Marc,
Angry doesn’t even come close to explaining how this photo makes me feel. This photo terrorizes me. One of my black, female graduate students sent it to me on at 7:00 this morning. It was the first image I saw when I woke up.
Nearly five thousand men and women were lynched in the American South in the years between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement. These black men and women were not slaves. They were hardworking, taxpaying citizens of America who had been granted the right to vote and given equal protection of the law in the American Constitution. Yet they were viciously murdered for tiny infractions of a racist social code. These gruesome murders were carefully constructed to impact the entire community. The lynch mob not only killed its victim, it stripped whole communities of any sense of security, protection, or predictability.
The attacks of September 11 had the same effect on America. As the attacks robbed thousands of families and communities of their loved ones, it also destroyed our country’s sense of security. Like the victims of lynching, the victims of September 11 were targeted solely for their identity, not for any crime. After September 11, African Americans mourned along with the rest of the country. But many black Americans also harbored a secret knowledge that this was not the first time that Americans had faced terrorism.
We remember Emmett Till’s broken body and distorted face. We remember four little girls murdered in a church basement. We remember grandmothers who dared to register to vote being visited in the dead of night by masked white men bearing torches and crosses. We remember slain leaders and know that strange fruit hung from American trees too recently to be discounted as archaic history. While the memory of racial terrorism is fresh for many, it has been completely absent from public conversations about terrorism over the past seven years.
American schools teach children that Jim Crow was about separate water fountains and sitting at the back of city buses. Jim Crow was so much more. The system allowed and encouraged daily acts of terrorism against ordinary, working black people. Sometimes the terrorism took the form of vicious public murders where black men were tortured and maimed before being killed. Other times the terrorism took the form of economic, social, or psychological abuse meted out against African Americans simply to remind them of their subordinate position. For black people there was no protection against the whims of racists protected by a Southern code.
That is the history that crawled up into the bed with me this morning when I clicked this link. That is the history that curled up into the pit of my stomach and made me feel like throwing up. Michelle and the Obama daughters means so much to me as a black woman raising a my own young daughter. That such a horrifying imaging of Michelle could be deployed in her so-called-defense made me sad, angry and really very scared.
Melissa
