Civil Rights Under Fire? Race, Memory, and Militarized Masculinities in the Twenty-First-Century United States

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Simon Wendt; Professorin Dr. Catherine Whittaker
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology ; Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 569164615

The three-year project will analyze the civil rights memories that Latino and African American men are guided by and produce in several contemporary self-defense organizations in the post-civil rights era U.S. Historical memory - selective interpretations of the past that shape and frame identities, norms, and values in the present - affects how Men of Color view their role in the history of struggle, and it may inspire leadership styles, ideologies, symbols, and the aesthetics of liberation. Thus, joining self-defense groups may be a way for Men of Color to assert and redefine their masculinity and their rights as U.S. citizens. By taking a transdisciplinary in-depth oral history and ethnographic perspective, the project critically examines whether the perceived growth in ethnic minority armed defense groups is a reaction to a crisis and thus a new phenomenon, or whether it should be considered a revival of the civil rights movement. The project will focus on four research questions: 1. How do Men of Color who join Black or Latinx self-defense organizations use and interpret guns in their quest for full equality in the twenty-first century? 2. What role does the memory of the civil rights movement play in their activism? 3. To what extent do public perceptions and authorities’ reactions to POC self-defense groups echo the repressive actions that were taken against those groups in the 1960s and 70s? 4. How have the changing gender politics of current African American and Latinx militancy affected these organizations’ interpretations of masculinity, national belonging, and citizenship? By answering these questions, the project will fill important empirical and theoretical gaps in the scholarship on militarized masculinities among marginalized men in the twenty-first century U.S. A transdisciplinary perspective is necessary to answer these questions, which is why both subprojects combine ethnographic and historical approaches. Both build on case studies: subproject 1 studies Latino men in community defense organizations and gun clubs; subproject 2 focuses on Black men as gun club and militia members. The focus will be on Latino and Black self-defense organizations not only because of their growing visibility, but also because their work has been shaped by the memory of the civil rights struggle and a related tradition of interracial solidarity and collaboration. Probing historical memory sheds light on the institutional and historical conditions that shaped these groups in the present context of accelerating militarization and will help to make sense of the current authoritarian turn in the U.S. As memory and research of the civil rights movement is being actively repressed and forcibly forgotten be the current U.S. government, this research aims to salvage this material for future research and affected communities.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants