“Criminals and Mentally Ill People”

(otherwise known as black men and white men, respectively)

I am very very happy with today’s announcement that President Obama is taking executive action against gun violence. More gun regulation would be better, but this is a great step in the right direction. To me, this is unmitigated good news.

But. We have a huge problem with the way we talk about the people we need to keep from acquiring guns.

A New York Times article describing the details of the executive action today described various “provisions of the president’s plan that would help keep guns out of the hands of criminals or mentally ill people.”

Mentally ill people who shoot folks are still criminals . So why those two phrases?

Why refer separately to criminals with guns and mentally ill people with guns? It’s about race, people.

“Mentally ill” is what we call white male mass shooters. The deadliest shootings in recent American history were carried out by white men, many of whom openly flaunted their racist and sexist motives, but were still described as flawed, but touchingly human, mentally ill individuals.

Adam Lanza, who killed 20 first-graders and 6 teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School, was profiled on CNN as “an isolated young man with deteriorating mental health whose problems were not ignored but misunderstood and mistreated.” James Holmes, who shot 12 people in a Colorado movie theater, was described as an “outstanding student” and a “typical American kid,” who “kept to himself” and “didn’t seem to have many friends.” Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who massacred Bible study students at a black church in Charleston, SC while saying, “You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go” — he was called a “loner” until so much evidence of his racist agenda had been amassed that it could no longer be ignored. Robert Lewis Dear, who shot 12 people at a Planned Parenthood and later explained he did it so there would be “no more baby parts,” was described as “a big man, well-groomed, gentle and pleasant, but not much for chitchat,” and “dedicated to his family.”

White men are always humanized, even when they commit acts of unspeakable inhumanity.

Black men, on the other hand, are vilified even when they are the innocent victims of violence. Tamir Rice, whose shooter went free last week, was a 12-year-old child playing in the park, but the media excused his murder by emphasizing that he was “big for his age.” Michael Brown and other innocent black victims get called “thugs.”

“Criminal” is a racial code word.

Like “thug,” the word “criminal” is an ostensibly race-neutral word used to conjure up an image of degenerate black criminals, selling crack cocaine in the “inner city” and raping white women. As Michelle Alexander writes in The New Jim Crow:

What it means to be criminal in our collective consciousness has become conflated with what it means to be black, so the term white criminal is confounding, while the term black criminal is nearly redundant.

As Richard Nixon demonstrated with his wildly successful Southern Strategy, talking about “crime” and “criminals” is an incredibly effective way of appealing to white racist beliefs of black inferiority without getting caught. The most famous example of the Southern Strategy is President George H. W. Bush’s campaign ad using the image of black inmate Willie Horton to portray his opponent, Michael Dukakis, as soft on crime.

Distinguishing between “criminals” and “mentally ill people” when talking about gun violence is a signal to white people that they can calm down. Don’t worry, we’re not coming for white people’s guns. We just want to make sure black people can’t get them. And nobody likes maniacs who massacre first-graders either. Yeah, those dudes were white, but we’ll call them “mentally ill” to distinguish them from hard-working, God-fearing, salt-of-the-Earth white people like you. No one is coming for your guns. Feel better now?