In the wake of the racial tensions in Jena, La., which was sparked by the hanging of three nooses at the local high school, it seems like the rest of the country (well, the white racist part of the country) couldn’t wait to play the copycat game. Nooses, emblematic of the era of lynching in America, when mobs of whites, often with the tacit acceptance or actual assistance of local white law enforcement officials, felt free to hang any black male they believed guilty of a crime (and occasionally whites believed to be sympathetic to blacks), are popping up everywhere since the Jena story was pushed into the mainstream media by African American bloggers. And the results are revealing the ugly underbelly of America’s cultural, racial and ethnic diversity:
An orange hangman’s noose reported nailed to a tree Friday in Ogle County, Ill., is the latest of several nationally reported cases of hanging nooses — which many consider to be a symbol of racist tension from America’s past. […]
“Such incidents are shameful,” said acting attorney general Peter Keisler in a statement to ABC News. “The message of fear and terror that nooses communicate is deplorable. Many of these cowardly actions may also violate federal and state civil rights and hate crime laws.”
But do the nooses reflect a resurgence of racism in America? […]
“It’s not different from the domestic terrorism we experienced during the civil rights movement,” NAACP CEO Dennis Cortland Hayes said, “and even in the early 1900’s, when the NAACP was founded to respond to lynchings that were occurring.”
Two things. I don’t see this as a resurgence at all. This is simply evidence of underlying racism which in today’s political environment many whites now feel enabled to express openly. If you are a white person, at some point in your life you are likely to have been regaled with racist jokes by a relative, friend or business associate, usually when the “jokester” thought it was safe to do so. I will readily admit having heard such jokes on many occasions in my lifetime, and it wasn’t until I married an Asian-American woman that I openly began to express my distaste for such “humor.” Before then I often remained silent, afraid to speak up while others laughed, some nervously, some with gusto, at jokes which employed racial slurs and stereotypes.
Many white people do not tell such jokes, and many do not express overt racist attitudes in public or in private. But neither do many of us protest those who do, and we all share some of the underlying prejudices which support racism. Indeed, it’s impossible for most of us not to have imbibed racial and other group stereotypes when they are so prevalent in the way our media represents minorities in the news and in popular culture. Italians are wise guys and wife beaters, blacks are stupid, lazy and “gangstas” (unless they are entertaining us as dancers, musicians, comedians or sports stars), gays are flaming, effeminate hairdressers who like to dress up in women’s clothes and have sex with little children, Latinos are drug dealers who can’t speak English well and drive old cars with poor suspensions, women who are raped were asking for it, Jews are invariably from New York City or work in Hollywood, Asians are good at math but calculating and emotionally repressed, and so on and so forth. Name a minority group, and our media will trumpet popular stereotypes about them.
Second, this is the direct result of the conservative movement’s efforts to change the discussion on race in our country. Their attacks on affirmative action and claims of reverse racism were just the opening salvo in a long campaign to make it acceptable to hold and express racist attitudes. They have funded sloppy and biased pseudo-scientific “research” into racial differences such as Charles Murray’s claims of inherent racial differences between the races in intelligence (The Bell Curve), attacked “political correctness” as the equivalent of “Stalinist repression” by liberals in academia, the media and government. Where opposition to hate crimes laws are alleged to be violations of their “first amendment rights” (as if terroristic acts against women, gays, blacks, Latinos, native Americans or other groups was somehow constitutionally protected speech of some kind). And they have been largely successful in negating the cultural narrative that briefly reigned during the late 60’s and 70’s that racism, discrimination or prejudice in any form should not be tolerated.
Over the last 30 years we have moved from a culture that officially expressed the need for racial tolerance, integration and the elimination of racial barriers in employment, education, mortgage lending, business opportunities and voting rights to one where openly racist “media personalities” such as Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh dominate our airwaves and nightly cable “news shows” with their no longer so peculiar brand of bigotry. A world where equal rights for gays are attacked as “special rights” that no one else has, and where gay marriage is decried as part of some nebulous “homosexual agenda” designed to destroy American values and corrupt our children. Where racial profiling of African Americans (they even have a name for it: driving while black) is a daily occurrence. And where unhinged demagogues like Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter are given a platform to spout their insidious claim that Muslims in America should be rounded up and placed in “internment camps” if another terrorist attack on American soil should occur, the Constitution be damned.
So this isn’t a resurgence at all. It’s merely the end product of a long campaign to make racism, bigotry and prejudices of all kinds as “American as Apple Pie” once again. And it would help if the media would recognize that the purveyors of this hateful agenda are all card carrying members of right wing organizations funded by conservative extremists whose goal is to turn back the clock to the days of the 19th Century, when it was perfectly okay to use racial slurs in everyday speech, and to discriminate against people of color. When gays stayed in the closet and women stayed at home. When labor unions were outlawed and violence was management’s preferred approach to collective bargaining. And when strange fruit hung from trees all across this country as a warning to any non-white who dared to step out of line and protest their treatment by the dominant white culture.
Because nooses are not the problem, they are merely just the latest symptom of the disease the conservative movement has actively promoted over the last several decades, one which will only get worse unless good people of all colors, creeds and sexual orientations stand up and say “enough is enough” to the racists, bigots and bullies in our society. Until then, expect things to only get worse, and perhaps much, much worse.
