Brené Brown: Hi, everyone. I’m Brené Brown, and this is Unlocking Us. Welcome back to our new eight-part series that I’m calling “On My Heart and Mind.” The series started with my conversation with Valarie Kaur on the power of revolutionary love and being a sage warrior. This is just like goodness in a book. This is a book about hope and action and love. The next podcast, “On My Heart and Mind,” where Sarah Lewis actually lives full-time at this point was a conversation with Dr. Sarah Lewis on her stunning new book: The Unseen Truth. Whew, that just rearranges everything you thought, everything you never thought was true, but you couldn’t figure out how we got here. Now we know. I’ll also be talking coming up in the future with Dr. Mary Claire Haver on menopause, and I’m going to talk to Ashley and Barrett, my sisters, on grief, love, and unexpected joy, kind of what our journey has been with my mom’s dementia and then my mom dying on Christmas of last year.

BB: So it’s a personal podcast series, really focusing on what I’m thinking about, what I’m feeling right now. In today’s episode, I am talking with one of my very favorite cultural critics, Roxane Gay. I love her work. I just see myself in so much that she writes, and sometimes she pisses me off and sometimes she encourages me to snuggle in for a warm hug. It’s a little bit of hugging and a lot of, “Oh god, I’m so mad.” She wrote an incredible long-form essay called “Stand Your Ground: A Black Feminist Reckoning with America’s Gun Problem.” I will put a link to the long-form essay on the podcast page on brenebrown.com so you can find it. We are going to talk about this article, and this is such a big conversation. I mean, I’ll just give you a little preview. Roxane and I are both gun owners, and we are both pro-gun reform, and sometimes that feels like table for two, but I don’t think that’s true.

BB: Her perspective is… a lot of it is really new for me. The article’s called “Stand Your Ground.” It’s a bold, very personal piece where she unpacks gun culture and gun ownership in America from a Black feminist perspective. This long-form essay, you just have to look at all these essays. It’s the capstone piece to “Roxane Gay &,” which is a curated series of eBooks and audiobooks available exclusively on the subscription hub Everand. And so we’ll link to all that. If you want to do some deep learning and unlearning this series of essays that Roxane curated and contributes to with this essay, oh, just so powerful.

BB: Before we jump into the conversation, let me tell you a little bit about Roxane Gay and some of the amazing work she’s done. She’s the author of several bestselling books, including Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, the essay collection: Bad Feminist, which is I think where I met her, maybe, where I met her work, the novel: An Untamed State, the short story collections: Difficult Women and Ayiti, and the graphic novel: The Sacrifice of Darkness. She’s also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel and the editor of Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture. She is also the editor of The Selected Works of Audre Lorde. She’s a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and has launched the Audacious Book Club and a newsletter: The Audacity. I learned so much from Roxane every time I read her, talk to her. Let’s dive in.

BB: Roxane, welcome back to Unlocking Us. I’m glad you’re here.

Roxane Gay: Oh, thank you so much for having me.

BB: I have read and reread this article. Are you calling it an article, an essay? How are we framing this?

RG: I call it an essay.

BB: Yes. An essay. I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s called Stand Your Ground: A Black Feminist Reckoning with America’s Gun Problem. Before we get into the essay, I wanted to ask a question about how you came to write it and the decision-making process about where to publish it. And because one, I want everyone to be able to find it, but also I feel like once we get into the essay, it’s going to be hard to pull out and ask that more macro question.

RG: Yes. So it’s kind of two separate things, but a couple years ago, Scribd had approached me to write an essay for them, and I wrote an essay about writing trauma and what it’s like to write trauma, best practices for writing trauma, and so on. And that went really well. And so a while later they asked if I wanted to curate a series of essays, including one of my own. And it was a really excellent opportunity to be able to pay writers a really fair wage to write about whatever they wanted, because I approached four different writers and I just said, “If you could write about anything you want and be well-compensated, what would you write about?” And so Elaine Castillo wrote about German Shepherds and becoming a foster parent for German Shepherds. Randa Jarrar wrote about becoming a mother at 17 and sort of what it meant to raise herself alongside raising her young son, Julia Turshen, who’s a cookbook author and chef, wrote about getting into power lifting and how it helped her develop a stronger and more loving relationship with her body.

RG: And Gabrielle Bellot, who is a Caribbean American writer, she wrote about getting into psychedelics and how they helped her deal with depression and anxiety and the adventure of sort of exploring your own mind with the help of psychedelics. And so originally I was going to write an essay called: “A Brief History of Scandal.” And it was going to be about how we think about scandal and the things that we culturally are scandalized by, but also the real scandals, which are the ways that we tend to abandon the most vulnerable populations among us. And I hope to still write that essay, but at the time, it just wasn’t coming together. And then separately I was thinking about gun ownership because my younger brother, Joel, was an avid gun enthusiast and collected guns and practiced shooting and did all kinds of gun things. And none of my family members, none of us are into guns at all.

RG: And so it was always curious like, “Wow, where did this even come from?” And then during the pandemic… I have always gotten threats about my work. And they’ve been either like just trolling, insults, et cetera, threats of harm, and then of course death threats. And so that’s nothing new. But during the pandemic, those threats became particularly persistent from a handful of people and specific, and then the threats started including my wife, Debbie. And it wasn’t a secret that we were together at the time, we were dating and then engaged, but people clearly had done research because a lot of the threats were antisemitic and referenced her appearance. And it just made me feel, “What is happening here? How is this possible?” And of course, law enforcement can’t really do anything, which is infuriating that even though it’s 2024 and the digital age is no longer new, we still don’t have an adequate set of responses to digital-based harassment, which sometimes does bleed into the day-to-day life. And so I bought a gun, and as a feminist, as a Black feminist, I felt a lot of different things about gun ownership. It’s not something I’ve ever aspired to or had an interest in. And so I decided to write an essay about all of that and about gun culture in the United States and the sort of unholy alliance between this country in the Second Amendment. And “Stand Your Ground” is what rose out of it.

BB: Wow, is this an art form.

RG: Thank you.

BB: Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, this is what I want to read every time I sit down. Not only is it beautifully written together, but I learned a ton. I saw myself in it. I got so effing pissed off, and I got scared. We don’t have unsimilar experiences with the public. Let’s start where all good podcasts should start. Let’s start with Aerosmith.

RG: Yeah. [laughter] Absolutely. Who doesn’t think of starting with Aerosmith? Yes. At the opening of the essay, I talk about a song that I first heard many, many years ago in the 1990s called: “Janie’s Got a Gun,” by Aerosmith. And for you young folk, it’s okay. It’s on Google. [laughter] And it’s a song about a young girl who’s being sexually abused by her father, and she has no recourse, no one’s coming to save her. And so she gets a gun and decides to save herself. And at the time, I found this song incredibly cathartic. I had recently dealt with the trauma of being gang-raped. And that was a very satisfying idea, that you could put a stop to the harm in that way and it would be permanent. And I thought that would be a great place to start the essay, because normally I’m a very, on the page I’m very forthright, and I’m very confident, and I’m very grounded in my convictions. But in my day-to-day life, I’m actually quiet and shy, and usually I’m sort of passive. Things happen and I decide there’s nothing I can do about them. I just kind of throw my hands up because it is what it is. I say that phrase exhaustingly too much. And for the first time in my life I sort of decided, “I don’t want to be passive about this. I don’t want to put my family in danger and just sort of treat it as inevitable.” And so that song felt like a good way to bring readers into that conversation and my thought process.

BB: It’s interesting that you started there because I remember that I’m of the age to remember the song really, really well. And it was such a departure in many ways from what I thought of Aerosmith. But I remember having to turn that song off sometimes because it was, the word that I would use to describe that song in parts of your essay, I think would be haunting. It was not a normal, like, “Rock and roll, let’s go,” song. Would you agree there was something haunting about it?

RG: Very much. And Steven Tyler’s vocals, especially towards the middle and the end of the song, are haunting. Like, you can hear the pain. And it was really surprising to me that a man could sort of capture that on behalf of this 12-year-old girl persona. Actually, I don’t know how old she was, but not only was the song haunting just listening to it, the music video was haunting. And so I always thought of those two in combination. Because to have these visuals, and there’s nothing graphic in the video, but everything that’s happening in the song is well-communicated. And so that song has always inspired a visceral reaction in me. And I actually think we’re supposed to have, and we should have visceral reactions to gun violence and to any kind of violence for that matter. And because we seem to be inundated by violence, I think we often become inured to it. And we just sort of take it for granted, that, “This is the way it is.” Á la J. D. Vance, who expects us to believe that mass shootings are commonplace, and we should just suck it up. We shouldn’t. I think that we should be horrified each and every time someone is harmed. And that song makes me feel that way. And so does the subject matter.

BB: Yeah. Tell me about Joel.

RG: Yes. So I have two younger brothers, Joel and Michael Junior. Joel’s the middle child, and he was a quintessential middle child. And he died three years ago, three years ago, and two months. And it was a shock because he was 43. And in general, 43-year-olds are not supposed to die. And we did not expect it. And it threw us all for a loop because he was very vibrant. He loved life. He had two children, he was married, and he left a crater-sized hole in our lives. And it still feels incredibly fresh. I just never in my life imagined losing a sibling. You prepare to lose your parents, who thankfully my parents are still alive and your grandparents and elders. You know that this is the cycle of life. And sometimes you even think my own death is inevitable.

RG: I just never in life thought about losing a sibling. And so while he was alive, Joel always tried to get us into his various enthusiasms, of which he had many. But the thing about Joel is that he did everything full on. He never half-assed anything, whether it was work or his hobbies or his parenting. He just was a fully-committed guy. And so for years, he talked about guns. And I just sort of vaguely paid attention because it was just so out of the realm of normalcy for us. It just was so bizarre. But one time when we were down in Florida visiting where both he and my parents lived, he took my dad and I and my brother to the shooting range. And it was fun. It wasn’t the first time I had shot a gun, but it was… To be able to do that with him.

RG: And normally he was very arrogant, but he could back it up to be fair. And he talked all the time. But on the gun range, he was extremely patient and helpful. And he gave all kinds of encouraging feedback. And it was a really nice experience. And after that, I started taking his interest more seriously and just trying to understand, “Where does this come from?” And I think for him a lot of it was just enjoyment. But also as a Black man, as a Black father, he firmly believed in his right to avail himself of the same rights as everyone else, and to protect his family. And he was very committed to that. He had a concealed carry license. He was all in. And so when I did get a gun, he was actually thrilled [chuckle], and he was very excited, and he sort of walked me through it. He offered to fly to California to help me buy it. And I was like, “I think I can handle this.” And of course I could. It was very easy. It was too easy, quite frankly. But yeah, Joel became a centerpiece of this essay because he was alive when I started thinking about it. And he was gone by the time I actually finished it. And that was very disorienting. Kind of like my world was completely off its axis, and quite frankly, still is.

BB: I’m really sorry about Joel. I was very quickly falling in love with him through the pages.

RG: He’s just so great.

BB: Yeah. And then we got to the paragraph, I was like, “I don’t… No, no, no, no. This is… No, no. No,” because I knew how old he was by the time I got to the paragraph where he passed. And I was like, yeah, I didn’t… I think what I fell in love with him about him is his conviction. Not just about guns, but everything, you know, like.

RG: Everything. That’s so hypnotic in a person because he was also a good person. He was just genuinely good. He was loyal. He was kind. At his funeral. We knew he had a lot of friends, of course. But so many people came to his funeral and every single person would say, “Joel was my best friend.”

BB: Best friend.

RG: “Here is the thing he did for me. Joel was my best friend.” And of course, Joel was Michael Junior’s best friend. He was my best friend. He was my dad’s best friend. He was my mom’s best friend. There were people he worked with and women in particular who said, “He gave me my career. And he never once hit on me.” That’s, again, the bar is in hell sometimes, but also to know that he was exactly the man I thought he was was a small comfort in that moment, to see just how far he reached. And to this day, I get messages from people who have learned belatedly of his passing and send pictures of them together and these really beautiful, generous messages. And so it’s so lovely to know that even though he’s no longer here, he will never be forgotten. Not only by our family, but by anyone who met him.

BB: Yeah. He was an easy guy to fall in love with on these pages. I can tell you for sure. It was anticipatory for me. Because I would read about him taking up cooking, and then I’d be like, “Oh, I better get a paragraph somewhere that delivers on that,” about what he could cook. And then there was no ethnicity of food left behind. [laughter]

RG: No, none.

BB: I really appreciated your generosity with him, sharing him with us. That was great. And it was hard. I’ll tell you why it was interestingly hard for me. I, like you have a very bad feminist relationship with guns. Fifth generation Texan. Family motto, but like, I’m not even joking. It’s on tumblers, like lock and load, hunting family. And my mom’s only sibling was killed with gun violence. Yeah. He was shot in the head when he was sleeping and…

RG: Oh my god.

BB: Yeah. And so as I was going through this, I thought, “Roxane Gay doesn’t look for answers, and she doesn’t even live into the question. She rides in the question.” [laughter] And so as Joel came and took you shooting and started talking to you about guns and you started doing the research for this essay, which is one thing I appreciate about it, it’s so personal and so wholehearted and then so unapologetically factual. The research. The gun industry loves a woman interested in guns.

RG: And how.

BB: Say more.

RG: Which… Yeah, absolutely. It’s one of the things that was most striking to me. One of the things I knew I wanted to do was not only speak from the personal, which is important, but you have to balance it with context. And there is quite a lot of context in this country from our unnatural obsession with guns and the fact that there are more guns than people in this country, even though only about 35% of Americans own guns, which is to say gun people really love guns. But that there’s a very pernicious way in which the gun industry tries to market its wares to women. And one of the main things that they do is to frame women as victims in waiting. And that violence is inevitable. And so you better be prepared. And the only way you can be fully prepared is with a gun.

RG: And then they make it condescending by coating everything in pink. Now pink is my favorite color, so I am not opposed. But the notion that all you need to do is make a little petite gun in pink or violet or some other feminine-coded color is insulting at best. But it’s also so cynical. Like that’s just how little they think of women. We’re just consumers and they’ll do anything they can. And at the same time, there’s a lot of harmful rhetoric around guns. Not only about victims in waiting, but there are many people who believe women shouldn’t handle guns because women are so emotional. You hear this also a lot with regard to a woman becoming president, “Is she going to be able to handle it while she’s on her period?” Like, listen, if she can handle a period, she can literally handle anything.

[laughter]

RG: And so it’s just interesting to see that either we’re supposed to empower ourselves or we are so disempowered by our femininity, which I can never say easily, that we can’t possibly have access to guns. It’s just quite the contradiction. And the gun industry doesn’t really care about resolving that contradiction. But I was interested in it, and it’s something I think a lot about because the other impetus for this essay is, when I did buy the gun, I was not the only Black woman in the gun store. And I’m certainly not the only Black woman at the gun range. And that shocked me because we all have our sort of preconceived notions. And one of mine was that gun ownership is primarily a white people thing. Of course Joel disabused me of that, but only, I just thought, we’re from Nebraska. Like, so he’s an outlier, but in fact Black women are one of the fastest-growing gun owner demographics. And that made me interested. I thought, “Wow, why are Black women buying more guns? What’s going on there?” And it became a very interesting question to try and answer.

BB: I read this over and over this… Let me just show you your essay.

RG: Oh my gosh. Yeah. I love how you printed it out. That makes me so happy. Thank you so much.

BB: Oh, I didn’t just print it out. I had it bound.

RG: I see that [laughter] and there, for those of you who are listening, it’s covered in post-its, which is truly I think the highest compliment you can give someone’s writing that it’s been actively engaged with.

BB: I mean yeah, it’s flown across the room a couple times with a big “Fuck you, Roxane.” [laughter] But I knew you’d love that actually.

RG: And my work here is done. Yes. [laughter]

BB: I literally thought “I’m going to text Debbie and just be like, ‘You need to have her back off on this gun thing. I can’t handle it.’” [laughter] So, can I read you to you?

RG: Yes, please.

BB: This is talking about the industry marketing to women. “They market smaller guns, petite enough to fit in a woman’s generally smaller hands and create advertising depicting women, scantily-clad, fondling various weapons imposing coquettishly. Criminology professor Peter Squires notes: Gun companies appropriated feminism to try to sell more guns. Gun marketers have taken the concept of empowerment to both sell neoliberal rationalities to women and to offer up recalibrated kind of empowered women as ideal consumer subjects in return. But the so-called empowerment exaggerates the range and scope of personal control and agency.” And then you write, “The industry is happy to stoke women’s anxieties about safety by marketing the idea that with a gun, women can protect themselves from the dangers of the world beyond our homes. It is a condescending, reductive approach.”

RG: Mm. Hm.

BB: Would you agree that in the marketing of guns to women, not only are we like petite and carry very small clutches, which I’m not petite and I carry a bag the size of a hefty bag, [laughter] But there’s some kind of sexualization of armed women that goes into that marketing, which is so… Given the kind of violence that they’re intimating will happen to us if we’re not armed, to then sexualize the guns themselves is just abusive.

RG: It is. It’s grotesque. And if you look at gun magazines, a lot of the advertisements that are quite frankly advertisements to men, are women scantily-clad while holding, for example, an AR15 with a belt of ammunition draped over her décolletage. And it’s just so interesting to see the way that they try to have it both ways. They sexualize the weapons, they make them incredibly phallic in the hands of women. They also sexualize the women to sell the guns to men, even though, quite frankly, you don’t need to do that. Men are going to buy them anyway. Not all men, but a lot of them. And you just have to wonder how craven are you that this would even occur to you? And then that you decide that this is a good tactic, and one that they’ve been using for years and years.

RG: The research I did for this essay, sometimes you just think you really shouldn’t open Pandora’s box. Like you don’t want to know. But at the same time, I’m also glad to know more because when we talk about a lot of the major cultural issues that we contend with, those conversations tend to be very broad, very sort of easy soundbite. And like, I’m always interested in what’s beyond the soundbite, what’s beyond the sort of pithy thing. And I even allude to that in the essay when I talk about how I used to have a boyfriend who was a gun enthusiast, not a gun enthusiast. He was a hunting enthusiast. And he had some guns. And I said something like, “I don’t believe in guns.” And he was like, “What does that even mean?” And that was one of the first times where I thought, “Okay, really what do I mean by that?” Because I mean, they do exist. So what am I saying? And I think it’s always important to go beyond that sort of knee jerk reaction that is true and valid, but really what do you mean by that? Like, let’s unpack it. And I try to do a lot of that in this essay.

BB: I’ll be so curious to get your thoughts on this because it’s something I wrestle with personally all the time. Again, I came up in a gun family. We got BB guns when we were five, we got 22s when we were 10. And we got rifles when we were 15. And we all hunted. We couldn’t shoot a gun that we couldn’t take apart and clean and put back together again. We were the Bubba Gump family of venison, like chicken fried, venison jerky, venison. I mean, just that’s all we ate during off season, in season. And I actually, my dad really wanted me to go to school on a shooting scholarship. I was a big skeet and trap shooter.

BB: And in those days we had a hunting lease and we leased out part of it to other people. My dad, who was, and I don’t know how still is a big NRA supporter and a conservative in general. But my dad used to say, if he caught hunters on that land with automatic weapons, he’d be like, not only is the weapon going, you’re going, you’ll never be invited back. The women shot the same guns as the men and could outshoot them most of the time. There was nothing sexualized about it. There were rules, there was respect. Basically, I came from a family that hunted and had guns and absolutely, back then at least, believed in everything that’s being proposed in gun reform. They thought gun ownership was a responsibility, not a right. And so what changed and when… How did this happen? How did we get here where I’m not allowed to exist because I believe in responsible gun ownership and hunting and sports shooting. And I’m also a progressive who 100% believes in gun reform, like that is not allowed to exist today. How did we end up here?

RG: It isn’t. Which is why we have to articulate these ideas as often and as loudly as we can. Part of how we ended up here is that as a culture, and it’s not only the United States, but it’s primarily the United States, we seem to resist and reject and resent nuance. We don’t want to hold multiple ideas at once.

BB: No.

RG: Even though several things can be true, responsible gun ownership is as you say, and as your family believes, a responsibility, like you need a license to drive a car, surely we should have a licensing process for gun ownership, because both of these things can actually take other people’s lives. I think part of it is just the inability to hold competing ideas at once. Part of it is that we have unchecked campaign finance. And so we have a class of politicians on both sides of the aisle who are willing to take money from the gun lobby. And therefore just offer up their thoughts and prayers. I mean, this essay was published a couple months ago, and there have been multiple mass shootings since. There have been I think 600 this year already. The numbers are staggering and time and again, we act like there’s simply nothing we can do about this. And even though only 35% of Americans own guns, about 20% of gun owners are in the NRA. So it is a really small group of people that has a disproportionate amount of power when it comes to guns. And it’s really the gun industry that’s funding all of this so that they can continue to make money. And they’re clearly willing to make money at any cost. They’re clearly willing to sacrifice our children, which I just can’t even… I don’t know how parents send their children to school every day.

RG: I just don’t know how they do it. It seems terrifying. And it shouldn’t be this way. It should not be this way. And there are so many sensible gun owners who do everything that’s responsible and right and want stricter gun laws, want background checks. I mean, and the things that we’re asking for are so bare minimum. We’re not even getting into like the more advanced, it’s not that advanced, but the more advanced stuff, like let’s limit the… In California there’s a limit unto the number of bullets you can put in a magazine. I think it’s 10, and things like that. Again, sensible because, like, how many bullets do you need to shoot at once, truly? A ban on assault weapons, which if you hunt with an assault weapon, you’re a coward.

BB: So simple. Yeah.

RG: Real hunters do not hunt animals with weapons of mass destruction. Period. And so to see people say, “I use it for hunting,” it’s like, “What are you hunting? Like an alien or an actual animal? Please, let’s be real about what you’re doing here. You just want the firepower.” And so it’s just this confluence of things and it’s really disheartening. And I don’t know how we move past this. I don’t know how we address the gun lobbies hold on our country, on our children’s lives, on our own lives, quite frankly. It just doesn’t seem to make any sense to me.

BB: It’s really interesting, my kind of real beef with the NRA is that they took something that was part of our family tradition, that was important to us. And they became really, in my mind, the death eaters. They became the bad guys. And I was watching a couple of ads after I read your essay. And do you think it’s fair to say that they kind of radicalize members using race and immigration and current political topics and have you seen that? Or is it just me looking to pick a fight?

RG: No, no. I mean, first of all, that’s a good fight to pick. And it’s not just you. That’s exactly what they’re doing. And we see it almost every day, and particularly because we’re in the sort of heat of an election cycle, we’re seeing it. And it’s so disheartening, not only that they’re doing it, but that it’s working. J. D. Vance made up a story about Haitian immigrants in Ohio, saying that they were undocumented, and then that they were eating people’s pets. This is a figment of his imagination. And for whatever reason, there is a segment of this country, and it’s a significant segment, that genuinely believes that their lives are in danger from immigrants who have crossed the borders illegally and who are marauders and simply out to get all sort of God-fearing, peaceful, Americans. I’ve seen an interview, I can’t remember, it was on one of the news channels. It was an older woman, a white woman who was articulating these fears about immigrants. And the newscaster, it was a European newscaster, said, “Have you ever met an immigrant? Are there any immigrants in your town?” And she said, “No, but there could be.”

BB: “But they’re coming.”

RG: Yes, [laughter], it’s the threat that might potentially manifest. And it’s just, people love to act like we’re post-racial, that we have made enough progress, that we have addressed the ills of racism. And the reality is we have barely scratched the surface. Because as long as race and immigration status can continue to be weaponized in service of political ambition, and to paint a very apocalyptic portrait of the United States, we have a long, long way to go. And as a Black woman, it’s incredibly distressing, as a Black woman with Black men in her life, it’s incredibly distressing, but I just can’t believe that we’re still here and that it seems to be getting worse, not better. We always act like things are getting better, but they’re not getting better right now. They’re stalled and it feels like we’re losing quite a lot of ground.

RG: And it’s just in service of fear. And I don’t know what it is about MAGA Republicans that, like support who you want, believe what you want to believe, but why do you want to believe this apocalyptic version of events when you live your lives day to day and things are mostly fine. I’m not talking about the economic component, which I know that especially given our shocking price of groceries, people are feeling different kinds of economic challenges. But how does that translate into these really bizarre fears where they take isolated incidents of violence and globalize them and people go along with it? People who seem otherwise sane. It keeps me up at night.

BB: I think it’s a pretty brilliant strategy actually as someone who studies emotion. I mean, I think really right now, all you have to do is make people afraid and then sell them an enemy. You don’t really even have to sell them a solution, [laughter] you just have to say you’re afraid because these people are terrible. And then people go, “Oh my god, thank you. I thought I was going crazy. I’m not. You’re right. And you’re my hero for letting me know that my shitty cancer diagnosis and my bad marriage really is somebody else’s fault. And we can blame them and fix it and find it.” Yeah. It’s just, it’s interesting. I read this over and over in the… It’s a quote from you. “As a Black feminist, I’d love to see a more robust, nuanced, discourse about guns and gun violence. One that goes well beyond empowerment and victimhood, passivism and aggression. Women are now the fastest-growing demographic for gun ownership. And among women, it is Black women who comprise a significant percentage of that growth. We should be asking ourselves why.” And one of the things that’s very interesting is I don’t think that would be surprising to Texans. We have huge Black rodeos. We have a huge elders mentoring Black hunting movement in Texas. But I think the rest of the world is surprised about Black gun ownership. Would you agree?

RG: I would agree. And as I was doing research for this essay, oftentimes when we talk about the civil rights movement, we talk about the non-violence aspect, which was incredibly important and did a lot of good work. But there were also plenty of civil rights activists who thought that, “You know what? We need to fight fire with fire. We need to arm ourselves, defend ourselves, and take the fight to the oppressor.” And they did in Mississippi, in Alabama, in the Carolinas, to great effect. And I actually read a really great memoir, and I’m blanking on the title, but I do reference it in the essay, from a civil rights activist who was essentially shunned by the NAACP because he believed in gun ownership and believed that nonviolence was not necessarily the answer for achieving progress. And a lot of what he was dealing with took place in Monroe, North Carolina. And when he and some of his fellow comrades took up arms, the aggressors backed down. And there’s a scene that he writes about where an older white man is crying because the N words have guns. “I can’t believe they have guns.” And he was so distressed that this God-given right that he felt entitled to was being availed of by others, by Black people.

BB: Co-opted. Yeah.

RG: Yes. And the racial component of this matters because “Stand Your Ground,” the title of the essay, speaks to the idea that most people articulate they’re gun owners because of self-defense. They want to protect themselves. They want to protect their family. And in many states, there are stand-your-ground laws based on the castle doctrine, which is the notion that you have the right to defend yourself. And if you take someone’s life in service of that self-defense, you can’t be prosecuted. That’s true for white people and George Zimmerman, who used the stand-your-ground defense when he killed Trayvon Martin. But oftentimes when Black people try to stand their ground, they either lose their lives or they spend years in prison. Marissa Alexander was defending herself against her abusive husband, who admits that he abused her and several other women that he had had relationships with. And she fired a gun away from him into the air and spent five years in prison and under house arrest because the prosecutor decided that she had endangered people’s lives. She was a legal gun owner. She had a concealed carry permit. She did everything correctly, and it didn’t matter.

RG: A couple months ago, there was a young Black man who was in the Air Force. He had a gun, and someone was breaking into his house, or so he thought, and so he had his gun out to defend himself, and the police shot him, no questions asked. Sonia Massey, who did not have a gun but called the police for help, was killed by police. And this happens time and time again. So who gets to stand their ground, really? It’s really like some people get to stand their ground, and some people are the ground that’s stood upon.

BB: You know, I wonder about the selective application of stand your ground. I wonder if what is beneath that is a very pervasive belief that that is not your ground.

RG: Absolutely. Absolutely.

BB: You know what I mean? I mean, like, that it goes so deep that you really have no ground. You just have no ground to stand or protect.

RG: And I firmly believe that’s part of it. And it’s just sad that this is where we’re still at in this day and age, that we’re still dealing with the three-fifths doctrine. And that we’re still being excluded from the very laws that are supposed to benefit and serve every American, regardless of race, faith, creed, et cetera. You always wonder, “How do we change this?” And we’d like to tell ourselves that the racists are dying out, but they’re actually not. They’re raising the next generation in their own image. And some of the younger people might resist that, but many of them are embracing it. As evidenced by a whole slew of young conservatives who are also racist. The two are not synonymous. As someone who grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, I know all kinds of conservative people who are just fine. Who might have beliefs I disagree with, but also believe that I have as much right to be an American as anyone else. And yet there are these really toxic ideologues who, of course, get a disproportionate amount of press attention. And… Are young and virulently racist, xenophobic, and proud. And so we cannot just rely on the idea that the bad folks are going to die out. They’re actually not.

BB: In 2015, I was asked to write a foreword for a book and to kind of explain what I thought was going on. And it was Trump’s first run at the White House. And I predicted that he was absolutely going to win. And I said, my fear is that what we’re witnessing is a specific brand of power, white male power over. And there are plenty of white males who believe in power with and power within and power to. But a specific strand of power, which is white male power over, I believe is getting ready to make a very long, entrenched, bloody last stand. Demographics are not in their favor. And I think what we’re going to see is an absolute assault on women’s rights, an increase in racism, anti-immigration, anti-Semitism. I mean, we’re going to see it. Like, this is going to be a white male power over, period. And the person who edited it and gave it back to me said, “I’ll put this out there, but I hope you’re wrong because last stands last a long time.”

RG: Yeah.

BB: Do you think we’re in that place where there’s a desperation to holding on to something that is just not going to work?

RG: That’s a great question. That’s a great question. And I don’t know. I do think there is some merit to the belief that this is a last stand. But as you say, wow, what a last stand. And I think that people have to be prepared for it to be a very violent and long-lasting last stand. Because people love power. They just love it. They crave it. And they’re very reluctant to let go of it. What Joe Biden did, no matter how long it took, is unprecedented. And it’s too soon for people to recognize what he did. But in the years to come, he’s got a mixed bag of a career, but in the years to come, people are going to write about what he did. Because it’s so unprecedented and so very rare to be at the height of your career, to be the most powerful person in the world and recognize what’s best for the country is for me to step aside and cede power to someone else. And a woman of color at that, a Black woman and a South Asian woman. It’s incredible. And that happens so rarely. And the way we see how tightly these people are holding on to power, the way that we see people flocking to the MAGA movement, is because, as you say, too, the demographics are working against them. They have 15 years, maybe. And…

BB: Max.

RG: That is the absolute most of being the majority. They will not be the majority in our lifetimes. And I actually think that’s lovely because I love the diversity of this country at its best. I love meeting people from different walks of life. One of my favorite, my wife and I live between New York and Los Angeles, and having spent most of my life until very recently in very rural places, I love that every single day I meet people from all walks of life, speaking all kinds of languages, inhabiting all kinds of cultures. The other day I was walking down the street in Manhattan and it was like 1:10 PM and I noticed that there were these hundreds of men kneeling on the sidewalk. And all of a sudden they leaned forward and I realized I was standing in front of a mosque. And the mosque was so full that there were these hundreds of men on the sidewalk, on the New York sidewalk, bowing in prayer. And it was so beautiful and such this profound moment of, “I love that I get to see this. I love that I get to behold this level of faith.” And I marvel at that kind of faith. And to know that the world does have space for all of us. And it was just great. And I just don’t understand why people don’t see that as a reason to celebrate. It completely made my day just because it was so unexpected and so interesting. And just… An everyday fact of life here.

BB: A tiny moment of awe.

RG: As much as the demographics are changing. It really was a tiny moment of awe. And, you know, the demographics are changing, but like, that’s not a bad thing. It’s a good thing. And white people aren’t going anywhere. My goodness, look how many of them are, like, you guys are everywhere. It’s going to be fine.

BB: Like, come on, folks, we’ve had a good run and we made a shit show of it.

[music]

BB: Can I read to you again?

RG: Absolutely.

BB: Oh, I didn’t like this. I’m just going to tell you that this was hard. You write, “Safety is a myth. I know that. But most of us crave safety. We crave knowing with some certainty that we can move freely through our lives, free from threat. Safety is a reasonable desire. For the very privileged, safety is taken for granted, wealth is cosseting. It makes safety another one of those inalienable rights. But the more marginalized you are, the less you can take your safety for granted. When many gun advocates talk about individual gun ownership, they talk about safety. They want to protect themselves and their homes and their families. If they carry a gun in public, they believe that they’ll be a ‘good man with a gun’ in circumstances that call for one. But safety is an illusion whether you own a gun or not. There have been many deadly situations where good men and women with guns did absolutely nothing to stop a tragedy. It’s very easy to believe you are a good person with a gun, but it is much harder to actually be a good person with a gun.”

RG: It is. And we see that time and time again. And that was particularly inspired by what happened at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas. Which has been on my mind now for a few years.

BB: Yeah.

RG: Again, because anytime this kind of thing happens at an elementary school and the country as a whole does nothing, I just think, “Wow, we are just not interested in children anymore?” Which is ironic given the way that people try to control women’s bodies and our reproductive freedom. We only like children in the womb once they come out, “Eh, fuck them kids.” It’s just… The thing about Uvalde, when you read the reports that have come out since, and the sort of accounting of what went wrong, and so much went wrong, that school was surrounded by supposedly good men with very big guns, and they know the power of the AR-15, and they were so fucking scared of it that they did nothing for so long. And so we have to really dismantle this trope of the good man with the gun. And also we have to recognize that a good man with a gun is not impervious to bullets. You know, a good man with a gun, a good woman with a gun can only do so much. So perhaps we should be looking for solutions that are not related to guns.

RG: Because guns are not going to solve the gun problem, no matter what. And a lot of the feedback I’ve gotten from this essay since it has been published or a lot of the questions are, “Should everyone be armed?” And the answer is no. Absolutely not. People are too chaotic. We feel our emotions too deeply. You can’t trust what you’re going to do in the heat of the moment. Frankly, nobody should have access to guns. But in the meantime, you know, let’s figure out a better way forward. I just don’t know how we undo the Second Amendment, but I think we can do better with what we have.

BB: They’ve run so many scenarios, like real scenarios, school shootings, public shootings, where armed, trained, marks-people cannot respond in a way that’s helpful. I mean, the answer is not to arm everyone. I mean, and if you’re going to keep your family safe, you’re going to keep it locked away. You’re going to keep your ammunition locked separately. You’re going to have to find all that shit in the middle of the night. Otherwise, your kids are more likely to die than an intruder. So this illusion of safety is so real. And at the same time, when I was reading the paragraph, I could barely make it through the paragraph when you talked about security being at events, when you talked about what it meant to take the stage sometime for you.

RG: And it makes me sad that this is my reality, that when I do public events, which is alarmingly frequently, I have to generally have armed security. And it’s something I never would have imagined, you know, when you’re a writer. The dream of success for me was publishing a book that was worthy and that maybe some people would read. I didn’t know what to possibly dream beyond that. That was the dream. And as I’ve gotten deeper into my career, I’ve learned that there are all kinds of other interesting things that can rise out of a successful publishing career. And one of them is speaking engagements and getting to talk to a lot of interesting people. And… Early on, I started getting threats at these events. And I tend to be very insular and sort of in my own head, but I started noticing these men following me around at these events. And I was like, “Jesus, why is this guy on me?” And then I realized, “Oh, they’re security.” And more and more, I have armed security at these events. And in certain places, I require it. And it just makes me scared. Because in general, the security happens because there has been a threat or multiple threats called into a venue. And I worry not only about my own safety, but the safety of everyone in attendance.

BB: Right.

RG: Because so many people become collateral damage during mass shootings. And I always wonder when I walk out on stage, like, “Is this the day?” And it takes a lot to just suck it up and just say, “Well, if it is, it is.” And I don’t say that cavalierly, but the alternative is to never leave your house, which I don’t think is a reasonable solution, or at least it’s not a reasonable solution for me. So it’s just sad at best, but it’s also scary. And this should not be the price of having opinions. And quite frankly, as I have been accused of multiple times, I think I’m very progressive. But I know that I am closer to the center than a lot of people would prefer. And that’s just partly my nature, where I came from. I’m a Libra. I have all my suns and moons in Libra. I’m just, I’m like, “Libra.” So I tend to seek balance in all things. And if the idea that women are people and that the queer community should be left alone and that trans women are women are, like, if these are heretical ideas that beget death, well, at least I stood up for what I believe in. But I just have to believe that this is not the case. And yet…

BB: And it goes back to the very first thing that we talked about, about a world that not only has, can I go as far as to say, not only an intolerance towards nuance, but a sheer hatred of it. I mean, I’m like you. I have security often because of threats. And especially when Braving the Wilderness came out and I took a stand that was, as a hunting person and a sports shooting person, I believe in gun reform. There were some really scary moments on that tour. But I would have to say the far left has been as scary recently for me as the far right.

RG: Mm hm. And that’s something that is under-discussed.

BB: Tell me what that face is. What is that face you’re making?

RG: That face I’m making is I’ve been dealing with the same thing. And it’s been really hard for me because it’s very hard to feel something from people with whom, in general, I am aligned. We’re in the same book, even if we’re not on the same page, and…

BB: Yeah. It’s an interesting way to put it.

RG: Yeah. We definitely believe in a lot of the same things, even if we go about it differently. And especially one of the issues that this has risen up around quite a lot is around Gaza. And people, we like to say it’s a complicated issue. It’s actually not that complicated. Everyone should have a right to live freely. And free from oppression. And yet people, some further left people would like me to say different things, even though I’ve been crystal clear, on TV, all over the world, about how what’s happening with this war in Gaza is unconscionable. I’ve been really clear about this. And yet it seems to not be enough. And then there’s a lot of anger. And a lot of that anger becomes even threatening. And that’s really just disheartening because we’re not disagreeing. I’m just not you. And I feel what I feel, and that’s okay. And the fact that there seems to be no room for dissent at either extreme is very interesting and very telling. The challenge is the extremes. But most people aren’t in the extremes.

BB: Yeah, I would agree. And I think I’m starting to believe that the political continuum is not a line at all. It’s a circle. And at some point, the extremes meet and are the same. Because, you know, when you’re threatening to hurt me or my family because I disagree with you and I have to have security, I fail to give a shit what side you’re on at some point. It’s just what you’re not on the side of is self-determination.

RG: And I think a lot of people who do turn to those tactics. Whether they’re on the far left or the far right, need to take a hard look in the mirror. Because I think if you told them that this is what they were doing and that it was wrong, they wouldn’t recognize it. They would just point the fingers at others and say, “That’s not what I’m doing. I’m standing up for what is right.” And it’s like, “Are you standing up for what is right? Or are you trying to impose a singular worldview on everyone?” And people don’t like to ask difficult questions, and they don’t like to consider difficult answers. But I agree. The minute threats come out, I stop hearing what you have to say. I stop engaging entirely. There’s nothing more there for me to say to you because I refuse to let my work put my family in harm. And when people start bringing up Debbie, my incredible wife, they have hunted down my parents, and my parents, you know, my mom has cancer and my dad is, you know, like they’re fine, but they’re also not… They’re older… And they’re awesome. But like, “How dare you? How dare you?” They don’t bother anyone. They just mind their business and over-parent.

[laughter]

BB: Is that the Haitian way though?

RG: That’s the Haitian way. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m blessed. My parents are incredible. So it’s fine. But the minute you start doing all of that, there’s nothing more for us to talk about. It doesn’t alienate me from my beliefs in any way. And some people are like, “You’re pushing me further right.” Absolutely not. I believe what I believe, and I’m always going to believe what I believe. But what it does make me do is stop listening to that particular person. And also do everything in my power to cut them out of my life. And however it means. Like part of it, I left Twitter, which was extremely healing. And I’ve just pulled back from social media in general because I just can’t expose myself to that much negativity all the time. It’s not that I’m reluctant to hear feedback. It’s just that there’s some feedback that does not deserve to be in my day-to-day life.

BB: Amen.

RG: And allowing myself to believe that, with therapy all the time, has been very helpful.

BB: I agree with you. Yeah, I left Twitter three or four years ago. I said, “I’m starting a dead bird club.” And I went off social for a year and came back, closed comments, and now just kind of have a different relationship. It’s hard because I really am a firm believer that I have many more questions than I have answers. So I love the debate and the discourse. But if the debate and discourse comes with a side dish of, “I’m going to hurt you or somebody you care about,” it ceases to be debate and discourse.

RG: A couple of weeks ago, I posted something. I can’t even remember what. And I closed comments because people were unhinged. I posted it at like 9:08 in the morning, I came back at 9:32 because I had to like go get ready and take a shower. And they were already like, that was my mistake because I can never anticipate the thing that’s going to set people off. I thought I was just making an innocuous post. I come back and there are 135 comments.

BB: God, in 20 minutes?

RG: And I’m just like, “Wait, how is this possible?”

RG: Yes. Which I’ve never actually seen. On my social media following, because I have a fair number of followers, but I don’t have an exorbitant amount of followers on Instagram. This was on Instagram. And I actually shut down comments. And in the weeks since, people are like, she shuts down all dissent, et cetera, et cetera. I’m like, “This is not dissent. This is my private social media feed. I’m sorry that you think it’s a democracy, but this right here is a dictatorship.” It’s not a democracy here. No. No. No. No.

BB: And is it fair to say you’re the reigning queen of your dictatorship?

RG: I am absolutely the reigning queen. You know, I like to listen to people. I like to listen to other ideas. We can do all that. But when I’m just posting a picture on Instagram, like that’s a one-way street.

BB: Yeah, I got you.

RG: And you are not entitled to comment. People have really developed this sense that democracy is being able to say whatever the hell you want on the internet without consequence. That’s not the case for me. Not this sheriff. Mm-mm.

BB: And you’ve got Max.

RG: I do have Max. Now he’s running downstairs because Debbie just walked in the door.

BB: Oh, yeah. Okay, well, we’ll close with this. Can I read you one more time to you?

RG: Oh yeah. Hit me. I love hearing my own work. [laughter] That’s a joke.

BB: I’m just going to start calling you Debbie and the Sheriff. That’s how I’m going to start referring to y’all. I like it.

RG: And she’d be really into it. By the way, she says “Hello.”

BB: Hello, Debbie. So you write, “I own a gun, but I have more questions than answers. I continue to wonder what I will do if I need to stand my ground and protect my proverbial castle. Responsible gun ownership means, among other things, storing weapons safely in a lock safe. That makes using a weapon in self-defense a somewhat tricky thing. In the middle of the night, will I have the wherewithal to go to the safe, open it, remove the gun, turn on the sight, so I can see where I’m aiming and pull the trigger, knowing the bullet will strike another human being? Will I be able to do all of that knowing that I’ll have blood on my hands. I don’t know. I cannot know. I hope I’ll never know.” And when you go to the shooting range now, you inevitably think of your brother, which I love, “And how happy he would be to know that I’m working on my marksmanship.” I want to read this last thing. “When I aim and pull the trigger and absorb the recoil, I try to shoot straight and true.” And I have a feeling that means not just when you’re shooting a gun. I have a feeling that means when you’re writing, you shoot.

RG: Absolutely. Absolutely.

BB: You shoot straight and true too, damn it. “I revel in how capable I feel, what a welcome departure it is to be an active participant in my life instead of passively seething at all of the things I cannot control. In those moments, I am not merely a weapon. I am a shield. I am not empowered. I am powerful.”

RG: Mm. Hm. Yes.

BB: Janie may have a gun, but Roxane, the sheriff, has a pen.

RG: I do have a pen. And actually, the pen is my weapon of choice.

BB: Oh, it’s good.

RG: And it always will be. I think that I can get far more done with words than anything else. And that is just my medium of choice. And I’m grateful for it. And I’m grateful to have the ability to put my ideas into the world. I know that not everyone gets this opportunity and not everyone uses it responsibly. And I sure try. I don’t get it right all the time, but I do try.

BB: I’m grateful.

RG: Oh, thank you, Brené. Truly, it means the world to me that you engaged so thoughtfully with this essay. I was very nervous about putting it into the world because people feel such deep feelings about guns one way or the other. But I was trying to engage with that. I accept the world as it is while also envisioning hopefully a better place. And I just hoped that this would just be part of the ongoing conversation about the place of guns in our lives.

BB: Yeah. I think what I love the most about this and your work in general is your ability to use your mind and your heart to straddle the tension of things that should not be true at the same time, but are, in this messy-ass, m-f’in’ world that we live in. So thank you for being a beacon in that area. And thanks for showing us how to at least stand the ground between competing ideas and visions of what’s true. I’m grateful.

RG: I try. Thank you. It means a lot. And this has been great. It’s always great to talk with someone like you. So I appreciate it very much.

BB: What a conversation. I’m so grateful for Roxane who just keeps showing up and keeps putting down on paper the things that we need to grapple with. I’m still thinking about this conversation and what it means to stand your ground, and who gets to stand their ground. You can learn more about the episode along with all the shows on brenebrown.com. We’ll link to Roxane’s essay, “Stand Your Ground: A Black Feminist Reckoning with America’s Gun Problem” on the episode page. You can also sign up for our newsletter on the same episode page. Stay awkward, brave, and kind, and wow, stay curious.

BB: Unlocking Us is produced by Brené Brown Education and Research Group. The music is by Carrie Rodriguez and Gina Chavez. Get new episodes as soon as they’re published by following Unlocking Us on your favorite podcast app. We are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more award-winning shows at podcast.voxmedia.com.

 

© 2024 Brené Brown Education and Research Group, LLC. All rights reserved.