I Shoot Therefore I Am?

This post reminded me of how the two-ness of being black while American permeates my life in ways big and small.

I like America. I drove from Atlanta to Northern California twice last year. I took a different route every time. I wanted to see the country at ground level. I learned a lot on the trips. One, you need to pick a favorite truck stop brand and stick with it. Brand consistency has never meant so much to me as when it came time to pee.

This is the Travel Center of America. Clean bathrooms. It matters after mile 821. copyright Tressie McMillan Cottom

I also learned that America is not New York or Chicago or Atlanta. I learned that in some places in this country it can still get dark enough to see the sky. And I learned why politics in this country is so vitrolic and FOX News exists. For one, this is still a tourist attraction:

The cottage tourism industry that has sprung up around Dollywood includes these little gems. Not that I think Dolly Parton would ever endorse a set of mammies (I hope). But it is still very much a thing. copyright Tressie McMillan Cottom

Despite the homogenity of media, ours is not a singular national culture. Place shapes that in some ways. How can you represent me in Atlanta the same way you represent someone in rural Oklahoma? We might both want the same big things — clean air, safe food, potable water — but I can see the similarities breaking down after that. For one, I want a gun in Oklahoma. It is quiet and dark and sparsely populated and people may not have ever seen someone who looks like me and, well, I would want a gun.

Making my way through rural America. Those dots out there? Some of them are homes. copyright Tressie McMillan Cottom

Having a gun isn’t that new to me. I am Southern. Even black Southerners do guns. You have to do guns in rural places. That dark-enough-to-see-sky? It may reveal the Milky Way but it also obscures critters and n’er-do-wells. A gun is handy for both.

My great-grandmother had a pearl-handled six-shooter given to her by her grandfather. She called it Little Lizzy. You knocked softly and waited patiently when you visited my great-grandmother because she came to the door after 5 PM with Little Lizzy cocked. I learned to respect guns as tools.

I also learned to respect guns as a kind of politics. I got that one from my mother. The least conflict driven person you are likely to ever meet, my mother joined the Black Panther Party because she couldn’t imagine any way to justice but through conflict. And the Party believed in guns. Owning our citizenship, despite the two-ness, was a critical Party platform. Whether you ever shot it, the idea was that owning a gun said you were American, no hyphens.

Mirroring the incident in Sacramento that had brought so much attention in 1967, on February 29, 1969, a group of Seattle Panthers led by Lt. Elmer Dixon gathered on the steps of the Capitol in Olympia to protest a bill that would make it a crime to exhibit firearms “in a manner manifesting an intent to intimidate others.” In contrast to the California demonstration, they did not enter the building and they were not arrested. (Photo: Washington State Archives)

I think I own a gun. Rather, somewhere a gun is owned in my stead. My grandfather bought me a darling little handgun when I started growing breasts. That could be correlation or causation. I do not know for sure. I also do not know where my gun is. After a lesson in cleaning and loading it, I got in two shooting lessons with my grandfather before my mother quietly put the gun away.

At every one of these intersections of identity, a gun is about something more. It’s about citizenship, fractional and full. It is about politics. It is about place. It is always about race. And fundamentally it is about being American. I may be most flummoxed of all by that last one. We rise to the level set by our beliefs. If it is American to shoot guns then we become shooters of guns. Perhaps there is another way.