The Second

Carol Anderson, a professor of African American Studies at Emory University and author of White Rage, argues that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was designed from its inception to deny rights to African Americans and has consistently functioned as an instrument of racial oppression. Anderson traces this thesis from colonial-era slave control through the 21st century, contending that the amendment's three traditional interpretations, the individual right to bear arms, the right to a well-regulated militia, and the right to self-defense, have each been weaponized against Black people.

Anderson opens with the July 2016 police killings of Philando Castile in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Louisiana, two Black men shot for carrying guns. Castile, pulled over because his "wide-set nose" (1) supposedly resembled a robbery suspect's, informed the officer he had a legally permitted concealed-carry weapon and was shot dead. Sterling, carrying a gun in a right-to-carry state, was pinned to the ground and killed at point-blank range after police responded to a prank call. The National Rifle Association (NRA), which had loudly defended white gun owners in previous confrontations with law enforcement, issued only a tepid response about Castile and ignored Sterling entirely, prompting observers to note that the Second Amendment appeared not to apply equally to Black Americans.

Anderson traces this disparity to colonial origins. By 1639, Virginia had prohibited Africans from carrying guns, deploying a three-part strategy: denying the enslaved the right to bear arms, eliminating Black people's right to self-defense, and empowering militias to suppress uprisings. In South Carolina, where the enslaved population outnumbered whites by 1710, slave patrols merged with militias to search slave quarters for weapons and signs of resistance. The 1739 Stono Rebellion, the bloodiest slave revolt in colonial North America, saw 90 enslaved people seize firearms and march toward Spanish Florida before the militia crushed them with brutal reprisals. All 13 colonies eventually enacted laws forbidding gun possession by enslaved people and often by free Blacks.

When James Madison led the drafting of a new Constitution at the 1787 Philadelphia Convention, slavery shaped every major compromise. Southern delegates threatened to abandon the Union unless the Constitution protected slavery through the Atlantic slave trade extension, the three-fifths clause (which counted each enslaved person as three-fifths of a free person for congressional representation), the fugitive slave clause, and federal support for suppressing insurrections. During Virginia's ratification debate, Patrick Henry and George Mason warned that a Northern-dominated Congress could use federal control of the militia to undermine slavery. Madison drafted the Second Amendment to address these fears, as the militia's primary function in the South was slave control. Anderson argues that the amendment, ratified on December 15, 1791, was "steeped in anti-Blackness" (39) and served as another concession to keep slaveholding states in the Union.

Anderson examines how post-ratification laws entrenched these foundations. The Militia Acts of 1792, passed as the Haitian Revolution terrified American slaveholders, required every white able-bodied male to join his state's militia and buy a gun, explicitly excluding Black men. The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), in which enslaved people in Saint Domingue, present-day Haiti, defeated the armies of Spain, Britain, and France, proved that white supremacy was "vulnerable and thereby surmountable" (50–51), prompting states to tighten slave patrol laws and further restrict Black access to firearms. Anderson contrasts the government's treatment of armed resistance by race: The Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, in which white farmers battled U.S. soldiers over a tax, ended with pardons, while slave revolts such as Gabriel's Rebellion in Virginia (1800) and Charles Deslondes's uprising on Louisiana's German Coast (1811) triggered mass executions and sweeping disarmament. The Supreme Court's 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision crystallized the link between citizenship and arms when Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled that Black people could never be citizens, warning that citizenship would grant them the right to keep and carry arms. The decision deepened the sectional crisis and hastened the Civil War.

The post-Civil War era intensified these patterns. President Andrew Johnson sabotaged Reconstruction, tolerating Black Codes that banned African Americans from owning weapons. At the 1873 Colfax Massacre in Louisiana, white supremacists killed at least 100 African Americans, 60 after surrendering, yet the Supreme Court's Cruikshank decision (1876) overturned convictions by ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment provided no federal protection against private violence. Jim Crow brought decades of lynching and state-sponsored massacres. During the 1906 Atlanta Riot, Black residents in the Darktown neighborhood repelled a white mob with armed self-defense, but the state retaliated against the Brownsville neighborhood with infantry and a machine gun, disarming Black residents. The Red Summer of 1919 saw at least 25 major riots nationwide. In Elaine, Arkansas, sharecroppers organizing against wage theft were attacked at a church meeting, and the resulting massacre, involving posses from multiple states and a U.S. Army machine-gun battalion, killed up to 856 African Americans over five days.

Anderson argues that civil rights victories did not overcome the amendment's anti-Black roots. When Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland to challenge police brutality through legally armed patrols, frustrated police persuaded conservative assemblyman Don Mulford to draft the Mulford Act banning loaded firearms in public, with the NRA helping craft the bill. Governor Ronald Reagan signed it, saying it would not affect the "honest citizen" (136). The Gun Control Act of 1968 further restricted firearms access, with one advocate observing the law "was passed not to control guns but to control blacks" (140). Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" then channeled anti-Black sentiment into a law-and-order agenda, associating Black Americans with crime and disorder to justify massive investment in policing and prisons.

Anderson demonstrates how modern self-defense doctrines continue to fail Black Americans. In 2020, Breonna Taylor was killed in her Louisville apartment when police executed a no-knock warrant; her boyfriend's single shot from a licensed gun at unidentified intruders yielded no protection under the castle doctrine. Marissa Alexander, a Black woman in Florida who fired a warning shot at her abusive husband, was denied stand-your-ground protection and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Yet George Zimmerman, who stalked and killed unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin despite a 911 operator's warning not to follow the teenager, was acquitted after stand-your-ground principles limited deliberation to the moment of confrontation. Twelve-year-old Tamir Rice was shot within two seconds for playing with a toy gun in a Cleveland park. Stanford researcher Jennifer Eberhardt's studies confirm that police perceive Black people as threats even when none exist, and that both Black and white officers are more likely to fire on African American subjects in simulators.

In the epilogue, Anderson contrasts Kyle Rittenhouse, a white 17-year-old who killed two people during 2020 protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, with an illegally acquired AR-15 and was allowed to walk away by police, with Tamir Rice, killed almost instantly for holding a toy. She notes that the "good guy with a gun" narrative also fails Black Americans: Security guard Jemel Roberson was killed by Chicago police after subduing a shooter, and army veteran Emantic Bradford Jr. was shot from behind in an Alabama mall after using his licensed gun to protect shoppers. Anderson concludes that the Second Amendment is analogous to the three-fifths clause: Both were designed to deny African Americans' humanity while carrying constitutional legitimacy. Quoting Justice Robert H. Jackson's warning from the Japanese internment case Korematsu v. United States, she positions the Second Amendment as racism that "lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need" (163).