When Kyle Rittenhouse shot and killed two people and wounded a third with an assault rifle on the night of August 25, 2020, the police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, let him just walk away. The white seventeen-year-old was even able to drive from Kenosha to his home in Illinois before finally being arrested.
By contrast, Philando Castile, a thirty-two-year-old Black man, was shot to death during a traffic stop in Falcon Heights, a suburb of Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 2016 for simply telling the officer that he was carrying a firearm.
The racist disparity between how Rittenhouse and Castile were treated by law enforcement is equally clear in other cases—like when white nationalist Dylann Roof was treated gently by police after he murdered nine people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, or when Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old Black boy, was killed by police for displaying a toy gun in Cleveland, Ohio.
When it comes to the Second Amendment, the “right to bear arms” is not universal but, instead, almost always applies exclusively to white men. But it’s more than that, as Carol Anderson argues in The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, because the deeper issue is that Black people, whether armed or unarmed, are treated by most of this country as a threat. And while debates around the Second Amendment focus on whether an individual’s right to own a gun or join a militia outweigh collective safety (or vice versa), Anderson—a professor of African American Studies at Emory University and author of the 2016 best-seller White Rage—takes a strikingly different approach.
The Second centers on the amendment’s anti-Black roots and details how, from the eighteenth century on, the so-called “right” it prescribes has been used to suppress, control, and kill African Americans. (“This is not a pro-gun or anti-gun book,” Anderson declares in the prologue. “The key variable isn’t guns. It’s Black people.”) To highlight this, Anderson locates the origins of the Second Amendment as a concession to Southern slaveholders to empower state militias to put down slave revolts.
Thus an “amendment rooted in fear of Black people,” she writes, became a “Faustian bargain” enshrined in the Bill of Rights, binding the United States together in anti-Blackness after fighting a revolutionary war waged ostensibly for liberty for all. Anderson provides an in-depth account of several major slave revolts—such as Deslondes’s rebellion in Louisiana (see Brian Gilmore’s review of How the Word Is Passed).
Perhaps the most staggering sections of The Second, however, are those that touch on the “orgy of lynchings, terror, and racial pogroms” that occurred immediately after World War I, during a period referred to as the Red Summer of 1919. That year, white mobs descended on more than three dozen cities across the United States, laying siege to Black neighborhoods often with the tacit support of local police departments. The worst of these attacks, Anderson notes, took place in the rural town of Elaine, Arkansas.
World War I had caused the price of cotton to skyrocket, and Black sharecroppers in Elaine, realizing they were being drastically underpaid by their white landlords, decided to unionize for higher wages. Soon, rumors began to spread that the sharecroppers were amassing an “arsenal of high-powered rifles” (which was not true) and that a “race war” was imminent. Late at night on September 30, 1919, two white men opened fire at a small church in Elaine where the sharecroppers were holding a union meeting; in the aftermath, one of the white attackers was killed.
What followed in Elaine was a massacre, which over the course of five days left up to 856 Black Americans dead, resulting in the deadliest racial conflict in U.S. history. And though the massacre occurred more than one hundred years ago, Anderson’s epitaph of its victims could equally apply to any of the Black people who have been slain by police in 2021 so far: “They just were Black. That was their crime.”
Editor’s note: This review has been changed from the print version to correct an error regarding the arrest of Dylan Roof.