THE SECOND
Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America
By Carol Anderson
In “The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America,” the historian Carol Anderson argues that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, which provides for a “well regulated militia” and “the right of the people to keep and bear arms,” offers “a particularly maddening set of double standards where race is concerned.” On the one hand, she claims that slaveholding founding fathers insisted on the inclusion of the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights in order to assure themselves of a fighting force willing to suppress slave insurrections. On the other hand, she maintains that racist practices have deprived Blacks of access to arms that might have enabled them to defend themselves in the absence of equal protection of law.
These discriminations and the attitudes behind them, Anderson charges, have generated a baleful catalog of affronts that predate the establishment of the United States and that grow apace. She shows that the specter of armed Blacks was so alarming that white authorities revisited their fears obsessively, enacting statute after statute with alterations that invariably broadened prohibitions and intensified punishments.
For purposes of policing Blacks’ access to firearms, differences in legal status between African-Americans who were free and those who were enslaved were often swept aside. A Virginia law enacted in 1723 provided that, under penalty of whipping, “no Negro, mulatto or Indian whatsoever” was allowed to possess a firearm. A Florida law authorized whites “to seize arms found in the homes of slaves and free Blacks.” African-Americans deemed to be in violation of such prohibitions could be summarily punished with up to “39 strokes on the bare back,” all “without benefit of judicial tribunal.”
Anderson notes that in the struggle for independence from Britain, many white American leaders resisted arming Blacks who were willing to fight for the rebels. The racial policy of the Continental Army varied. At one point, it became “whites only.” But the exigencies of war forced a reconsideration of that exclusion. Connecticut allowed masters to free slaves for enlistment. Rhode Island offered freedom to enslaved Blacks who enlisted. Virginia began to recruit free Blacks. South Carolina, however, steadfastly refused. Its leaders said that they were more appalled by the prospect of Negroes with guns than of submission to King George.
Resistance to arming Blacks for military purposes continued. Only under the stress of combat did Gen. Andrew Jackson accept Black soldiers in the War of 1812 and President Abraham Lincoln permit Union forces to enlist Blacks in the Civil War. Gaining acceptance for armed Blacks in the military proved even more daunting. Anderson recounts how Black soldiers were persistently reviled, harassed and terrorized by fearful and resentful whites. Justifying racially motivated violence during Reconstruction, a white Southerner remarked that “the sight of Negro troops stirred the bosoms of our [ex-Confederate] soldiers with courageous madness.” In 1906, the mayor of Brownsville, Texas, accused Black soldiers of firing on townspeople, killing one and badly injuring another. Even though strong evidence undercut the allegation, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered his secretary of war, William Howard Taft (a future president and chief justice of the United States), to impose without due process dishonorable discharges on all 167 of the Black soldiers who made up the First Battalion, Twenty-Fifth Infantry (Colored). Eleven years later, in the aftermath of an altercation in Houston that claimed the lives of 16 whites, including five police officers, and four Black servicemen, “justice” was similarly blinded by racism as the authorities executed 19 African-American soldiers and imprisoned 54 others.
Anderson narrates numerous episodes in which Blacks were terrorized by gun-toting mobs, often with the support of local law enforcement officers, state National Guards or federal troops. She also recounts how Blacks have been disabled repeatedly from defending themselves by authorities who evince enthusiasm for the rights of gun owners when they are white, indifference when they are Black and outright hostility when they are dissident African-Americans committed to challenging the racial status quo. “The Second” is written with verve, painted with broad strokes and dotted with memorable anecdotes and vivid quotations.
Anderson’s account, however, is wanting in important respects. She argues unconvincingly, in the face of formidable scholarship to the contrary, that the aim to protect slavery was the predominant motive behind the Second Amendment. She writes that the Second Amendment was “the result of [James] Madison’s determination to salve Patrick Henry’s obsession about Virginia’s vulnerability to slave revolts, seduce enough anti-Federalists to get the Constitution ratified and stifle the demonstrated willingness of the South to scuttle the United States if slavery were not protected.” The Second Amendment, she claims, “came into being … steeped in anti-Blackness, swaddled in the desire to keep African-descended people rightless and powerless, and as yet another bone tossed to keep the South mollified and willing to stay aligned with the grand experiment of the United States of America.”
Because the centrality of racism to American history has often been obscured, revisions adding racial realism are urgently needed. Racism, however, for all its importance, is not the only major influence in the country’s affairs. Akhil Reed Amar’s careful explanation of the debate over the Second Amendment in “The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction” (1998) points to considerations that Anderson notably slights, particularly “deep anxiety about a potentially abusive federal military.” Anderson does not ignore altogether such concerns. She alludes to “the anti-Federalists’ heightened fear of a strong central government” as a factor in their calculations. But in her telling, dread of Blacks was the essential, overriding cause of the Second Amendment, an entitlement “rooted in fear of Black people, to deny them their rights, to keep them from tasting liberty.” Such claims significantly overstate the role of race in the amendment’s development.
Finally, Anderson, who is also the author of several influential books, including, most recently, “One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy,” provides little useful guidance regarding contemporary approaches to the matter of “race and guns.” A historian need not be a policy analyst. But Anderson wades into the volatile debate over the legality and wisdom of competing views on gun possession. Citing a Supreme Court case in which, she says, felons were stripped of the right to bear arms, she writes disapprovingly that “this ruling, of course, fell disproportionately on African-Americans, because an unequal justice system had unnaturally created mass incarceration and imprisoned the Black community.” She elides completely the issue of whether there might be good reason to strip some people — say, convicted murderers — of the right to bear arms no matter the resulting racial demographics. On the same page, she notes rulings in which the Supreme Court has impeded the ability of cities to regulate firearms despite frightening rates of gun violence. Condemning both sets of rulings, she writes that “African-Americans were always the ones who posed the threat and always the ones who bore the brunt of the decision.”
In her portrayal, Blacks are racially victimized whether gun control is permitted (thus perhaps reducing the amount of gunfire unleashed on the streets) or whether gun control is restricted (thus perhaps giving ordinary folk more scope for self-defense). Anderson acknowledges the dilemma but offers no advice for moving beyond it. “This is not a pro-gun or anti-gun book,” she asserts. “Guns are not the key variable here. It’s Black people. … The Second Amendment is so inherently, structurally flawed, so based on Black exclusion and debasement, that … it can never be a pathway to civil and human rights for 47.5 million African-Americans.” For Anderson, there is no better or worse alternative, only an unchanging and unchangeable racial curse.
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