Now, why is Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old, a threat? And Kyle Rittenhouse, not a threat. That is what I'm getting at here in the second.

Hi, and welcome back to our summer season of amicus.

This is Slate's podcast about the law and the rule of law and the courts.

I'm Dahlia Lithwick.

I cover these things for Slate magazine.

And as we do every summer, we like to step back from the daily TikTok of the law and the Supreme Court

docket and to look at some books and films that are reshaping, maybe in big ways, the way

that we think about the law. This week, our show lies right on the seam of two issues that we

discuss so often on this show, racial justice on the one hand and the Second Amendment on the seam of two issues that we discuss so often on this show, racial justice

on the one hand and the Second Amendment on the other. Our guest is one of our very favorite

guests, historian Carol Anderson. Professor 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 for the Penn John

Kenneth Galbraith Award. Her book, White Rage, was a New York Times bestseller and winner of the

National Book Critics Circle Award, and she was named a Guggenheim

Fellow for Constitutional Studies. Carol Anderson's new book is called The Second. It was

published in June by Bloomsbury Press. The Second explores the ways in which the Second

Amendment ostensibly conferring the right to bear arms upon all Americans,

was actually conceived as and continues to be, as she puts it, not about an abstract

liberty to carry guns, but as an instrument of, quote, black exclusion and debasement, end

quote.

Carol has joined us before to discuss her prescient warnings about voter suppression and race in America.

...