Welcome to Walmart (Bam! Bam! Bam! You’re Dead)

Over at Commonweal.org, Fordham University professor Michael Peppard reflects with pointed honesty about how the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, opened up new vistas of realization for him on the entrenched disease of racism in America. Yet for Peppard, “the most horrifying example” of America’s “racist dirge” is the surveillance video of the shooting of John Crawford, killed last month in a Walmart in Ohio. I agree.

As Peppard points out, the situation in my home state of Ohio and many other open carry states “would be worthy of satire if it were not so tragic.” He highlights the case of an assault-rifle-carrying man in Tennessee who decided that “a school is a prime place to be able to hand out my leaflets and educate children that guns aren’t dangerous as people think they are.” Peppard observes:

A white man can wear a bullet-proof vest and carry a real assault rifle around the perimeter of a school. It gains him free publicity for his bizarre cause. A black man carries a BB gun (for sale by the store) around a few of its aisles and is shot on sight, from the side, by police.

Meanwhile here in Cincinnati, I ponder the prospect of open carry in our local Kroger store. The Tennessee man–his name is Leonard Embody–thinks I should just relax and get over it. “I don’t think I look terrifying. Other people may think I look terrifying, but that’s in their own minds and that’s something they should deal with … with maybe a psychologist.”

Whether I’m a policeman or your average Joe shopping for ice cream, my once-banal trip to Kroger now invites the scenario of nervous strangers making split-second judgments in the freezer aisle about who “looks terrifying” and who does not. God help the NRA card-carrying black man, trained and registered to carry, who walks into Walmart or Kroger with his gun while wearing anything but a 3-piece suit – universal code (I guess) for “safe and respectable” in the white world. Or is it hunting fatigues and a Cabella’s sporting goods cap?

Leonard Embody, our Tennessee hero, is right about one thing. This is something all of us have to “deal with,” and already it looks like most of us — not least our state and federal legislators — will need “maybe a psychologist” to sort it all out. Welcome to Walmart: May I get you a cart, a Rorschach Test, and a bullet-proof vest? And God help my children and yours, children of every color, victims already in this crossfire of American racialized culture and culturally racialized insanity.

I invite you to read Peppard’s piece here, as well as the comments thread. Is Peppard guilty, as one reader accuses him (and by implication other white scholars like myself) of a kind of self-congratulatory public hand-wringing about race, a bad case of white “selfie scholarship”? Or is he right to join with others of all races–albeit many of us rather late to the game–in communal lamentation for this “dark testament” of America’s original sin?

3 Responses to "Welcome to Walmart (Bam! Bam! Bam! You’re Dead)"

Simon Belmont says:

September 29, 2014 at 9:22 am

What a pleasure it must be for you, a white, liberal professor, to let two of your favorite hobby horses, guns and racism, out of the barn in the same article. Or perhaps even three if you count Walmart.

Now, as we all know, cosseted progressives are the final word when it comes to police shootings. When Michael Brown is shot, Chris Pramuk knows for a fact that it was a racist atrocity. The fact that he had just robbed a convenience store and then allegedly tried to take an officer’s gun is irrelevant. Then there is John Crawford. You, of course, know all there is to know about the story because of a few snippets of hazy video footage. That an eyewitness said Crawford was waving the gun around or that the officers on scene said they ordered him to drop the weapon multiple times doesn’t matter. Nope. Doesn’t fit that whole “dark testament” narrative.

Finally there is Leonard Embody, whom you derisively call a “hero.” I don’t know if he’s a hero, but he’s certainly no criminal. Whether you like it not, he is exercising his 2nd amendment rights. Also, in the link you posted, you’ll notice that his weapons are securely holstered. He’s not waving them at anybody. It also mentions that he has been arrested a number of times but never charged, thus dismissing the notion that he can open carry with no consequences. You then write this completely disingenuous sentence.

God help the NRA card-carrying black man, trained and registered to carry, who walks into Walmart or Kroger with his gun while wearing anything but a 3-piece suit – universal code (I guess) for “safe and respectable” in the white world.

In the real world a black man has much more to fear from another black man than he does whites or the police. Black on black crime is the true scourge of the African American community, but people will never hear that truth from the likes of you. If anyone is perpetuating the “American racialized culture and culturally racialized insanity” in this country it is you, you and all the other race-obsessors and fear-mongers. You neither educate nor heal. Rather you indoctrinate and divide.

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1. Christopher Pramuk says:
  
  September 29, 2014 at 3:08 pm
  
  Mr. Belmont,
  
  I had to look up the word “cosseted” (coddled, pampered, overindulged) but I guess if the term fits, there’s consolation in numbers. I’m on my way now to Starbucks, in my Prius, then to the faculty club for late morning drinks, where I’ll get juiced up for the daily delight of indoctrinating my fawning students with liberationist Marxism disguised thinly as Catholic social teaching, with quotes from Pope Francis and the Gospels liberally sprinkled in.
  
  Please pardon the sarcasm – my rhetorical stab at Mr. Embody, as you note, is probably not helpful. The thing is, my post is not about black on black crime, a topic worthy of discussion about which I’ve written elsewhere and broach in my classes. It’s disingenuous (though predictable) to bring it up in response to racial profiling (alleged). Nor is my post about staking out ground in the conservative-liberal-libertarian culture wars. The emotion (and rhetorical heat) behind my post is more personal than that. It rises from my Catholic faith in the transcendent dignity of human life and my hope – call it Christian or Marxist-Utopian or simply naïve – that we could build a more inclusive society where the dignity of all life is protected.
  
  It’s about the banal trip to Kroger, or any public space, where we are pressed into split-second judgments about others – we see, we judge, we act – based on complex and (yes) racialized social perceptions of who is more likely to be “dangerous” and who is more likely to be a “law-abiding citizen.” For parents of black children the stakes are precariously high when they hand their car keys to their son or daughter and send them to the grocery store for milk. There is no room for error – nor the perception of error – when you are black. (See the South Carolina case cited by Peppard.) Admittedly my post is not a reasoned argument so much as a lament, a cry of protest, on behalf of a community that feels itself besieged – yes, from within, to be sure, but no less and often more arbitrarily from without.
  
  What gives me some hope, though my post doesn’t reflect it, is our capacity as a society to think through and transform these painful realities as reasonably as we can via the law. (My post reflects more despair than hope on this point.) You’ll pardon me, in the meantime, if I don’t place much faith in the Mr. Embodys of the world to make reasoned judgments about who “looks terrifying” and who doesn’t. To pretend racial perception does not or will not come into play in laws and law enforcement around open carry or stand your ground is, in my (cosseted?) view, not only disingenuous but willfully ignorant. We see, we make split-second judgments, and we act, too often tragically. I include myself, by the way, in “we.” But I also include my son, a large, dark-skinned Haitian boy, who looks far more like the son of John Crawford than me. I have not yet figured out how to tell him his very appearance is going to be a problem.
  
  If you’ll pardon me, I need to sign out – back to my polished leather office chair and battered copy of Marx.
  
  Reply
Anon says:

October 13, 2014 at 4:12 pm

Brilliant piece.

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