Unlocking Us with Brené Brown · Vox Media Podcast Network

Roxane Gay on “Stand Your Ground: A Black Feminist Reckoning with America’s Gun Problem”

September 25, 2024·1 hr 10 min·5 clips

Gay says white shooters like George Zimmerman walk on stand your ground while Black defenders like Marissa Alexander go to prison.

Brené begins by making the series personal. On My Heart and Mind is not a tidy shelf of topics. It is what she is carrying now: hope, love, grief, dementia, menopause, and books that have been rearranging her thinking. Roxane Gay comes in as one of Brené's favorite cultural critics. Brené says that plainly, then turns to Gay's essay, Stand Your Ground: A Black Feminist Reckoning with America's Gun Problem. The conversation is not built around one gun slogan answering another. Gay wants to get under the familiar lines people reach for when gun politics get loud. She remembers saying she did not believe in guns. A hunting-focused boyfriend asks what that means, and the question makes her move past the reflex toward something more exact. Brené answers with her own background. She grew up in a gun family, with BB guns at five, .22s at ten, rifles at fifteen, hunting, cleaning weapons, and eating venison in every form. Those details matter. They keep the episode close to actual life, especially when Brené talks about skill, family rules, gender, and her father's conservative NRA support. The inheritance is not clean. Her father could support the NRA and still set strict rules around weapons on hunting land, and Brené does not smooth that contradiction away. Gay's essay gives the conversation room to slow down. Again and again, the episode comes back to language: what people say about guns, what they mean by it, and what stand your ground asks us to accept. Brené stays with her discomfort. Near the end, she is still turning over what it means to stand your ground, and who actually gets to stand theirs. The question lands softly, but it does not feel small. Biography and cultural criticism sit together here without pretending either one solves the other. The episode is intimate without getting mushy, and careful without sanding off the hard parts.

As heard by us

Two cultural thinkers dismantle their own assumptions about guns before they get to anyone else's.

Roxane Gay's essay 'Stand Your Ground: A Black Feminist Reckoning with America's Gun Problem' gives the conversation its engine, and both women arrive with more personal history than the title suggests.

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Why you'd press play

Your take on guns probably stops at the slogan. Roxane Gay and Brene Brown went further.

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