5 Questions with Carol Anderson, Author of The Second

Jun 9, 2021

Author portrait of Carol Anderson

Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies at Emory University and author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Nation’s Divide, a New York Times Bestseller, Washington Post Notable Book of 2016, and a National Book Critics Circle Award winner. She is also the author of Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960, and One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy, which was long-listed for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Galbraith Award in non-fiction.

Carol Anderson will be in conversation with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz discussing her newest book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (published by Bloomsbury) in our City Lights LIVE! discussion series on June 9th, 2021!

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Where are you writing to us from?

A home office that has been my cocoon, my idea pod, and archeological dig given the mounds of paper. Afraid I’ll hit the magma if I dig down too deeply.

What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?

You think I stayed sane? That’s cute. If there’s any semblance of sanity after the consistent killing of Black folks by police, the callousness and incompetence of governmental officials who’d rather score cultural warrior points over a mask and vaccine than save the lives of their citizens while a deadly disease stalks the globe, it was an odd combination of the pedantic and the urgent. Pedantic: the NYT Spelling Bee and crossword puzzles, Blue Bunny Double Fudge ice cream, and then, of course, followed by the absolute necessity of Nutrisystem. The urgent: answering the fierce urgency of now by weighing in on voting rights every chance I got.

What books are you reading right now?

Right now, I’m grading papers. I have stacked up some books that are beckoning me, Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir, Rachel Maddow’s Bag Man: The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-Up, and Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House, and Eddie Glaude Jr.’s Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own.

Which books do you return to?

Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest; Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing.

Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?

W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles White, Robert Redbird, James Baldwin, David Levering Lewis, Elizabeth Hinton, John Dower, Adam Hochschild, Brenda Gayle Plummer.

If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?

In a part of town where folks love to read and enjoy good music; Rhythm and Books (R&B); anything that Jesmyn Ward or Kiese Laymon wrote.

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