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The Second

by Carol Anderson, 2021

Published: 2021.11.29

Home > Book Reviews > Carol Anderson > The Second

 

Photo by Wil C. Fry

★★★★ (of 5)

(* 165 pages does not include the 90+ pages that include notes, index, acknowledgements, and about the author.)

 

Carol Anderson (best selling author of White Rage, which I haven’t yet read) addresses in this book the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, systematically dismantling the usually unspoken myth that it applies equally to all citizens or functions as some kind of “equalizer”. Beginning with the earliest documented debates over the right to bear arms in the North American colonies and during the build-up to the Revolutionary War and the ratification of the Constitution, Anderson shows how there is no question that early gun ownership rights were at least partially aimed at controlling the enslaved Black population (rather than the common idea that the only purposes were self-defense and to allow state militias to oppose federal armies).

The author draws from well-documented conversations between slave owners James Madison, Patrick Henry, and George Mason (and others) just before the addition of the Bill of Rights. Henry worried that the Constitution — as then written — would not allow states to call up militias to suppress slave revolts, and pressured Madison to rewrite the relevant amendment “for the specific purpose of assuring the Southern states, and particularly his constituents in Virginia, that the federal government would not undermine their security against slave insurrection by disarming the militia.” (This is the same Henry known for “Give me liberty or give me death”, a phrase obviously meant only for white people.)

Methodically moving through history, Anderson notes that the very first law passed by the U.S. Congress (the Naturalization Act of 1790) ensured that only “free white persons” could become citizen of the United States, and that almost all states forbade any Black person, slave or free, from owning or carrying firearms. Even when state supreme courts struck down as unconstitutional certain restrictions on gun ownership, they made it clear that the same restrictions were permitted for Black inhabitants.

She freely quotes from our liberty-loving founding fathers when they were scandalized by Haitian residents using their exact words to justify their own revolution. (The main difference being that the Haitians were Black.) She notes how white-led rebellions in the United States (such as Shay’s Rebellion or the Whiskey Rebellion) resulted in a handful of convictions each, with most or all sentences later commuted or the men pardoned — in a few cases by George Washington himself — while Black-led revolts (like Gabriel’s Rebellion and others) resulted in mass hangings of everyone involved, even when the plot was discovered before any actual insurrection occurred.

The pattern continued through the 1800s, and long after the Civil War, with each “race riot” in city after city across the United States. The white perpetrators would be ignored, pardoned, or even rewarded, while the Black victims who attempted to defend themselves with firearms found themselves imprisoned, killed, mutilated, villified. If they survived, they were stripped of firearms, often left homeless and penniless. And the pattern continued unabated to modern times, from Ronald Reagan’s signing of the NRA-backed Mulford Act in California (designed to disarm the Black Panthers), to the big-news events of the 21st Century like the police killings of Philando Castile, John Crawford III, Tamir Rice, and others, when a Black man possessed a firearm, or was thought to have one, and the Second Amendment didn’t offer them the protection that it offers white people. She points out the well-publicized statistics that Black people are far less likely to be armed when encountering police today, but far more likely to be shot dead (regardless of whether they have a gun). Also included are studies of the modern “Stand Your Ground Laws”, which consistently prove the author’s point.

The book is surprisingly thorough given its brevity.

Though I was convinced of this disparity long before I heard of Carol Anderson or her new book, I’m glad I read it. The straight line from pre-Revolutionary U.S. history to the modern day is unmistakeable when it comes to Black people and the right to bear arms. The only difference today is the Black exclusion isn’t explicitly written into the law.

Note: I removed a full point from my rating for the overuse and mis-use of quotations. Anderson often uses multiple quotations from multiple sources in a single sentence or paragraph, and often the only attribution is a superscript number which refers to a note in the back of the book. This is misleading at best and dishonest at worst — especially when referring to historical events and the first quotation is from a well-known historical figure but the other quotations are from writers opining on the events many years later. In most cases, a discerning reader should be able to tell the difference, because the language has changed over time, but it is the writer’s responsibility to make the source of the quotation exactly clear.

I don’t know whether the book would convince anyone not already convinced. I think it might have worked for me if by some time warp I had come across this book in the days when I was not fully convinced that systemic racism was alive and well today. (Note: this book does not argue against the Second Amendment or even the right to bear arms — “this is not a pro-gun or anti-gun book”; it only strives to point out that the United States has never, and still does not, treat Black people as equal, especially on this particular issue.) If there is someone today who still holds the viewpoint that “Black people have the same gun rights as white people in the United States”, I strongly encourage them to read this book, only because I’m curious as to what they would think of it.

 





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