Antiracist Challenges to the Gun Violence Debate

Abstract

researchers, activists and artists have demonstrated the devastating intergenerational effects of gun violence, among them trauma and disability/debilitation among survivors and kin of persons shot or killed. Following in the footsteps of work done by Jodi rios,1 Keona ervin2 and Barbara ransby,3 I conducted fieldwork in st. Louis, Missouri, between March 2018 and October 2019 on organizational forms, political subjectivities and transformative processes led by a Black-led coalition of organizations, actors and movements. I volunteered for the campaign “Close the Workhouse” and for the Bail Project. During this time, I attended protests, meetings among activists, public events, informal get-togethers, city hall interventions and, in 2020, a range of online events developed by a Black-led coalition of organizers in st. Louis. although the focus of my research was not gun violence, the issue appeared prominently throughout the time I spent in the st. Louis area. Contrary to the near-exclusive emphasis on mass shootings I found in national media coverage, I became interested in how Black organizers in st. Louis had been working to address broader problems of violence and reframe the debate to foreground the problems facing their neighborhoods, thereby providing an anti-racist intervention for how the issue of gun violence and its attendant structural conditions were discussed, analyzed and ultimately addressed.