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