Posted on 10/31/2019 4:54:12 AM PDT by Kaslin
Michele Norris is an award-winning journalist and founder of The Race Card Project.
Last week, Norris wrote a poignant opinion piece for The Washington Post in which she calls for Americans to know the history of lynching before they cavalierly throw the word around.
She's right.
Public murders by lynching in America and related private violence like the grisly murder of Emmett Till were not just brutal; they were barbaric and shockingly widespread.
The Monroe Work Today website has an interactive map of lynchings across the United States between 1835 and 1964. In an online article about the work that produced the map, Smithsonian (like many other publications) describes lynchings as "acts of domestic terrorism." The accuracy of that description becomes nauseatingly clear when you read the accounts, all the more so if you can bring yourself to look at the photographs.
For the past decade or more, we have seen horrifying videos and images from other countries of political dissidents and ethnic minorities being burned alive, gay men being thrown from buildings, college students being beheaded or women being lashed to the point of death, all while a crowd looks on. But Americans cannot afford to feel superior. Read the story of Mary Turner's lynching in 1918. Read the story of Emmett Till's vicious murder in 1955 and the travesty that was the trial and acquittal of his killers.
Some may argue that the brutality we have seen in places like Iraq, Syria and Indonesia has been the policy of government. Perhaps. But here in the U.S., lynching was often the de facto punishment for an accusation after a show trial -- or no trial -- and those with government titles were among the perpetrators.
Even where the government wasn't doing the lynching, the government did not protect people from it. And where what was done was expressly illegal, juries often refused to convict, even when the perpetrators -- like Emmett Till's murderers -- were caught and tried.
So we have our own shameful past with which to contend.
All of that said, those who claim that the word "lynching" should never be used as a metaphor need to take their censorship elsewhere. Language conveys ideas for a reason. Sometimes metaphors are intended to shock.
If you don't want someone to compare what's happening to them as a "lynching," then don't act like a lynch mob. I'm not referring to comparatively tidy matters like the impeachment investigations of President Donald Trump or former President Bill Clinton. The use of the word "lynching" in those contexts is just political pandering. (As is apologizing for having used the word 21 years ago, Joe Biden. You knew what you were doing with your faux indignation in your Senate floor speeches as senator in 1998, just as much President Trump knows it with his red meat tweets today. Spare me.)
But I absolutely am referring to those people like the furious mobs who pummeled the doors of the Supreme Court last year and screamed for then-Supreme Court nominee (now associate justice) Brett Kavanaugh's head on a platter; those who wanted punishment for a 35-year-old accusation with no evidence, no corroborating witnesses, gaps in memory large enough to drive a Mack Truck through and admitted political motives.
I am referring to those people -- and a lot of them were in our own Congress -- who completely ignored the rule of law, who stated angrily and self-righteously that "the presumption of innocence doesn't apply," that due process doesn't matter and -- most ironically -- that we should "believe all accusers."
That's what the lynch mobs said, too.
I am referring to the people who yell, "Words are violence," as a way of silencing others and then use their own words to justify their violence against anyone who disagrees with them or whose political views make them uncomfortable.
That's what the lynch mobs did, too.
In terms of sheer numbers, lynchings were overwhelmingly perpetrated against blacks and other minorities. But those were not the only victims. In the lawless American West of the 19th and early 20th centuries, anyone accused of theft, for example, could have seen a bare declaration of their guilt be made at the gallows and been dangling from the end of the rope minutes later.
One of the most important lessons from lynchings is that there is nothing special about Americans as human beings, per se. We are subject to the same whims and caprices; the same capacity for rationalization and retaliation; the same biases; the same capability for violence; and the same thirst for vengeance as those of any other people. The only things standing between us and a complete breakdown into the anarchy, chaos and bloodshed we've seen elsewhere are the moral underpinnings of our society and the principles of justice set forth in documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
As our own history shows, the procedural protections created by the founders and put into the Constitution have admittedly not been consistently applied. But the instances where they have not been -- like lynching -- serve to demonstrate the importance of those principles and protections.
Even with them, we can descend into barbarism. Without them, we surely would.
Life is hard.
It’s even harder when you’re a horse theif.
~ John Wayne. Well maybe Clint Eastwood. James Garner?
“So there seems to be no need for bitching and moaning about the past. What’s the point?”
The point is to stir up blacks and get them to vote Democrat. That is why that one little fact is missing from the article.
I understand there were signs in New England that said “No Micks On The Grass”. Mick was for Irish people.
Sure, why not? I doubt you will ‘win’ a victim contest with the descendants of chattel slaves, however.
The term “Lynch” is believed to be started during the American Revolution. It doesn’t appear that the color of the person had much to do with it’s implementation until later.
It seems possible that blacks murder more black annually now than the sum total of all blacks lynched by whites in the last 200 years.
Am I wrong about that?
There is this:
https://thelibertarianrepublic.com/study-more-blacks-killed-in-chicago-than-lynched-in-deep-south/
Thought so. Thanks for the stats.
Crackers got tired of hearing about it so the blacks insisted (and, we acquiesced) it be renamed "The Tulsa Race Massacre."
Now they're even putting together a museum dedicated to it. They heard their great grandaddies talking about mass graves and we've been spending tax dollars looking for them. No graves.
But they're still talking about the injustice.
It will never end. We have created an entire class of people whose primary demographic is attention seeking whining because, in the past, it has translated into profit. Keep whining long enough, and the crackers will fork over money like an indulgent parent to a spoiled child.
The DemonRat’s KKK lynched a lot of white Republican abolitionists during the last part of the 19th century.
Imagine a child, perhaps a child whose parents were sympathetic to Nazism, born and raised in Germany post-WWII. That child had no control over what happened before its birth. But the massive wrongs of the Third Reich changed his heritage. The child can’t just walk away from any responsibility for the massive wrongs committed by his forbearers, because the culture created by their actions is the world he lives in.
I grew up in the Cradle of the Confederacy during the 1960’s. My family was not a bunch of freedom-marchers by any means, but were anti-George Wallace, anti-Democrat, anti-Klan (but I repeat myself). The culture there was filled with racism and racialism, to the point that employment ads in the newspaper specified race like “Negress Wanted for Laundry Work” (I kid you not). Discrimination was real, and damaged real people’s lives. Until recent years, Southerners have been profoundly conscious of history (selectively remembered of course). As a child, I was not literally responsible for the wrongs done, but as an adult I have to face up to the evils done in “my own shameful past”.
The author is exhorting readers to recognize the potential for barbarism within ourselves, and rise above it by requiring the rule of law. We can’t allow lynch mob tactics to enter our politics, and we should not tolerate law enforcements’ failure to protect the victims of same.
“The majority of folks lynched were white.”
____________________________________________
Right!
I am constantly reminded that most folks have no clue about the hangings in the West as it was growing.
A whole lot of white men were hung.
Many more than blacks.
To say it’s a ‘black’ problem is really undercutting their belief system’s integrity.
..Where’s the outrage?
That goes only one way, in favor of the race grievance agenda.
I bet the Tuskeegee Lynching figures are not well known. That is a shame.
Fascinating. Looking at the map, Oregon only had a dozen or so lynchings (the Idaho-Oregon border seems vague), and Marshfield hosted the only one that involved, to use the word used on the chart, a black.
Only a single dot. I guess being sent out to sea on a log doesn’t count.
On the whole, whatever its other shortcomings, it looks like the Oregon Constitution as originally designed did cut down on lynchings.
You want to get on your knees and beg some sort of forgiveness for things that you had nothing to do with please do. You want to subject your children and grandchildren to be under some form of constant harassment and never ending grievance/harping because of their race help yourself but I will not and I will stand up for my children and progeny at all cost. I’ve had enough of this one way street that has become so called ‘race relations’ in this country and across the globe for that matter. It seems it is almost exclusively whites responsibility for the state of them. Last I looked relationships take two. This myopic focus on the idea that whites are uniquely and collectively somehow responsible for the evils of the world is complete BS. Why just selectively pick out southerners or whites? And why only focus on a particular window of time? Why don’t we look at all races and history? Blacks whether here or in Africa have been and are responsible for all kinds of wicked evil crap. Rwanda comes to mind as does Chicago and multiple American cites and we are talking current history not something in the past.
The democrat party actually has had members who belong to the KKK that have lynched blacks. See Sen. Robert Byrd, KKK recruiter. The democrats currently uses the thug group called antifa against anyone the democrat politicians hate.
Democrats are the party of hate hate hate.
Proven since before the civil war.
I’m sorry if what I wrote triggered such an avalanche of angry projections. If you actually read what I wrote, you didn’t understand it. Adios.
It's one thing to acknowledge and to change one's attitudes and guard one's present and future actions due to the wrongs that were done; it's quite another to "take responsibility" for those wrongs. If you own a family business that directly exploited others in the community, perhaps. But if you had nothing to do with slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, discriminatory actions of your forebearers and you did not specifically profit from them, "white guilt" is not going to help the descendants of those harmed or yourself. It's reverse racism.
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