(theme music playing) LAKE: Hello, everyone.

I'm Chelsea Lake.

I'm a member of the events team at Politics and Prose bookstore.

And I'd like to welcome you to "P&P Live".

It is now my pleasure to introduce Carol Anderson and Dr. Rashawn Ray.

Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African-American Studies at Emory University.

She is the author of One Person, No Vote, long-listed for the National Book Award and a finalist to the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award.

White Rage, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the National Book Critic Circle Award.

She was named a Guggenheim Fellow for Constitutional Studies and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Anderson will be in conversation with Dr. Rashawn Ray.

Ray is a David M. Rubenstein Fellow at the Brookings Institution.

He is also a professor of sociology and executive director of the Lab for Applied Social Science Research at the University of Maryland, College Park.

He is one of the co-editors of Contexts Magazine: Sociology for the Public.

Please join me in welcoming them both to "P&P Live".

Take it away.

RAY: I am so excited for this conversation because Dr. Carol Anderson is not only one of the most noted scholars, not just nationally but internationally.

But also a person who I consider to be a mentor.

So I am honored to be having this conversation with you, Carol.

I'm so excited.

I mean, and I just have to mention the title of the book again, because I found the title, and of course all of the words that you chose, to just be so deliberate.

I mean, The Second.

I mean, you know, people don't, you don't have to even put the word Amendment on it.

People know what people mean and what you mean when you say The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America.

So this is, look, a phenomenal book by an incomparable scholar.

And I really look forward to this conversation.

ANDERSON: Thank you.

I do, I do, as well.

I'm just, I'm ready to go.

RAY: Alright, well, let's get rolling.

Look, the first question I have is, I want to start out with you connecting gun rights to citizenship in the United States.

What is the link here, and have you seen it strengthened or diminished over the years?

And maybe even over the centuries, as you reflect on everything that you put into that book?

ANDERSON: The way that I got this, frankly, was the killing of Philando Castile, where you have a Black man was pulled over by the police.

And following NRA guidelines, he alerts the police officer that he has a licensed weapon with him.

But he is reaching for his ID, as the police officer has asked.

The police officer begins to shoot him, kills him.

And so you basically have a Black man killed for having a weapon.

Not for brandishing it, not for threatening anyone.

Just carrying it.

And then the guardians of the Second Amendment, the NRA, goes virtually silent on this.

And NRA has propagated the narrative that the Second Amendment is foundational to citizenship.

And so their virtual silence on the killing of Philando Castile for simply having a gun, whereas they had been absolutely vociferous with, at Ruby Ridge and at Waco, where they called federal law enforcement "jack-booted government thugs."

But here, silence.

I went, wow.

And journalists were asking, don't African-Americans have Second Amendment rights?

And I thought, that is a great question.

Because you know, as you can tell from my body of work, my research is really invested in understanding the fractured citizenship of Black people.

And so what I've seen over time is that, in this issue of the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms, the right to self-defense, the right to a well-regulated militia, that the status of African Americans, the legal status, enslaved, free Black, denizen, which is that halfway point in-between enslaved and citizen, emancipated free people, Jim Crow Blacks, or post-Civil Rights African Americans, the way that the Second Amendment has been used against them has not diminished.

RAY: You know, I want to keep on this theme.

Because you note in the book that the Second Amendment, let's just go there.

Because I mean, you talked about Philando Castile.

And I know, for me, I mean, that incident was a turning point for me, particularly hearing Diamond Reynolds' daughter in that police car.

I mean, that is something that I don't think that I can ever get over.

And you note in the book that the Second Amendment is not about guns at all.

That it's not about guns at all, that that is the red herring.

That's the Trojan horse, if you will.

But instead, the Second Amendment is about anti-Blackness.

Moreover, you note that only White people can engage in self-defense or Stand Your Ground, especially in their home.

And we know that Black women are significantly more likely than White women to be killed in their home.

So can you expand on this?

You noted Philando Castile, which of course you started the book with.

But I'm thinking about Tamir Rice, Breonna Taylor, Emantic Bradford, all of the Black, all these Black people were killed by police.

Break in anti-Blackness here and tell us why the Second Amendment is about that and not about that and not about guns.

ANDERSON: And so the, when I went on this hunt to figure out whether Black people actually have Second-Amendment rights, it sent me all the way back to the 17th century in what was now the colonies.

And as I'm looking, I'm seeing this incredible, inordinate fear of Black people.

When I say anti-Blackness, I mean the societal definition of Black people as dangerous, as a threat, as something that the White community has to be protected from.

That security means subjugating Black folks.

And what I saw was that, over time, this language of dangerous, threat, criminal, dangerous, threat, criminal just kept coursing through the narrative, coursing through the laws, and coursing through the cultural framing of Black people.

And it's so that by the time we get into the 21st century, for instance, and we have this heralded Second Amendment that is defined as, that the NRA has defined as the individual right to bear arms and this right to self-defense, this Stand Your Ground that the NRA backed, which is like the right to self-defense.

What we see is that that is an unequal right.

So what Stand Your Ground does is it says, it expands the Castle Doctrine.

The Castle Doctrine says if somebody comes into your house, you have the right to defend yourself because they have come into your house.

Stand Your Ground expands that to say anywhere that you have a right to be, you have the right to defend yourself.

So if I'm in the grocery store, I've got the right to defend myself.

If I'm in a parking lot, I've got the right to defend myself.

If I'm in a park, I've got the right to defend myself.

And it says if you perceive a threat, and that is where the difficulty really is.

Because when Black is the default threat in American society, then the perception of threat, the perception of danger then allows Black people basically to have a crosshair on them.

The hollering threat, I was afraid for my life, Black person killed.

What we know from the data is that Whites who kill Blacks under Stand Your Ground are ten times more likely to be able to walk away with a justifiable homicide ruling, than Blacks who kill Whites.

What we also know is that when Whites kill Blacks, they are 281% more likely to walk away with justifiable homicide than Whites who kill Whites.

So when Black people are the victim, then that becomes the kind of evidence of threat.

And that is what makes this lack of right to self-defense so obvious, so inherently, fundamentally unequal.

Think about Trayvon Martin.

So here, you have a teenager who goes during the half-time of the NBA All-Star game to get Skittles and iced tea.

And the neighborhood watchman, George Zimmerman, sees Trayvon and says, “He looks suspicious.

There's something not right about this guy.

These kind, they always get away.” And then Zimmerman grabs a loaded nine millimeter and stalks this child through the neighborhood, this unarmed child through the neighborhood.

And the 911 operator says to Zimmerman, “Are you following him?

Sir, you need not to do that.

Don't do that.” And Zimmerman goes anyway.

What we know is that Trayvon, the unarmed child, ended up with a bullet in his chest.

The ruling was, is that this was self-defense.

And remember the thugification of Trayvon.

They made him taller, heavier, bigger.

They criminalized him to dramatize the threat against this poor, older guy.

The narratives in that just were so embedded in anti-Blackness.

RAY: You know, when I think about George Zimmerman, I also think about how, a couple of years after that, he was found with a gun in his car, I believe in Texas.

And he was like, yeah, I just have a gun in my car.

And I think about Trayvon Martin's murder.

I think about Philando Castile's murder in the context of a George Zimmerman and the rights that he was given and continues to be given, versus others.

I mean, you note, the thugification of Trayvon Martin.

I really appreciate how you put that.

I mean, they just made him older.

I appreciate you calling him a boy, because he was a child.

He wasn't even 18 years old yet.

And I think about how Black people, even when we don't have a gun, even when it's just in a car, or whether or not it's fake, like 12-year-old Tamir Rice, that Blackness becomes weaponized in ways that arms our physical bodies when no one is committing a crime or resisting.

ANDERSON: Exactly.

And so that was that chapter with, how can I be unarmed when it's my Blackness that you fear?

It is, that's what I mean by anti-Blackness.

That armed, exponential threat.

Unarmed, vulnerable and a threat.

So either way, this is why I'm saying this isn't about guns.

This is about anti-Blackness.

How many Black folks have been gunned down because they have a cell phone?

And the police read that as danger, danger, danger, and shot.

How many times have we had, you know, so when we talk about like Castle Doctrine.

Castle Doctrine should be inviolate, virtually.

But we've got Breonna Taylor, who is in her apartment with her boyfriend, banging on the door.

They're hearing banging on the door.

It sounds like somebody's trying to break in.

He grabs, Kenneth Walker grabs his licensed weapon.

The door flings open.

He shoots.

And what happens is a fuselage of bullets, over 30-some bullets, just pouring into that apartment.

And five of them, plus a projectile, hit Breonna Taylor and kill her.

And the narrative that we get is that, well, you know, he shot first.

You broke into the apartment.

They had the right to defend themselves.

You didn't announce that you were police.

And what you saw, then, was Daniel Cameron, the Attorney General in Kentucky, basically saying, look, this was a justifiable shooting.

You don't have the right to protect your own home.

And the roots of this go back into the era of slavery, the fear of slave revolt, the fear that Black people would fight for their freedom, the fear that Black people would rise up and kill Whites in retribution.

That fear of Blackness, because of slavery, led to a series of laws that banned Black people from having access to weapons.

But also to create the infrastructure of control and subjugation, which were the slave patrols and the militia.

The slave patrols were the smaller units that would go into the slave cabins, hunting for contraband.

Things like weapons, things like books and paper, things where, that suggested that Black people thought that they could be free.

And then the militias were there to backstop the slave patrols.

So if there was an uprising, a big one that the slave patrol couldn't handle, the militia was there to come in and just shut it down and to hunt down those enslaved people who were trying to get to freedom.

RAY: You know, I want to stay on this, this really historical point that you make about the links between slavery and property.

And then also we have to bring in taxes, right?

And of course, we're going to talk about the Constitution and the Founding Fathers.

And I'm wondering if you could talk about the link between guns and property.

And the reason I'm asking it this way is because you just talked about Breonna Taylor, which I think really highlights these connections, where she was in her own home.

She's shot up five times.

Interestingly, they ended up ruling that her boyfriend, her fiancé, that he could employ the Castle Doctrine.

But yet, still none of those officers were charged or convicted of her killing.

In fact, the dry wall between her apartment and the other one received more justice than her body.

And what you're highlighting in this book is that this has historical roots.

So I'm wondering, can you talk about property and Black people as property, right?

Because when we start talking about Blackness, Blackness has always been viewed as property.

The freedom and resistance of Blackness is also part of the threat, regardless of whether we're armed or not.

So expand on this in the way that you do so well throughout the book.

ANDERSON: So and I opened up that first chapter with the beginning of the debate about, how were the colonists going to pay for this war?

Because they had just, as we used to say on the playground, you have let your mouth write a check that your butt can't cash.

(laughter) That they were like, they have just taken on the most powerful nation on earth, Britain.

And they were like, oh, now how are we going to pay for this?

And so somebody, one of the colonists from Pennsylvania says, if we tax all, the heads of all 2.5 million people here in the colonies, we should be able to raise enough funds to be able to finance a full-blown army.

We should be able to do this.

Well, one of the colonists from South Carolina was like, I'm sorry.

What did you say?

Tax 2.5 million?

I know you're not counting our property.

We don't count your sheep to tax.

Why would you count our property?

And they meant the enslaved people.

How are you counting them?

And so Benjamin Franklin is sitting there, listening to this.

And he says, well, you know, there's one big difference here.

“Sheep will never make a revolution.” And in that moment, that crystallized for me how they knew that, for all of the language of property and all of the value that Black people brought, the wealth that Black people brought to these colonists, that these were really people, not property.

And these were people who demanded to be free, who wanted to be free.

And so Benjamin Franklin, in those few words, “Sheep will never make a revolution,” really got at what the fear was, was the revolution.

And interestingly enough, you see this fear happening throughout the war.

So in 1775, they banned Black people from joining the Continental Army.

Black men could not enlist in the Continental Army.

But they are getting their butts whooped by the British.

And there aren't enough White men who are willing to enlist in this army to fight the British.

And so the exigencies of war are saying, look, we're either getting ready to get our butts truly whooped, and then we're going to be like in the trouble of being traitors to the King.

Or we're going to have to do that thing and bring in Black people to serve in this army.

So you start seeing these Northern colonies basically offering emancipation to Black men who are willing to fight for the colonists.

And that means that the Continental Army becomes a truly integrated army.

And they stiffen, and the British are like, oh, dang.

Okay, let's hit this soft underbelly.

So they're going to the South.

They're going to hit Georgia and South Carolina.

Georgia collapses like that, just boom.

Georgia, done.

Now, the British forces are turning towards South Carolina, getting ready to hit Charleston.

George Washington's emissary goes down to South Carolina and says, look, the British are coming.

The British are coming.

They've got 8000 troops.

You only have 750 White men eligible to join the army, only 750.

Because South Carolina had deployed the vast majority of its White men as militia in order to keep that enslaved population under control.

And South Carolina said, you want us to do what?

You want us to arm the enslaved?

Oh, no.

Oh, no.

You know, they were horrified, alarmed.

And they said, we're not even sure this is a nation worth fighting for.

And that they were really thinking about declaring their neutrality in the war or surrendering to the British, because they would rather face the wrath of King George III than arm the enslaved.

That is the fear of Black people.

That's what I mean by this, the depths of the anti-Blackness, how steeped in it this nation is.

And you see that when it comes time for the Constitutional Convention, because the Articles of Confederation aren't working.

When it comes time for the Constitutional Convention, the South is playing hardball, true hardball.

Because the North, for the most part, wants this thing, the United States of America, to work.

And the South is like, we want slavery to work.

And so we are willing to hold the United States of America hostage unless we get the protections for slavery that we need, that we demand.

And those protections were a 20-year extension on the Atlantic Slave Trade, the Fugitive Slave Clause, and the Three-Fifths Clause.

What's fascinating about the Three-Fifths Clause is that the same folks that were hollering that we don't, you know, tax your sheep.

Why would you tax our property?

Were now arguing that the enslaved needed to be counted on an equal basis with Whites for representation purposes.

And so the compromise was no, we're only counting them as three-fifths for representation purposes.

But as the ratification conventions begin to happen, and the ratifications begin to stall.

And so, and Virginia was one of the big hold-outs.

James Madison goes down to the Virginia Ratification Convention in Richmond.

And he has to deal with Patrick Henry.

And Patrick Henry hates James Madison from the depths and the breadths and the heights that his soul shall reach.

And Patrick Henry is arguing fiercely that, when Madison put control of the militia in the Constitution under federal control, that what that did was it left the slaveholders defenseless.

Everyone knew that that militia was important for controlling slave revolts.

And he said, we cannot trust the North.

The North detests slavery.

So do you think those folks from Pennsylvania and Massachusetts are really going to send the militia down here, to Virginia, when there's a slave revolt?

And George Mason is like, yes.

We will be left defenseless.

And the push was to basically scuttle the Constitution, to get a new constitutional convention unless they could get a Bill of Rights that could protect them.

And that is the role of the Second Amendment.

When you think about our Bill of Rights, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom to not have a state-sponsored religion, freedom to not be illegally searched and seized, to have a free and fair, speedy trial.

A right not to have cruel and unusual punishment.

And then the right to a well-regulated militia for the security of the state?

It reads like an outlier because it is.

It is the bribe.

It is the same kind of bribe as the Three-Fifths Clause, as the 20 years of the Atlantic Slave Trade, as the Fugitive Slave Clause in the Constitution.

So sitting here in the Bill of Rights, we basically have the right for this militia to control and subjugate Black people, to deny Black people their rights.

RAY: I have so many reactions.

That one, I guess the first direction I want to go down is, thinking about militias.

And I want to connect what you just said to what we've been seeing happening now.

And many people would say that we have this plethora of militias that have been popping up, right?

And I'm curious how you see the legacy of militias continuing to this day, particularly as it relates to right-wing militias in the United States.

ANDERSON: And so part of the narrative that we get about these militias is that the militias of back in the day, was that they were the bulwark against tyranny.

They were the bulwark to fend off a foreign invasion.

But what they knew at the time was that those militia, during the War for Independence, they were unreliable.

Sometimes, they would fight.

Sometimes, they wouldn't.

Sometimes, they'd show up.

Sometimes, they'd take off running.

George Washington was beside himself at how unreliable the militia actually were.

Gouverneur Morris, from New York, said, “To rely on the militia to fend off a foreign invasion is like depending upon a broken reed.” So they knew that the militias weren't all that.

That was one of the reasons for putting it under federal control.

They also, what we also have happening right before the Constitutional Convention was Shay's Rebellion.

Shay's Rebellion was when you had a group of White men, who were angry about taxation policy and the seizure of land for nonpayment of taxes.

They basically attacked the Massachusetts government, and they were headed for the armory in Springfield.

And so the Massachusetts government tries to call out the militia to put down Shay's Rebellion.

Well, the militia were like, naw, I'm not feeling that.

And in fact, some members of the militia actually joined Shay's Rebellion.

So you had to have Boston merchants finance a mercenary army to put down Shay's Rebellion.

So the thought of the militia as being this bulwark against domestic tyranny?

No.

That didn't, that wasn't ringing true, either.

That is part of the PR narrative that has been scripted, that turns the current-day militias into these staunch defenders of America, of American democracy and the American way of life.

It is like one of those ads with amber waves of grain.

It is PR.

And it is swaddled in the flag.

That is the thing that struck me so much about doing this research, is how the Second Amendment has been swaddled in the flag and become the avatar of patriotism, the avatar of liberty.

But in fact, what it really is, it is steeped in anti-Blackness.

And so what you get then is this really weird warping, where you get the narrative of the right to bear arms and the right to a well-regulated militia.

But what you really are seeing is the right to subjugate Black people.

And so when you think about this well-regulated militia, in terms of these militia groups, these right-wing militia groups that pop up, they are actually adhering to the Southern way of defining “militia,” in terms of the destruction of Black people's rights.

RAY: You know, listening to you talk about this, and there's a question that asks about this, because I want to continue this theme about militias and really go into thinking about soldiers, and Black soldiers in particular.

I mean, you highlight some stories in the book.

I mean, one of the ones that stood out to me was what occurred in Texas in 1906.

I mean, there was another one about what happened in Louisiana.

And Carla Stocker is asking, were there free Black people and people of color under the control of militias or who operated militias?

Were they allowed to bear arms like White people?

Were they promised freedom?

Can you just expand on this?

Because I mean, you do this in a way, in the book, that I mean, I think people, there were so many turns in the book.

And that was one of them that I think, this is a part of history that people don't really know.

So can you speak to soldiers, Black people being soldiers, militias, freedom, all of that stuff?

ANDERSON: Yes, yes.

There were Black militias.

And in fact, in Louisiana, when the US bought Louisiana from the French, there was a viable, strong, Black militia there that had operated under the Spanish government and then under the French government.

Now that the Americans had bought it, Whites in Louisiana, in New Orleans, were demanding that this Black militia be disbanded, because they did not want to see Black men with that kind of skill that knew how to use weapons and knew how to fight.

But the problem was that this militia was the best militia in that area.

The White militia, the governor looked up because, as he was getting this pressure to disband, the governor looked up.

And he saw that the White militia didn't have really good leadership, that they were too far apart to be able to deal with the scope of the problems that were happening in that area.

But this Black militia was on point.

And so he tried to square the circle.

He tried to keep the Black militia but mollify angry Whites by removing the leadership of the Black militia and installing White officers on top of this militia.

This militia was then called on to help put down a massive slave revolt in 1811.

This militia was then called upon to help fight with Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812 at the Battle of New Orleans.

And Andrew Jackson was like, ooh, I heard you could fight, but I didn't realize you were this good.

I mean, you are good.

But the promises about equality and citizenship, that are supposed to come with military service, just basically evaporated.

Because what the Andrew Jackson then, after the war, sent that Black militia out into the swamps as labor battalions.

And you had the pressure coming in from the Louisiana government to disband this Black militia.

Disarm them and disband them, which eventually happened by 1834.

You also had, when you think about it, during the War for Independence, as Black folks are in the Continental Army.

And they are promised freedom.

That freedom was really tenuous, really tenuous.

Sometimes, it get reneged upon.

Sometimes, it followed through.

But Black folks, the language of free Blacks, is you had a Virginia court ruling that basically said, if you are Black, our assumption is that you are enslaved.

And you have to prove otherwise.

So you sitting around here, strolling around, going I fought for this nation, I fought for independence, I fought for freedom, and I got my freedom.

That won't matter.

What matters is you have to prove you are free.

Because our assumption is that with Black skin, you are enslaved.

We see this happening after the, during the second, during the Civil War.

You, in fact, had a ban on Black soldiers joining the Union Army.

It took a series of defeats, and it took pressure from the Black community that demanded to fight for this nation, demanded to fight for freedom.

That, in fact, opened up the Union Army.

But they were segregated units.

So unlike the Continental Army, where you had integrated units, here, you had segregated units with White officers.

And, and they weren't treated well.

They were not treated well.

And after the war, when you had Black soldiers as part of the occupying force in the South.

And you're having all kinds of violence raining down on the newly emancipated folk.

And this line of Black soldiers saw themselves as the line of defense for this newly freed community.

And Whites were hollering up to President Andrew Johnson that the violence was because there were Black soldiers here.

And you've got to understand that seeing Black men in uniform, parading around with their guns, is just horrifying.

It is unseemly.

It just violates the laws of nature.

And if you would remove them from our presence, remove them as an occupying force, then there will be peace in the South.

Now, when you think about, this is where you get the kind of Orwellian plane with the language.

They didn't want peace.

They wanted subjugation.

And Andrew Johnson, who was a racist of the first magnitude, had the Black soldiers removed as a part of the occupying force in the South.

So the, after the First World War, you asked about Black soldiers.

After the First World War, Black soldiers were treated horribly by the Americans in the First World War.

But when they were in France, oh, they tasted a kind of freedom that they had only imagined.

So imagine being in the middle of trench warfare, but it is better than what you had in the U.S. And that's what these Black soldiers had.

And so there was this fear in the U.S. that the kind of freedom that Black folks had tasted, over fighting in this war, this war to make the world safe for democracy, that they would come back to the U.S. and not accept their place as subjugated people, as second-class citizens.

That they would think that they were equal.

And so we get Red Summer of 1919 that is about destroying this sense of equality in the Black community.

Burning it, killing it, machine-gunning it.

It's just, the blood ran in the summer of 1919.

RAY: I mean, it sure did.

I mean, and of course, I mean, one of the things you talk about is what happened in Arkansas.

I mean, of course people are now starting to know about Tulsa.

But there were so many of them.

Could you talk to people, I mean, you can use a myriad of examples.

But Arkansas, what happened there is the one that really comes to mind for me.

Could you talk about that and make the parallels to today?

Because when we talk about Red Summer, it was a series of pandemics, as well, right?

Right, we're dealing with the flu, the Spanish flu.

We were dealing with racial disparities there.

We were dealing with over-policing and police brutality.

We fast-forward 100 years, and we're dealing with those same pandemics today, of health disparities from a pandemic, police brutality, and systemic racism.

So talk to us about Arkansas and kind of make that connection between the Red Summer and what's happening now in America.

ANDERSON: Yes.

And I've got to say, when I was working on this, this part made it just so hard because we were living through it at the same time.

So in Elaine, Arkansas, what you had, you had Black sharecroppers who had been working for an entire year and not getting paid.

So imagine working for a year, and the debts are rolling up.

And you know that it's going to be balanced with your pay.

And then the landowner's like, no.

You don't get any money.

And so they got tired of working for free.

It actually is worse than working for free.

Working to be deeper in debt.

And so they decided to organize a union.

And so they were meeting in a church in Hoop Spur, just right outside Elaine, Arkansas.

And they said, you know, if the White folks find out, they're going to kill us.

And they set up a sentry outside to guard against that, self-defense.

Well, the White planters had sent a surveillance party there to shoot up and break up the meeting.

Well, the sentry spotted them.

And there was an exchange of gunfire.

A White man was killed, and a White man was wounded.

Word got back to the town, to the planters that Black folks had killed White people.

And it was like, this is the beginning.

This is a Bolshevik move.

They are out to kill every White person in Elaine, Arkansas.

That unleashed the mob, the mob from Arkansas.

And the mob came over from Mississippi, across the border, to go on this hunt, killing Black people.

As Black people are running from this mob, they are shooting, you know, just trying to get away.

Two more White men are killed.

That sent the signal all the way up to the governor, that this is a Black insurgency.

That Black folks have tasted White death, and they want more of it.

He got the U.S. army to come in with their machine guns that they had used in the war in France to mow down all of these Black folks.

Black folks were hiding in the canebrakes from these mobs.

And the machine guns would just go in there and just destroy, chop out that canebrake and all of the human beings that were hiding in there.

And then they would just move from field to field to field.

Somewhere around 800 Black people were killed.

Then, they were, the ones who had escaped and had surrendered, they were then tortured for confessions about this massive Black insurgency to kill White folk.

And then during the trial, 12 of them, I believe it's 12 of them were sentenced to death.

And another swathe of them, 60-some of them, were sentenced to prison for self-defense and for trying to hold on to their wages, for trying to get paid for their labor.

But you had this sense of, a societal sense that Black people doing that was absolutely illegitimate and worthy of death.

And what they couldn't get with the U.S. army mowing them down with machine guns, they were going to use the criminal-justice system to make this killing legitimate, to make the destruction of this Black community and the subjugation of this Black community seem legal.

And I looked at that.

And whew.

So I looked at that, and this is right about the time when Tom Cotton wrote that op-ed in the New York Times about how it is appropriate to bring in the U.S. army, bring in the military to shut down protests.

And I thought, he's from Arkansas.

He knows what he's saying, because this U.S. army coming in to Elaine, Arkansas and slaughtering hundreds of Black folks, on top of the mob violence that had happened there, yes, yeah.

RAY: I mean, it's two things that I think about, two categories of questions that, we'll start with one.

Which is, well, the first big thing you highlight is the role that local state and federal policymakers play in this process.

I mean, as you noted, they start local.

They started locally and went up to the governor.

It then got all the way to Capitol Hill, where Theodore Roosevelt, I believe, was president then.

And you talk about those connections.

Then it also highlights that Black people always fight for the freedom of the United States of America that fails to love it back and acknowledge Black people's contributions.

And instead, oftentimes takes credit for them.

And so I want to talk about two things.

I want to talk about the gun lobby, which we're getting some questions about.

Then I want to talk about resistance.

And so on the first point, as it relates to the gun lobby, let's talk about the NRA for a second.

No pun intended when I say the second.

John Aaron essentially asked a set of questions, and what role is the NRA playing in this process?

Why is it so hard for the United States to deal with gun violence and the gun violence epidemic in the United States?

And then finally, what do you make of states, like my great home state of Tennessee, that is not requiring a permit for a gun but is making it more difficult to vote?

So I mean, I know that's loaded.

But the overall point is, the National Rifle Association, what role are they playing in all this process?

ANDERSON: You really see, the NRA was founded in like 1871 by Union soldiers as a group organized to help folks with their marksmanship.

Because they were appalled at how poor the marksmanship was during the Civil War.

And so for the longest time, that's who they were.

And you saw them kind of say something about the federal ban on sawed-off shotguns in the mid-1930s in dealing with gangsters.

And then you see them help draft the Mulford Act, which banned open carry that was targeted at the Black Panthers, who were figuring out how to police the police.

But you really see them get fully politicized and activated after the takeover in 1977, where the leadership of the NRA goes like, yeah, we really can't get too political.

And you have this other group like, oh yes we can.

And they basically hijacked the meeting, voted folk out, took over the NRA.

And the NRA, that hyper-politicization then led to a recrafting of the organization's vision and its role in politics.

And so you see that, on the NRA's, at the NRA's headquarters, they have removed the first part of the Second Amendment, about the right to a well-regulated militia.

And have instead emphasized the right of a people to bear arms shall not be infringed.

That's what's on, you know, so that was the motto that they kept harping on, pounding on, swaddling in the flag.

This individual right to bear arms.

It has worked, so to the point where you had Chief Justice Warren Burger calling what the NRA had done the biggest fraud perpetrated on the American people.

This individual right to bear arms, he's like, that doesn't hold up.

Yet this is what we see happening in the Heller decision in 2008, and the McDonell decision in 2010, that says that these gun-control laws in these cities were basically unconstitutional because they violated the Second Amendment's individual right to bear arms, because the right to self-defense is a core value in the Second Amendment.

So this question, then, about why, why, in the midst of Sandy Hook, in the midst of Pulse, in the midst of so many, why we haven't, Las Vegas.

Why we haven't seen real gun-safety laws.

And I posit that what we're looking at, and I did a piece in The Guardian, where I said, we are seeing the convergence of two pandemics.

One, mass shootings, and two, the pandemic of anti-Blackness.

And what that means is that this fear of Black people coming, as a threat, coming to take from Whites is what becomes the barrier to really thinking through real gun-safety laws.

That fear of being left defenseless.

You heard it with Charleton Heston, was president of the NRA.

We heard it from Lauren Boebert, who said, if we have to defund the police, and if we don't have our Second-Amendment rights, we will be left defenseless to all of these gangs and these thugs and these drug dealers.

Now, what we know is that gangs, drugs, thugs, and drug dealers, that's a synonym for African Americans in this society.

This is part of the criminalization of Blackness.

And so that sense of being left defenseless.

And Jonathan Metzl's Dying for Whiteness deals with this, as well, when he talks about dealing with Whites who had suffered gun violence in the family.

And then discussions about gun-safety laws.

And they're like, no, we've got to hold onto our guns, because those people from Saint Louis will try to come down here and take everything that we have.

So that fear of Black people, that fear of being left defenseless, is what becomes the fear motivator that consistently short-circuits common-sense gun-safety laws.

And so we would rather, we would rather deal with the lack of security in our schools, the lack of security in our churches, the lack of security in our grocery stores, the lack of security in our malls, than have to deal with real gun-safety laws and dismantling the anti-Blackness that is driving this.

RAY: I mean, I mean, I mean you just talked about so many things.

I mean, it speaks to Debbie Knox and this question.

And you know, she was essentially asking about the Black Panthers.

And one thing I've always noted is that Ronald Reagan was an anti-gun governor and a pro-gun president.

And I mean, he was able to navigate that conundrum, I think because of the ways that you're talking about.

And on the point of the Black Panthers, I want to shift to talk about resistance, specifically Black resistance.

How have Black people resisted this process that you're talking about?

This link between the Second Amendment and anti-Blackness.

How have Black people resisted that?

And how has that resistance changed over time?

ANDERSON: Black people have consistently resisted their subjugation.

This was part of what was driving the fear of Black people, is that they refused to stay in that subjugated, rightless labor spot.

So this is why we had the Stono Rebellion in 1739, in South Carolina.

This is why you had, when, Gabriel's Rebellion in 1800 in Virginia.

This is why you had, in 1841 in Cincinnati, Whites were coming to the Black side of town to destroy Black people, because they had heard that a Black man had tried to rape a White woman.

And so, but Black folks had their guns.

And they took up their defensive positions and shot.

And that pushed the White mob back.

The White mob went, whew, did they really shoot at us?

It was like, yes.

And so the White mob came again.

Black folks shot again.

So the mob went back and got a cannon, a cannon.

They brought a cannon to a gunfight.

Then the police decided to intervene.

How the police decided to intervene was not to arrest the folks who were trying to kill Black people and brought a cannon, but instead to disarm the Black community, thinking that removing the weapons from the Black community would ease the fears of Whites.

But all that did was to leave the remaining Black folks there vulnerable to the massacre that happened afterwards.

You had, wow.

You had the resistance...

I'll take us up to the Black Panthers, because I know we're short on time.

I'll take it up to the Black Panthers.

In California in the 1960s, police brutality was just raining down on the Black community.

Murders, beatings, just sheer humiliation and degradation happening.

And there was no accountability.

There was no force in the system that would get these cops to stop.

So from that comes the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale.

And what they decided to do, they knew the law.

They decided they would police the police.

So they knew what the open-carry laws were.

They knew the kinds of guns they had to have, they could have.

And they knew that they had to be licensed.

And they knew how to carry them, as well as they knew the distance they had to maintain from a police officer who was arresting someone.

But the cops did not like having these leather-wearing, gun-toting Black people who were not silent, watching them as they are arresting Black folks.

So the Oakland PD ran to Don Mulford, who was a California assemblyman, and said, we need your help.

Every time we pull these Panthers over, we can't get them on anything because what they're doing is legal.

They've got the right guns.

They're licensed.

They're not pointing them at anybody.

I mean, they're doing, can you make them illegal?

And Mulford decides, yes I can.

And he begins to write up, with the help of the NRA, the Mulford Act that bans the process, that bans the strategy that the Panthers use in terms of open-carry to police the police.

And Ronald Reagan was, I will eagerly sign that bill the moment it hits my desk.

And so you have this resistance happening in the Black community.

And what you consistently see is the power of the state to overwhelm that resistance.

RAY: I want to ask you one quick question, because I know that we're running out of time here.

I mean, because this has just been an amazing conversation.

I mean, I have still a list of questions.

But the one that I want to end with, and I don't want to give away the end of the book.

If people have not read the book, I want people to ensure that they do.

But in thinking about that, and in line with a question that we got about thinking toward the future.

When people finish reading this book... Because look, I'll tell you, Carol.

When I read this book, I got a headache.

And let me tell you why I did.

I got a headache not because it's not amazing, as I was reading through it.

It's because it's so heavy.

And this is the same physiological response that I have to my own work.

And so I'm thinking about you coping with that.

I'm thinking about your writing process.

But more so, I'm thinking about people who read it.

When people finish reading this book, what do you hope happens with them in the spaces where they live, work, and play?

And how they grapple with their own relationship between citizenship, guns, and racism in America?

ANDERSON: And what I'm hoping is that we will remove the Second Amendment from its hallowed ground, from being so venerated as this hallmark of citizenship, and treat it the way we treat the Three-Fifths Clause.

As an example of the deal cut with the slaveholding South to denigrate and debase African Americans.

And that once we understand how anti-Blackness is foundational, we begin to dismantle the anti-Blackness is this society so that we can really be free.

Anti-Blackness is doing enormous damage.

You had asked about the role of voter suppression with this, and it's all the same.

It is the fear of Black power, the fear of Black insurgency, the fear of Black voices, the fear of Black humanity that is driving this.

And so that's why we've got to have good history that lays this out, so that we can engage, we can fully engage with accuracy.

That the militia is not this wonderful thing that stopped the British, because they weren't.

That Black folks fought in these armies, over and over, for the United States of America.

And the response was that basically second-class to no-class citizenship.

That we have to have these real conversations about real history so that we, it's like therapy.

So we can tell the truth and we can get better.

We can get free.

RAY: You know, and I mean, look, as you talk about this, I mean, it really speaks to this warped, nostalgic, Confederate history that we have.

And I mean, we can even highlight this current debate about critical race theory.

That when I was, as I was reflecting on your book and I was thinking about the way that people are trying to frame critical race theory, it is very much in line with responses to Blackness and responses to Black people pursuing equity.

When you view things through that lens, it all makes sense.

Because for a lot of people, they're like, I don't understand why they're interpreting it that way.

You interpret it that way if you view Black progress as being something that you should fear.

ANDERSON: Yes, yes.

Drop the mic.

RAY: Mic drop.

I mean, look.

And we are basically at time, and this has been an amazing conversation.

I mean, Dr. Anderson, I really, really appreciate your time.

This book, like all your other books, is an instant classic.

And I mean, it grapples with an issue that is at the core of what Congressman Hakeem Jeffries calls “America's genetic birth defect,” and that is racism.

ANDERSON: Yes, thank you.

Thank you so much, Rashawn, Dr. Ray.

And thank you so much, Politics and Prose, for hosting us.

LAKE: Thank you both for such an important conversation.

I wish we had more time.

Thank you so much for being here at "P&P Live".

Thank you all out there for joining us this evening.

In the meantime, stay well, everyone.

And stay well-read.

NARRATOR: Books by tonight's authors are available at Politics and Prose book store locations or online at politics-prose.com.

(music plays through credits)