I wish I could hug the youth that got whipped. Poor kid.
Then beat the crap out of those goons who whipped him.
I always found it “hilarious” that folks who would lynch black people (which often involved a LOT more than just ‘grab ’em and hang ‘em’) would see themselves as “humane and civilized” and the people they’re killing as “barbarian savages”. The gruesome deaths of Jessie Washington in 1916 and James Byrd Jr. in 1998 don’t strike me as “humane & civilized”.
One thing that really astounds me about many lynchings as gross as Washington’s, the people committing it could do something like that in the middle of an otherwise “civilized” town without feeling squeamish and even bring their kids, grab street vendors and turn it into a big lawn feat affair….like it’s no big whoop….like doing some stuff straight out of Best Gore is no big whoop. DUDE, even if I was a huge bigot who loathed blacks myself (I’m not), I wouldn’t want to SEE THAT!
Imagine….being so full of hatred for a demographic that doing stuff straight out of a horror film IN PUBLIC is something so “meh”. Real life gore-galore is something usually censored or given warnings but a bunch of jerks in downtown Waco Texas (which, at the time, was considered urbane, progressive, modern, etc.) thought that slowly burning a guy to a crisp was perfectly okay to commit and witness.
All I could think of is that….
* It was a different time and newspapers of the era did tend to show stuff like dead bodies in photos. This is similar to present-day Mexico’s news showing cartel atrocities uncensored (people get desensitized).
* These bigots saw people like Mr. Washington as non-human critters and not people, thus slaughtering and roasting a black man was akin to doing the same to a cow or pig (a butchering critters to eat was a regular thing for folks, back then).
* Extreme hatred turns you into Ted Bundy.
Bigots are weird.
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I GOT ANOTHER THING (ALBEIT RELATED) TO DISCUSS….
I really think that the world needs a better term than “Race / Racism / Racist” to describe hating people due to color. I’ve floated around the concept of expanding the meaning of “Ethnic / Ethnicity” to cover “Race”.
However; I have another idea; Since many see “Ethnicity” and “Race” as separate, I also propose the term, “Chromaism”. “Chroma” means “color” and “colorism” is already taken.
SO! I NEED A VOTE! DO YOU PREFER….
A.) ETHNICITY / ETHNICISM / ETHNICIST
B.) COLOR or CHROMA / CHROMAISM / CHROMIST
….Please give me your answers and I’ll tally how many of A and B there is.
Then; We’ll use that term from now on, make it memetic and then have the world pick it up.
Words have power and “Race” is a terrible word that implies “species” and if we kill it, it might lessen bigotry against colors a bit.