woods 2007, 4). The assumption of Black aspatiality stems from the deracination—or loss of nativity and claims to nation—inherent to slavery (Sexton 2010, 2020). Anti-Blackness in modernity has rendered Black diasporic populations as the quintessential unsovereign figures of the modern world (Sexton 2020), absent the possibility of nativity, citizenship, or belonging (Sexton 2010).

In the present, “Black people in the world are often regarded as living outside of the protective folds and spaces of the human” (King 2016, 1024, italics added), remaining “conceptually unable to legitimately create space” (Bledsoe and Wright 2019a, 12). Even as slavery is no longer a legal practice, assumed Black aspatiality remains the condition of spatial possibility for modern humans to create dominant spatial formations (Bledsoe and Wright 2019a; Bledsoe 2020). This assumed aspatiality even negates the possibility of Black populations establishing home spaces, because assumptions of Black nonbeing negate the possibility of domesticity (Spillers 1987). Black residences remain the “spatial extension of the master’s [read: Human’s] dominion” (Wilderson 2020, 227). Hence, modern notions of space do not recognize the Black ability to make, occupy, or claim space in this world. Along with the denial of Black corporeal sovereignty, the assumption of Black aspatiality upends Black claims to legitimate self-defense.

The inability for Black populations to claim self or space undergirds modernity, as gratuitous violence and the condition of Black aspatiality set the boundary for what it means to be Human. Whereas other racially oppressed populations maintain a claim to sovereign space—and thus a legitimate right to self-defense—Black populations have no rights to any space, including their own bodies, the home, or spaces outside the home. Thus, they have no legible claims to self-defense. Just as the Human’s right to self-defense is central to modernity and modern spatial practices, so, too, is the untenability of Black self-defense vital for modern notions and practices of being. The structural prohibition of Black self-defense has important implications for Black political aspirations.

Black political claims, broadly, are destabilized due to the fact that gratuitous violence legitimates any and all acts of anti-Black violence, and aspatiality denies legitimate Black spatial creation and occupation. Still, an organized Black rejection of gratuitous violence and aspatiality and a commitment to establishing the sanctity of the Black body and Black spaces via self-defense creates the potential for political change. Historically, by preventing the violation of their bodies, Black actors have, at different moments, temporarily held off the concrete effects of gratuitous violence and aspatiality, thereby protecting Black individuals and collectives and creating the possibility for new spatial relations to emerge. In other words, Black self-defense against anti-Black violence has created temporary spaces in which Black dreams, aspirations, and relations can take shape.

The following sections explore historical examples of the legal prohibition of Black self-defense in the United States, as well as historical moments in which Black populations employed armed self-defense with the goal of protecting distinct political projects. These two sections demonstrate that although the legal realm is informed by, and works to reproduce, anti-Black gratuitous violence and aspatiality, Black populations have, throughout history, effectively used armed self-defense as a method to both demand and enact concrete political changes.

The Legal Denial of Black Self-Defense

Space and the law are mutually constituted, as spatial relations have legal correlates, which, in turn, influence the relations that give rise to space (Blomley 2003). Laws work to incarnate and “world” various social and political phenomena, including anti-Blackness (Delaney 2010). By sanctioning recurrent forms of anti-Blackness, the legal realm reinforces an uneven spatial distribution of violence, authorizing enactments of anti-Black violence and the exclusion of Black populations from the right of self-defense (Delaney 1998). From the U.S. colonial era through the present day, laws and legal decisions have specifically prohibited Black populations (free and enslaved) from defending themselves or carrying potentially defensive implements, thereby reinforcing gratuitous violence and aspatiality.

The Antebellum Era

The antebellum United States enshrined laws based on the ontological realities of anti-Blackness, creating a legal zone in which codified legislation and statutes buttressed anti-Black violence (Bogues 2010). Central to U.S. legal codes was the prohibition of self-defense by free and enslaved Black populations. Across the U.S. South, enslaved and free Black populations were prohibited from owning any variety of weapons (Slaves and Free Persons of Color, An Act Concerning Slaves and Free Persons of Color 1831; Wilson 1965; Cottrol and Diamond 1991; Cramer 1994; Diamond and Cottrol 1995; Kennedy 1997). As stated in an 1844 decision by the North Carolina Supreme Court, legally preventing Black access to arms would ensure “Self preservation” as “the first law of nations” and individuals (Burkett 2008, 89). Other laws and legal decisions spoke to the act of Black self-defense specifically.

Enslaved and free Black populations were perpetually open to physical attacks from slave owners and strangers alike. Black individuals and communities had no legal recourse in the face of such attacks (Fede 2012). Even in instances in which a Black person had experienced a physical assault, the law upheld the principle of gratuitous violence by denying the right of Black self-defense. In addition to not having legal access to defensive implements, Black individuals faced the death penalty for using potentially deadly defensive force against Whites (Cottrol and Diamond 1991; Burkett 2008).

In an 1855 case in Missouri, Celia, an enslaved woman, killed her master (in her own cabin) after years of sexual abuse. Although the habitual rape of Celia was never contested, she was ultimately sentenced to death (Hartman 1996). In this particular case, as well as across the antebellum United States, self-defense on the part of the enslaved was conceptually and legally impossible—any agentic armed action could only be murder or manslaughter (Fede 2012). Even outside the U.S. South, in nominally “free” states, Black self-defense was prohibited by state action. In 1841 in Cincinnati, Ohio, for instance, multiple nights of White assaults on the city’s Black business and residential districts led to Black residents defending themselves with firearms. The following day, at the behest of the mayor, county militia and deputized citizens largely disarmed and imprisoned Black males who had defended their homes and businesses. The disabling of the Black residents’ defensive capacities led to further White destruction of Black property (Cottrol and Diamond 1991).

Antebellum U.S. laws openly negated the possibility of Black self-defense. Black populations could not defend their bodies, the ground on which they stood, nor their places of residence from assaults—they legally retained neither personal autonomy nor the right to occupy any violence-free space. This legal prohibition stemmed from ontological understandings of Black nonbeing, defined by anti-Black gratuitous violence and aspatiality. An 1829 North Carolina Supreme Court decision encapsulates this reality, asserting that a “slave, to remain a slave, must be made sensible that there is no appeal from his master” (Fede 2012, 109). Following the formal abolition of slavery in the United States, laws and legal decisions continued to take direction from the ontological imperatives of gratuitous violence and aspatiality but did so in terms less overt than those of the antebellum era.

Postemancipation and Jim Crow Eras

The formal emancipation of enslaved Black populations did not end the realities of gratuitous violence and aspatiality or the legal denial of Black self-defense. Anti-Blackness persisted, destabilizing the position of the now nominally free Black populations of the United States (Sexton 2010). A number of states passed Black Codes in the years immediately following the Civil War, prohibiting free Black individuals from carrying weapons, while sanctioning civil and military officers to arrest armed Black persons² (An Act to Confer Civil Rights on Freedmen, and for Other Purposes 1865; Wilson 1965; N. Johnson 2014). During this time, and persisting during Reconstruction, White terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), the White Brotherhood, the Knights of the White Camelia, and other paramilitary organizations worked to curtail Black movement and confiscate defensive weapons from Black households (N. Johnson 2014; Dunbar-Ortiz 2017). Following the end of Reconstruction in 1877, the Jim Crow era brought renewed efforts to legally deny Black self-defense.

Jim Crow legal statutes were put in place with the direct intent to curtail Black self-defense. An 1893 Florida Act regulating the carrying of pistols, for instance, was instituted with the express purpose of disarming Black Floridians (Diamond and Cottrol 1995; Burkett 2008). The passage of such legislation by southern state legislatures made it all but impossible for Black southerners to arm themselves. In other cases, local law enforcement agencies worked alongside White terrorist organizations to confiscate defensive weapons from Black households (Tahmassebi 1991). During the early twentieth century, across the northern and southern United States, states enacted firearms licensing requirements that allowed police full discretion to grant or deny licenses. States passing these laws had a significant KKK presence (Polsby and Kates 1997). Both legal and extralegal actors thereby worked to disarm Black communities, even as these same communities experienced rampant violence (Du Bois 1998; C. Light 2017). During this time, both federal and state courts actively refused to render decisions in favor of Black self-defense (Tahmassebi 1991).

Although Black people were nominally citizens, providing for the conditions of Black self-defense and, thus, the protection of Black life was “officially outside the scope of [postbellum] law” (Hartman 1997, 171). Anti-Blackness continued to exhibit “strong elements of continuity, persistence, durability, and reproduction” in postemancipation spatiolegal relations (Delaney 2010, 136). This remained the case after the end of Jim Crow.

Late Twentieth-Century Civil Rights and Black Power Era

The mid- to late-twentieth-century civil rights movement and its immediate aftermath saw myriad Black political and social demands coupled with Black resolve to use self-defense to secure such demands. In the face of these struggles, legal practices continued to reinforce anti-Black spatial relations. For example, the district attorney of southwestern Mississippi gave the state’s Highway Patrol the authority to disarm members of the Deacons for Defense, a Black civil rights organization that carried firearms to protect civil rights activists from White mobs, vigilantes, and paramilitary organizations. Other southern states took direction from this approach and began to make it illegal to carry guns in the cab of automobiles, specifically in response to attempts by Black organizations to defend themselves (Umoja 2013). Perhaps the most infamous post–civil rights legal prohibition of Black self-defense was the California state legislature’s response to the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.

In the late 1960s, the public conveyance of loaded firearms was not uncommon across California. However, after the Panthers began openly asserting a Black right to self-defense and actively defending Black communities from the predations of California police departments (see Seale 1991; Brown 1994; Hilliard and Cole 2002; Newton 2002, 2009; Forbes 2006), California legislators sought to change laws around the ability to openly carry loaded firearms. On 29 July 1967, then-Governor Ronald Reagan signed Section 12031 of the California Penal Code—colloquially known as the Panther Bill—into law, prohibiting the carrying of loaded firearms in public. California State Representative Donald Mulford introduced and coauthored the bill. Mulford’s legislative files contain an unsigned report stating, “Law enforcement groups were concerned about the Panthers because of their publications, which advocated the end to police brutality and the murder of black people, and because of their support for an armed black populace.” The report continues, the Panthers’ “prime objective is to arm the Negro community to full capacity for the purpose of backing all plays by the Negro community and to act as a deterrent to all organizations, including police department,” making it “clear that new enforceable legislation is urgent and imperative” (Leonardatos 1999, 989). These files suggest that legislators put laws in place to curtail Black self-defense and political activity and to ensure the continuation of anti-Black violence in California. Today, legal decisions continue to sustain anti-Black violence through the uneven application of laws.

Present Day

In the early 2000s, states across the United States began implementing SYG laws. These laws stipulate that a person is justified in using force—including deadly force—“to defend his or herself in any place where he or she has the right to be” (M. Lee 2019, 108). Florida was the first state to implement SYG laws in 2005. Florida legislators outlined figures like “cop killers,” “gangs,” and “drug dealers” as those groups that “would mark the proper bounds of the statute’s enforcement” (M. Lee 2019, 111). In other words, although race was not explicitly mentioned prior to the passage of SYG, groups that are undeniably racialized as Black in the social psyche were publicly cast as those who “should not be the beneficiaries of Stand Your Ground but were its intended victims” (M. Lee 2019, 121). The anti-Black origins of SYG are reflected in the concrete enactment of the law.

In SYG states, White people who kill Black people “are more than eleven times more likely to escape conviction than Blacks who kill whites” (C. Light 2017, 10). A study by the American Bar Association in 2015 found that in SYG states 3 percent of Black shooters are not charged or convicted after shooting a White person whereas 34 percent of White shooters are not charged or convicted after shooting a Black person. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) data from 2005 through 2010 suggest that White-on-Black homicide is justified 281 percent more than White-on-White homicide, whereas Black-on-White homicide has barely half the odds of being justified relative to White-on-White homicide (Roman 2013). Even in cases where there are no fatalities, Black individuals defending themselves are more heavily penalized than White shooters in SYG states (Bell 2019). These data indicate that across SYG states Black attempts at self-defense against non-Black individuals (particularly White individuals) are criminalized far more regularly than are non-Black acts of self-defense against Black individuals. In places like Florida, this trend remains the case even when controlling for who initiated the confrontation and whether the victim of the encounter had a weapon (Ackermann et al. 2015).

Whereas antebellum laws overtly denied the act of Black self-defense, a variety of legal actors work to preserve conditions of anti-Blackness in postbellum society. The postbellum actions of police, vigilante groups, and judicial entities have, by and large, acted in petty sovereign capacities to prohibit Black self-defense. Petty sovereigns act in a political structure that they do not fully control, yet they retain the power to make unilateral, arbitrary decisions with state backing (Goett 2017). In the postemancipation era, petty sovereign actors with differing institutional capacities have taken on the primary role of legally prohibiting Black self-defense via legal interpretations and decisions (Cover 1986).

Examples of the petty sovereign denial of Black self-defense described earlier include police officers seeking to confiscate defensive arms from Black individuals, denying licenses for firearms to Black individuals, and tacitly sanctioning (when not actively participating in) vigilante disarming of Black communities. District attorneys and state legislators advocating the harassment and disarming of armed Black activists and the disproportionate indictment of Black individuals invoking SYG legislation are also examples of petty sovereign prohibitions of Black self-defense. If self-defense is premised on the right to protect oneself from bodily harm and create and occupy space free from harm, it appears that for Black populations there is neither a self to legitimately defend nor ground on which to legitimately stand. Examining the legal realm offers insight into how anti-Blackness and its attendant spatial logics give shape to laws and legal decisions and also receive reinforcement from those same legal renderings. Gratuitous violence and aspatiality have spanned centuries and continue to define the spatial relations that set the boundaries between the human and inhuman. Despite this modern ontological denial, Black populations have insisted on, and employed, self-defense to establish spaces conducive to the propagation of Black life.

Black Self-Defense

In this section I focus on four historic examples of Black-led organizations that used self-defense in an effort to change the sociospatial relations in which they lived. I first discuss the phenomenon of Black militias during the Reconstruction era in the U.S. South. I then turn to the civil rights movement and how its stated goals of integration relied, in part, on the presence of armed political actors. Next, I describe the armed struggle of Black Seminole maroon communities in nineteenth-century Florida. I close the section by examining the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and their commitment to community-wide armed self-defense. These four examples encompass two instances of struggle aimed at Black incorporation into established U.S. power structures and two instances of struggle that sought to break with dominant U.S. political, economic, social, and cultural trends. Each case demonstrates that, whether reformist or radical, Black political movements have often relied on self-defense to counter the destabilizing effects of gratuitous violence and aspatiality. Although geographical literature on the Black Panthers has explicitly discussed self-defense (Tyner 2006; Bledsoe and Wright 2019b), geographers analyzing Reconstruction (Winders 2005; Heynen 2018, 2021), the civil rights movement (Inwood 2009; Alderman, Kingsbury, and Dwyer 2013; Inwood and Alderman 2018; Alderman, Inwood, and Bottone 2021), and marronage (Bledsoe 2017, 2018; Thomas 2020; Winston 2021) have not emphasized self-defense in their discussions of these Black struggles (for a notable exception, see Ferretti 2019). The following section thus adds depth to understanding the spatial relations present in these Black geographies.

Reconstruction

Following the U.S. Civil War, the Reconstruction era (1865–1877) saw recently freed Black citizens align themselves, to a large extent, with Radical Republicans in the hope that this alliance would lead to their full participation in U.S. society. Across the U.S. South, Black populations embraced voting, directed and attended schools, campaigned for elected office, negotiated labor contracts, and strived to exercise their newly acquired constitutional rights. The promise of this moment was made possible, in part, thanks to the presence of armed Black militias.³

Shortly after the beginning of Reconstruction, Black men were “recruited in nine of the eleven former Confederate states to protect” the Southern Radical Republican state administrations from White mob violence (Singletary 1957, vii; Barr 1978, 209). The militias had significant effects on the political, economic, and social life of the Reconstruction South. During the 1868 presidential election, for example, states that mobilized militias (Tennessee, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Arkansas) saw Republican victories, whereas states that had not mobilized their militias (Louisiana and Georgia) voted Democrat (Singletary 1957). Militias both supervised the registration of voters and provided protection for the recently freed Black populations, escorting “black voters to the polls and [holding] watch over Republican rallies” (Emberton 2006, 621; Storey 2010, 641).

The presence of Black militias also served as an aid in Black refusal of racist labor relations. In various locations across the South, the presence of militias gave Black populations the ability to break unfair labor contracts and demand wages from employers (Fletcher 1968; Burton 1978). In the Mississippi Delta, labor strikes, Black women’s refusal to labor on plantations and on weekends, and protests against high rents were all possible because of Black militia activity (Woods 1998). Land redistribution was also contingent on an armed Black presence. In South Carolina, militia activity helped ensure the distribution of plots of land to Black families in the Low Country (Burton 1978). Furthermore, Black militias countered the activities of White paramilitary organizations, as in 1868 Arkansas, where a three-month militia campaign against the KKK led to a disappearance of the terrorist organization from the state (Hahn 2003; C. Light 2017). These developments meant new, unprecedented forms of engagement between Black and White populations. In the past, labor, land tenure, and paramilitary activities existed as sites of overt White domination of Black populations. Black militias’ temporary and, admittedly uneven, prevention of concrete enactments of gratuitous violence allowed freed Black populations previously unknown access to political and economic institutions.

The federal abandonment of Reconstruction dashed the immediate hopes of Black integration into society as full citizens. Still, for a brief, unprecedented, and hopeful moment, Black populations in the South were able to expand their civic participation and, in some cases, avoid an onslaught of unilateral White terrorism thanks to the activities of armed Black militias. Such gains would have been impossible in the face of unchecked anti-Black violence. The necessity of drawing on armed struggle for inclusion in society’s dominant institutions would once again animate Black struggle nearly one hundred years later.

Civil Rights

The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, like the Reconstruction experiment, sought to create opportunities for Black populations in the United States to participate in the prevailing political, economic, and social institutions in society. To achieve these ends, civil rights activists implemented a number of approaches. Although nonviolence is generally understood as the driving force behind the successes of the civil rights movement, “these gains could not have been achieved without the … practice of armed self-defense” (Cobb 2015, 1–2).

During the struggles preceding the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Black activists routinely availed themselves of armed self-defense. Efforts to desegregate Arkansas schools in the 1950s involved organized, armed efforts to protect NAACP leaders, as well as some of the Black students who first integrated Arkansas public schools (Wendt 2007). The Montgomery bus boycott was, in part, possible because of the armed defense units that protected Martin Luther King and the armed carpool drivers who helped make the boycott possible (Strain 2005). The armed self-defense practices of Robert Williams and other Black activists in Monroe, North Carolina, employed against White vigilantes and police, led to relatively violence-free sit-ins and the eventual integration of a number of Monroe’s public facilities prior to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (Williams 2013). In 1961, an armed “defense guard” helped make Black voter registration possible in McComb, Mississippi (Strain 2005). In the late 1950s, activists from Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, took up arms as part of the civil rights struggle, preventing various bombing attempts (Wendt 2007). By 1964, almost all activists for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the U.S. South carried firearms (Strain 2005). These forms of self-defense were important for the passage of civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965. After this legislation came into being, self-defense remained an important practice for those seeking realization of those rights.

Mississippi’s 1964 Freedom Summer was made possible thanks to local Black communities taking up arms to defend efforts for Black voter registration (Umoja 2013). In Louisiana and eventually Mississippi, the Deacons for Defense used arms to defend Black demands for the implementation of civil rights laws, such as improved school facilities, integration in local institutions, and the right to publicly protest. The Deacons not only helped activists succeed in these demands but they also effectively ended the KKK’s ability to hold large-scale rallies and by May 1965 had ended almost all attacks on Black homes (Hill 2004). In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the integration of movie theaters, buses, restaurants, lunch counters, and schools, as well as the ending of KKK attacks, resulted from armed Black self-defense units (Wendt 2007). Although these struggles for inclusion did not lead to a complete societal transformation, Black acts of self-defense made certain demands achievable by protecting those making the demands from the concrete effects of anti-Blackness.

The Reconstruction and civil rights eras were marked by the attempts of U.S. Black populations to secure access to existing societal institutions, such as elected office, private- and public-sector jobs, leisure spaces, and public education. These moments show how Black demands for social inclusion and political recognition have historically required armed self-defense. Self-defense was necessary due to the fact that demands for Black political participation—even when simply seeking inclusion—were destabilized by the realities of gratuitous violence and assumed aspatiality. Gratuitous violence and aspatiality make demands for inclusion tenuous by normalizing the violence used to deny those demands. Only through self-defense were Black groups able to access and occupy the spaces they saw as necessary for societal transformation. Historic examples of struggles for Black autonomy also evidence a reliance on armed self-defense.

The Black Seminoles

The Black Seminoles were maroon communities that originated in the 1770s. After escaping enslavement in Georgia and South Carolina, they headed to Florida, where Indigenous Seminole communities received them as “vassals and allies” (Opala 1980, ii). Black Seminoles became fully participating members of the Seminole community, free from the violence of chattel slavery and assumptions of inhumanity. The maroons lived in villages containing their own houses, crops, and livestock; hunted and fished; and held central political roles in the wider Seminole nation as councilors, warriors, governing actors, and translators (Porter 1964; Garvin 1967, 2; Klos 1989, 58). The defense of the Black Seminole contingent from the predations of chattel slavery determined the political trajectory of the Seminoles throughout the nineteenth century.

By the mid-nineteenth century, it is estimated that around 80 percent of the Black Seminoles were runaways or children of runaways, meaning that the large majority of the Seminoles’ Black contingent was considered chattel by the U.S. government (Porter 1943, 1964). The prevalence of the maroons in the Seminole nation, along with Seminole support for the survivors of the U.S. military attack on a maroon military community known as Fort Negro and the collective Black–Indigenous commitment to protect all of the previously mentioned maroons from reenslavement, led to the First Seminole War when the Mikasuki Seminoles refused to let U.S. troops search their territory for runaway slaves in 1817 (Porter 1951; Opala 1980). The war ended in 1821, but self-defense against anti-Black violence continued to shape the political trajectory of the Seminoles.

Although the Seminoles made an agreement with the U.S. government to move west in 1832, the Second Seminole War (1835–1842) broke out over Seminole refusal to send the Black Seminoles back to slavery before moving. The U.S. commander of the war effort commented, “This … is a negro, not an Indian war,” ultimately arguing that the long-term effects of this “negro” war would seriously destabilize racial dominance across the U.S. South (Porter 1943, 400). A stream of runaway slaves fleeing plantations and other maroon communities present in northern Florida bolstered the Seminole contingent (Porter 1943; Garvin 1967; Opala 1980). The Seminoles eventually ceased their military struggle once the U.S. government ensured that all of the Black components of the Seminole nation—those of long standing in the community, as well as those that had recently joined—would receive unmolested passage west. Between 1838 and 1845, about 500 Black Seminoles relocated to eastern Oklahoma as free people (Opala 1980).

After leaving Florida and arriving in Oklahoma, the Black Seminoles continued to employ armed self-defense against efforts to reenslave them from both White and Indigenous slave catchers (Opala 1980). Eventually, a group of Black Seminoles moved to Coahuila, Mexico. After settling in Mexico, the Black and Indigenous Seminoles “welcomed escaped slaves from across the border,” just as they had done in Florida (Opala 1980, 15). The use of arms to defend their communities thus had long-term effects not only for the Seminoles themselves but also for other Black groups seeking freedom from slavery.

By employing armed self-defense, the Black Seminoles and their Indigenous allies were able to not only preserve the autonomous ethic of marronage but expand it, as they welcomed Black escapees at every stage of their communities’ existence. The Seminoles created spaces of Black humanity and self-reliance, establishing a radical subjectivity through the deployment of armed self-defense. More than a century later, an urban-based Black social movement would draw on armed self-defense to protect their aspirations for autonomy.

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense

In 1966, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale officially formed the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The primary goal of the Panthers, as stated in their Ten-Point Program, was for Black people to “determine the destiny of [the] Black Community” (Newton 2009, 122). A central part of their political orientation was their insistence that the Black community rely on itself to achieve self-determination. This autonomous approach entailed addressing several pressing community needs and relied on armed self-defense against manifestations of anti-Black violence.

The Panther programs addressed various aspects of life in California’s Black communities. The Free Breakfast for Children and free groceries for families programs helped secure proper nutrition for community members. Panther-run schools took in students whom the California public school system had abandoned or deemed uneducable, providing them with a critical pedagogy designed to make them active political subjects. Health clinics served the needs of all sectors of the community and brought attention to issues generally ignored by mainstream health care, like sickle-cell anemia and Black maternal health. The Panthers ran a factory to produce free shoes for community members and a busing program to bring the families of prisoners to their incarcerated loved ones (Seale 1991; Brown 1994; Newton 2002; Tyner 2006; Heynen 2009; A. Nelson 2011; Bledsoe and Wright 2019b). These programs directly and indirectly relied on armed self-defense, because it was necessary to build “a protected space” for Black people to keep “anybody from doing any more damage than [had] already been done” (Brown 1992, 393).

Panther self-defense took various forms. For example, they used arms to prevent the police from disrupting public sites of mourning in Richmond, California, following the police murder of Denzil Dowell in 1967 (Seale 1991; Newton 2009). The Panthers also frequently patrolled local police departments to check the rampant police violence in their communities. Armed Panthers would stop when they saw a police officer questioning a community member and ask the individual whether they were being abused. Initially, this led to police leaving the scene altogether, resulting in a decline of police murder and brutality (Newton 2002). These instances of Black self-defense against state violence had material and psychological effects on Black and non-Black actors alike.

Huey Newton noted the bewilderment with which police often reacted to the Panthers’ armed patrols, stating, “The police did not know how to respond, because they had never encountered patrols like this before.” Confronting the police with “weapons in our hands, we were no longer their subjects but their equals” (Newton 2002, 59). In certain instances, armed self-defense resulted in actual firefights with police officers, as in the case of the L.A. Panthers’ 1969 shootout with the newly formed Los Angeles Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) unit. The SWAT unit’s raid on the Panthers’ Los Angeles headquarters led to a five-hour shootout between Panthers and the police. Wayne Pharr, a former L.A. Chapter Panther who participated in the shootout, described how, during the battle, “I felt free. I felt absolutely free. I was a free Negro. … I was making my own rules. You couldn’t get in, I couldn’t get out. But in my space I was the king” (S. Nelson 2015). This experience of Black psychic transformation and the non-Black vertigo described by Newton typify not only the Panthers’ experience but all of the examples of self-defense previously described.

The Ontological Challenge of Black Self-Defense

The armed self-defense of the Panthers, Seminoles, Reconstruction-era militias, and civil rights activists allowed for the pursuit of a variety of Black freedom struggles. These acts of self-defense also led to new senses and practices of self and emergent spatial relations. Self-defense temporarily challenged gratuitous violence and aspatiality—the bases of the assumption of Black inhumanity—and thus challenged notions of Human being. The Seminoles’ ability to defend their Black contingent from reenslavement cultivated among those enslaved in Florida the belief in, and aspiration to, spaces free from chattel slavery. This recognition of the existence of spaces not defined by assumed Black inhumanity was one of the primary driving factors for slaves to run away to Seminole communities (Porter 1943). The existence of such spaces was also a motivating force for allowing the Black Seminoles to move west, as Army officers and slave owners alike greatly feared that the Black Seminoles’ experience with freedom would lead to continued, and intractable forms of, marronage that would destabilize slavery in the region (Porter 1943; Opala 1980).

In the Reconstruction-era South, the psychic effects of Black self-defense are partially encapsulated in an episode where “a column of Negro soldiers passed by to the cheers of a boisterous entourage of freedmen, [and an] old Southern gentleman threw up his hands in horror and pleaded, ‘Blow Gabriel blow, for God’s sake blow’” (N. Johnson 2014, 76). This invocation was a clear plea for the world to come to an end, as the implications of a Black defense corps were sufficient for this White individual to question the rectitude of the world he inhabited. A similar episode played out in Monroe, North Carolina, a century later when Robert Williams and a number of other armed activists found themselves confronted by a violent mob on their way to protest for the integration of the town’s public swimming pool. Williams and his companions presented arms to defend themselves against both the mob and hostile police officers present. While this transpired, there was “an old white man in the crowd, and he started screaming and crying like a baby and he kept crying, and he said, ‘God damn, God damn, what is this God damn country coming to that the niggers have got guns, the niggers are armed and the police can’t even arrest them!’” (Williams 2013, 46).

Black self-defense had the effect of inducing a kind of vertigo among those whose sense of self relied on the perpetuation of anti-Blackness. The disorientation that induced non-Black individuals to question the very existence of the world is understandable when one reflects on the fact that the very sense of being that underpins the modern world depends on the prevalence of gratuitous violence and Black aspatiality. Inaugurating a permanent end to anti-Black gratuitous violence and aspatiality would signal the simultaneous inauguration of a new epoch altogether; hence the conceptual vertigo among the non-Black antagonists discussed earlier.

In the process of disrupting concrete enactments of gratuitous violence and creating defensible space, the various actors already described induced not only non-Black vertigo but also a new sense of being for the Black individuals and groups involved. Spaces of emergent political possibilities—where the logic of anti-Blackness, gratuitous violence, and aspatiality was hindered—became realizable goals for those in proximity to these movements. The transformative potential of these acts of self-defense is found in the fact that such self-defense was important to programs that propagated Black communities. In these cases, defensive violence was not a reason unto itself; it was but a part of a much larger, complex set of relations that sought to create spaces that fostered (Black) life.

The recognition that gratuitous violence and aspatiality precluded the potential for Black political recognition animated the efforts of Black self-defense. Because gratuitous violence entails the legitimation of all acts of anti-Black violence and aspatiality denies legible Black spatial creation and occupation, political claims by Black communities are destabilized by the imminent violation of the claimants. Black resolve to establish the sanctity of the Black body and Black spaces created the potential for political change. Preventing the violation of Black actors produced the possibility for new spatial relations to emerge, as fear of the effects of Black responses to anti-Black violence occasionally forced non-Black antagonists to capitulate to Black demands. So, whether pursuing the nonradical demand of inclusion in the prevailing political and economic systems of the country or seeking the radical establishment of spaces of autonomy separate from dominant society, all iterations of Black politics described earlier exercised self-defense to protect against the politically disqualifying realities of gratuitous violence and aspatiality and open up spaces of political potential. In the struggle to exercise spatial agency, Black populations have transhistorically relied on self-defense—a reality that continues today.

Looking toward the Future

The necessity of Black self-defense remains evident in the present. Renewed rounds of human and civil rights struggles have emerged, led by Black women, trans folk, and men who call for the recognition of, and end to, different forms of anti-Black violence. These groups and individuals are responding to a situation in which the structural realities of gratuitous violence and aspatiality have manifested in renewed forms of concrete anti-Black violence. The past five years have seen rates of hate crimes against Black individuals rise (FBI 2017; Beirich 2019). In addition, state-sanctioned violence continues to disproportionately affect Black populations (Edwards, Lee, and Esposito 2019). The protests, occupations, and actions of different Black-led and Black-influenced movements fighting against these very conditions have faced numerous forms of violent retribution in places like Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Texas, to name but a handful of instances (B. Stahl 2017; Carson and Rodriguez 2020; Peiser 2020).

Given the importance of self-defense among prior Black political movements, as well as the persistence of anti-Black violence today, it is perhaps unsurprising that there have emerged a number of individuals and groups intent on enacting forms of Black self-defense in the present. The National African American Gun Association reported 9,000 new members between November 2016 and February 2017 (Young 2017). Firearms dealers and gun clubs across the country have also noted a sharp rise in Black gun purchases (T. Lee 2017). Black-run organizations like Guerrilla Mainframe, the Huey Newton Gun Club, and Black Women’s Defense League have garnered public attention in the past few years, further demonstrating the continued Black commitment to practicing armed self-defense (Cooper 2017; A. Stahl 2018). Recently, a number of Black community organizations in Minneapolis have established armed patrols to provide protection for community members amidst the opportunistic anti-Black violence occurring in the wake of the 2020 uprising (Jany 2020; Winter 2021). Only time will tell what the long-term outcomes of these forms of self-defense will be. These self-defense efforts will only be as efficacious as are the movements and goals that they protect and will only persist if they are able to navigate the various societal efforts at preventing Black self-defense. Nonetheless, current practices of Black self-defense suggest that Black-led movements are following in the footsteps of their predecessors and seeking to realize their goals through the physical protection of themselves and their spaces.

Although this particular article focuses on the context of the United States, further inquiries should examine the history of Black self-defense in the wider diaspora. Across the Americas, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Dutch colonial laws prohibited enslaved and sometimes free Black individuals from carrying arms (Cramer 1994; Peabody 2011; Woods 2017; Patisso and Ermete 2020). Gratuitous violence and aspatiality have also been transhistorical realities for diasporic populations outside the United States (Bledsoe 2015; Smith 2016; Alves 2019; Vargas 2020). Finally, historical acts of Black self-defense outside the United States remain some of the major drivers of world history, as the willingness for Black populations across the diaspora to assert a (societally denied) right to self and space has ushered in major territorial and political developments in the Americas (James 1989; Price 1996; Reis 1997; Meeks 1999; Gottlieb 2000; Gomes 2005). These factors demonstrate the necessity of engaging the question of Black self-defense in a diasporic context.

The question of the possibility of Black self-defense offers important insights into the nature of modern space and notions of being. Because self-defense, as a central component of modern humanity, is predicated on a multiscalar right to self and space and because chattel slavery and its afterlife foreclose a Black ownership of self or a legible Black creation and occupation of space, the condition of Blackness reveals to us the limits of modern humanism and spatiality. Nonetheless, the resolve of Black populations to reject the modern insistence of Black inhumanity and aspatiality and employ self-defense as part of the realization of various political demands offers insight into key components for the struggle of new spatialities and ways of being. The historical necessity of Black self-defense offers important precedents that will shape future forms of Black struggle. After all, resisting the destabilizing effects of anti-Blackness is necessary to create a world not defined by anti-Blackness.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Willie Wright for generous suggestions on sources and feedback on how to clarify the article’s main arguments; Tyler McCreary for invaluable insight into how to organize the article; and Nik Heynen for editorial guidance and support throughout the publication process.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adam Bledsoe

ADAM BLEDSOE is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, Environment & Society at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests center on the African diaspora and the ways in which diasporic populations analyze, critique, and create alternatives to anti-Blackness.

Notes

1 Unlike Black diasporic populations, Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Africa, and Asia have historically received recognition from European colonizers as having sovereign rights and legitimate military capabilities vis-à-vis European occupation. The recognized sovereignty and right to self-defense of the colonized are evident in things like European purchases of Indigenous lands (Churchill 2002); settler juridical categorization of Indigenous populations as “military opponents” (Riley 2012, 1686); political and military delineation between “hostile,” Native lands and European-controlled territories (D’Andurain and Krause 2017); mid-twentieth-century European-directed referenda on the possibility of self-government of colonized nations (Schmidt 2009); and the discursive support for anticolonial efforts by nations of the Global North (V. Johnson 1993). As legitimate self-defense remains predicated on a right to self and space, the realities of colonization, although certainly instances of racialized violence, nonetheless hold open the possibility of Indigenous self-defense creating “zones of respite by putting the settler ‘out of the picture,’ whether back to the European zone or into the sea,” or by submitting settlers to “Native lifeways” and Native sovereignty in a drive for Indigenous “restoration” (Sexton 2020, 98; Wilderson 2020, 241).

2 The Black Codes existed as statute in many states in the U.S. South immediately following the Civil War. The 1867 Reconstruction Acts and the prospect of readmission to the Union gave most state legislatures incentive to repeal the Codes throughout the late 1860s and early 1870s (Du Bois 1998, 444). Unsurprisingly, the Black Codes were largely struck down after Congress legalized militias in the U.S. South in 1868—a measure that temporarily protected Republican voters across the region, leading to more progressive elected officials (Emberton 2006, 616).

3 Although these militias were called Black militias, in reality many were comprised of both Black and White men. Nonetheless, the presence (and often preponderance) of Black men in the militias was sufficient to lead to a “Black” moniker.