[chrisco255]

You were half right until you dug into the helplessly racist narrative. The wild west had many incidences of such events and the victims were often white. One need only look at the story of Billy the Kid and the regulators or Wyatt Earp's arc for evidence. The only thing that makes this unusual is it was in 1981.

EDIT: person I'm responding to makes the case that this case is SPECIAL in U.S. history and draws a direct line to racially motivated lynchings even though there's plenty of evidence that white-on-white lynchings occurred. I am not saying racially motivated lynchings didn't occur. I'm saying that history is not black and white.

[coldtea]

>The wild west had many incidences of such events and the victims were often white

Yes it did. But there were many incidences of such events AFTER the wild west era, and the victims were mostly black...

[widowlark]

helplessly racist? Thousands of lynchings occurred like this across the country for a hundred years - you can bet they weren't lynching whites more often.

[rolltiide]

According to the NAACP

A) many states had more white people lynched than blacks

B) The concentration of the south eastern states did make black people the victims more often both statistically and numerically, by a large margin but

C) White people being killed was not a statistical outlier. So there is no novelty.

D) “White” didn't include Italians, known Jewish people, any many others at the time. Not until the late 20th century, and pretty much still only so largely inclusive within North America.

E) Extrajudicial killing is a deep seated part of American history

https://www.naacp.org/history-of-lynchings/

So the conclusion is that neither of you are wrong but both are unproductive unsubstantial comments.

Not everyone’s family history is about a secret killing of a black person. Many’s only experience is mob justice against someone who was white.

Its not rare enough for race to be the focus of everyone’s bewilderment here.

This is a story about the Midwest and west where the targets were often not black. So turning it into a cohesion region with the entire north american continent is counterproductive when regions just have different history.

[tdb7893]

The link you posted said that a lot more black people were lynched than white people and also that many of the white people lynched were lynched for just helping black people. It really makes it sound like it was primarily racially motivated

[mieseratte]

> It really makes it sound like it was primarily racially motivated

Were most lynchings? The numbers and history sure make it sound that way.

'rolltiide also has a point, that to take things as one giant pile of numbers masks regional variations. That and I don't know why people need to shoe-horn race relations into every article they can. It's not as if lynching is a long untold story, though maybe I'm slanted having spent time in the south where it is a well known facet of history.

[rolltiide]

I didn't refute that from my summary, I pointed out additional aspects that are also in the article

Is it inaccurate for me to point out that the same study says some states had mostly white lynchings [that therefore may have had nothing to do with helping black people]

Is it inaccurate for me to say that it wasn't rare enough to consider it a novelty?

[danielg6]

“Neither of you were wrong”

So you also think the original comment was “helplessly racist” lol?

[mieseratte]

Well, the original comment seems to imply that the only reason people care about TFA is because the man was white and allegedly did something which is, at best, needlessly provocative, some might say race-baiting.

One could have trivially found another way to bring up the history of lynching as relates to this instance of mob "justice."

[rolltiide]

This accurately describes what I observed

This is more in line with currently existing high crime areas where nobody talks to the police as part of the culture. The demographics of this reality have no commonality with lynching statistics.

Its more closely related to anti snitching culture than us debating novelty of white people being lynched.

It is a total red herring to what this story even brings to the table.