Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, was quoted in a CNN article on the racialized dimensions of contemporary legislation related to gun possession and gun control. Anderson’s most recent book, The Second: Race and Guns in an Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021), interrogates the links between anti-Blackness and the second amendment throughout U.S. history. Read an excerpt from the article below along with the full piece: “The fight to curb gun violence without inflaming racial biases.”
The issue when it comes to gun control isn’t necessarily the law, according to Carol Anderson, an African American studies professor at Emory University. Sometimes, the issue is the enforcement of the law.
Brandon Tensley and Eva McKend, “The fight to curb gun violence without inflaming racial biases,” CNN, July 31, 2022.
“Let’s go back to the Bruen decision in New York, that horrible decision by the US Supreme Court,” Anderson said, referring to the high court’s ruling in June that struck down a century-old New York gun law and that observers suspect will unleash a wave of lawsuits seeking to loosen restrictions at the state and federal levels. “The amicus curiae brief from public defenders said, The NYPD has used this law to go after Black folks. Look at what this has done.”
Anderson, the author of “The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America,” said that, at the core, the problem was policing.
“That’s the component I don’t think is understood well enough,” she said. “We’ve got to clean up policing.
Until we take anti-Blackness seriously, we’re going to keep dancing around the issue.”