There must be something vile in us to make us
linger, age after age, in this insanitary spot.
—Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon1
WE DO NOT CURRENTLY HUNT WITCHES. That is, we do not, as a nation, have established legal institutions whose responsibilities center upon investigations into supernatural acts, with the aim of punishing those men and women who perform such anti-miracles. Yes, we may still engage in cultural practices that collectively punish those whose ideology stands at variance with reigning doctrine, or those whose practices have been taken to represent, by some twisted metonymy, an affinity for said outsider ideology. We may well seek scapegoats for our personal setbacks, and we may still take a particular delight in the downfall of independent women. Our police officers may often act like the old witchfinders who roamed the countryside and directed their fire against the marginalized, and our criminal justice system may well be permeated with beliefs and practices that echo the notorious 1487 treatise on witchcraft, Malleus Maleficarum. But here, in the United States, and now, in the twenty-first century, we do not literally hunt witches.
However, the term witch hunt continues to be applied metaphorically to various moral panics and mass hysterias in an attempt to equate them with the irrationality that we now locate in those olden witch hunts. When innocents are drawn into a spiral of accusations overseen by a monomaniacal figure of single-minded purpose who is blind to the destruction wrought by his attempts, as he sees them, to purify the population of heresy and disorder—then we feel comfortable calling this process a witch hunt. Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible, which dramatizes the Salem Witch Trials, helped to cement the metaphorical application of the term, given that the play was explicitly intended as a criticism of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Second Red Scare. However, powerful terms can be double-edged swords. The same word or idea employed to draw attention to a fundamental injustice can also be wielded to slander the mechanisms of justice itself. Thus did former president Donald Trump, who openly admitted his criminal activities, describe congressional hearings into those activities as a witch hunt, and although such a comparison constitutes an absolute obscenity to anyone with the most meager historical consciousness, the viability of the analogy, for Trump’s explicit political purposes, rested upon the willingness of his followers to interpret events within that particular frame.
This president also described these congressional hearings as a lynching, which raises a somewhat different set of questions, since this application of the term was obviously metaphorical.2 We do not currently have literal witch hunts, but do we continue to have, in the United States, literal lynchings? For scholars such as Christopher Waldrep and Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, the word lynching constitutes more a discourse than a discrete phenomenon, and that discourse can be and has been shaped—warped—by agents who, through malice or ignorance or other motivations, end up robbing said term of its power through a broader application than was originally intended. The latest example is, of course, the aforementioned president undergoing the process of his first impeachment, employing that terminology in order to wrap himself in martyr’s robes and designate any act against him some species of persecution. Is there any feasible way in which an impeachment resembles a lynching?
In my introduction, I defined lynching as
• a scapegoating form of lethal violence;
• performed by one group of human beings against another group of human beings (or an individual representing said group) assigned lower moral status;
• for purposes regarded as virtuous by its perpetrators, such as punishment and regulation;
• with the effect of maintaining the very structural inequalities that delineate group boundaries and their respective moral statuses.
The problem with examining lynching solely as discourse is that bad actors can shape the discourse by appropriating its terminology. Thus, the employment of a discrete definition centered on the types of violence actually present in the behavior of lynching gives us more solid ground upon which to offer a critique of such appropriations. And as I hope would be obvious by the definition used here, the impeachment of a president on criminal allegations in no way resembles a lynching. In fact, the president’s appropriation of the term lynching is what novelist and activist Sarah Schulman has called the “practice of overstating harm.” Such overstatements result from a “conflation of Conflict with Abuse” and fundamentally serve “as a justification for cruelty”: “namely, false accusations of harm are used to avoid an acknowledgment of complicity in creating conflict and instead escalate normative conflict to the level of crisis.”3 And false accusations of harm served as the basis for many a historical case of actual lynching, which better aligns Trump’s behavior with the mob than with the victim hanging from a noose or burned to ash in a fire.
Trump was certainly overstating the harm of impeachment, but not all such overstatements, however, need necessarily result from bad-faith efforts. Instead, they may stem from a desire to latch on to specific language in order to draw attention to a historical or enduring injustice. For example, many scholars of genocide have criticized similar overstatements of harm and the threat they pose to maintaining precise and legally actionable terminology. Legal scholar Payam Akhavan, for one, has lamented the “unfounded efforts to appropriate genocide and the historical imagery of the Holocaust” as fostering a “banalization of suffering” or representing “a political culture of recognition in which ownership of anguish is not merely a means of working through trauma . . . but also a means of achieving a form of celebrity.”4
But Trump’s appropriation of the term lynching could, arguably and ironically—if coincidentally—have its roots in the rhetoric and imagery adopted by twentieth-century anti-lynching activists who compared this form of violence to the crucifixion of Christ. For example, the December 1911 issue of The Crisis featured a lynching photograph displayed alongside a cross and the mournful face of Jesus and titled Jesus Christ in Georgia.5 Likewise did the Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen write, in his 1922 poem “Christ Recrucified,” “But lest the sameness of the cross should tire / They kill him now with famished tongues of fire, / And while he burns, good men, and women, too / Shout, battling for his black and brittle bones.”6 For Black Christians, the comparison seemed particularly apt; false charges of criminal misdeed, an execution demanded by the mob, a long and tortuous death—not all of these were present at every lynching, but they were common enough to facilitate the analogy. Too, there was rhetorical power in appropriating the identity of Christ for the victim of lynching, given that Southern whites were typically very public about their religiosity, and so the comparison automatically entailed an accusation of hypocrisy, charging these mobs with crucifying Christ all over again. Here, the innocence of Christ is the cornerstone. Comparing various scapegoat myths with that of the crucifixion narrative presented in the canonical Gospels, René Girard writes, “In biblical texts, victims are innocent and collective violence is to blame. In myths, the victims are to blame and communities are always innocent.”7 He elaborates further:
Jesus is presented to us as the innocent victim of a group in crisis, which, for a time at any rate, is united against him. All the subgroups and indeed all the individuals who are concerned with the life and trial of Jesus end up by giving their explicit or implicit assent to his death: the crowd in Jerusalem, the Jewish religious authorities, and Roman political authorities, and even the disciples, since those who do not betray or deny Jesus actively take flight or remain passive.8
And modern Black thinkers in liberation theology have continued to draw parallels between the crucifixion and the practice of American lynching. For example, theologian James H. Cone writes at the beginning of his 2011 book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, “Until we can see the cross and the lynching tree together, until we can identify Christ with a ‘recrucified’ black body hanging from a lynching tree, there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America, and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy.”9
In other words, more than a century of rhetorical battle against the practice has transformed lynching from something deserved of a criminal, especially a prototypical “Black beast,” into a form of violence directed against the innocent. Novelist James Carroll has questioned the “ancient Christian impulse to associate extreme evil with the fate of Jesus, precisely as a way of refusing to be defeated by that evil.” “At the Golgotha of the crucifixion,” he writes, “death became the necessary mode of transcendence, first for Jesus and then, as Christians believe, for all.” The application of the name “Golgotha” to such events as the Holocaust, however, raises an important question for Carroll: “Can mechanized mass murder be a mode of transcendence? . . . If Auschwitz must stand for Jews as the abyss in which meaning itself died, what happens when Auschwitz becomes the sanctuary of someone else’s recovered piety?”10 Indeed, while Cone and others may insist upon the necessity of understanding the specific historical context that produced lynching, the comparison of racial violence to an alleged event that is theologically imagined to transcend all human divisions, including race—moreover, an event that now lies at a two-thousand-year remove and thus constitutes myth more than it does history—may well serve to abstract and universalize lynching, rendering it another drama of unwarranted persecution, another example of good versus evil, stripped of the specificities of race, class, geography, and more. Moreover, the theological emphasis upon the absolute innocence of Christ does not equate to the absolute guilt of lynching victims. Not that all or even most were likely complicit in the crimes of which they were accused—rather, that their guilt was socially constructed, given that it was inherent in their racial identity. And it was absolute.
So we return to the question: Are there manifestations of violence today that can be called lynchings? Or perhaps this question would better be phrased: Are there manifestations of violence in our present time that correlate to the practice of lynching? According to sociologist Jonathan Markowitz, “Lynching was always intended as a metaphor for, or a way to understand, race relations. While there were many different types of lynchings, lynch mobs typically worked to ensure that black audiences were aware of the strength of white supremacy and the costs of violating the boundaries of the racial order; at the same time, they wanted to reinforce images of white men as chivalrous protectors of white women.”11 As we have seen, the perpetrators of lynching, and their defenders in government and media, were typically open in their expressions about the utility and necessity of lynching to protect the racial order. By contrast, those who perpetrate and/or defend violence for the same motivation now are regarded as exhibiting the psychological condition of hate, a condition that is explicitly individualized, and their crimes are thus labeled hate crimes rather than lynchings. As sociologist Chris Gilligan points out, “The very idea of hate crime focuses attention on the state of mind of the offender.”12 He goes on to observe:
The idea that racism was a psychological problem located in the minds of racists, rather than a product of the organisation of society, was facilitated by the post-Second World War rise of the psychology industry in universities, in human resource management, in counterculture awareness-raising and self-actualisation programmes, and in crime-fighting. The resort to the law as a means of redress was an indication of the receding of the emancipatory dynamic of the Civil Rights era and the rise of a reformist belief in the state as an instrument for tackling racisms.13
This particular approach to matters of racism narrows the horizon of feasible action a society might undertake to address the problem. As scholars Christopher Kyriakides and Rodolfo D. Torres argue, the psychological turn, in essence, places any pursuit of equality “beyond human hands. The criminalization of dangerous emotion does not locate oppression within the social structure, the institutions of ‘White Power,’ nor does it admit to the contradiction between universal rights and the inability of the capitalist system to deliver those rights.”14 But the identification of racism and its attendant violence as a psychological problem is perhaps not as new as Gilligan and others might believe, for it correlates to some of the strategies employed to oppose the practice of lynching, what rhetorician Ersula J. Ore calls the “rhetoric of shame and blame” applied by anti-lynching activists, especially the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching; thus it is perhaps no accident that such rhetoric also correlated to “the advent of a discourse characterized by a narrower definition of lynching, which proponents used to deny the continued practice of lynching during the 1940s onward.”15 At the time, it was no doubt regarded as a worthwhile strategy—to identify the mob with psychological derangement, and thus make lynching seem a lower-class affair (when, in reality, it was typically the opposite) as a means of breaking white solidarity and thus motivating boosters and businessmen to take a stance against such violence. And then, both activists and those boosters were likewise motivated to turn a blind eye toward the evolution of lynching into the discrete assassinations that occurred in the dead of night and haunted the South during the civil rights era, into the legitimized violence of law enforcement against racialized others, into the individual practice of armed self-defense against those who appear out of place. And if some act of violence threatens to recall the form and spirit of lynching, it can be dubbed a hate crime and its perpetrator(s) sufficiently pathologized so as to protect the state and broader society from being implicated in its performance.
Thus does the equation of lynching with any present-day event stoke significant controversy, for in our modern era, we do not have lynchings—we have hate crimes. We do not have communal celebrations of butchery and blood defended by leading voices of the era—we have isolated individuals, psychologically askew, who perpetrate murders for reasons of some personal, pathological motivation. And, as a consequence of this development, we do not have any unified opposition to the practice of lynching, however it might be manifest, but, instead, an array of disparate interests attempting to tackle issues of police violence, hate crimes, economic inequality, and political disfranchisement, as if these were separate matters and not simply varied manifestations of the same underlying structure. What Ashraf H. A. Rushdy calls the end-of-lynching discourse that arose in the 1930s and 1940s “has conflated the end of lynching with the onset of a racially tolerant modernity. And what is lost as a result of that discourse is the opportunity for more subtle analyses of what racial conditions were like then and are like now.”16 American society may not currently exhibit the form of lynching, but the function remains present in other manifestations of violence, both subjective and objective, both personal and structural. Ore sees at the center of lynching a rhetoric of citizenship and belonging that perpetually marks the Black body as the outsider, and it is this rhetorical core that allows us to link such events as the lynching of Emmett Till with the murder of Trayvon Martin by self-appointed “neighborhood watchman” George Zimmerman. As she writes:
There is only one tradition that describes the conscious choice to profile a black boy to death as chivalrous, only one tradition that posits the conscious eradication of black life as an unfortunate, but nonetheless ugly, consequence of supposed black delinquency, and only one tradition that uses racial terror as a means of policing the boundaries between America’s white “us” and its black “them”: that tradition—what Ida B. Wells referred to as America’s “national crime”—is lynching.17
But it can be difficult for us to recognize this continuity, despite some obvious parallels, such as the various slanders thrown at the victim, the requirement of national attention to force local law enforcement to act, and the total exoneration of the killers to great fanfare in the more conservative press. The era of lynching, we are told again and again, has long since ended, and any evocation of that word, any application of it to modern “tragedies,” is overstating the case (although presidential appropriation to describe a nonracialized act of nonviolence like impeachment is, according to the same voices, entirely permissible).
Scholars beyond the field of history have come to the conclusion that violence is “constitutive,” that, as rhetorician Megan Eatman writes, it “shapes the identities of victims and participants. Violence clarifies the division of ‘us’ and ‘them.’ We are just and strong, they are dangerous and deviant. Violence is thus not an interaction between discrete individuals, but a process that creates both subjects.”18 The events covered in this book, the indisputable lynchings of the past, are part of a broader “rhetorical ecology produced by practices of direct, structural, and cultural violence,” an ecology that, in ways mirroring the reality of a biological ecosystem, “is hospitable to only certain identities and practices.”19 And it is this metaphor of an “ecology of violence” that allows us to draw more firm lines between the atrocities of the past and the policies of the present. After all, biological ecosystems do not exist in a state of homeostasis. They evolve throughout time as the conditions that created and maintain them change and as the organisms contained within themselves undergo evolution. But we can, with careful work, see similar creatures occupying similar roles within these ecosystems throughout time. It is not that the modern vigilantes like Zimmerman are necessarily directly descended from the lynchers of yore. However, with the slow diminishment of classical lynching, there was an ecological niche that went unoccupied—specifically, a niche for the informal and violent enforcement of white supremacy and the regulation of Black bodies. People like Zimmerman now occupy that ecological niche.
With this book, therefore, I hope that I have sufficiently strengthened the case for recognizing a continuity of lynching across the years by explicating the five types of violence that, to me, seem to lie at the core of the practice. Recognizing how lynching specifically encompassed group, structural, humanistic, virtuous, and scapegoating forms of violence should help us track its evolution, for any form of violence that exhibits these same qualities may, arguably, be compared with lynching, and we should not hesitate to apply the term and employ the full force of its rhetorical power. Using the right label can allow us to connect meaningfully with the past and recognize that the projects of previous generations of activists have not, in fact, been completed, but wait upon those now living to bring them to fruition. The end of lynching, unfortunately, lies before us still.