People of Color

Guns are part of everyone’s life in the South. Guns came to the continent of North America as the violent conquering weapon. They became central to white supremacy’s cult, part of how whites terrorized Black communities over the centuries we’ve been coexisting here. Guns are deeply intertwined with the lives of many of the Black folks you’ll find living in Southern states, in Mississippi and Georgia and Texas and Alabama. It’s a fact of life for us that people around us are armed. We hope that those who are armed are on our side, to help defend against threats.

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.