{"id":9727,"date":"2021-01-18T08:46:11","date_gmt":"2021-01-18T08:46:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=151195"},"modified":"2021-01-18T08:46:11","modified_gmt":"2021-01-18T08:46:11","slug":"lynching-political-correctness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/01\/18\/lynching-political-correctness\/","title":{"rendered":"Lynching Political Correctness"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

I still see the noose<\/a> in front of the capitol building, dangling oh so metaphorically.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo matter how all this plays out, it\u2019s only the beginning,\u201d wrote a user on The Donald message board, according to the Associated Press<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Actually, it\u2019s anything but the beginning \u2014 though I get what the writer means, that there\u2019s more to come. All 50 state capitals are now in the crosshairs of the armed protest movement, apparently, not to mention, once again, the national capitol, where Joe Biden is scheduled to be inaugurated on Jan. 20.<\/p>\n

Indeed, Huffington Post<\/a> reports that Capitol Police briefed congressional Democrats this week on three \u201cpotentially gruesome demonstrations planned in the coming days,\u201d which could include assassination attempts, and among other things suggested that on inauguration day all representatives and senators be put through metal detectors before they\u2019re allowed to enter the halls of Congress, just to make sure they aren\u2019t armed. Some of them are . . . uh . . . \u201cin league with the insurrectionists.\u201d<\/p>\n

As one lawmaker explained to Huffington Post: \u201cYou can\u2019t just let them bypass security and walk right up to Biden and Harris at inauguration.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thanks to Donald Trump, a national return to some sort of centrist \u201cnormal\u201d is now impossible. Lots of people believe a civil war is already underway and they\u2019re excited as hell about it. Political Correctness meets Jim Crow \u2014 finally!<\/p>\n

The \u201crigged election\u201d craziness Trump and his minions have pushed to justify their armed insurrection is reality-based to the true believers, at least in one sense. You wanna know how the election was rigged? People of color \u2014 lots of them \u2014 voted! They swayed the damn election. If Jim Crow (code name: MAGA) were still the law, the orange-haired guy would have his second term and then some.<\/p>\n

The noose, the Confederate flag, the poisoned American flag, the guy in the Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt, T-shirts proclaiming 6MWNE (6 million were not enough) . . . stir these obscenities in with the Second Amendment and what you have is Hell, also known as the good old days. American racism is anything but superficial.<\/p>\n

Its language and manifestation may change, but make no mistake: It never goes away. \u201cWhites only\u201d restrooms morph into the prison-industrial complex. And we always have our wars to wage, our enemies to dehumanize. White supremacy will never be defeated, but I\u2019m certain it can be transcended, both personally and collectively, and the time to do so is now. But this can only happen if we stare unblinkingly at our national history.<\/p>\n

As a starting place I recommend browsing through Without Sanctuary<\/em><\/a>, a.k.a., the coffee table book from hell, a collection of lynch mob photographs and postcards from the first four decades of the 20th century, compiled by James Allen, which came out in 2000. It\u2019s truly unbelievable and well beyond horrifying, but indispensable in helping one understand the depth of collective rage in the human soul, making the United States of America the equivalent of an active volcano. One of these days it will erupt \u2014 again.<\/p>\n

I wrote about the book at the time:<\/p>\n

July 19, 1935. Rubin Stacy, lynched in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Stacy, a homeless black tenant farmer, had asked a white woman for food, frightening her. Mob justice converted this to the capital offense of rape.<\/p>\n

In the photo, the dead man\u2019s pain is palpable. He hangs from a scrub pine in ghastly, almost prayerful repose. The noose around his neck cuts a deep gouge, pulling the flesh taut to the jaw line. The onlookers are mostly women and little girls. The other central figure in the picture is one of the latter, maybe 9, sweet-faced, in a sleeveless, wide-collared dress you could imagine her wearing to Sunday School. She stares almost beatifically at the dangling corpse.<\/p>\n

Raw, racist violence, for much of the country\u2019s history \u2014 and well beyond the Civil War (that earlier one, which started in 1861) \u2014 existed front and center, without shame. It was as American as apple pie.<\/p>\n

And sometimes, when necessary, elected governments were overthrown. Consider the Wilmington. N.C., massacre of 1898, when a white mob torched much of the city and overthrew a racially integrated government that had been made possible in the brief era of Reconstruction, when black people could vote. By some accounts, as many as 300 of them were killed in the insurrection, led by former congressman Alfred Waddell, who had produced a \u201cWhite Declaration of Independence\u201d that declared: \u201cWe will no longer be ruled, and will never again be ruled by men of African origin.\u201d<\/p>\n

Waddell led a mob of 2,000 armed white men, who burned the building housing the black-owned newspaper, the Daily Record, to the ground, stormed into black neighborhoods with rifles and a Gatling gun, and eventually took over the city government.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs bullets were still flying,\u201d according to the Zinn Education Project<\/a>, \u201cWaddell threw out the democratically-elected aldermen and installed his own,\u201d who quickly named him mayor. \u201cThis was nothing less than a coup d\u2019\u00e9tat.\u201d<\/p>\n

A century-plus later, is another coup in the making? How many secret, and not-so-secret, adherents does a possible coup have within the nation\u2019s political and defense infrastructure? Are we in a state of national emergency?<\/p>\n

And how do we become a different country?<\/p>\n

This question hasn\u2019t had such urgency in a long time.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I still see the\u00a0noose\u00a0in front of the capitol building, dangling oh so metaphorically. \u201cNo matter how all this plays out, it\u2019s only the beginning,\u201d wrote a user on\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":526,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9727"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/526"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9727"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9727\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9728,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9727\/revisions\/9728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}