Lynching was collective public ritual expressing white supremacy, not aberrant violence

Evidence

Clearly, it was not enough to simply kill Blacks, Austin comments. Instead, ‘the killers had to murder Blacks in the most excessive and public way. Afterward, instead of shame and guilt, the perpetrators expressed pride in their actions, taking trophies, fragments of the corpse, selling body parts as souvenirs, and proudly displaying the photographs they had taken in local shop windows.’ People walked around town carrying the bones of lynched men. The collective, open aspects of these acts make them hard to grasp. Phillip Dray recounts the story of W.E. Dubois discovering that crowds were excitedly gathering to see the lynching of Sam Hose. Dubois was forced to face the fact that lynching was not the action of a few violent men as he had assumed, but rather a collective expression of hatred and white supremacy. These acts of violence ‘made clear to everyone the proper social order of things.’ — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 162

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the torture-at-Abu-Ghraib argument (this chapter’s topic) and to Hannah Arendt’s banality-of-evil and collective-will scholarship on state violence. — connects to: Black and white church members brought different fears to a lynching memorial visit — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 601; Churchgoing white citizens streamed directly from morning worship to participate in a lynching — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 91
• ADDENDUM: Ties to the sacrificial-ritual logic in ‘On Sacrifice’ — public collective killing as community-stabilizing display rather than private aberration.