Nearly five years ago, in July 2016, Philando Castile was fatally shot by a police officer during a traffic stop after mentioning that he was licensed to carry. Many journalists and commentators at the time wondered: why the radio silence from the NRA?
Historian Carol Anderson wondered the same thing. For this show, Monday host Patty Peltekos spends an informative hour with Dr. Anderson discussing her latest book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, in which she traces the history of the Second Amendment and the “right to bear arms” alongside slavery, Jim Crow laws, and contemporary anti-Black racism in America.
Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (Bloomsbury, 2016), One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying our Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2018), and The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021).