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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of One Person, No Vote , longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award; White Rage , a New York Times bestseller and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; Bourgeois Radicals ; and Eyes off the Prize . She was named a Guggenheim Fellow for Constitutional Studies and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (June)
Kirkus Review
The author of White Rage (2016) returns with a powerful consideration of the Second Amendment as a deliberately constructed instrument of White supremacy. "The Second is lethal," writes Emory historian Anderson: "steeped in anti-Blackness, it is the loaded weapon laying around just waiting for the hand of some authority to put it to use." In 1906 in Atlanta, where Emory is located, one such use was made when a White mob attacked Black businesses and neighborhoods in a kind of mass lynching. "Let's kill all the Negroes so our women will be safe," yelled one instigator. When armed Black citizens responded, the Georgia government immediately sent in the cavalry, not to protect the neighborhoods but to suppress what was tantamount to a modern slave revolt. And it was precisely to suppress revolts, Anderson argues, that the "well-regulated militia" language of the Second was formulated. Militias and slave patrols were one and the same in several Southern colonies and then states, and only Whites could enlist, meaning that only Whites were legally allowed to carry firearms. Indeed, as Anderson carefully documents, many states specifically forbade Blacks from owning or carrying firearms, even after emancipation. Many leaders in the Southern states were fearful because of the success of the Haitian revolution, which, though inspired by both the French and American revolutions, also extended suffrage and political power to free Blacks. The Second Amendment, writes the author, helped reinforce the Constitution's "three-fifths" clause, a means of disempowering Blacks politically forevermore. Today, the racial component of the Second is starkly revealed in police shootings and the National Rifle Association's reticence to defend Black gun owners and police victims even while leaping to the defense of 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, whose attorneys tellingly claimed that he was a member of a "well-regulated militia." Writing evenhandedly and with abundant examples, Anderson makes a thoroughly convincing case. An urgent, novel interpretation of a foundational freedom that, the author makes clear, is a freedom only for some. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Were the founding fathers as concerned about racial subjugation as they were about national security when they crafted the Second Amendment? In this powerful indictment, award-winning historian Anderson (One Person, No Vote, 2018) posits that from its inception, the right to bear arms was exclusively meant for white men. Whether enslaved, restricted by Jim Crow segregation, or at least legally protected by hard-won civil rights, Black citizens have consistently been subjected to a double standard regarding gun ownership and this has warped race relations throughout the country's history. Anderson illustrates, often in vividly disturbing detail, the brutal reprisals that have occurred whenever African Americans sought justice on this issue, and the litany of counterattacks by police, politicians, the military, and the courts cements the unassailable veracity of her argument. From vigilante violence to the ongoing horrors of police killings, the country's Black population has not been able to secure the protection of the Second Amendment. In her passion and precision, Anderson presents a uniquely positioned, persuasive, and unflinching look at yet another form of deadly systemic racism in American society that has stoked the centuries-long crimes of insecurity, inequality, and injustice. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Best-selling Anderson's works are key to public debates about human rights and systemic racism, and gun rights is a particularly urgent subject.
Choice Review
Ed. Note: Choice considers racial justice a cornerstone of its mandate to support academic study. Accordingly, Choice is highlighting select racial justice titles through the creation of long-form reviews such as the one featured here. Though the scope of these reviews will be broader than those applied to our standard 190-word reviews, many of the guidelines regarding what to focus on will remain the same, with additional consideration for how the text under review sheds light on racist systems and racial inequities or proposes means of dismantling them. Our intent is to feature important works on racial justice that will be useful for undergraduates and faculty researching racism and racial inequalities from new perspectives. Does the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantee all American citizens the right to bear arms? Is it the foundation for the individual right to self-defense? What is the historical record of the Second Amendment as a tool for African Americans' protection and liberation? Anderson (Emory Univ.) explores the history of this amendment in relation to the racial dynamics of American politics and finds a consistent pattern of constitutional interpretation that disadvantages African Americans, rendering them victims of white violence and citizens unprotected by one of the central freedoms defined by the Bill of Rights. Anderson, the Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies at Emory University, previously explored the impact of race on the evolution of American society in her 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award--winning book, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, and in her 2018 study of the history and politics of voting, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying our Democracy. She extends her historically grounded analysis here to the history and political fights surrounding the meaning, implementation, and impact of the Second Amendment to the Constitution. In the context of the deep divisions presently fracturing American society over race, partisanship, and the ways Americans understand their past, the analysis here helps clarify the Second Amendment's role in fueling this political divide and in determining the circumstances that impact the lives of African Americans. Anderson contextualizes the Second Amendment as part of the Bill of Rights added to the Constitution in an attempt to ensure the document's ratification in 1789. She explains that modern understandings of the Second Amendment (as guaranteeing people the right to own a gun) ignores the context of the debate that led to the inclusion of the "right to bear arms." The fear of a strong centralized government (the issue at the core of the rebellion against the King of England) influenced the idea of citizens having access to guns, but it was not thought of as an essential right of individual self-defense. The movement toward enshrining this right became part of a legislative compromise needed to bring along recalcitrant representatives from states where slavery was both legal and essential to the economy and culture. How could plantation owners protect themselves from the ongoing threat of slave rebellions? Did the fact that the British offered freedom to American slaves during the Revolutionary War represent an ongoing threat to their livelihood and their lives? Did this concern fuel the necessity of legally defining the right to bear arms? Anderson discusses these circumstances in detail and illuminates how these questions ultimately structured the text of what became the Second Amendment. She notes the following: Madison conveyed that he believed the "great rights" were "trial by jury, freedom of the press and 'liberty of conscience.'" On the other hand, the right to bear arms and a well-regulated militia, in both his discussion in the House of Representatives and with Thomas Jefferson, did not make his list. … The Second Amendment was, thus, not some hallowed ground but rather a bribe, paid again with Black bodies. It was the result of Madison's determination to salve Patrick Henry's obsession about Virginia's vulnerability to slave revolts, seduce enough anti-Federalists to get the Constitution ratified, and stifle the demonstrated willingness of the South to scuttle the United States if slavery were not protected (p. 32). Her analysis also speaks to a broader concern regarding the individual liberties enshrined in the Constitution. The neutral language of the rights described in the first ten amendments leaves them open to different political and judicial interpretations, a fact that has historically been problematic for African Americans. As Anderson demonstrates, this ambiguity could and very often did lead to contradictory understandings of the meaning of the Second Amendment for both white and Black people. It could compel gun ownership in one circumstance (during the debate over the Constitution, for instance), yet limit the right in another. Anderson describes a different understanding of the Second Amendment in California during the modern Civil Rights Movement and the rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland in 1965: In a report marked "Confidential," the Oakland Police Department reported to the state legislature that Seale and Newton's "prime objective is to arm the negro community to act as a deterrent to … the Oakland Police Department and the San Francisco Police Department." … The local newspapers were equally alarmed. The Panthers didn't just bear arms or carry weapons; "Oakland's Black Panthers Wear Guns, Talk Revolution" ran a headline in the San Francisco Examiner. Even more frightening--"It's All Legal," the headline warned (pp. 132--133). The primary argument in The Second points to a consistent element of inconsistency: the rights of African Americans to own guns and make claims to self-defense fluctuate given the racial tensions and politics of a given era. The very fact that there are political and legal questions regarding these rights undermine the claim that this is a fundamental aspect of life granted to all citizens. The impact of this is problematic in that so many of the questions surrounding the limits and privileges of gun ownership often involve life-and-death situations. Given such high stakes, a degree of ambiguity regarding free speech or freedom of religion is a major concern, however rarely a confrontation over these rights leads to the immediate possible loss of life. The only consistent aspect of these interpretations is that African Americans have been continuously denied treatment equal to that of white citizens. What are the consequences for African Americans of these shifting interpretations of the law? The pattern of disadvantage that Anderson highlights illuminates a systemic problem: a focus on individual rights fails to notice group exclusion and deprivations. When one African American loses access to guns because of a judicial ruling, that raises a specific legal concern that can be addressed through litigation, but if the right is restricted by legislation, a broader political strategy will be required, and that evolving dynamic complicates African Americans' Second Amendment rights. What strategy (legal or political) is best suited to protecting the right to bear arms and how can this right be connected to other civil liberties to ensure full citizenship for African Americans? In the era of Black Lives Matter and public protest against police brutality, the relevance of understanding what the Second Amendment means and how it is enforced is more important than ever. Though numerous states have passed laws extending the Second Amendment's reach, the interpretation of how that right applies continues to be vexing. Two cases from Florida after the 2005 adoption of a Stand Your Ground Law (allowing citizens to use deadly force if their lives are in danger) are illustrative. In 2010, Marissa Alexander, an African American woman (and licensed gun owner) fired a warning shot toward her ex-husband who was threatening her in her home. She claimed self-defense under Florida's Stand Your Ground Law--she had filed a restraining order against him after a previous domestic violence incident--but was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison (even though no one was injured), serving three years before being released in 2015 under a plea deal. Only two years later, in 2012, George Zimmerman, a volunteer neighborhood watchman, confronted and shot unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman also claimed a Stand Your Ground defense, alleging that his life was in danger when he confronted Martin and they fought. Zimmerman was found not guilty of murder. What was the difference in the two cases? Which interpretation of the Florida law (and understanding of the Second Amendment) is correct? Contemporary protest movements regarding police brutality and gun violence often reflect the contours of the history and arguments surrounding the Second Amendment that Anderson outlines in this book. Relatively recent calls to "defund the police" (or at least move away from the use of military-style weapons and tactics by government agencies) as well as the push for background checks, gun registrations, and assault weapons bans, reflect an ongoing debate about a constitutional provision that is often understood in unstated but influential racial terms. In The Second, Anderson makes a compelling case that the perceptions of violence and threats associated with racial prejudice undermine any possibility that African Americans can reasonably expect to exercise their Second Amendment rights. This book is a clear and powerful statement of the continuing impact of race in the US. The fact that contemporary politics is still divided over questions of race, history, and their meanings for current debates over education and public policy underscores the importance of this book's poignant, historically grounded, compelling argument for assessing all human rights in the context of American politics. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals. --Kevin Anderson, Eastern Illinois University
Library Journal Review
In this latest work, Anderson (White Rage) argues that the rights afforded under the Second Amendment represent a double standard and have never fully applied to Black Americans. She traces the origins of the right to firearms ownership to pre-Revolutionary War militias, which were formed to control enslaved people and uphold white supremacy. The author explains that during the Constitutional Convention, a deal was reached to enshrine both gun rights and white supremacy, in order to ratify the Constitution at the expense of Black people; nevertheless, slaveholders feared uprisings by enslaved people, and sought to curtail the ability of Black people to legally obtain firearms. This fear persisted after the end of slavery, which led to a series of restrictive laws. Anderson follows gun rights and restrictions throughout U.S. history, addressing Black codes, the Black Panthers, and the Southern Strategy, among others. Finally, she argues that recent police killings of Black men demonstrate that open carry, stand-your ground, and castle doctrine laws are cast aside when Black people are involved. VERDICT An important but too-compact analysis that might leave readers wishing for more. Like Anderson's previous works, this is essential for everyone interested in U.S. history.--Rebekah Kati, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Table of Contents
| Introduction "Why Did You Shoot Him, Sir?" | p. 1 |
| 1 "Sheep Will Never Make a Revolution" | p. 10 |
| 2 Keeping a Ferocious Monster in Chains | p. 40 |
| 3 The Right to Kill Negroes | p. 84 |
| 4 How Can I Be Unarmed When My Blackness Is the Weapon That You Fear? | p. 126 |
| Epilogue Racism Lies Around like a Loaded Weapon | p. 159 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 167 |
| Notes | p. 169 |
| Index | p. 241 |
