>> she will be joined by nyu professor ann -- and they will talk amongst themselves about the book and they promise she will make it very lively. i think we can say that. caroline will also be reading from the book and then we will have a q&a session. so just a quick introduction. caroline light is directed of undergraduate studies and studies of women gender and sexuality at harvard university.she is also the author of a previous book from 2014 that friday race and character -- was published by nyu press. ann pellegrini and is also at nyu for the study of gender and sexuality at nyu. it is with great pleasure that i am here to welcome those of you and welcome the people in the audience. thank you for joining us. let's have a little pause for a topic exit was very timely for a list. thank you so much for being here and please welcome caroline light and ann pellegrini. >> thank you so much everybody for being here on a school night to talk about somewhat demoralizing things. and also i want to thank nyu bookstore for hosting me. it is a real honor to be here. and especially to thank ann pellegrini for engaging in this with me and invited me into her classroom today we had a really interesting discussion with students about the legal writs of temporary lethal self-defense. and ann has been an intellectual influence in my work for the past couple of decades. obviously she is a prodigy. she was five years old when she published her book performance anxieties. but a lot of the work that i do on regionalization and structures of legal and -- exclusion are directly derivative of the words that -- the work that she has done. where should we start? >> the book is so topical. i guess - i wonder what can history offer? this is a book you begin writing after the death of trayvon martin in 2012. we hear still far too often about the lethal use of force against young black and brown men in particular. and so it is a topic in the news all the time. but how can history think about what subjects may be targeting this and who gets to use, who gets to the panay's fear? >> that is an excellent question and so i am - can you will hear me? i'm obviously trained as an historian. and i look at history in the universe. tend to look into the past to see what is the genealogy of this way of thinking. in this case the weaponization of fear as professor pellegrini just said. and for me, i was very surprised by what i found when i started looking back into legal doctrines. not just of the united states but prior to the instantiation of the common law doctrines that endow particular kinds of social actors with the privilege of using lethal self-defense in particular circumstances. one of the things that i discovered that i found really interesting was the roots of the -- doctrine. when you look at stand your ground laws which are now a reality in different iterations in 33 states in the united states. so they very according to the statement. but they are often referred to as castle laws. to this invocation of that old adage, a man's house is his castle. it really haunts this sort of justification of these stand your ground laws. the idea that you have a right to protect yourself and help from danger without first retreating. however, it is misleading, it is historical because truthfully the castle doctrine is about your right to protect yourself and your home. and stand your ground laws and dealt people with the power to fight back with lethal violence in public spaces. beyond their home. actually selected in the way stand-your-ground laws are adjudicated as if seen with trayvon martin also others like melissa alexander as well. stand-your-ground laws did not apply equally to everyone. they very selectively enforced. i would say one of the lessons of history is to show the inaccurate way in which stand-your-ground laws get promoted as being a universal appeal to the safety of everyone's castle. >> the initial premise is that within your own home you, and you might not just be anyone but the owner of the home, the property holder has a right to defend himself and his family. in his own home. how does it move from being located in a particular private space to being something that is, i don't know, portable? some people get to take it with them into the public space such that they can defend themselves in a shared, and a proper example or a roadway. >> right.it changes a lot in translation from england to the united states. so one of the things i tried to show in the book is how this idea of lethal self-defense and the castle doctrine shipped. in space and time. so princes, it is in the early republic in the united states that the duty to retreat begin to be undermined seriously. we certainly will battles. >> can you say a little bit more about the duty to retreat to what is that meant someone to do? >> that was one of the central legal doctrines in english common law. it was that if someone was attacking you, you did not have the right to fight back with lethal violence until you are quote - your back was against the wall. we were trying to get away as much as you could before you fight back. the one exception to that was the castle doctrine. that gets instituted in 1604. in a court case in england. where we get this all adage a man's house is his castle. so the castle doctrine then provide exception for someone who was attacked in the home. initial there was a duty to retreat and that also existed states. i argue in the book that the duty to retreat wherever you are, still exists for certain social aspects. in it if those politically, economically etc. >> so if the notion of the duty to retreat except in limited space of the house comes united states or comes to the us colonies become the united states, how does that expand? what are some moves? i think one of the things you do in the book, and this is where history, thinking about this historically so helpful. you're showing that the obviousness of certain conversations we have now about self-defense, it is not obvious at all.it happens through a set of sort of - legal action, social action and then it gets knit together. so it seems inevitable at the time. >> but it really isn't. there is a section i can read that lays the groundwork for this. i show in the book that there is a certain set of cultural economic political circumstances that come to bear in the united states on the duty to retreat and that in the end it makes the duty to retreat incommensurate with white masculinity and with the priorities of manifest destiny. so ultimately, this duty to retreat is completely incompatible with the, for instance, the spread of the nation from one coast to the other.it becomes incompatible with white masculinity honor. and i show that three different kinds of court battles in particular because the law provides particularly -- are times when you look at the ways in which laws get adjudicated for different kinds of social actors. so what was true for one kind of social actor would not be true for another. >> you talk about the case of thomas -- from the early 19th century in austin. he tells about that case? it is like the moment of this movement or this expansion of the duty to retreat. >> okay so this case of thomas selfridge happens in boston. i think it is two years within the killing of alexander hamilton by birth. so it is within a couple of years of that. it is not, it does not become his famous but becomes a landmark legal case. that gets referred to in the later 19th century case is about the duty to retreat. do you want me to read this section? this is early in the book. it starts with this trial. so when thomas selfridge stood trial for manslaughter in december 1806 the nation's laws were based on the topic of lethal self-defense. this 32-year-old lawyer had killed a man in the streets of boston claiming that he did so to protect himself from grave danger. the english common law in which united states legal foundations were based, held that one must withdraw the face of an attack and not retaliate until retreating as far as he can safely. the crown of the king of the capacity of vindicating or avenging the wrongs that citizens inflicted on one another. and accordingly did taking of another's life is among those of serious fines. one commonly perhaps ironically, punishable by death. yet in the united states, the idea of backing away from a threat or of allowing the government to protect one from harm clashed with the ideals of independence and individual rights on which the nation was founded. and while the race of the men at the center of this landmark case went unmentioned, whiteness and masculinity along with poverty ownership were as critical to the distribution of political rights as to the right to defend oneself. while legal doctrine upheld the duty to retreat popular opinion in the young republic increasingly saw a white men's retreat from assault especially in assault on his honor as cowardly as incompatible with the values of liberal democracy. so i talk a little bit about how enlightenment thinkers like thomas hobbes and john locke challenged the monarchy's monopoly on legal punishment. in 18 or 1651 hobbes was the first to invoke an inalienable right. his is a covenant not to defend myself from force or by force is always void. and in his second essay on civil government in 1690, he invoked self-defense at that great law of nature. he argued whosoever shed a man's blood by man shall be blood be shed. so i mentioned before that the exception to the english duty to retreat was the castle doctrine. that originates in a case in 1504. in the popular's is the notion of a man's house is castle. but while there is no reference to the race of the man authorized to defend is castle in practice, this castle doctrine originates predominantly in the context of white property owners. predominantly white men. in the united states the legal conditions that exclude most women and nonwhites from access to political deduction and property ownership guarantee that the castle would serve as a safe haven for white men and their property. so i go on to talk a little bit about the legal doctrine of culture. and we spoke about this in your classroom. this is where under british common law when a woman got married she relinquished all of her property and any of her political rights to her husband. essentially as sir william blackstone writes, the very being more legal existence of the woman is suspended during marriage or at least incorporated and consolidated into that her husband under his wing protection and cover she performs everything. hence the name overture. the castle that in woman occupies belonged entirely to her husband. so the essential mythology of this is that the married woman lives under her husband's protection within his castle. has a lot of implications and one is that a woman cannot defend himself from an abusive spouse. the law allowed husbands to discipline their wives their chastisement are punishment. they say a husband might give his wife moderate correction. the only exception to the masculine monopoly on violence existed when a white woman protected her chastity. so and this had to be from a stranger so there was no such thing as marital rape. there was never a knowledge of marital rape. when a woman said i due to marriage she essentially consented to sex whenever her husband wanted it. in fact in this nation, marital rape was not a lot until the 1990s. so this is another illegal fiction in the words of carla holloway who writes about the interception of literary knowledge with legal knowledge. so - there is a right to protect her chastity by granting men full authority over their wives and their daughters, the doctrine coexisted harmoniously with settler colonialism and legalized slavery. so i talk about the way in which the legal doctrine of coverture -- the legal immunities of the castle doctrine and a woman's defense of chastity did not extend to native americans and african-americans unless they were free property owners. like coverture, they rest in the belief and the hypocrisy of men of european descent and the necessary control over other human beings. the law allowed masters liberal discretion when it came to disciplining their slaves and mostly prohibited african-americans free as well as enslaved from owning weapons. while a few of the laws punished masters for outright killing their slaves, usually murderers for abusive masters were taken care of by the law. the incentives to keep the master from killing slaves were the monetary investment in their slave labor. living at the intersection of white supremacy and patriarchy enslaved women could not legally defend themselves from most forms of violence. valued for their labor and reproductive capacities which contributed to the owners workforce. enslaved women played a vital role slavery sexual autonomy. a slave consensual effect was viewed as property. as legal systems under this young nation's social order coverture and slavery were interdependent and sharing must -- legal doctrines governing the hierarch relations of husband and wife of master and slave were inextricably connected. thus law and custom conspired to exclude the nation's most vulnerable from the legal rights to defend themselves. so that is the historical which this case was homage. suffrage took place. suffrage dine they made it feed with a man named benjamin austen who was a democratic republican or the party of jefferson. he published a statement in the boston gazette calling austin a coward, a liar and a scoundrel. i will not get into the details they were fighting over a catering bill. quest he would be tweeting it today. at 3:00 a.m.. >> absolute. this is a provocative gesture and it resulted in benjamin austen planning to send somebody to settle the score with suffrage. so selfridge armed himself with a pistol because he was described as being weak and infirm. he said to one acquaintance that he would not sit for bullying or -- but he was prepared to defend himself. that afternoon on august 4, he was walking towards the public exchange on state street where he encountered austen's 18-year-old son charles austin. he was a steady athletic young man.a harvard student and at that moment he was rapidly approaching selfridge with a cane in his upraised hands. witnesses disagree who made the first assault but the end result was that selfridge fired killing austin and selfridge was taken into police custody in the rain for manslaughter. at the end of the legal battle, this case goes on for quite a while. it receives a lot of sort of popular interest. and especially because it was political, because it was between these warring parties. it did receive a lot of press. also, paul revealed was on the jury which i find fascinating as well. in the closing arguments, defense argues that the castle doctrine's defense of habitation applied to thomas selfridge and he had a legal right to protect himself just as people were allowed to protect their homes. he said every man is bound in order to defend and protect his own life when the government cannot do it for him. which i find resonates a lot today. so further echoing hobbs, the defense argued that no law created by civil society may abridge so essential and natural the right of that as of defense. on the prosecution side they argued that not only was it illegal to kill in defense of one's honor but it was incompatible with democracy. in the question the -- or his elegantly mounted pistol in defense of his honor by a secure but mortal game. under such circumstances violent chaos would reign supreme in the minds of laws we become cavemen for the soles of my shoes. although the defense insisted on selfridge's natural right to defend both the and his honor, the judge's instructions to the jury upheld the duty to retreat. the judge suggested the selfridge could have escaped austen's attack through less lethal means. however, his instructions did not resonate with the jury. which simply returned a verdict of not guilty. selfridge went free. so this trial becomes the precedents for all the cases in the 19th century for the duty to retreat. is there a duty to retreat in a public space? in this case it says not really. it depends on who you're talking about. so this case provides legal foundation for the gradual decay throughout the united states of the duty to retreat. selfridge's case proved that man violently attacked in a public place might not be obligated to retreat before defending himself and practice however,, this was a right reserved only for particular people in specific circumstances. >> also sketched out of a genealogy of a document allowed, okay, some white men. the white and the own property to defend their property understood as a domicile. but also the property of the wife and the children and what slaves they might on. since slaves were also property.this movement from the right to defend your property and people can be property to, that it moves into public space away from so fascinating in this case is that the defense is arguing and selfridge i guess attested to this as well. that if he were to invested bends b,18 he would have lost his manliness. he would lose his family honor. it would have made it impossible for them to live even if he survived the beating. so there is something about the property value of white masculinity. that has lived with him.>> absolutely. >> so the logic of property is there in public. at least for that subject was property rights over his self and his identity are considered valuable. >> exactly. i could not put any better myself. even in the small part they read, there is an indication of this defensive habitation. which is really what the castle doctrine is about. it is about your right to protect your domicile. and there is a stretching that goes on here. this stretching of the defensive habitation to the defense of white masculine honor itself. they are so many different things that influence bends in the early republic.one of which i think is the command to spread the influence of european descended christianity civilizations from sea to shining sea. even in thomas jefferson's vision of a so-called limited government.which is at the heart of the debate between the federalists and the democratic republicans. >> maybe like the musical hamilton. >> and i do not think marinda has made musical yet about the selfridge case but this is his next frontier. but, jefferson even in his sordid doctrine of limited government was all about expanding. the territory itself through the louisiana purchase.so this was something that became very naturalized once the early republic takes root. so i think that is a part of team. the expansion of property. an obviously embedded in all and this is colonialism. i do not spend nearly enough time this book on packing the naturalized understanding that of course, european descended people are going to spread their influence. without regard to people who are already living in the territory. so that is part of it too. the naturalized violence that takes place against average people. >> yes the naturalization of a notion of property that is alienable. then you can actually sell and trade. and so the less its killing of those have a different view of property, when not actually see land is property in the same way. >> exactly. >> you can kill those -- is a sign of their lack of capacity for higher civilizations. they failure to recognize property value and alienation of land is property. so i think that is a part of it. i definitely think there is an economic principle to this as well. but this long and short of this, once this happens it does not take long throughout the 19th century for the duty to retreat to essentially become guided but specifically for white men. and there is multiple times that mirrors this. in later cases they reflect the sense that this man is vulnerable, he is a veteran, injured or whatever. white masculine vulnerability becomes central to reasonable suspicion of threat. and that is a recurrent theme today. the sort of reverse victimization there in that narrative. >> need is effectively described jury nullification. the teacher explained selfridge in some ways against the judge. and this is in perspective of -- preview - >> fast forward to the future. given the history and are there some contemporary examples of how this expression of reasonable self-defense is perpetuating from racial and gender biases? >> i think that is what led me to do this work. the concept of reasonable across the margins of all of these contemporary cases right now. so when we look at what happened to trayvon martin five years ago, his killer was acquitted based on the injurious understanding of his reasonable sense of fear and anxiety. when he was faced by an unarmed black teenager in a florida suburb. so this nation of who has reasonable fear, for whom is that they are intelligible? in the eyes of the jury it was intelligible understandable that george zimmerman was fearful when he saw trayvon martin. i have been the end of the book, a bunch of cases that i read a little bit about mcdonald's, that is a good illustration of how reasonable fear ends up in some ways selectively creating a duty to retreat that continues to haunt certain groups of people. in other words, groups of people that are excluded from the idea of reasonable anxiety and fear. i do not know people are familiar with this case. this was back in assisi mcdonald's, in june of 2011. back then, cici mcdonald was a black transgender woman attacked by a group of people yelling racist and sexist obscenities.a woman slashed her face with a bottle. and it white man with a criminal history attacked mcdonald's she was trying to flee the scene. mcdonald stepped in with a pair of scissors that she kept in her purse. he died later from loss of blood and mcdonald was arrested and charged with second-degree murder. we know how all of this and is but essentially, in the poorest, the court case that resulted, cici mcdonald maintained and many witnesses maintained that she was acting in self-defense. but in fact, she was trying to flee this group of people that work attacking her. the prosecuting attorney michael freeman insisted that mcdonald's and had every opportunity to retreat to safety. this happened in minnesota which is not a stand your ground state. so freeman cited the individual duty to retreat from danger when you are attacked outside of the home. so mcdonald's failure to retreat adequately, therefore made her a murderer. insisting quote - that the scales of justice have a blindfold on them for a reason. freeman signaled the blindness of the law to differences such as race and gender and sex. thus, he could dismiss the racist and transformative origins to the attack in which mcdonald defended herself. insisting that the deadly encounter was no different from an unmarried barbara with both sides being equal. in the end mcdonald pled guilty to second-degree manslaughter and she was sentenced to 41 months. she served 19 in an all-male prison. according to the executive director of the trans support network resolved was placed on travel forward surviving a hate crime. so i have a bunch of cases and i keep seeing the ones. it seems every time you turn on the news there is another case of somebody. whether a small child or a person of color, a gender nonconforming person who is attacked and fights back for a woman who is a domestic violence survivor who fights back against her attacker. and they end up in prison in spite of being in a standard ground state. one of my conclusions from the study is that for all of the reasons we were talking about before with the specific reasonableness in which so much of the adjudication of criminal law is based, stand your ground laws in many ways they do not just not help socially minor and ties people and protect them and give them the right to protect themselves. in fact i think they exacerbate the already powerful racial and gender injustices in the criminal and justice system. in many ways, there is plenty of efforts to suggest that stand your ground laws give certain groups of people, usually socially dominant actors, a license to kill. while excluding the vast majority of us from the right to defend ourselves. >> and get their cast and being gender-neutral. and that was the case of cici mcdonald with the prosecutor says, and this is the best of the language in liberal diversity. we can have this and talk about this. here is violence being done against this trans woman. the lush is just how neutral it is by prosecuting her as her vulnerability was not a factor in what happened to her. >> exactly. it happens time and time again. they are semi-different cases. there is the case of a young trans man less well-known. he is in georgia right now. he is serving a sentence in a woman's prison. so to add insult to injury, the trans individual who becomes criminalized serves time in the prison and the gender with which they do not identify. and he was criminalized because he shot his rapist. he had a positive rate kit, he had all kinds of evidence in his favor. he did not have money to appoint a great attorney. the court appointed attorney did not even tell him about stand your ground laws. not that it would have necessarily exonerated him. but we see so many different layers to this. it is not just about racial exclusions or patriarchal exclusions. homophobic exclusions. there is a element by which if you lack the resources to hire yourself a really good defense attorney, you run the risk of being criminalized.or have to plead down.this happens to partners of violence to fight back against their violent partners. >> there are so many contemporary examples but the one that i want to mention and then maybe open us up to some conversation with the audience and some more back-and-forth. but this i found to be an extraordinary case. this is whitley jones. an african-american in south carolina which is a standard ground state. she defended herself against her boyfriend and ended up stabbing him with a knife and he died. actually initially charges were not going to run against her. it was actually thought she had reacted reasonably in the adoption of standard ground. within the state appealed the initial position not to charge. but what i found extraordinary was actually the attorney from the state and what they said and why this charge had to be brought. and the solicitor said quote ã a woman's right to stand her ground, a domestic dispute is less than man's right to stand his ground with some stranger he has gotten into a fight with. >> exactly. >> and that is the nutshell. this also an african-american woman, it is an intersection of racism and sexism and doubly disadvantaged. in terms of how the law would possibly perceive her legitimate use of self-defense. >> absolutely. i was originally drawn to this case because i thought i saw this as an example of the law working weight was supposed to. it was obvious there were witnesses, she had been abused by this man multiple times. she tried to escape. she only kill him she cannot get away. and indeed, at the stand your ground hearing they decided it was reasonable for her to have acted the way that she did. and then the state prosecutors came after her. with guns blazing. and that statement summarizes everything. that the laws were never intended to protect women from domestic violence within the man's castle. but instead, these laws were designed against stranger danger really. and part of the goal of the book is to illuminate that fear generated discourse of the stranger danger that permits us to think that we need to be individually participating in armed citizenship against all of these different encroaching threats. whether they are criminal thugs or undocumented immigrants or terrorists. there is this whole litany of threats that we are supposed to be afraid of and yet, the actual threats to women safety are often men that they now. and these laws were not designed to protect them. >> as far as i know whitley jones has remained free. she is a free woman as far as i can tell. i do not think the prosecutors were able to get her into prison. perhaps one example of the law as it may be shed. >> i think the issue of stranger danger in this particular moment is especially urgent because there are so many different characters being proposed as the stranger that endangers us. and i think it is a time to be very watchful of solicitation of fear and ways in which people are being, certain citizens are being deputized to perhaps - act in ways that are violent toward other citizens. >> absolutely. whether we are talking about the border patrol on the policing of public bathrooms. which you know, essentially is about policing borders. and invocations of protection that we started with and coverture is an implication to a particularly racialized gendered protection of white women. and that is a recurring theme in american history. justify the lynching of more than 4000 african-american invocation of the urgent need to protect women. and i see with current, echoes of that in our fears around bathrooms and the fear that transgressive others are going to threaten women and children's safety and bathrooms. these are recurrent themes and i hope that i excavating the history we can be more mindful of them when they creep up time after time. >> let's open this up to conversations with our audience here. >> hello. i guess i'm just wondering hearing all of this what can be done? not just what should be done from a lawmakers standpoint. what could we do? do you have any ideas? >> i do not, the book is not prescriptive. i really do not have at the end words of wisdom in terms of what we need to do aside from sort of greater awareness of our past. one of the things i'm starting to see is that antiviolence work has to think constellation only.has to be deliberate in seeing violence. not just is one thing. so when i wrote this is not just about guns. although guns play a role in a lot of these stories, these case studies.but to look at vectors of violence as they are connected. domestic violence, intimate partner violence and the way in which that is connected to mass incarceration and the erosion of a social safety net. and violent policing and racial profiling. these things are connected and we need to become really self-critical about the way in which we engage in certain kinds of practices that become naturalized.like this stranger danger. it becomes often very seductive to imagine that you can protect yourself from terrorists by packing your own pistol. although i do not really know how that works. it is a seductive narrative that you as an individual take your safety into your own hands. so a lot of people, they follow that. because it feels empowering. but i think we have to really actively push back against that narrative. in think more collectively and he ãagainst the violence. >> also, what is the language that we use for this? whose actions to defend themselves or their communities get called violence? whose get called justice or defending freedom? and i do not think that, i think this is actually a very deep question. i do not know what violence is. i mean i think that what gets named violence is historical, it's -- ef2 not assume that we all know it violence is when we experience it or see it. i think history really helps here. because it gives us i think a kind of, a different or a complicated view of the present. it could slow down reaction time potentially. one of the things that caroline was talking about was talking about the black panther party. and sort of the crucial role it played in the history of civil rights in this country. and the way that with the organization that a husband is characterizes some histories as non-law-abiding when in fact it was actually making use of the law and deeply in creative ways that were against white supremacy. but if you have a system organized around white supremacy, such that those of us that are white do not even recognize it, groups that stand up for themselves to fight against it might be experienced by those of us with the privilege of our skin is somehow acting violently against us. when in fact it is actually acting in accord with the idea of justice or freedom. so from whose perspective do these stories even get told? >> that is an excellent point about the language that we use. because one thing i noticed is the way in which the language of writing gets used -- rioting gets used. and where this destroys entire communities.so like the black panther party lives in the wider popular imagination and being violent or antiwhite when in reality, therefore principles were about social justice and resistance to white supremacists, power and violence. so i need to be more about how i'm using it to. but i think absolutely we can be all more self reflective as we think about our naturalized understanding of what is violence versus what is justice. >> and i think also, i love the way that you use these early legal cases to flesh out what has become a sort of obviousness for american public life. at the get is also really important not to think that law then becomes determinative of every single way we can think about things. the law provides one language, one set of conceptual resources, one tool. but it is not all of them.so what other languages to be get to use outside of the court of law? i am not a lawyer so i don't have to change what i'm saying in terms of what the law will recognize. >> do you see a connection between the legal history of standard ground laws and save the trump immigration policy. a connection between the domicile an extension of it to the homeland. and the preservation of white masculinity. >> is a great question, thank you. so many levels. absolutely. i do not even know it to start. i mean there is the - one of the necessary factors in the discourse about an armed citizenship is the category of alienation and otherness and stranger hood. sarah asked me to write beautifully about the conceptualization of the stranger other. so yes, this idea of the security threat to our borders that is especially amplified in the wake of 9/11. and they talked about contributing to naturalized knowledge and insecurities. in the wake of 9/11, especially right here in new york city, we have become fearful. we have become terrified, all borders have been breached. in a lot of ways it becomes very convenient to invoke these figures of alienation and danger and use them as justification for draconian and incredibly cruel exclusionary laws. so many different levels and yes, the implication of the homeland. the slippage between the sort of defensive habitation and the defense of the entire homeland. you can see it when you work at border patrol also. the deputization of civilians, armed white civilians to go and patrol the border against so-called illegal immigrants. again, it serves the same kind of constellation of exclusion. it concentrates power into particular kinds of already -- >> when you in my class today i was thinking also reading your book, and you can tell me the exact quote. but the notion that a good guy with a gun will always be the bad guy with a gun. >> yes. >> he said the ability to identify, we know who the bad guys are. and we need these band objects out there that define us and our goodness. and i started thinking about this a connection to the brilliance and simplicity of president trump's language during his campaign about hombres. which was extraordinary. for many of us who are critical and aghast on his policies and also, the simplicity of the speech in the caricature but we do not understand it. it actually works brilliantly to just in this broadway tag huge groups of people and the lack of specificity is what makes it work. >> yes. >> it magnetizes whomever you wish to put in there to be scared of. and then he correlates back to the border and brown people. really, it is quite a good use of language if you are trying to produce this division. justify violence. >> yes and those boundaries are deliberate. that almost anyone can fit in that category. and that has been a long-standing position of the rhetoric. that the good guys always know, they can always tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys. it is really entrenched in the idea that only there had been somebody. a good guy with a gun at the pulse night club in florida. only, then all of those people would have been saved. and i think there is kind of on this other level. maybe you can help us out a little bit but i believe there is and i fantasy a level, people want to do good. and i think this is about being that hero, becoming your own action hero where you have got your gun, you're in the right place at the right time and he managed to take up that bad guy. and that comes up. that is a recurrent theme. the good guys are going to find the bad hombres and identify them and take them up before they harm the innocent citizens. >> if we're going to go with melanie klein i mean it was a fantasy of a splitting. the purely good and the purely bad. it is very hard to live and acknowledge all the ways in which we fall short of our own ideals. and that we actually are aggressive not only towards people we do not know and who are strangers to us and his differences we might find confusing but we actually have aggressive feelings towards people we love. how do that with that? one of the ways i think is an unconscious way that can also be unfortunately manipulated. and we transfer all of the negative feelings that we find unbearable and we transfer them onto ready-made objects whom we have learned i would say to hate. and this is, i believe it is possible to live in the space of discomfort and not have to act out. but there is a splitting of good and bad. it has catastrophic consequences. it is not just at eight level of fantasy where it is lived. some bear the brunt of being the bad objects so others can feel if we are good citizens. >> right. that category of safety hate is proliferating right now. >> to what extent do you see this as an, i mean really think about nonviolence. i have to dissociate out with the greater availability of weapons and things like that. america is not the only polish or imperial power. and this clearly comes from english law. so how is this different in united states versus elsewhere? >> i think it is a great point. statistically in the united states we have more guns than people. and that is unusual. we have something like five percent of the worlds population in this country but we have almost half of the guns. >> we are overachievers. >> we are total overachievers. we are also overachievers in mass shootings. i mean astronomically more mass shootings than any other nation. our mass shootings also, and other unacknowledged fact about the massachusetts typically they are enacted by angry white men. and that somehow gets lost amidst the efforts to create these ready-made bad objects. that are safe to hate. but i do not know. i think part of it is corporate. i think a part of it is a very deliberate effort in the past couple of decades by gun manufacturers to find new ways to market the technology. given a waning interest in hunting. he used to be several decades back, hunting was the number one reason for owning a firearm. now, people say their number one reason for owning a firearm in self-defense. so a lot of that perception of urgent fear and anxiety is rooted in a manufactured effort to create a need for a particular commodity. but i do not know, i mean this is the sticky question. why did this happen in the united states? i think it is a whole variety of different interlocking normalized ideas about safety and also individualism. where we are really into the subjectivity here also. so it is like every man for himself. it is really big in the united states as well. >> i think it is such an interesting question. what you just said about the long tradition of the glorification of the individual in the united states, distrust of the federal government and you put that together with i think this, not only the common targeting. but who will buy the weapons now? there still are large, there are a lot of hunting cultures but you have to sell more and more weapons. so how do cultivate this new market? but i'm also thinking about how neoliberalism fits into this into the sense of, the government is in fact retreating. from the provision of more and more services for the public good. so people are being called upon as individuals to do more than they were historically. if you put that alongside the ideology that already disrupts government with a capital g. in the sense of the individual who pulls himself up by his bootstraps. i think have a lot of trends together that producing orientation towards gun ownership and you know you use language, i think it is hugely helpful for the diy self-defense. >> like you said, it is about self-care. given the shrinking of the welfare state. and i think these things are parallel. i mean that explosion of do-it-yourself security citizenship correlates with the sort of late capitalist retreat from social welfare. and one of the symptoms of this is increased militarization. militarization of police forces. less investment in training for example or trying to counteract implicit bias and more investment and better weaponry. or more advanced weaponry. militarization also, the citizen, the posse on the border. so all of these i think are symptoms of that kind of neoliberal turn to self-care that is beautifully compatible with that arming yourself and find more guns. >> and it goes back to the question what is to be done? people are not hallucinating. many people are in fact more secure. for example then they were a decade ago. so how is one called to respond to the insecurity and with what resources? and his responsibility is it to help with a shared insecurity? if you individualize this and sell weapons at the same time i think you have a recipe for an awful lot of violence. >> to pick up on the question about if this is uniquely american. i wonder if we thought about the nature of the split in the united states historically between urban and rural. and it is really a product of the kind of line station of a kind of rural america since the time of thomas jefferson. do all of these generalizations work if you think about urban populations which are not as heavily armed. federal facility heavily armed and they are overrun and apprehended, but within a year they are acquitted and it happens in harney county in rural oregon and portland oregon. i wonder if you have reflections about the kind of nuance about the american quality looking at the urban and rural split. >> that is a great question. i don't know. i mean, i feel like in the book i have kind of a mix of examples in different cases. i am also more recently a report came out in chicago. i think about in chicago in particular as an interesting case. illinois was the last state to grant its citizens concealed carry permits. it was the last so now in all 50 states you can have a concealed carry permit or a permit to carry if you are in one of the 12 states that has kerry. gun violence in chicago in particular areas are intractable problems when you look at the sort of culture and of underserved communities and withdrawal of social safety net in various forms and gang violence, hyper incarceration, racialized incarceration and police violence. it's a really intractable problem. and so yes, there is a real difference. the only problem i really spend on the difference between rural versus urban is in the chapter where i am looking at african-american resistance, armed resistance, and the interesting thing i find is that we talked about the black panther party, but the precursor is rural. the first black civil rights organization to be armed and stand up to white supremacy with weapons all according to the law have ended in the rural south, select munro north carolina into different areas in mississippi and alabama and yet we don't hear about those in our history books as much as we do about the black panther party which gets demonized as being anti-white or violent, so the riots are mostly in urban phenomenon as well. but i don't do what you say then about the sort of difference between the translation from urban. the jury is found dead seats in portland that is persuaded by the self defense given so that means to suggest i want to know more about the demographics and the jury and how they were selected. >> in some ways it doesn't even matter. matter. like often the demographics of the jury don't matter as much as p. per failing ideologies and what is reasonable. so, like in the trials. they still think it is reasonable for the particular actors to stand their ground or to be fearful in a particular moment so in a moment i not surprisei'm notthat surprised tt of interesting. certainly those folks into becoming kind of lionized and become the action heroes of do-it-yourself security who believe that is our right. good question. >> i wondered about the relationship in the united states, so obviously the case against most of these have juries and they are all terrible but i kind of been thinking isn't it incredibly dangerous to have defense counsel and you've alluded to this upset as operating based on their own projections. so how did you find that impacts the cases? a lot of domestic violence survivors will plead down because they are instructed that it's the best way to get out of serving more prison time. so, what happens is that influences shape of our archives. it influences the way in which we see these cases out in the stand your ground cases or as cases of something else whether it is justifiable homicide or something excusable or straight on criminal homicide. so, yes. people who recognize in the jury his eyes they are less likely to be perceived as reasonable and the claims of fear will often plead down or be instructed to use do so. so whether you have the money to hire a great defense attorney has a lot to do with it, so it is that inequality that influences who is going to end up behind bars for basically exercising their right to defend themselves. >> you touched on police brutality and i'm curious about looking at the historical context you've outlined and the idea of property and historical definition and how it kind of gets amplified when the uniform is on and if you can talk about that in the stanford prison experiment and also look at it in terms of the idea of properties changing and the need to protect the public safety, so it becomes this massive thing that one person is protecting and i'm curious what you think about that. >> a lot of different players to that question. so, if i understand correctly, one is how the policing becomes focused on public safety which is often very much code for protecting property. often when we see there is a riot happening in ferguson, it's a major transgression that call out law enforcement when people destroy private property whether it's automobiles or stores or whatever that these are seen as transgressions against public safety rather than transgressions on public safety comes absolutely there is a call to protect private property for sure. what i found historically in troubling things one of them was for law enforcement, it is a much lower bar. it's a much lower bar for the police to be exonerated based on reasonable fear. when a member of law enforcement claims self-defense after shooting an unarmed civilian, it's easier for them to get exonerated, and it has been for a very long time. this has a long genealogy. there's a lot of disturbing stuff i found about post-reconstruction policing in the south that the police forces in southern states proliferated in the wake of black liberation in response to what was perceived as the threats to public safety of black freedom itself. so the policing in mergers and southern jurisdictions in response to that. so none of that is surprising to me except for the extent to which now we have recording devices readily at our disposal. we can record these instances of police violence and still do justice is elusive. there was a case just a day and a half ago where an off-duty white police officer basically was trying to hold onto this child, this 13-year-old i think latino boy and ended up in the end pulling a gun on him and shooting. it didn't kill anybody, thank goodness. but the 13-year-old boy and a 15-year-old friend who was trying to intervene are facing criminal charges. the police officer so far hasn't been charged with anything. but if you look at this video, it is shocking. this is an adult, a grown man brutalizing a small child. it continues and i don't know what to say about it except yes who has the right to own the property and protect it. i think the reason the man was attacking the child is because the child had been on his property. so it comes up again and again and again. >> to have a happy ending would be to turn away from the sobering argument of your buck. in facbut in fact history has my things to tell us which bodies can be targeted for violence coming and it's not about a happy ending. it's about making a better the r futures together. >> thank you for being with me this evening. plus >> i'm told he will sign copies of your buck. >> thank you all for being here. we also have a book that was co-authored you can tell just by looking and 20 others. thank you for being here and we hope to see you soon. plus iand who is this? >> this is henrietta looking at the magnificent images, looking at the images taken because the whole sky had to be covered. there was a second observatory built in peru to photograph the stars of the southern hemisphere and she was looking at the images of the clouds and discovered a couple variable stars and made a fundamentally discovery about the pattern of the variation of the stars that took the longest time that tend to be the brightest stars and that observation led to the first usable yardstick for the milky way to be determined -- they figured out that it was not the only galaxy in the universe that the universe in fact consisted of multiple galaxies. >> it would be fair to say that at that time they were not sure if the universe was maybe a few hundred thousand light-years across and maybe that was it. >> this led to us looking at the spiral galaxies and then to place ourselves within the geometry.