In America: lynching feels closer than freedom in America.
Content Warning: This article contains explicit material, including a historical photograph of a lynching from the 1930s. The image is central to the subject matter, but it may be disturbing.
Content Warning: This article contains explicit material, including a historical photograph of a lynching from the 1930s. The image is central to the subject matter, but it may be disturbing to some viewers.
Another 6-3 decision removing the rights of minorities
First, some facts: Today (Monday, September 8th), the Supreme Court voted 6–3 to basically greenlight racial profiling by ICE. What that means in plain terms is they just said it’s fine for agents to stop, question, and detain people because of the color of their skin, the language they speak, or where they happen to be. Justice Kavanaugh tried to spin it as just “one factor” in deciding suspicion, but Justice Sotomayor called out the decision for what it is: an open door to racial and ethnic profiling that shreds away our rights. This isn’t just legal jargon. This is about our everyday lives, our communities, and the way we’re being openly targeted.
With that out of the way, I believe it’s obvious especially people who are aware of the political spectrum that we are in that policies like stop & frisk are at risk of returning and people getting kidnapped off the street solely for things that they can’t control, their accents, the color of their skin, the shape of their facial features, etc. It’s a blanket excuse to harm minorities.
From my understanding, this case was specific to Los Angeles, but it will almost certainly open the door for racist policies in Chicago, DC, Seattle, and any other metropolitan area that refuses to submit to the administration’s views. The precedent is now set, and cities that resist will be the first to feel the weight of these policies.
Operation Midway Blitz
For example, today, ICE made its plan public under the name “Operation Midway Blitz.” The image below is from an app called Red Dot, an open-source platform that allows people to alert the public about ICE raids or police presence in neighborhoods.
I wish I were exaggerating, but the amount of progress stripped away from minorities in just seven months has been immense. Rights once protected under the Constitution, hard fought and sacred, are being dismantled in the name of “order.” Yes, our society has always had problems, but we were inching toward progress. Now, with the Supreme Court’s new ruling, ICE and other agencies have carte blanche to harass citizens, undocumented, and DACA recipients, by silencing dissent and erasing civil rights across all three branches of government.
I wish I were exaggerating, but the amount of progress stripped away from minorities in just seven months has been immense. Rights once protected under the Constitution, hard fought and sacred, are being dismantled in the name of “order.” Yes, our society has always had problems, but we were inching toward progress. Now, with the Supreme Court’s new ruling, ICE and other agencies have carte blanche to harass citizens, silence dissent, and erase civil rights across all three branches of government.
What we are seeing today with ICE harassing people on the streets for the color of their skin is not separate from the terror of lynchings in the South. Both are tools of racism meant to control, intimidate, and strip people of their humanity. In the past, mobs carried out violence in public squares while crowds watched. Today, agents in uniforms patrol our neighborhoods, detaining immigrants and people of color with the same presumption of guilt. The thread between them is clear: when a government or society decides certain lives are lesser, violence and dehumanization become not only possible but justified and/or celebrated.
Content warning for the photograph below.
The last public hanging in the United States was that of Rainey Bethea in 1936, in Owensboro, Kentucky. Few people know that postcards of lynchings were once sold as souvenirs. We look at those black and white photographs and want to believe we’ve moved past those dark times. In fact, it was an encounter with one of these photos in 1937 that pushed New York schoolteacher Abel Meeropol to write “Strange Fruit”, a haunting poem about lynching later immortalized in song by Billie Holiday.
I am aware of how uncomfortable this photograph is to look at, but it’s a reminder that this history was alive and well when my grandparents were alive. We need to learn from our mistakes with compassion and to know that victimizing someone for the color of their skin is never an appropriate response. If we don’t look at history, we are doomed to repeat it.
But here we are, with an administration actively trying to drag us back. Immigrants today are locked in for profit prisons, exploited as slave labor for Fortune 500 companies that profit off our everyday purchases.
Just today, Trump floated bringing back capital punishment in Washington, D.C. When leaders call human beings “illegals,” they reduce them to something less than human, a slur that justifies torture, removal, and death. This is why remembering history matters. Photography teaches us that context is just as important as composition. Without photographic evidence of lynchings, or of people being snatched from their homes today without due process, many would say it never happened. If we don’t face this reality, if we don’t learn from it, then history will not only repeat itself, it will consume us.
We cannot stay silent. Stand up, document, organize, and take to the streets. Our voices, our presence, and our resistance are the only way to stop this from becoming our future. There is a correlation between what is happening today across this country and the hate crimes tied to the photographic evidence I presented earlier, along with the many lives that have been taken due to racism in this country and buried in the sands of time. But they are all connected. Similar to the Nazis, you do not suddenly begin the Final Solution.
You start with propaganda to dehumanize minorities as lesser than. And when that propaganda is accepted after several months, people begin to vanish. This is where we are today.
“Racism is a disease of white people.”- Albert Einstein.
