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African Americans Should Be Wary of Ohio’s Proposed ‘Stand
Your Ground Bill’
By Anthony Bouyer, PhD
Guest Column
Ohio Republican law makers
have introduced a new bill, HB228, “Stand Your Ground.” If
passed, the bill will eliminate a person’s “duty to retreat”
if he feels his life is in danger, allowing the individual
to protect himself by using deadly force. Representative
Niraj Antani, R-District 42 , is a co-sponsor of the bill
and says he supports it because it will clarify the current
law which only allows citizens to use lethal force to
protect their homes or car.
The new law, if passed,
will state that if you get into a confrontation with someone
and you feel threatened, you don’t have to retreat. You can
shoot the individual and then the burden of proof is on the
prosecution.
So the question is why
should African Americans be wary of the bill? Let’s digest
the bill’s language. The issue that African Americans, and
particularly African-American men, need to be concerned with
is the “duty to retreat” language which permits an
individual if he feels his life is in danger, he will be
able to use deadly force to protect himself.
So as an individual all I
have to say is: “I felt my life was in danger.”
Why is this troublesome
for African-American men? The
images of African-American males today from the media often
show them as violent, and as non-human. Alexander (2011)
offered an historical view of how disingenuous the dominant
culture is in creating negative images of African-American
males:
Following the Civil War, it was unclear what institutions,
laws, or customs would be necessary to maintain white
control now that Slavery was gone. Nonetheless, as numerous
historians have shown, the development of a new racial order
became the consuming passion for most white Southerners.
Rumors of a great insurrection terrified whites, and blacks
increasingly came to be viewed as menacing and dangerous. In
fact, the current stereotypes of black men as aggressive,
unruly predators can be traced to this period, when whites
feared that an angry mass of black men might rise up and
attack them or rape their women. (p. 28)
Americans were reminded of this portrait of African-American
men, when Police Officer Darren Wilson, when interviewed by
Good Morning America (2015), described how Michael
Brown looked right before he shot him in Ferguson Missouri,
saying, “Michael Brown looked like a demon, non-human.”
According to spring (2010), negative images of conquered
groups go back much further than the Civil War, noting, “For
early Christians, barbarian was synonymous with pagans and
without civilization. Consequently, pagans or non-Christians
were considered as less than human” (p. 3).
Over the past year we have witnessed an increase of whites
calling the police on African Americans for going about
their daily business. In Portland, Ore, an African-American
male is approached by Double TYree security officer and
asked to show his key to his room for no reason, police was
called and the man was removed from the hotel for no reason.
Last month, police in the Seattle suburb of Kirkland helped
the owner of a frozen yogurt shop kick out a black man
because employees said they felt uncomfortable. The arrest
of two Africa-American males at Starbucks for doing what
other customers do meet and talk. There are numerous
incidents where the police have been call because whites
felt uncomfortable around African Americans.
African Americans are
being set up to become victims of a law that will be based
on individual’s indefinable fears of African Americans. The
law will create more deadly situations for communities of
color .Remember, those fears will not be based on your
position, job title, income level, neighborhood or status in
the community. Those fears will be based upon your race and
gender if you are an African-American male.
Ed. Note: Bouyer, who has spent the past 25 years in the
criminal justice system as a licensed counselor specializing
in drug and alcohol counseling, earned his masters’ degree
from the University of Toledo in 2003 in counseling and
education and his doctorate in 2016 from UT in philosophy of
education in Social Foundation and Leadership
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