WGS Professor Caroline Light reads from her new book: Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense

Stand Your Ground: A History of America's Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense explores the

development  of the American right to “self-defense,” and reveals how the “duty to retreat” from threat was transformed into a selective right to kill. In her rigorous genealogy, Caroline Light traces white America’s attachment to racialized, lethal self-defense, from the original “castle laws” to the radicalization of the NRA. A convincing treatise on the United States’ deadly ascension as the world’s first Stand Your Ground nation, Light shows how violent self-defense has been legalized for the most privileged and made the most marginalized more vulnerable.

Caroline Light is the WGS Director of Undergraduate Studies. She is the author of That Pride of Race and Character: The Roots of Jewish Benevolence in the Jim Crow South, from New York University Press (2014).