When I hear the pro-gun side start to recount the same old arguments, I just feel such an exhausted feeling of despair. Their defense is so full of evasion and hypothetical and avoidance. I guess each time I just hope that they'll feel shamed into really grappling with the devastation, rather than falling to the same old arguments.
I was also bummed out to read this argument from Project NIA that we shouldn't take hold of this moment of passion and attention, because the legislation we pass in response has a high likelihood of being enforced in a racist way. (I have been unable to conclusively identify who's tweeting, and I don't want to get it wrong, so I will just refer to the Twitter account. The website in question can be found here.) I think that this is problematic first because I can't see any positive change arising against guns without the immediacy and passion of recent events. The pro-gun lobby is simply too powerful. But more, I think that the argument is indicative of a deep and deeply troubling pathology among contemporary progressivism, one that ultimately makes necessary structural and economic changes far more difficulty.
First: I don't mean to come across as too critical. I understand that this is mostly a call for caution and prudence, and I also recognize that this country has suffered in the past decade or so from bad laws written in reaction to tragedy. And I am totally cognizant of the impact of any law and order legislation on racial minorities. But the piece is filled with the classic social liberal tendency to define problems as uniquely or solely afflicting racial minorities, when in fact the best chance for lasting political change that positively affects those minorities lies in demonstrating their universality. The question, as often, is whether social liberals are more interested in actually benefiting society in a way that helps everyone, including the traditionally oppressed, or are merely interested in demonstrating their superiority on issues of race and gender.
Start, for example, at the Tweet within the Storify that says, "Let's see... After Columbine, they passed a slew of "zero tolerance" laws. Guess which schools got the police officers and metal detectors?" Was the post-Columbine expansion of security disproportionately face by racial minorities and students from low socioeconomic backgrounds? Of course. Does this mean that only those students were negatively affected? Plenty of schools with predominantly white student bodies got police officers and metal detectors. Plenty of white students who were perceived as odd or different or unusual faced routine harassment and discrimination following Columbine. That's just the facts. The white students who endured such hardship deserve our attention and sympathy too, though advocating for their needs doesn't score any points for the person so advocating. The crackdown on difference post-Columbine and similar efforts generally afflict all kinds of people. They just do. And it is bizarre to me that social liberals are frequently so desperate to appear on the side of black people that they draw divisions between the problems affecting them from problems that affect everyone else. In a pluralistic democracy, you do minority groups no favors when you work to convince others that their problems are only theirs. What's the priority?
Yes, it's true: we live in a fundamentally racist society, and that means that laws will be enforced in a way that perpetuates racial oppression. That will be true of any legislation. Think of a huge piece of policy legislation like Obamacare. Is anyone under the misapprehension that Obamacare won't, in many instances, be applied unequally and unfairly, along racial or socioeconomic lines? To suggest that this is a reason not to support the legislation is perverse. Racism cannot be fought by avoiding structures and policies that might be applied in a racist manner. It can only be fought by attacking the root discrimination itself. Arguments like those from the Prison Culture Twitter feed suppose that they are taking racism more seriously, but in fact they underestimate racism, because they operate on the false assumption that racism can be combated through the avoidance of certain kinds of policy. That's without even getting into the way that this "anti-racism of avoidance" essentially lets racism dictate public policy.
As whoever wrote these Tweets knows better than I do, we already have effectively criminalized young black manhood. We don't need to imagine the mass incarceration of black men. We're already there! The forces of racist oppression will use any legal regime to lock up black people out of proportion with their numbers. They don't need the excuse of new legislation. We have to have the right to say "let's pass non-racist gun control legislation," even as we know that we will achieve imperfect results. If we give up that right, no progress for racial minorities or anyone else is possible.
Another issue, and one that's even harder for most people to talk about, is the way that social liberal positioning forbids the suggestion of problems for marginalized groups that are internal to those groups. Take, for example, the massive problem within the black community of black men shooting other black men. This is a hugely important topic for our discussion of gun control; it's one of the most consistent and terrible consequences of our gun culture. Yet many of my left-wing friends are unwilling even to discuss it, because they're so afraid of the perception that they are blaming black people for their own problems, or simply for not being "on black people's side" in some vague and useless way. For myself, blame is simply not the way to consider the problem; black-on-black gun violence is the product of a complex combination of forces, almost all of them beyond the control of the individuals directly affected. Black on black gun violence is without question a consequence of historical oppression and institutional racism, and addressing it will take structural change that acknowledges racism and seeks to fight it. But it's also true that positive change could come from within the black community itself. Stating this idea publicly is enough to make me persona non grata among those white liberals who see racial politics as first a vehicle for social sorting, for declaring who is more or less enlightened. Yet anyone who genuinely cares about the terrible violence that afflicts black America has to reckon with that reality.
I can think of almost no major change in American society that would do more to help black Americans than removing all of the guns from our society. The tweets correctly point out that school shootings are rare, although not nearly rare enough. But shootings are not rare. They are the opposite of rare, and they harm black people more than any other group. We are a country in which black people make up 13% of the population but suffer half the homicides. That's reality. Yes, efforts to criminalize gun possession would inevitably be used against those same black Americans. But with the numbers on gun violence against racial minorities as stark as they are, the net benefit would likely be huge.
I know that the specific argument from the Prison Culture Twitter is coming from a genuine and noble desire to address terrible structural inequality and racism. But the urge to define any and all problems first through the lens of their reference to minority groups threatens the ability to build mass action in a country that still has a dominant white majority. And while I am certainly not accusing this particular person of this, my time interacting with fellow left-wing people (of various self-definitions) suggests that there is a deeply unhealthy tendency among many of them to speak out in favor of racial minorities primarily as a way to position themselves against their peers. What's more, there is a constant stream of social liberal arguments that seem to make a fetish of counterintuitivity and condemnation of the wrongheadedness of other liberals. This "social liberalism as cultural competition" aspect of today's left-wing discourse is, I think you'll agree, filled with problematic and unhealthy tensions. I am deeply concerned with what I see as a growing divide between social liberalism and economic liberalism, between issues of racial and gender equity on one side and issues of class and economics on the other. This is disastrous for left-wing causes. These sets of issues are one and the same, and any worthwhile anti-racism movement will necessarily favor stricter gun legislation.
We have a crisis, in this country, a constants crisis, of gun violence. That issue must be addressed and addressed forcefully. And efforts to undermine our attempts to deal with such problems through reference to the persistent racial inequality that haunts all aspects of our society are terribly wrongheaded and self-defeating. Worse still, they reflect an American left that seems more concerned with deciding who is righteous than in doing the righteous thing.
Update: I got an email in response to this post which I would like to quote from, but the emailer did not give me permission to do so. Again, I have to ask: what is the purpose of social liberalism? Because right now, most people writing about social liberalism online appear to me to be far more interested in winning some sort of weird social competition than in actually fixing the material conditions that improve the lives of the groups they claim to be speaking for. No complaints about someone's privilege have ever done anything to materially improve the lives of those who lack that privilege. And they demonstrate the degree to which white liberals view minority groups as symbols rather than as human beings.
Lewis Gordon once wrote
The eyes that are evaded are the eyes that matter, the eyes that judge... . Whoever desires to be protected from these eyes accepts the core assumption of antiblackness-- the supremacy of whiteness. Such a figure experiences vertigo in the presence of whites; whites become the bottomless subjectivities at the edge of which, the body of which, there is the threat of slipping into facticity, slipping into being seen by "truly human" eyes. The exoticist is therefore not a masochist, for as it turns out he doesn't want to be seen. He wants to stand before innocent eyes, eyes incapable of understanding what stands before them, eyes that can look without seeing.That strikes me as a perfect example of many people who write online about social justice.
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