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.
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.
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.
Except the context is the high number of white lynching's that also occurred.
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.
Have you done so to sources your own statements?
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.
[*] 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.