I grew up in North Carolina, the child of a father who’d been raised in rural poverty in Virginia and a mother whose parents had met at the historically Black Xavier University in New Orleans. Almost all my family lives in the South. I live a Southern life in D.C., in that my people here are D.C.’s Black population, who have lived culturally Southern lives south of the Mason-Dixon line in a municipality where slavery was legal until Lincoln’s decree and Jim Crow was brutal.
Black Southerners weren’t displaying their guns as a visible symbol of defiance, like the iconic portraits of armed Black Panthers from the 1960s. There’s nothing wrong with that at all—to stand in the face of white America and boldly announce you won’t be backing down. But the ways guns were culturally held in the Black South were different, the covert protection kept for when white supremacists reared their heads at you, that you pull out when needed. That is the distinguishing feature of Black Southern gun culture as opposed to mainstream white gun culture: Black Southern gun culture is a response to violent white supremacy and a defense against it, not a colonial offensive against marginalized groups to subjugate them.
Being tied to the land—to the cycles of the crops and the seasons, to the types of soil and the temperament of the winds—is likewise part of the experience of being a Black Southerner, relating to other Black Southerners. The rifle in the Black Southern home served a dual purpose: to protect against the ever-present threat of white supremacist terrorism and to hunt game. It served a utilitarian and practical need. It wasn’t there for plots to commit mass violence. My father’s stories of his boyhood in a small Virginia county of a few thousand people were of shooting house mice, going on hunting and fishing trips, and staying guarded in the night for if the white folks got too rowdy and thought terrorizing their Black neighbors could be entertaining. And his experience isn’t a singular one. It’s an upbringing many Black Southerners had and are still having.
I’m a person who’d never choose to own or use a gun myself. I don’t trust my physical capacity to handle a gun, I don’t trust my ability to manage it with cool or calm, and I think that because my manic depression takes me into the kind of lows that have me desperately clinging to the urge to live, owning a gun would be a liability for me. But partly because of how I grew up, I still want to be part of a community where I’m protected by those who do own guns. It’s the way I live as an urbanite in Black working-class D.C., too, knowing that I enjoy protection because the ruffians who are robbing in my neighborhood are the people looking out for me. I exist in my urban community where the criminals are fellow community members and only criminalize people who aren’t part of our social network.
And we won’t forget that climate disaster is here and now: While the rest of America looked away, much of Appalachia has lain in ruin in the months after Helene. Communities that don’t have running water or roads or electricity have been in survival mode, organizing labor so that the vulnerable are cared for and resources are distributed. The reason survival leftism is organically operating in Appalachia (though the people who get paid to sit in studio sets and deliver the news forgot) is the reason Black Southerners are keeping their guns by their sides, too: Because when there is no order or rule to protect you, or when the order is against you, you become your own order. Be fooled by none of the myths that say we, as Black Southerners, are dupes. We survived centuries of America’s mightiest brutality because we knew what we were doing and used every scrap of a tool at our disposal. That is how we can continue to survive and how, if they dared listen to us instead of hating us, we could lend ourselves to others who wish to survive.
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