Don't Black People Have Second Amendment Rights?
Years before protesters across the world took to the streets in defense of an unarmed George Floyd’s right to life while in the custody of Minneapolis police, the 2016 police shooting of fellow Minnesotan Philando Castile highlighted the callousness of another American double-standard. While each was a Black man killed by police whose death was filmed in progress for the world to watch in horror, Castile’s shooting, which took place seconds after he alerted Officer Jeronimo Yanez of the presence of his licensed firearm, begged a question central to one of the most hotly debated amendments to the Constitution: Don’t Black people have Second Amendment rights?This is the question that set historian and Emory University’s Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies Carol Anderson on the path to her latest book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. While making neither a pro- nor an anti-gun argument, as the bestselling author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Nation’s Divide passionately explains during this week’s episode of The Root Presents: It’s Lit!, the Second Amendment is yet another aspect of structural inequality encoded into the policies of the United States; one intended to exclude Black people in particular.
'Don't Black People Have Second Amendment Rights?': The Root Presents: It’s Lit! and Carol Anderson Take Aim at the Fatal Inequality of The Second
The bestselling author of 'White Rage' turns her historian's lens onto the anti-Blackness baked into the American right to keep and bear arms.
www.theroot.com
