Legally Armed but Presumed Dangerous: An Intersectional Analysis of Gun Carry Licensing as a Racial/Gender Degradation Ceremony

Abstract

This article analyzes gun carry licensing as a disciplinary mechanism that places african american men in a liminal zone where they are legally armed but presumed dangerous, even as african americans now experience broadened access to concealed pistol licenses (CPls) amid contemporary U.s. gun laws. Using observational data from now-defunct public gun boards in Metropolitan Detroit, this article systematically explores how CPls are mobilized by administrators to reflect and reinforce racial/gender hierarchies. This article broadens scholarly understandings of how tropes of criminality shape racialized men's encounters with the state beyond nonvoluntary, coercive settings and unpacks how race and gender interlock to shape these encounters. i extend insights from intersectionality scholarship to examine gun board meetings as degradation ceremonies whereby african american men are held accountable to controlling images of Black masculinity in exchange for a CPl. This article sharpens the conceptual apparatus that accounts for marginalized men's subordination vis-à-vis the state by focusing on the provision of legitimate violence and revealing the persistent, if paradoxical, mobilization of legitimate violence in the reproduction of racial/gender hierarchies.

Note passing as gendered practices of public ambiguity in a hyper‐masculine organization

“…Harold Garfinkel (1956) coined the term degradation ceremonies, originally as a conceptual framework for understanding individuals' encounters with the state as having a regimenting effect by creating feelings of shame (Van Cleve, 2016). Jennifer Carlson (2018) argued that such ceremonies are often used as public dramatizations of gender and racial hierarchies, when people are differentially located around race and gender intersections and are given a different institutional treatment based on what is expected of them. Not all note-passing degradations remained covert.…”

“You’re still an angry man”: Parole boards and logics of criminalized masculinity

“…Symbolic images of Black male criminality like the “superpredator” have been used to justify the surveillance and incarceration of large numbers of Black and Brown men (Alexander, 2010; Kilgore, 2015). Outside the criminal justice system, state agents mobilize the racially gendered trope of “the thug” and its implications of criminality to discipline Black men in administrative processes like gun license revocation hearings (Carlson, 2018). In all these instances, images of racialized male deviance facilitate and justify state violence against men of color.…”

Black Femininity and Stand Your Ground: Controlling Images and the Elusive Defense of Self-Defense

“…The implications of these controlling images or stereotypes are especially complicated when considered through the lens of SYG and concealed firearm licensing. Carlson (2018) in her examination of concealed carry licensing in Michigan finds that the whole process puts Black men in a “liminal zone where they are legally armed but presumed dangerous” (p. 205). Traditionally, the right to self-defense has been the realm of White men, but more recently with the liberalization of gun carry and self-defense laws, that realm has expanded to officially include groups, people of color in particular, who have historically been stigmatized as violent or dangerous (Carlson, 2018).…”