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.
