Black people are being found hanging from trees across the nation – something is very, very wrong here
Over the past few weeks America has seen landmark protests in support of Black Lives Matter, and against the racist murders of black people. Even as this storyline has been loudly playing out, a parallel storyline has been getting surprisingly little attention. In multiple U.S. cities, black people have been found hanging from trees – and if you have any understanding of American history, there’s something very, very wrong here.
In recent weeks we’ve seen this play out in California, in Portland, in the Shady Acres area in Houston, and in New York City. In each instance, it’s been ruled a suicide. But white supremacists in America have historically used the hanging of black people from trees – lynching – as one of the most widely known, violent, cruel, disgusting symbols of racial oppression. And now this is all happening within the context of Black Lives Matter marches, which are specifically in protest of white people murdering black people.
Suicide isn’t meant to make sense. But even if we’re to accept the possibility that one black person might hang himself from a tree as part of a misunderstood statement about racism, how are we supposed to blindly accept that all of these hangings are suicides? Such a thing is possible, but given the circumstances, it seems highly unlikely. It’s not at all difficult to imagine a scenario in which white supremacists around the nation have begun doing this in coordinated fashion, each time trying to make it superficially look like a suicide, while still sending a clear KKK-style message.
In truth, we don’t know what’s going on here. But it’s blatantly suspicious, to the point that common sense says a federal investigation is warranted. Given how the local authorities keep classifying these hangings as suicides, they need to be removed from the process of determining what’s really going on here. This week the FBI announced that it’s taking up the matter. Good. Now we just have to hope that the division of the FBI responsible for investigating hate crimes hasn’t been corrupted by Donald Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr, who has already succeeded in corrupting so many other aspects of the Department of Justice.
