The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America

by Carol Anderson

Just as the continuation of the Atlantic slave trade for an additional twenty years, the three-fifths clause, and the fugitive slave clause were embedded in the Constitution to purchase the South’s participation in the United States of America, the Second Amendment was also a bribe.

As the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reported in its study of the racial implications of the law, the criminal justice system is “ten times more likely” to rule a homicide justifiable “if the shooter is white and the victim black” than if an African American kills someone white and claims self-defense.32 In fact, the report notes, stand-your-ground laws actually worsen and increase the racial disparity outcomes of self-defense claims.33 When the NRA provided the template of this law for Florida’s legislators, it “wanted the legal equivalent of carte blanche for the exerciser of a Stand Your Ground right.”34 The NRA got it.

The asymmetry in aims allowed the dream of the United States of America to be held hostage to the tyranny of slave owners. If South Carolina and Georgia, in particular, did not get nationwide protection for slavery, did not get to have inordinate power in the halls of government, and did not get to enrich their wealth on the backs of the Atlantic slave trade, they “threatened to bolt.”97 Repeatedly, during the deliberations they made clear that human bondage was their price for signing onto the Constitution.98 If Americans wanted a United States, it was going to cost Black people dearly.

The discipline, the reliability, and the training were simply not there. Even the Southern militias, when up against a professional army, were wholly inadequate. “Virginia’s militia … had disgraced itself by bolting before firing a single shot in the critical battle of Camden, South Carolina.” It was obvious, whether North or South, that no militia was going to stop a foreign invasion. The war proved that beyond a reasonable doubt.127 What the militia could do rather well, however, as George Mason noted, was keep slave owners safe.

The second major law passed by Congress, therefore, was all about getting guns and control into white men’s hands. Prior to 1790, numerous states, especially in the North, allowed free Blacks to be members of their militias.40 The Uniform Militia Act of 1792 sought to change that. This federal law required every white, able-bodied male between eighteen and forty-five to join his state’s militia. “More significantly, it required them all to buy a gun.”41 This was an act of citizenship and an act of self-defense. Whites believed that they “lived in an enemy camp.”42 The threat was always there. Ironically, the Age of Revolution contributed greatly to the foreboding threat of being overtaken, ruled, or killed by Black people.

Louisiana was ratcheting up the restrictions because it was smuggling in and importing enslaved African-descended people as fast as the burgeoning sugar and cotton plantations could chew them up. As historian Daniel Rasmussen notes, “Nowhere in America was slavery as exploitative, or were profits as high, as in the cane fields of Louisiana. Slaves worked longer hours, faced more brutal punishments, and lived shorter lives than any other slave society in North America.”129 Those conditions fed into the brutality of iron collars, facemasks, cowhide whips, and even a Black child held as a pet to fetch food off the master’s floor.130 Louisiana proudly epitomized “the horrors of an archaic labor system with the rapacious efficiencies of capitalism.”131 Not surprisingly, it was also the site of the largest slave rebellion in North America.

Andrew Johnson, who ascended to the presidency after Lincoln’s assassination, was instrumental in sabotaging efforts to craft a political and legal environment in which the formerly enslaved and free Blacks could live fully. He pardoned many leaders of the Confederacy, welcomed those unrepentant rebels into their old positions in state government, and did not wince as they drafted new constitutions, such as Louisiana’s, that boldly stated, “We hold this to be a Government of white people, made and to be perpetuated for the exclusive benefit of the white race.” And perhaps even more important, the state’s new Constitution affirmed the founding principle “that people of African descent cannot be considered as citizens of the United States.”4

As President Reagan dismissively said in 1987, “In the sixties we waged a war on poverty, and poverty won.”78 Instead, since 1971, the one-trillion-dollar government investment was now being funneled into policing and prisons.79 That depth of expenditure required a nation in a perpetual state of fear. The media was key. “While the murder rate in the United States fell by 20% from 1990-1998, the numbers of stories about murder (excluding O.J. Simpson) on the network news increased by 600 percent.” The message was clear: “Be afraid, be very afraid!”80 That fear focused on African Americans and their supposedly documented and inherent propensity for violent crime.81 That pervasive anti-Blackness, even after the Civil Rights Movement, turned the Second Amendment’s laws for protection—the castle doctrine, stand your ground, and open carry—against African Americans.

The Tampa Bay Times conducted an investigation and found that since stand your ground had been enacted in Florida, “nearly seventy percent of those who invoked it as a defense had gone free.” Moreover, “there was a racial imbalance: a person was more likely to be found innocent if the victim was black.”130 This racial imbalance was affirmed by another study, which found that from 2005 to 2013, “juries were twice as likely to convict the perpetrator of a crime against a white person than against a person of color.”

Just as stand your ground was an affirmation of the Second Amendment’s right to self-defense, open carry laws were the companion piece for the right to bear arms—and proved to be equally lethal to Black Americans. The research project Mapping Police Violence has documented that between 2013 to 2019, with more than 1,900 deaths, Black Americans were killed by police “at three times the rate of white Americans … when adjusted for population.” In addition, they were more likely than any other racial or ethnic group to be unarmed when killed by law enforcement.132 Those data, coupled with the work of Stanford University researcher Jennifer Eberhardt, suggest that Black people are perceived as the universal threat.133 Her team “conducted studies where police and others, cued with an image of a black person, quickly deciphered very blurred images often associated with crime, such as a gun. White people see an African American, and they’re immediately looking for something illegal. They almost instantly see a threat.”134 As the studies on police killings of African Americans indicate, this is the case even when Blacks are unarmed. Thus, when African Americans openly carry a gun, although allowed by law, it raises exponentially the sense of danger about them and to them.

The aura of Black threat loomed. Like Trayvon Martin, Rice, too, aged dramatically from a minor into adulthood the moment they died. “As a recent study of police officers indicated, ‘Black boys are seen as older and less innocent and that they prompt a less essential conception of childhood than do their White same-age peers.’ Worse yet, the researchers’ ‘findings demonstrate that the Black/ape association,’ which is a dehumanization process, ‘predicted actual racial disparities in police violence toward children.’ ”157 Moreover, “computerized police simulators show black and white officers are each more likely to open fire on an African American subject they believe is armed, compared to a white subject who is dressed and behaving identically.”158 Columnist Charles P. Pierce wrote, “At its heart, open carry is about open season on the people who scare you. It’s certainly not about an absolute Second Amendment right that applies to black people as well as white.”159 The descriptors that often provide a cover of innocence—elderly, teenager, child, health care provider, mother—when applied to African Americans, were no match for the societal fear of Black people. In the film The Hate U Give, an activist portrayed by Issa Rae encapsulates the problem: “It’s impossible to be unarmed when your Blackness is the weapon that they fear.”160