On September 26, The New York Times published an opinion piece written by a young New Hampshire couple entitled; “Call a Lynching By Its Name”. In this piece, Sindiso Mnisi and Dan Weeks grapple with an alleged attack on an 8-year-old bi-racial boy that occurred in a small town in New Hampshire over the Summer. They go on to trace the history of lynching in the United States and outline the implications that the spread of lynching during the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras had on American society. They cited shocking evidence from the Equal Justice Initiative that tallied 4,084 lynchings perpetrated against African Americans in the South and another 300 in non-Southern states between 1877 and 1950. All of this provides context for what happened to the 8-year-old New Hampshire boy over the summer.
On the afternoon of August 28, a group of white teenagers threw rocks and sticks at the young biracial boy as they approached him in his backyard. While yelling racial slurs at him, the white teenagers wrapped a rope around a tree branch and tied it around the victim’s neck before pushing him off of a picnic table. Thankfully, the boy’s sister and grandmother were nearby and were able to rush him to the hospital. He survived, but sustained severe rope burns and was found with a bleeding neck.
These overt acts of racialized violence, while increasingly rare, act as a reminder of the possibility that the more subtle implications of institutional racism can manifest themselves in very concrete and dangerous ways. It also forces us to confront our long and damning history of condoning, supporting, and codifying race-based terrorism in the United States. While acts violence inspired by racial hatred are oftentimes prosecuted, the attempted lynching in New Hampshire shows us that there are Americans who are so heavily invested in white supremacy and their visions of white superiority that they will march and commit violence to protect it.
In the immediate aftermath of the lynching, members of the community came together to set up a vigil in support of the victim and his family. At the vigil, a contingent of white men showed up flying Confederate flags while they “decried the slogan ‘Black Lives Matter”. These blatant displays of racism reveal that there are still those who would go out of their way to promote and perpetrate racial violence. Given that fact, it is vital that we do not become complacent in our fight against inequality and bigotry in this country.
Pledged: Nick DeMaris
WC: 454
Source Cited:
Weeks, Sindiso Mnisi & Weeks, Dan. “Call a Lynching By Its Name.” New York Times, September 26, 2017. https://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/call-a-lynching-by-its-name/?_r=0
I think an important part of lynching is the community support it also needed. It would take the entire village and the courts and police would support it. I see parallels now to how courts repeatedly let police killings go unpublished and the public supports it.
ReplyDelete