Abstract
This article analyzes gun carry licensing as a disciplinary mechanism that places African American men in a liminal zone where they are legally armed but presumed dangerous, even as African Americans now experience broadened access to concealed pistol licenses (CPLs) amid contemporary U.S. gun laws. Using observational data from now-defunct public gun boards in Metropolitan Detroit, this article systematically explores how CPLs are mobilized by administrators to reflect and reinforce racial/gender hierarchies. This article broadens scholarly understandings of how tropes of criminality shape racialized men’s encounters with the state beyond nonvoluntary, coercive settings and unpacks how race and gender interlock to shape these encounters. I extend insights from intersectionality scholarship to examine gun board meetings as degradation ceremonies whereby African American men are held accountable to controlling images of Black masculinity in exchange for a CPL. This article sharpens the conceptual apparatus that accounts for marginalized men’s subordination vis-à-vis the state by focusing on the provision of legitimate violence and revealing the persistent, if paradoxical, mobilization of legitimate violence in the reproduction of racial/gender hierarchies.
In July 2016, Philando Castile, one of 13 million-plus Americans with a license to carry a firearm concealed (Burnett 2016), was pulled over by police in a Minneapolis suburb. Earlier that day, Castile recognized that as an armed African American man, he foremost had to “comply” with police. As his mother recalled, “That’s the key thing in order to survive being stopped by the police” (Windsor 2016). His sister was apprehensive: “I really don’t even want to carry my gun because I’m afraid they’ll shoot me first and then ask questions later.” During the stop, Castile disclosed his status as a licensed gun carrier to the officer. Castile was then shot several times, dying on the scene as he gasped, “I wasn’t reaching for it.” Almost a year later, a jury found Castile’s killer not guilty of manslaughter and other charges. Commentators—from the National Review to the New York Times—questioned the verdict, often situating Castile’s killing alongside other highly publicized police killings of African American boys and men. Alongside police violence, the Castile case—particularly his conversation with his sister about “compliance”—also suggests subtler ways in which the state punitively disciplines men of color looking to carry guns legally.
This article examines gun licensing as a disciplinary mechanism that places African American men in a liminal zone where they are legally armed but presumed dangerous. In exchange for a license, African American men are held accountable to controlling images (P. H. Collins 2004) of Black masculinity (i.e., the Thug and the Deadbeat Dad) that justify racial domination and inequality by pathologizing marginalized groups. Using observational data from now-defunct public gun boards in Metropolitan (Metro) Detroit, this article systematically explores how concealed pistol licenses (CPLs) are mobilized by state agents to reflect and reinforce racial/gender hierarchies.
The gun board meetings I observed were staffed almost entirely by law enforcement (either current or former municipal police or sheriff’s deputies) and served as forums for claimants with denied, suspended, or revoked CPLs to contest their cases. With African American men disproportionately represented among claimants, administrators disproportionately lectured them (as compared to white men) regarding their behaviors during police stops; their relationships with their girlfriends, wives, and fiancés; and their financial responsibilities to their families. Complementing scholarship on coercive sanctions that disproportionately affect boys and men of color (e.g., arrest, incarceration, or execution), this analysis shows how state agents use tropes of racialized masculinity to punitively discipline African American men in voluntary, noncoercive settings. While gender scholars have theorized the provision of legitimate violence as a means of bolstering hegemonic masculinity (Carlson 2015; Stroud 2012; Young 2003), I show that this provision can also serve as a disciplinary mechanism of social control for marginalized men.
African Americans’ access to CPLs represents a historical shift. After the Civil War, Southern states developed discretionary gun licensing regimes to disenfranchise African Americans while sanctioning white access to firepower (Johnson 2014). White access to lawful guns increased Black vulnerability to violence, with whites justifying white-on-Black violence as collective and individual self-defense, especially vis-à-vis white women (Feimster 2009). Meanwhile, genuine cases of self-defense by African Americans were often criminalized by police and courts (Muhammad 2011). By the mid-1950s, most U.S. states had discretionary licensing systems. However, the 1980s ushered in a sea change across the United States. Reflecting “tough on crime” politics (Simon 2004), states began passing “shall issue” gun licensing regimes. In contrast to the discretionary “may issue” regimes, under “shall issue” laws, authorities are compelled to issue a license to any applicant who qualifies based on statutory requirements such as age, residency, and criminal history.
I extend insights from intersectionality scholarship to analyze gun board meetings as degradation ceremonies—that is, public dramatizations of racial/gender hierarchies (Garfinkel 1956; Van Cleve 2016)—whereby African American men are held accountable to controlling images (P. H. Collins 2004) of Black masculinity in both the public sphere (i.e., the Thug) and the private sphere (i.e., the Deadbeat Dad). Indeed, today, African Americans apply for gun licenses, obtain them, use lawfully permitted guns in self-defense, and at times even publicly broadcast their lawfulness in the form of open carry (Carlson 2015). Although rates vary by state, 1 according to 2013 Michigan State Police data, African Americans and whites across the state are armed at equal rates of one in 25 residents. Complementing scholarship that explores the reassertion of racial/gender hierarchies via contemporary American gun laws and gun culture (Carlson 2015; Light 2017; Roman 2013; Stroud 2012), this article suggests that CPLs also open up distinct kinds of social control of racialized men by expanding opportunities for state discipline. Incentivized by a CPL, African American men are encouraged to internalize controlling images as administrators angle to shape their public lives and private matters. Theorizing the provision of legitimate violence (i.e., gun licensing) to marginalized men, this article contributes to scholarship on masculinities, intersectionality, and the state by showing how controlling images (P. H. Collins 2000) animate racialized men’s voluntary encounters with the state, reproducing racial/gender hierarchies among men.
Beyond Coercion: Racialized Masculinities and the State
Gun carry licensing—as the social provision of legitimate violence—provides an unusual but generative context in which to ask how marginalized men are not just coerced by the state but also punitively disciplined and how this disciplining maintains racialized hierarchies among men. Whereas coercion revolves around naked (i.e., explicit) domination, discipline reshapes the sensibilities, capacities, and habits of the dominated and incentivizes complicity and consent through material, symbolic, or cultural concessions (Althusser 2014; Foucault 1977; Gramsci 1971). This distinction illuminates arrangements of inequality (e.g., patriarchal domination versus hegemonic masculinity; Connell 2005) as well as the actions of state institutions (e.g., prisons that exert coercion versus welfare agencies that discipline neoliberal subjects; Korteweg 2003; Tonry 2011).
Despite the heuristic utility of this distinction, recent criminological, public policy, and intersectional scholarship documents a blurred line between coercion and discipline. Criminologists and socio-legal scholars examine penalties such as fines, school disciplinary infractions, immigration detention, welfare sanctions, and beyond (Beckett and Murakawa 2012; Gustafson 2011; Rios 2011) to show how practices and policies commonly associated with “right hand” criminal justice institutions penetrate into the “left hand” institutions of welfare, education, and elsewhere. Meanwhile, by examining how the state delivers services and messages about civic engagement, belongingness, and deservingness, public policy scholars show that frontline workers adopt a range of approaches (Bruch, Ferree, and Soss 2010; Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2003), at times empowering claimants by cultivating civic capacities, punishing them and allowing civic capacities to wither, or paternalistically compelling them to internalize particular capacities, habits, and sensibilities.
Feminist and intersectional scholarship expands this work by explicitly highlighting how the governance of gender (i.e., who is dominated) and the gender of governance (i.e., how they are dominated; Brown 1992; Mirchandani 2006) intersect with other lines of difference such as race and class. Recentering scholarship on African American women to account for their lack of social standing before the law (Crenshaw 1989, 1991), intersectionality identifies mechanisms through which race, gender, class, and other lines of difference become interlocked and maps this interlocking across the market, the family, the state, and other institutions. Embedded within a historically specific “matrix of domination” that “describes th[e] overall social organization within which intersecting oppressions originate, develop, and are contained” (P. H. Collins 2000, 227-28), state institutions—such as welfare agencies, schools, courts, and gun boards—matter not just because they revolve around the distribution of material resources but also because they circulate cultural resources that reshape the subjectivities of marginalized groups: “Domination operates by seducing, pressuring, or forcing African American women and members of subordinate groups to replace individual and cultural ways of knowing with the dominant group’s specialized thought” (P. H. Collins 2000, 287; italics added).
According to Collins (P. H. 2000, 286), there is a motivated interest in such tactics: “Dominant groups aim to replace subjugated knowledge with their own specialized thought because they realize that gaining control over this dimension of oppressed groups’ experiences simplifies control” (see also Foucault 1977). Accordingly, sociologists, criminologists, and legal scholars use an intersectional lens to show how state practices and policies reflect and reinforce gender, race, and class oppression through coercive and disciplinary means. The interlocking of race, gender, and class helps explain the inordinate and coercive state interest in Black homes and Black families (Bumiller 2009; Roberts 2002), the criminalization and “rehabilitation” of girls and women of color (Chesney-Lind 2006; Haney 2010), and the reliance of welfare administrators on both disciplinary and coercive sanctions (Gustafson 2011; Korteweg 2003). This scholarship largely examines how state apparatuses penetrate the lives of marginalized women by blending social provisions with social sanctions and discipline with coercion.
But to quote Matlon (2016; see also Wingfield 2008), “What of the men?” Less attention has been paid to the racialized and gendered disciplining of boys and men of color with respect to criminalizing stereotypes. The heightened focus on racialized boys’ and men’s experiences of coercion, rather than discipline, reflects the sheer scale of U.S. mass incarceration: With over two million people held in U.S. federal, state, and county prisons and jails, incarceration is a demographically significant life event for African American boys and men, outpacing college and other coming-of-age experiences (Pettit and Western 2004; see also Tonry 2011; Wacquant 2001). Further, perhaps because “race is still seen by many as the primary oppositional force in Black lives” (Crenshaw 1989, 161), the scholarship on punishment reveals how race shapes police stops (Epp, Maynard-Moody, and Haider-Markel 2014), the judiciary process (Van Cleve 2016), and punishment (Harris, Evans, and Beckett 2011; Tonry 2011; Wacquant 2001), but masculinity is often overlooked as an interlocking factor despite obvious gender disparities that accompany racial disparities (Messerschmidt 1993). Indeed, “penal-welfarism” has largely been left out of these analyses as a mechanism to discipline men of color peripheral to the criminal justice system (although see scholarship on racialized discipline in schools; Oeur 2016; Rios 2011).
To broaden scholarly understandings of how criminalization shapes racialized men’s encounters with the state beyond nonvoluntary, coercive settings and unpack how race and gender interlock to shape these encounters, I examine the gun board as an administrative context that is separate from but adjacent to and interlocking with the criminal justice system (Carlson 2017). A gun board involves the state provision of a gendered and racialized “good” (i.e., legitimate violence; Jauregui 2016), but unlike the welfare apparatus, this “good” is associated with hegemonic masculinity rather than resistant femininities (Carlson 2015; Connell 2005; Stroud 2012). Further, unlike the carceral apparatus, African American men elect to engage with the state when they seek out a gun license. The voluntary nature of this engagement allows gun board administrators to supplement the criminal justice system (Carlson 2017) by enforcing racial and gendered codes of conduct. A parallel can be drawn between African American women’s experiences with the welfare state and African American men’s experiences with the gun board: As a “price” of provision (whether consumable goods or legitimate violence, respectively), claimants become accountable to racial/gender stereotypes and expectations. Thus, rather than idiosyncratic, administrators—whether at welfare hearings or gun board meetings—engage in practices that reflect and reproduce racial/gender hierarchies with respect to the populations they serve. I adopt an intersectional framework to situate the gun board within a broader matrix of domination—namely, a state that subordinates racialized men and women in gender-specific ways—by theorizing one micro-level context where this matrix is sustained. Interrogating racialized men’s encounters with the state, I consider the gun board as a degradation ceremony (Garfinkel 1956; Van Cleve 2016) organized around two controlling images—the Deadbeat Dad and the Thug—according to which state administrators attempt to shape Black masculinities and assert racial/gender hierarchies that indicate African American men’s subordination.
Gun Board as Dramatization of Racial/Gender Hierarchies
Degradation ceremonies, a concept developed by Garfinkel (1956), provide a theoretical frame for understanding those state encounters aimed at disciplining claimants through the deployment of shame, embarrassment, and accusation. 2 Garfinkel establishes criteria for “successful” ceremonies that “effect the ritual destruction of the person denounced” (1956, 421) by framing the denounced “as a representative of a ‘type’ of person . . . that poses an affront to common values” such that “the denouncement can serve not just as a personal punishment but as a broader warning about, and affirmation of, community values” (1956, 422-23). Using Garfinkel’s framework to theorize Chicago’s Cook County courts, Van Cleve (2016, 68) highlights how degradation ceremonies impart punitive “lessons” through which “racial divisions [are encoded] with symbolic meaning about violating the shared moral values of hard work, competence, and motivation.”
“Controlling images,” which “are designed to make racism, sexism and poverty appear to be natural, normal and a part of everyday life” (P. H. Collins 2000, 67-68), provide a mechanism for degradation ceremonies to reflect and reproduce dominant “specialized thought” (287). When organized around controlling images, degradation ceremonies can serve as dramatizations of racial/gender hierarchies: People positioned differently along the intersecting lines of race and gender are publicly subjected to different treatments that communicate race- and gender-specific social expectations. Amid the specter of the high-crime, African American–majority city of Detroit (colloquially disparaged as a “murder capital” by area residents; see Carlson 2015), African American men looking to carry guns lawfully in Metro Detroit encounter a courtesy stigma by virtue of their racial/gender identities and social locations (Harris et al. 2011). Specifically, I found that they are held accountable to two controlling images: the Thug and the Deadbeat Dad.
The Thug is a version of “African American masculinity associated with criminality and poverty” (Dow 2016, 175). It has been used to justify public expenditures on policing and punishment (Jackson and Carroll 1981; Tonry 2011; Wacquant 2001) and legitimate “attacks on African American boys’ and men’s bodies and minds” (Dow 2016, 182). Controlling images of African American men as criminals began to circulate in the late 1800s and early 1900s (Du Bois [1899] 1995; Muhammad 2011) but gained traction widely in the post–Civil Rights era (P. H. Collins 2004, 159), during which “tough on crime” politics mobilized the threat of Black criminality. If the Thug stereotypes the public lives of Black men, the Deadbeat Dad is tied to the private sphere. The Deadbeat Dad trope refers to “a man simply too lazy to try” (Edin and Nelson 2013, 165) and “who has simply walked away from his children and—most important—doesn’t seem to care” (Edin and Nelson 2013, 188). The origins of the Deadbeat Dad trope may date as far back as the 1920s (Marks and Palkovitz 2004), but it enjoyed mass circulation under the auspices of the 1965 Moynihan Report, which declared the African American family to be in “complete breakdown” due to “out of wedlock childbearing.” By 1986, Bill Moyers’s The Vanishing Family recirculated this imagery (Edin and Nelson 2013, 165), creating a “widespread moral panic about absent fathers” (Freeman 2003, 33). Recognizing that controlling images of Black men as Thugs and Deadbeat Dads can intersect to produce a trope of Black fathers as delinquent providers who are prone to violence within the home, I broaden the definition of the Deadbeat Dad to include fathers framed either as delinquently absent or abusive.
Gun boards’ deployment of the Thug and the Deadbeat Dad reflects how racial/gender hierarchies relate to the social construction of legitimate violence. Connell (2005) notes that hegemonic masculinity—a term that denotes the most socially esteemed form of masculinity in a given social context, in contrast to subordinate and marginalized masculinities—is defined through and justified by the use of violence that is socially framed as heroic, courageous, and morally righteous. From the militiamen of the Early American Republic, to dueling Southerners in the antebellum era, to settlers on the Western Frontier and their mythical lionization in popular American culture, to white lynch mobs mobilized on behalf of white women under Jim Crow, to today’s armed citizen and street cop (Carlson and Goss 2017; Feimster 2009; Herbert 2001; Slotkin 1992), violence has been historically legitimated through “masculinist protection” (Young 2003). Furthermore, violence—like masculinities (Connell 2005)—is defined relationally: “Good men can only appear in their goodness if we assume that lurking outside the warm familial walls are aggressors who wish to attack them” (Young 2003, 4). The boundaries of “legitimate” violence are established in relation to not just a feminized victim but also a hyperviolent, immoral, or cowardly aggressor. Thus, in the United States, illegitimate violence has been understood through racialized and gendered terms, ranging from Black insurrection during slavery to Black criminality, such as the Thug and the Deadbeat Dad, in the present era (Dew 1975; Feimster 2009; Muhammad 2011; Wacquant 2001). The social designation of certain acts of violence by certain men as “legitimate” alongside the social denigration of other acts of violence by other men as illegitimate, criminal, or rebellious maintains racial hierarchies among men (Light 2017; Roman 2013; Smångs 2016).
Reflecting and reasserting these racial/gender dynamics, a gun board is a forum in which the boundaries surrounding access to legitimate violence are broadcasted and enforced. However, unlike past historical periods during which gun access and use were more strictly regulated along racial lines (Johnson 2014), today’s gun laws are formally nondiscretionary regimes in which African American men can, and do, apply for and receive CPLs. In this context, racialized men may be publicly and punitively disciplined as they pursue CPLs. State agents nimbly deploy controlling images of the Thug and the Deadbeat Dad to impart “lessons” to African American men that compel those men—as an informal condition of their CPLs—to recognize their social position at the bottom of the racial/gender hierarchy and modify their behaviors, if not their sensibilities.
Methods
I attended public gun board meetings for five months in 2014. The Wayne County board met twice a month for morning and afternoon sessions; the Oakland County board met once a month for morning sessions. Because Michigan’s gun boards were public during my research, this project was exempt from Research Ethics Board Review. 3 Although consent was not required by my university’s ethics board because the research took place in a public forum, I introduced myself to all administrators in Oakland County and the majority of administrators in Wayne County as a researcher who studies gun policy; given the regular rotation of some of the administrators in Wayne County (sometimes mid-meeting), it was unfeasible to introduce myself to each one. Further, under the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), all hearings involving health records are closed to the public; I recused myself at the request of gun board administrators for the handful of such cases. All names are pseudonyms, and all data have been de-identified to prevent the identification of specific individuals.
As a white woman in her 30s who wore professional attire, my presence did not appear to affect claimants. Claimants occasionally acknowledged my presence to ask logistical questions (e.g., the bathroom’s location), suggesting that I was mistaken for an administrator. Likewise, gun board administrators rarely spoke with me. When they did, their commentary ranged from helpful (i.e., to explain the legal reasoning behind a particular decision) to sarcastic (e.g., “That pesky Second Amendment!”). Though my presence may have affected the behavior of administrators, this would have influenced administrators to be less likely to engage in the behavior analyzed here.
I was instructed by administrators at both sites to sit in a row of chairs behind the gun board panel, and I visibly took notes. My synopses of each case included claimant demographics, the initial sanction, the reason he or she was called to the gun board, the conversation between administrators and the claimant, and the outcome. I then transcribed my notes into narratives for analysis using Atlas.ti. Before my observations, I expected administrators to be primarily motivated to curtail civilians’ ability to carry firearms. Recognizing the moralizing nature of the gun board, my analysis took a theory abduction approach (Tavory and Timmermans 2014), whereby I iteratively moved between empirical patterns and existing literatures on intersectionality and the state. I coded observations by case type and then focused analysis where gender was most explicit: child support, child custody, and intimate partner violence cases. For these cases, I developed a coding scheme focusing on the racializing/gendering discourse deployed by administrators. Examining whether these differences held beyond cases involving domestic relations, I examined cases in which claimants were policed on proper behavior with public law enforcement and broadened my coding scheme accordingly. Matching by case type (child support, child custody, intimate partner violence, and interactions with police), I compared how administrators processed white versus African American claimants and found that African Americans are subject to more disciplinary treatment than their white counterparts. Broadening to other case types (e.g., erroneous criminal records, warrants due to unpaid parking tickets, simple assault, etc.), I found that African American men were both overrepresented and processed differently as compared to their white counterparts. Nevertheless, the most striking differences—especially from an intersectional perspective—related to cases involving interactions with public law enforcement, child support, child custody, and intimate partner violence. The controlling images of the Thug and the Deadbeat Dad emerged as meta-themes that organized the coding scheme; while no gun board administrator explicitly referred to either of these tropes, their lectures and inquiries revolved around assumptions captured by these tropes. The analysis section that follows includes these narratives to illustrate.
My observations comprise the only (to my knowledge) gun carry licensing data set that allows for in-depth and qualitative analysis of racial/gender differences in implementation as individual gun records are generally sealed from public disclosure requirements. Further, Michigan closed the doors to its public county-level gun boards at the end of 2015; as in most states, those wishing to contest licensing decisions must now appeal to a court rather than a gun board or submit a written petition (Rose 2013). Given the parallel between this study’s findings and Van Cleve’s (2016) court ethnography, this new setting will likely exhibit the dynamics observed at gun board.
Wayne County and Oakland County gun boards served two different populations: an urban, economically depressed area that includes Detroit and is disproportionately poor and African American (Wayne) and a wealthier, whiter suburb (Oakland). According to 2016 U.S. census figures, a quarter of Wayne County’s population is below the poverty line, and the median household income is $41,210; its population is 54.6 percent white and 39.2 percent African American. Oakland County is a suburban county with a median income of $67,465 and a poverty rate of less than 10 percent, and its population is 76 percent white and 14.3 percent African American. Nevertheless, lawful gun carrying is common in both Wayne County and Oakland County; in these counties, African Americans are issued CPLs at rates slightly higher than their population rates, based on 2013 CPL data obtained from the Michigan State Police.
Even accounting for this disparity in licensing rates, African Americans still comprised a disproportionate number of claimants called to gun board (see Table 1). Individuals were called to the gun board when their CPLs are revoked or suspended or their applications are denied; specific reasons can include an active personal protection order; an outstanding arrest for assault, homicide, or other violent offense as far back as the 1940s; an active warrant issued for unpaid traffic offenses; a second offense of driving with a suspended license; the possession of a medical marijuana card; excessive police contact; and referral by local police. Though the population of Wayne County was about 1.5 times that of Oakland County, about eight times the number of cases were processed at the Wayne County gun board meetings. Because people are often called to a gun board because of contact with the criminal justice system, this suggests Wayne County residents’ greater exposure to the criminal justice system, in line with previous studies of marginalized urban communities (Rios 2011).
Gun Licensing among African Americans in Wayne County and Oakland County
The Wayne County and Oakland County gun boards were organized according to different spatial logics, which communicated somewhat distinct power relations and expectations (Lipsky 2010; Van Cleve 2016). Wayne County’s gun board took place in a large auditorium on the 13th floor of the Wayne County building. The sorting of people was visually striking: The audience, mostly African American men, filled the auditorium, while gun board officials, around half of whom were white men, sat on a long table behind a podium equipped with a microphone. Meetings typically began with a lecture on the etiquette of the gun board. Hats and cell phones were forbidden; claimants were required to come to the front podium, spell their name, and present paperwork on their cases; and they were required to leave identification if they left the room for any reason. During the meetings, audience members were implicated in the proceedings as administrators referenced community values or made statements geared at gaining an audience response, such as laughter. In contrast, in Oakland County, each claimant was individually called into a room with a large conference table, and the door was generally shut, although the meetings were officially public. The gun board members—three white men—sat across a table from claimants. A more conversational, rather than formal, tone often prevailed. At times, the Oakland County gun board resembled “middle-class quarreling” (R. Collins 2009; Garfinkel 1956), which provided opportunities for claimants to save face and maintain their privacy but also increased their isolation as compared to the public spectacle of Wayne County (Lipsky 2010, 118). Reflecting the localized nature of county governance in the United States, the specific spatial contours and interactional styles were different across the two county gun boards.
Disciplining Public Black Masculinity: The Thug
The CPL is a permit that regulates public behavior: carrying a gun. Standards for contact with police are built into the legal framework of gun licensing. Licensees who failed to disclose their status as CPL holders had their licenses suspended and their files reviewed at a gun board, and the gun board had the discretion to suspend licenses up to six months. Police could also suspend, revoke, or deny licenses based on “excessive police contact.” I observed gun boards explicitly discuss standards for contact with police 64 times, including contacts with 39 African American men, eight white men, and nine African American women. The majority were in Wayne County. Discussions of disclosure were often justified by concerns about officer safety. During Wayne County’s gun board meeting, one administrator offered an impromptu lecture on appropriate behaviors during a police stop aimed at the entire audience: “Everybody—whether carrying or not—just put your hand on the wheel and say ‘I have a CPL.’ That puts the officer at ease.”
While disclosure requirements are intended to enhance safety, such cases also serve to discipline African American men according to the controlling image of the Thug by enforcing informal rules of conduct between African Americans and the police, particularly regarding the deference of the former to the latter (Cooper 2009). Consider one African American man called to the Wayne County gun board. Explaining his failure to disclose to an officer, the claimant asserted his awareness of appropriate conduct with police: “Over the last five years I have been stopped by as many suburban agencies as are people on this board.” He used the term suburban to flag his awareness of the changing rules of engagement across the 8 Mile border (the street that runs between Detroit and its suburbs). This assertion of expertise, however, backfired because it raised another set of concerns: “Why [so much police contact]?” Despite documented evidence of African Americans’ disproportionate contact with police due to racial profiling (Epp et al. 2014), the gun board treated this claimant’s police contact as an indicator of his individual suspiciousness. 4 Sticking to a colorblind script (Bonilla-Silva 2014), this claimant affirmed the gun board’s interpretation and furthermore demonstrated his willingness to comply with the heightened scrutiny he warrants as a CPL holder: “Just because! I have a ten-year-old car. And I always have insurance. And I always disclose.”
Claimants often adopted scripts that appealed to—or did not contradict—colorblind sensibilities. In one case, however, I did witness a claimant explicitly cite race as a factor in police stops. This African American man’s CPL was suspended because of a felony assault charge from a Detroit suburb. He said, “I was driving, a guy flipped me off, and then flicked his cigarette into my car as I was getting in the right lane. We both called the police—and I was the one who got arrested.” One administrator responded by individualizing responsibility, saying, “Road rage. You want to have a CPL? You have to be responsible. Why were you the one that got arrested?” The claimant apprehensively names race:
Truthfully?
Yes, I want the truth.
Because I was Black, and he was white.
At these words, the panel of administrators threw up their hands in a show of indignation. The administrator retorted, “Watch the news: every other day people are getting killed over things that start out as nothing! You are a nice young man, you need to take the higher road!” Rather than directly address his claims, the gun board reasserted that the outcome of police encounters rests on the claimant’s shoulders. Had this claimant “watched the news” leading up to this meeting, he would have viewed public outrage over the police killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. Unaware, or unwilling to recognize, that these violent incidents were indicative of racial disparities in policing (Epp et al. 2014; Muhammad 2011; Rios 2011; Tonry 2011) and widely interpreted as such, this administrator appeared to frame them as unfortunate but preventable escalations. With this heavy-handed cautionary tale, the man’s license was reinstated.
White claimants generally did not undergo this kind of treatment for cases involving police contact. Both Wayne and Oakland County gun boards tended to take a matter-of-fact approach to cases related to police contact involving white men. As a typical example, one white man, who looked to be in his 60s, came to the Wayne County gun board after paying a $675 fine for failing to disclose. An administrator informed him that his license would be suspended for six months, after which he should “come see us . . . [to] get your license back.” This applicant was not questioned about the incident, warned about the consequences of misbehavior, or instructed on appropriate interactions with police. While rare, when white men were admonished, it was often brief and even jovial. One Oakland case involved an affluent suburban police department that had entered a warning in a white man’s federal record, which effectively barred the man from purchasing or possessing firearms. Adopting a sympathetic tone, an administrator jokingly mused, “You did something to tick off [those] police!”
This joking tone was absent in cases involving African American men’s police stops, although a gun board member did adopt a wisecracking attitude toward one African American woman. This woman returned to the Wayne County gun board after a six-month suspension to claim her license. Before reissuing, an administrator reminded her how to engage with police:
And now you know the first thing to say is . . . ?
I have my gun!
No! If you do that, they are going to start pulling their guns on you! You say, “Officer, I have a CPL, and I have my weapon on me.” Not, “Guess what’s in my pocket!”
A follow-up “quiz” was common for African Americans but not for whites who failed to disclose. Even with the softer tone adopted by the gun board toward this woman, the racialized nature of police stops led the gun board to warn her that she should expect police to perceive her as a threat. This treatment resonates with the growing criminalization of women of color (Chesney-Lind 2006) and the historically longstanding tendency for African American women to be treated as socially male by state apparatuses of social control (Haley 2013). Rather than a fleeting moment of sympathy as with the white applicant in Oakland County, this interaction both encouraged the claimant to adopt the gaze of the police officer by seeing one’s legal actions as dangerous and made light of the gravity of having to do so.
At the meetings I observed, African Americans, especially African American men, were disproportionately disciplined according to the controlling image of the Thug. Administrators reminded them that their guns—though legal—made them suspicious, that they should expect guns drawn if they broke informal rules of conduct because their actions would be read as threatening, and that, therefore, the outcomes of police stops ultimately rested on their shoulders. Animated by the controlling image of the Thug, such encounters dramatized the subordinate position of African Americans, particularly African American men, vis-à-vis law enforcement (claimants were expected to demonstrate knowledge of and behavioral compliance with informal rules of conduct during police stops), the gun board (administrators mobilized moralizing scripts to compel claimants to account for controlling images), and other claimants (such questioning was usually reserved for African American men).
Disciplining Private Black Masculinity: The Deadbeat Dad
Although CPLs regulate behavior outside of the home, a significant portion of cases involved private matters. Of 936 cases observed, 111 involved intimate partner violence (IPV), 16 involved child support, and three involved child custody cases. African American men were disproportionately represented: They comprised 60 percent of IPV cases (67 African American men, 21 white men, 12 African American women), 67 percent of child custody cases (two African American men, one white man), and 100 percent of child support cases (16 African American men). The majority of cases took place in Wayne County; Oakland County heard nine IPV cases, two child support, and no custody cases during the period of observation. Such cases suggest that CPLs were used to address a fundamental flaw in federal gun control efforts related to IPV: uneven and ineffective enforcement due to poorly kept databases and inadequate interoperability between enforcement agencies (Vigdor and Mercy 2006). However, my observations, especially at the Wayne County gun board, suggest that CPLs also opened opportunities for state agents to discipline African American men according to the controlling image of the Deadbeat Dad.
Consider one 59-year-old African American man whose license was suspended because of a weapons charge. 5 Admitting he was on probation, a Wayne County administrator asked why. “Child support. I’m paying back. I’m retired now, and I owe $107,000. And I pay $100 [a month]. I’ve had employment issues.” The administrator exclaimed, “That’s stacks on stacks!” The man continued:
I got a weapon because I was assaulted. I asked the police if I was restricted from getting a weapon, and they said no, so I sent in my paperwork.
How much was the weapon?
Between $500 and $600.
That could have been used to pay child support!
But they are grown now!
Don’t say that. Their mother paid the bill. She had to foot the bill! When they needed a fieldtrip, Pampers [diapers], someone had to pay for that! That’s why you have to pay this.
I take the blame, and I haven’t missed a payment in three or four years.
Your priorities are all screwed up.
While the claimant provided a pragmatic justification for purchasing a gun (“I was assaulted”) as well as a legal one (“I asked the police if I was restricted”), the gun board admonished him about his poor parenting choices, defined by his financial contributions (or lack thereof) to his family. While the gun board appeared to be legally required to reinstate his license, they did so only after compelling the man to accept his blameworthiness (“I take the blame”) and interrogating his “priorities.”
In IPV cases, the gun board likewise compelled claimants to account for their private behaviors. The disproportionate scrutiny of African American men reflects cautionary feminist analyses (Bumiller 2009) that IPV law enforcement protects women by penetrating the privacy of marginalized groups (including marginalized women). In IPV cases, the gun board routinely inquired about personal matters, and in cases involving African American men, I observed questioning of both the claimant and the partner. Consider this Wayne County case involving an African American man who was suspended because of a 2014 assault charge:
Who was it?
My fiancé.
Is she here right now?
Yes.
Ma’am, come on down!
The woman walked down from the “audience” to the podium to explain: “It was a bad argument at home, and the police came. I didn’t call the police, and the police did not really speak to me. I said I did not want to press charges. It was a few days of heated argument, the kids were there, the kids were arguing too.” The administrator called for responsible parenting: “That sets a bad example for kids. Both of you need to find a better way to communicate.” The claimant responded, “We’ve been together for 14 years, three boys and three girls, we started from the bottom, and we are here now. And now after the fight we kissed and made up.” The couple smiled as they talked about their kids; the gun board seemed adequately pleased as the claimant’s license was reinstated.
The Wayne County gun board approached white men differently. Inquiries were less inquisitive and more lighthearted. I never observed the partners of white men testify on their behalf. One white man’s IPV charge from Las Vegas was met with moralizing laughs before the board approved his license: “You know what happens in Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas!” Another white man with a misdemeanor assault charge was simply asked, “How is the relationship now?” He explained, “Wonderful. Terrible then.” His license was approved; the gun board admonished him with a threat but refrained from further questioning: “Kids don’t need to see parents arguing. If there is anything else, we’ll pull [the license] in a second.” Wayne County was willing to approve and reinstate the licenses of African American and white claimants; the difference was the extensive, moralizing inquiries that the former, but not the latter, experienced as an informal condition of their licenses.
The Oakland County gun board appeared more proactive about suspending, revoking, or denying the licenses of African American men in cases related to child support and IPV. Noting that they simply had to “follow the law” (to paraphrase), Oakland County decision making in these cases appeared to disadvantage African Americans by adopting a bureaucratic approach that discouraged them from pursuing their cases (Carlson 2017). For example, one African American man brought to the gun board for a decades-old child support arrest was told to get his paperwork in order: “We need a clearance letter saying wrong person, case dismissed, or the final adjudication. . . . It probably won’t be an easy task, but that’s what we need to know.”
Whereas white men experienced less intrusive questioning as compared to African American men in Wayne County, white men in Oakland County (especially wealthier claimants who could afford legal counsel) appeared to experience more impunity as compared to African American men. One white man, who spoke with a Middle Eastern accent, came with two lawyers in full suits. 6 Taking their seats in the conference room, one of the lawyers stated that the IPV incident “was not an arrest, it was just an argument.” Reviewing the file, an administrator noted, “He had one before [a charge], but they decided not to press charges this time. There’s a pattern here.” Another responded, “You could be a safety hazard.” According to CPL statutes, the gun board had the authority to revoke a CPL if the licensee was deemed a “danger to self and others”; I saw a handful of African Americans revoked by this gun board for this reason. However, the gun board resolved to reinstate. As the next claimant shuffled in, the administrators quipped to one another, “The first incident involved him choking his daughter in ’08. It sounded pretty serious, but apparently it was just ‘my bad.’ . . . It was coded as family trouble. That’s the officer being lazy. Next time, arrest him.” Instead of interrogating or lecturing this claimant, these administrators chastised “lazy” police officers and relied on a legal justification to reinstate a CPL to a man with a documented record of IPV.
The gun board’s inquiries into the private matters of African American men complements state penetration into the private sphere of marginalized women (Bumiller 2009; Roberts 2002), revealing that the state’s interest in the private sphere extends to men (see e.g., Randles 2013). As public policy scholar Lipsky (2010, 93) notes, “The administration of public welfare has been notorious for the psychological burdens clients have to bear. These include the degradation implicit in inquiries into sexual behavior, childbearing preferences, childrearing practices, friendship patterns, and persistent assumptions of fraud and dishonesty.” Similarly, the CPL can serve as a disciplinary mechanism for regulating private Black masculinities. Especially in Wayne County, African American men were held accountable to the controlling image of the Deadbeat Dad as they were given lessons on financial responsibility and communication skills and compelled to open up their private lives to scrutiny, accept blame, and demonstrate appropriate priorities.
Conclusion
This analysis shows that state apparatuses do not just coercively enforce racial hierarchies among men; they also may punitively discipline certain men by trading security goods (i.e., CPLs) for complicity with particular tropes of racialized masculinity that indicate Black men’s subordinate place in the racial/gender hierarchy. Existing scholarship on American gun culture emphasizes the cultural links between masculinity and protectionism that drive men, particularly white men, to bear arms (Carlson 2015; Stroud 2012). In contrast to legally armed whites, lawfully armed African Americans are situated at the contradictory intersection of statutes that expand access to guns and practices that criminalize people of color, especially men. In seeking permission to carry a gun, such claimants push the racial/gender boundaries of legitimate violence that have been historically endorsed, facilitated, and enforced by state actors at local, state, and federal levels.
This study suggests that state agents have responded to this contradiction by mobilizing racializing/gendering discourses and controlling images vis-à-vis African American men. Specifically, when African American men seek—and receive—gun licenses, they do not do so on the same terms as other claimants, particularly white men. There are formal and informal reasons for this. First, because African Americans were more likely to experience police contact (Epp et al. 2014; Rios 2011; Tonry 2011), they were more likely to encounter bureaucratic hurdles as they move through the process of obtaining a CPL (Carlson 2017). Second, state agents also enforced a set of social expectations surrounding armed African Americans, expectations that rely on negative stereotypes. Not only were African American men disproportionately called in to gun board (see again, Table 1), but they also were exposed to a different set of racialized and gendered demands to obtain a license. This article thus examined the gun board as a degradation ceremony that featured two controlling images of Black masculinity—the Thug and the Deadbeat Dad—to discipline African American men.
This article opens avenues for future study. First, reflecting the demographics of Metro Detroit as well as self-selection into the pool of CPL applicants and holders, the vast majority of claimants were African American or white. While scholarship suggests the persistence of African American subordination despite demographic shifts (Bonilla-Silva 2014), this study raises the question of how the mechanisms analyzed here would be mobilized with respect to other racialized men, particularly those who have experienced increased criminalization (e.g., racialized immigrants; Armenta 2017; Maghbouleh 2017). Second, this article examines observations of social interaction at public gun board meetings. I did not interview claimants or administrators; thus, I am limited in evaluating how the “lessons” of the gun board shaped claimants’ broader lives (although see Carlson 2015 on gun carriers more generally) and how administrators understand the provision of legitimate violence as compared to other kinds of social provision. As police increasingly rely on third-party policing (Desmond and Valdez 2013), scholarship should examine how police negotiate gun laws as they imagine and pursue social order as a core policing prerogative. Third, I was unable to collect systematic data on less observable axes of difference, including class, educational attainment, social capital, and family status. Such factors were visible in some cases (e.g., the handful of claimants who arrived with lawyers, referenced their dangerous neighborhoods or their employment difficulties in arguing their cases, or referenced friends or family in local police departments). A more systematic analysis of such factors would add nuance to the processes outlined in this article.
In this analysis, gun board meetings revealed the persistent, if reformulated, mobilization of legitimate violence in the reproduction of racial/gender hierarchies. Not unlike the penal-welfarism that punitively disciplines marginalized women, gun licensing likewise entails punitive discipline vis-à-vis marginalized men. The gun board fits within the “matrix of domination” of interlocking institutions that coercively “contain” (P. H. Collins 2000, 228) racialized men through criminalization, including the police, courts, and prison, which reify stereotypes about Black criminality. This article shows how race- and gender-making discourses and stereotypes percolate across state apparatuses to widen the net of state control over racialized men well beyond the police car, court room, and prison cell. In the context of gun licensing, African American men encounter the state as neither victims of violence nor its perpetrators but as would-be wielders of legitimate force. Against the broader social context wherein the social embrace of gun carry is often animated by fears of Black criminality (Carlson 2015; Stroud 2012) but under legal regimes that expand African American access to lawful guns, gun board administrators improvised degradation ceremonies that place African American men in a zone of provisional citizenship.
Footnotes
Author’s note:
Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2016 American Sociological Association annual meeting and the 2016 American Society of Criminology annual meeting. I would like to thank Jessica Cobb, Kimberly Hoang, Neda Maghbouleh, Kate Mason, James Messerschmidt, Freeden Oeur, and Poulami Roychowdhury for their incisive commentary on earlier drafts of the article as well as Gender & Society, Jo Reger, her editorial team, and the three anonymous reviewers for their insights and assistance throughout the editorial process. This research was funded by the Connaught New Researcher Grant from the University of Toronto.
Notes
Jennifer Carlson is an assistant professor in the School of Sociology and the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona. Her research examines American gun culture, policing and public law enforcement, and conservative politics. She is the author of Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline (Oxford University Press), and her peer-reviewed work appears in Gender & Society, Contexts, Social Problems, and Theoretical Criminology, among other venues. Her current research focuses on the intersection of gun politics and public law enforcement.