Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, lynched in Marion, Indiana, on August 7, 1930
Photo by Lawrence H. Beitler
According to Nietzsche, cruelty is one of the great festive joys of mankind. Put simply, we delight in the suffering of others and in witnessing the public exercise of power in all its spectacular brutality.
Not only is human history written in blood, but even human culture is ultimately no more than a refined form of torture; a method of inscribing the body with certain spiritual values on which we ironically pride ourselves as signs of our moral superiority as a race or species.
In addition, displays of cruelty are also ways of keeping those who are despised as inferior and feared as other in their place.
This is perfectly demonstrated by the lynching of African-Americans in the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries; a targeted practice of violence and terrorism, largely tolerated by officialdom, designed to enforce and encode white superiority and traumatize the emancipated black population.
Between 1870 and 1950 - i.e. the great age of modernity - an estimated 4,000 people were lynched in the (mostly) Southern states. And these murders were not committed secretly or in private, but openly before excited spectators who delighted in seeing strange fruit dangling from the trees.
The sociologists Tolnay and Beck, authors of A Festival of Violence (1995), describe how public these events were:
"Large crowds of white people, often numbering in the thousands and including elected officials and prominent citizens, gathered to witness pre-planned, heinous killings that featured prolonged torture, mutilation, dismemberment, and/or burning of the victim. White press justified and promoted these carnival like events, with vendors selling food, printers producing postcards featuring photographs of the lynching and corpse, and the victim’s body parts collected as souvenirs."
Thus, more than merely an effective mechanism of socio-economic control or a method of killing uppity niggers, lynching has to be seen also as a celebratory act of self-affirmation on behalf of clean-living, hard-working, law-abiding, God-fearing white folk; as American as apple pie.
Notes
The above photo by Lawrence Beitler inspired the poem Bitter Fruit (1937) by Abel Meeropol, which became better known as the song Strange Fruit after being set to music and recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939. Click here to watch her performing it.
For Nietzsche's thoughts on culture and cruelty, see On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
See also: Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930 (University of Illinois Press, 1995).
