{"id":41503,"date":"2015-06-21T02:28:07","date_gmt":"2015-06-21T02:28:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=41503"},"modified":"2015-06-21T03:37:47","modified_gmt":"2015-06-21T03:37:47","slug":"charleston-and-the-age-of-obama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=41503","title":{"rendered":"Charleston and the Age of Obama"},"content":{"rendered":"

Charleston and the Age of Obama<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The New Yorker<\/a>
\n2015-06-19<\/p>\n

David Remnick<\/strong><\/a>, Editor<\/p>\n

Between 1882 and 1968, the year Martin Luther King, Jr.<\/a>, was assassinated, three thousand four hundred and forty-six black men, women, and children were lynched<\/a> in this country\u2014a practice so vicious and frequent that Mark Twain<\/a> was moved, in 1901, to write an essay called \u201cThe United States of Lyncherdom<\/a>.\u201d (Twain shelved the essay and plans for a full-length book on lynching because, he told his publisher, if he went forward, \u201cI shouldn\u2019t have even half a friend left down [South].\u201d) These thousands of murders, as studied by the Tuskegee Institute and others, were a means of enforcing white supremacy in the political and economic marketplaces; they served to terrorize black men who might dare to sleep, or even talk, with white women, and to silence black children, like Emmett Till<\/a>, who were deemed \u201cinsolent.\u201d<\/p>\n

That legacy of extreme cruelty and unpunished murder as a means of exerting political and physical control of African-Americans cannot be far from our minds right now. Nine people were shot dead in a church in Charleston<\/a>. How is it possible, while reading about the alleged killer, Dylann Storm Roof<\/a>, posing darkly in a picture on his Facebook page, the flags of racist Rhodesia<\/a> and apartheid South Africa<\/a> sewn to his jacket<\/a>, not to think that we have witnessed a lynching? Roof, it is true, did not brandish a noose, nor was he backed by a howling mob of Klansmen<\/a>, as was so often the case in the heyday of American lynching. Subsequent investigation may put at least some of the blame for his actions on one form of derangement or another. And yet the apparent sense of calculation and planning, what a witness reportedly said was the shooter\u2019s statement of purpose in the Emanuel A.M.E. Church<\/a> as he took up his gun\u2014\u201cYou rape our women and you\u2019re taking over our country\u201d\u2014echoed some of the very same racial anxieties, resentments, and hatreds that fuelled the lynchings of an earlier time.<\/p>\n

But the words attributed to the shooter are both a throwback and thoroughly contemporary: one recognizes the rhetoric of extreme reaction and racism heard so often in the era of Barack Obama<\/a>. His language echoed the barely veiled epithets hurled at Obama in the 2008 and 2012 campaigns (\u201cWe want our country back!\u201d) and the raw sewage<\/a> that spewed onto Obama\u2019s Twitter feed (@POTUS<\/a>) the moment he cheerfully signed on last month. \u201cWe still hang for treason don\u2019t we?\u201d one @jeffgully49, who also posted an image of the President in a noose, wrote…<\/p>\n

…Obama hates to talk about this. He allows himself so little latitude. Maybe that will change when he is an ex-President focussed on his memoirs. As a very young man he wrote a book about becoming, about identity, about finding community in a black church, about finding a sense of home<\/a>\u2014in his case, on the South Side of Chicago<\/a>, with a young lawyer named Michelle Robinson<\/a>…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Charleston and the Age of Obama The New Yorker 2015-06-19 David Remnick, Editor Between 1882 and 1968, the year Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, three thousand four hundred and forty-six black men, women, and children were lynched in this country\u2014a practice so vicious and frequent that Mark Twain was moved, in 1901, to write […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,63,8,26,20],"tags":[8757,16820,20284,20283,16819,1449,3886],"class_list":["post-41503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-usa","tag-charleston","tag-david-remnick","tag-dylann-roof","tag-dylann-storm-roof","tag-new-yorker","tag-south-carolina","tag-the-new-yorker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41503\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}