On Marissa Alexander and the Politics of Defenseless Defense

This paper pursues an understanding of Marissa Alexander’s question: “If you do everything to get on the right side of the law, and it is a law that does not apply to you, where do you go from there?” Alexander has been imprisoned since July 2012, serving a 20 year sentence in a Florida prison because she could not convince a judge nor jury that there was even a chance that she had been brutally physically attacked by her then husband, that she was fearful for her life and had no means of escape when she fired one warning shot into the ceiling to scare him away. Her case drew national attention first following Travyon Martin’s murder and then following the acquittal of George Zimmerman, his murderer, as evidence of the unequal application of Stand Your Ground Law and the persistent denial of self-defense for African Americans and women who experience intimate partner abuse. How might we think about the various articulations of injury expressed in protest against these forms of injustice, including the law’s regulation of interpersonal racial and gender violence, through Marissa Alexander’s question? A philosophical question about where we are supposed to go, what we are supposed to do, in a society whose law is founded on an anoriginary black criminality, a society whose law produces the position of blackness as indefensibility. This paper argues that the symbolic signifiance against black protest against injustice, then, is not to argue that black life is defensible, as defensible as non-black life. Alexander's question calls for a different way of reading offense which pushes us to think about what a radical political imagination would be around a category of defenseless defensiveness, of offense without defense.