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.