Carol Anderson: White Supremacy & the Second Amendment

Episode 98

Sun, 11/28 3:48PM • 51:58

Carol Anderson 00:00

The thing about white supremacy is it is a viral toxic… The fact that there are little or no consequences for the violence raining down on Black folks is what becomes this spur to vigilante violence… That kind of vigilante violence is endemic in the United States. That is what is so frightful and perilous about this time that we’re in right now.

Sam Goldman 00:43

Welcome to Episode 87 of the Refuse Fascism podcast. This podcast is brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of this show. Refuse Fascism exposes, analyzes, and stands against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in this country. In today’s episode we’re sharing a conversation I had with Dr. Carol Anderson author of The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. We spoke November 23 shortly after the verdict on Kyle Rittenhouse but before the verdict was announced on the killers of Ahmaud Arbery.

But before that, I want to remind listeners that in just three days the pro-fascist majority Supreme Court of the United States will hear a direct challenge to Roe. On Wednesday the Supreme Court will hear Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, where the state of Mississippi had specifically asked the Court to overrule Roe v. Wade. The Mississippi law bans abortion after 15 weeks with no exception for rape or incest and makes abortion illegal two months before a fetus becomes viable. If they rule in favor of the Mississippi abortion ban, the Constitutional right to abortion will be overturned—immediately made illegal in almost half country, in states that already have “trigger” bans in effect. What needs to be heard outside SCOTUS & nationwide: Abortion on Demand & Without Apology! In the Name of Humanity We Refuse To Accept a Fascist America! The future of abortion access hangs in the balance!

For more background on this case, what is at stake, and it’s connection the whole fascist onslaught go back and check out two episodes from earlier this fall episode 82 When Is It Time to Break the Law and Episode 78 on the Abortion Rights Emergency. Most importantly take action that makes clear our refusal to surrender, to go back and makes clear how essential abortion really is. Visit RefuseFascism.org to get signs, banners, and flyers to bring into these actions. Okay, so back to today’s interview.

Right now we are on the heels of three high-stakes trials that concentrate the looming threat of fascist mobs and threats of violence unleashed to build this movement and consolidate power. Trial 1: Kyle Rittenhouse is as folks listening know a cowardly racist punk who traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020 with an AR-15 rifle and joined other fascist gunmen, confronting protesters in the guise of “protecting private property.” When two unarmed people encountered him, he shot them both dead with the assault rifle. On Friday, November 19, a jury declared him “not guilty” and let him walk free. This ruling gave a green light to more slaughter of Black people and anyone who would stand up for their lives.
Trial 2: Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael, and William Bryan were convicted of murder. These three hunted down and murdered Ahmaud Arbery for the “crime” of being Black and jogging through a white neighborhood. Remember – these three were told to “go home and shower” by the police who came to the scene to “investigate”… they were the ones who videotaped the whole thing from the time they jumped into their pickup truck until they gunned him down… and they went free for months until public outcry and mass struggle finally forced a trial. But in the end, they were found GUILTY. Rightly—and righteously—so. This lynching was swept under the rug until weeks of local protests were joined by an unprecedented nationwide uprising against white supremacy. In the face of a growing fascist movement with its roots in the confederacy and klan terror, the peoples power is in the streets.

Trial 3: The lead organizers of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, were sued in federal court. This is the “rally” that drew thousands of white supremacists and Nazis. They marched with torches like lynch mobs. They chanted, “Jews will not replace us!” They brutally beat anti-racist protesters and Black people. All this culminated when a Nazi drove his car into a crowd of peaceful protesters, sending bodies flying through the air and murdering Heather Heyer. All of this 21st century violence to “defend” a statue of a 19th century confederate general built by 20th century segregationists. A jury returned a mixed decision, clearing the white supremacists of federal violations but holding them liable under state law. They ruled that organizers must pay $26 million. To me, the fact that the jury could not decide against them using the federal KKK act of 1871, even as kluckers marched amongst them in full white robes makes it clear that the law is at best insufficient to take on the fascist threat on any level, although the payout does provide a taste of justice.

There’s a history behind all this. That’s what we’re going to get into today. Where does this all come from and how does this relate to a fascist offensive that involves a whole fascist movement that attempted a violent coup on January 6 to overturn an election, the GOP which has since purged itself of anyone disagrees, its deepened and hardened the belief of millions in their fascist base that this violence was righteous and made be necessary again. How does all this fit together? Where is all this going? Where does it come from? And where do we go from here?

To talk about all of this, I am honored to be talking to Dr. Carol Anderson. Dr. Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Emory University and the author of ‘White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide’. She’s also the author of ‘One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy. Her latest book, ‘The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America’. That’s the book we will mainly focus on today. It’s a brilliant piece that everyone who is wondering what’s going on here with these cases that I described, what’s happening with the January 6 insurrectionists that walk free and the larger backdrop of a coming civil war this is a key text to go to make sense of it. So let’s have a listen. Thank you, Dr. Anderson, for joining us.

Carol Anderson 08:39

Thank you so much for having me.

Sam Goldman 08:41

I know that you’ve been talking about it a lot, but I do want to start with this because it’s what’s on peoples’ minds. Many people have rightly contrasted the numerous cases of unarmed young Black men, or even black children, who have been murdered by police or vigilantes to Kyle Rittenhouse, who not only was allowed to roam the streets of Kenosha with an AR-15 but was just acquitted for gunning down people protesting there, resulting in the deaths of two people as I said earlier, and maiming a third, for example, 12 year old Tamir Rice, who was playing with a toy gun in a park in Cleveland before being shot to death by a police officer; Trayvon Martin, who was assaulted and shot dead by a neighborhood vigilante. Both of them claimed that they felt threatened by these unarmed children. Many people have also rightfully compared the Rittenhouse scenario to a fictional alternate, predicting a Black teenager who attempted to confront right-wing protesters with an AR-15, that he would not have survived that encounter, much less than acquitted after shooting anyone. I was hoping that you could talk a little bit about what this Rittenhouse case reveals about the right to self-defense and the right to bear arms.

Carol Anderson 09:43

Thank you so much. So one of the things that I really laid out in my book “The Second” was the deep anti-Blackness that courses through this nation and that was part and parcel of the crafting of the Second Amendment. We get the narrative, the NRA narrative of the Second Amendment, as being bedrock foundational to American citizenship, that it is the thing that is there to stop domestic tyranny, that it is the thing that is your bedrock right. What we have to understand about the Second is that it was a bribe to the South to get the South to buy into the United States of America.

When the Constitutional Ratification Convention was happening in Virginia, James Madison had put control of the militia under federal control. He had done that because the militia had proven that it was absolutely unreliable in the War for Independence. Sometimes they’d show up, sometimes they wouldn’t. Sometimes they’d fight, sometimes they would take off running. So it was this thing about how do we have this militia, and have this militia do what we need to do when we can’t rely upon it? So Madison had put it under federal control. The slave owners in Virginia were absolutely apoplectic about that. You had Patrick Henry and George Mason, arguing strenuously that you could not trust the federal government to send in the militia, when there would be a slave revolt. George Mason was like, we will be left defenseless. And was like, you know, under the federal government, you’ve got those folks in Pennsylvania and in Massachusetts, who have been rolling back slavery in their own borders. We can’t rely upon them to defend us. We will be left defenseless.

It’s important to understand that this Second Amendment, which was what George Mason had required — he had required a Bill of Rights put in the Constitution. That was the way to keep the South from organizing for a new Constitutional Convention, because Madison was afraid it would go back to the old days, open up a Pandora’s Box, and go back to the old days of the Articles of Confederation. How do we save the United States of America? Just like with the three-fifths clause, just like with the 20 additional years of the Atlantic slave trade, just like with the Fugitive Slave clause that was in the Constitution, now we have the Second Amendment as this bribe to the South to not scuttle the United States of America and to do so on the back of enslaving Black people. And to do so understanding the militia is part and parcel of this ongoing anti-blackness of defining Black people as the default threat in American society, as those who the white community has to be protected against.
The way that you provide that protection is via the militia, is via determining who has access to guns and who does not, determining who legitimately can claim self-defense and who cannot. Black folks in this narrative do not have the right to self-defense. That came out of a Virginia law in the 1600s, I believe it was, that made it clear that if a white person hits somebody black, either enslaved or a free Black, that Black person does not have the right to strike back.

So, you begin to see how foundational these themes are that are carrying through into our modern day. I’d look at, for instance, Trayvon Martin. When you see the Trayvon Martin story, what you had in that legal proceeding, was to cut off the entire narrative of how George Zimmerman had the gun, how George Zimmerman said, Oh, and they always get away, how George Zimmerman stalked an unarmed child through that neighborhood, and only in the judge’s instructions to the jury, only to look at that confrontation and to see that you have this big Black scary guy threatening poor, pudgy George Zimmerman. What was George to do?

It is that same narrative that you get where they cut off Kyle Rittenhouse’s origin story. You don’t get being at the CVS and saying, Ah, I really want to put a couple of bullets in them for looting. You don’t see the rest of the story about the illegally obtained AR-15. You don’t get the story about how he inserted himself in the midst of a protest about a Black man being shot in the back seven times by the police. You don’t get that. You don’t get that these were folks protesting injustice. Instead, the judge rules that you cannot call them victims. You can call them rioters, looters, but not victims. And you get that you don’t see the initial killing because of the problem of pixilation by expanding the screen so that you get a better view, to not call in a technological expert on that but instead to rely upon this judge who was talking about the text messages that he gets and his ability to handle text messages.

So you see that you get this very narrow sense of who has the right to bear arms, who has the right to defend themselves. I hear folks say, yeah, but the folks that he killed were white, that Rittenhouse killed were whites. Whites who believe that Black folks, that their lives matter, whites who fight for Black citizenship rights, they are in the crosshairs. That is a consistent theme. We see it in 1837 with Elijah Lovejoy, who was an abolitionist, and his newspaper kept getting attacked. They kept burning down his building, messing up his presses. He kept having to rebuild. Finally he got sick and doggone tired of it, and he’s like, the next time they come, I’m ready. So he had a gun. Well, the mob got to him first and killed him. They were found not guilty. So arsonists and killers are found not guilty. Because you have a white man who believes that slavery is wrong.

You begin to also think about Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman in Freedom Summer in Mississippi. Mickey Schwerner was the first one killed by the Klan in Shelby County, Mississippi. They put a bullet in him immediately. The anger that there would be somebody white, who could believe that Black people have citizenship, that Black people are human. In this system of white supremacy, it is anathema. It is the penultimate, it is heresy. It is blasphemy. It is going against the way the hierarchy, the way that things should be, and it is a way to signal to whites: stay in your place.

Sam Goldman 16:29

Thank you for that, Dr. Anderson. One of my favorite parts of your book was learning all the stories; the stories that we aren’t told. I knew about the attacks, let’s say, in more recent history, the Freedom Riders that were white, but going back and looking at the rebellions that took place and white people that supported it in some way, offering any kind of support to these rebellions of slaves and how they were deemed equivalent as the slave because they identified a human being as being a human being.

Carol Anderson 16:59

It becomes a false narrative that race had nothing to do with Kyle Rittenhouse killing those men and wounding the third one, because that was a Black Lives Matter protest, and what we have seen in this nation. Think about the difference between the way that the Black Lives Matter protest was handled in DC, where Trump had called out all kinds of federal officials, even those that weren’t identified by their names or what unit they were with, violating law, and the tear gas that was just raining down on these folks. Juxtapose that to the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, where the message goes out, we will not be able to contain this, but let it happen. Yeah, let it happen. And we will see that with Ashli Babbitt, who was breaking into a federal building to overthrow an election, a duly, free and fair election, to basically stage a coup, and you had an officer shoot her. What you see from the right wing is to lionize her and make her a hero, make her a martyr for trying to overthrow the US government.

Let me back up to say that part of what we’re seeing in that is, again, the de-legitimization of Black people. So when you have a Newt Gingrich say they stole the election in Milwaukee. That is a city that has a lot of Black folk. They stole the election in Detroit, yet another city with a lot of Black folk. They stole the election in Atlanta, yet another city with a lot of Black folks. Saying if these Black folks did not vote for a white supremacist, then this election was not legitimate, therefore it must be overturned. That invasion that you saw was about delegitimizing the votes of folk of color.

Sam Goldman 18:55

It’s very helpful the way that you are threading these together, because I think for some people, they see the hypocrisy, they see the difference in treatment, but they don’t see the commonality that’s at the center of all of them. That’s the center of white rage, of white supremacy, of, in my opinion, people have been talking a lot about the Second Amendment trumping the First Amendment. There’s a lot of language around that. And I have been feeling like, let’s stop, let’s wait a second here. It’s about who, and it’s about what. It is about power and it is about taking away power from anybody who is not a white Christian male. It’s a very particular thing. And if you don’t fit in that, then who do the guns go to? Maybe it’s not true, so I’m always cautious about what I saw on social media type things. I believe that before jury deliberations began, there were Black folks in Georgia armed, walking. I don’t think that’s the kind of Second Amendment right that they’re going for. If gun rights were a very certain section of people, the people who were out in the capital, their gun rights are protected but whose voting rights are on the line, whose right to protest is on the line. It has everything to do with power and, in my opinion, with fascism. On creating a certain section of people that are subhuman — the Trumpers and all those who follow him are really, as Tony Norman, who was a guest on the show a little while back was saying, these are people that are going, they’re going back.

Carol Anderson 20:24

It’s one of the things that I wrote in the new epilogue for White Rage. You know, because I smelled Trump coming in that first version of White Rage, I smelled him as the antithesis as the response to Obama’s election. When Obama becomes the scary Black man, it begins to tell you how deeply entrenched this anti-blackness is in American society. So the response to Obama is the un-Obama, which is Donald Trump. What Hillary said in her campaign was we are stronger together, which meant that there were enough resources in American society where we could all benefit. What Trump offered was a neo-apartheid state, which was a state where you have a vast right-less labor pool made up overwhelmingly of folks of color. And you would have whites in there, except there would be the allure that in this neo-apartheid state, all of those resources that are generated by this vast right list labor pool would eddy up to that strata of whites, but it is a small strata of whites in this system.

That is what Trump put on the line. That is what fed into the fury and the violence, fed into Tucker Carlson talking about replacement theory, fed into the rise of vigilante justice, the storming of the capitols. Remember, in Michigan, where you had this group coming in with their rifles into the state capitol, overlooking the legislature as the legislature is trying to do its business. You had the plot against the governor, to kidnap the governor and hold her on trial. Wow! Wow! This was basically a prelude to what happened on January 6, where they were hunting down Mike Pence, and they were hunting down Nancy Pelosi, because they would not do the ultimate right-wing’s bidding and overturn an election and install Donald Trump as president for life.

Sam Goldman 22:27

I wanted to ask your opinion on whether you feel like this movement that we’re talking about — the GOP as it stands today — would you use the word fascist to apply to it? Is this the same-old same-old going back to the nation’s origins? Or do you think that there’s anything new, akin to a movement that’s aiming at eliminating the rule of law and democratic and civil rights? How do you see that?

Carol Anderson 22:54

When I look at the Southern Strategy, which really came into the fore during Nixon’s campaign for presidency, what you had, there was the Southern Democrats who were the group that hated civil rights. The Southern Democrats were like, we cannot be in a party that believes that Black people have rights, and is putting the federal government behind the exercise of Black people’s rights as American citizens. So you have the Republican Party look up and go, ooh, we can finally break the solid Democratic South, and we can get the number of conservative votes in order to move forward our conservative agenda.

To me, just like the conservatives in Weimar Germany, who looked at Hitler and said, ooh, we can use Hitler’s group and Hitler’s status in order to create the coalition that we need in order to quash the socialists and the communists who are in our Reichstag. We can do that and we can control them. Well, the thing about white supremacy is it is a viral toxin. It is all powerful. When the Conservatives brought that toxin of the Southern Democrats into the Republican Party, it took over it. It moved the moderate Republicans out, silenced them. It also then led to the base being just turned up, fueled on this fear, this anger, this hatred, fueled on it. So it required that those who were in the GOP primary had to speak to that base, that energized base, which continued to move the party further and further to the right.

So when you think about the insurrection, and you think about the big lie that this election was stolen, and the way that Republicans have tried to downplay the insurrection, oh, this was just a tourist visit. Wow. The way that they have blocked subpoenas, the way that they have blocked the investigation, a full blown investigation and an unveiling of this; juxtapose that to Watergate where you in fact had Republicans who were absolutely appalled at what the Nixon administration had done, and said, Oh, we cannot abide by this. When you have Barry Goldwater going to Nixon saying no, son, no, son, you got to go. We cannot do this. You will not have the votes in the Senate to survive an impeachment. Barry Goldwater was the one who helped with the Southern Strategy, because of his belief that Brown versus Board was unconstitutional, his belief that the Civil Rights Act violated basic states’ rights. Barry Goldwater is no flaming liberal, but he was like “under this line, I will not go.” We have yet to see that in this current version of the Republican Party, there is no line under which they will not go. The rule of law does not matter. Democracy is the enemy. That is what is so frightful and perilous about this time that we’re in right now.

Sam Goldman 26:06

I really, really agree. I wanted to shift back to something that we touched on earlier in the conversation. I wanted to talk about the federal law versus states’ rights, because it’s something that is in your book, “The Second,” and something that I think really relates to a few cases that are happening right now. The slave states demanded the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 occur because the supremacy of federal law, as you talked about in “The Second,” required non-slave states to recognize and “honor their right to retrieve their ‘property’ in human beings anywhere in the US.”

Today fascist novice demands the supremacy of federal law when it comes to overturning any prohibition on conceal and carry. Now you have the New York case, attempting to overturn any state or municipality’s attempts to regulate the individual’s right to bear arms anywhere they want, despite when it comes to stripping people of their basic civil rights, states’ rights must prevail. I think about Texas and SB8, the abortion ban that denies what has been recognized as a right by the Supreme Court of the United States, and dozens of states are suppressing their citizens’ rights to vote. So there’s a long history to this apparent conflict, and I was wondering what your thoughts are on this.

Carol Anderson 27:20

Sophistry is what it is. It’s situational. It’s like when I need the federal government to do my bidding, I’m all for federal power. When I don’t want to do the federal government’s bidding, then I’m all for states’ rights. You had the slave states demanding, bullying, ending up with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which said that any state had to provide support for slave owners to come and retrieve their property; their runaway slaves. If the state refused, the state then had to pay the slave owner out of the state’s Treasury for that lost property. So either way the, northern state had to provide resources to uphold slavery and human bondage. The states were bristling at this, and you had the South just strolling around going, yeah, yeah. Look, we can really go get them now. I look at that moment.

I talk about the Battle of Cristiana in the book, where you had a slave owner named Edward Gorsuch out of Maryland, who goes up to Pennsylvania to retrieve his property. He has a US Marshal with him as well as his son and his nephew. They go to Christiana and they knock on a man named William Parker’s door, saying I’ve come to get my property. Parker was a fugitive slave himself, but they had set up a self-defense community in Christiana. When Gorsuch started getting, really just, “I come to get my property,” Parker was like, “There’s nothing here that you own. That chair is not yours.” So think about the humanity in Parker to say that there is nothing here that you own. The response was Gorsuch was ready to get it on. Gorsuch ended up dying there, in Christiana. You had this really weird moment because a white man named Castner Hanway, who was in that group of those defenders, was charged with treason. So think about that: those who defy the Fugitive Slave Act. That is like a war against the United States, charged with treason, and thank God you had a judge who was like, nah, this was a self-defense community. This was self-defense. This was not treason and Hanway was found not guilty. The South felt violated by that, that we want the federal law to uphold this.

Remember, earlier on they fought to ensure when Benjamin Franklin came in with a petition saying that Congress would have the right to regulate and end slavery, that the South rose up and did its first filibuster, even before they knew what a filibuster was, and bullying folks, saying you do not have that right, and if anybody tries to take my property, they will be in danger, mortal danger. So you get this sophistry here, where we like federal law when it is about the violation of people’s rights. We don’t like federal law, but federal law is about honoring citizenship rights, honoring the human rights, honoring the humanity of the folks who live within our borders. When federal law says you are an American citizen, and as an American citizen these are the array of rights that you have, and the state says No, you don’t, you are a citizen of Mississippi, you are a citizen of Alabama, you are a citizen of Georgia, and your rights are therefore conscribed and the feds do not have the right to step in. Think about the way Texas has SB8. It allows for basic vigilantes to police women who are exercising their reproductive rights.

Sam Goldman 31:12

Yeah, the growth of vigilantism that people are seeing and rightly shocked, rightly shocked that at this point in time, we have people in Texas hunting down abortion providers, hunting down aunties, who gave their nieces some money to get an abortion — it’s insane. This is part of the same vicious and violent, revenge fueled movement that is hunting down and killing Black folks. Turning to the Arbery case, which I consider to be a modern day lynching straight-up. They lynched a man and then they lynched his character in court. The disgusting verbiage that came out of the defense attorney in the MacMichael trial, people should have nothing but contempt for. There’s a history in this country of lawless vigilantism under the guise of law and order. This is something that you speak to in your book. I think that it’s very helpful for us to ground ourselves in this.

I was listening to the closing argument, as I’m sure you did in the McMichaels murder trial; that’s a trial of the murderers of Ahmaud. They were leaning heavily on this “neighbors were helping neighbors to deal with this wave of burglaries, because the police were unable to apprehend them.” This is the same argument that resulted, in my opinion, in Rittenhouse’s aquittal. He was there to “protect that community”, protect private property over people, right? and was forced to defend himself against these “rioters and looters.” I was hoping that you could touch on that history and roots of where this murderous vigilantism under the guise of law and order, where that comes from in American history.

Carol Anderson 32:51

I see it coming out of basically the slave patrols, where at a certain point in South Carolina’s history, basically every white person was deputized as a member of the slave patrol to be able to have the right to question somebody Black. Why aren’t you in your place? What are you doing out here? Let me see your papers? Who are you? Who do you belong to? That kind of white gives right. So when you think about how Travis MacMichael said, “Well, he wouldn’t stop and answer my questions”, as if Travis MacMichael had the right to question why Ahmaud Arbery was running, jogging in that neighborhood, that Ahmaud Arbery did not have the right to refuse to answer this man who had been harassing him by following him in this pickup truck and cutting him off. That is the sense of: whites have the right to control Black bodies. They have the right to demand and get an acceptable answer for the whites who are asking the question. That sense of whites have the right we see carrying through to the Atlanta race massacre in 1906, where under the guise of protecting the white community, protecting white women from these Black rapist beasts. This had been the press and the politicians who are running for governor stoking the fears and the flames that there were just mass rapes happening, that no white woman was safe because of all of these Black men.

So you had whites forming vigilante mobs and hunting down Black people and just killing them left and right. You had the same kind of sense that “we’ve got to get these Black folks under control” in Red Summer 1919, where you had in Washington, DC, white mobs attacking Black folks under the guise of putting Black folks back in their place because they were acting like they were equal. They were doing things like looking at white women — “We have to protect our community.” You see the same kind of language happening in Tulsa when Black Tulsa was wiped out, the same kind of thing about we have to protect our community.

We see it in Groveland, Florida in 1948, and you saw today that the four Black men who were convicted of rape were finally exonerated. When Groveland burned down, it was the same “we’ve got to protect our community.” That kind of vigilante violence is endemic in the United States. What makes it endemic? Go back to the rise of Jim Crow, where you would have a lynching on average every other day for three decades. Begin to think about the terror that rains down on the Black community, knowing that kind of violence is happening and that law enforcement is not there to protect you. That’s where this conjoins — you get this violence and this nation of laws does not value the laws that protect Black people.

Now, I go to Ahmaud Arbery, laying this out. Remember, that video was readily available immediately. The cops saw it. Two DAs saw it, and one DA wrote a long, long brief about why this killing was justifiable. It took protest to make that video public, and when it became public, that’s when you begin to see some movement. You did not have the kind of coddling, that kind of legal justification for an unjustified killing. The fact that there are little or no consequences for the violence raining down on black folk, is what becomes this spur to vigilante violence. And the assault on the capital was vigilante violence. The fact that there haven’t been real consequences to that violence puts this democracy and the people in it at risk; at serious risk.

Sam Goldman 36:58

I really appreciate all that you were laying out. I think that people really need to shake off whatever denial they have, discomfort that they have, and really take a sober look at not only the history but the current reality and danger. Part of, in my opinion, confronting this, as you were talking about the white supremacy being endemic. I’ve heard you speak and talk about the genesis of the Second Amendment, the genesis of this law is white supremacy. You have to confront that. I think that it’s pivotal, and if we look at it with clear eyes, we see a situation in which the very foundation and fabric of this nation is totally interwoven with an inseparable, in my opinion, white supremacy in a nation whose wealth continuing to this day stems from Black people being property. People need to look at it as a system that continues to perpetuate and be fueled by and fuel white supremacy. Because people are rightly outraged, I wanted to get your opinion on something that we see in the movement as important which is non-violence — in this movement being Refuse Fascism. You’re a historian. Your work documents and analyzes deep roots of racism in this country. Our role as ordinary folks who want to uproot that racism have a lot of work to do. To me, it starts with understanding what we’re up against.

Carol Anderson 38:25

Yeah.

Sam Goldman 38:26

We also need to act. In Refuse Fascism we’ve consistently argued that we need massive nonviolent protests on the lines of the beautiful rising that swept the country last year after George Floyd was murdered so cruelly, as an example of how a whole conversation can be changed and a sliver of justice can be won through massive determined protest that doesn’t stop. Some have argued, since we are still seeing people being murdered by police at the same or worse rates than ever before, and since the fascists have now been given a green light to murder, that our own side needs to stop being non-violent. To me, this isn’t just an ethical stand, it’s about a blueprint for prevailing. I think about how a massive determined protest can make space for everyone to participate and rely on our courage for others to join us. I feel like we’re in a moment where that actually does matter. But I was wondering what your thoughts or comments on it? Because my friend Coco was an editor for a few sessions. She was writing about, we need a beautiful rising and talking about non-violence, and all these comments were about we need to stop being non-violent. I was wondering, as a historian, what advice would you give people around this?

Carol Anderson 39:33

It is both strategic and practical. The practical side is that you can never match the violence that the state can rain down. The state’s access to weaponry, to the tools of violence are just [whistle] oh, you know. I think about at Selma after Bloody Sunday and Andrew Young talked about there were folks who were like, I’m sick of this. I’m getting my gun. And Young was like, Okay, you have to talk them down. You had to say, okay, so what kind of gun you got? And they talk. Yeah, I got this, I got a 22. And we’re like, Okay, have you seen that shotgun that they have? You know what a shotgun can do? And then he’s like, okay, so how many do you have? And they’re like, Oh, it was like–. Okay, so you know you got the whole Alabama State Patrol out there, you’ve got Sheriff Jim Clark folks, and you know they’ll call in the National Guard. Can your weaponry match what they have?

Practically, we know that this state is armed. So “I’m going to get my gun” is a suicide run. I teach the civil rights movement, and I’m teaching it this semester, actually. One of the key elements was non-violence. That language of non-violence and the non-violent protest — and I’m going to tie this into Ahmaud Arbery — what that did was it helped short circuit that long-standing narrative, as Black people as criminals, as violent. Because then what you see when you see white folks going after Black folk, and you’re like, Well, why were they doing this? You know, they went after me because I’m a Black. We can’t figure out what else is happening here. It was just because they were Black. Then it begins to shift the narrative. I think about the prosecuting attorney’s closing arguments on Ahmaud Arbery. She said he didn’t have a weapon. He didn’t even have a cell phone. All he had were his running shorts. The reason they went after him is because there was a Black man running through their neighborhood. That was jarring. Absolutely jarring.

What we know is that in this society that is so steeped in anti-Blackness, it makes it easy to say” “Well, you know, he had a gun.” “Well, you know, he was a druggie.” “Well, you know”, as the way to justify the systemic violence that is raining down on folk. What we also know, when we imagine the kind of society that we want, that we want to live in, that we want to raise our kids in, that we want our neighbors to be in, it is not a community steeped in violence. It is a community that has rethought what safety and security really looks like, that has rethought what humanity really looks like, that values real safety and real security, that values real humanity. That does not happen by trying to take on a state that is as well armed as this one. There are almost 400 million guns in private ownership here in the United States. I’m not even talking about those guns. I’m just talking about the state guns.

Sam Goldman 42:44

Yeah, I think it makes sense why people are saying, “Do I need to come to a protest armed when this is happening?” My solution is No, we need to stop this fascist danger. We need to get rid of a society in which you have over 74 million people wanting to go back to what they think is friggin’ antebellum greatness. We need to get rid of that, and you don’t get rid of that by going gun to gun with a violent, genocidally racist movement who has the full backing of the state. You don’t do that. I’m not saying that violence is never warranted or there isn’t such thing as self defense and all those things. Let me be clear on that. People have a right to defend themselves, obviously.

I just guide people back to Dr. Anderson’s work and who gets to have that right and who’s going to be put in most jeopardy, and it’s going to be Black folks. So people should just be cognizant of those things when they start saying this crap. I wanted to close out… We’ve talked a lot about how deeply rooted white supremacy is and the foundation of the country right down to the Constitution itself. In a recent article that you wrote for The Guardian you wrote, “The nation has a really bad habit of letting white supremacy get away with repeated attempts to murder American democracy. It’s time to break that habit. If we don’t, they just might succeed next time.” I’m wondering, what gives you hope that we can dismantle this oppression, that we can break this habit?

Carol Anderson 44:09

It’s several things. It’s the people. After the killing of George Floyd, we had protest movements in 50 states. People saw that and were appalled. It is in the 2020 election, in the midst of a pandemic, where hundreds of thousands of Americans had been killed, you had the highest voter turnout, record-breaking turnout, because people understood that democracy was at stake. What Trump was bringing was the destruction of American democracy. Because if he didn’t have to worry about re-election, Lord, Katie bar the door! That was so clear about what the plan was. So here in Georgia, you have folks saying I will stand in line to vote for 12 hours to make sure that I have done all that I can do to fight for this democracy. When it’s really clear what’s at stake, the people rise up. They make clear that they want a vibrant, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi- religious democracy. They don’t want what Michael Flynn was talking about — this one Christian nation under one religion, one God. No. So my hope is in the people.

Sam Goldman 45:22

Well, Dr. Anderson, we share that hope. Even though my listeners know, I think, that we can’t talk about democracy without talking about that there’s never been democracy for all in this country. So we need something very different. But I definitely agree that what gives me a lot of hope is the people and that they’re not all powerful. They are weak in the sense that they are afraid and very cognizant of our power, if we choose to make it visible. So we don’t want to hand these fascists the future. We’ve got to change that. We’ve got to make it visible. I want to thank Dr. Anderson. Thank you so much for sharing your time, your expertise with us, and folks can be sure to find a link to Dr. Anderson’s books through her website in the Show Notes. Dr. Anderson, is there anything else that you want to guide people to besides your book, your website?

Carol Anderson 46:13

My website: professorcarolanderson.org. You will find all of my op-eds on there, as well as my podcasts and TV appearances. Just keep reading and knowing this history and continue to fight for a better future. That’s the thing — to really imagine what we could be. Wow!

Sam Goldman 46:35

As we say at the top of every show, this podcast is about exposing, analyzing, and standing against fascism. In this interview we did some deep exposure and analysis but we also touched on how Dr. Anderson’s deep insight into what is really meant by the right to bear arms in this country has deep implications for “standing against” fascism and I wanted to say a few things about that before we close out. I really appreciate her insights in that the way that this country has developed and the way it is now. White supremacy has the guns on its side, the gun laws substantially on its side, and to some extent, their violence even has some level of perceived legitimacy on its side. This gives enormous weight towards our use of non-violent strategies.

I also appreciate what she says about the world that we want to live in not being drenched in violence. Refuse Fascism was formed with the goal of non-violent sustained mass protest to stop fascism, to drive out the Trump/Pence Regime for these reasons and others and we took and continue to take inspiration from movements around the world that have succeeded in ousting heinous regimes through those means, broadly speaking. That nonviolence was uniting foundational principle of Refuse Fascism which you can learn more about at RefuseFascism.org.

At the same time, if we’re looking at the nightmare of the world that we live in and taking seriously our responsibility to change it for the better, or even to give future generations a fighting chance to change it, we should be having many more conversations about how we are going to get really free. And this quote from revolutionary leader Bob Avakian gets to the very heart of that conversation. “Can this system be reformed, through a struggle relying solely and as an absolute principle on nonviolence? Or, in fact, is a revolutionary struggle of millions, to overthrow this system, necessary in order to open the way to eliminating the exploitation, oppression, inequality and injustice that is built into this system?” Especially at a moment when there is a real showdown for their future coming to a head this question is essential to discuss In that light, on a personal note I’d like to recommend two resources from the website revcom.us “THIS IS A RARE TIME WHEN REVOLUTION BECOMES POSSIBLE— WHY THAT IS SO, AND HOW TO SEIZE ON THIS RARE OPPORTUNITY by Bob Avakian.

Thank you for listening to Refuse Fascism. I wanna hear from you, share your thoughts, questions, ideas for topics or guests, or lend a skill Tweet me @SamBGoldman. Or you can drop me a line at [email protected] or leave a voicemail by calling 917 426 7582. You can also record a voice message by going to anchor.FM/ Refuse-Fascism and clicking the button there. You might even hear yourself on a future episode.

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