Why We Need the New Lynching Memorial

[pnewton]

No, it is not okay for anyone to erect a memorial which demonizes another race and fuels racial hatred and bitterness.

I would protest just as much if a group of whites wanted to put up a memorial demonizing blacks for stealing jobs or taking welfare or whatever racist accusation.

Wow!. You actually are equating conservative talking point so torture and murder on a systematic basis. If nothing else, you make a solid argument for why this memorial is needed.

 

[exnihilo]

I sure don’t when you just think you are being clever and you aren’t.

 

[Jump4Joy]

In your response to usagi about black experience, you claimed a lot of the ancedotes were made up, a matter of perception and that people see things from the lenses of race.
I don’t know if I believe that you honestly care about the white lynchings. I think you believe remembering exclusively the black lives lost plays on white guilt. That’s what you’re truly angry about

 

[Jump4Joy]

I thought that was a ridiculous comparison as well.

 

[exnihilo]

Right, well read more closely. I never said I knew any specific facts about it. I answered hypotheticals. You don’t need to know specific facts about something when discussing hypotheticals. I know of the event in a general sense.

I don’t know if I believe that honestly give two cares about the white lynchings.

You don’t have to. I don’t know what anyone on the internet honestly believes or cares about. Here is an interesting question. Why should I care much at all about the Blacks or Whites murdered a hundred years ago in the US and not the many Middle Eastern folks killed in modern times by the US government? We’ve actually killed far more of them than people were lynched. So why not put up a memorial to them somewhere in the US?

 

[Jump4Joy]

You’re right. You don’t have to care. Why does memorial bother you to begin with? Let it be.

 

[Jump4Joy]

What’s with you? It once again sounds like you don’t want the lynchings of black americans acknowledged

 

[exnihilo]

You sound like you like that Middle Easterners are murdered by the hundreds of thousands. See, I can play that game too.

 

[Jump4Joy]

It sounds like you don’t want to give the lynchings their significance. If people wanted to erect a monument for the middle Easterners killed, I would not respond on a forum how it is racist not to include the other ethnicities killed as well.

 

[meltzerboy2]

But a sizable portion were, and that is the point. How many Italians were lynched in the U.S. due to THEIR heritage?

This whole discussion reminds me of revisionist history regarding the Holocaust. It’s bad enough slavery took place to begin with, but then to minimize its effects is shameful.

 

[philipl]

I am fine with that. I have no problem with any memorial being torn down that is used to force a political belief upon another group. All these statues in the south that have been removed, fine with me. Those statues should be sold to the highest bidder. If you want a lynching memorial, fine pay for it with 100% funds and place it on Private property.

 

[mVitus]

This whole discussion reminds me of revisionist history regarding the Holocaust. It’s bad enough slavery took place to begin with, but then to minimize its effects is shameful.

How can you have revisionist history of something that never happened?
And as this thread shows I need to actually say this, that was sarcasm.

 

[Usagi]

I don’t see how “a great many people were killed by vigilante mobs as a form of racial terror, and society at the time let it happen” is a political opinion rather than a set of facts. I suppose “…and we should have a monument to remind us of that horror forever” is an opinion, but not necessarily an overtly political one being forced upon anyone. (I mean, in one sense, everything is political, but this doesn’t seem to be the sort of partisan political thing where half the country thinks one way and half the other. This happened, and it was terrible, and we should remember it lest we repeat it.)

 

[philipl]

I could not care less. It is in the past and it needs to stay there. it is in the history books so no it won’t be repeated. I am sick and tired of progressive shoving down my throat garbage that happened so long ago there are few people alive that were there. Get over it and grow up. You think there should be one. Raise the money to build it and put it on private property.

 

[exnihilo]

I am sick and tired of progressive shoving down my throat garbage that happened so long ago there are few people alive that were there.

Worse, if you are White, you have to suffer today for it. You may not get into a college or get a job because you are White. Making a whole race pay for a crime is wrong, except when the liberals make Whites pay for past injustices. They have zero consistency in their morals.

 

[LilyM]

I am fine with that. I have no problem with any memorial being torn down that is used to force a political belief upon another group. All these statues in the south that have been removed, fine with me. Those statues should be sold to the highest bidder. If you want a lynching memorial, fine pay for it with 100% funds and place it on Private property.

I’ve gone over everything I could find online about the Memorial and the EJI which set it up - as far as I can see the EJI actually is a privately-funded NGO and no public funding appears to have gone into the Memorial either.

Happy to be corrected if I’m wrong, of course.

 

[TheAmazingGrace]

I have no problem with any memorial being torn down that is used to force a political belief upon another group.

I really don’t see how commemorating victims = forcing politics, unless you’re someone who simply resents the fact that the victims it commemorates are black.

 

[Augustinian]

I really don’t see how commemorating victims = forcing politics, unless you’re someone who simply resents the fact that the victims it commemorates are black.

I see no problem with the memorial, but the location is problematic. It would be better to have it located in Washington DC or perhaps a different northern location.

Placing it in the old south seems to be fingering current white southerners for the lynchings to the exclusion of everyone else. Makes those folks- including relatives of my own- somehow the “others” worthy of condemnation.

Of course most people involved in lynchings have long since passed, and it was a nationwide phenomenon.

 

[pnewton]

I guess we have a long way to go to get rid of racism.

Exactly. I would say this objection of it being an all black memorial, because blacks were the ones who were victims of most all lynchings,

 

[pnewton]

Placing it in the old south seems to be fingering current white southerners for the lynchings to the exclusion of everyone else.

Now that is a rather valid point. People speak of racism as a Southern issue, when in reality, the nation is rather unified in this. More to the point, as the South alone has been subject to affirmative action, and forced desegregation, it is easily arguable that the South is less racist now than the North. New York, for example, is more highly segregated than than Houston.