What, after all, could we really expect to learn about American society from a pathetic character like John William King, a strutting white supremacist with an appetite for torture, self-aggrandizement, profanity and murder? We knew well before King and his cronies came along that demented, violent individuals existed and that–inevitably, given America’s troubled racial history–some of those imbeciles would be racist. Sickening and outrageous as King’s actions were, they don’t tell us much about the role of race in today’s world. Sure, some commentators tried to use them as a sign that a huge new racial threat is on the horizon. But after all, no one truly believes that King represents the typical American, or even the typical white resident of Jasper, Texas.
There was a time, of course, when King’s perspective was not so rare, when unreconstructed racists roamed the land and lynching blacks was a Southern spectator sport. As sociologist Orlando Patterson reminded us in his 1998 book, “Rituals of Blood”: “When two Afro-American brothers, Irving and Herman Arthur, were lynched and burned in Paris, Texas, in August 1920, their roasted bodies were chained to the back of an automobile and dragged through the streets, the celebrants shouting jubilantly as they drove through the Afro-American neighborhood: ‘Here come the barbecued niggers’.”
It says a good deal about how far we have come as a country that no celebrants stood by cheering King’s crew, that the typical reaction was neither encouragement nor acceptance, but shock and anguish–ultimately resulting in the first death penalty imposed this century on a white Texan for killing a black. Given the racial strides Americans have made over the last 80 years, the tendency to wallow in self-congratulation is more than understandable. And that wallow is made all the easier by King’s being something of a demonic apparition, a foul-mouthed fiend cursing the family of his victim. Since most Americans cannot imagine being anything like King, and cannot imagine their friends being anything like him either, there is a certain comfort in castigating him. In condemning him, we celebrate our own relative enlightenment, our obvious moral superiority. We celebrate, in short, our own innocence. And in the process, we perhaps forget that morally outranking an evil lunatic is not a particularly exalted achievement.
There is certainly nothing wrong in using a tragedy like James Byrd Jr.’s murder to remind ourselves that our society no longer tolerates lynching, or that we have outgrown the need to revel in blood-drenched rites of racial domination. We should not confuse such activity, however, with honestly coming to grips with the more serious racial problems that challenge us today.
Thank God, being lynched and dragged through the street is not something present-day black Americans spend much time worrying about. Today’s concerns are a good deal less dramatic, having to do with such things as schools where children routinely fail. With workplaces where promotions and opportunity are held hostage to color. With neighborhoods so isolated from mainstream society that the American dream seems an ocean and a universe away. Sentencing a racist murderer to death has no effect on such distressing and perplexing problems. It may, however, make it easier to believe that, even if integration and equality continue to elude us, our ability to unite in outrage makes us virtuous anyway. In truth, all it does is make us better than John William King.
