PSYCHOLOGICAL LYNCHING
Several months ago I criticized Congress and many African Americans for lauding the House of Representatives’ approval of the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act. I complained that Congress waited more than 60 years too late to make the lynching of a black man a federal crime, that it the was frivolous, archaic and merely a political stunt given the fact that ropes had long been replaced by mass incarceration, socioeconomic inequities, and other forms of injustices. I even had the audacity to say that lynching was a thing of the past. Then came George Floyd.
Boy, how wrong I was. Not about the Act being a political stunt, but about black men no longer being lynched. We are lynched thousands of times per day. Every time we see images of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Eric Gardner, and other black men being viciously murdered by white men, or police brutally detaining black men for the world to see, we not only witness a lynching but also are essentially lynched ourselves.
A lynching is a public castigation designed to instill fear and obedience into the hearts and minds of Black America. Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy heinously murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman, wasn’t killed out of retribution. He was lynched as a warning to every black boy in America who dared to eyeball a white woman. Floyd was murdered to send a message to every strong black man who dare to exude strength and power in the face of white authority. That is the essence of a lynching. A message to the black man to be obedient and submissive to the presence of white authority.
So when the images of Floyd and Arbery’s death compel us to warn our children about disobeying police, we’ve been psychologically lynched, for we spread the very fear the lyncher seeks to instill. Every time they show the images in the media, we, Black America as a whole, is once again, psychologically lynched. Dak Prescott and every other NFL player who feared kneeling after Colin Kaepernick was blackballed for doing such have essentially been lynched. That fear of being harmed, murdered, or rejected by white authority has acted as a rope around their necks.
That said, Lynchings are as prevalent today as they were 60 years ago. I see them all the time in prison. I just witnessed one today. When dozens of white guards surrounded, shackled, dragged a lone black man from his cell solely because he didn’t want to move into a cell with a prisoner he wasn’t compatible, I witnessed a lynching. The posturing and force used to control a non-resisting prisoner is no different from that at the core of a lynching.
It is that attitude and the lack of will to understand the scars and pain of Black America that has propelled millions into the streets shouting, “Black lives matter!” It isn’t the skin color or mere actions of authoritarian figures who castigate us. It is the authoritarian attitude of white supremacy cloaked in white privilege that foments Black indignation. The audacity of he or she to use badges and white skin as a license or absolute right to not only kill a black man and get away with it, but also force us as a whole to be obedient.
So when we all witnessed via social media a white woman in Central Park call cops and falsely claim that a black man was threatening her, we witnessed a lynching. And if we allow that lynching to stop us from confronting the wrongs of White America, we too have been lynched. Psychologically lynched.