THE ANTI-BLACK AND ANTI-INDIGENOUS ROOTS OF THE SECOND AMENDMENT

reedak

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Part 1

1. ....Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Loaded: The Disarming History of the Second Amendment dismantles all of these explanations and justifications into one chilling thesis: The Second Amendment is fundamental to the roots of white settler violence in their genocide project against Native populations, as well as to control and ultimately eliminate freed Black people in America. In a nutshell, the Second Amendment’s main origin and purpose is to protect and promote white supremacy in these United States.....

Dunbar-Ortiz analyses these words in the context of which they were originally written: As permission granted to the white settler-colonists to seize Native lands by whatever violence necessary, and including the murder, rape, and torture of non-combatants like women and children. She writes, “The Second Amendment’s language specifically gave individuals and families the right to form volunteer militias to attack Indians and take their land.” (p. 20)

“The violent appropriation of Native land by white settlers was seen as an individual right in the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, second only to Freedom of Speech. … Settler-militias and armed households were institutionalized for the destruction and control of Native peoples, communities, and nations.” (p. 30-31)

Further, these so-called “savage wars” are the historical basis of current military strategies like “special operations” and “low-intensity conflicts” that do not discriminate between civilians and military targets:

“The chief characteristic of irregular warfare is that of the extreme violence against civilians, in this case the tendency to pursue the utter annihilation of the Indigenous population.” (p. 48).....

The white citizen militias protected by the Second Amendment did not stop with the terrorizing and murder of Native populations. Once these violent settler-colonists had cleared land of Natives, whether by herding them onto reservations or outright massacre, those lands were now ripe for slave labor. Let’s also keep in mind that without the millennia of work that the now dead or displaced Indigenous populations accomplished in terraforming America’s landscape, there would have been no cultivated lands or ecosystems for these white settlers to exploit with theirs or anyone else’s labor....

Guns and gun violence are more American than baseball, apple pie, or any of the banal signifiers we pretend are our emblems. Guns are so entrenched in America’s blood-drenched history of violence against Native and Black peoples, there is no easy way to untangle them today until we have dismantled systemic white supremacy in this country from its roots and up to the highest levels of government.

Source: https://afropunk.com/2017/10/anti-black-anti-indigenous-roots-second-amendment/

2. The Second Amendment reads:

“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of the free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

As usual, America resorts to high-sounding moralism to cover up its evil deeds. As the anti-black and anti-indigenous roots run deep in America’s blood-drenched history of violence, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to dismantle systemic white supremacy in the country from its roots.

Jimmy Carter, the only US president to complete his term without war, military attack or occupation has called the US “the most warlike nation in the history of the world”.

Unfortunately for the rest of mankind, America's blood-drenched history of systemic white supremacist violence will march on in tandem with its manifest destiny.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/04/19/jimmy-carter-us-most-warlike-nation-in-history-of-the-world/
 
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Part 2

As much as America loves her guns, she has never liked the idea of seeing them in black hands.

Before the Revolutionary War, colonial Virginia passed a law barring black people from owning firearms — an exercise in gun control as racial control. In 1857, in his notorious Dred Scott decision, Chief Justice Roger Taney summoned the specter of black people freely enjoying the right to “keep and carry arms wherever they went.” Surely, he argued, the founders were not “so forgetful or regardless of their own safety” to permit such a thing. When black people armed themselves against white supremacist attacks following the Civil War, Southern state governments passed “black codes” barring them from owning guns. After the Black Panthers open carried to signal to California police officers that they would defend themselves against racial attacks in the late ’60s, then-Gov. Ronald Reagan signed a state ban on open carry into law.

In 2016, legal gun owner Philando Castile was shot after informing a Minnesota police officer that he was armed. Two years prior, Tamir Rice was killed by Cleveland police while holding a toy gun. John Crawford suffered the same fate in a Beavercreek, Ohio, Walmart.

So what does black gun ownership mean in a country so determined to keep its black populace unarmed? Since the 2016 election, interest in firearms has supposedly ticked upward in the black community. Gun shops and clubs link the interest to a desire for self-protection against the white supremacists emboldened by President Donald Trump’s election....

Maj Toure, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Toure, who declined to give his age, is an activist and entrepreneur who founded Black Guns Matter. He never discusses what firearms he owns....

America would not have even been created without firearms. Some people say it’s a contradiction for me as an African-American man to have a position: “When they wrote the Second Amendment, they didn’t mean it for you.” I don’t give a fXXk who they meant it for. It’s mine now....

Rodney Jackson, 46, Plano, Texas
Jackson works in IT security. He owns several handguns....

I just wanted to exercise my right. It was almost like I was witnessing people ― when I say people, I mean white Americans ― exercise theirs, but they didn’t want us to carry. Anyone who wasn’t white and who had a weapon was considered a thug. I wasn’t a thug. So I was gonna get one, and I was going to go through the proper classes and safely learn how to use it...

Source: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/black-gun-ownership_n_5a33fc38e4b040881bea2f37
 
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