In an OpEd written yesterday, June 4, Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler professor of African American studies at Emory University, clears up a nagging question for us all. That question being, "Why are all gun owners racist?" Well, if your incredulity can stand it, here you go:
America’s gun obsession is rooted in slavery
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... on-slavery
Published in England's
The Guardian (originally founded as
The Manchester Guardian) because--could it be possible?--it may be that even U.S. liberal rags didn't want to touch it. But, don't worry, it's only capitalism. Anderson is wanting to stir up clicks anywhere she can because her brand new book just came out, as in days ago, and she's trying to promote sales:
The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America; "From the New York Times bestselling author of
White Rage, an unflinching, critical new look at the Second Amendment--and how it has been engineered to deny the rights of African Americans since its inception."
I mean, you know you have a serious problem with a race-baiting book if even
The New York Times thinks you have your metaphors all mixed up:
In The New York Times, May 28, 2021, Randall Kennedy wrote:
On the one hand, she claims that slaveholding founding fathers insisted on the inclusion of the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights in order to assure themselves of a fighting force willing to suppress slave insurrections. On the other hand, she maintains that racist practices have deprived Blacks of access to arms that might have enabled them to defend themselves in the absence of equal protection of law.
...
Anderson’s account, however, is wanting in important respects. She argues unconvincingly, in the face of formidable scholarship to the contrary, that the aim to protect slavery was the predominant motive behind the Second Amendment.... The Second Amendment, she claims, “came into being … steeped in anti-Blackness, swaddled in the desire to keep African-descended people rightless and powerless, and as yet another bone tossed to keep the South mollified and willing to stay aligned with the grand experiment of the United States of America.”
...
Akhil Reed Amar’s careful explanation of the debate over the Second Amendment in The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction (1998) points to considerations that Anderson notably slights, particularly “deep anxiety about a potentially abusive federal military”.... But in [Anderson's] telling, dread of Blacks was the essential, overriding cause of the Second Amendment, an entitlement “rooted in fear of Black people, to deny them their rights, to keep them from tasting liberty.”
...
In her portrayal, Blacks are racially victimized whether gun control is permitted (thus perhaps reducing the amount of gunfire unleashed on the streets) or whether gun control is restricted (thus perhaps giving ordinary folk more scope for self-defense).
Read Kennedy's (a professor at the Harvard Law School, by the way) full review here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/book ... erson.html.
Anderson's article in
The Guardian opens this way:
"Bodies are piling up all over the second amendment as two of America's pandemics converge. The plague of gun violence and the inability to mount an effective response, even in the wake of multiple mass shootings, is, unfortunately, rooted in the other pandemic gripping the United States: anti-Blackness and the sense that African Americans are a dangerous threat that can only be neutralized or stopped by a well-armed white citizenry."
It only gets worse from there. If the only lens you have through which you can look is clouded and mostly opaque, you'll never see beyond the end of your own nose. Which is fine in Anderson's case. Because that's how she makes her living, by spouting this kind of crap. So she has no need to view anything of the
real world beyond her own nose.