Yanez isn't looking for Castile; he's looking for a robbery suspect. But Castile is black, so he is stopped.
A woman and child are in the back seat. The woman begins video taping with her cell phone. There's the dead man. There's their little girl. The woman, Diamond Reynolds, is hand-cupped and the child pleads with her mother to stay calm. What do white children know of this horror? Of this small child warning her mother to stay calm: "'I don't want you to get shooted.'" Her father is dead and her mother is hand-cupped in the back seat.
"The second a black person exercises that right, the second they pick up a gun to protect themselves (or not), their life as surely as Philando Castile's, as surely as Alton Sterling's, as surely as twelve-year old Tamir Rice's could be snatched away in that same fatal second."
"Why did you shoot him, Sir?" is Reynold's question to Officer Yanez. Carol Anderson's The Second joins Diamond Reynolds in asking the question, "Why?"
Why is he dead?
I forgot that Castile was armed. I'm still seeing the image of an unarmed George Floyd, neck under former Minn. Police Officer Derek Chauvin's knee. I suppose Floyd was armed and, therefore, dangerous to Chauvin. To Cleveland Police Officer Timothy Loehmann, little Tamir Rice was armed with a toy gun. Because what this man and child have in common is that they were black with gun. Black first. With guns. Even a toy gun. Tamir might be alive today if he had been a white children playing with a toy gun.
Armed or unarmed, the "key variable," writes Anderson, isn't guns. It's black Americans! As a black in a country anti-black at its core Castile's death, writes Anderson points to how little has changed in the way "the Second Amendment [works] against" the rights of black Americans because the intentions of the writers of the Second Amendment meant to protect white Americans. And protect the white population from what if not plantation escapees, perceived criminals and terrorists. That is, black people.
Eight years after the end of the American Revolution, the focus of the former British colonies fell on the number of black militias present among citizens insisting on maintaining the free land for white people. As the head of the Second Amendment committee, James Madison settles on a version of the amendment reflecting those fears of the nation as a whole, concerned about armed blacks and potential uprisings of the free and the enslaved. And then there was the South.
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