On the Anti Lynching Resolution

Over a dozen US Senators refuse to sign on to anti-lynching resolution.
John and Atrios mentioned earlier about how a dozen or so senators didn't want a roll call vote on a resolution apologizing for the lack of congressional action to stop lynchings. The resolution, introduced by Democratic Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, eventually passed Monday evening on a voice vote. The AP mentions nary a word about the fainthearted senators who didn't allegedly want to be on the record opposing lynchings.

Surprise, surprise, surprise!

Who ever thought they might want to lynch a nigger in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Texas and Louisiana? I mean who knew? I had no idea they might feel this way. I guess I should have had a clue.

Its not the fact that Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.); Richard Shelby (R-Ala.); Mel Martinez (R-Fl.); Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.); Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.); Thad Cochran (R-Miss.); Trent Lott (R-Miss.); Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.); James Inhofe (R-Ok.); Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.); John Cornyn (R-Tx.); Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tx.); John Warner (R-Va.); and John Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), are die hard racist. It’s the fact that the Senate couldn’t manage a roll call vote on this issue. By the way it’s not too late; you can still pass an anti-lynching law. Because, guess what, there are folk still being lynched.

It may be hard for your average person to really get a good idea of why this is an important issue. This might have to do with the gross misunderstanding of race and racism that persist in this country.

Very nearly every bit of wealth ever produced in America is grounded in racism and genocide and was supported in one form or another by the practice of lynching. Without slavery there would be no wall street, no commodity exchange, and no major banking firms. When the entire wealth of a country is rooted in the surplus value created from forced labor there is no possible way to escape that debt other than radical denial.

Let’s say that the price of cotton begins to fall. We are somewhere in the south (pick a state) or imagine that textile prices are down, timber prices are up and you are anywhere in the north (pick a state). So now that prices are down in cotton, material costs are up in ship building and textile manufacturing what do you do? Well any good capitalist will cut costs wherever he or she can. Wages are always a controllable cost. If a white man costs $1.00/ hr and a black man costs $0.25/hr guess who is going to be building boats, picking cotton, chopping trees, weaving cloth , making furniture, cleaning houses, picking lettuce, cooking your food, taking care of your children . . . you get the point. Well while wages drop to near starvation levels white folk become agitated and instead of going to see the factory owner or the plantation owner the person who no longer needs to hire them, they turn their frustration elsewhere. This is the heart of lynching – an irrational hatred born of frustration at the incommensurability of American whiteness. Few people realize that to be white in America requires an enormous apparatus of suppression, repression, selective violence, terror and tyranny. The very idea of “American exceptionalism”, this pathological notion that there is a god that watches over this country and blesses her endeavors and is white, is rooted in an insane pathology that has its roots in denial and repression. America was born of thieves and pirates, genocidal, rampaging, murderers that “cleansed” the land mass of its indigenous population and removed and destroyed one quarter of the population of the African continent all for profit. Not for food, not for shelter, not for water, not for their safety or well being – for profit – a fiction.

So when this white man determines that he can no longer get hired at $1.00/ hr and will not work for $0.25/ hr and his bills will not wait another minute. He becomes frustrated, angered, unhinged, pathological, and homicidal. He is faced with a reality he was never raised to contend with – that he and the object of his disdain (niggers, wetbacks, spics, coons, chinks, gooks, whatever colorful name is in fashion at the time) are the same in society, just a cog in the wheel. When white folk are reduced to existing in a world the majority of Americans (North, Central, South) live in, they lose their mind. They hang people from trees, tie them behind trucks and drag them on the ground until their head is shorn from their body, they do things like dip you in hot tar and, while the skin is still bubbling free from the body and every nerve ending is raw with pain, roll you in feathers, or they place you in a barrel with nails hammered in and roll you down a hill, they beat you senseless on the street because you asked why you were pulled over, they fabricate new laws to prosecute you with because the last time you were acquitted, they give you ten years to life for less than a gram of cocaine, they shoot at you as you try to find work across the border . . . yeah we still need an anti-lynching law.

I’m not so mad at those who would not sponsor the bill they have made their position clear. I’m mad at those who never passed an anti-lynching law – fuck your apologies and resolutions. If human life is cheap enough to be ultimately indefensible against economic interest then to hell with it – you reap what you sow.

No more water . . .