Lynching photographs addressed white audiences, not Black ones

Evidence

It is remarkable, Austin observes, that one can find many expressions in the crowds of white men, women, and children who watch or who actually do the lynching, but the expression one never sees on anyone’s face is horror. Ordinary Americans participated in these crimes, had their photos taken beside lynched bodies, smiled for the camera, and sent postcards of the event in which they circled their own faces and described the ‘barbecue.’ As I am suggesting for Abu Ghraib, lynching photos were not intended for Blacks but for whites, a tangible and lasting reminder of an important occasion. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 161

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what does the total absence of horror in these crowds’ faces tell us about how moral affect gets socially suppressed at scale?
• XREF: Echoes the grins captured in modern atrocity recordings — from Abu Ghraib to livestreamed violence — and connects to Milgram’s findings on ordinary people’s capacity for cruelty.
• BMF: The postcard with circled faces and the description of a lynching as a ‘barbecue’ — the cheerful domestic framing of an atrocity, mailed to friends — evokes the casual, smiling participation-in-violence dynamic in White Noise’s culture of spectacle, though the match is a resonance rather than a plot device.