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Moon Not Sun's avatar

Happy New Year and thank you for writing this piece, Neil. It's so necessary that you, as a white man, write the things that you wrote. Writing can be a form of restorative justice. I want to also add that lynching isn't about the lynchers need to feel safe. I believe it's almost exclusively about power, and domination. And maintaining what they consider to be a world order. Their divine right, to subjugate and brutalize people who are Black. (And other people of color too.) And it's not just the folks down South. Lynching in the broadest sense crosses borders. It can be state-led. Look at US foreign policy in Africa and the Caribbean. Think about Grenada. What's been happening in Haiti. Sometimes the military can be a lynch mob, agents of a very unhealthy state. Little of that is about fear. But that is what gets sold in newspapers. So and so lynches or terrorizes x because they're scared of x. But I've always thought that was too easy a narrative. Sometimes brutalization is exclusively about the desire to dominate. White supremacy is one hell of a drug. And that is the more scary perspective, I know. Thank you once again for writing this important piece.

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Luke Padgett's avatar

Such a key insight. Seems to be something of what so many old spiderman and batman episodes were always trying to tell us kids about taking the law into our own hands. Part of staying in any real democracy is frustration with due process. The bogus vigilante honor that's so much a part of rebel couture nationwide is a step firmly outside democratic rule and straight towards the goon squad tyranny of the plantation. It's complete with a direct appeal to whitey's weirdly earnest sense of retributive justice. It can shape-shift in the 'it was just a joke' way of our time. Here, the January 6 resurrection of the lynch mob is shown to be a shockingly precise echo.

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