From one shameful pastime to another...

I read an article close to ten years ago in George (remember JFK’s political magazine with that famous cover of Crawford dressed up as George Washington?) entitled “America’s Shameful Pastime.” The story featured several disturbing images of young black men (and some women, too) dangling from anything – a tree, a bridge – that could support the weight of America’s strange fruit: the dead, often mutilated, mangled, and castrated bodies of young black men. And almost every image, every gruesome death had a story. The characters changed, but the plot was predictable: an ‘inappropriate’ glance or display of pride, accusations of rape and other lascivious crimes, theft, etc. The crowds would converge to watch the public executions. Oh, and they would watch, their faces plastered with smiles. Most had a look of sheer unadulterated joy, blood lust.

I got to thinking about all of this – the terror and violence which, in its own way, articulated and quelled the fears of many white southerners – as I read articles and watched interviews regarding the scandal surrounding the dismissal of Shirley Sherrod. To be fair, lynching and unjustified public outrage and backlash are not the same. But her harsh treatment by the mainstream media, the careless response of the White House and the NAACP, and the shenanigans of the Tea Party should serve to remind us that, contrary to all this talk of a ‘post-racial America,’ we are an America mired in the discord and acrimony brought on by racism. And we’ve come to a dangerous place where racists – and let’s face it, the Tea Party is a racist organization – have become the arbiters of what’s racist and what’s not. They define racist. Then they sit back and watch as we punish the ‘racists’.

And I guess I can’t help but to wonder if we’ve become that crowd. Do we gather to look on as someone is metaphorically lynched and flogged because they’ve been accused of a crime they’re not guilty of? Is this how we articulate our unspoken fears about race (that it exists amongst blacks and whites, that it still matters, that we still don’t know the full and ugly history of the Jim Crow South, that many crimes from that era have gone unpunished, etc.)? If we are to become a post-racial America (electing Obama is not enough), mustn’t we also acknowledge that we have been, and sometimes still are, a racist America?

How long will this, our shameful pastime, last?