The right to bear arms
In 1705, a Virginia law was passed requiring masters to provide white male servants whose indentured time was up with 50 acres of land, 30 shillings, 10 bushels of corn and a musket.
Whose land were they given? Why was a musket deemed a necessary part of the deal?
In 1705, the Virginia slave codes also transformed indentured servants of African descent into slaves and gave white slave owners the ability to beat and kill them without the threat of arrest or other judicial system penalties.
The second amendment, which provides for the “right to bear arms”, was passed by Congress in in 1789 and ratified in 1791.
Slavery was not officially abolished in the US until 1865 through the thirteenth amendment.
Now, I am not a constitution or second amendment expert or an historian but I don’t need to be to understand that the right to bear arms, something that sounds like it has nothing to do with race, has everything to do with race, and not just race but the construction of white supremacy, white power, and white advantage in this country.
Why does everything have to be about race?
Well that’s because race was constructed by people who racialized themselves as white in order to build wealth in a country where there was more land than labor to extract value from it.
This is not a country that loves guns more than children.
This is a country that prioritizes white advantage over all else, building it into every aspect of its design and so embedding it into its functioning that most people can’t see it.
Ideas of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are so entangled with white advantage that we’ve dug a hole we can’t get out of.
I don’t claim to have the answers but I know this - if we can’t even have the conversation, we are not going to get anywhere.
In “Minor Feelings” Cathy Park Hong talks about white “innocence”:
Innocence is both a privilege and a cognitive handicap, a sheltered unknowingness that, once protracted into adulthood, hardens into entitlement. Innocence is not just sexual deflection but a deflection of one’s position in the socioeconomic hierarchy, based on the confidence that one is “unmarked” and “free to be you and me.” The ironic result of this innocence, writes the scholar Charles Mills, is that whites are “unable to understand the world that they themselves have made.”
All over social media I see white liberal progressives confused, distraught, horrified, traumatized by yet another school shooting. I find these reactions a little disheartening to be honest, for their lack of a racial analysis and the implied proclamation of innocence.
White people created this world. Children are collateral damage in a system that is working exactly as designed. 19 slain 10 year olds in Uvalde, Texas, along with their two teachers, are a small drop in the bucket of violence this system has wrought, a price that we as a society willingly pay, over and over, to maintain the status quo of dominant culture and power.
Spare us your white tears unless you are willing to confront the history of white violence in this country.
As Cathy Hong Park says, “White Americans, if they hadn’t before, now felt marked for their skin color, and their reaction for being exposed as such was to feel—shame… It’s also human nature to repel shame by penalizing and refusing continued engagement with the source of their shame… For to be aware of history, they would be forced to be held accountable, and rather than face that shame, they’d rather, by any means necessary, maintain their innocence.”
And Nikole Hannah-Jones says in the Preface to “The 1619 Project”, “If we are a truly great nation, the truth cannot destroy us. On the contrary, facing the truth liberates us to build the society we wish to be.”
Additional reading (pulled from my article archive):
Thank you to Danaé Aicher on the CCI team for workshop content she recently created that helped me come to a more clear articulation of this discussion. To learn more about the creation of whiteness in the US, we recommend the Seeing White podcast as well as the Racial Equity Institute’s Phase I two-day workshop.
Banner photo by Bangsal Nam on Unsplash
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