Bound to Preserve the White Self: Speculative Frenzy and the Patriarchal Right to Self-Defense in John Locke and Ida B. Wells

Abstract

Abstract Debates about policing and gun violence often break down to conversations about the violence of either “private” white men engaged in vigilantism or “public” police misconduct. I argue, however, that this split misses the way that patriarchal power structures the American state across public and private spheres by uniting the police with white citizens. I make this argument through a novel juxtaposition of John Locke’s liberal theorizing of patriarchy and self-defense with Black feminist Ida B. Wells’s critiques of how American liberalism disavows Black people’s own right to defend themselves. Reading these theorists together, I diagnose how American liberalism justifies the patriarchal basis of white democracy, even as Black people refused to accept their status as objects of patriarchal power with no right to resist. By centering patriarchal power, I also argue then that the abolition of white democracy best directly responds to the contemporary crises of both policing and white masculinity.