You can never make me believe a Black person would kill themself by public hanging.
That's an extraordinary claim requiring bonkers levels of evidence.
But somehow there's a rash of these claims lately.
The only people who believe this shite are willfully ignorant of any meaningful aspect of reality.
I usually make space for ignorance, because I used to be like that, but I'm not giving one inch on this one.
(I'm not even sure I would have believed it even when I was sheltered.)
The first time I became aware of what lynching was, was in Madeleine L'Engle's The Arm of the Starfish when I was a young teen. I was a huge fan of her. Winkle in Time was highly formative for me (and it's highly antifascist), and she's one of the authors who inspired me at a young age to become a writer.
Part of Arm of the Starfish was set in the American South, probably reconstruction times, but I had no context to remember. There's a particularly awful lynching scene that involves tar and feathering and castration, told from a sympathetic POV (I think the character's love interest? I really don't remember.)
That really affected me. One of my earliest awarenesses (that and the miniseries Roots) of how awful people can be in the context of anti-Black racism in the US.
My big blindspot was that I thought it was all in the past.... ofc that one's been cleared up for me.
Racists think that everyone is as stupid as them
@burnoutqueen I think it's more of a power thing. Flaunting it. Like, "I can do whatever I want right in front of everybody and there's nothing you can do about it." A big part of their trip seems to be in controlling the masses in the aftermath.
(This is also true of predators being covered by their church communities.)
Mx. Luna Corbden 🐸
Jacqueline