Queer Eye’s Karamo Brown: the national gun debate needs to address black lives

On Queer Eye, the Netflix reboot of the early 2000s makeover show, activist and social worker Karamo Brown is in charge of having the difficult conversations: He’s talked someone through a photo album of a late relative, walked another through their social anxieties, and maneuvered a two-hour conversation with a white, Trump-supporting cop about police brutality.

But when news broke of a mass shooting in a Parkland, Florida, school — which killed 17 people and injured more than a dozen others — Brown said it shocked him: He graduated from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 1999, and Aaron Feis, a football coach who died in the gunfire, was his classmate.

“Seeing people die at the hands of guns as a black man is not new,” Brown told me at a Washington, DC, coffee shop Saturday. “But to see students running through the same hallways I used to walk through was really hard.”

On Saturday, Brown joined the hundreds of thousands of March for Our Lives protesters in DC, calling for legislators to act on gun violence. I spoke with him afterward about how the national conversation around gun control has developed and where he sees its potential. Below is our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity.

Why do you think this gun control message resonated now? Sandy Hook, we said never again. Columbine, the country said never again.

I think where we are at as a country — we are so fed up with so many different things that I think this is sort of the boiling point. Not to say we weren’t fed up with the other moments. Those were really hard and unimaginable. But politically, as a climate and as a country, we were at a state where we were coexisting in a very friendly way.

But now people are tired. They are tired of being treated as third-class citizens, fourth-class citizens. Those vocal high school students — their experience came in a time of history that allowed our world to be open and ready to hear them.

So it’s almost that protesting under Trump has become second nature to so many more now?

Before, it wasn’t.

Can I say something? Something that I have been a little shocked about is the lack of media coverage of the students of color coming out of Douglas. As a student that came out of there, maybe 30 to 40 percent — I don’t know what it is — are either black, Latino, or Asian. There’s a huge queer, LGBT student population. And I just have not heard those voices. That doesn’t take away from them. But I wish that the media would have decided that it was necessary for all voices to be heard right now.

What’s missing from the national gun control conversation right now?

We are finally having a conversation that strategically supports gun reform that is going to inadvertently affect everyone. But when we start talking about the other layers, especially when it comes to people of color, that has to be unpacked. Because we systemically have not valued black lives that we should.

So when we hear black lives being carelessly taken by gun violence, we just assume that it is the norm — that it is okay. There becomes a conditioning that black lives are expendable. Or Latino lives are expendable. People of color are expendable.

So when we talk about to Republicans, and talk about this, I’m glad a broader conversation happened but I think it’s up to the communities of color to make sure that we are being heard right now. As we are addressing this, we need to address these other offshoots.

When we have seen these movements, like Black Lives Matter, gain a national platform, they are often vilified. Some on the right have even compared them to hate groups. So how have you seen that movement — groups like BLM — fit into this larger gun control conversation?

Well, they are this movement. Black Lives Matter is the gun movement. We forget that when we started protesting against Trayvon Martin’s death, it was because he was shot by someone that should not have shot him.

The media has dismissed, again, the black bodies and the communities of color. I do think that the more we bring this up and bring this to the forefront, [the more] it will become a conversation and a topic.

Unfortunately, women, people of color, the LGBT community, to feel equal, we have always had to fight a little bit harder than communities who have had privilege. So when we are talking about lives and our lives being policed and our lives being harmed by gun violence, we have to work a little bit harder.

It breaks my heart that we put the responsibility on those that are being oppressed to lift themselves out of that oppression, but it’s what made us strong as communities. If you are not going to recognize that the Black Lives Matter movement was the catalyst for this movement, we have to work harder to make you understand that our lives and our bodies need just as much.

You said the country was ready to have this broader gun control conversation now. Do you think it is ready to accept that intersectionality?

I am hopeful. The show that I am on, Queer Eye, it’s all about reaching out across. We are different. But the response has been, “Oh, my gosh, I didn’t know how to approach this conversation, and I’m grateful.” So I feel like people are ready. I posted two days ago about how people should stop saying “I don’t see color” when talking about race issues.

I hear that so often in Congress.

I’m like, you see color. You need to say you see color because by saying you don’t, you are basically dismissing our heritage. And even that video got so many comments. So I am optimistic that people are ready. If we can put a sense of openness to reach out, then I think we will be able to get there.

I watched the third episode of Queer Eye, with the cop Cory. How do you start the conversation to change people’s minds?

First of all, by just listening. A lot of times we are just fighting to be heard and no one wants to be the first one to step up. Especially when you are talking about the left and the right. Black lives. Police officers.

I think — and I can’t tell you how many times me and my friends have this conversation because I get frustrated; I didn’t make the problem, so why do I have to be the big person to solve it? But that’s just what it is. So I take that responsibility. Like with that episode, my reaction was to be turned off. I didn’t want to assist him.

What did we not see of that conversation?

He and I took a two-and-a-half-hour car ride that got chopped into two and half minutes. During that car ride, I made it a point to connect on the things that made us alike. Talk about us both being athletes, the music we liked. Us both being fathers. A lot of times we are so busy seeing the things that make us different that we don’t take time to see what makes us alike. And then we went into a very transparent conversation about my distrust of police officers.

He expressed he had never had a situation, an altercation, with someone of color, but anytime he walks to a car, whether it’s a person of color or white, he’s scared. He doesn’t know whether the person he is walking up to had a bad day, is on drugs or is doing anything. You walk up, and the moment you walk up, they can pull out a gun and shoot you. And for just a second, I saw the fear of putting yourself out there.

As much as I have a complicated relationship with police officers in this country as a black man, I have still called on them when I need help. It’s one of those double-edged swords. When I need you, you better be there, but when I don’t need you, I don’t want you to harass me.

So when he said he was scared, it just put things into a place of — we’re all scared. We just want to get home to our families. That was part of the conversation I wish people saw. It doesn’t excuse any bad behavior of a police officer. But it does make me feel bad for those that are lumped in with the bad ones.

The past two weeks leading up to this march, one conservative student from Parkland [Kyle Kashuv] won the hearts of Republicans on Capitol Hill — and Trump and Pence. His message on social media was basically: What’s the point of these performative marches and sit-ins? Have the real bipartisan conversations. What do you say to that?

For a kid like that, I would really want to make sure he understood what role activism played in marginalized people getting their rights and feeling equal in this country. To dismiss that takes away from the civil rights movement. Civil rights leaders did so much work with legislators to try to make policy, write bills, and make things change, but it was gathering the attention of the people who weren’t in government who then pressured people. Otherwise, we would not have had a voice.

So how do you translate the march — when no one is in the Capitol building and Trump is in Florida — to that actual conversation of changing policy?

What needs to happen is this can’t stop. We have a tradition in the past five, six, seven years where something happens and we start talking about it and then we let it fade away. And that can’t happen here. When a tragedy happens, we protest, we’re upset, and then we forget and another tragedy happens. And while we are forgetting, legislators are passing bills to allow what they want to continue to happen. This can’t die.

In this era of extreme polarization, [with] Trump in the White House, is this year of activism resonating more or less?

This year of activism has been so inspired. It’s like the world woke up. Everyone got woke all of a sudden. And sometimes it takes divisiveness from higher-ups to bring the rest of us together.

I think about one of the first jobs I had when I was 15, our boss was so vindictive. He did so many horrible things. And the seven of us were tired of it, and it made us band together — and some of us didn’t even like each other — to say enough is enough.

That’s what’s happening here. I don’t want to say Trump is a united enemy. But the policies — when he decided to ban trans people from the military when he himself dodged the draft five times. We need to go against what you are saying here.

And you think that is changing now? Like Trump was enough of a rude awakening that people started crossing these lines?

No.

So what changes?

What changes is us being aware. It’s no longer that we can depend on politicians. Talk to our co-workers, talk to people we never thought we could talk to. If we rely on our social media feeds, our newsfeeds, to bring that together, it’s not enough.

I bring in the example of me and the cop talking about Black Lives Matter — it’s up to us to do the job. I literally try, this is not BS, to seek out someone who is different and say, “Hi, my name is Karamo.” And I have people say ignorant things like. “What kind of name is that?” And instead of being turned off I say, “This is what kind of name it is, why did you have that reaction?”