In the year 1968, a group of housewives in Dearborn, Michigan, then a nearly all-white suburb of Detroit, gathered for a workshop on how to shoot a gun. The women at the pistol range, mostly late-middle age and grandmotherly, were reacting to rhetoric from Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign, which fixated on a so-called crime wave. They were scared, defensive, willing to pick up a gun as a guard against what Nixon called “cities enveloped in smoke and flame”.
The neighboring city of Detroit was 40% Black, and the “crime” supposedly overtaking US cities meant, in this context, Black people, and white suburbia’s racist fear of them. Nixon knew this, though he didn’t say it outright – “You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the Blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to,” he once said, as quoted in the opening minutes of White with Fear, a new documentary on decades of Republican political strategy to stoke and manipulate white racial resentment.
