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I sit here and think about the children and grandchildren of the white people who are alive today here in my country, whose immediate ancestors attended “spectacle” lynchings.

*Trigger warning if you can’t deal with reading about violence.

Here’s how the Equal Justice Initiative describes them:

More than 4000 African Americans were killed in racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950. Many of these extrajudicial murders were celebratory public spectacles, where thousands of white people, including elected officials and prominent citizens, gathered to witness victims being gruesomely tortured and mutilated. White newspapers advertised these carnival-like events; vendors sold food, photographers printed postcards, and victims’ clothing and body parts were given out as souvenirs. In Newnan, Georgia, in 1899, at least 2000 whites watched as a white mob mutilated and burned alive a black man named Sam Hose, and then sold pieces of his organs and bones. In 1916, a white mob in Waco, Texas, tortured and lynched a mentally disabled 17-year-old black boy named Jesse Washington in front of city hall, stripping, stabbing, beating, and mutilating him before burning him alive in front of 15,000 white spectators. Charred pieces of his body were dragged through town, and his fingers and fingernails were taken as keepsakes. Public spectacle lynchings were most frequent in the South, but also occurred in Northern and Midwestern states as black Americans migrated during the 20th century. In 1920, 10,000 whites attended the lynchings of three black circus workers in Duluth, Minnesota. In Springfield, Missouri, in 1906, two black men, Horace Dunn and Fred Coker, were hanged and shot to death for a crowd of 5000 whites. White lynch mobs and spectators rarely faced consequences. Although these killings were widely attended and photographed, whites committed public spectacle lynchings with impunity. Before I die, I hope to make a pilgrimage to Alabama to visit the memorial depicted in the photo at the top of this story. x YouTube Video New York Times reporter Campbell Robertson described the opening last year in an article titled “A Lynching Memorial Is Opening. The Country Has Never Seen Anything Like It”: The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opens Thursday on a six-acre site overlooking the Alabama State Capitol, is dedicated to the victims of American white supremacy. And it demands a reckoning with one of the nation’s least recognized atrocities: the lynching of thousands of black people in a decades-long campaign of racist terror. At the center is a grim cloister, a walkway with 800 weathered steel columns, all hanging from a roof. Etched on each column is the name of an American county and the people who were lynched there, most listed by name, many simply as “unknown.” The columns meet you first at eye level, like the headstones that lynching victims were rarely given. But as you walk, the floor steadily descends; by the end, the columns are all dangling above, leaving you in the position of the callous spectators in old photographs of public lynchings. The magnitude of the killing is harrowing, all the more so when paired with the circumstances of individual lynchings, some described in brief summaries along the walk: Parks Banks, lynched in Mississippi in 1922 for carrying a photograph of a white woman; Caleb Gadly, hanged in Kentucky in 1894 for “walking behind the wife of his white employer”; Mary Turner, who after denouncing her husband’s lynching by a rampaging white mob, was hung upside down, burned and then sliced open so that her unborn child fell to the ground. White massacres of blacks and other people of color are part and parcel of our history, starting with Native Americans. They are rarely included in what is taught as “history” in schools across the U.S. Head over to the Zinn Education Project for a listing titled “Massacres in U.S. History”: Here is a list of some of the countless massacres in the history of the United States. Most of these massacres were designed to suppress voting rights, land ownership, economic advancement, education, freedom of the press, religion, LGBTQ rights, and/or labor rights of African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Asians, and immigrants. While often referred to as “race riots,” they were massacres to maintain white supremacy. One of the best explanations about why it is important for students to learn this history is included in the article (and related lesson) by Linda Christensen, Burning Tulsa: The Legacy of Black Dispossession. A tweet thread by historian Stephen West shows how politicians fueled hate crimes during the Reconstruction era, with parallels today. Ursula Wolfe-Rocca writes about Red Summer of 1919, Remembering Red Summer — Which Textbooks Seem Eager to Forget. I was watching Rachel Maddow on MSNBC on Tuesday, and she brought up the case of one of the last lynchings to take place in the U.S.: the terrorist murder of Michael Donald. On the night of March 21, 1981, a cross crackled and burned on the lawn of the Mobile County courthouse—the Ku Klux Klan’s grim protest of the outcome of a local murder trial. It was just the beginning of the terror that would take place that night. The cross burned out, but the Klan’s anger didn’t. Later that night, two men roamed Mobile looking for a black man to kill. They found him: 19-year-old Michael Donald. Before the night was through, Donald had been murdered and his body hung from a tree. x YouTube Video

Maddow pursued a line of thought focusing on using legal avenues to potentially destroy the sources of funding for white supremacists.

I agree with the idea, as just one part of what needs to be done to combat white supremacist terror. However, it places the onus of taking action onto the shoulders of the victims’ families.

It does little to erase what I call the “collective amnesia” of white people here in the U.S. for the role they have played—and continue to play—in maintaining white supremacy.

The strongest case made in this respect that I’ve read since the advent of Trump came from Ta-Nehisi Coates. If you missed it when he wrote it in 2017, I strongly suggest you read the entire piece titled “The First White President: The foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy.”

There is far too much in this tour de force to cite here without violating copyright. I was struck by his critique of “the left” and its current avoidance of really addressing white supremacy in pursuit of white working-class Trump voters. The focus on one subsector of Trump voters—the white working class—is puzzling, given the breadth of his white coalition. Indeed, there is a kind of theater at work in which Trump’s presidency is pawned off as a product of the white working class as opposed to a product of an entire whiteness that includes the very authors doing the pawning. The motive is clear: escapism. To accept that the bloody heirloom remains potent even now, some five decades after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a Memphis balcony—even after a black president; indeed, strengthened by the fact of that black president—is to accept that racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of this country’s political life. The idea of acceptance frustrates the left. The left would much rather have a discussion about class struggles, which might entice the white working masses, instead of about the racist struggles that those same masses have historically been the agents and beneficiaries of. Moreover, to accept that whiteness brought us Donald Trump is to accept whiteness as an existential danger to the country and the world. But if the broad and remarkable white support for Donald Trump can be reduced to the righteous anger of a noble class of smallville firefighters and evangelicals, mocked by Brooklyn hipsters and womanist professors into voting against their interests, then the threat of racism and whiteness, the threat of the heirloom, can be dismissed. Consciences can be eased; no deeper existential reckoning is required. He concludes:

...the most powerful country in the world has handed over all its affairs—the prosperity of its entire economy; the security of its 300 million citizens; the purity of its water, the viability of its air, the safety of its food; the future of its vast system of education; the soundness of its national highways, airways, and railways; the apocalyptic potential of its nuclear arsenal—to a carnival barker who introduced the phrase grab ’em by the pussy into the national lexicon. It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, “If a black man can be president, then any white man—no matter how fallen—can be president.” And in that perverse way, the democratic dreams of Jefferson and Jackson were fulfilled. The American tragedy now being wrought is larger than most imagine and will not end with Trump. In recent times, whiteness as an overt political tactic has been restrained by a kind of cordiality that held that its overt invocation would scare off “moderate” whites. This has proved to be only half true at best. Trump’s legacy will be exposing the patina of decency for what it is and revealing just how much a demagogue can get away with. It does not take much to imagine another politician, wiser in the ways of Washington and better schooled in the methodology of governance—and now liberated from the pretense of antiracist civility—doing a much more effective job than Trump. It has long been an axiom among certain black writers and thinkers that while whiteness endangers the bodies of black people in the immediate sense, the larger threat is to white people themselves, the shared country, and even the whole world. There is an impulse to blanch at this sort of grandiosity. When W. E. B. Du Bois claims that slavery was “singularly disastrous for modern civilization” or James Baldwin claims that whites “have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white,” the instinct is to cry exaggeration. But there really is no other way to read the presidency of Donald Trump. The first white president in American history is also the most dangerous president—and he is made more dangerous still by the fact that those charged with analyzing him cannot name his essential nature, because they too are implicated in it.

This short video illustrates the content of the essay, noting that Trump is our first “white President” elected solely because of his whiteness, with no other redeeming values or qualifications.

I concur.

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Coates cites James Baldwin, who wrote “On Being ‘White’ and Other Lies” in an essay published in Essence in 1984:

There has never been a labor movement in this country, the proof being the absence of a Black presence in the so-called father-to-son unions. There are, perhaps, some niggers in the window; but Blacks have no power in the labor unions. Just so does the white community, as a means of keeping itself white, elect, as they imagine, their political representatives. No nation in the world, including England, is represented by so stunning a pantheon of the relentlessly mediocre. I will not name names I will leave that to you. But this cowardice, this necessity of justifying a totally false identity and of justifying what must be called a genocidal history, has placed everyone now living into the hands of the most ignorant and powerful people the world has ever seen: And how did they get that way? By deciding that they were white. By opting for safety instead of life. By persuading themselves that a Black child's life meant nothing compared with a white child's life. By abandoning their children to the things white men could buy. By informing their children that Black women, Black men and Black children had no human integrity that those who call themselves white were bound to respect. And in this debasement and definition of Black people, they debased and defamed themselves. And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white. Because they think they are white, they do not dare confront the ravage and the lie of their history. Because they think they are white, they cannot allow themselves to be tormented by the suspicion that all men are brothers. Because they think they are white, they are looking for, or bombing into existence, stable populations, cheerful natives and cheap labor. Because they think they are white, they believe, as even no child believes, in the dream of safety. Because they think they are white, however vociferous they may be and however multitudinous, they are as speechless as Lot's wife— looking backward, changed into a pillar of salt. However, White being, absolutely, a moral choice (for there are no white people), the crisis of leadership for those of us whose identity has been forged, or branded, as Black is nothing new. We—who were not Black before we got here either, who were defined as Black by the slave trade—have paid for the crisis of leadership in the white community for a very long time, and have resoundingly, even when we face the worst about ourselves, survived, and triumphed over it. If we had not survived and triumphed, there would not be a Black American alive. And the fact that we are still here—even in suffering, darkness, danger, endlessly defined by those who do not dare define, or even confront, themselves is the key to the crisis in white leadership. The past informs us of various kinds of people—criminals, adventurers and saints, to say nothing, of course, of popes—but it is the Black condition, and only that, which informs us concerning white people.

Baldwin, of course, was not the only author and black political thinker to address the issue of whiteness and white supremacy.

We have just lost Toni Morrison. Her death has revived interest in a piece she wrote after Trump was elected.

x This is what Toni Morrison wrote for @NewYorker just after Election Day 2016: "Making America White Again" https://t.co/Xe8I6WjHrI Ã¢ÂÂ Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) August 6, 2019

It was titled “Making America White Again,” and the subhed read “The choices made by white men, who are prepared to abandon their humanity out of fear of black men and women, suggest the true horror of lost status.”

On Election Day, how eagerly so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump. The candidate whose company has been sued by the Justice Department for not renting apartments to black people. The candidate who questioned whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, and who seemed to condone the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester at a campaign rally. The candidate who kept black workers off the floors of his casinos. The candidate who is beloved by David Duke and endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan. William Faulkner understood this better than almost any other American writer. In “Absalom, Absalom,” incest is less of a taboo for an upper-class Southern family than acknowledging the one drop of black blood that would clearly soil the family line. Rather than lose its “whiteness” (once again), the family chooses murder.

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Toni Morrison, who chronicled the African American experience in fiction over five decades, has died aged 88. The novelist was the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and is widely regarded as a champion for repressed minorities. Speaking on racism, Morrison said in an interview: "If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees then you have a serious problem. And my feeling is white people have a very, very serious problem"

x Toni Morrison on white supremacy: pic.twitter.com/F8mNDBe0jq Ã¢ÂÂ David Kamp (@MrKamp) August 6, 2019

x "If you can only be tall because somebody is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And my feeling is white people have a very, very serious problem, and they should start thinking about what they can do about it.Ã¢ÂÂ



Rest In Power Toni Morrisonpic.twitter.com/KD0mukv4x0 Ã¢ÂÂ Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) August 6, 2019

As I have done in the past and will continue to do in the present and into the future, I call upon those of you who are defined or define yourselves as “white” to stand up and fight this plague inflicting our nation. Black folks, as only approximately 13% of the population, cannot fix it alone.

Donald Trump and his minions are but a symptom of the white supremacist problem we all face today, and that problem is rooted deep in the foundations of this nation.

Become a part of the solution.