100 things blogging challenge: 17

[untonuggan]

So there are certain things I mention at dinner parties and at any parties or conversations that I know about from my history degree that are conversation stoppers. But they are things I feel like people should know about, only they don't know about them. But it's kind of like, I dunno, talking about genocide at dinner?

Usually I just stay quiet, but I am going to mention a thing here behind a cut. Be forewarned that it is a TRIGGERY thing and it has the potential to:

1. make you angry at people in the past
2. be visually disturbing (pictures of graphical violence if you follow the link)
3. poke at any anti-racism feelings you have rather hard
4. make you angry at people in the present for ignoring this part of history in favor of the [World War II] History Channell
5. make you insufferable at dinner parties

Today I am going to talk about lynching and "lynching postcards." They used to be a thing for lynch mobs, which were a big part of Jim Crow south.

Lynching, as I understand it from my summer of researching lynching (that was not a good choice for brain weasels) basically fulfilled the following social roles:

1. keep people of color from rebelling against the Jim Crow social code by proving what white mobs would do if anyone acted up
2. provide Southern Whites, who often felt less well off than Northern Whites particularly after the Civil War, with a means of feeling superior to someone else
3. protect Southern "womanhood" from being "sullied" by African American males. Note that in many cases, the "rapes" that African American men were lynched for were actually consensual affairs, or they were simply the scapegoat. For "obviously" white Southern women couldn't possibly want to have sex outside of marriage (thus oppressing two groups at once, or three if you count African American women who were left without partners if their significant others' were lynched and faced increased sexual harassment from men because they were supposed to be "lascivious").

This is obviously a very simplified nutshell, but that is the basic ugly truth as to why lynch mobs usually happened in the South.

Prominent anti-lynching crusader of awesomeness Ida B. Wells deserves recognition here for facing violence herself to raise awareness about how prevalent lynching was.

Lynching postcards - back to my big party-stopping bomb - were basically photos of white people having a party at a lynching scene, complete with dead bodies, with messages like, "Wish You Were Here, We Had Such a Good Time" on the back.

If you are feeling really full of emotional spoons - and I mean really full, don't do this if you are depressed - you can check out the online museum of lynching postcards/photographs. The thing that hits me most in our allegedly "post racial" society is the comments section, in which trolls leave vicious comments about those murdered as part of a hate crime a century ago.

Comments

[jjhunter]

I've seen the site before during class time in high school - the Facing History & Ourselves program at the junior/senior level of high school is brutal. I know exactly where you're coming from - it's hard and horrible and people turn away from it because remaining present in the face of unapologetic evil shakes you down to the foundations and eats at every sacred certainty about human nature one might hold.

I assume you've come across the Billie Holiday song 'Strange Fruit'?

[untonuggan]

It's sort of like the Holocaust Museum, only fewer people seem to know about it.

Billie Holiday song: yes

[alee_grrl]

Listened to a remarkable story about the guy who wrote strange fruit on NPR the other day.

[untonuggan]

Wow, that's really amazing! Thanks for sharing.

[cadenzamuse]

I got through nine postcards out of over a hundred. My stomach is turned. It is not any less horrific on a second viewing/hearing.

[untonuggan]

That's about how far I got.