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The tragic shooting deaths of 17-year old Trayvon Martin in 2012 and 18-year old Michael Brown in 2014 reawakened the nation to the epidemic of killings of unarmed blacks by private citizens and law enforcement officers. Sadly, the shooting of unarmed blacks seemingly continues unabated despite the numerous nation wide street protests, town hall meetings, and pledges from politicians and law enforcement agencies to address this systemic problem. According to the
Washington Post, "Although black men make up only 6 percent of the U.S. population, they account for 40 percent of the unarmed men shot to death by police in 2015. What is more, the
Post's analysis documents that black men were seven times more likely than white men to die by police gunfire while unarmed. Whereas in 2012, Trayvon Martin was literally the poster child for unjustified killings of unarmed blacks, today there are a litany of black victims (Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice to name a few) that can fill that role.
Given the frequency and oftentimes callousness of these killings, black activists as well as black people have begun to refer to them as modern day lynchings. Framing police killings of unarmed blacks as lynchings is decidedly an attempt to draw attention to a phenomenon that might otherwise be overlooked in our soundbite/hashtag driven news cycle.
Yet, more fundamentally, labeling police killings of unarmed blacks as lynchings is an effort to imbue them with significance as well as historicize contemporary violence against black Americans. With that being said, some Americans bristle at police being associated with racist lynchers and still some assert that it is disrespectful to the memories of lynch victims to equate what they suffered with contemporary police killings. So, the question becomes, are these commentators right? More broadly, what are the implications of embracing or rejecting police killings of unarmed blacks as lynchings? And why does this discussion matter?
To be sure, police killings of unarmed black men are not lynchings, at least not in a technical sense. Nonetheless, there are deeper truths at stake in referring to the killings of unarmed black men as lynchings. In what follows, I will identify those deeper truths and resonances that black activists and the public are channeling when they invoke the phase modern day lynching to describe police killings of unarmed black people.
During the late nineteenth and early/mid twentieth centuries, approximately 5,000 Americans were lynched. Of the 5,000 or so documented lynchings, 70 percent of lynch victims were black. And so while white Americans, Mexicans Americans, Native Americans, Chinese Americans were all victims of lynchings, black Americans, by far, were the primary targets of lynch mobs.
Comment: "Public safety orders in particular have the real ability to deny a person of their constitutional right to freedom of political communication," and that is part of the problem with this Public Safety Order. Another is the fallacy in creating laws to curb a 'potential intent' to commit a crime by presuming someone is preemptively guilty. It's then a short matter of time before the rights of all citizens will be subject to this restriction. Rights have a way of disappearing as authority leverages its power. Fascism in the guise of "Safety." It's a con (isn't that a crime?).