Freedom is the image of freedom. In the United States, “freedom”, as it has been enunciated and experienced by the majority of citizens, means freedom to move and the power to effectuate that movement. In many respects, that movement comes at a cost to someone else in the form of restriction. Much as Charles W. Mills asserted in The Racial Contract, the Western ideal of self is often in direct contrast to an Other that helps define the fully realized self in stark relief.
As Hayden White points out, the creation of the “Wild Man” illustrates “the technique of ostensive self-definition by negation,” the characterization of oneself by reference to what one is not.1
Being a person, being white, meant—definitionally—not being a subperson…. Orlando Patterson argues that freedom has been generated from the experience of slavery, that the slave establishes the norm for humans.2
Thus you also get Joel Kovel in White Racism detailing the psychohistorical origins of some of these tendencies and impulses.
The result of these cultural manipulations has been to ensure to the black person a preassigned degraded role, no matter where he turned. [...] Thus black people have been the last to be included into the democratic equation. Such participation requires full and equal selfhood; and while American culture provided selfhood to most, it needed some left-over people to degrade so that the majority could rise.3
White people, especially White men, determine the degree to which they possess freedom in direct comparison to those who do not possess freedom. This explains the lingering lure of racial discrimination on a personal, psychological level. Clear distinctions in freedom of movement make obvious differences not only in status but also in this imagistic understanding of freedom.
(cued to 11:22)
Interviewee: White privilege is probably the freedom to move through the world fearlessly in a way that Black people cannot move through the world. That you can take advantage of much opportunit[y] with much less fear, and an assumption that you’ll be treated equally with all other White people.
This physical demonstration of fearless movement reflects all other types of freedom accorded to such a person.
But now in our overzealousness as a nation in fetishizing one particular symbol of freedom—freedom of the gun—we are at a point in history where the image of freedom threatens to steal all actualized aspects of freedom. This is true even for the ones who live by the gun, by the culture or philosophy of gun possession. Now even other White people are in direct danger by this inviolability of gun possession and gun utilization; now, even other White people are in direct danger of other White people. And it seems this danger is infinitely potentiated by the fact that it is that segment of the population that is widely seen or supposed to be at the top of the societal pyramid—White men—who are so disaffected that they are the ones turning the gun on their fellow citizens.
Will our culture sacrifice itself on the altar of freedom so that certain men of status can keep exercising their freedom to shoot in crowded places? This is the question. It’s not just about the “2nd Amendment.” It’s about the power of some men to exorcize demons of impotence through the mechanism of the trigger so that any several of us are offered up in exacting sacrifice. Are we willing to make that exchange just so some men can demonstrate their ultimate power and strength over society? And when I say society here, I mean embodied society made of flesh and bone, of little girls being separated from mothers as a mass shooter targets a shopping mall; of everyday folks trying to bring food home for dinner that night; of tiny schoolaged children being plucked off one by one to satisfy every grievance some male holds against the world at large. The victims’ very bodies are that killer’s balm, his recompense.
I single out men because far more men than women commit acts of mass killings. I single out White men because of their unique susceptibility to aggrieved entitlement. These men feel they must even some epic score, and the gun restores some measure of balance of power. In fact, the gun can tip the scales, if there lies in power utter destruction and waste. These men would rule over desolation, just to satisfy their need to be able to move through society as no one else can.
1 Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract, p. 43.
2 Ibid., p. 58.
3 Joel Kovel, White Racism, pp. 195, 196.