People
I guess preening Yale philosophers don’t have to know anything about history.
It didn’t matter whether or not women were “supportive of” lynching, whatever that means. Nobody asked them. Nobody cared. Women had no power. It’s grotesque to talk about them as if they had just as much power to “be supportive of” lynching as men had. Women could have favored communist revolution or fascist counter-revolution or a takeover by Martians, it would have made no difference to anything.
Isn’t this a common woke talking point, that “white women” were somehow more responsible for lynchings than the white men that were actually carrying them out?
I haven’t seen more responsible, but yes the also or equally responsible is a trope.
What was this tweet even in response to? What’s his point?
I think the argument is something like:
1. Lynchings of Black men were always (!) based on claims of rape or sexual harrassment.
2. White women reported cases of rape and even (horror!) reported cases of mere sexual harrassment. This is what led to lynchings.
3. If only those awful White women would have kept their damn mouths shut, lynchings wouldn’t have happened. So they are ultimately the most responsible.
Or something like that.
I wonder if, as I have German heritage, he holds me responsible for his family’s suffering and loss at the hands of the Nazis.
He claims to be a philosopher and he makes such bad arguments?
It’s a little more complicated than that. There were false claims which were used to incite and/or justify lynchings or prosecutions, with or without the assistance of women. (There were probably true claims as well.) But it’s just disgusting for this smug prosperous Yale narcissist to announce that women were just as much behind lynchings as men were when women had no formal power of any kind.
I’m with Nullius, without context this is absurd. I think this dude is grandstanding for attention. I’m developing an entirely different opinion of Yale, he sure isn’t adding prestige to the place.
Mike @5 That’s what I was thinking too, but he’s not claiming to be doing any kind philosophy on twitter either. He’s just making outlandish, unjustified claims like most ideologues do. You’d expect a professor of philosophy to do better than that, but apparently this guy is too self important to worry about reputation. After all, he’s going to be famous in 200 years and beyond for his philosophy, he’s so damned good at it. How do we know? Because he said so very self righteously. :P
I never saw pictures of a mob of White women lynching anyone by themselves.
Not to mention that the entire rationale behind “we must kill a black man who has ‘defiled’ a white woman” is sexist as well as racist — it relies on the misogynist notion that sex diminishes a woman’s value (and then tacks on the racist notion that it’s much worse if a black man is involved).
Or, more simply, it’s just about not wanting to bring up other men’s offspring, ESPECIALLY not non-white ones.
Some white women were very much involved in lynchings. They were treated like community events and families, including children, would come to watch, sometimes even picnic. There are photographs of lynchings that look like something out of a horror movie where the community is celebrating a ritual human sacrifice.
There have always been, and will always be, women who embrace patriarchy and white supremacy. That is not all white women. Some women did it to survive, some women did it because they were trapped in abusive marriages, other did it for the power and status, some were true believers, having been raised from birth with white, Christian supremacy. When you’re taught that God made white people superior, some people never are able to reject that upbringing. In an obscene way, it mirrors what is happening with trans rights, the social and economic consequences of openly dissenting kept people from in line.
Lynchings often did not even need the excuse of protecting white women from rape or avenging an assault. Black women were lynched as well. Several years ago, the wife of the ringleader of Emmet Till’s murderers did an interview where she said that Till had never done anything, that what she said in court was a made up story. I found the journalist’s retelling of the interview very confusing. One way to interpret what she said was that her husband and his friends decided to murder Till because he was an “uppity” black boy from the North, and when they were caught they pressured her into making up the story that he had touched her and been sexually suggestive. She was, unsurprisingly, an abused wife and after the men were arrested she was taken to a motel by her husband’s friends and kept there for several days. The article was incredibly opaque about whether she was saying that she lied about Till “assaulting” her before the murder that led to Till being killed, or she told the lie after it happened, after she was possibly beaten and threatened, to help her husband and his friends get acquitted.
I know some white women were “involved” in some sense, but I was addressing what Jason Stanley wrote and the context he wrote it in. His implication is that white women were every bit as responsible for lynchings as white men. That’s nonsense.
I posted about the Carolyn Bryant interview in 2017.
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2017/recantation-2/
That “supportive of” is such a weasel phrase, isn’t it?
It’s a tarry brush. It’s like “Y’all”, which is almost always used to turn a vague impression of bad behaviour into a specific, unfounded accusation with semi-plausible deniability.
I get it all the time on Twitter. At least once a day:
This “supportive of” is just the same. It’s insinuated guilt for which the only defence is denial.
To be clear: Ophelia’s defence of women in general here is a perfectly good one, but if I know Twitter then the point of this Tweet being made in the first place was to attack some particular woman or women.
And their only defence can be “um…. I don’t support lynching”.
And the inevitable retort will be “but you’re exactly the sort of white woman who would have done”.
This is philosophy, is it?