A symbol of hate making an unwelcome comeback

October 20, 2007

For a while, it seemed as if the most notable example of a public noose was the one that used to be in George “Macaca” Allen’s office. Now, apparently, in the wake of the painful developments in Jena, La., they’ve become increasingly common.

When he reached his third-story workstation at a construction site near Pittsburgh two weeks ago, Errol Madyun saw the noose — thick, neatly knotted and strong enough to hang a man.

“It was intimidating,” said Madyun, a black ironworker.

More than 400 miles south in North Carolina, Terry Grier, superintendent of Guilford County Schools, saw the same type of noose last month at predominantly black T.W. Andrews High near Greensboro.

“It was huge,” Grier, who is white, said of a noose he discovered hanging from a flagpole, one of four nooses placed at the school. “I became very angry. Part of what you think is it’s a copycat of Jena.”

Law enforcement authorities, including the Justice Department, are expressing concern over a recent spate of noose sightings in the aftermath of events in Jena, the small Louisiana town that has been engulfed by racial strife and was the scene of a recent civil rights demonstration.

Nooses have been looped over a tree at the University of Maryland, knotted to the end of stage-rigging ropes at a suburban Memphis theater, slung on the doorknob of a black professor’s office at Columbia University in New York, hung in a locker room at a Long Island police station, stuffed in the duffel bag of a black Coast Guard cadet aboard a historic ship, and draped around the necks of black dolls in the Pittsburgh suburbs. The hangman’s rope has become so prolific, some say, it could replace the Nazi swastika and the Ku Klux Klan’s fiery cross as the nation’s reigning symbol of hate.

It’s simply breathtaking. I can’t put it any better than Oliver Willis did: “Seriously, people, this is 2007. We are in the 21st century. We’ve got to do better.”

It’s painful to consider the scope of the phenomenon.

Last week, the Justice Department called the placing of nooses “shameful” and deplored the fear and intimidation they are meant to arouse. “Many of these cowardly actions may also violate federal and state civil rights and hate crime laws,” acting Attorney General Peter D. Keisler said in a statement. “The offenders should be aware, and the American people can trust, that the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation . . . are actively investigating these incidents.”

But the Justice Department could not point to any recent arrests on hate-crime charges as a result of incidents involving nooses, and at a House Judiciary Committee hearing this week Democrats sharply criticized department officials for not aggressively pursuing such cases.

That seems reasonable, given the circumstances.

And yet, there are some who still don’t realize the significance of the symbol.

At the construction site near Pittsburgh, Madyun said his white supervisor waved off his complaint: “He told me it was just a joke.” […]

When the Greensboro News-Record ran a story about the four nooses at Andrews High School, an anonymous writer posted an angry comment on the newspaper’s Web page.

“Once again . . . over reaction to a childish prank,” the comment said. ” . . With the over reaction will probably come more copycats.”

It’s getting worse. Though the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission doesn’t keep track of specific cases of nooses, the “number of racial harassment cases filed at the EEOC since 2000 has surpassed the total number of cases filed in the 1990s.”

Not to get too meta here but, I can’t help but think that this has something to do with the institutionalization of hate by the Bush administration. Once it became acceptable, even praiseworthy, to hate a large bloc of people the genie was out of the bottle.

Another few hundred years’ work tossed in the shitter by Bushco with no more thought than they gave to tossing the rule of law, our credibility, our standing in the world and our military.

  • The rapid appearance of nooses around the country has the potential for much more serious actions. As Malcolm Gladwell persuasively details in ‘The Tipping Point’ so-called “little things” like grafitti create an environment in which criminal behavior becomes the norm. Pranks like taking your hands off the steering wheel are amusing until someone gets killed.

    This administration has borrowed heavily from the playbook of Machiavelli. Fear is a route to power. It destroys community to gain power. What we are experiencing is the result of the first few tears at the fabric of society.

    We are at a juncture where the constitution is not the only thing in jeopardy. Are we witnessing the last gasps of the old institutions in this country that are based upon oil, destruction of natural resources, and military might? Are we experiencing a mighty struggle as the center of power moves toward Asia? Is the old guard willing to create an environment that is toxic to democracy?

  • Hmmm. Fear and intimidation. Fear and intimidation. Where have I seen those tactics recently? Let me think. Oh yeah. The Bush administration.

    We are looking at a return to ignorance in America. We have the theocracy party in control of the government and I’m sorry to say, but the thing that promotes a theocracy more than anything else is ignorance. The population that is easiest to control is one that is afraid and ignorant. We have seen reductions in funding for education since 1995 when Republicans took over the House. We have seen lies from the White House since Reagan without much investigation by the media or the Congress.

    Our government is giving us false information and trying to reduce the number of people with enough education to see past the lies and analyze it critically.

    As long as the general population is kept afraid and ignorant the fear of people who are different will produce more of these noose incidents and more attacks against people who are different.

    My thoughts

  • This administration has borrowed heavily from the playbook of Machiavelli.

    Have you even read Machiavelli? Not even in The Prince, which I assume you’re basing your comment on, is the destruction of community a praiseworthy event.

    Keep using Machiavelli as a political boogeymen if you want, but maybe you should actually read the guys work first.

  • This is obviously embarrassing to have such racism persist into the 21st century, but we need to get a grip – not everything is President Bush’s fault. He’s done so much to damage our country that we don’t need to blame him for this. Save the outrage for government incompetence, political favoritism in the Justice Department, unabashed lawbreaking, torture, or indefinite detention or US citizens. I fully understand the sense of outrage… but let’s direct is at the people hanging nooses to intimidate fellow Americans.

  • not everything is President Bush’s fault

    It certainly wasn’t President Gore who essentially abandoned the Civil Rights division of the Dept of Justice, using it solely to prosecute cases where allegedly voting rights of white persons were in jeopardy. But perhaps you are right, since it wasn’t Bush who ran inflammatory racist-bating Willie Horton ads to get elected – it was his father. Or the even more directly racist “Pink Slip” ad in the North Carolina Senate race. Or the racist “Harold, call me” ad.

    I guess you’re right; CB was being too limited. The return of racism isn’t really Bush’s fault, mre the fault of the entire Rethug establishment.

  • Perhaps the best way to fight this intimidation is to publicly ignore it? Maybe I’m off base, but I wonder if those perpetrating it are secretly thrilled with the publicity they’re getting, which is motivation to continue. If nooses are quietly removed and everyone goes about their normal business they won’t get that.

    That said, I think that law enforcement, employers, etc. must find those who are doing this and hold them responsible. That’s negative action, and not thrilling at all. Bullies always flee when someone confronts them. And that’s what these people are – bullies. And cowards.

  • A few years ago, a revival of interest in the music of Billie Holiday and her song, “Strange Fruit,” generated articles that drew attention to the “lynch law” era that predated the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s, but these articles appeared mostly in scholarly journals, which most Americans don’t read. Copycat noose-hangings are now occurring across the country because few Americans associated nooses with racist sentiments until the Jena High School incident created national headlines. Some may turn out to have been hung by actual racists while some may turn out to have been hung by activists eager to protray America as a racist society. Some probably will turn out to have been hung by people primary interested in stirring up trouble just for the hell of it.

    Nooses can be racist or not, depending on the context. The hangman noose has been a symbol of dread and foreboding since the middle ages. It’s the card you don’t want to draw from a pack of Tarot cards. Hangman nooses have been incorporated into Halloween displays for decades. (Halloween Magazine even post instructions for tying nooses on its website at http://www.halloweenmagazine.com) A few years ago, a woman committed suicide by hanging herself from a tree in her front yard. Unfortunately, she chose Halloween eve to end her life. Her body dangled for days in full view of passerbys who thought it was part of the Halloween decorations. Today, she would be cut down and charged with a hate crime.

    The hunt for nooses is turning into a witch hunt with often ludicrous results. The U.S. Army announced yesterday that it had ended its investigation into a noose-hanging incident at Anniston Army Depot. The “noose” turned out to have been a tie-day that had fallen from a truck delivering supplies to the depot.
    The three Jena High School students who hung the nooses claim they did not realize that nooses have racist connotations. They claim they were merely replicating the famous lynching scene from Lonesome Dove, in which Texas Rangers string up with outlaws. This claim has been ridiculed by just about everyone, except those who actually investigated the incident. According to the Jena Times, state Welfare Supervisor Melinda Edwards said it might surprise everyone to learn that the three students did not have knowledge of black history in relation to that hanging of black citizens in the south during the civil rights movement.

    “We discussed this in great detail with those students,” Edwards said. “They honestly had no knowledge of the history concerning nooses and black citizens. This may seem hard to believe for some people, but this is exactly what everyone on the committee determined.”

    She also said that once the historical significance of the nooses was revealed to the students and how it was considered a tremendous insult to those of the black race, they showed great remorse. “When they were told about the historical relevance of the nooses and how others would interpret their actions, they really were very remorseful,” she said. “I can honestly say that these boys regretted tremendously ever hanging those nooses.”

  • Even if I buy the notion that the white students didn’t know the meaning of the nooses, their parents surely did. And all the people who started hanging nooses off the back of their pick up trucks did.

    And why shouldn’t noose incidents proliferate? Who among white people ever took it seriously to begin with.

    In Jena, it was dismissed as a prank. So the white kids actually got in-school suspension for several weeks. Regardless of why they did it, why weren’t they made to apologize and explain to the black students?

    Because making white people apolgoize to black people in this country is still unthinkable.

    But no. What’s allowed to happen is escalated fighting, instigated by the white kids and resulting in, what else, the black kids getting locked up. Talk about blaming the victim.

    It’s barely been a good six months since the Imus incident. He may have lost one job, but he’s on the heels of another lucrative deal. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, that hellhound Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly – when does anyone ever really stand up to them besides the occasaional blog post and shake of the head. And if you really want me to step on some toes, even Colbert and Stewart don’t have a problem jumping on the racial bandwagon from time to time all in the name of fun and comedy. Only even they, who seem to get it…well…sometimes they don’t.

    It is very disheartening that so few white people, even in this day and age, understand or feel the need to stop participating racism and bigotry.

  • Basically, this demonstrates that the brownshirt wannabees of the Party of White Supremacy And Southern Treason are extraordinarily unoriginal in their moron stupidity. But then we knew that about them. Please, let them do more of these, since it only energizes more of the “targets” to get out and vote next year.

    It is seriously too damn bad my great-great grandfathers didn’t get to ethnically cleanse the South when we had the chance.

  • Tom Cleaver @ 11, perhaps we should reserve the phrase “moron stupidity” for those who think “ethnic cleansing” would have a viable solution to white supremacist rule in the postbellum South?

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