Hacker News Reader

Comment by aaronbrethorst | Hacker News Reader

Those numbers don't take into account the percentage of the total US population that was Black and white from 1883-1941. In 1880 and 1940, respectively, 13.1% and 9.8% of people in the United States were identified as Black. The Wikipedia article below only offers the white population number for 1940, but that is reported as being 88.4% of the US population.

Despite the wildly disproportionate population sizes, more than three times the number of Black people were lynched compared to white people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d...

View on HN

> Despite the wildly disproportionate population sizes, more than three times the number of Black people were lynched compared to white people.

Now do per-capita murder rates today, I think you'll find the same disparity.

The fact is, lynching of whites and blacks (usually for murder) were inline with "likelihood to commit that crime" based on having virtually identical per-capita murder rates today. Lynchings occurred in the past primarily because the law didn't function effectively.

No one wants vigilante justice (then or now), but we shouldn't be too surprised that communities police themselves when the government can't (or won't).

> Lynchings occurred in the past primarily because the law didn't function effectively.

Jesus Christ I thought this thread was bad but then we get to this post.

It's trivially true though? If you had a functioning justice system, the lynchers would be arrested and it wouldn't happen again.

It's also true in more significant ways, in that lynchings happened because people felt that crimes (or "crimes") were not being appropriately dealt with.

The point is that OP is ignoring the blindingly obvious element of racism involved in lynching of Black Americans in the Jim Crow South (and indeed elsewhere). The post is bordering on apologism for these crimes by painting them as merely a rational reaction to underpolicing. If there is a place for wildly revisionist takes on this part of America's history, I'd suggest that HN is probably not it.

> the blindingly obvious element of racism involved in lynching

Except the context is the high number of white lynching's that also occurred.

If someone wants to argue against the scholarly consensus regarding the role of racism in lynchings in America, I'm happy for them to do so if they do it properly. That is, if they take on the best existing scholarship on the subject and give references to support their arguments. The OP's comment simply asserts that the existing consensus is wrong. I see no reason to take such an assertion seriously, or even to debate it. In the absence of any real effort to engage with the historical facts and scholarship it's mere apologism.

What consensus? Im not even sure what your arguing is true or not true.

Say, the points made in the first few paragraphs of the relevant Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States Nothing controversial, just the normally accepted historical reality.

OK, that doesn't seem to run counter to the grandparents comments?

I’m talking about this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32948728

Those two seem unrelated? You can have lynching of blacks as a method of control while also having lynching being extrajudicial punishment for whites?

I'm not sure how serious you're being at this point, but I'll try one more time. The original post clearly puts forward the hypothesis that lynching of black Americans was not driven by racism, and that lynching of 'whites' [*] and blacks occurred for the same underlying non-racially-related reason. The Wikipedia article states the generally accepted historical facts, which are incompatible with this hypothesis. Take e.g. the lynching of Emmett Till, and many other less famous instances along the same lines. It would be absurd to suggest that these events occurred due to a lack of adequate policing (unless you think that an adequate policing system is one that puts Black 14 year olds in jail for allegedly whistling at white women). That is why no-one who seriously studies the history of lynching makes this claim.

[*] As mentioned elsewhere in thread, it's not so simple to say who was or wasn't 'white' at various periods in America's history, and we shouldn't assume that lynchings of non-Black Americans were necessarily not motivated by racism or other neighboring prejudices.

Including white lyching? "scholarly consensus" is that it was racism?

>Including white lychings? "scholarly consensus" is that it was racism?

Actually yes, in many cases. 'White' in these stats often includes Jews, Italians and other groups who also suffered from discrimination based on their ethnicity. The category 'white' has not remained constant over the past 200 years. You can certainly find scholarly treatments of this point if you look on Google scholar.

> You can certainly find scholarly treatments of this point if you look on Google scholar.

Have you done so to sources your own statements?

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-science-histo...

Found the same thing googling myself.

Posting a link rather than quoting the relevant parts make me think that's all you did, once I called you on it. Should you be held to the same high standard?:

> take on the best existing scholarship on the subject and give references to support their arguments

You essentially put the burden on me to figure out how this document supports your argument - that the majority of white lynching (in some unspecified time period) where racially motivated.

I've also found quite a few that argue white lynching were motivated by support for progressive racial causes, but yet to find concrete statistics/evidence supporting that conclusion either.

>It's also true in more significant ways, in that lynchings happened because people felt that crimes (or "crimes") were not being appropriately dealt with.

Given the way that lynchings seemed to function in some parts of the U.S based on documentary photographs and such that probably some people would like to make illegal, it could just as well be argued that lynchings happened because the country did not have effective mass entertainment.

> It's trivially true though? If you had a functioning justice system, the lynchers would be arrested and it wouldn't happen again.

That is explicitly not what the GGP argued. They were very clear, and it's incredibly disingenuous to suggest otherwise. You can make your own argument but don't misrepresent others'.

> It's also true in more significant ways, in that lynchings happened because people felt that crimes (or "crimes") were not being appropriately dealt with.

"I want to beat someone, hang them from a tree, and then have a picnic around their mutilated body" is not something that needs to be both-sides-ed as someone's personal beliefs on justice.

I don't know if this is the typical HN thing of "I know a few details, I can figure out the rest from first principles" but there's an incredibly large amount of historical evidence of people who very plainly stated their motivations that you need to reckon with before you can make claims like these. Like, it's not reasonable to claim the KKK was primarily an activist group primarily motivated by the need for criminal reform.

There are lynchings in large parts of the world, and yes the government is dysfunctional, but not as dysfunctional as a mob acting on relgious prejeducies. Take pakistani lynchings for halucinated sacrilege to the qroan or african lynchings. So comunity circulating word of mouth becomes "fact" and then murder.

Meaning the most crazy, shizophrenic person told tale in a comunity becomes the "law" base. Lynchings are a horror.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com