This talk explores the role of “self-defense” narratives in legitimating police killings of young women of color from two angles—how it is used to justify the shootings and how it is refused to the victims of police violence. Young women of color’s failed attempts at self-preservation in the face of police violence are re-narrated from self-defense to attempted murder, from a duty to retreat to evidence of guilt and shame while police are trained to narrate their acts of violence as always already in defense of oneself or another. Self-defense law has a racial, gendered, and colonialist history, which has disempowered women, girls, and gender nonconforming people of color and empowered white men and state agents to take the lives of those most marginalized. Dr. Lisa Marie Cacho is an Associate Professor of English, Asian American Studies, Latina/Latino Studies, and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Cacho’s work demonstrates how race, gender, sexuality, class, nation, and legality work interdependently to assign human value and to render relations of inequality normative, natural, and obvious in both dominant and oppositional discourses. She is the Author of Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (NYU Press), the winner of the American Studies Association’s 2013 John Hope Franklin Book Prize. Dr. Cacho is also an esteemed “double alumna” of UC San Diego, having received her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies here in 2002 and before then, her BA in Ethnic Studies and in Literature/Writing in 1996. Sponsored by the Asian & Pacific-Islander American Heritage Celebration (APIAHC), the Pan-Asian Staff Association, the Dept. of History, the Critical Gender Studies Program, the International Institute, and the Dept. of Ethnic Studies.