Carol Anderson’s “The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America”

'Carol Anderson, whose previous work, White Rage, won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award, joins LARB Radio Hour to discuss her latest book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. Anderson takes a long historical look at the emergence and development of the Second Amendment — “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” — in the context of anti-Black violence and public policy debates. Anderson reveals the various ways in which slavery — and, in particular, white slaveowners’ fears of insurrection — shaped the Second Amendment from the very beginning, with long-reaching effects that we continue to face today, a year after the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer. The infamous Amendment is premised on a racial divide: a white man wielding a gun receives Constitutional protections, while in the hands of a Black man in the United States, a firearm can so often be a death sentence.'