We cannot be ahistorical nor have historical amnesia if we are going to seriously deal with racism and hate crimes. Racism is a power term, different from merely prejudice. Racism is the attempt to codify notions of perverted ontology and humanity into the law.
In other words, racism’s goal is to make one’s prejudices about other human beings a matter of law and a part of the social structure. We have never been able to deal with racism by just talking and having discussions on diversity. Racism based on the sick sociology of separation by skin color, the heretical theology of a divine intention for slavery and separation, and an evil economic justification for turning black Americans by law into chattel property and considered in the nation’s founding document as three-fifths of a person has never been dealt with just by talking. It took the blood of a civil war and the bloody struggles of martyrs in a modern civil rights movement to just break some of its terribly resistant physiological, social and legal grip.
One of the symbols of this racist history is the noose. Never was it merely a prank but always a tool of domestic terrorism used in the waves of violence, which rose to preserve the power and evil purposes of racism. And, to talk of a noose in any lesser terms must be challenged on every front. Any attempt to isolate the noose from its ugly past and present revival is to intentionally or unintentionally participate in what it represents.
What gives the noose continuing power is the fact that we still wrestle with the nooses of racial disparities and racial injustice in education, economics, politics and the criminal justice system, which many refuse to face and often attempt to deny. Those who have used the noose and other forms of terror in acts of racism and hate crimes have killed over the course of history more people than Al Qaeda killed on September 11. We would not allow Al Qaeda’s symbols to be paraded or placed anywhere without an all-out legal battle. Nothing less should occur towards the noose as an instrument of domestic and psychological terrorism.
Our state law should make its placement and usage a hate crime with the penalty of felony. N.C. State University, and for that matter any University, should make it clear– “hang a noose, display a noose, immediate suspension, immediate firing. Period.”
Founded in 1909, the NAACP is the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization whose mission is to ensure the political, educational, social and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination. For more information, call the State Office at 866-626-2227 or e-mail us at [email protected].
