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.
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.
Plug for Ashraf's Rushdy's book "The End of American Lynching" or "American Lynching." should be required reading for Americans. get a copy at Thriftbooks, or at the bad place (Amazon)...
Fascinating perspective that I would not have come to without your article. Thank you!
Also, to your point about MA, I live in FL and went to high school in CT and college in MA, and I have always said that racism exists equally in all three states. The difference is its visibility. Racism in Florida is just easier to see. It exists right at the surface and on the FM airwaves, and is fairly foundational in the very recent pasts of many of its communities. Up north it's tucked away discretely behind polite gentility and intellectual walls.
Thanks for reading it, Louise. You make a very important point that I didn't understand until long after I left the North. A few years ago I heard race-relations explained this way: "In the North, white people don't care how high you go as long as you don't get too close. In the South, white people don't care how close as you get, as long as you don't go too high." This is bad paraphrasing and obviously only goes a very short distance toward explaining anything. But it captures one strain in the many expressions of white supremacy ...
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.
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.
Plug for Ashraf's Rushdy's book "The End of American Lynching" or "American Lynching." should be required reading for Americans. get a copy at Thriftbooks, or at the bad place (Amazon)...
https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-end-of-american-lynching_ashraf-ha-rushdy/9815609/item/46806716/?gclid=Cj0KCQiAw9qOBhC-ARIsAG-rdn4HnXnUJ1OhgAcmrhkvfo4AaQLujIw89PINeNLgYj8CnpDB7KTopMAaApuaEALw_wcB#idiq=46806716&edition=9252108
Fascinating perspective that I would not have come to without your article. Thank you!
Also, to your point about MA, I live in FL and went to high school in CT and college in MA, and I have always said that racism exists equally in all three states. The difference is its visibility. Racism in Florida is just easier to see. It exists right at the surface and on the FM airwaves, and is fairly foundational in the very recent pasts of many of its communities. Up north it's tucked away discretely behind polite gentility and intellectual walls.
Thanks for reading it, Louise. You make a very important point that I didn't understand until long after I left the North. A few years ago I heard race-relations explained this way: "In the North, white people don't care how high you go as long as you don't get too close. In the South, white people don't care how close as you get, as long as you don't go too high." This is bad paraphrasing and obviously only goes a very short distance toward explaining anything. But it captures one strain in the many expressions of white supremacy ...
Thank you for this article, Neil. Hope you're well.
Good to hear from you, sir. I hope you are well, too, and thank you for reading the story.