A Harvard University Course will examine “gun culture” in the U.S. and its relation to “notions of race, gender, class, and sexuality” this fall.
The course, “Guns in the U.S.: A Love Story,” will take place from Sept. 3 to Dec. 4, and asks: “How did the nation become a ‘gun culture,’ and whose rights and interests does widespread armament serve?”
“Who is included in the Second Amendment’s appeal to ‘the right of the people to have and bear arms,’ and how have notions of race, gender, class, and sexuality framed popular understandings of ‘good guys’ and ‘good women’ whose armed citizenship is required for the nation’s security?” the course description adds.
The course instructor, Professor Caroline Light, is Director of Undergraduate Studies and Senior Lecturer on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the Ivy League university. In 2017, Light published “Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense,” a book that, among other focuses, examines the Second Amendment through the lens of racial identity politics.
“Light traces white America’s attachment to racialized, lethal self-defense by unearthing its complex legal and social histories—from the original ‘castle laws’ of the 1600s, which gave white men the right to protect their homes, to the brutal lynching of “criminal” Black bodies during the Jim Crow era,” the book description advertises.
In March, 2021, Light wrote an op-ed for the Tampa Bay Times titled: “Instead of standing your ground, retreat when possible.” Light alleges that “Stand Your Ground” laws, which empower law-abiding citizens to defend themselves and others against violent criminals, actually serve as a defense for “predominantly white aggressors [to] use excessive force against unarmed, usually non-white men or boys.”
Light has a Ph.D. in history, “with particular focus on gender, race, and sexuality in the U.S. South.”
In a 2020 event, Light claimed that America’s legal system is “based on essential injustices that originate with the very beginning of this nation in settler colonialist violence, in racial capitalism through chattel slavery, [and] gender violence.”
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She also alleged that laws promoting self-defense overwhelmingly benefit white Americans, that certain efforts to promote firearms for women to defend themselves against sexual assault are rooted in racism, and that “modern policing” is partially related to “early slave patrols.”
In 2022, The Harvard Crimson took its annual poll of Harvard’s Faculty of Art and Sciences. The survey found that more than 80 percent of those polled identified as either “liberal” or “very liberal.”
Campus Reform has reached out to Caroline Light for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
Republished with permission from Campus Reform
