The Strange Marriage of White American Manhood and Chickenfoot Shit Behavior In addition to highlighting the country’s ongoing racial divide, the Ferguson, Missouri tragedy reveals something interesting and seldom discussed about the concept of American manhood, and what counts as acceptable behavior for white men. It may be that universal conceptions of acceptable male behavior with their traditional emphasis on honor and physical courage have an underlying base of fear. In the U.S., however, where the traditional conception of white male conduct relies on guns and the glorification of the quick draw who shoots first and assesses the situation later, fear stands in full relief. The gun gets presented in our national discourse as the iconic instrument of freedom and exploration. This is the way an alleged peace-loving and freedom-loving people justify the historical and cultural ubiquity of an instrument of fear and impotence. Think about it. Images of the gun throughout different periods of U.S. history come to mind like a dumb internet slide show: the buckled pilgrim with his horn-shaped musket, the irregulars of the continental forces during the American Revolution with their rags and more regularly-shaped muskets, fully-armed with shotguns and knives Westward pioneers like Lewis and Clark, straw-hatted Southerners with their shotguns and pistols, legendary Western cowboys with pistols and bullet-decorated gun-belts, all the way up to today’s hillbillies and outdoors men with shotguns, semi-automatic pistols, and pick-up trucks. These are the iconic, popular images of American manhood. These are real American men. No need for ethnicity or complicating hyphens, these are the images of American men as white and American as the white in the red, white and blue. Now imagine the world outside the immediate frame of these captured images. Who are these guns mostly protecting these men from? There is always an other, either within the frame as a temporary ally soon to be betrayed, as in representations of the original Thanksgiving feast, or without the frame as already the enemy and villain to be feared, to be armed against. The pilgrims and the Westward pioneers protect themselves from the Native Americans who greeted them upon their arrival. The straw-hatted Southerners protect themselves from slaves hungry for freedom. The Western cowboys protect themselves from Native American tribes, many of which were displaced decades before by pilgrims and pioneers, and from Mexicans, who refused to leave what were once the most Northern states of their federation. There is always an other these guns are meant to protect these men from. Even the more contemporary armed white man in his pick-up truck rides in a world where he increasingly finds himself in the minority, feeling surrounded by African-Americans, Latinos and Asians, who he turns into bogeymen with monikers like criminals, animals, drug dealers, illegals, and terrorists, to name just a few. White American manhood is defined by fear of the dark, male other. This dusky other is always imagined as having the physical advantage, either because of his superior numbers, like Native American tribesmen earlier in the nation’s history and the Asiatic hordes looking to come across the seas in times of war and colonial adventurism in the far East, or because he is presumed physically gifted. Though the angry Arab indifferent to death because of his primitive belief in the rewards of Allah is a contemporary edition of the latter portrayal of dark males, the super-strong African-American men who continues to be a threat no matter how many bullets he has in him is the ultimate exemplar. When confronted with the imagined threat posed by African-American males, acceptable formulations of White male honor and physical courage are strangely and evidently fueled by fear. White men are allowed by the U.S. criminal justice system and much of the public discourse in the society to indulge in racist horror fantasies. White males, even police officers sworn to protect the law and by implication accepting of a greater risk to their physical well-being than the rest of us, are allowed to let their imagination run wild and kill as a consequence of their horrifying visions. If I understand all the reports about what happened to Michael Brown in Ferguson correctly, he was shot twice after a scuffle with police officer Darren Wilson. Never mind the competing accounts of who started the altercation, Wilson shot Brown from his police car. Brown, injured, then fled. Wilson got out of his car and told Brown to stop. Brown stopped by a light pole, turned around and according to Wilson, “he looked at me, he made like a grunting, like aggravated sound and he starts, he turns and he’s coming back towards me. His first step is coming towards me, he kind of does like a stutter step to start running.” He “grunts” like an animal? The word choice reveals more than Wilson can ever imagine. Wilson here envisions the injured teenager, who has difficulty breathing from fear and pain, as some sort of wild bison ready to charge. In fact, for Wilson, Brown is worse than a bison for he does Brown the dubious honor of attributing to the kid some sort of human consciousness: “At this point it looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that I’m shooting at him.” Wilson seems incapable of imaging that Brown can be hurt by a couple of bullets. In Wilson’s vision, Brown is morally and intellectually the equivalent of a beast, but his physical strength coupled with his very human maliciousness turns the scared boy into a threatening super being. With Wilson’s imagination running wild, it follows that he can not remember “how many” bullets he fired, but clearly remembers seeing “the last one go into him.” That is the one that brought Brown down for the last time and allowed Wilson to feel temporarily safe again. Under most other conceptions of manhood throughout history and throughout much of the contemporary world, Wilson’s account of a panicky, almost hysterical man shooting blindly and thoughtlessly an already-injured teenager would be a cause for shame and ostracism. In the United States, Wilson goes free from any penal consequence, has money raised for his extraneous legal defense, and well-paid pundits justify his less than heroic conduct in his chosen line of duty. The ideal of white American manhood is indeed a strange mix of racism, fear and guns.
Posted on: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 20:26:13 +0000
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