by Jay Ramasubramanyam
A little over a week ago, I was biking past my neighbour’s house. The kids, who are just about six or seven and are white, brandished their toy weapons and proceeded to “shoot me” with very cinematic voice overs. With shootings dominating the news, I couldn’t help but feel a tinge of abhorrence to kids playing with toy guns. Since the shooting of Tamir Rice in 2014 in Cleveland, Ohio to scores of other similar incidents which have led to the spread of movements like Black Lives Matter, my concern for toy guns as tools of imaginary play has amplified. However, this opinion of mine is not about shootings per se but about the pervasive power and privilege that mandate play in an environment of pre-existing racial divisions.
Growing up as a non-white kid in India, toy guns were far from a normal plaything. However, the observable normalization and ubiquity of guns in the U.S. and Canada raises the question whether violence is inherently normalized in society. If so, do toy guns represent a microcosm of such normalization? To what extent does race, privilege and the inherent power structures in our society act as a barometer of this so-called normality?
As bizarre as it may sound, despite my awareness of pre-existing power structures and white privilege in our society, it wasn’t until the day I was confronted by six-year-old white kids with toy guns that made me realize how embedded they truly are. This incident took me back to the video of the shooting of Tamir Rice in November 2014. A 12-year-old Black kid in a public park pointing his toy gun at passersby is an aggressor in the eyes of the “law;” however, the actions of my neighbours’ children wouldn’t be mistaken for legitimate violence, would they?
White privilege is something that only non-whites identify as a characteristic in a society, since many of those who hold such privilege are oblivious to its existence. Such obliviousness leads to perpetual racial divides and, among other things, gives white kids the right to brandish toy guns at passersby with no calamitous consequences whatsoever.
The implication of all this is how strategies of awareness at home concerning behaviour and play with faux weaponry have had to transform to adapt to such challenges. While children today are being educated to embrace racial forms of diversity, among others, a contradiction may also be presented simultaneously that alludes to the fact that our society may not be as accepting of diversity as we would like to believe.
Parents of non-white kids can no longer afford to preserve their children’s innocence and not discuss events of horrific shootings of Black youth and children, as their lives could depend on them having this information. Needless to say that inherent racial biases have for long characterized perceptions of criminal intent. The shooting of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who was described as a “big bad dude” by the police officers in the helicopters as officers on the ground were pursuing him, is a testament to race and “hypercriminality”, which has for long “justified” police malfeasance.
Initiating systemic changes in power structures continue to be the responsibility of the marginalized and the aggrieved. Racial biases in ownership of weaponry, both faux and otherwise, cannot be viewed as just being a part of academic rhetoric. Biases coupled with paranoia that a Black kid with a toy gun is a greater threat, is not only flawed but is also dangerous. As long as prejudicial views exist that imply that young white kids playing cops and robbers with toy guns are fun-loving, whereas kids of racial minorities involved in similar activities are predisposed and indoctrinated to commit violence, we will continue to see incidents that overtly exhibit power and privilege that comes with being of a dominant race.
This article first appeared in the Leveller Vol. 9, No. 2 (Oct/Nov 2016).
