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Comment by neaden | Hacker News Reader

To be clear, community murders like this happened all the time in US history. The thing that makes this special is that the man killed was white and actually guilty of crimes.

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100% true. This is the history of lynching in America. Community murders where nobody saw a thing, and the justification was always that the murdered person was a degenerate who would not receive what the town thinks would be adequate punishment under the law.

Great reading on the culture that gave rise to lynching:

https://www.quora.com/Did-slave-masters-actually-lynch-slave...

That was a brutal read.

Grotesque but the fact is that these public square hangings were done since medieval times and probably earlier. From the Salem witch trials to the San Francisco vigilantes, it happened in many town squares, and it was believed to be justified: https://www.legendsofamerica.com/ah-lynching/2/

These weren't all that long ago. Someone claimed that there are people walking around today that went to one of these events. I couldn't corroborate that claim but we're talking less than a hundred years ago. While the Middle ages were some 5-900 years ago.

Also what makes these public killings so notable is the fact that it was a deliberate effort of an entire society to instill fear into a minority. That you don't see very often. There wasn't even an attempt at justice, they didn't even try to make it seem like these people weren't being killed just because of the color of their skin.

No, they were always accused of rape, murder or something substantial. Read the article I posted above. I suspect that in some cases, they were correct in their accusations. That being said, I don't believe in the death penalty for a lot of reasons, not least of which is this tendency of humans to seek "justice" with often little evidence at all.

> Also what makes these public killings so notable is the fact that it was a deliberate effort of an entire society to instill fear into a minority. That you don't see very often.

I prefer the version of history suggested by the last sentence, but unfortunately cannot accept it was accurate.

Looking around the world, I see it frequently and with broad geographic distribution. (Though it's not the whole society, just the dominant group, both in the immediate example and the general case across time and space.)

Lynchings frequently happened because white people wanted to steal land from black or native people.

Yep. Although you don't have to go back too far for the latest lynching and subsequent revisionism.

https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-shocking-legacy-of-amer...

You were half right until you dug into the helplessly racist narrative. The wild west had many incidences of such events and the victims were often white. One need only look at the story of Billy the Kid and the regulators or Wyatt Earp's arc for evidence. The only thing that makes this unusual is it was in 1981.

EDIT: person I'm responding to makes the case that this case is SPECIAL in U.S. history and draws a direct line to racially motivated lynchings even though there's plenty of evidence that white-on-white lynchings occurred. I am not saying racially motivated lynchings didn't occur. I'm saying that history is not black and white.

helplessly racist? Thousands of lynchings occurred like this across the country for a hundred years - you can bet they weren't lynching whites more often.

According to the NAACP

A) many states had more white people lynched than blacks

B) The concentration of the south eastern states did make black people the victims more often both statistically and numerically, by a large margin but

C) White people being killed was not a statistical outlier. So there is no novelty.

D) “White” didn't include Italians, known Jewish people, any many others at the time. Not until the late 20th century, and pretty much still only so largely inclusive within North America.

E) Extrajudicial killing is a deep seated part of American history

https://www.naacp.org/history-of-lynchings/

So the conclusion is that neither of you are wrong but both are unproductive unsubstantial comments.

Not everyone’s family history is about a secret killing of a black person. Many’s only experience is mob justice against someone who was white.

Its not rare enough for race to be the focus of everyone’s bewilderment here.

This is a story about the Midwest and west where the targets were often not black. So turning it into a cohesion region with the entire north american continent is counterproductive when regions just have different history.

The link you posted said that a lot more black people were lynched than white people and also that many of the white people lynched were lynched for just helping black people. It really makes it sound like it was primarily racially motivated

> It really makes it sound like it was primarily racially motivated

Were most lynchings? The numbers and history sure make it sound that way.

'rolltiide also has a point, that to take things as one giant pile of numbers masks regional variations. That and I don't know why people need to shoe-horn race relations into every article they can. It's not as if lynching is a long untold story, though maybe I'm slanted having spent time in the south where it is a well known facet of history.

I didn't refute that from my summary, I pointed out additional aspects that are also in the article

Is it inaccurate for me to point out that the same study says some states had mostly white lynchings [that therefore may have had nothing to do with helping black people]

Is it inaccurate for me to say that it wasn't rare enough to consider it a novelty?

“Neither of you were wrong”

So you also think the original comment was “helplessly racist” lol?

Well, the original comment seems to imply that the only reason people care about TFA is because the man was white and allegedly did something which is, at best, needlessly provocative, some might say race-baiting.

One could have trivially found another way to bring up the history of lynching as relates to this instance of mob "justice."

This accurately describes what I observed

This is more in line with currently existing high crime areas where nobody talks to the police as part of the culture. The demographics of this reality have no commonality with lynching statistics.

Its more closely related to anti snitching culture than us debating novelty of white people being lynched.

It is a total red herring to what this story even brings to the table.

>The wild west had many incidences of such events and the victims were often white

Yes it did. But there were many incidences of such events AFTER the wild west era, and the victims were mostly black...

The thing that makes this different is that the US government has kept better track of its citizens since about 1955. Despite our fear of the Mark of The Beast, we track (effectively) everybody via Social Security Number. I don't think this was true until on into the 1970s.

I'm sure that this kind of thing went on all the time in the US, in smaller towns and rural areas. People disappeared all the time. Probably most of them moved to the big city or California, but a bunch probably ended up in unmarked graves. A friend of mine had a grandmother who lived in Milwaukee. She was Jewish. She fell in love with the Polish butcher. They disappeared from Milwaukee. A couple of months later, they were in Denver, married, and she was now Catholic. The special thing about my friend's grandmother, is that he knows the story. The bitter thing about that story is that it can't happen today, because we all are tracked. There are good reasons, but that doesn't mean that giving up segmentation of risks is all that great.

Clearly the “and” was not strong enough, based on the negative comments.

“is that the man was both guilty and white” might have done the trick.

The parent poster is referring to race-motivated lynchings, of which there have been thousands over the decades.[1]

[1] https://www.naacp.org/history-of-lynchings/

> The thing that makes this special is that the man killed was white

From https://www.naacp.org/history-of-lynchings/

> Out of the 4,743 people lynched only 1,297 white people were lynched.

Would not appear that being white and lynched are not necessarily unique, though perhaps for the time period.

Many of those whites were probably black-sympathizers who would have been called n*-lovers or "black on the inside."

Also 'coalburners' for the women who married/slept with black men

> Many of those whites were probably black-sympathizers

I'm sure some were. Would be great if we had more information.

the rest of my sentence was important too, I don't really appreciate you cutting it off to pretend I said something I didn't.

Surely you don't really believe that of the 1,297 white people lynched, all were innocent. His point remains then, there is no shortage of guilty white men getting lynched in American history. Lots of white murderers and rapists got lynched, sometimes after they were convicted in court, by mobs who were impatient or particularly enraged.

Special doesn't mean unique. This is the second time you've engaged in bad faith with what I've said.

So what is special to mean here? Uncommon as to be noteworthy? Based on what data?

It is also worth pointing out you assume the man is guilty and deserving of death, but this is arbitrary lynching. Even our most heinous deserve their day in court. Innocent until proven guilty is more than a multiple choice test answer.

I'm pretty sure that's the first time I responded to you, but whatever... If you concede that it's not unique, what makes you think it's special? I don't feel as though you are making a good faith effort to express your ideas clearly, and are instead choosing to nitpick the precision with which people paraphrase your argument.

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