White Men, Guns…And That Masculinity Thing

About 50% of the guns in the US are owned by only 3% of the gun owners.

Think about that. What if 50% of the cars were owned by 3% of the drivers? Houses with attached parking lots instead of lawns would not be totally uncommon.

When I used to shoot at local ranges as common site was of a white man who had been frightened into buying a gun to defend his home ( a statistical probability of a inner city gangbanger wandering out into the ‘burbs or rural areas to “rob de whidte folks” being on the order of winning the Powerball lottery) – acquiring his first, and probably only pistol. Fumbling with the damn thing during the Free  Hour” of range time, trying to hit a man sized target at 15 feet. Discovering it just doesn’t work like in the movies, where everyone but the “bad guys” is a crack shot. Few, if any of these guys ever realized that by the simple act of gun ownership, they had increased the chance that  someone in their house would be shot by something on the order of 2,000% Ten or twenty thousand times more likely someone would be shot in the house by a family member, than of said mythical black gangbanger out to rob only moderately better off poor white folks.

I know it is popular with the racist buffoons and their associated black conservative Lawn Jockeys to talk about the city “murder rate”.

Fact is –

In 2016, there were more than 38,000 gun-related deaths in the U.S. — 4,000 more than 2015, the new CDC report on preliminary mortality data shows. Most gun-related deaths — about two-thirds —in America are suicides, but an Associated Press analysis of FBI data shows there were about 11,000 gun-related homicides in 2016, up from 9,600 in 2015. The increase in gun-related deaths follows a nearly 15-year period of relative stasis.

Meaning 2/3rd of all gun deaths every year in the US are either accidental or suicide. If you break that down, nearly 27,000 folks – mostly white, died by suicide or accident vs 5,000 homicides committed by black folks, whose victims were over 90% fellow black folks, and 90% of the homicides were committed within 10 miles of an urban center.

So what is the real problem?

Manhood.

And specifically the manhood of the low educated white male Trump supporter.

The AR-15…Mas Murder Weapon of Choice

Why Are White Men Stockpiling Guns?

Research suggests it’s largely because they’re anxious about their ability to protect their families, insecure about their place in the job market and beset by racial fears.

Since the 2008 election of President Obama, the number of firearmsmanufactured in the U.S. has tripled, while imports have doubled. This doesn’t mean more households have guns than ever before—that percentage has stayed fairly steady for decades. Rather, more guns are being stockpiled by a small number of individuals. Three percent of the population now owns half of the country’s firearms, says a recent, definitive study from the Injury Control Research Center at Harvard University.

So, who is buying all these guns—and why?

The short, broad-brush answer to the first part of that question is this: men, who on average possess almost twice the number of guns female owners do. But not all men. Some groups of men are much more avid gun consumers than others. The American citizen most likely to own a gun is a white male—but not just any white guy. According to a growing number of scientific studies, the kind of man who stockpiles weapons or applies for a concealed-carry license meets a very specific profile.

These are men who are anxious about their ability to protect their families, insecure about their place in the job market, and beset by racial fears. They tend to be less educated. For the most part, they don’t appear to be religious—and, suggests one study, faith seems to reduce their attachment to guns. In fact, stockpiling guns seems to be a symptom of a much deeper crisis in meaning and purpose in their lives. Taken together, these studies describe a population that is struggling to find a new story—one in which they are once again the heroes.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO HARD WORK?

When Northland College sociologist Angela Stroud studied applications for licenses to carry concealed firearms in Texas, which exploded after President Obama was elected, she found applicants were overwhelmingly dominated by white men. In interviews, they told her that they wanted to protect themselves and the people they love.

“When men became fathers or got married, they started to feel very vulnerable, like they couldn’t protect families,” she says. “For them, owning a weapon is part of what it means to be a good husband a good father.” That meaning is “rooted in fear and vulnerability—very motivating emotions.”

But Stroud also discovered another motivation: racial anxiety. “A lot of people talked about how important Obama was to get a concealed-carry license: ‘He’s for free health care, he’s for welfare.’ They were asking, ‘Whatever happened to hard work?’” Obama’s presidency, they feared, would empower minorities to threaten their property and families.

The insight Stroud gained from her interviews is backed up by many, many studies. A 2013 paper by a team of United Kingdom researchers found that a one-point jump in the scale they used to measure racism increased the odds of owning a gun by 50 percent. A 2016 study from the University of Illinois at Chicago found that racial resentment among whites fueled opposition to gun control. This drives political affiliations: A 2017 study in the Social Studies Quarterly found that gun owners had become 50 percent more likely to vote Republican since 1972—and that gun culture had become strongly associated with explicit racism.

or many conservative men, the gun feels like a force for order is a chaotic world, suggests a study published in December of last year. In a series of three experiments, Steven Shepherd and Aaron C. Kay asked hundreds of liberals and conservatives to imagine holding a handgun—and found that conservatives felt less risk and greater personal control than liberal counterparts.

This wasn’t about familiarity with real-world guns—gun ownership and experience did not affect results. Instead, conservative attachment to guns was based entirely on ideology and emotions.

WHO WANTS TO BE A HERO?

That’s an insight echoed by another study published last year. Baylor University sociologists Paul Froese and F. Carson Mencken created a “gun empowerment scale” designed to measure how a nationally representative sample of almost 600 owners felt about their weapons. Their study found that people at the highest level of their scale—the ones who felt most emotionally and morally attached to their guns—were 78 percent white and 65 percent male.

“We found that white men who have experienced economic setbacks or worry about their economic futures are the group of owners most attached to their guns,” says Froese. “Those with high attachment felt that having a gun made them a better and more respected member of their communities.”

That wasn’t true for women and non-whites. In other words, they may have suffered setbacks—but women and people of color weren’t turning to guns to make themselves feel better. “This suggests that that these owners have other sources of meaning and coping when facing hard times,” notes Froese—often, religion. Indeed, Froese and Mencken found that religious faith seemed to put the brakes on white men’s attachment to guns.

For these economically insecure, irreligious white men, “the gun is a ubiquitous symbol of power and independence, two things white males are worried about,” says Froese. “Guns, therefore, provide a way to regain their masculinity, which they perceive has been eroded by increasing economic impotency.”

Both Froese and Stroud found pervasive anti-government sentiments among their study participants. “This is interesting because these men tend to see themselves as devoted patriots, but make a distinction between the federal government and the ‘nation,’ says Froese. “On that point, I expect that many in this group see the ‘nation’ as being white.”

Investing guns with this kind of moral and emotional meaning has many consequences, the researchers say. “Put simply, owners who are more attached to their guns are most likely to believe that guns are a solution to our social ills,” says Froese. “For them, more ‘good’ people with guns would drastically reduce violence and increase civility. Again, it reflects a hero narrative, which many white man long to feel a part of.”

Stroud’s work echoes this conclusion. “They tell themselves all kinds of stories about criminals and criminal victimization,” she says. “But the story isn’t just about criminals. It’s about the good guy—and that’s how they see themselves: ‘I work hard, I take care of my family, and there are people who aren’t like that.’ When we tell stories about the Other, we’re really telling stories about ourselves.”

HOW TO SAVE A WHITE MAN’S LIFE

Unfortunately, the people most likely to be killed by the guns of white men aren’t the “bad guys,” presumably criminals or terrorists. It’s themselves—and their families.

White men aren’t just the Americans most likely to own guns; according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they’re also the people most likely to put them in their own mouths and pull the trigger, especially when they’re in some kind of economic distress. A white man is three times more likely to shoot himself than a black man—while the chances that a white man will be killed by a black man are extremely slight. Most murders and shoot-outs don’t happen between strangers. They unfold within social networks, among people of the same race.

A gun in the home is far more likely to kill or wound the people who live there than is a burglar or serial killer. Most of the time, according to every single study that’s ever been done about interpersonal gun violence, the dead and wounded know the people who shot them. A gun in the home makes it five times more likely that a woman will be killed by her husband. Every week in America, 136 children and teenagers are shot—and more often than not, it’s a sibling, friend, parent, or relative who holds the gun. For every homicide deemed justified by the police, guns are used in 78 suicides. As a new study published this month in JAMA Internal Medicine once again shows us, restrictive gun laws don’t prevent white men from defending themselves and their families. Instead, those laws stop them from shooting themselves and each other…(More)

 

Giant Negro Alert!

Apparently the infamous Giant Negroes of Jim Crow racism lore still walk among us!

People see black men as larger and stronger than white men — even when they’re not, study says

Even if white and black men are the same heights and weights, people tend to perceive black men as taller, more muscular and heavier. So said a psychological survey, published Monday in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, exploring stereotypes about perceptions of male bodies.

What’s more, the study found, nonblack participants believed black men to be more capable of physical harm than white men of the same size. The results also indicated that nonblack observers believed that police would be more justified to use force on these black men, even if they were unarmed, than white male counterparts.

“Unarmed black men are disproportionately more likely to be shot and killed by police, and often these killings are accompanied by explanations that cite the physical size of the person shot,” John Paul Wilson, an author of the study and a psychologist at New Jersey’s Montclair State University, said in a statement Monday.

The psychologists noted that, in the wake of police shootings, the physical size of those killed frequently becomes a focal point. Tamir Rice, who was shot and killed on a Cleveland playground in 2014 while holding a replica gun, was described as “menacing” after his death.

“He’s 5-feet-7, 191 pounds. He wasn’t that little kid you’re seeing in pictures. He’s a 12-year-old in an adult body,” Steve Loomis, president of Cleveland’s Police Patrolman’s Association, told Politico magazine in 2015. “Tamir Rice is in the wrong.”

Trayvon Martin, a Florida teen who was shot and killed by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman in 2012.

And in 2012, after George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin, “images circulated depicting Martin as older and larger than he was,” the authors of the new study wrote. “In one notorious example, people widely shared a photograph of a man with facial tattoos in what was purported to be an up-to-date representation of Martin. In fact, it was a rap musician known as the Game who was in his 30s in the photograph.”

Wilson and his colleagues at the Miami University of Ohio and the University of Toronto conducted seven experiments, asking 950 online participants to gauge the physical and threatening characteristics of men, based on male faces and bodies.

In one of the studies, for instance, survey participants gauged men’s height and weights given only photographs of male faces. Of the 90 male faces, half of the men were black and the other half were white. The researchers used images of high school football quarterbacks being recruited to play college ball (therefore their height and weight data were publicly available to the scientists).

Those surveyed rated black men to be consistently larger — even though that was not, in reality, the case. Based on just the faces, they estimated that the black men were slightly taller (an average of 72 inches vs. 71 inches tall) and a bit heavier, at an average of 181 pounds for black men but 177 pounds for white men.

Another study asked participants to match the athlete’s faces to a series of illustrated bodies. These illustrations ranged from the depiction of a slender male body to a shredded physique, not unlike that of former NFL player, actor and deodorant pitchman Terry Crews. As in the cases of height and weight, participants rated black men as more muscular.

To gauge people’s perceptions of strength, the study authors created a pool of athlete profile photos from a group of black and white men who could bench-press the same weights, on average. Participants judged the black men (from “Not at all strong” to “Very strong”) as stronger.

“We found that these estimates were consistently biased,” Wilson said. “Participants judged the black men to be larger, stronger and more muscular than the white men, even though they were actually the same size.”

The psychologists asked participants to gauge the men’s capability of causing physical harm. The researchers also wanted to know, if the men in the photos were acting aggressively, whether participants thought police would be justified in using force while making an arrest. Black observers did not rate black men as more likely to cause harm.

But nonblack participants did. These participants also indicated that, if police were to use force to subdue the men, it was more likely to be justified in the cases where the men were black. That is, although black and white participants equally overestimated the strength of black men, only nonblack observers considered the black men to be more dangerous.

“Participants also believed that the black men were more capable of causing harm in a hypothetical altercation and, troublingly, that police would be more justified in using force to subdue them, even if the men were unarmed,” Wilson said. “Our research suggests that these descriptions may reflect stereotypes of black males that do not seem to comport with reality.”

The psychologists pointed out that limiting the photos to faces of football players — a sport that puts a premium on strong, large bodies — could skew the results, but they said they would expect similar trends in a broader sample pool of black and white faces.

The study authors also noted that these hypothetical scenarios and results do not necessarily translate into the real world.

“It would be valuable for future research to investigate whether the biases that we have observed here manifest in face-to-face interactions outside of the laboratory,” they wrote in the study. “Despite this limitation, we believe that the consistency of the effects that we have observed from multiple sets of face and body photographs is quite striking on its own.”

Across the United States, the average black man and the average white man are roughly the same height and weight. According to what data are available, such as information taken from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention surveys, the average white man older than 20 weighs 199 pounds. So does the average black man. Height averages for black and white men are within a centimeter of each other, with the average white man being slightly taller at 5-foot-10.

 

Why I Don’t Sleep With White Guys

Ok…Now that I got your attention – This one isn’t about me.

Not that it’s any great loss to the gay community – I’m a heterosexual guy who likes the ladies.

But this one caught my eye from a Student in Canada. Interesting viewpoint, since it’s now in style in some parts of America for some black women to get their “swirl” on. And I certainly have run into black guys “who only date white women”. So I wonder if the reverse sort of thing is going on with those women. And do some of those women feel the same way?

And no – the eye candy isn’t the author – I just couldn’t find a decent pic..

They say nothing comes without a price. However, in the case of being one of the only coloured girls in my city, nothing comes without a race.

I live in a predominately white city. Not by choice (I’m from Toronto), but to attend university. When I first got to the city, I thought people would be incredibly racist and I’d be excluded and snubbed by my peers. Well, the opposite happened.

Arrogance aside (I promise), everywhere I went, I was white men’s object (emphasis onobject) of desire. And it wasn’t just white men — all races of men I’ve never encountered, but white men seemed the most enthralled by my presence. But the initial adoration and my swelled ego soon subsided after I realized that men were not attracted to me for being just a “pretty face” — I was being objectified, exoticized and sexualized for being one of few coloured girls in a sea of white men. I felt alone. And more importantly, I felt disgusted with myself.

Feminist, social activist and African American author bell hooks terms this kind of attraction to the ‘Othered’ body as “Eating the Other.” This is the phenomenon where white men as well as the media view coloured women’s bodies, especially black women’s, as a site of difference. The coloured body is stereotypically everything the white woman’s body is not: she is not “pure,” “fair,” or “docile.” Rather, her body represents deviance, darkness, temptation, evil, and hypersexuality. This detrimental image generates a deep sense of desire and adventure within the white man — a desire to colonize her body — ‘eat’ it up, and use it to come to know himself.

Through fucking a coloured woman, the white man transcends his ‘whiteness’ and innocence, moving into more experienced and dangerous territory. Literally through her body, he learns what he is and what he is not. He gains access to cross the border into a dark territory that only he, of all his friends, has yet to venture to. But after ‘consuming’ her multiple times, he becomes sick and repulsed, as with any overconsumption of food, and spits her out.

I found hooks’ theory to be overwhelmingly comforting. It came at a time when I was trying to make sense of what was happening to my body and how it was being perceived. It especially came at a time when I found out the guy I had been seeing had a white girlfriend and was sleeping with me to finally make his fantasy of fucking black girls come true (wasn’t I lucky to be the first?). As a mixed-race girl, I also found it unsettling that the colour of my skin allowed people to label me as “Black,” or as something tropical and exotic — it was always one of the two. I was getting sick of being approached at bars by white men, changing their pick up line from “Are you an angel? ‘Cause it looks like you fell outta heaven.” to “I love black people. I have black friends, you know — now can I take you home?”

Sometimes it was more of an excited squeal, a wide-eyed gawk, their hands shaking as they coyly tried to place their hands on my ass, exclaiming, “I’ve never danced with a black girl before,” looking at me the same way one would attack a Quarter (Dark Meat) Chicken Dinner at Swiss Chalet. Dressing up in cheetah print made it worse. My skin colour and mixed heritage had given me a label I didn’t like — that “Black” girl at the bars, that “Island girl” on the bus. Nobody knew what I was, so I was immediately placed in a stereotypical category that both separated me from others and made me mysterious. I was always that girl, not just a girl.

After months of self-hatred, feeling dirty inside and out and wondering what I was doing wrong, I finally started to come to terms with what was happening around me. Being a racial minority female in a city of racially dominant men made me exotic. I was a hot coloured commodity in a rather colourless city, because they had so few “people like me.” The exotification of women comes from being that racialized woman — the Other kind of woman who does not carry “white” features or practices “white” culture.

It is not a compliment, because like eroticization, it sexualizes, objectifies and racializes the female body, jamming it into a tight space where hypersexuality, primitiveness, danger, temptation and difference are forced upon us. The exotification of the racialized body is a way for non-racialized subjects to, like hooks reminds us, come to know themselves. By casting coloured women as different, they maintain the status quo of race and sex dominance while marginalizing, sexualizing, and dehumanizing coloured women.

This is not to say I have become the mad mixed woman in the attic and have cast off all white men. It’s also not to say that this can’t happen with all races of men — I just have yet to find an interracial relationship where my difference isn’t at the forefront. I have yet to find that guy who hasn’t used me to see if sleeping with me makes him a new man, or a guy who hasn’t made the wretched “I love black people” disclaimer upon meeting me.

Maybe I’m just looking in the wrong place. But I am speaking to something more structural than just the colour of my skin and people’s reactions to it; I am talking about privilege, racism, colonialism — systems and institutions of power and hierarchy that allow for women of colour to be exotified and Othered; to be treated as sex objects and animals instead of humans. To be treated by non-coloured men as cheapened territory that becomes a game of conquering. Until I find that guy and regain my trust in white men, I’ve saved myself from being checked off someone’s “To Do” list again. And although I could be missing out, it’s a good feeling to know I’m finally in control. And it feels great.

 

Talking Heads Stir Paranoia Among White Men

Listening to Glenn Beck and Michelle Maliken this week you would have to believe that every old white guy in the country has a bulls eye painted on his back. White victimization is a popular string among the racist set, where a long line of perceived disadvantages manufacture the justification for hate.

Bread Line Statue at Franlin Delano Roosevelt Memorial

The target audience for this currently is disaffected older white males, who are suffering from the recession/depression which was manufactured by failed conservative policies. Obviously, it is Beck and his kindred talking heads job to point the blame at Minorities – instead of squarely at folks like him who enabled the crippling of the nation’s economy.

Turns out there is some real pain out there to leverage racial hatred from –

Older white males hurt more by this recession