Ending Slavery Didn't Address the Real Problem

Book cover for "The Cross and the Lynching Tree" by James H. Cone. Image source.

[content note: anti-black violence, lynching, the N-word]

We're going to be looking at James Cone's book The Cross and the Lynching Tree. This post will cover chapter 1, "Nobody Knows de Trouble I See." This book was extremely eye-opening for me, and the reason I'm blogging about it is because white Americans all need to learn about this. In school I learned the basic facts about slavery, reconstruction, segregation, and all that, but I didn't really *get* it. So. Here we go.

First of all: Let's talk about what happened after slavery was abolished.

When I was a child, I had this sort of perspective on slavery and racism: Obviously everybody should have equal rights, obviously there shouldn't be discrimination based on race, obviously slavery is bad. I saw these principles as clear and obvious, and sort of imagined them to be a "default" or a "reference point" which racist policies had been put on top of at various times during history. In other words, I thought that white people during the time of the Civil War would have "by default" believed in racial equality, but the problem was that slavery was legal. As a child, I imagined that abolishing slavery had solved that whole problem. As if the only alternative to slavery is full equality.

Yeah, no. The main problem wasn't slavery itself, the problem was an entire society full of white people who believed that slavery was right and good. And I really didn't get that. I had never imagined that nice people could hold such objectively racist views- believing that black people have a lower "place in society"- and that they believed that was just normal, that was just the way things are supposed to be. That they didn't see those things as evil. That they believed God set it up that way.

"All races are equal" was very much NOT some kind of "obvious" principle which all the white people reverted to when slavery was abolished. Ha. No.

And I should know equality isn't "obvious", because I used to believe in complementarianism. That's what I had been taught in church- that men are leaders, blah blah blah. I very much did NOT see it as "all right so our starting point is that all genders should have the same leadership opportunities, but then on top of that we add some rules from God about how wives should submit to their husbands..." No, they taught it as "this hierarchy is just the natural way that things go, created by God." When I started learning about Christian feminism, I was like "so............. so then how do you interpret the 'wives submit to your husbands' verse? Would it be like, the husband and wife discuss things and then, like, only as a last resort if they can't agree, then the husband makes the final decision?" I needed to spend time unlearning complementarianism.

And the United States should have worked on unlearning slavery. Not just making it illegal, but working through all the implications, examining why it was wrong and what we should do to bring justice to the people who had suffered under slavery.

On page 4 of the book, Cone says "Most southern whites were furious at the very idea of granting ex-slaves social, political, and economic freedom." And "White supremacists felt insulted by the suggestion that whites and blacks might work together as equals." I didn't get this before- I didn't get that a lot of white people disagreed with abolishing slavery. They genuinely believed that blacks were just inferior and that's just the way it is. You can change the laws but you can't change the culture. That takes time.

And OF COURSE if society is run by white people who don't think black people should have freedom and equality, then they're going to do everything in their power to control and limit black people. Even though slavery is no longer an option. That's what happened during Reconstruction.

Again, how did I miss this when learning about US history in school? Maybe the problem is that "colorblind" white Americans see racism as something so horrific and bad that it must exist only in some faraway time and place that we can't relate to at all. We don't think about the motivations of those racist caricature people in our history books. We don't realize that the reasoning they gave for their racist ideas is very similar to debates happening today.

Cone describes how lynching became more and more common after the Civil War ended, and became a racialized form of violence specifically directed at black people (whereas originally it wasn't necessarily directed at black people, but was seen as "the only way a community could protect itself from bad people out of reach of the law"). Lynching became a way for whites to terrorize blacks- and they knew they could get away with it. On page 7, Cone says:

Lynching was the white community's way of forcibly reminding blacks of their inferiority and powerlessness. To be black meant that whites could do anything to you and your people, and that neither you nor anyone else could do anything about it. The Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney had said clearly in the Dred Scott Decision (1857): "[blacks] had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." For many whites, whether in the North or the South, that conviction was unaffected by the end of slavery.

And that's horrifying. But... it's also horrifyingly similar to news stories I've seen over the past few years. #BlackLivesMatter has been calling attention to cases where black people were murdered (often by police) and the murderer totally got away with it. "To be black meant that whites could do anything to you and your people, and that neither you nor anyone else could do anything about it." To give just one example: Philando Castile was killed by a police officer, who was then acquitted of all charges. I remember reading accounts of lynchings in my history book in high school, which always seemed to end with "he was acquitted by an all-white jury." And I remember it was scary and shocking to read that, in history class, to think, "how could this happen?" Even more scary and shocking to realize it still happens today.

Another quote from the book:

A black Mississippian recalled a lynching with these words: "Back in them days, to kill a Negro wasn't nothing. It was like killing a chicken or killing a snake. The whites would say, 'Niggers jest supposed to die, ain't no damn good anyway-- so jest go an' kill 'em.'"

Yeah, again, holy crap, that's horrifying. But. There was a GoFundMe page for Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed Mike Brown- and The Guardian reports that it received racist comments:

“Don’t let the savages win,” wrote one donor, calling himself Timothy Flagg. An anonymous donor told Wilson: “We appreciate your service in the animal control division of the Ferguson police department.”

And I remember seeing stuff like this, comments like this in support of various people who had killed unarmed blacks. When I first saw them, I had trouble even understanding- why would someone say something like that? What were they even talking about? But that's the reason right there- "N*****s jest supposed to die"- there are literally people who actually believe it would be better if black people just died.

GoFundMe was criticized for "collecting 'reward money for a lynching'". I've come to realize that lynching is about getting rid of black people- the actual reason given in each specific case is just an excuse. And wow, this is horrifying.

(This also explains why the N-word is so bad and we must never say it. It was a word that was used back when society believed that black people should be killed for not "staying in their place." Like yeah I always knew it's a really bad word, but HOLY SHIT it's way worse than I thought.)

I remember maybe about 10 years ago, there was drama because some radio host called a local black politician "a monkey." People were all angry and said it was racist. But the good Republicans- including me- said no it's not racist, he called him "a monkey" because he thinks he's not very smart and disagrees with his political views, it's certainly an insult but it doesn't have anything to do with race. The idea that "monkey" would be an insult specifically directed toward black people, to claim they are less than human, was just unimaginable to me. What nonsense! Who would think something like that? With my "colorblind" racism that didn't know anything about history, I believed that the people who called it "racism" were the ones introducing race into a situation that really had nothing to do with race at all. Why on earth would they interpret "monkey" as being a reference to the fact that he is black? That's just ridiculous! Why would anyone imagine that those things would be connected at all?

I didn't know about the history of black people being treated like animals, like their lives didn't matter. I didn't know about white people who used their power to restrict black people's rights and freedom- even to the point of murdering them- because they believed they weren't really human. Or, I learned about it in school, but I believed it was some long-ago-and-far-away thing that doesn't have any relation at all to any modern ideologies. Maybe a two-dimensional caricature in my history book might say that black people are animals [in some sense other than the scientific definition that says all people are animals], but obviously no one would believe such nonsense now. Right?

Back to the book. Cone also quotes this passage from Benjamin E. Mays:

A crowd of white men ... rode up on horseback with rifles on their shoulders. I was with my father when they rode up, and I remember starting to cry. They cursed my father, drew their guns and made him salute, made him take off his hat and bow down to them several times. Then they rode away. I was five years old, but I've never forgotten them.

And Cone also says this:

Should a black man in the South lift his hand or raise his voice to reprimand a white person, he would incur the full weight of the law and the mob. Even to look at white people in a manner regarded as disrespectful could get a black lynched.

Just like all the blog posts about how unarmed black men wouldn't get shot if they'd just respect police properly. Just like Sandra Bland refusing to put out her cigarette and then mysteriously dying in jail. Just like the black people I follow on twitter, talking about how they are very very very careful to never ever take any action that could be interpreted as threatening or disrespectful when talking to police- even though they're innocent, even though theoretically they have rights.

And here's what I want to know: Why did we learn about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in church, but we never talked about our own history of threatening black people with death, continually, if they don't "stay in their place"? Why was that bible story presented as a one-time thing, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego had lives just like us until one day this whole statue thing came up, and then when it was over life just continued as normal, free and happy? Why didn't I ever hear about the fact of entire groups of people living under continuous threat of death if they assert their rights- and no, God doesn't save them like in the bible. Some of them do get killed, and it sends a message to the rest, to keep them afraid and "in their place."

In the second half of the chapter, Cone talks about how blacks dealt with their trauma through blues music and church. Through blues songs, they asserted their humanity and expressed the pain they suffered and their hope. In church, they found meaning in Jesus' suffering and Jacob's struggle with God. Lots of song lyrics in this chapter- both from blues songs and spirituals. Here's an example:

Nobody knows the trouble I see,
Nobody knows but Jesus,
Nobody knows the trouble I see,
Glory Hallelujah!

Cone says,

Because of their experience of arbitrary violence, the cross was and is a redeeming and comforting image for many black Christians. If the God of Jesus' cross is found among the least, the crucified people of the world, then God is also found among those lynched in American history.

They could relate to the accounts of Jesus suffering unjustly, being beaten and mocked, being tortured and executed publicly. I'm struck by how lynching and the crucifixion of Jesus were basically the same thing, but white Christians see them so differently. We romanticize and ascribe symbolic meaning to every aspect of Jesus' suffering and death, while essentially ignoring our history of lynching, or treating it as nothing more than a bad thing that KKK members did way back then, which has no connection at all to our lives in the present.

(At the same time, though, Cone mentions that black Christians also questioned how God could allow atrocities like slavery and lynching to happen.)

In conclusion, Americans (especially white Americans) should all read James Cone. We've forgotten our history, and that means we're not able to recognize the racism and systemic discrimination that still exists in the present. I believe white people should learn about the reasons and motivations behind what "those racist people" did in the past- because we will recognize some of our own biases there too. It will reveal that, even though we call ourselves "colorblind," we are also guilty of racism and we need to change.

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Cone starts out chapter 1 with these two quotes, which I'll reprint here because they're quite powerful:

They put him to death by hanging him on a tree.
-- Acts 10:39

Hundreds of kodaks clicked all morning at the scene of the lynching. People in automobiles and carriages came from miles around to view the corpse dangling from the end of a rope. ... Picture cards photographers installed a portable printing plant at the bridge and reaped a harvest in selling the postcard showing a photograph of the lynched Negro. Women and children were there by the score. At a number of country schools the day's routine was delayed until boy and girl pupils could get back from viewing the lynched man.
-- The Crisis 10, no. 2, June 1915, on the lynching of Thomas Brooks in Fayette County, Tennessee

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Posts about The Cross and the Lynching Tree (by James H. Cone):

Reading US History Inerrantly
Ending Slavery Didn't Address the Real Problem
For the Sunday School Kids Who Never Heard About "the Curse of Ham" Or "Black Simon"
Dr. King and What Taking Up the Cross Actually Looks Like
"The South is Crucifying Christ Again"
"Strange Fruit"
"The Cross and the Lynching Tree": Conclusion