’)Jeez. I really hate writing a lot about racial issues, but sometimes you gotta. I’m constantly amazed at the complete ignorance exhibited by way too many white folks on these issues. From a Washington Post chat:
Washington: When did nooses become racist symbols? When I was a kid we’d always make nooses in scout camp in Virginia to “string up the rustlers.” It was a Western symbol with roots in all the Western movies we grew up with — something dangerous that knot-tiers could make, but always about the Old West. Later in high school depressed friends would make them for what you’d now call “Goth” culture, but back then it was more Alice Cooper. About five years ago an African American friend said that nooses are “always about lynching.” I never thought that my entire life and it’s totally news to me. Is this a symbol with strong meaning in the South?
Are you shitting me? Pardon my french, but are you seriously shitting me? What would it take, as far as a sheltered upbringing, to not automatically get that nooses would instantly bring to mind lynching? I’ve lived in the mixed suburbs almost all my life, so I don’t get the mindset that comes with living in a racially homogenous area, but even in the most monochromatic enclaves of society I have to assume people have TV, radio, newspapers, and the web… right?
How is somebody so ignorant in 2007?
“How is somebody so ignorant in 2007?”
They work at it.
The main difference between conservatives and liberals is their attitudes toward differing opinions. Conservatives hate and fear those that don’t think like them. They work at avoiding differences because it makes them uncomfortable.
(On a side note, this is why big cities tend to be much more liberal. It’s impossible to live in New York City, for instance, and not run across different people on a daily basis.)
As a white kid growing up in the 60s, I would have agreed with the Washington Post chatter, and in fact we all learned how to create a noose because of its association with Westerns and the urban legend that a noose of 13 knots or greater was illegal. However, after high school, or even seeing Blazing Saddles in jr. high school, no way.
But more importantly, the context as I understood it was that the nooses appeared on the tree immediately AFTER the black kids sat under the tree. And given that, how could anyone NOT think it was about lynching?
(And frankly it’s appalling they had to ask for permission.)
I’m surprised (and a little skeptical) that anyone could grow to adulthood without forming any association whatsoever between nooses and the practice of lynching. But for those of us who are white and were raised outside the South, the link is hardly indelible. Death by hanging precedes the Jim Crow era by some centuries.
In the Jena context, though, the implication is obvious, and the commenter is either naive or reflexively contrarian.
When I was about 10 my friends and I learned how to make a noose out of rope. We thought it was cool. I had absolutely no association with lynching. I’d heard the term lynching in history class, but at that age they didn’t go into the details, and didn’t show pictures, so I didn’t know what it was–I thought it was tying someone to a tree. That was in Berkeley, California in the 1970s, a far cry from a homogeneous suburb. I still wouldn’t associate a noose with lynching black people without having it pointed out to me–the association is more with a generic old-time hanging, like in an old movie. Maybe it comes from growing up in the west and not spending any time in the south.
I grew up in Mass., in a whitey-white suburban bubble, and going to whitey-white scout camps across the northeast, and even I know that aside from the contextual use around halloween (or Alice Cooper), a noose is pretty much equivalent to a burning cross on your lawn, or a brick with a note coming through the living room window.
Not acceptable social behavior.
Unless you honestly believe the kids were being warned away from their cattle.
AND that if it were the chess club who sat there that nooses would have been used.
While in college, I dated someone who once remarked about how offensive Madonna’s video for “Like a Prayer” was. (It had just been released on MTV.) I asked about it, and she said it was “sacreligious”. So I started taping MTV in large blocks (this was way before TiVo), until I got the video on tape and watched it. Didn’t see what could have been bothering her, so I asked. She said, “The burning crosses. What’s that supposed to be, if not destroying Christian symbols?”
Yes, this person had made it to college without *any* knowledge of the civil rights movement, or the terror tactics employed by the KKK. It can really happen.
Well, you’ve got to remember, this is probably the kind of person who just doesn’t understand why people get so worked up about the Confederate flag – it’s just “a symbol of heritage”, after all (you hear THAT BS line a LOT here in the South)
On a related note, I think people here might get a kick out of this less publicized, but significantly funnier, protest of a Klan rally in Knoxville, TN:
Send In The Clowns!
The journalism is shoddy and the comments underneath the article will make you weep for America, but the protest itself is gold.
How many cowboys are in that LA. town?
I have not commented a whole bunch on Jena, except to object to Jesse Jackson, Sr. accusing Barack Obama of “being white” until today, but this white boy agrees with Oliver Willis:
* Some black kids hang out under a “white” tree, and nooses are hung on it the next day.
* The principal wants to expel the fucks who did this, but the school board makes it a two fucking day suspension.
* The black students decide to sit quietly under the tree as a non-violent protest.
* The police are called in, and the DA threatens the black kids (and it’s clear that is what he did) at a school assembly.
* Tensions are inflamed with at least two instances of groups of white kids beating down a black kid, no prosecutions.
* The same school board that allowed the noose hanging perps to walk refused to allow black students and parents to testify before them.
* In the fight in question, the kid who was beaten up, but is not even kept over night.
* The students involved in the fight are charged by the same DA who threatened them with attempted murder.
* The one student who has made it to trial maintains that he wasn’t even there, but his public defender refuses to call any witness and the all white jury convicts him of aggravated assault.
* That conviction has been overturned because an appelate judge basically said, “are you out of your fucking mind charging this kid as an adult.”
You’r right, it’s just some uppity n***ers, no discrimination here.
Someone send these jerks a copy of Billie Holiday’s Greatest Hits, OK? (Meaning: ‘Strange Fruit.’) Cassandra Wilson does a good cover, too.
I recently had someone tell me that there is no institutionalized racism in America. I cited the Jena 6 story, and he said, Nope. Just a kid with priors getting busted for starting a fight.
You’re absolutely right, Oliver, that the civil rights movement people have their act together, much more than the anti-war crowd. The real problem is that, just as there are many who want to deny that the war is going poorly, there are also many who want to deny the history of race relations in the US.
I don’t know. I think that Washington Post comment is a sign that race is no longer an issue in America.
“What would it take, as far as a sheltered upbringing, to not automatically get that nooses would instantly bring to mind lynching?”
Apparently mine. I see a noose first thing I think of is a European gallows. Second thing is hanging cattle rustlers.
Mr. Willis’ reaction of rightous indignation reminds me of the uproar that surrounded the tempest in a teapot that was the flight attendant on Southwest Airlines.
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCulture.asp?Page=%5CCulture%5Carchive%5C200304%5CCUL20030416a.html
Obviously when the setting is a high school in a defacto segregated town in Louisiana nooses hanging from a tree is a very different symbol, but absent the context, it’s very ignorant to assume that every person sees every symbol the same way you do.
Nooses always me of the Norse God Odin. Scandinavians beware! Yeah right.
When I see a noose, I automatically think of lynching. But I apparently have a slightly better grasp on lexicology than everyone else here, article author specifically included.
Lynching is ANY murder by mob, especially by hanging. It is not specifically related to racial bigotry.
Seriously, how educated can you be and not understand that?
That said, it is clear that this case was racially motivated. The noose was meant to remind of the lynchings of blacks in the South. Not the huge number of OTHER lynchings that have taken place throughout the United States.
Seriously, don’t make your stand on a flawed too-narrow definition of an emotional word. That just makes it easier for the conservatives to pretend you are lunatics (instead of themselves).
Ok. Because the next time the subject of nooses and lynching comes up I’ll be sure to start talking about all those rustlers and outlaws that were hanged in the Old West, before I mosey my way into that whole Deep South thing. I guess it’s always better to be a pedantic doofus than, you know, get right to the point.
Well, frameone, you could try being smart for a change. Instead of again narrowing your focus too tightly, you can LOOK AT THE CONTEXT.
In this case, we have racial bigotry and the threat of hanging.
It doesn’t bloody matter if when you see a noose you normally think of lynching blacks or lynching cattle rustlers or lynching that stranger who came into town. What matters is the context in which the noose is shown.
The noose is a common symbol of lynching. Can it be used in other ways? Yes, but only when the context is very clear.
Lynching is killing without legal sanction. In other words, murder.
In the west, and in 95% of Westerns where a person is hanged, it is seen as a one size fits all solution. Works for thieves, rapists, killers, blacks, Mexicans, Native Americans, and that stranger who rode into town.
In the South, there is a much stronger association with lynching blacks, mostly for the crime of being black.
In popular media, BOTH of these contexts are widely known. It is really astounding that so many people here blythely pretend they have never heard of a Western. Does Clint freaking Eastwood ring any bells? He’s been lynched by and he’s lynched plenty of bad guys in his western flicks.
This deliberate blind side in order to make one’s outrage seem more justified is just making you look like as much a hypocrite as anyone in the conservative camps. And you don’t have the combination of sheer balls and utter stupidity that they have to persuade otherwise sensible people to believe your bull, so they will roast you over the flames like the incompetents you are.
Rather than trying to be more competent at being stupid and dishonest, you should work harder at being logical and humane. That’s a level they will never be able to compete on.
“The noose is a common symbol of lynching. Can it be used in other ways? Yes, but only when the context is very clear.”
Um, okaaay. Now please point to me an incident, let’s say in the last 100 years of American history, when a white guy was lynched or threatened with lynching by an angry mob … oh and Spencer Tracy doesn’t count.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0027652/
You know Naruki, there’s context and then there’s just being obtuse. Then, of course, there’s just plain idiocy. After telling us that lynching means a lot of different things to people you reference Clint Eastwood? Brilliant.
Actually, let me rephrase that question: Name an incident of lynching in the last 100 years of American history in which a black was lynched and Hollywood made a movie about it.
Fury was based on the hanging of two whites by a mod in California but was made at a time when the VAST majority of lynchings going on in the United States involved blacks in the deep south. While Fury is a powerful anti-lynching film, it nevertheless obfuscates the role that racism played in the epidemic of lynchings that was then occurring at the time. Why do you suppose Hollywood chose two white victims to dramatize instead of, say, two black victims? You really think it was out of fairness and balance?
It is, exactly what you are proposing here: downplay the role of racism in the history of lynching in favor of some ridiculous sense of balance. Once again, the vast majority of lynchings in this country’s modern history were of blacks in the deep south. To pretend otherwise by mentioning Clint Eastwood is just idiocy.
Although nooses have been used for lawful executions in the United States, these have almost always involved a constructed gallows, not stringing someone up from a tree. As someone said earlier, “lynching” is a word for when individuals take the law into their own hands and kill someone. Stringing someone up from a tree is pretty well always lynching whether they’ve been strung up for rustling cattle or for being black and accused of a crime. So when you see a noose hanging from a tree, if your first thought isn’t about lynching then you’re either ignorant of history or in denial. And if you aren’t ignorant of history, then you’ll know that far more people were lynched in this country for having the wrong skin color than were lynched for stealing cows. If you don’t believe me, go read up on the subject. The wikipedia article on Lynching in the United States is a good place to start.
But, of course, I think that the answer is that people are ignorant of history. And it’s not all the fault of people who get their history from the movies either. We don’t really teach the history of racism in America in our high school history classes. Things which make America look bad don’t find their way into our history books.
Keith