Portia Podsnap

Writing at American Renaissance, Peter Bradley rejoices in a grand new party game:

The game sells for $26.95 on Amazon and arrived a day or two after ordering. It is also available on sites such as Walmart if you don’t want to support Amazon, which censors dissidents. The game is independently produced, but is polished and professional; it looks like a game you would buy in a store. Right or Racist is meant for 3-to-10 participants and comes with 300 stereotype cards, 100 player cards and 100 debate cards. You can also buy expanded packs to augment the game.

Stereotype cards present a statement, and players decide if it is right (true) or racist (false).

 

Read the whole thing, or just enjoy this funny graphic:

Lynching stories hold a central place in the history of American race politics. They are a genre of folklore, occupying a place somewhere between “urban legends” and tales of atrocities in wartime. When we see references to Emmett Till, or Ahmaud Arbery, or George Floyd, or Willie McGee [1] as “lynching victims,” it’s easy to dismiss the hyperbole as just one more tiresome invocation of victim culture.

But I am going to argue that there is a deeper significance here. Narratives that describe extreme cruelty meted out to a black victim—torture, immolation, mutilation—have really been the main driver behind American race politics of the past century. “Justice,” “equality,” “Civil Rights”—those goals are merely the noble-sounding face of black activism, a movement that will never be satisfied (there’s never enough justice; never enough equality). Because what the movement is really all about—what it’s always been about— is anger and destructiveness, fueled by a never-ending, self-perpetuating cycle of Lynching Porn.

In calling it “porn” I don’t mean to imply that there’s an erotic component to lynching stories (though for some people, who knows?). Rather I’m comparing the genre to such things as “snuff films” and “torture porn.” As you’ll see in grisly examples below, the resemblance is striking. And now let me make another analogy. From a financial angle, pornography in general was the main driver of the World Wide Web 20 years ago and probably is even now. (Here’s an amusing and informative BBC business story from 2019.) Meanwhile, even a cursory survey of the past 160 years finds Lynching Porn as the main fuel for race politics and Civil Rights agitation. Anyone who doubts this needs only to stroll over to the prurient-minded Equal Justice Initiative. The EJI is one more organization full of cant about fighting “racial injustice” and “racial inequality.” Yet to judge by its website, it’s mostly obsessed with celebrating violence and victimhood.

Lynching Porn as a phenomenon first occurred to me in early 2020, when the Emmett Till Antilynching Bill was before the House of Representatives. I thought I’d do a little research on the past century of failed anti-lynching legislation. I ran across a really lurid little book that came out in 1962, called 100 Years of Lynchings. But what really stood out for me was not the garish “bloody America” cover on my Kindle version, but the author’s name: Ralph Ginzburg. Because Ginzburg was a man of many interests and careers, but what he’s mainly remembered for is being a—well, a pornographer.

Ginzburg was even sentenced to five years in Federal prison for “obscenity” (specifically, sending an erotically themed magazine through the U.S. Mail, usually postmarked from places like Intercourse, Pennsylvania, or Middlesex, New Jersey). He ended up serving only eight months in 1972, at the minimum-security Allenwood prison farm, soon to be home to Watergate co-conspirators. Ginzburg turned his experience there into a memoir, charmingly titled, Castrated: My Eight Months in Prison. Ginzburg loved the sensationalistic and suggestive, and it’s no surprise that he was successfully sued for libel by Senator Barry Goldwater, after his “satirical” investigative magazine Fact described Presidential candidate Goldwater as a raving paranoid. (“1189 PSYCHIATRISTS SAY GOLDWATER IS PSYCHOLOGICALLY UNFIT TO BE PRESIDENT!”)

But before all his erotica and freewheeling libel, Ginzburg came up with 100 Years of Lynchings, a messy little cut-and-paste number that he published and distributed himself. In sixty years it’s never been out of print, but as the material has been mostly in the public domain (cuttings from old newspapers) we’ve seen several publishers and many editions and typefonts. Ginzburg’s 1969 reissue put a photo of an armed, afro’d black man (a model) on the cover and plugged the book as “The Shocking Record Behind Today’s Black Militancy.”

The news clippings are often highly exaggerated or downright implausible. We’re shown sessions of torture, mutilation, immolation that surely would kill anyone within a few minutes, but somehow go on for an hour or two. Sometimes you get reports from two or more papers, and it becomes clear that the scribes were competing with each other to come up with ever-more-gruesome descriptions. For example, in early 1904 a wealthy Mississippi planter named James Eastland was shot in cold blood, along with his negro field-hand, by a black couple. The miscreants were eventually captured by a posse of 200 men and two packs of bloodhounds, chasing across several counties. Wire-service reports merely reported that the two were “burned at the stake…by a mob of 1,000 persons” in Doddsville, Mississippi. (“Negro and Wife Burned,” New York Press, February 8, 1904.) But the down-home Vicksburg Evening Post did the story up proud:

An eye-witness to the lynching of Luther Holbert and his wife, negroes…today gave the Evening Post the following details concerning retribution exacted from the couple prior to their cremation yesterday:

“When the two Negroes were captured, they were tied to trees and…forced to hold out their hands while one finger at a time was chopped off. The fingers were distributed as souvenirs. The ears of the murderers were cut off… Some of the mob used a large corkscrew to bore into the flesh of the man and woman. It was applied to their arms, legs and body, then pulled out, the spirals tearing out big pieces of raw, quivering flesh every time it was withdrawn.” (“Lynched Negro and Wife Were First Mutilated,” Vicksburg Evening Post, February 8, 1904.) [2]

That “quivering flesh” is an interesting touch, a 19th century phrase from the days when newspaper wags called whores “nymphs of the pave,” while well-dressed negresses were “notorious colored courtesans.”  Some people evidently believed that hunks of severed flesh would twitch and squirm like a wiggly-worm. Strangely, this “eye-witness to the lynching” does not tell us whether he got a body-part souvenir to take home. I’m joking, of course. Such stories are reminiscent of the pulp-fiction and newspaper tales about the so-called New York Draft Riots of 1863, when white people supposedly caught hundreds of negroes and subjected them to diabolical tortures before hanging them from lamp poles. [3]

When Ginzburg started to compile these newspaper stories in 1960, little original research was necessary. Most of the negro-lynching reports had long since compiled and annotated by black writers Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. DuBois, and DuBois’s colleagues at the NAACP, for whom lynching stories were the main expression of Civil Rights activism. Wells rode to fame in the 1890s by telling America, and the world, that lynching of negroes was epidemic throughout the South. She hunted down reports of alleged lynchings of negroes, and published them in a book called A Red Record[4], meanwhile haranguing editors, politicians and rapt audiences with her findings. People might not care to listen to a colored woman banging on about segregated railroad cars or literacy tests…but what about tales of hangings, burnings, horrendous torture and mutiliations? That got their attention, and they came in droves to hear more.

Much in the same way vast crowds would turn out for horrific lynchings, such as this one in Paris, Texas in 1893. The mangled body of a missing four-year-old girl had been found, “torn limb from limb.” The only suspect was her father’s negro employee, who fled on a freight train before being apprehended:

Curious and sympathizing alike, [the crowds] came on train and wagons, on horse, and on foot…the victim was tortured for fifty minutes by red-hot iron brands thrust against his quivering body. Commencing at the feet the brands were placed against him inch by inch until they were thrust against the face. Then, being apparently dead, kerosene was poured upon him… The child’s father, her brother, and two uncles then gathered about the Negro as he lay fastened to the torture platform and thrust hot irons into his quivering flesh… Every groan from the fiend, every contortion of his body was cheered by the thickly packed crowd of 10,000 persons… Then the eyes were burned out and irons were thrust down his throat. (From Wells, A Red Record.)

And there’s that “quivering flesh” again, and a body that lives for fifty minutes while being roasted alive.

As for DuBois, he followed Wells’s lead when editing his NAACP journal, The Crisis (1910-1934). He stuffed the magazine with year-by-year enumerations of “extrajudicial killings” of blacks, often reprinting gory newspaper accounts of burnings and mutilations, including the one with the corkscrews from the Vicksburg Post.  The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People officially stood for justice, equality, and the negro voting franchise, but those abstract causes would never have the drawing power of Lynching Porn. Conveniently enough, the NAACP made passage of a Federal anti-lynching bill their premier political cause from the 1910s through the 1930s. The campaign accomplished nothing, of course (lynching was already illegal everywhere) and can’t have aided the Advancement of the Colored People, but it provided an excellent excuse to keep publishing grisly tales.

Like Wells, DuBois and his editorial staff preferred to emphasize the most violent and repulsive accounts, preferably where one or two black individuals—people with names and histories—were set upon by a white crowd. This personalized the victims, while making the white mob into a nameless, pullulating mass. The cruelty had to be heinous in the extreme; average lynchings wouldn’t do. As Prof. Dwight Murphey pointed out in his 1995 monograph, Lynching: History and Analysis, most lynchings were simple hangings, with no mutilations or body-roasting, and perhaps a quarter to a third of people lynched in the 19th and early 20th century were white. (The book was reviewed here in 2019.) But the NAACP wouldn’t bother describing those; it wanted sensationalism and outrage.

Besides their dubious details, a bigger weakness in the DuBois/NAACP version of lynching history is that they fudged and padded the numbers. For 1917, for example, The Crisis magazine claimed 222 negroes were killed by lynchings and “mob murders” (e.g., race riots). But the breakdown is 178 “mob murders” and only 44 cases of anything that could truly be called a lynching. Further, the “mob murder” numbers are mere guesstimates. If there was a race riot in Philadelphia or Chicago or Houston or Tulsa—and there were many more in the Teens and Twenties—any negroes not accounted for afterwards were thrown into the “mob murder” totals, regardless of whether there was ever a body found. The same thing continues today, with the NAACP and the Equal Justice Initiative both playing fast and loose with their numbers. The EJI claims about “4,000 victims of racist terrorism” at their lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, but close scrutiny of that count shows that many of the victims are nameless, and the vast majority are said to have actually died in a riot or “massacre“—or “mob murder” as The Crisis would say.

My argument, that black Civil Rights activism was never really an constructive initiative for Justice, Equality, etc., may look radical to some people, or unnecessarily antagonistic. (Was not Doctor King sincere? Did he not say, “I have a dream”?) But it is merely noticing the obvious. For most people it constitutes a paradigm shift. We’ve seen political paradigm shifts before. Up until the late 1940s, it was very difficult to attack Communism directly, because in the Stalinist era propagandists had so successfully positioned it as a well-intentioned, if sometimes badly managed, economic system. Repression, terror, torture—these were explained away as unfortunate byproducts of the coming Utopia, when there would be Freedom and Democracy for all.

The person who finally cracked that nut was political philosopher James Burnham (The Managerial Revolution, The Machiavellians, Suicide of the West, etc.). In his 1947 book, The Struggle for the World, he stated the obvious. The torture and terror we saw in Communist regimes were not growth pains or temporary discomforts, they were the essence and purpose of the regimes themselves. The insight had enormous impact on Burnham’s Partisan Review colleague George Orwell, who reviewed the book for the New Leader, just as he was settling in to complete the dystopian novel that became Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell had no trouble depicting the oppressive atmosphere of a Big Brother society, but as a good socialist he could not find an explanation for the cruelty and oppression. Burnham provided him with the answer. Bolshevism never was about Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, or Freedom & Democracy. No, none of that window-dressing. It was a self-perpetuating terror regime, “a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

Notes

[1] None of these were actual lynchings, but they’re often described that way provocatively. The Till incident (1955) was a bawling-out and beating that got out of hand. Arbery (2020) was shot while “jogging” away from a burglary scene. The heavily drugged Floyd (2020) died of heart failure while under arrest, while Willie McGee’s “lynching” (1951) was a legally ordained execution in an electric chair for the crime of rape.

[2] Planter Eastland was uncle and namesake of U.S. Senator James O. Eastland, who in the 1950s and 60s had a decided point of view on racial matters. Senator Eastland was born nine months after his uncle was killed.

[3] (As I pointed out a few years ago, only a handful of blacks were killed in the “riots,” usually after shooting firearms at crowd of white people.)

[4] A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings In the United States. Online here.