Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland

by Jonathan M. Metzl

Gun laws that secured the rights of white gun owners and restricted those of slaves and free persons of color spread dramatically in the antebellum period of the early nineteenth century, as white concerns about violent “negroes” reached fever pitch in many Southern states.

In 1834, the Tennessee Supreme Court revised the firearms provision in its state constitution on racial grounds: “the freemen of this State have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defence” became “the free white men of this State have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defence.”

So-called Slave Codes in states such as Georgia, Mississippi, and North Carolina banned gun ownership by slaves and free blacks because, as the Georgia Supreme Court put it in 1848 in an argument that presaged the infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, “persons of color have never been recognized here as citizens; they are not entitled to bear arms.”

Racial divides in civilian gun rights widened during Reconstruction, with lethal consequences. The Fourteenth Amendment promised equal protection of the laws to all citizens starting in 1868, and indeed, a number of black Union soldiers returned from the war with rifles in hand. But in the South and Midwest, local laws and everyday practices assured that firearms remained a white prerogative.

Many Southern states enforced what were then called Black Codes that contained vagrancy statutes or defined black Americans as less than citizens in ways that made it virtually impossible for freedmen, or free black citizens, to obtain firearm licenses or carry guns.

racial disparities in firearm ownership gave white terror groups, such as the White League and the Ku Klux Klan, maximum leeway to intimidate and spread fear amo...

As Adam Winkler aptly describes it in his terrific book Gun Fight, “few people realize it, but the Ku Klux Klan began as a gun control organization” that aimed to confiscate any guns that free blacks may have obtained during and after the Civil War and thereby “achieve complete black disarmament.”

Abolitionists turned activists such as Frederick Douglass argued that newly freed slaves deserved the right to defend themselves against nightriders and white lynch mobs because local authorities failed to do so. Yet black disarmament campaigns continued for decades, leading to a state of affairs historian David Schenk describes succinctly: “Without political agency, or the means of an organized community militia to generate such power, the realization of freedom and the rights of citizenship for African Americans remained unobtainable for nearly 100 years.”

Armed Klan intimidation of black families and congregations continued virtually unimpeded in many parts of the South through the mid-twentieth century. Meanwhile, African Americans who attempted to take up arms in self-defense against white supremacist intimidation met with violent resistance.

Robert F. Williams, president of the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter of the NAACP in the 1950s and early 1960s, became a vocal proponent of “the right of Negroes to meet the violence of the Ku Klux Klan by armed self-defense.” With no protection from law enforcement, Williams advised African Americans to “arm themselves as a group to defend their homes, their wives, their children” because, as he contended, the Constitution bestowed the right to own a gun for the defense of a person’s home or property on all Americans.

Violent white protests ensued after the Freedom Ride passed through Monroe, and Williams and his family fled to Cuba after being pursued by the FBI on fabricated kidnapping charges.

Mainstream condemnation followed Malcolm X’s claim in 1964 that “Article number two of the Constitutional amendments provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun.” Republican politicians, including California’s Ronald Reagan, swiftly moved to enact expansive new gun-control measures when Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense advocated carrying guns in public—as permitted by California law at the time.

Fear of black people with guns also suffused a congressional report produced after a summer of urban unrest in 1967, which drew “the firm conclusion that effective firearms controls are an essential contribution to domestic peace and tranquility.”

On one side of the emerging gun divide, the modern gun control movement took shape after the high-profile assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. An unlikely coalition of politicians and activists drove what in retrospect would be the crowning achievement of the movement, the Gun Control Act of 1968.

Meanwhile, starting in the 1970s and 1980s, the corporate gun lobby began its steady climb to dominance by proclaiming that gun ownership was an unalienable constitutional right bestowed to all Americans (in other words, the same argument made by Malcolm X).

The gun lobby supported Ronald Reagan’s successful run for the presidency in 1980 and funded the campaigns of senators such as Orrin Hatch, who in 1982 chaired the Subcommittee on the Constitution that produced a report titled The Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

The political emergence of the NRA went hand in hand with the exponential growth of the US gun industry and the numbers of guns it manufactured and sold. By some estimates, America’s privately owned gun stock increased by 70 million between 1994 and 2014. By 2015, American citizens owned 255 million guns, or more than one for every adult in the country—far and away the highest rate in the world.

In short, changes to the politics and economics of firearms meant that many more Americans could buy guns and that there were many more guns for people to buy.

However, despite an insistence on universal rights and the promise of unencumbered gun purchases, legal gun ownership remained concentrated in white populations well into the twenty-first century.

According to polling data from the Pew Research Center’s 2014 Political Polarization study, whites were more than twice as likely as African Americans to own and carry firearms. While the survey showed expanding demographics of gun ownership across the United States, it also supported the notion that non-Hispanic white, male, self-identified conservative Republicans over the age of thirty-five overwhelmingly owned and carried the most guns in the country.

An extensive 2015 Harvard-Northeastern survey similarly found that white men comprised the majority of US gun owners, and particularly the majority of so-called gun super-owners whose firearm collections included between 8 and 140 handguns and long guns.

Researchers tracking US gun trends suggested numerous practical explanations: Perhaps white men in places like Cape Girardeau hunted more often than did other people. Perhaps white men kept firearms because of connections to military service or felt more “comfortable” around guns because they had grown up in households with firearms. Perhaps black communities more likely supported gun control. Or perhaps the trends also symbolized three hundred years of history in which owning firearms and carrying them in public marked a privilege afforded primarily to white men.

Such legislation legalized what were previously considered extreme gun-rights positions, such as the right to openly carry firearms in public spaces. A number of these bills also ended gun-free zones in places like parks, airports, and hospitals and allowed people to purchase even high-capacity firearms without a permit or training.

In 2014, for instance, white Missouri open-carry advocates asserted their self-claimed rights to carry anywhere and everywhere by parading through the African American areas of downtown St. Louis brandishing handguns, long guns, and assault rifles.

Ick

A number of parents asked the man to stop acting in a frightening manner, but instead, he allegedly pointed to his firearm and shouted, “See my gun? Look, I got a gun and there’s nothing you can do about it!”

However, when police arrived at the scene, parents were startled to learn that the gun-toting man was wholly within his rights because of new legislation in the state that expanded so-called stand-your-ground rights and eliminated many gun-free zones, such as at county parks.

In 2015, police in Gulfport, Mississippi, cited open-carry laws in the state for their initial failure to detain a white man who frightened Walmart shoppers when he ambled through the store loading and racking shells into his shotgun. And in 2016, a Washington Post reporter followed a fifty-one-year-old white man named Jim Cooley as he strolled through the aisles of the Walmart in Winder, Georgia, buying groceries while wearing a “Trump Wants You” T-shirt and with an ATI Omni-Hybrid Maxx AR-15 semiautomatic rifle strapped to his back.

These and other anecdotes played into the time-honed notion that gun laws validated the moral rights of white people, and often white men, to own firearms and carry them in public spaces. And they highlighted ways that the racial divide in guns, gun ownership, and societal reactions to armed civilians retained and derived meaning from historical connection to the tensions between white supremacy and black disarmament.

Predictably, tales of black men who paraded their guns in public under the full protection of the law were few and far between. Instead, much like responses to Robert Williams and Malcolm X, armed black men often elicited public anger and fear.

A sixty-two-year-old African American man named Clarence Daniels entered a Walmart in Tampa, Florida, with a legally owned pistol strapped to his waist, only to be tackled and put in a choke hold by a white vigilante who held Daniels to the ground while shouting, “He’s got a gun!”

“Florida Deputy Cleared in Killing of Black Man by ‘Stand-Your-Ground’ Law,” read a headline in 2016 above an article that detailed how “a Florida judge dismissed manslaughter charges Wednesday against a sheriff’s deputy who fatally shot a black man armed with an air rifle, citing the state’s stand-your-ground law.” The legislation protected the deputy who felt threatened by a black man with an air gun at the expense of the African American victim he shot.

the implicit bias framework often overlooked the different historical narratives embedded in American racial assumptions about guns. From before the birth of the nation, American laws, mores, and traditions coded armed white men as defenders and armed black men as threats. Not just the bodies were racialized; so were the guns as well.

Historical constructions also provide themes used and manipulated by staunchly pro-gun politicians, lobbying groups, manufacturers, and advertisers in their attempts to allow the selling of ever-more guns, primarily to white people.

(Wayne himself once said in an interview that “I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility.”)

in his book Gun Crusaders, sociologist Scott Melzer exposes the role of white men with guns on the nineteenth-century frontier as a mythology not of the 1800s but of mid-twentieth-century popular culture. Guns were “unquestionably part of white westward expansion,” Melzer writes, “but the role of firearms in expansion has been greatly exaggerated,” and in reality, many settlers who traveled west found little use for firearms in their daily lives.

Most settler communities valued cooperation and law and order and thus banned guns in public spaces unless a person was taking a gun for repair, hunting, or going to or from a military gathering.

Even Dodge City, Kansas, despite its reputation as a town of shoot-outs and chaos, had a mere five killings in 1878 at its peak of violence “due to a lack of duels and six-shooter pistols.” According to Melzer, white Protestant gunslinger heroes were largely invented by writers such as Zane Grey and Louis L’Amo...

For much of the twentieth century, gun manufacturers promoted firearms as useful tools that aided responsible sportsmen or hunters. Companies like Bushmaster marketed their products in publications such as the American Rifleman as if they were sports equipment, akin to fishing gear or golf clubs.

starting in the 1980s, the rhetoric shifted around the same time that the rereading of the Second Amendment found its way into legislation and the new NRA emerged; gun manufacturers began promoting the notion that their products help men recover their status, power, and respect.

“The Armed Citizen, Protected by Smith & Wesson,” read one campaign—recall that Southern states long-denied gun rights to African Americans because they were not allowed to be “citizens.”

Based in MA

Communication studies professor Leonard Steinhorn maintains that this shift from firearms as utilities to firearms as totems of manhood and symbols of white male identity emerged because the gun lobby and gun manufacturers positioned guns as responses to yet another crisis of masculinity in post-1960s America.

According to Steinhorn, working-class white men long benefited from racial and gender discrimination that gave them a monopoly over manufacturing and construction jobs. Starting in the 1960s, the civil rights and women’s movements brought increased competition into these marketplaces, while at the same time wages and the availability of manufacturing jobs declined precipitously.

Surveys of American opinion suggest that these associations between armed protection and idealized whiteness were reflected more than in just advertisements or images—they also shaped the ways that Americans imagined why they needed guns in the first place, with marked shifts just in the past two decades.

This shift coincided with the emergence of the so-called new way of the NRA that promoted guns as primary means of self-defense in an increasingly unsafe world, even as crime rates fell considerably over this same period.

In a particularly unkind historical appropriation, the NRA based its controversial 2017 “Save America” campaign on a symbol lifted from the Black Power movement: the clenched fist.

Similar themes emerged when sociologist Angela Stroud asked white, permit-holding gun owners in Texas to define what they meant by “good guys with guns.” The men Stroud interviewed without fail portrayed people like themselves—other “responsible,” white, permit-holding gun owners.

Note the quotes

By contrast, Stroud found that persons of color appeared in the responses only to illustrate the logics whereby white people needed guns in the first place and never as good guys who might require guns for their own protection. John warned of a racialized “criminal class” that aimed only to steal and rob if not thwarted by armed “good guys.”

As a man named Adam explained to Stroud, “You hear about carjackings… let’s just say you pull up to a convenience store and there’s some certain people outside that make you feel a little nervous, then you’ve got your gun there… to make yourself feel more comfortable.”

For Stroud, examples of white people who carried guns to protect against racial others were particularly important because most of the racialized altercations never actually happened.

white gun owners imagined these encounters based on anxieties about persons of color.