The Second
Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America
-
- $17.99
Publisher Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of White Rage, an unflinching, critical new look at the Second Amendment and how it has been engineered to deny the rights of African Americans since its inception.
In The Second, historian and award-winning, bestselling author of White Rage Carol Anderson powerfully illuminates the history and impact of the Second Amendment, how it was designed, and how it has consistently been constructed to keep African Americans powerless and vulnerable. The Second is neither a "pro-gun" nor an "anti-gun" book; the lens is the citizenship rights and human rights of African Americans.
From the seventeenth century, when it was encoded into law that the enslaved could not own, carry, or use a firearm whatsoever, until today, with measures to expand and curtail gun ownership aimed disproportionately at the African American population, the right to bear arms has been consistently used as a weapon to keep African Americans powerless--revealing that armed or unarmed, Blackness, it would seem, is the threat that must be neutralized and punished.
Throughout American history to the twenty-first century, regardless of the laws, court decisions, and changing political environment, the Second has consistently meant this: That the second a Black person exercises this right, the second they pick up a gun to protect themselves (or the second that they don't), their life--as surely as Philando Castile's, Tamir Rice's, Alton Sterling's--may be snatched away in that single, fatal second. Through compelling historical narrative merging into the unfolding events of today, Anderson's penetrating investigation shows that the Second Amendment is not about guns but about anti-Blackness, shedding shocking new light on another dimension of racism in America.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Emory University history Anderson (White Rage) takes an illuminating look at how U.S. laws and customs around gun ownership have been used to subjugate Black Americans. Arguing that the primary function of the "militias" mentioned in the Second Amendment was "controlling the Black population" in the South, Anderson compares 18th-century insurrections such as the Whiskey Rebellion, which was led by white agitators who largely escaped punishment, to contemporaneous slave uprisings, in which dozens of perpetrators were executed upon capture. She also details the harsh consequences faced by Black citizens who took up arms to protect themselves from lynch mobs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and discusses California's 1967 Mulford Act, which was designed (with the support of the NRA) to prevent the Black Panthers from carrying weapons while patrolling Black communities. The well-informed historical discussions provide essential context for recent events, including the 2016 deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, two Black men in possession of guns at the time they were killed by police. This is a persuasive and eye-opening look at the intersection of gun rights and racial injustice in America.
