Illegible Black Death,Legible White Pain

Breaking News

Los Angeles International Airport: Gunman opens fire at Airport, killing 1 and injuring 6 more.

Washington Navy Yard: Gunman opens fire, killing 12 and injuring 3 more.

New Jersey Mall: Man opens fire at New Jersey mall. No one injured.

Sparks, Nevada: “A gentle boy” opens fire at Middle School, killing 1 teacher and wounding two classmates.

Troutdale, Oregon: “A good kid with good support” walks into a high school with plans to kill as many as possible.

Newtown… Aurora…. Oak Creek.… Columbine.… Isla Vista, California. . . .

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Twitter News . . . Facebook Feed News

Renisha McBride: 19-year Black women killed in all-white community Dearborn Heights while trying to get help following a car accident.

Cornell Square Park, Chicago: 13 wounded, including 3-year-old Deonta Howard, are stuck as “assailants fired more than a dozen rounds from an assault-style rifle” in what appears to be “a gang-related” shooting; news reports emphasize “several gang members were injured.”

Detroit Barber Shop: Dressed in body armor and armed with a high powered assault weapon opened fire killing three and injuring 6 more. “A Mass Shooting Happened Yesterday But You Didn’t Hear Anything About It.”

Chicago: Over July 4th weekend, more than 60 people are shot or wounded.

New Orleans.… Oakland .… Detroit.… Houston . . . . Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania

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All gun violence is not created equally. All victims of gun violence are not created, seen, or treated equally – no ‘all lives’ don’t matter. Those assailants, those mostly men who hold, pull the trigger, and use their guns to inflict pain and death on others, are most certainly not created or treated equally. Race, gender, zip code, and class all matter. At least that is the message told each and every day from the media. According to Annie-Rose Strasser (2013),

The relative media ignorance of the shooting tracks with a common theme: Gun crimes often occur in low-income neighborhoods with largely non-white victims, but, from the news, you’d think every shooting put the white and affluent at risk of violence. There’s an obvious reason from a producer’s perspective: They want traffic, or viewers, and think they can get more if more well-off news consumers are self-concerned with the story. But it doesn’t reflect the reality of gun violence in the United States, where Black people are far more likely to be victims of gun homicides compared to their white counterparts.

The differential spotlights is not simply about visibility, media sensationalism, and the spectacle that is part and parcel with contemporary gun discourse; the separate and unequal media coverage also reflects the legibilities and illegibilities of certain bodies, communities, and experiences. Mark Anthony Neal (2013), in Looking for Leroy, argues that the legibility of Black masculinity emanates from its existence as a flattened object, an ideological and financial commodity, and a source of derision, surveillance, discipline, and punishment. As a criminal statistic, Black masculinity is legible; as a source of blame, evidence of pathology, and as a scapegoat for violence, poverty, and despair, Black masculinity is legible.

Neal (2011) further clarifies the importance of this concept, highlighting the structural and individual dialectics, and the ways that representations and collective imagination connect in/through policy:

Stereotypes that circulate in contemporary American culture of black bodies are premised on the idea that said black bodies are legible to the average American. The “legible” black male body, for example, is often a criminal body and/or a body in need of policing and containment thus “legible” black male bodies ironically bring welcome relief—a comforting sameness—and it is this logic and comfort that this course aims to disturb by suggesting the radical potential of rendering “legible” black masculinities as “illegible,” while simultaneously rendering so-called “illegible” black masculinities as “legible.”

Neal’s idea of the legibility Black bodies, in possession of basketball or a gun, and the corresponding responses—to police, criminalize, contain, incarcerated—extends beyond these sort of examples. As Black bodies are defined as legible through a set of signifiers—aggressive, violent, threatening, intimidating—Black innocence is illegible within the dominant imagination.

As an example of humanity, as a complex being, with a story, with a history, with a family, and with desires and fears, Blackness is illegible. Whether evidence in the lazy deadbeat Black father, or incarcerated criminals, hegemonic representations of Black masculinity offers little room for Black innocence, for heterogeneity, contradiction, and complexity; as such, it offers little room to see or hear the victims of gun violence as the narratives that ask why or how are reserved for Whites .

On the other hand, Whiteness is legible as the hero, the victim, and even the future; narratives focusing on “why” are only legible in narratives with White actors.

By extension, White guilt is illegible in that the markers of goodness, purity, civility, and innocence are at the center of dominant inscriptions of Whiteness. Innocent Whiteness or the innocence of Whiteness is the only legible Whiteness.

With this in mind, this article argues that discourses around gun violence are anchored in and divided by race, class, and space. Racial hierarchies and narratives determine the legibility of victims, of innocence, and of intervention, mass shootings, and meaningful death. The failure to see mass shootings or gun violence within Black communities as lost lives deserving attention, protection, and intervention not only perpetuates Black Social Death (Cacho, 2012; Sexton, 2011), and the realized human death, but also derails a true discussion of gun violence and the roots taking hold in communities across the nation.

As focused here, the violence in places such as New Orleans and Chicago is instead imagined as the result of violent places, cultures, and communities; there is no penetration of violence from the outside but instead it manifests from within (compared with the intrusion of video games, unregulated guns, mental illness, and popular culture within White suburban spaces). This explains the varied reactions whereupon the suburban spaces and those of the White middle class need protection, and insulation from those outside dangers. With inner city spaces and those of the Black underclass, the focus rests with protecting and containing those outside from entry into the good parts of America. Here lies the focus of this piece: looking at the differential responses from the media, from political leaders, and from gun rights groups depending on the shooter, the victim, and the location.

As Eric Mann (2013) notes, “[d]eep in the white American psyche” rests the controlling belief and script that sees “the impossibility of Black innocence.” This has been all too clear in recent months (and throughout the history of the United States). From the “exoneration” of George Zimmerman and the criminalization of Trayvon Martin to the initial 20-year sentence of Marissa Alexander, from the inability to successfully prosecute police officers killed of killing unarmed Black men and women to the efforts to blame Sandra Bland, Eric Ganrer, and Mike Brown for their own killings, Black innocence is both imagined and realized as a contradiction in terms.

From the efforts to blame gun violence on single mothers, welfare, and criminality in Chicago to the erasure of Black Death in Detroit, Baltimore, and New Orleans, Black innocence remains an unfulfilled promise in a post–civil rights, post–racial America. From Jonathan Ferrell to Renisha McBride, from Alex Saunders to Jonylah Watkins, lost lives are seen as not worthy of media, mourning, and mobilization from those purportedly concerned with gun violence. As noted by Ruthie Gilmore (2007), “Racism is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production & exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (p. 28). The failure of the media, political leaders, and gun control groups to address racism, its consequences in Black Death, further contributes to “vulnerability to premature death.” The illegibility of Black victim status and the centering of mass shootings within the denate around guns as well as the the defining of mass shootings through Whiteness all contributes to this vulnerability. The legibility of White gun death as exceptional and abnormal compared with the efforts to normalize and ritualize Black Death as self-created, self-perpetuated, and therefore expected is central to understanding guns in American culture.

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When Numbers Don’t Make a Mass Shooting: Whiteness

Amid the endless media reports about mass shootings, one thing that is clear is there is no consensus as to what constitutes a mass shooting. According to Mother Jones, a mass or spree shooting is defined as a public shooting, resulting in four deaths, usually from a single shooter. This builds on the FBI’s system of classification, which defines a mass murder as an incident where “four or more people” are “killed in a single incident,” “typically in a single location.” Time magazine uses a different definition, concluding that over the last 35 years there have been “nearly 20 mass shootings” each and every year. As evident in their different numbers, it is clear that both publications are defining mass shootings in different ways.

Yet, incidents such as those in Cypress, Texas, New Orleans, Cornell Park, or Al’s Barber Shop (which are discussed in epigraph) are clearly not part of this framework. The number of victims, and the purported specifics of these cases, doesn’t compel inclusion alongside of Columbine or Virginia Tech, at least within the national imagination.

The media is not alone, as rightwing groups have disputed the inclusion of many instances that meet the criteria of a mass shooting, instead arguing that many should not part of the disucssuon about the ‘epidemic of gun deaths’ since they are not mass shootings but instead “gang-related, drug-related, crime-related or suicides.” They are neither indicative of the problem of guns nor worthy of consideration whether creating policy or mourning lost lives.

What’s clear in looking at the multiple definitions and by examining what incidences get grouped into the category of “mass shootings” is that the definition, media coverage, and public interest has little to do with numbers, with the type of location the shooting takes place, or the firearm used; rather, mass shootings are defined by expectations of where/why gun violence takes places. In other words, in spaces where gun violence is normalized, where people of color reside, where poverty and inequality are defining characteristics, mass shootings are illegible.

Mass shootings are a concept that has come to define gun violence carried out by people not supposed to kill, in communities that are believed to be safe and secure, within spaces that are public, mainstream, and ritualized (White and middle class). For example, in September 2013, a gunman opened fire in Chicago Park, wounding 13, including a 3-year-old child. Despite being an incident where 13 people were wounded as a result of gunfire; despite it taking place in a park, this incident was not reported as a “mass shooting.” Compare this incident to the shooting at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), where one person was killed and six injured, which was seen through the narrative of mass shootings, resulting in not only media coverage but also mobilization from gun control groups. The legibility of mass shooting is contingent upon its Whiteness and the spatial economy.. It is no wonder that our conversation about mass shootings and guns, violence and victims, remains separate and unequal, divided by racial expectations and racism.

The silence about mass shootings within inner city communities, involving Black and Brown youth, further demonstrates that the discourse around “mass shootings” is not determined by the type of gun or the number of victims but faces and places, location, and bodies. Race and space overdetermine who is afforded the rights of safety and security, and where violence is normalized, expected, and therefore nothing to worry about. The differences here also reflect who is indeed innocent, who is worthy of protection, sympathy, and assumptions of innocence.

The lack of media coverage for incidences in Chicago and New Orleans, the focus on “gangs” and narratives of normalization, embodies the powerful ways that race, class, and space anchor these discursive articulations about gun violence from those illegible mass shootings to those illegible victims of extrajudicial gun violence.

What’s Legible in New Orleans?

Amid the celebration of moms across the nation (even as legislatures passed policies that directly and indirectly hurt so many moms), America was once again reminded that all Moms’s don’t matter. Everyone is not entitled to celebrate equally. All lives are not worthy of similar mourning and attention.

In New Orleans, 19 people, including two children, were shot at a Mother’s Day celebration in 2013. Walking in a parade, two men opened fire turning an annual celebration into one of terror, despair, and death.

Two weeks later, a lone shooter opened fire at a local community college in Santa Monica (Leonard, 2013a), California. After setting fire to his father’s home, and killing both his brother and father, the shooter carjacked a woman, demanding that she drive him to Santa Monica College. Dressed in black, and armed with an assault rifle and at least 1,300 rounds of ammunition, he shot several people on campus, including multiple students. Before the suspect was even identified, the police and media began to report that the person responsible for this shooting had “issues.” Citing a history of mental illness and despair resulting from the divorce of his parents, the response immediately turned to “why” and “how could he do something like this.”

What was striking was how this shooting—like other “mass shootings”—became a moment to reflect on mental health and threat of gun violence. Even the definition of mass shooting was clearly reserved for those places where violence was not “supposed to happen,” where violence was committed by those who didn’t fit the stereotype. Compare this with the shootings in New Orleans, where criminal record and gang affiliation provided all the explanation needed.

Thinking back to New Orleanas, it is not hard to imagine how many articles, news reports, and public relfection about mothers who died while celebrating with their children would have been on the air had this occurred in West Los Angeles or Manhattan, New York). Hamilton Nolan (2013) reflects on these differential narratives. offering a powerful comparison to the Boston marathon bombing:

A couple of disaffected young men in search of meaning drift into radical Islam and become violent. A couple of disaffected young men in search of meaning drift into street crime and become violent. A crowd of innocent people attending the Boston marathon are maimed by flying shrapnel from homemade bombs. A crowd of innocent people attending a Mother’s Day celebration in New Orleans are maimed by flying bullets. Two public events. Two terrible tragedies. One act of violence becomes a huge news story, transfixing the media’s attention for months and drawing outraged proclamations from politicians and pundits. Another act of violence is dismissed as the normal way of the world and quickly forgotten. The victims bleeding on the ground may be forgiven for failing to see the distinction between the two acts. For those on the receiving end, violence is violence. For the rest of us, it is a rhetorical tool, to be deployed when it fits a narrative of American triumphalism. Otherwise it will be forgotten, by everyone except the victims.

Whereas violence in one location—the suburbs—enacted by White youth is both rendered hypervisible and understandable (and worthy of explanation), violence in urban communities, perepetuated by youth of color, is imagined as inevitable and not worthy of attention of intervention.

The juxtaposition of Boston and New Orleans, or LAX and Chicago, Santa Monica and Detroit, is striking given the extent of death, given the violence that occurred within ritualized spaces, and given how each is a communal gathering space. Of course, one doesn’t have to travel down South to New Orleans or West to Chicago to see the hypocrisy in the separate and unequal narratives. The lack of national attention afforded to violence in Roxbury, Massachusetts makes this clear; the lack of interventions in the form of jobs, reform to the criminal justice system, investment in education, and economic development is a testament to the very different ways violence registers in the national imagination. Roxbury doesn’t enliven narratives of humanity but instead those dehumanizing representations.

Yet, don’t we need to extend the comparison to Newtown, Aurora, and Milwaukee? Remixing the above: A couple of disaffected young men in search of meaning drift into spree shootings and become violent. Flying bullets wound crowds of innocent people attending a movie, going to school, or praying at their local temple. How is the reaction to Newtown and New Orleans, to Boston and Milwaukee, and to Aurora and Chicago an indicator of who we expect to commit violence, where we expect to be safe, who we see as a victim, and where we see violence as normalized and where it is exceptional?

One comment in a discussion thread that followed Nolan’s piece made the link between Boston, Newtown (Aurora), and New Orleans in a profound way:

The difference is, of course, that the media and the public focus on Things That Could Happen to Middle Class White People. Bombs placed at a marathon or a plane hitting a building or a gunman mowing down people in Newtown, Connecticut or Aurora, Colorado are things that happened to middle class white people and show the other white people that it could happen to them. Crime is somehow not supposed to happen to middle class white people; it’s supposed to happen to black people.

The differential narrative compel differential interventions. In the aftermath of the Mother’s Day shooting in New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu cited the shooting as yet another reminder of the violence plaguing their city. Describing it as evidence of “the relentless drum beat of violence,” Landrieu quickly located the discussion within the narrative of New Orleans. “It’s a culture of violence that has enveloped the city for a long, long period of time” (Lai, 2013) Whereas James Holmes and Adam Lanza were bad apples, this shooting was evidence of rotten trees, a rotten orchard, and worse a blithe destroying the community block by block.

The FBI similarly isolated the shooting as everyday violence, positioning as distinct from Boston or even Newtown. The FBI (Johnson, 2013) reported that they “have no indication the shooting was an act of terrorism. ‘It’s strictly an act of street violence in New Orleans.’” Did Boston not happen on a street? Even Aurora and Newtown, while occurring inside, occurred on a street, No? Prior to any investigation, the shooting in New Orleans had already been profiled to fit a particular story of violence, guns, race, and safety.

Such pathologizing explanations are nothing new. As far back as 2010, shootings during second line parades in New Orleans have been used as a moment to demonize and pathologize, deploying cultural explanations for understanding gun violence. For example, Red Cotton (2013), who was tragically shot at the Mother’s Day parade (Mock, 2013), laments this Fox News Report:

Violence at second lines is nothing new, especially post Katrina. In 2006 alone, there were seven people shot during three different second lines, prompting former police chief Warren Riley to double permit fees to try and beef up security. But Riley’s new fee structure was struck down in court, leaving many feeling vulnerable.

Cotton goes on to argue,

The unfortunate murder that occurred on Sunday is not symptomatic of second line culture. On the contrary, it’s directly attributable to deep social ills that New Orleans has yet to get a firm grasp on . . . To end the murder culture, one must acknowledge and address the legitimate root problems and depart from racial biases that serve to further marginalize a distressed community.

The 2013 murders in New Orleans also highlights these issues while demonstrating the cost and consequence of a culture of violence; one entrenched by narrow constructions of masculinity and gun culture. It also reflects a failure to see the various manifestation and locations of violence through a shared narrative, instead racially profiling each toward very different stories, conclusions, and interventions.

This isn’t simply an abstract difference, or even the very different media coverage seen when we compare New Orleans and Boston, Chicago, and Newtown. It isn’t simply reflective in the mere 10,000 dollars reward offered for information in New Orleans compared with 50,000 offered with Boston bombing or the ridiculous two million in the case of Assata Shakur. America’s hyper culture of militarized policing and racial profiling did not lead to public concern or mobilization from those empowered to protect and serve. Whereas the police shut down Boston in search of suspects, no such operation occurred in New Orleans. It is crystal clear as we examine the very difference responses, governing legislation, and the services available with each community. Brentin Mock (2013) highlights this important point, noting that Governor Bobby Jindal’s refusal to fund “a behavioral health program in Louisiana that served ‘at-risk,’ low-income children to close.” He quotes Samantha Kennedy, who highlights the often ignored issue of mental health within Black communities: “We have a multigenerational multi-layered PTSD in this community,” wrote Kennedy on Facebook. “Violence begets violence because trauma begets trauma. We live in a highly traumatized community. When are we going to take the biopsyhochemical and emotional needs of our people seriously?” (Millhollon, 2013).

The tragic shooting in New Orleans was yet another reminder of America’s gun problem. Gun violence, from Newtown to Chicago, from the killing of youth in Aurora to those in New Orleans, continues without systemic intervention. Societal failure and ineptitude in addressing gun violence at political, cultural, or social levels reflects the very real ways that race and racism impacts these discourses. Just as every person within America is profiled as guilty or innocent, as desirable or undesirable, violence is profiled as well. Gun violence is profiled racially. We have looked farther than the responses from the FBI and the Mayor Landrieu, from the news media and the political elite to see this at work. We can see how all violence is not created equally, how the issue of “guns” is one determined by the hand holding the gun, and the victim of gun violence, in the aftermath of incidences of violence. This is not limited to media, conservative politicians, or the gun lobby but guides mainstream gun rights groups as well.

Gun Control Groups

The differential response to incidences of gun violence, shaped by location, the legibility or illegibility of victim or assailant, and race is not limited to the media. This separate and unequal approach to gun violence is equally visible among gun control groups. Just as certain acts of gun violence—involving White shooters, involving White victims, involving middle-class spaces, involving ritualized spaces (airport, schools, movie theater, places of worship), involving suburban (safe) spaces—prompt breaking news coverage and the insatiable desire to understand “why” from the media and the nation’s political leaders, these types of events activate liberal gun control activists in ways not seen following OTHER incidences of gun violence.

Whereas, the Brady Campaign did not issue statements about Renisha McBride and Jonathan Ferrell, both of whom were killed following car accidents, the Mother’s Day shooting in New Orleans, countless shootings in Chicago, or a mass shooting in Detroit; it, along with many other groups, has focused time and political capital on “the REAL VICTIMS of GUN Violence.” They have issued statements in the aftermath of shootings at LAX, the Washington D.C. Navy Yard, an Aurora movie theater, Newtown school, Oak Creek Temple, and Santa Monica College. Following a mass shooting at a Sparks, Nevada School, the Brady Campaign issued the following statement:

Our thoughts and prayers are with the community of Sparks, Nevada and Sparks Middle School. The heartbreaking sight of children fleeing from gunfire in our schools is becoming an all too familiar sight. Tragically, 90 Americans are killed with bullets every day, including eight children and teens. While we don’t know the specific circumstances of this tragedy yet, we do know that solutions exist that can prevent most gun violence and we vow to continue to fight for those solutions until this is becomes the safer nation we all want and deserve.

Unlike a group like the Violence Policy Center, which focuses on injustices resulting from gun legislation that allows for concealed weapons and thus organized around Newtown and the killing of Jordan Davis, in response to the Navy Yard shootings and the disproportionate victimization of Black women (Violence Policy Center, 2013), other groups disproportionately focus on those OTHER events. For example, Moms Demand Action issued this statement in the aftermath of the LAX shooting:

For the second time in six months, a deadly shooting has occurred inside an American airport. According to press reports, earlier today at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) a gunman with an assault weapon fired at least 10 rounds near security at Terminal 3, killing a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employee and injuring several others.

This is the second airport shooting in just six months. In May, a gunman opened fire in a Houston airport before turning the gun on himself. And the TSA recently reported a record number of firearms being found at airport checkpoints in 2013, up 30 percent from last year. Despite these tragedies and increased gun danger at American airports, the gun lobby continues to fight to make it easier to carry loaded guns inside airports. For example, the gun lobby advocated for the new policy that makes it legal for permit-holding gun owners to bring loaded weapons into the Hartsfield-Jackson airport in Atlanta, one of the busiest airports in the world.

These same groups, that issued press releases following every “mass shooting,” that highlight the scourge of gun violence within White spaces and involving White faces, have remained silent when the victims and the communities appear to be different. Whether looking at Cornell Square Park Shooting, Al’s Barber Shop, or the Mother’s Day Shooting in New Orleans, mainstrean (White) gun control advocates have failed to spotlight, mourn, or give voice to victims of shootings that have resulted in multiple deaths and injuries involving people of color. They have failed to respond when the safety and security of communities of color is threatened because of gun violence; they have neglected to stake a stand when innocent youth of color are terrorized by gun violence. In those spaces where gun violence (and death) are seen as inevitable, where it’s supposed to happen, where the issue is not as guns but something else, they have remained silent.

For example, in the aftermath of a shooting in Cypress, Texas (Russell, 2013), where two African American youth were killed and 22 were injured, politicians, media reports, and even gun control groups remained silent. Emphasizing that it was a shooting at party, it was constructed as different from those OTHER shootings. Media reports worked hard to distinguish it from other incidents, highlighting how it was the outcome of a “gang initiation.” Noting that some attending the party where gang members, the dominant narrative denied victimhood, telling the public, “look away, this is not the kind of mass shooting you should care about.” Anti-Black racism is not only evident in the differential narratives but can be seen in how the media discourse contributes to the criminalization of Blackness. In the end, it’s not about the numbers, the innocent youth, or the disrupted sense of security, but if violence is inevitable. It’s about who and where, and what sort of narrative is needed to appease (or spark fear) the dominant White imagination. Not surprisingly, this incident has gotten little media coverage or intervention from gun control advocates.

Extrajudicial Violence: Why Isn’t It Part of Gun Debate?

As Black youth face almost daily confrontations with police and other forms of security, resulting in numerous deaths, causing heightened anxiety and insecurity, these incidents have been cordoned off from the gun discussions. Those incidents where police or security guards or men acting like security guards have shot dead African Americans with virtual impunity have not prompted national discussions on the dangers of America’s gun culture. While their crimes have been everything from “walking while Black” to “asking for help while Black,” from “playing music while Black” to “looking suspicious while Black,” the alarm have not gone off. While disrupting a sense of security and safety, while embodying an issue of mass proportions, while taking place in public spaces, while involving innocent youth, these deaths and the destructive harm of guns in the hands of those harboring stereotypes, these deaths have not led to a conversation about guns.

The killings of Jonathan Ferrell and Renisha McBride (as with the killings of Michael Brown LaQuan McDonald, Rekia Boyd, and countless others) did not prompt national discussions about guns, gun violence, and the deadly mixture of anti-Black racism, the White racial gaze (racial stereotypes, racialized fear), and safety.

Given the nature of entrenched ant-Black racism and systemically-produced white privilege, the killing of African Americans at the hands of police does not prompt national mourning or outrage; it doesn’t lead to demands for action, especially as it relates to gun control, for guns are necessary for protection, for safety, and for security. As Brittney Cooper (2013) notes, in a nation where “Black life is still considered a reasonable price to pay for the protection of white property and white life,” discussions about guns, gun control, and police violence rarely focus on the precarious future of Black life; Black death is ostensibly illegible within discourses of guns, policing, and commonplace shootings.

Chauncey Vega (2013) further notes the continued absence of such a conversation that deals with racism, the law, and guns.

Once more, although it will not, White America needs to have a moment of introspection and a “national conversation” about how its laws make it legal to shoot and kill innocent people of color who are “guilty” of “crime” such as walking down the street or seeking help after a car accident.

Yet, we don’t see press conferences or statements regarding Renisha McBride or in the aftermath of countless other Blue-on-Black shootings from the various gun control groups.

With the exception of a tweet from Moms Demand Action, which has focused on “stand your ground laws” (they and others have organized around Zimmerman as it relates to these laws), the devaluing of Renisha McBride’s can be seen in the lack of outrage, mourning, and attention her killing is receiving from these “liberal” gun control groups. The hyperfocus on “stand your ground” rather than racism or police shootings not only erases a myriad of issues surrounding guns and gun violence but is often done in such a way that race and racism are equally obscured from the conversation. To talk about gun control and gun violence requires talking about race and racism. As Rania Khalek (2013) notes,

The problem with a law like Stand Your Ground is that it excuses and encourages deadly force against “perceived” threats. In the United States, where implicit and structural racism persists on a vast scale, is it wise to empower people who almost certainly have irrational and racist fears, to kill instead of call police who are trained (at least they’re supposed to be) to deal with potential threats?

Race also appears to play a significant role in whether a homicide is deemed justifiable. A recent study conducted by John Roman of the Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center found, “the odds that a white-on-Black homicide is ruled to have been justified is more than 11 times the odds a Black-on-white shooting is ruled justified,” a reflection of the racial disparities that plague all aspects of the US criminal justice system.

For these groups, race and racism is peripheral at best but more likely a superfluous issue. For these groups, Black innocence, and therefore Black Death, remains out of focus, if not unworthy of attention.

This is especially the case with those killed under “justifiable” or understandable circumstances, whether those “standing their ground” or those empowered to “protect and serve.” A report from the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM; 2012) titled “Report on Extrajudicial Killings of 110 Black People” highlights the ubiquity of Black Death resulting from “Street Justice” (Leonard, 2012). In the first 6 months of 2012, police, security guards, and self-appointed agents of “justice” killed 110 African American men, women, and children. Since its publication, there have been 10 additional killings, ,which means that in 2012, there has been one killing every 36 hr. By 2013, this number had reached 1 killing every 28 hr, yet the lack of mobilization around gun violence directed at Black and Brown bodies continued, demonstrating the illegibility of Black innocence.

Much of the discourse seemingly exonerates those who have killed African Americans through imagining Blackness as inherently threatening and dangerous. How else can we explain toxicology reports for Trayvon Martin, Jonathan Ferrell, Renisha McBride, and countless others, while their shooters are sent home without so much as a drug/alcohol test much less an arrest.

Conclusion

The denied innocence and criminalization of Black bodies is commonplace and helps us understand the silence from the media, from political leaders, and from gun rights activist groups:

African-Americans are not allowed such protections by the White Gaze. They are viewed as guilty until proven innocent, a criminal Other who is a priori categorized as “suspicious” and “dangerous,” writes Chauncey Vega. “While formal racism and Jim and Jane Crow were shattered and defeated by the Black Freedom Struggle, this ugly cloud continues to hover over the United States, some 400 years after the first Black slaves were brought to the country.”

The hundreds dead in Chicago or the killing of Trayvon Martin consistently led to stories that seemingly turned victims into criminals; even those not criminalized are imagined as complicit and culpable for their own death. Whether citing past arrests, suspensions, drug use, clothing choices, or attitude, whether arguing that they should have known better to go to strangers house late at night or they should the presumption of Black guilt shapes national conversations about gun violence. This group cannot be saved or helped. Such narratives are commonplace within the media, from the Right, from 2nd Amendment “birthers,” from defense legal teams, and countless others. Yet, the failure of liberals and gun-right advocates to spotlight these instances, to focus on race.

Whereas violence is supposed to happen in Chicago, Detroit, and New Orleans, because of “culture of poverty,” because of single parents, because of dystopia and nihilism, because of warped values, gangs, and purported pathologies, the Boston Marathon, an Aurora movie theater, or a Newtown school are reimagined as safe. These are places and spaces immune from those issues.

The normalization of violence within inner cities is why the suburbs exist; it is why police work to keep violence from entering into those suburban safety zones; it is why police guard the borders, making sure the wrong people don’t cross into the idyllic homeland of the American Dream. It is why White middle-class America avoids “those” communities or activities presumed to be dangerous (or go during the right time with the right people); it is why the White middle-class America reacts when those spaces that are presumed to be safe are simply not.

The movie theater, the school, and the marathon are symbols of Americana and therefore desirable, pure, and the embodiment of goodness. They demand protection. That is what white and middle-class privilege looks like. As such, the violence that happens in these “otherwise safe” enterprises and places occurs because of the entry of “dangerous” and threatening people. Outsiders enter into otherwise safe and idealized spaces. It is almost as if the national media, the political elite, and society as a whole expect violence in New Orleans or Chicago and therefore anyone who is the victim is in some ways responsible because they knew the risks. Whereas watching a movie in Aurora or going to Boston marathon is a safe choice, a similar narrative doesn’t guide discussions of attending parade in New Orleans or walking the streets of Chicago. These facts illustrate why the media, gun rights, gun control, and political leaders flock in the aftermath of Newtown or Aurora, all while avoiding Chicago and New Orleans except in moments to blame, scapegoat, and normalize the violence there and NOT HERE.

This is America, so race matters. It matters given stereotypes of who is dangerous; it matters because studies have shown that the mere sight of black face elicits fear among Whites; it matters because Renisha McBride, like Trayvon, was drug tested following her death (which cannot be read outside the larger context of anti-Black racism. In one study, when asked to imagine a drug user, 95% of Whites picture a Black person). It matters because as noted by dream hampton, we are continually witnessing the “criminalizing Black Corpses” (King, 2013). Race matters given days it took for an arrest and the non-existent media coverage; it matters given the inequality in the legal application of the stand your ground law; it matters because of history of racism as it relates to guns; it matters because of history, from Emmett till to Trayvon, from #every28 hours to Jonathan Ferrell; it matters because of fear and terror; it matters the legibility and illegibility of life and death are stratified by race; it matters because mass shootings are legible within White spaces and places; and it matters because White America continues deny how race matters even when faced with facts, rightful anger, justifiable protest, and tears of pain, loss, and fear.