Roxane Gay stopped by the Daily Show on Monday to discuss her new e-book, Stand Your Ground: A Black Feminist Reckoning With America’s Gun Problem.
The book, made up of a standalone essay and published by the reading platform Everand, was released today. Everand calls the e-book Gay’s “own bold and deeply personal exploration of gun culture and gun ownership in America from a Black feminist perspective.”
Asked by Daily Show correspondent Michael Kosta about the origin of the book, Gay explained she decided to write it after her brother convinced her to buy a gun.
“One of the things I noticed at the gun store and at the gun range was that there were a lot of people of color and Black women in particular,” she said. “Black women, I think, are buying guns simply because we often recognize that if we don’t protect ourselves, no one else will. A lot of times, it’s that we don’t trust that the police will come to our homes and protect us.”
Kosta noted that in her book, Gay writes that while Black gun ownership is seen as intrinsically political, white gun ownership is seen as “an inalienable right.”
“We tend to…treat [the] Bill of Rights as inalienable,” Gay said. “But the further you get from a white, heterosexual, cisgender man, the more you have to fight for those rights, and the more you are considered sort of an anomaly when you choose to avail yourself of those rights.”
Gay acknowledged that she feels conflicted about the gun issue.
“I’m not the kind of person who’s going to wrap myself in the Second Amendment,” she said. “I think that no one should be able to own a gun, and if they want to come take it, feel free. But that said, as long as the right is there, I think there are many Black gun owners who say, Why not?”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
