Anderson cites legislative debates from the Founding Fathers and a range of historical records to make some bold points. She says some early lawmakers who supported the Second Amendment were more worried about armed Blacks than British redcoats. She says that even after the Civil War ended, many Southern states banned Black citizens from owning weapons.

And that famous line about a “well-regulated militia?” Well, that was inserted primarily to deal with potential slave revolts — not to repel a foreign army, she says.

Anderson spoke recently to CNN. Her answers were edited for brevity and clarity.

I’ve been told that the Second Amendment was about an individual’s right to self-defense and to protect against a tyrannical government. But you say it’s also “a bribe placed on Black bodies.” What does that mean?

One of the things that many previous historians have not linked up was the role of the militia in putting down slave revolts, in buttressing slave patrols and keeping enslaved Black people, and free Blacks, under the boot of White supremacy.

Why haven’t more historians made this link you talk about?

How did Castile’s shooting spark this?

What would you say to people who argue the reason the Second Amendment was so important in the 18th and 19th centuries was not so much race but security? If you were a farmer isolated on the frontier, you needed guns to hunt, to protect crops from predators and defend your family.

When you heard the Supreme Court will take up another Second Amendment case, what were your first thoughts?

Is that we’re going to be in the same traditional loop of, is there an individual right to bear arms or is this about a well-regulated militia? Does the state have the right to control access to arms? And we’re not going to deal with the reality that anti-Blackness is really foundational to understanding the Second Amendment. I look at it this way. After Sandy Hook, nothing happened. How could that be? That could be because of this underlying fear that if there are real gun safety laws then Whites will be left defenseless against these Black people.

You probably heard that the Texas legislature recently approved a bill that would allow residents to carry handguns in public without getting a license. If this standard interpretation of the Second Amendment continues, what will this country look like in five to 10 years?

A slaughterhouse. How many mass shootings have we already had? And with the growing diversity of Texas, I’m not surprised.

I would say to look back at our history, to look back at the enslavement of millions of human beings and the fear that it generated. Look back at our history of removing Indigenous people from their land, and the narrative of fear and of might makes right. And that the way you solve things is through the barrel of a gun.

Think about the way we depict the “Dirty Harry” movies, right? Or remember that scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” where there’s a swordsman who is displaying all kinds of incredible swordsmanship in front of Harrison Ford and Ford just pulled out a gun and shoots him. This nation has a history of violence, and in that history, the gun has been used to deal with fear and guilt, and the fear of retribution. That history helps define where we are now.

You’ve written about White rage and the recent campaign to suppress voting among Black people. And you’ve written powerfully about how racism is so adaptable and durable. How do you still have hope for this country?

What I also know about this history is that we’ve always had a large number of people who have fought to make this nation better. It is what we saw in 2020 — in the midst of a pandemic — that massive Black voter turnout saying we will not live under an authoritarian regime like Donald Trump’s. That was significant.

And of course, we’re now dealing with the White rage backlash to that as all of these states are proposing or implementing these new Jim Crow voting regulations. But people aren’t sitting down accepting subjugation. That’s where the hope is.