Anderson, Carol

The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America

Bloomsbury (New York)

2021

OUR SYNOPSIS: Carol Anderson argues that the Second Amendment was “a bribe” to convince southern states to join the United States, and that from the start it was rooted in Black exclusion from the rights of citizenship. (32) The protection of white rights was to protect the institution of slavery. She argues the Second Amendment was designed to empower militias to patrol, manipulate, and end Black lives. She shows that the white right to bear arms was accompanied by efforts to disarm African Americans, and that Black self-defense rights only existed when they aligned with white interests. After the Civil War, the Second Amendment’s protection of slavery shifted to the protection of whiteness accompanied by persistent anti-Blackness.

BIG QUESTIONS:

How did the exclusionary operation of the Second Amendment operate differently regarding race than other rights of citizenship? What made these rights different from the others?
To what extent was the Second Amendment created out of an international context?
What impact did the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 have on usage of the Second Amendment?

FEATURE QUOTES:

“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. Regardless of which legal interpretation of the Second Amendment is deployed—be it an individual’s right to bear arms, the right to a well-regulated militia, or even the attendant right to self-defense—each has been used against African Americans. The Second was designed and implemented to abrogate and deny the rights of Black people.” (5)
“Emancipation and Reconstruction had not led to the promised land. Instead, Blacks were ushered into the killing fields. African Americans’ military uniforms angered. Their self-defense enraged. Their right to bear arms triggered. Their claims to citizenship lynched.” (124)

PRIMARY SOURCES:

U.S. Congress, [Twelve articles, the Bill of Rights as submitted to the States] (New York: Thomas Greenleaf, 1789), https://guides.loc.gov/bill-of-rights.

BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS: