The Second

Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America

By: Ph.D. Carol Anderson

Narrated by: Karen Chilton

Bloomsbury presents The Second by Carol Anderson, Ph.D., read by Karen Chilton.

From the New York Times bestselling author of White Rage, an unflinching, critical new look at the Second Amendment and how it has been engineered to deny the rights of African Americans since its inception.

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 “pro-gun” nor an “anti-gun” book; the lens is the citizenship rights and human rights of African Americans.

From the seventeenth 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 neutralized 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.(P)2021 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Critic reviews

The perfect balance between righteous wrath and intellectual rigor.

The Second is written with verve, painted with broad strokes and dotted with memorable anecdotes and vivid quotations.

A bracing reminder that the defense of rights is not necessarily a liberatory project.

Absorbing... as timely as some of Anderson’s best known books... The Second adds another dimension to the gun debate and proves that it is stained with the anti-Blackness mindset that disfigures every debate.

Like Anderson’s previous works, this is essential for everyone interested in U.S. history.

[A] powerful indictment . . . In her passion and precision, Anderson presents a uniquely positioned, persuasive, and unflinching look at yet another form of deadly systemic racism in American society that has stoked the centuries-long crimes of insecurity, inequality, and injustice.

In this extraordinarily important book, Dr. Anderson shows that the Second Amendment was designed, and has always been implemented, to enable white Americans to dominate their Black neighbors. In her trademark engaging and unflinching prose, Dr. Anderson traces America’s racist history of gun laws from the 1639 Virginia colony’s prohibition on Africans carrying guns to the recent police murders of Breonna Taylor and Emantic Bradford, Jr., showing how calls for ‘law and order’ have concentrated guns in the hands of white people while defining Black gun ownership as a threat to society. Anderson’s deft scholarship convincingly places the right to use force at the center of American citizenship, and warns that the Second Amendment, as it is currently exercised, guarantees that Black Americans will never be equal.

The Second Amendment, as Carol Anderson deftly establishes here, was written in the blood of enslaved Black people. Our stalemated gun rights debates have focused on the idea that the Second Amendment preserves liberty rather than its historic role in denying it. This book does a great deal to change the parameters of that conversation.

Carol Anderson brings her brilliant analytical framing to one of our most pressing issues: the proliferation of guns and the epidemic of American gun violence. She reveals the racial hypocrisy inherent in Second Amendment defenses of gun rights. The Second is a must-read for students of American History.

Carol Anderson brings her storied sense of the intertwining of past and present, her keen insights into the wiles of racism, and her passionate prose to this extraordinary take on the meaning of the Second Amendment. This is a necessary history of the roots of gun obsession in slavery, racial assumptions, legal and political fictions that may have put America on a ‘fatal’ spiral we can only hope to prevent. Let's dream that this book echoes across the partisan canyon.

Phenomenal National Treasure!

Read it and pass it on! This educationally excellent material should be the standard and taught everywhere.

Very Informative Read!

I learned so much from this book. The historical research is outstanding and I have shared it with everyone I know. It’s highly worth the listen.

Loved this book

Well researched - historical outcomes weaved with historical facts - to teach us the truths we learned about the Second are vastly different for blacks and whites. .

#Blackgunsmatter

Essential reading for any self proclaim 2A person that is truly about “liberty”, but more specifically for Black/ AFRIKAN descent persons here in this “Land of the Free”.

The narrator’s delivery and tone is superb, almost to the point of having a conversation or lecture.

Went on ahead & ordered the physical copy as this is essential to have in the library when it comes to this country’s HIS story & getting a firm starting position when it comes to 2A & gun laws in general.

Great companion tool & direction pointer for research in regards to the subject.

Carry on!

Spot on!

The use of the 2nd amendment is often nothing close to the intended purpose. Yet, like most laws, this one is used in the spirit of those that created it wand is successfully used against those it deemed to disarm and disenfranchise. Great listen!