Dr. Carol Anderson was recently quoted in the Associated Press News article “2 trials, 1 theme: White men taking law into their own hands.” Following the trials of Kyle Rittenhouse and the three men convicted of killing Ahmaud Arbery, the piece examines white vigilantism in historical and contemporary perspective. Anderson’s most recently book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021), charts how anti-Black racism shaped the Second Amendment. Read an excerpt from the AP News piece below, along with the full article here.

“So much of this issue about protection and safety is about the safety and the protection of whites or white property,” said Carol Anderson, historian and professor of African American studies at Emory University. “There is a hubris of whiteness. The sense that it is on me to put Black lives back into their proper place.”

Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently published an opinion piece in The Guardian. Surveying U.S. history since the eighteenth century, Anderson highlights a pattern of white supremacists endangering U.S. democracy and yet suffering few to no consequences thereafter. Anderson links this historical pattern to the results of current cases brought against the invaders of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Read an excerpt from the article below along with the full piece: “White supremacists declare war on democracy and walk away unscathed.”

“This horrific attack on American democracy should have resulted in a full-throttled response. But, once again, white supremacy is able to walk away virtually unscathed. US senators and representatives who were at the rally inciting the invaders were not expelled from Congress. Similarly, in shades of the post- civil war Confederacy, several politicians who attended the incendiary event at the Ellipse were recently re-elected to office. And those who stormed the Capitol are getting charged with misdemeanors, being allowed to go on vacations out of the country, and, despite the attempt to stage a coup and overturn the results of a presidential election, getting feather-light sentences.”

Reuters recently quoted Dr. Carol Anderson in a piece titled, “NRA lawsuit gives SCOTUS chance to confront 2nd Amendment’s roots in racism.” The article discusses a pending Supreme Court case on the 2nd Amendment and the possible implications if the justices were to consider the central argument from Anderson’s most recent book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021): that anti-Blackness was fundamental to the clause guaranteeing the right to bear arms. Anderson is Charles Howard Candler Professor, Chair of African-American Studies, and Associated Faculty in the History Department. Read an excerpt from the Reuters piece below along with the full article: “NRA lawsuit gives SCOTUS chance to confront 2nd Amendment’s roots in racism.”

“But there’s another ‘originalist’ narrative evident in the very source materials the justices studied, which seems to have more support than their versions of history. Indeed, the historical record shows that the Second Amendment is rooted in racism and was written to preserve Southern state militias whose job it was to crush slave rebellions and capture runaways.

“The court’s acknowledgement of that narrative would indicate its willingness to confront our history in the forthright manner demanded by originalism — whether or not one agrees that we should adhere to the founders’ ideals.

“The thesis of racism at the root of the Second Amendment has been developed, most notably, by Carol Anderson, a bestselling author and historian at Emory University. Anderson published The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America in June. Anderson’s book also asserts that the right to weapons has been continuously denied to Black people.“