I see I’ve been jumped on a bit for this remark.
But today I saw a photo of the noose distinctly clearer than photos I had seen before. No shit, it’s really a noose.
I rescind the above comment.
See, UV? That’s how you show integrity!
It was definitely a hangman’s noose, and they definitely did NOT find any other nooses in any other hangers.
My reactions to this incident went from:
“Damn, wish we didn’t live in a time where that crap still happens.”
to
“Dang, wish we didn’t live in a time where people were so sensitive to everything.”
to
“Holy crap! That’s actually a hangman’s noose, and it looks like it’s made out of rope strong enough to reliably hang someone!”
I’ve tied hangman’s nooses (it’s one of the easier knots to learn, really). There’s no overt racist tone to the knot itself, it was the way the law usually killed folks in large parts of the world for quite some time. Hell, it seemed like England was willing to hang someone for looking at you funny at some points in history. But I’ve almost always tied one out of something that was either too flimsy or the result was way too short to actually be tied to anything and used. To tie one and leave it around where it could actually be used if you just blocked the garage door is still pretty screwed up, even if it doesn’t rise to the level of a racist act.
Wouldn’t a noose, by it’s nature as a knot meant to be tightened when pulled, be a bad knot for a door pull? The reason I say that is that someone said, oh, it’s just someone being bored and tying a slightly more complex knot, but it’s still just a door pull.
Hard to say the motivations of the person who tied it. Unless they were very good at predictions or had access to information that I don’t know if it actually existed at the time, the motivation was not to put it in the garage of a black driver.
OTOH, it was in bad taste, no matter how you look at it. A noose is a symbol of death, and in a sport as dangerous as NASCAR, you really don’t want to attract any more attention from the Reaper than absolutely necessary.
Very well done, Senegoid.
Only one noose on the whole property, and he gets assigned to that particular hanger. Could the person who assigned it to him have known about it beforehand? BTW, is there actual photographic evidence that that noose existing before all this shit happened?
That’s a possibility, but I’d doubt it. If someone had that sort of animosity, they could have simply assigned whatever bay, and then tied up a new noose on that one.
Yes, that is how the FBI determined that it wasn’t a targeted hate crime. I can’t find it now, but on the news, they did show a video from last November from outside the garage that showed the noose hanging there. (The video was not to showcase the noose, rather something else going on in front of the garage, and just happened to be caught in the camera.)
That’s right. The Hangman’s Knot, in particular, “may be counted on to draw up smoothly and not let go.”
Any noose, by definition, constricts when the rope is pulled on, and therefore makes a pretty poor handle compared to, well, essentially anything you can think of immediately.
Back when I was in high school, if I was sitting next to a window with a string to pull the shades open/closed, I’d sometimes tie a noose in it, and my best friend would sometimes do the same. Neither of us had any racial animus behind it, just (as someone else said) literal gallows humor, of the sort that teenagers are sometimes prone to. I can believe that the motivation behind this one was similar.
Of course, in our case, whenever a teacher saw it, they always untied it (I never saw one of those nooses remain until the next day). And the nooses we tied couldn’t have hanged anyone larger than a Barbie doll. So there was maybe a bit more irresponsibility in this case. Still, “irresponsible youth with insufficient supervision” is a lot less bad than “racist death threats”, so this story has a better ending than one might have feared.