Ep. 438: America's Addiction to Gun Violence, Racism, and White Rage Will Be Its Downfall

Dr. Carol Anderson is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of several books including the New York Times bestseller White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, and One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy. Her most recent book is The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America.

Dr. Anderson has appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show, PBS NewsHour, ​The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, and Democracy Now!.

She has also been featured in the Huffington Post, The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Dr. Anderson explains how white rage, the color line, gun culture, and gun violence are knotted together in American history and life. She details how the Black Freedom Struggle -- and Black Americans’ claims on their fundamental Constitutional rights, civil rights, and human freedom, including the inherent right of self-defense -- are often viewed as an existential threat by White America. This is especially true in the Age of Trump.

Dr. Anderson also warns that America will never be able to end its epidemic of gun violence and mass shootings as long as gun ownership remains intimately connected to whiteness, white masculinity, and a fear of Black people and other non-whites as seen with “stand your ground laws” and other forms of State violence.

Chauncey DeVega shares an update about his absence and how he has been experiencing his own version of the iconic hammer fight from Park Chan-wook’s film Old Boy. In that context, Chauncey reflects on how America’s collapse into mass disinhibition and authoritarianism has greatly accelerated because of last week’s horrific events in Utah.

And Chauncey goes for a walk around his neighborhood and shares some of the amazing, wondrous, and disturbing things he encountered. This includes offering pastoral care to an honored elder who hit a woman with his truck, and learning some life wisdom from a man who is dying from prostate cancer. This street prophet -- who had a plastic catheter that was visible outside of his pants -- was warning all the young men outside the local drug store to get their annual physicals or they could end up dying a painful death like him.

This week's conversation with Carol Anderson is from the archives of The Chauncey DeVega Show and was recorded in July of 2021. I was saving it for an extreme crisis moment such as the one we "the Americans" are experiencing right now. This conversation is eerily and frighteningly prescient and timely. 

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