Stand Your Ground

A new long form essay published by &Everand

For the past several months, I’ve been sharing essays I’ve published in my series Roxane Gay Presents… hosted by &Everand. This has been an amazing project to work on because I was able to ask four writers I really admire to write about any topic they wanted, for as long as they wanted and then I just waited to see what brilliance they would conjure. I was not disappointed. You won’t be, either.

Julia Turshen wrote Built For This: The Quiet Strength of Powerlifting about becoming a powerlifter and how it changed her relationship with her body. In this video, you will learn about the queer powerlifting club she started. The second essay in this series was You Are a Teen Mom: Instructions by Randa Jarrar—a beautiful reflection on young motherhood and raising yourself alongside your child as a Palestinian American. You can learn more about Randa and her charming child (all grown up) in this video. The third essay is an adventure of the mind. In My Year of Psychedelics: Lessons on Better Living Gabrielle Bellot writes about turning to psychedelics and how they’ve expanded her consciousness and helped her mental health. In the fourth essay, Good Girls: Notes on Dog Rescue , Elaine Castillo writes about becoming a dog person and, in particular, a German Shepard person when she least expected to. It is also, in its way, a cultural history of dog training. I can’t tell you how often I will now randomly drop some tidbit about German Shepards. Reading! It’s amazing. You can learn more about Elaine in this video.

And, at long last, I wrote the final essay in this series. It is called Stand Your Ground and it is OUT NOW!

In Stand Your Ground I am thinking through gun ownership as a Black feminist, as a woman with a family, as a person in a community. I write about how much we crave safety and will do almost anything to feel safe, and how safety and privilege tend to go hand in hand which is to say that the less privilege you have, the more vulnerable you are. And sometimes, you have to recognize that, truly, no one is coming to save you, that the people whose sole job is to save you will all too often view you as a threat rather than the threatened.

This is also an essay about my beloved brother Joel who was, during his all too brief life, an avid gun enthusiast. And it’s an essay about how tech companies try to monetize our fears and anxieties but do nothing to solve the actual problems we contend with. And how a great many people are walking around with a little (or a lot) of cop in them. It’s about the alarming gun violence statistics we know that still bear repeating because the numbers—of guns in the country, of people who die from gun violence, of dollars funneled into our political system by the gun lobby—they are shocking. Those numbers tell a terrible story about the United States and our absolutely warped priorities. And, finally, this is an essay about standing your ground and how not everyone gets to do so. Sometimes, when you’re marginalized, the ground you’re standing on collapses under you. If any of this interests you, take an hour out of your day and give this essay a read! &Everand made a little film about me, too.

I’ve been doing some press in support of the essay. You can catch me on The Daily Show, and On With Kara Swisher and Brown Ambition and Choice Words and on KERA in Dallas and WYPR in Baltimore

And for paid subscribers a book giveaway of several titles….