To contend with the demands of the South's insistence on maintaining local white militias, charged with keeping enslaved blacks on the plantation, Madison walked a tightrope. But, in the end, he was accommodating, writes Anderson. "Stepped in anti-blackness, swaddled in the desire to keep African-descended people rightless and powerless," the Second Amendment, Anderson argues, throws a bone to the South in order the keep the region "mollified and willing to stay aligned as the grand experiment of the United States of America."
Castile's right to carry a licensed gun was in conflict with the Second Amendment's intent to grant to white Americans the rights to protect themselves. "That pervasive anti-blackness, even after the Civil Rights Movement, turned the Second Amendment's laws for protection the castle doctrine, stand your ground, and open carry against African Americans."
" Patrick Henry's clarion call, 'Give me liberty or give me death,'" writes Anderson, was, for James Monroe and patriots, "dangerous when espoused by blacks."
**
And there's another bit of history to contextualize what black Americans are witnessing in the 21st century.
On December 15, 1791, the same year the Second Amendment is ratified, black people south of the US border decide to stand to the European forces and fight for freedom. The enslaved in Haiti (San Domingo), C. L. R. James explains in The Black Jacobins, Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, reasoned that if the French could overthrow the masters "and were now enjoying the fruits of the earth," why can't they? Why should black people be exploited for the sake of another people's gain? Freedom meant something to black people too!
So the Haitian Revolution begins, and in 1804, the once-enslaved people declare a victory, winning the struggle to be a free and self-determined while black. In America, whites are holding their breaths. Once they exhaled, white America recognized that the "security" of their "free State" was anything but secure. White Americans reasoned, rightly, that if the Haitian rebels heard of the French Revolution, and took up arms, the enslaved in the US would also know what's happened in Haiti. Would the enslaved along with the free blacks take up arms and revolt?
In 1792, during the revolution in Haiti, a federal law, the Uniform Militia Act, writes Anderson, required white men to "buy" guns and organize a militia. Doing so would be "an act of citizenship and an act of self-defense," Americans were told. And white America did what it was told.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
