Enforcing A Racial Order

 

Enforcing A Racial Order

Nick Estes, a professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico and author of the book “Our History Is The Future,” remembers listening to the police scanner earlier this summer when the gun-toting militia group New Mexico Civil Guard turned up to harass and attack anti-racist protesters in Albuquerque. 

He said cops could be heard on the scanner referring to this group of vigilantes — founded by a neo-Nazi —  as “heavily armed friendlies.”

A short time later, one of those “friendlies” shot and badly injured an anti-racist protester. 

Estes argues it’s important to remember the history of white vigilantism in the U.S. in order to understand how these fascist groups operate in our society today, and how they’ve often proven an eager partner with law enforcement. 

“The Second Amendment was created specifically to arm white settlers against runaway slaves, enslaved African people, as well as to kill native people on the frontier,” Estes said. 

Fast forward to the Reconstruction Era after the Civil War, Estes said, and you see the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan, a white vigilante group that used the Second Amendment to terrorize Black Americans. Decades later, during the Jim Crow era, armed citizens often attacked Black Americans in Sundown Towns — referring to all-white municipalities or neighborhoods across the country — with little to no recourse from law enforcement.

And look at the violence in “border towns” — white majority settlements ringing Native American reservations — where white vigilantes have maimed and murdered Indigenous peoples for generations. Law enforcement has often looked the other way.

“These white vigilantes today don’t misinterpret history,” Estes said. “They’re actually upholding the kind of the original intent of the Second Amendment.”

What’s happening now, he added, is “an intensification of that kind of citizen policing” in response to a growing tide of Black Lives Matter and anti-fascist organizing. 

READ: White Vigilantes Have Always Had A Friend In Police | HuffPost

Our earlier post on the history of the SECOND AMENDMENT :  
Slave patrols, several scholars have traced the genealogy of slave patrols into modern police forces so we still see the controlling of especially young black men by police forces. It’s not just history; it has led up to the exact kind of situation, both militaristic and institutionally violent society that we have now.

Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on the Roots of the NRA and the Second Amendment

FROM THE INTERCEPT PODCAST April 2018

JEREMY SKAHILL: There’s a new book that just came out that lays out a provocative argument for getting rid of the Second Amendment in its entirety, and the book asserts that the NRA has become a white nationalist organization. That book is titled “Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment” and it was written by the radical historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Her book tells a very different tale about the so-called gun culture in the United States and about how the Second Amendment was, at its core, a solidifying of the rights of white people to bear arms to steal native land by force, to capture so-called runaway slaves and to prevent rebellions from oppressed people. It wasn’t about hunting. It wasn’t about protecting against the tyranny of government. It wasn’t about simply protecting your property from criminals and thieves. Sure, those arguments are made by Second Amendment enthusiasm. They’re certainly representative of a lot of people’s motives for possessing guns.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is the author of many books, including “An Indigenous People’s History of the United States,” “Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico,” and “Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War.” Her latest book, again, is called, “Loaded.”

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz joins me now. Welcome to Intercepted.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: Thank you, Jeremy.

JS: If the United States has a gun culture, what is that gun culture?

RDO: It’s a weapon of settler colonialism, all over the world: Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Argentina, where settler colonialism was used. But in the United States, by putting it in the Constitution, that sacred document, as an individual right, it veered considerably from those other settler colonies.

From the very beginning, guns and ammunition were required in the colonies, in Virginia and then in Massachusetts Bay Colony and then in Virginia first, that every man, every household had to have firearm and a certain amount of gun powder and bullets. And if they couldn’t afford that, the colonial government would subsidize it.

So, what were they so afraid of? That they had to have all these guns because they were on land that they had stolen by burning people’s villages down, by killing, raping, maiming and driving Native people into the periphery where they fought back and tried to regain their land and also keep them from taking more.

So, U.S. settler colonialism was really required, the whole build-up of the United States, a white nationalist democracy: Every man a king with land. And, of course, then, institutionalized slavery took hold by the 1670s — out of these militias they carved slave patrols as well.

So that dual usage: you know, the right to own human bodies and land and to steal them, kidnap people, and kill people — really genocide — is just written into the very cellular structure of the United States: The Constitution, every institution.

And that, plus the militarism that lasted from before, during and after independence, and continued until 1890, more than 100 years of daily, moment-by-moment warfare against native people, at the same time invading other countries: The Barbary wars in 1806 and 1809, and then Mexico, 1846 to ’48, that just continued and continued and then jumped over the Pacific and into the Caribbean and then into the whole world. So, the militarism is the key component of it and only a third of the population even own a gun, and there’s a good portion of those who are combat vets.

JS: Hmm. The exact text, “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” — now, I’m not asking you about more recent interpretations by various courts, but at that time, in 1789, when they were referring to a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, what was the historical context, and what did they refer to when they were talking about well-regulated militia?

RDO: Well they certainly weren’t talking about state militias, because those were provided for in the Constitution itself, that’s the genealogy of the National Guard. But the Bill of Rights which was, came later [than] the amendments, these were individual rights, very specifically individual rights, so they could only have referred to the existing citizen’s militias.

But they came to be self-organized — they were very well organized for selfish interests, for their own purpose — the state, the government had no authority over them whatsoever. And this was how the whole continent was taken, was these settlers themselves organized, that every, every settler a soldier, they’re all armed, they say, out in their fields and everything and they’re, they’re all well-organized, so they could in minutes call up of a militia and they knew what to do. It was in their self-interest, so.

JS: Well, what were these militia doing?

RDO: Killing Indians! Taking their land. And, then the land was theirs. And the slave patrols were also self-organized. It was really every white man had an obligation to keep an eye out, even if they didn’t own slaves to keep an eye out and turn in any stray black person that didn’t have a permit on him, that he’s doing some errand for the owner, and if he didn’t have that then he was considered a renegade — you know, had to be captured and returned to the owner.

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