So 60 minutes had a piece on lynchings. I've no problem with going into that subject. History is history and has lessons for everyone.
Here it is:
However there were two things that I think should be noted about this era in American history that everyone and particularly African-Americans should be cognizant of:
Bryan Stevenson: We want to call this community to repentance, to acknowledgement, to shame. We want to tell the truth, because we believe in truth and reconciliation but we know that truth and reconciliation are sequential. We can't get to where we're trying to go if we don't tell the truth first.
So far, Stevenson's team has chronicled more than 4,300 lynchings. They continue to find more.
This is in line with the
NAACP report on the
total number of lynchings in the US:
From 1882-1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the United States. Of these people that were lynched 3,446 were black. The blacks lynched accounted for 72.7% of the people lynched. These numbers seem large, but it is known that not all of the lynchings were ever recorded. Out of the 4,743 people lynched only 1,297 white people were lynched. That is only 27.3%. Many of the whites lynched were lynched for helping the black or being anti lynching and even for domestic crimes.
So in a space of 86 years we have the statistical average of 55 lynchings per year or just under 1 every 8 days or so. Lets call it once a week.
For the entire country. Indeed no one should be lynched. And we should not look upon those days as something good. However; when we look at it as murder, the carnage that black people, particularly black men do to each other makes the lynch era of the United States look like utopia.
US News and World Report
noted for 2015 the following:
What we see here is that on average, between 2001 and 2015, roughly 3,000 black people were killed by other black people.Per year.That is nearly 2 orders of magnitude higher than the lynching era of the US. For those who don't know, an order of magnitude is multiplying by 10, otherwise known as moving the decimal point over one place for each order.
To look at it another way, if we look at the 15 year span we find 45,000 dead black people. That is 10 times more than the 86 year span of lynchings. And that is
only accounting for 2001 to 2015. If we were to extend this back to 1969 and come forward, we would see a far far higher number. So while it is completely acceptable to discuss the lynching era as the stain the country that it is, to act as if a far more deadly (and I can say fratricidal) phenomenon is occurring right now. And no amount of staring back at lynchings is going to solve that problem. Which brings me to the second issue.
Since 60 minutes has generally ceased to be a news organization, it allowed Oprah and her guest, Walker to make the totally speculative and incorrect statements:
Stevenson wants people to understand that lynchings were not just brutal footnotes in history, they reflected a belief in racial differences that reinforced segregation in the 1950s and 60s, and, he says, has resulted in a pattern of unequal justice today.
Bryan Stevenson: And now we live in a landscape where you see young black boys and men being rounded up. One in three black male babies born in this country is expected to go to jail or prison.
Oprah Winfrey: You actually think that slavery and lynchings led to African-Americans being disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system?
Bryan Stevenson: Yes, I do. And I think, actually, it's not a hard thing to understand, you know, I look at--
Oprah Winfrey: I think it is a hard thing to understand for people who think people get locked up, people are locked up because they commit crimes.
Bryan Stevenson: About 13 percent of the people illegally in possession of drugs in this country are black. That's about our proportion of the population. You know what percentage are arrested? That's about 35 percent. That is an echo of this consciousness that doesn't value the lives of these folks.
"Black men are being rounded up". Really? Police generally respond to crimes they either see occurring or that are reported to them. When there is a dead body, there is a dead body. Suspects are rounded up. How does Walker not understand this. Ahh because he wants to run to the drugs straw man. He, and by extension 60 minutes, wants the viewership to think that all these "rounded up" men are being rounded up because of drug possession. No sir. Most possession laws result in a fine. to graduate to a prison term one has far more drugs (and more potent drugs) than a simple splif.
But even Walker's math is wrong. While African-Americans may make up 13% of the population (which is what he was trying to say earlier) black men are about half that population. Hence you have 6% of the population that commits offenses far above what their population would suggest. If we return to the homicide chart above, we see that blacks and whites commit roughly the same numbers of homicides. However; once we realize that white males are 38% of the population and that black males are 6% of the population, you realize the the 6% population is committing waaaaaay more murders than they should be
if all things were equal.
Lastly, since 60 minutes wanted to discuss interracial violence and terrorism, the following two graphs become very relevant:
You'll note that by percentage of victims, in the past decade whites have been victimized by blacks more often than the reverse. Now lets be completely fair here: We are not seeing blacks go to a park and set out a blanket with their kids to watch a white person get murdered and burned. However; murder is murder.
By the raw numbers more white people have been killed by blacks in the time space of 2001 to 2015 than all blacks known to have been lynched during the US lynch era.
So to close, I agree with Oprah and Walker that there needs to be an honest discussion of racial violence in America. However; I do not think that black people are willing to have that honest discussion because as the old saying goes, when you point a finger at me, three others are pointing back at you.
