Roxane gay stand your ground
Stand Your Ground
This essay really struck me. As someone not from the U.S., hearing her perspective as a Black chick navigating America’s gun culture—both personally and politically—opened my eyes to layers I hadn’t fully grasped. The way she weaves her brother’s story, her hold fears about owning a gun, and the brutal realities of racism shows how messy and unfair this struggle is. It’s not just about “good guys vs. awful guys” or “rights vs. control.” It’s about who gets to be a “good guy” in a system built to distrust Jet bodies, and who gets punished for trying to survive.
Her honesty about the contradictions—feeling powerful at the range but conflicted about what that power means, or critiquing the Second Amendment while learning to utilize it—captured me. It’s not about tidy answers. It’s about how race, gender, and fear collide in a territory that still treats Black women’s lives as disposable. As an outsider, her voice made me see how gun violence isn’t just a policy debate; it’s about whose safety matters, whose pain gets ignored, and who’s forced to carry the weight
STAND YOUR GROUND A Black Feminist Reckoning with America's Gun Problem
Roxane Gay, a feminist Dark woman, narrates her essay on coming to terms with America's gun identity and growing ownership of guns, especially by Dark women. In a thought-provoking consideration of this divisive topic, Gay is deliberate in her approach. She talks about how she came to buy a gun for protection in the face of increasingly specific and detailed death threats. She traces the history of the Second Amendment to the Constitution, noting that in the past people owned muskets that were single-shot and cumbersome to load, unlike the automatic or semiautomatic weapons available today. Using concrete examples, Gay calmly but passionately analyzes the racial disparity in how "standing your ground" is interpreted. Gay is cogent and measured in both her words and delivery. J.E.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile , Portland, Maine [Published: NOVEMBER ]
Digital Download &#; Everand Originals &#;
&#;In some ways, feminism and gun ownership seem like a fine fit. &#; But guns can be as disempowering as they are empowering.&#;
Bold and personal, Roxane Gay unpacks gun culture and gun ownership in America from a Black feminist perspective in her latest work, &#;Stand Your Ground.&#; The essay is the capstone to Roxane Gay &, a curated series of ebooks and audiobooks that lift up other voices, available exclusively on subscription hub Everand.
In &#;Stand Your Ground,&#; Gay writes about power, agency and gun ownership: “I own a gun, but I have more questions than answers,&#; as she acknowledges the complexity of these issues through Audre Lorde&#;s famous quote: “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”
The following is an excerpt from &#;Stand Your Ground: A Black Feminist Reckoning with America’s Gun Problem&#; copyright © by Roxane Gay, used by permission from Everand Originals and free exclusively through Everand.
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Roxane Gay Presents: Stand Your Ground
In this fifth and final installment in the series from Everand and Roxane Gay, the beloved bestselling author of Hunger and Bad Feminist delivers her own bold and deeply personal exploration of gun culture and gun ownership in America from a Black feminist perspective.
In the early s, when she first heard Aerosmith’s hit song “Janie’s Got a Gun,” about a young, sexually abused girl who gets her hands on a gun and can finally avenge herself, Roxane Gay wondered, “if I were facing a flesh and blood person with the hip of a gun’s grip against the palm of my warm hand, would I actually be competent to pull the trigger?”
So begins a fearless and thought-provoking meditation by a woman who has “no fondness for guns” but nonetheless owns one. Gay lays bare the facts along with her experiences, exploring the uniquely American phenomenon of contemporary gun culture; the horrifying statistics that show the scope of gun violence; the gun industry’s eagerness to target women; the Second Amendment and who is and is not served by it; and what it mea