I personally wish I lived in that era, so that I could hunt down every one of the men who killed these fine people. I would find these lynchers, and stab them all. I would watch them die, and revel in the knowledge that each time I was taking away from this world one sick, disgusting racist little fuck.
Would it make me a murderer? Yes.
Would it make me sick and disgusting myself? Maybe.
But sometimes it takes one to know one. And that doesn’t bother me. What bothers me is how people can commit such acts of hatred based only on someone’s appearance. The color of their skin. Such a meaningless characteristic, and people get killed over it.
I’m sorry if I’ve crossed any lines or broken any board rules here. There is one thing and only one thing in this world that can get me worked up to that extent, and that’s racism. I hate racists. I hope they all burn.
Maybe that makes me as bad as them. I don’t care.
Whew…I feel better now.
(FWIW, I’m white, not that that should matter…but I’m sure someone will bring it up, or ask, or assume, so I figured I should clear it up now.)
If you want to see more such photos, go here. It’s a fascinating exhibition, although i never look at it without feeling vaguely guilty, or at least somehow embarrassingly voyeuristic.
I find them rather upsetting, too. But i think that it’s worth trying to address images like this on more than just a visceral, emotional level. Simply ranting about such people doesn’t really help us to understand them any better.
Furthermore, there was no surprise link. I made it very clear what sort of images were there, and people can choose whether or not to click the link. The OP chooses not to, and that’s perfectly fine with me. I just think that knowing about and confronting things like this is important. It’s similar to remembering the Holocaust; it reinforces the notion of “never again,” and reminds us that even the most “civilized” countries can’t be proud of everything in their past.
Also, the site itself contains more than just images, there is commentary and text that provide context and aid in understanding. If you don’t like it, then don’t look at it. No skin off my nose.
I’m not a moderator, but I don’t see anything wrong with it, and I’m not clicking on those links because my reaction would be similar to fetus’s. Racism, I’m afraid is and was all too real, and 70 years ago, it did kill. Several years ago, a friend of mine who’s black talked me into seeing the movie Rosewood about a black town in Florida which was burned because a white woman told a lie. I refused to see it in movie theaters because of what I was afraid my reaction would be. When I saw it on video, my reaction was what I expected. “Who do we kill, and how do we stack the bodies?” Unfortunately, he and I worked in a manufacturing plant where racism did exist, including in management’s attitudes.
We don’t however, have to sit back and take it, be we black, white, oriental, Native American or any combination of genes and cultures. Several years ago I joined my church’s Diocesan Committee on Racism and I only dropped out this year because of a somewhat unrelated issues. We can also disagree aloud with racist opinions when we encounter them. I have said and will continue to say, “I acknowledge one race: human.”
It is a good thing to feel anger and disgust at the fact of lynchings but instead of wishing to be able to take revenge on the lynchers, do what you can to see to it that such things never happen again.
As to the link posted by mhendo, I’ve seen it before and, in fact, opened my own thread about it quite a while ago—I’m much too lazy to try to find it. The photographs are very upsetting, but the history and the fact of the hatred are very real. I would honestly encourage people to view the photographs, take them to heart, and to do everything possible to prevent such things happening again. Reflect on the fact that we live every day with people who could easily take that one fatal step—it isn’t a stretch to imagine lynchings of gays, Muslims, secular Arabic people, etc., etc. We might also reflect on the recent photgraphs from Iraq where the burned corpses of men were hung from pillars on a bridge—compare those to some of the photographs from mhendo’s link. Blind hatred is all too real.
It’s like “I’m so pissed off at these white people who took the law into their own hands and killed black people without due process, that I want to take the law into my own hands and kill the white people without due process.”
It’s a good thing that fetus doesn’t have a functional time machine. It’s not a good thing that fetus doesn’t have a functional brain.
Lynching in the U.S. was, of course, primarily a white-on-black crime. But some people have the idea it was only and always a white-on-black crime. T’ain’t so.
Anytime a mob didn’t want to wait for “justice” or felt that the courts ruled wrong, it was Good-Night Nurse for the victim. The most famous white victim was probably the Jewish Leo Frank (Georgia, 1910s). Whites, Jews, American Indians, Asians, women, were all lynched at various times.
But since, as I said (and please, no one accuse me of not having made this point) yes, it was in the U.S. primarily (though not always) whites lynching blacks.
I know of at least one man involved in a lynching who was haunted by the memory of what he had done. No one is beyond redemption for even the most heinous crimes against humanity.
I also make myself look at programs about the Holocaust. It’s the penance I pay for being a human being and capable of hatred.
There is a documentary that is on television from time to time that is important to watch for much the same reasons. It is about a little boy named Emmett Till, brutally murdered for racist reasons. It was that film that made me determined never to permit a racist comment made in my presence to linger without comment from me.
I appreciate this thread and the links. But adding still more hatred of other people serves no purpose. It just keeps the problem going. Educate others. Speak up. Work for justice. “Be the change you want to see.”
I am the Nazi. I am the Jew. I am the Palestinian.
I said those things in the heat of the moment, and looking back on them they’re a little scary. I generally try to educate rather than get angry–and those who know me IRL know that I’m not at all a violent person. I’ve never hit anyone for any reason (well, maybe I got into a shoving match with some other kid as a toddler or something, but that’s neither here nor there). It’s just that that page really got to me.
Desmostylus, as I said above, it was just that I was in a momentary fit of rage at that time. I think it’s a bit of a stretch to say that I don’t have a functioning brain. (Although I myself have thought “it’s a good thing I don’t have a functioning time machine”.)
Eve, point taken. Thanks for your input. Well-thought-out and informative as always.
Zoe, LouisB, etc., as I said above, I do try to educate rather than get mad (I’ve actually been working on a couple of my friends who dislike black people, and I think they’re making progress…well, one of them at least; but they seem to just avoid black people rather than stabbing them or whatever, so I guess it’s not a particularly urgent problem), although there are some people you just can’t talk out of anything. Thanks for your input as well.
I don’t think mhendo was in the wrong by posting that link. It was made clear that the page is upsetting, and that if I don’t wish to be made upset I can avoid going there. In fact, now that I’ve calmed down, I may actually go there and take a look. It was clear to me that the intention was to provide someone with the means to research a topic they’re interested in.
They used to have similar scenes used for postcards, which I find truly sickening. In fact I remember seeing one with a comment under the picture saying something like how a large group of whites “bravely” dealt with the bad black criminal.
The images in the exibit are not strictly blacks being lynched. It’s a collection of lynchings, not white-on-black mob violence.
If it disturbs you don’t shy away from looking at it. I know several people who won’t watch footage of the 9/11 attacks because they find them upsetting. Same for the holocaust. It’s easier to pretend such things don’t happen instead of viewing the images and realizing that such things have happened and probably will happen again.
What in my post implies that I took offense at this?
I just think it’s odd to, when someone says, “I really hate it when I see or hear about this sort of thing happening” to say, “wow, I’ve got a great coffee table book full of those very things!” or “Wow, if you hate that, just wait’ll you see this!” and hand it to them. Granted, the person in question doesn’t have to open the book, but it seems…childish? Provocative (as in provoking a fight)? Antagonising?
If our OP is so upset by images/etc. of lynchings (of blacks specifically as shown in the photo in a thread regarding racism towards blacks) isn’t it safe to assume that they wouldn’t follow a link to more lynchings? How does having examples of other lynchings (that is, not-necessarily-white-on-not-necessarily-black) make it safe for the OP to view especially as the description of the link doesn’t mention that? At best I think mhendo is guilty of not being descriptive enough in the description.
Are we talking about moral outrage as a reaction to injustice, or simply as a form of nostalgia?
I’m reminded of how everyone cried their eyes out in 1993 at “Schindler’s List,” and were so moved by it that when the killing began in Bosnia and Rwanda they did…not much, really.
There’s plenty of things going on today that we could get constuctively worked up about, things that someone in another seventy years will want to come back and wring our necks for aiding, abbetting and ignoring.
(Ouch!)