The Second by Carol Anderson

The Second by Carol Anderson

Author:Carol Anderson [Anderson, Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub


Emancipation and Reconstruction had not led to the promised land. Instead, Blacks were ushered into the killing fields. African Americans’ military uniforms angered. Their self-defense enraged. Their right to bear arms triggered. Their claims to citizenship lynched.

Four

How Can I Be Unarmed When My Blackness Is the Weapon That You Fear?

“What the goddam hell you niggers doing with them goddam guns?” he bellowed. “Who in the goddam hell you niggers think you are?”1

This was no Southern sheriff barking invectives. Or even a hooded Klansman angry about that centuries-long Trouble: Negroes with Guns. Instead, it was an Oakland, California, police officer raging at African Americans years after the Civil Rights Movement had already wrung citizenship victories from the United States. Those legislative hallmarks of Black citizenship, the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965), no matter how impressive, still did not have the power to overcome the anti-Blackness embedded in the Second Amendment.

That confrontation on the streets of Oakland made clear that Black people and the right to bear arms, even after African Americans had come into some semblance of full citizenship, was still anathema. The two men yelled at by the police, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, had not broken the law.2 In fact, they were well versed in the California Criminal Code and could recite the Second Amendment’s text “verbatim.”3 But that was irrelevant. What would become clear in this era was that the law did not mean what it appeared to say. “What made northern racial barriers so frustrating,” historian Thomas J. Sugrue wrote, “was that they were sometimes as hard and fast as they were in the South—but, … The rules of racial engagement in the North were seldom posted. And,” he continued, “a countervailing set of rules … promised blacks that the strong arm of the law would be on their side.”4 It wasn’t. Laws protecting Second Amendment rights, such as stand your ground, open carry, and even the “castle doctrine,” which gives residents the right to defend their home if there’s an intruder, just crumpled under the weight of anti-Blackness. The confrontation in Oakland thus also signaled the role of the police in upholding the underlying centuries-old rationale for the Second—a well-regulated militia to keep Black people in a state of rightlessness.



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