Lynching
The nooses in Jena and more recently in NYC seem to me to be very powerful symbols. I'm surprised at how many people scoff at them or write them off as trivial.
I've never been to a lynching. I've known people who did attend, however. In between my time in the Navy and when I started college I worked for a while on a core-drilling rig for an engineering company in Baton Rouge. A driller I worked with a lot had grown up in Mississippi. In the 30's, when he was a child, he'd attended a couple of lynchings. They weren't secret events in the dead of the night. They were Sunday afternoon after church picnics for the family. Fried chicken and potato salad and big jugs of sweetened ice tea. Just thinking about the normalcy of what it was scares me.
I've never been to a lynching. I've known people who did attend, however. In between my time in the Navy and when I started college I worked for a while on a core-drilling rig for an engineering company in Baton Rouge. A driller I worked with a lot had grown up in Mississippi. In the 30's, when he was a child, he'd attended a couple of lynchings. They weren't secret events in the dead of the night. They were Sunday afternoon after church picnics for the family. Fried chicken and potato salad and big jugs of sweetened ice tea. Just thinking about the normalcy of what it was scares me.
Labels: culture
posted by Gary Carson at 4:54 PM
1 Comments:
For the four score and seven years from 1882 to 1968 there were 4743 lynchings in the United States. Most, but not all, of the lynching victims were black.
From 1976 to 2005 (only 29 years), over 98,000 blacks were murdered by OTHER BLACKS.
A contemporary black man would be safer walking into a KKK meeting and saying, "Is this where they be handin' out the welfare checks" than he would walking down Martin Luther King Boulevard after dark. A black man in a hoodie should be more frightening for them than seeing a noose hanging from a tree in a schoolyard.
Blacks commit 52.2% of all murders, even though they are only 12.5% of the population. That's FOUR TIMES the expected value.
Blacks commit murder at over TEN TIMES the rate of non-hispanic whites. Blacks are the victims of those black murders about 96% of the time.
Blacks murder whites at TWICE the rate that whites murder blacks.
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/tables/ovrelracetab.htm
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