Black Gun Owners Speak Out About Facing a Racist Double Standard
Cory Hughes marched in Florida after Trayvon Martin was shot, in Ferguson for Michael Brown and in Baltimore for Freddie Gray. Last Thursday, the Black Lives Matter activist stood in a park in downtown Dallas giving a speech about Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, and his frustration with deaths like theirs.
“I basically told [the crowd] I’m tired of hashtags. We have to get to a place where we find a resolution — to where cops are not comfortable shooting black men and just turning them into a hashtag. That was basically my message: Enough is enough,” Hughes tells Rolling Stone. “Not only are these people becoming hashtags, but the cops, in 80 or 90 percent of these cases, they’re getting away scot-free, they’re getting a paid vacation. Usually, the white supremacist groups start a GoFundMe for them and, if they don’t end up back on the force, they get a golden parachute for killing a black man.”
After he spoke, Hughes, along with his brother Mark and some 2,000 others, took their protest to a downtown Dallas courthouse, where they held a moment of silence for victims of police brutality. As he marched, Mark Hughes carried a long gun slung across his chest. It’s legal in Texas to openly carry such guns, with or without a permit; Mark carried his that day in solidarity with Sterling and Castile, who was shot by a police officer after identifying himself as a licensed gun owner.
The Hughes brothers were marching back to the park shortly before 9 p.m. when sniper shots rang out. Soon after the shooting began, Mark flagged down a police officer and turned his gun in, worried he would be mistaken for the shooter. Their phones dead, the Hugheses didn’t realize as they helped redirect cars away from the scene that a tweet sent out by the Dallas Police Department containing a photo of Mark, erroneously identifying him as a suspect and asking for help tracking him down, was quickly spreading across the Internet.
“When I found out that my image had been released to the media as a suspect, I immediately feared for my life, because I thought I would just be another statistic — another, like my brother says, hashtag that would be gunned down at the hands of the DPD,” Mark says. “It was very traumatic.”
Mark’s photo was retweeted more than 40,000 times before midnight, and was re-published by a number of media outlets. The DPD, which questioned and released both brothers that night — Mark had been a person of interest, not a suspect — left the tweet up for more than 16 hours. Over the past week, the Hughes brothers say they have not stopped receiving death threats. The DPD has not apologized to Mark.
The Hugheses don’t consider themselves “gun nuts” or “Second Amendment apologists.” They’re not NRA members. They also aren’t members of the recently formed National African American Gun Association, nor the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, a Dallas-based group that advocates for black gun ownership. But Hughes’ experience, like Philando Castile’s, illustrates a double-standard that black gun owners say they experience regularly.