The Color of Fear: A Cognitive-Rhetorical Analysis of How Florida’s Subjective Fear Standard in Stand Your Ground Cases Ratifies Racism

Elizabeth Esther Berenguer

Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Patrisse Cullors created #BlackLivesMatter movement as “a response to the anti-Black racism that permeates our society.”They established this movement at a moment in time when “Trayvon Martin was [posthumously] placed on trial for his own murder and the killer, George Zimmerman, was not held accountable for the crime he committed.” This Essay analyzes the statutory structure that legalized, legitimized, and ratified Martin's murder.

When Trayvon Martin was shot and killed, Florida's Stand Your Ground laws took center stage on the national scene. Many decried Zimmerman's killing of Martin as outright murder, but Zimmerman was not convicted because this type of homicide in Florida is not only justified--it is legal. The Stand YourGround statutory scheme was enacted to permit just this sort of killing. In 2005, Florida's legislature abolished the duty to retreat so that anyone who feared an attack could meet force with force and kill with impunity; in essence, the state legalized homicide.

The impact of legalizing homicide extends far beyond the death count. As the founders of the #BlackLivesMatter movement have aptly recognized, acquittal and non-prosecution of homicides are deeply infected by endemic, long-standing racism. Florida's Stand Your Ground laws employ a subjective fear standard coupled with immunity from prosecution, which perpetuates racism in that it ratifies and propagates the implicit biases that cause us to fear “the Other,” especially Black male “Others,” however irrational that fear may be.