"Lynch Mobs"

Charles Blow published an excellent essay in today's New York Times titled "'Lynch Mob': Misuse of Language."  In it he discussed the history of lynching in the United States.  He noted that the defenders of police murders, like Baltimore FOP President Gene Ryan, now call the protesters a "lynch mob."   Blow writes: 

These “lynch mob” invocations are an incredible misuse of language, in which the lexicon of slaughter, subjugation and suffering are reduced to mere colloquialism, and therefore bleached of the blood in which it was originally written and used against the people who were historically victims of the atrocities.

The truth is that this fear and sympathy for the murderers, this inversion of victimhood, is actually characteristic of twentieth century US terrorism against minorities.  Consider these examples:

• In contemporary white accounts of the ghastly 1911 lynching of Laura and L.D. Nelson in Okemah, Oklahoma, the actual murder (and the actual dynamiting of a Black hotel) are subordinated to the “night of terror” white residents experienced as they fearfully awaited retaliation!  How familiar is language like: "The lawless Negroes of Okfuskee and adjoining counties made revengeful threats against residents of Okemah. Many Negro criminals from other states had taken refuge here prior to statehood and efforts to arrest them were generally futile as they were well armed with high-powered firearms”? The townspeople brutally murder a mother and her son and then choose to fix their minds on what might happen as a result. It sounds to me a lot like the press’s fixation on whether demonstrations in response to actual violence might “turn violent.”
• Both press and judiciary blamed the one to two hundred African Americans murdered in Elaine, Arkansas in 1919 for their own deaths. Only five whites actually died during the days-long pogrom, but the newspapers had scare headlines like: “Negroes Plan to Kill All Whites.”  And the court indicted 122 Black men for murder.  Trials lasted less than an hour with juries bringing back guilty verdicts after “deliberating” for minutes.  We saw the phenomenon of trying a murder victim for his own death in the Trayvon Martin case.  In Arkansas in 1919 they tried the friends and associates.  And — it being the year of the big Red Scare — the press raised the communist bogeyman, too, alluding to shadowy socialists who had instigated the whole affair.
• Along the Texas-Mexico border there is the same phenomenon of massive and extreme violence (in this case against Mexican-Americans) coupled with fear of imagined violence against whites.  During the Rinchada of 1915 (Bandit War in white histories) death squads, some deputized as Texas Rangers, roamed the border killing hundreds of Mexican-Americans.  The white press, though, was fixated on the depredations of “bandits.”  
• After the US Army murdered over 200 mostly-disarmed Lakota Indians at Wounded Knee, South Dakota in 1890 the press was full of the fears of local white people about the threats of Indian attacks.

What I see is a pattern of inverting real violence and terror with imagined violence and terror.  Michael Brown or Eric Garner or Freddie Gray are murdered by police?  They are “no angels.”  People are protesting a pattern of police violence and murder?  The press is frightened by the possible of protests “turning violent.”  Police violence looks like a continuation of lynch law?  Police are being hounded by a “lynch mob.”  Another example of skin privilege is the ability to frame a narrative -- all unconsciously, without intentional lies -- around your own psychic state.

Parade of Personalities

The biggest challenge for me in walking Prophet through the park every morning is negotiating the parade of personalities -- canine and human -- that we encounter.  There are dogs who are Prophet's great playmates and dogs who he walks alongside companionably.  There are dogs who he greets with respectful affection and those who he nods to and brushes shoulders with.  And then there are his nemeses.

For one reason or another Prophet holds long-term grudges with a few dogs.  They are, interestingly, not those who have hurt him.  One longhair Shepherd, who he met when he was a pup, tolerated his presence until the owners got a new puppy.  When Prophet went to greet the puppy the older dog opened up Prophet's forehead.  The next time they met they fought again, but this time Prophet was prepared and wasn't hurt.  I detoured around those two for months but they have now reached a modus vivendi.  The older dogs nod, Prophet barks at the younger one, and they go on their separate ways.

One dog who always tried to bully Prophet when he was small now enrages him.  We run into her on the weekends and I have to either lead Prophet on a long detour or leash him.  Another, who we see most mornings actually went after a seven-year old who was with us one day.  Prophet seems inclined neither to forgive nor forget, but as long as we don't get to close, my voice commands are enough to keep him away.

Then there is the Great Dane we see a few times a week.  Prophet tried to hard to make friends the first few times they met, bowing, wagging, making himself small.  But this Dane just gave him the hard eyeball and stood aloof.  After that, Prophet barked at her from a distance, but -- per instructions -- did not approach.

A few weeks ago I saw that Dane approaching so I leashed Prophet and led him down a very steep embankment.  Didn't that unleashed Great Dane come straight over with the angry eyes and the menacing bark.  I tried getting between them but the dog went after Prophet anyway.  I gave Prophet an extra foot of leash and the Dane eventually backed away.

This morning the first time we saw that dog Prophet started jumping around and stepping forward as if he were going to go after her.  I called him and continued on a tangent, so he barked a couple of times more and then followed me.  So when we saw them a second time on another path about thirty yards across the brush I leashed Prophet and instructed him to follow me.  But the Dane was still off leash and bounding toward Prophet.  I was considering releasing him, but the attack never got serious enough.  She was snarling at Prophet and jumping at him, but still avoiding his mouth.  Prophet grabbed her jacket, but let go when I told him to.

Meanwhile, the owner was yelling and pursuing her dog.  When she got close I realized she was yelling at Prophet!  The gentleman I was with, whose little dog was watching with interest, chuckled and asked why she was giving orders to Prophet instead of her own dog, particularly since Prophet was on leash!

After Prophet concluded that he was not under attack he agreed to step away.  I looked back and saw this woman carefully checking her dog for the injuries Prophet hadn't given her.  My dilemma is this:
It is so easy for me to see other people's blindness to their dog's aggressions and to their own complicity.  It is impossible for me to see my own blindness.  I try really hard, but I know that if they are that oblivious, I must be at least a little oblivious.  I can always keep Prophet away from dogs he doesn't like, sometimes with voice, sometimes with leash.  I cannot prevent him from disliking those dogs, or from expressing those emotions, and that contributes to drama.  With some owners it has been possible for us to reintroduce the dogs after conflict and have them be okay.  Others seem to think that Prophet is a ravening beast.  But they also seem to think that it is entirely incumbent on me to avoid them.  It's fine if I can lead Prophet on a long detour.  It's less fine if their dogs pursue us anyway.

I don't know what a person who really knows dogs would do.  I think I will pursue a professional consult.

Facing Our History: How do we understand lynching of Mexican Americans?

This morning’s New York Times included an Op-Ed piece titled “When Americans Lynched Mexicans.”  The authors refer the reader immediately to the recent and well-publicized report on extrajudicial violence in America, but warn us against thinking that lynchings in the United States were exclusively against African Americans.

The bulk of the essay details a few of the 500+ cases the authors were able to document in detail.  It also refers to the untold thousands of murders, mainly in south Texas, between 1915 and 1918, when vigilantes and law enforcement officers unleashed a wave of terror against the Mexican-American majority of the area.  Ultimately, the authors say nothing about the military conquest of the southwestern United States.  They do not mention the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo that promised the people of the area that they would be undisturbed in their persons or property after the conquest.  And they choose to discuss neither the theft of private property from Mexican Americans nor their reduction to the status of second-class citizens in their own homeland by Anglo newcomers.  Instead, the authors are content to remind us that lynching was not unique to the South and to ascribe all this violence to “hate.”

But the authors wrote the essay they chose.  Perhaps it is enough just to let people know about this legacy of murder without providing a context of robbery and power.  What interested me were the early comments on the article.  We Americans don’t just have a short memory for our own history.  We are actively skeptical and distrustful of the truths of our collective past.  One reader responded positively, but with strong reservations, wondering “IF it is accurate and based on hard evidence rather than anecdote.”  It is not hard to check on the facts in the essay.  They are a matter of public record, including – as mentioned by the authors – and investigation by the Texas Legislature itself.  But that doubt doesn’t end this reader’s disbelief.  He concludes: “When we accept people… as citizens they become part of us and should never have been targeted like that.”  All of which ignores the fact that those Mexican Americans’ families had been in Texas before Texas became part of the United States and in many cases before Mexico was independent of Spain.  They never crossed the border; the border crossed them!

Then there were the readers who want to consign this ugly history to the Kingdom of the Past, where things were Different, because we shouldn’t apply our standards to the people back then (who presumably were somehow unaware of the Biblical injunction against murder.)  One tells us, “Society tells us whether any action is ‘the norm.’  Slavery, though wrong, was not illegal in past centuries.”  Meaning what?  That lynching used to be okay?

Several commenters want to remind us that their own ethnic group was also the target of lynchers.  Two discuss lynchings of Italians, something the authors themselves mention in paragraph two.  A third insists on calling our attention to Jewish victims of lynchings.  I cannot help but feel that this is a way of distancing oneself from the history of American violence and denying the fact of one’s own (current) white privilege.  Some of those late 19^th and early 20^th century mob killings of Catholics and Jews were motivated by Protestant religious hatred.  But many were also meant to police the color line and teach newcomers that they would not be allowed to affiliate with African Americans: in marriage, in friendship, in business partnerships, or in labor unions.

Another reader complains about even being told this history.  He writes that “we whites” have to “take it on the chin” and “grovel in the dirt” even if our families just got here.  What apparently eludes him is that his family can arrive and be treated as Americans while those whose families arrived before Jamestown are stopped and asked for identification and treated as if they swam across the river.

Which gets to yet another point.  The authors refer in their very last sentence to “today’s charged debate over immigration policy.”  This really sets off some readers.  One admitted to being hostile before even reading the article: “When I read the headline I wondered what the point of this historical victimhood piece might be.”  Wow!  “Historical victimhood.”  That phrase alone conveys so much about our reluctance to learn our country’s history.  He concludes: “Cynical assumptions confirmed,” because the authors connect the anti-Mexican violence of the twentieth century with the hatred and suspicion of Mexicans today, as if that were some bizarre leap of illogic.

I am choosing not to quote or to comment on those readers who made some of the same points I do in response to the resistance to history I cite above.  But this is the week that the Oklahoma legislature is considering banning Advanced Placement US History, apparently because it includes “bad” stuff about our country.  Two and a half months ago I posted in this space about extrajudicial murders and about official impunity today in the light of our nation’s history.  Lynching isn’t over.  Neither is the habit of blaming it on those lynched.  It is important for us to look at the entire story and context of racial violence in the practice of racial oppression.

#CharlieHebdo

Yesterday masked gunmen entered the editorial offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and assassinated 12 people, including two police officers and four prominent political cartoonists.  It is a shocking act of contempt for civilized discourse and for free speech.  And the cowardice of storming an editorial meeting with automatic weapons?

But I live in a time in which politicians and corrupt cops have conspired with narco gangs to kidnap and murder student teachers.  I live in a country where masked gunmen have repeatedly stormed children's schools with automatic weapons.  I live in a city in which police can murder a man on camera, stand around nonchalantly as he dies, and escape indictment for any crime!  So how can I pretend to be "shocked"?

I wanted to respond to yesterday's shooting as others have, with the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie.  I wanted to put the Charlie Hebdo contributors in the company of the heroic journalists who have been objects of increasing attacks in recent years by both government and non-government actors who thrive in darkness.  I wanted to write again, as I have often recently, about impunity and the criminals who demand it.

But I find myself repelled by the editorial content of the magazine.  I find it filled with racism and sexism and hateful images.  I find it impossible to identify myself with their work, even as I condemn their murder.  I wouldn't write "I am Westboro" if that gang of extortionists were to become victims of extrajudicial attack.