The Violence We Carry

Lynching, then and now

Shaquille O'Neal, in cardboard cutout form, hung by the neck from a lamppost in my hometown Ocoee, Florida. My parents caught sight of this grotesque effigy, but I did not. They were entertainers looking to settle down and raise a family and had just purchased an affordable home in the greater Disney area without knowing too much about local history. I myself was four years old at the time and barely online, completely incapable of processing that image even if I looked right at it. I grew up in a liberal household with the general (correct) impression that racism is bad and that lynching people is bad, but the true significance of that effigy wouldn’t become clear to me until much later in life. The significance of that effigy is given by my hometown’s history, and also by something much deeper - the human urge to Lynch people in general, on display and in action to this day.

My childhood home, I would later learn, stood just blocks from the site of the Ocoee Massacre of 1920. The massacre, appropriately titled, was one of the worst acts of political violence in the post-war South. Black people could technically vote, but they were routinely and selectively required to provide proof of their voter registration to a commissioner who just happened to be out on a fishing trip that day. The violence event began with an act of democratic participation – Moses Norman, a prosperous Black farmer, organizing voter registration drives and meticulously documenting the names of those denied their Constitutional rights. The response to his legal, democratic action was extra-democratic violence: a deputized mob, a shootout, a siege, and ultimately the destruction of every Black church, schoolhouse, and residence in northern Ocoee. Dozens of Black people were massacred and the rest of the black residents fled with whatever they could carry in their hands. Norman escaped, but July Perry - who gave him shelter from the mob - was captured and hung from a lamppost by the road.

Shaq being hung in effigy over 70 years later was a symbolic honoring of this event by those residents who thought that the Ocoee Massacre was good. I didn’t learn about the tragedy itself until after 2020 brought racial questions to the forefront of America’s national consciousness. I did grow up surrounded by placards honoring various officers and veterans who settled there, eventually coming to ask about exactly which army they served in, but even so the full force of my own hometown’s history hit me with a profound shock when I finally found out.

That shock is one I feel to this day, as I find myself grappling with issues of lynching and extra-democratic violence, not in 1920 but in 2024. I find myself saying that lynching is bad, and strangely alienated from people for saying so.

The issue of lynching is not simply about racism, though that remains central to my hometown’s history. Rather, it's about how humans respond to democratic frustration – the peculiar pain of watching the world move in directions we oppose, even though that movement is achieved through legally-legitimate means(1). Reflecting on the Confederate losers who settled in my hometown, I consider Lincoln's central assertion: democracy requires accepting that losing doesn't grant license to secede or pursue extra-democratic means to achieve your goals. This principle, I think, extends beyond the specific historical context of the Civil War and slavery. It speaks to a fundamental requirement of democratic society – the capacity to lose with grace, to remain engaged in the process even when it moves against our deepest convictions.

Yet today we see this principle under assault from multiple directions. Many celebrate extrajudicial violence when directed at targets they deem deserving, arguing that certain forms of oppression justify bypassing democratic processes and overriding human rights.

A health care executive was shot in the street, and many on the left celebrate his slaughter. The man was a symbol of an oppressive system who enacted oppression himself. Overcoming oppression is the organizing moral goal of all human life, the virtue that blesses or condemns all human activity, so his death was warranted as a step in an anti-oppressive direction. To defend his right to life is to defend his right to oppress people, obviously. This line of thinking recreates the same logical structure that has historically enabled atrocities: the conviction that some higher form of justice supersedes democratic process and individual rights. (2)

The challenge for our current moment extends beyond simply condemning historical racial violence. We must examine our own impulses toward extrajudicial action, our own certainties about who deserves to be subjected to mob justice. The voice that speaks through racist lips and the voice that justifies contemporary lynching share a common grammar – they both assert that democratic process can be suspended when justice demands it.

This requires a difficult form of self-examination. Specifically, it requires us to confront the possibility of loudly condemning historical violence while, in parallel, harboring similar impulses dressed in contemporary moral language. The path forward requires more than moral certainty; it demands moral humility. We must build democratic institutions that can channel moral outrage while resisting the temptation toward vigilante violence. This means creating robust systems for addressing grievances while maintaining the principle that no one, no matter how righteous their cause, gets to suspend democratic process in pursuit of their vision of justice.

The lamppost remains, both as historical fact and contemporary temptation. Our task is to remember its lessons while resisting its logic, to find ways of pursuing justice that don't recreate the very violence we claim to oppose. Until then, ‘modern lynching’ is a phrase that sadly remains relevant, a practice cheered by those who loudly proclaim their love of peace and democracy. I hope that those advocates of modern lynching fail just as the advocates of racist lynching failed, and I hope that their failure hurts exactly enough for them to never advocate for it again.

Footnotes

1. René Girard is someone whose work I come back to more and more, and I’ll leverage his thought here: according to him, when groups cannot achieve their desires through sanctioned channels, they often turn to sacrificial violence as a way of restoring their sense of power and coherence^. Girard's concept of the "scapegoat mechanism" helps explain why violence often takes on ritual and even symbolic characteristics. The act of lynching wasn't simply murder, but a public performance meant to restore and justify a perceived social order through someone else’s sacrifice.

2. It’s worth thinking here about Hannah Arendt’s focus on the banality of evil. Just as the great monstrosities of history were often perpetrated by ordinary people convinced of their moral righteousness, today's advocates for extrajudicial violence see themselves as champions of justice rather than its violators^. The psychological mechanism remains consistent: the belief that one's moral certainty justifies abandoning democratic constraints and human rights in general, and that this moral certainty serves as a shield against ethical self-examination.