The Second: Race and Weapons in a Fatally Unequal America

In
The Second, historian and award-winning, bestselling creator of
White Rage Carol Anderson powerfully illuminates the historical past and affect of the Second Modification, the way it was designed, and the way it has constantly been constructed to maintain African People powerless and susceptible.
The Second is neither a “pro-gun” nor an “anti-gun” e book; the lens is the citizenship rights and human rights of African People.

From the seventeenth century, when it was encoded into regulation that the enslaved couldn’t personal, carry, or use a firearm by any means, till in the present day, with measures to develop and curtail gun possession aimed disproportionately on the African American inhabitants, the suitable to bear arms has been constantly used as a weapon to maintain African People powerless–revealing that armed or unarmed, Blackness, it will appear, is the risk that have to be neutralized and punished.

All through American historical past to the twenty-first century, whatever the legal guidelines, courtroom selections, and altering political setting, the Second has constantly meant this: That the second a Black individual workout routines this proper, the second they decide up a gun to guard themselves (or the second that they do not), their life–as certainly as Philando Castile’s, Tamir Rice’s, Alton Sterling’s–may be snatched away in that single, deadly second. By way of compelling historic narrative merging into the unfolding occasions of in the present day, Anderson’s penetrating investigation reveals that the Second Modification will not be about weapons however about anti-Blackness, shedding surprising new gentle on one other dimension of racism in America.