Koritha Mitchell is a literary historian, cultural critic and author of the award-winning book "Living with Lynching." As associate professor of English at Ohio State University, she specializes in African American literature and racial violence in US history and contemporary culture. Follow her @ProfKori. The views expressed here are solely the author's. View more opinion articles on CNN.

(CNN) Mississippi Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, who faces former Democratic Rep. Mike Espy in a run-off election on November 27, is facing public outcry after jokingly invoking "hanging" while campaigning in a state where lynching was once a common occurrence. "If he invited me to a public hanging, I'd be on the front row," Hyde-Smith is heard saying in a video posted to Twitter Sunday morning. She was referring to a cattle rancher who supported her. Hyde-Smith later issued a statement saying that she "used an exaggerated expression of regard [for a supporter], and any attempt to turn this into a negative connotation is ridiculous."

Koritha Mitchell

But her remark underscored a simple truth that many Americans prefer to ignore: Lynching and politics are inextricably linked. Lynching literally shaped the political landscape Americans have inherited; our politics today are in part defined by the belief that white people should have the right to hold themselves and each other to incredibly low standards -- that they shouldn't have to be decent toward people who aren't white.

When white people have not actively worked to create a society fueled by fair play and equal opportunity, they have often ignored the political repression that mobs bent on extra-judicial "justice" achieved -- and the benefits, like power and economic success, they themselves have reaped as a result. Only a person whose ancestors or family members bore no risk of being lynched themselves would dismiss as "ridiculous" objections to making hanging into a public political joke in Mississippi.

Hyde-Smith's remarks and her defensiveness are indicative of the flawed but common arguments made by some white Americans that they bear no responsibility for structural racism and -- as argued even recently by the President -- that pointing out instances of racism is itself "racist." We need the majority of white people to stop being content with the fact that there's no literal blood on their hands. We need them to hold themselves to a higher standard.

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Many Americans underestimate lynching's political role because they focus on "strange fruit," the image of black bodies dangling from trees during the Jim Crow era, and think of those who left those bodies as bygone extremists. However, there was a social and political purpose for producing visual evidence of black people's vulnerability: to make them accept their "proper," subordinate place in society. "Strange fruit" was also evidence of white people's freedom -- to exercise power, to be citizens, to kill. Even those who did not take their freedom to that extreme were assured of it. If all they did was insult a black person or exclude them from opportunity, they could by comparison see themselves as liberal and tolerant.