Description
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 ‘progun’
nor an ‘antigun’ book; the lens is the citizenship rights and human rights of African Americans.
From the eighteenth 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 neutralised 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.
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