Galvanizing Grief: Gun Violence, Maternal Politics and Pathways to Power

• In Event: Motherhood and Politics

Abstract

No issue has put maternal politics on the national landscape as centrally as recent efforts to curb gun violence. Mothers from across racial and class identities, both those who have lost children and those who have not, unite online and in advocacy groups like Moms Demand Action Against Gun Violence and Mothers of the Movement. Yet while these women are united in their efforts to change public policy around guns, their points of intervention and subsequent advocacy work are markedly different. While both white and Black women leverage the value of their privileged identity as mothers in a culture that values heteronormativity and feminine domesticity, white and Black women have very different drives and experiences in their advocacy.

Shannon Watts, a wealthy white woman and founder of Moms Demand Action, identifies her engagement with the organization on their website: “a mother of five who, prior to founding Moms Demand Action, was a stay-at-home mom and former communications executive. The day after the Sandy Hook tragedy, Shannon started a Facebook group with the message that all Americans can and should do more to reduce gun violence. The online conversation turned into a grassroots movement of Americans fighting for public safety measures that protect people from gun violence.” This Facebook group spurred Watts to lead a consumer advocacy campaign that called on restaurants like Starbucks, Chipotle and Chili’s to ban the open carry of firearms in their properties. The campaign was so successful that these companies banned open carry within two weeks, leveraging well-worn tactics of maternal activism as well as consumer politics. These small incremental policy changes led to more than a rule of decorum at a chain eatery, they situate the corporations involved as political actors and the hashtag activists as serious players in the gun debate. As Caroline Heldman notes, “If we take seriously the idea that corporations are political brokers and policy makers that require political accountability, then the high rates of consumer activism are a significant new form of grassroots activism.” I extend this argument to posit that consumer activism would be a natural fit for Watts and her allies, whose identity is steeped not only in maternal identity but also in a white, middle and upper class norm that recognizes their political power is connected to their wealth.

Using the same logics for activism as maternal activists before them, Black mothers who have lost their children, particularly Sybrina Fulton, mother of Trayvon Martin, and Lucy McBath, whose son Jordan Davis was killed by a white man who was eventually acquitted under Florida’s stand-your-ground laws, reached beyond their white peers to make change in their communities by running for elected office. Sybrina Fulton ran for Miami-Dade County Commissioner and Lucy McBath ran for and won a seat in the House of Representatives, now serving Georgia's 6th congressional district. These women began their public political lives as grieving mothers, then online advocates, then sought to become elected officials themselves.

Looking at Fulton and McBath’s social media engagements, this paper locates these women in a long lineage of Black mothers spurred to advocacy following the murder of their children, and makes the case that while there is solidarity across racial lines for both Black and white women who advocate against gun violence, Black women are pushing against a set of racial political realities that spurs them to reach for power found in electoral politics. Using theories of Black feminist epistemologies found in Patricia Hill Collins’ foundational work, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, and Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics as form of subjugation of life to the power of death, I center Fulton and McBath as women struggling to maintain and produce the humanity of their children in a society that always already strives to deprive them of life. Further, I use a frame of respectability politics to argue that even though Fulton and McBath lobby against white supremacist violence, they make their case from a rhetoric that functions to undercut efforts against over policing and subsequent violence endemic to poor Black communities. Both women’s status as members of the upper middle class provide a veil of acceptability among the cultural elite, but does little to change the real vulnerability of the less affluent.

This investigation, a discourse analysis of the women's interviews and social media platforms, examines the role of gender and racial identities’ impact on political behavior, and considers pathways for political change for maternal activists across communities. It offers further evidence of the development of maternal politics on the national stage, that while grounding heteronormativity, provides an access point to power for those privileged and marginalized by their maternal status.

Author

• Aidan Smith, Tulane University