Mike Brown shooting and Jim Crow lynchings have too much in common.

[gollygee]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/25/mike-brown-shooting-jim-crow-lynchings-in-common

Lynchings were, of course, distinct from today’s police killings. They were ritualistic displays of public violence before sometimes thousands of people, including children. They were intended to reinforce the arbitrary rules of a race-based caste system, primarily in the American south. One white father in Texas took his toddler to a lynching in Waco in 1916 for that express purpose. He propped the boy up on his shoulders as 18-year-old Jesse Washington was burned alive. “My son can’t learn too young,” the man said.

But there are parallels between the violence of the past and what happens today. Images and stereotypes built into American culture have fed prevailing assumptions of black inferiority and wantonness since before the time of Jim Crow. Many of those stereotypes persist to this day and have mutated with the times. Last century’s beast and savage have become this century’s gangbanger and thug, embedding a pre-written script for subconscious bias that primes many to accept what they were programmed to believe about black Americans, whether they are aware of it or not.

It is the ordinariness of the supposed infractions and the very human nature of the behavior of some of the victims that may be most heart-wrenching about both lynchings of the past and the public killings of today. In both cases, it has never taken very much for an African-American to lose one’s life, whether taking a hog during the time of formal Jim Crow or jaywalking three Saturdays ago in Ferguson. Or, in a stunning case in Brooklyn, New York, 19-year-old Timothy Stansbury Jr., unarmed and with no criminal record, was killed in 2004 as he walked up a stairwell. The officer who shot him said that he had been startled. A grand jury refused to indict.

There has long been a readiness to see ordinary human behavior as criminal when that human is black, to see the death penalty as justified even for common missteps by black people. There seems to come a thirst for more incriminating evidence about the victim – a trace of marijuana in the blood, say, or a grainy selfie on Instagram with pants sagging low – a search for justification that the victims brought the trouble on themselves.

[gollygee]

1. .

[bullwinkle428]

2. You know those photos that show all of the white people

standing around following a lynching with looks of smug self-satisfaction on their faces? These days, their descendants do it via social media.