The Real And Racist Origins of the Second Amendment
Tue, 12/18/2012 - 19:19 — Bruce A. Dixon
* US History |
* Native Americans |
* genocide |
* Second AmendmentPrinter-friendly version
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
The
“well-regulated militia” that the US Constitution's second amendment
refers to were slave patrols, land stealers and Indian killers, all
quite necessary as the amendment's language states “to the security of a free
state” built with stolen labor upon stolen land. Unless and until
we acknowledge that history, we cannot have an honest discussion about
gun control.
The Real and Racist Origins of the Second Amendment
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
This commentary was originally published in Black Agenda Report April 19, 2008.
Why does the
US Constitution guarantee a right “to keep and bear arms”? Why not the
right to vote, the right to a quality education, health care, a clean
environment or a job? What was so important in early America about the
right of citizens to have guns? And is it even possible to have an
honest discussion about gun control without acknowledging the racist
origins of the Second Amendment?
The dominant
trend among legal scholars, and on the current Supreme Court is that we
are bound by the original intent of the Constitution's authors. Here's
what the second amendment to the Constitution says:
“A
well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State,
the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
Clearly its
authors aimed to guarantee the right to a gun for every free white man
in their new country. What's no longer evident 230 years later, is why.
The answer, advanced by historian Edmund Morgan in his classic work, American
Slavery, American Freedom, the Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, sheds useful light
on the historic and current politics and self-image of our nation.
Colonial
America and the early US was a very unequal place. All the good,
cleared, level agricultural land with easy access to transport was owned by a
very few, very wealthy white men. Many poor whites were brought
over as indentured servants, but having completed their periods of
forced labor, allowing them to hang around the towns and cities landless and
unemployed was dangerous to the social order. So they were given
guns and credit, and sent inland to make their own fortunes, encroaching upon
the orchards, farms and hunting grounds of Native Americans, who
had little or no access to firearms. The law, of course did not penalize white
men who robbed, raped or killed Indians. At regular intervals,
colonial governors and local US officials would muster the free armed
white men as militia, and dispatch them in murderous punitive raids to
make the frontier safer for settlers and land speculators.
Slavery
remained legal in New England, New York and the mid-Atlantic region till well
into the 1800s, and the movements of free blacks and Indians were
severely restricted for decades afterward. So colonial and early
American militia also prowled the roads and highways demanding the
passes of all non-whites, to ensure the enslaved were not escaping or
aiding those who were, and that free blacks were not plotting rebellion
or traveling for unapproved reasons.
Historically
then, the principal activities of the Founding Fathers' “well regulated
militia” were Indian killing, land stealing, slave patrolling and the
enforcement of domestic apartheid, all of these, as the Constitutional
language declares “being necessary to the security of a free state.” A
free state whose fundamental building blocks were the genocide of Native
Americans, and the enslavement of Africans.
The
Constitutional sanction of universally armed white men against blacks
and Indians is at the origin of what has come to be known as America's
“gun culture,” and it neatly explains why that culture remains most
deeply rooted in white, rural and small-town America long after the end
of slavery and the close of the frontier. With the genocide of Native
Americans accomplished and slavery gone, America's gun culture wrapped
itself in new clothing, in self-justifying mythology that construes the
Second Amendment as arming the citizenry as final bulwark of freedom
against tyranny, invasion or crime. Embracing this fake history of the
Second Amendments warps legal scholarship and public debate in clouds of
willful ignorance, encouraging us to believe this is a nation founded
on just and egalitarian principles rather than one built with stolen
labor on stolen land.
Maybe this is
how we can tell that we are finally so over all that nasty genocide and
racism stuff. We've chosen to simply write it out of our history.
For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Bruce Dixon. Find us on the web at
www.blackagendareport.com.
Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and a member of the
state committee of the Georgia Green Party. He lives and works in
Marietta GA and can be reached via this site's contact page or at
[email protected].
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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