Home > Work > The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America
1 " The eighteenth-century origins of the “right to bear arms” explicitly excluded Black people.19 South Carolina encoded into law that the enslaved could not “carry or make use of fire-arms or any offensive weapons whatsoever” unless “in the presence of some white person. "
― Carol Anderson , The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America
2 " The planters responded to this challenge by adopting a three-part strategy to break the will, or at least the ability to fight, of a people who had been snatched from their homeland and brutalized and who were overwhelmingly “hostile to those who controlled their labor.” 14 In a series of moves that would scar the United States well into the twenty-first century, colonial Virginia deployed this triad of brutal control. It denied the enslaved the right to bear arms; ignored the right to self-defense for Black people; and put in place a “large-scale military machinery,” the militia, “to crack down [on] any conspiracies or uprisings.” 15 "
3 " If you have a badge, you have the government’s go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens.” 5 He further denounced cops as “jack-booted government thugs [who have] more power to take away our constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us.” 6 "
4 " Yet here the guardian of the Second Amendment was now deliberately ignoring the inconvenient fact that Black men had been killed for merely possessing a firearm. “Where’s the NRA?” asked journalist Hanna Kozlowska. Didn’t Alton Sterling and Philando Castile have Second Amendment rights, too? 11 David A. Graham, in The Atlantic, coolly observed that the “two shootings give a strong sense that the Second Amendment does not apply to black Americans the same way it does to white Americans.” 12 Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote that he saw that old Jim Crow “whites only” sign plastered above the Second Amendment. 13 The message was loud and clear: Even for the NRA, Black people did not have Second Amendment rights. 14 "
5 " That silence is not accidental. The eighteenth-century origins of the “right to bear arms” explicitly excluded Black people. 19 South Carolina encoded into law that the enslaved could not “carry or make use of fire-arms or any offensive weapons whatsoever” unless “in the presence of some white person.” Moreover, the state’s various militias had the “power to search and examine all negro-houses for offensive weapons and ammunition.” In Delaware, there could be no valid earthly reason that any “bought Servant, or Negro, or Mulatto slave … be allowed to bear Arms.” Georgia was even more direct. Not only were Blacks forbidden from owning or carrying firearms, but white men were required to own “a good gun or pistol” to give them the means to “search and examine all negro houses for offensive weapons and ammunition.” The distinction was clear: “Citizen( s) had the right to keep arms; the slave did not.” 20 "
6 " Plantation owners were thus notorious for “barbarities such as scalding, burning, castrating, and extracting the tongues or eyes of slaves.” 23 That combination of the insatiable desire for enormous profits coupled with the sadistic brutalization of bonded African labor created an overwhelming fear among whites of the enslaved’s capacity and desire for retribution. And they needed to be fearful. "
7 " Each of these—restricting felons from possessing guns, while also allowing a greater flow in urban areas for “protection” against crime, and forbidding firearms in public housing—had at its center the argument of “safety” and “security.” But they had something else in common, too: African Americans were always the ones who posed the threat and always the ones who bore the brunt of the decision. "
8 " Similarly, the amendments covering the criminal justice system—the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth—have offered little to no protection for African Americans because of numerous Supreme Court decisions that have embedded racism and racial profiling into policing, trial procedures, and sentencing. "
9 " Yet as myopic and convoluted as the rulings have been, there is a clear human rights pathway on this: The court simply has to acknowledge how profoundly embedded racism is in the criminal justice system—from racial profiling to police stops, to access to competent counsel, to jury selection, to the impact of the victim’s race on the trial, to sentencing—and declare the death penalty unconstitutional. "
10 " As the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reported in its study of the racial implications of the law, the criminal justice system is “ten times more likely” to rule a homicide justifiable “if the shooter is white and the victim black” than if an African American kills someone white and claims self-defense. 32 In fact, the report notes, stand-your-ground laws actually worsen and increase the racial disparity outcomes of self-defense claims. 33 "
11 " The Second Amendment is so inherently, structurally flawed, so based on Black exclusion and debasement, that, unlike the other amendments, it can never be a pathway to civil and human rights for 47.5 million African Americans. "
12 " It denied the enslaved the right to bear arms; ignored the right to self-defense for Black people; and put in place a “large-scale military machinery,” the militia, “to crack down [on] any conspiracies or uprisings.” 15 As early as 1639, Virginia prohibited Africans from carrying guns because “what white Southerners feared the most … [was] an armed black man unafraid to retaliate against both the system of slavery and those who fought to defend it. "
13 " In 1680, as racialized chattel slavery congealed, the legislature crafted a law denying the enslaved and free Blacks the right to self-defense if attacked by their “ ‘master’ and/ or Whites.” 18 Next, in 1723, the colony’s statute explicitly stated that “no negro, mulatto, or indian [sic] whatsoever” should have a gun “under penalty of a whipping not to exceed twenty-nine lashes. "
14 " Whether they trusted them or not, the plantation owners voiced concerns that if they didn’t use “great caution … our slaves when armed might become our masters.” 31 South Carolina then formally merged the separate slave patrol with the militia to strengthen the colony’s internal and external defenses. "
15 " The Negro Act of 1740 had as its foundational principles that Negroes were “absolute slaves” including those not even born yet. They were “property.” They were instinctually criminal. And therefore they must be “kept in due subjection and obedience.” With that as the underlying premise, the statute, which became the model for slave codes throughout North America, required heavy-handed white control that curtailed the enslaved’s movements, literacy, right to self-defense, and access to firearms. "
16 " It was obvious, whether North or South, that no militia was going to stop a foreign invasion. The war proved that beyond a reasonable doubt.127 What the militia could do rather well, however, as George Mason noted, was keep slave owners safe. "
17 " This legislative ennui about musket-and rifle-toting insurgents also ignored that, from Shays’s Rebellion to the Whiskey Rebellion, white men were the ones who had taken up arms against the United States of America. And in a pattern that would repeat itself well into the twenty-first century, there were little to no consequences for that. "
