I recently had the opportunity to interview Professor Caroline Light, the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Harvard University. Professor Light has written many books exploring gender and race, and is currently working on a book looking at how the “stand your ground” law disproportionately empowers privileged groups to use violence against others. Her bio reads:
“Caroline Light is a Senior Lecturer and the Director of Undergraduate Studies in WGS. Her research explores histories of citizenship and belonging, and the ways in which white supremacy, (hetero)sexism, and classism shape collective (mis)memory and archival silence. Light's first book, That Pride of Race and Character: the Roots of Jewish Benevolence in the Jim Crow South (NYU Press, 2014) illuminates the experience of southern Jewish assimilation through the lens of benevolent uplift. She illuminates the gendered and racialized performances of elite, white cultural capital as a critical mode of survival for a racially liminal community of southerners. Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense (Beacon Press, 2017) provides a critical genealogy of our nation’s ideals of armed citizenship. Beginning with the centuries-old adage “a man’s home is his castle,” she tracks the history of our nation’s relationship to lethal self-defense, from the duty to retreat to the “shoot first, ask questions later” ethos that prevails in many jurisdictions today. Ultimately, she contends that the contemporary appeal to “stand your ground” masks its exclusionary commitment to security for the few at the expense of the many.” (bio and photo from Harvard University Directory)
Could you talk about how you personally got involved in studying women, gender, sexuality, and race? What interests you about these topics and/or their intersectionalities?
Oh, I love that question. I'll try not to be too long-winded. I think it happened mostly in college. What really excited me was when I started investigating history. In high school, I loved my teachers and school, but a lot of the history we studied focused on the work of powerful white men. It centered on the wars they started and oversaw, often uncritically learning dates and looking at larger governmental institutions. I didn't enjoy it. I loved my teachers, but I didn't love the study of history. So, I thought I didn't like it much and decided to study science instead.
In college, however, I discovered classes that offered a new perspective on history. As a Southerner, I became very interested in the transatlantic slave trade, as well as questions of indigeneity in the U.S. and settler colonial violence, including indigenous resistance. At this point, I wasn't considering gender yet, and that was intentional. I didn’t see myself as a scholar of gender until grad school, where I became immersed in studying labor movements and resistance. History often highlights what men did in the workforce, including labor stoppages and resistance, but I became interested in enslaved women's resistance to their enslavement and immigrant women's resistance to labor exploitation in the needle trades.
It might sound like a roundabout journey, but I found that there were interlocking systems of power in society. Our history is often taught in a way that emphasizes the accomplishments of powerful individuals. I became passionate about uncovering histories that are less visible in popular depictions of the past. This sparked my fascination with intersecting systems of power, the people caught in them, and how they resist.
It was luck through which I discovered this path. I feel fortunate to have found teachers who inspired me. I ended up in classrooms with incredible teachers who were passionate about what they taught, and that was infectious.
Can you please tell me more about your class GENED 1065 Outside, Looking In: Race, Gender, and Belonging in the U.S.?
Oh yes, I will admit, I haven’t taught this class in years. I believe the last time I taught it was in the fall of 2016. I love this class because it stems from my interest in citizenship, how we belong, and what systems our nation puts in place to create exclusionary understandings of citizenship. I centered the course around perspectives and experiences that dominant history books often overlook. I examined how our nation is built on idealized understandings of citizenship, while simultaneously creating systems that regulate who belongs and who doesn’t. These systems are often based not just on race, gender, or sexuality, but also on class, ability, and religion.
The class begins with a look at colonial times, exploring how the nation defined citizenship in opposition to indigenous subjectivity. Native people in the U.S. were not considered citizens until the 20th century—about 100 years ago—and even then, their identities were often questioned, excluded, and exploited. I also studied various immigration laws that excluded certain groups, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, as well as its precursor, the Page Act of 1875, which specifically excluded Chinese women based on the assumption that they were all prostitutes. This created a racialized, sexualized discourse of exclusionary nationalism. We also explored anti-miscegenation laws, which dictated who you could marry based on jurisdiction.
The class covers everything from colonial times to the present, looking at how law, religion, and ability are used to constrain or undermine belonging in the U.S. Scholars refer to this as exclusionary nationalism, and I explore this as the basis for the United States. The last time I taught the class, it was during the 2016 election. The day after the election, we unpacked what "Make America Great Again" really meant. My brilliant students' insights back then are still relevant today. It represents the same kind of white supremacist, heteronormative, exclusionary gender principles about who belongs in the nation. Think of all the efforts by the current administration to exclude and deport immigrant communities—especially those providing essential labor we can’t function without.
I definitely want to teach it again. I love teaching about immigration. For me, it's about the tension in being a nation that brags about being a "nation of immigrants" while simultaneously undermining basic citizenship rights. If you go far enough back, we’re all descended from immigrants—unless we are indigenous or fully descended from indigenous people. Right now, we live under a regime systematically undermining our basic rights of citizenship. Donald Trump is trying to destroy birthright citizenship, which has been in the constitution since the 1860s through the 14th Amendment, a provision created to ensure citizenship rights for the formerly enslaved. And now we have a president who seeks to undermine that right. To me, this is such a powerful paradigm that we don’t question enough, and we need to think more about its history. So yes, I definitely want to teach that class again, I’m just not sure when.
What were your motivations for writing “Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense”?
I love that question. It's an easy one, actually. I have a very straightforward answer, though it's a tragic one.
In 2012, you probably know that Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in his own neighborhood. He was killed by a man in his 40s, a neighborhood watchman, who was carrying a gun. The 911 dispatch told him not to follow Trayvon, to let them do their work. But despite that, Trayvon was killed, and his murderer was never truly held accountable legally. In the same year, within the same timeframe, two other unarmed black teenagers were killed by men who claimed they were acting in self-defense. One was Jordan Davis, also 17, who was shot by a white man because he didn’t like the music Jordan and his friends were playing in their car. The other was Renisha McBride, who was only 19. Her car broke down in Detroit, and when she knocked on a door to ask for help, the man who answered saw her brown face and shot her dead.
These three incidents, among likely many others that I wasn’t aware of at the time, really caught my attention. In each case, the person who shot and killed an unarmed black child claimed they were in fear for their life. I thought, there has to be a history to this, so I started looking into the history of how our laws have allocated—or not allocated—the right to use self-defensive violence.
We still have “stand your ground” laws in two-thirds of the states, and even in states without these laws, there’s a system that privileges certain kinds of violence while making other forms of defensive violence illegal. For example, abused women trying to defend themselves against their biggest threat—their partners or ex-partners—can still be criminalized for defending their lives.
There’s this terrible hypocrisy at the heart of self-defense law. I was so angry about it. I actually wrote that book because I was angry. Writing out of anger isn’t a bad thing. I feel like I’m trying to channel that anger in a productive way. I just discussed Audre Lorde’s essay, “The Uses of Anger” in class today. It was one of the assigned readings—canonical stuff. My students were really mobilized by it. And I agree with Lorde that the worst thing we can do is try to suppress our anger, tame it, or turn it into guilt, like white guilt. I’m a white person who benefits from racial, class, and cisgender privilege. The worst thing I can do is just feel guilty about that privilege. The best thing I can do is use my anger to fight back against the systems of oppression by illuminating those systems. They oppress a vast majority of people and make us less safe. So yes, writing out of anger may be the only way I can survive the immediate future, possibly for a long time.
What are your goals for how you hope to see your research develop, specifically within the next few months?
I love that question. Honestly, I did a lot of flailing around for a while. I was working on a book about weddings, taking a critical look at the commodification of love and all those things. I was having fun with it. But honestly, you know what I can't stop thinking about, and what I keep coming back to, is the way we are weaponizing self-defense in this nation. More and more people have guns than ever before in our history.
They claim to be using these guns for self-defense, but what I see is that they're using the language of self-defense to whitewash very aggressive, and sometimes racially aggressive, behavior. I’m angry about that, and it also scares me when I think about what this administration might do to empower more of this violence.
Right now, I’m writing about it. I have a book proposal that addresses the “stand your ground” law, looking at it from the perspective of mapping the terrain—where it exists, what its manifestations are, and how we look ahead to the future. What will it be like to live in a fully “stand your ground” nation where everyone is essentially told they can shoot first and ask questions later? That is, unless they’re a person of color, an unhoused person, a disabled person, a queer person, or someone who is female-identified or trans.
In other words, a “stand your ground” nation will disproportionately empower already privileged groups to use violence against the vast majority of others.
Do you have blogs, podcasts, books, or movies that you recommend students explore?
Wow, I love that question. I have so many resources, I don't even know where to start. First, I have to say, Teen Vogue is crushing it—and it's free! You can go online and read it, and they have cutting-edge articles about everything political. Teen Vogue has the typical lifestyle and fashion content you'd expect, but they also provide excellent political commentary on issues like reproductive justice (or the lack thereof), gun violence, intimate partner violence, and the systemic governmental structures that are being gutted right now. They also discuss the implications for young people, which is really important.
For young people who want to get involved and feel like they're powerless—especially for those who can't vote yet—I would recommend a really great Substack called Chop Wood, Carry Water. It's free, though you can choose to pay if you'd like. The writer gives daily steps you can take to resist violent governing structures, reach out to your representatives, and support vulnerable people. I absolutely love it.
I also love the work of Mia Mingus. Mia Mingus is a feminist, queer Disability Studies public intellectual who writes a lot about mutual aid and kinship networks. She focuses on how to build community, especially in times of extreme despair. I think Mia’s work is incredibly accessible—anyone can read it, even if you’ve never taken a women’s studies class or read feminist theory.
If you're interested in reading some feminist theory, I highly recommend bell hooks. bell hooks has so many wonderful books, many of which are freely available. Another fantastic resource for free feminist theory is This Bridge Called My Back, a book by women of color that came out in 1981. I believe it’s available for free online as well. All of these works are transformative and made feminist thought publicly accessible.
So, these are all things people can learn more about, and they're all free! You can easily find them with a quick search online. These are things that people can learn more about, and they're all free.