Reasonable fear standards encode racist presumptions about black men

Evidence

Zimmerman’s “reasonable fear”—the threshold for his use of the “stand your ground” defense—was no ordinary response to a perceived threat. Trayvon Martin was a young black man, wearing a hoodie in a neighborhood in which Zimmerman thought he didn’t belong. And in our culture, young black men dressed like Martin and in the “wrong” place are presumed dangerous. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 221

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates what ‘reasonable fear’ functionally protects—a presumptive racial threat model.
• XREF: connects to: The politics of respectability required blacks to police their own behavior against racist stereotype — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 900