Why 80 year old lynchings of blacks keep getting re-told, while whites are being mass murdered by blacks today

Paul K. writes

I turned on “All Things Considered” on Saturday and heard the beginning of a lengthy report on a racially motivated multiple murder. Were they examining the recent mass murder of eight whites in Manchester, Connecticut? Only a person unfamiliar with National Public Radio would imagine they would focus on an incident of random violence with no particular social importance. No, they were marking the 80th anniversary of the lynching of two blacks in Marion, Indiana.

That’s the image we must forever keep in the front of our minds, lest we ponder the implications of what’s going on right now, all around us.

(It is perhaps worth noting that the two blacks in Marion were not innocent victims, like the men killed by Omar Thornton, but in all likelihood guilty of armed robbery, rape, and murder.)

LA replies:

A culture renews itself by the periodic recitation or symbolic reenactment of the sacred history of its founding. This rule applies as much to our modern, liberal, “scientific” society as to primitive, myth-based societies. The founding of post-1960s liberal America consisted in the birth of the widely shared conviction of America’s unappeasable guilt for its historic discrimination against blacks. This experience, which originally occurred in the early to mid 1960s (as I discuss in my 2005 article at FrontPage Magazine, “Guilty Whites”), is the sacred, sustaining source of the liberal order. All else flows from it. The very legitimacy of the regime flows from it. Liberal society requires for its continued vitality the endless rehearsal of the saga of white racism—that racism which makes our historic society, and the non-liberal whites who represent it in liberals’ minds, evil, and makes our present liberal order, and the liberal whites who lead and represent it, good.

- end of initial entry -

David B. (the one from Tennessee) writes:

Re NPR retelling the story of an 80-year old lynching: this was the favorite theme of my ex-friend, Professor F. A few years ago, I told him of a recent black on white atrocity. Professor F’s answer? “I’m concerned about blacks hanging from trees in the 1920s.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 09, 2010 09:37 AM | Send