By Nicholas Stix
In the wee small hours of August 27, I received and responded to an idiotic, racist letter by longtime reader, Brenda J. Verner, and published the correspondence. I responded to Verner’s e-mail with mockery and attempts at humor, but failed to make much of an impression on her.
That wasn’t the first moronic, racist letter Verner had sent me; unfortunately, I never got around to responding to and publishing an earlier one(s?), which I seem to have lost in the interim.
Well, Verner was just getting started. She sent me two more letters that day, which I have reprinted below verbatim.
So that the reader might get the full flavor of Verner’s racist bombast (and lack of paragraphing!), after publishing the first, longer letter in toto, I have quoted and responded to excerpts.In a message dated 8/27/2009 10:18:46 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, bjverner writes:
I don't know how old you are, but you are obviously ignorant, uneducated, or intentionally deluding yourself with selective amnesia. Lynching of black people was a common community activity in America until the 1980's. Still in 1974, while I was at Harvard University, my 18 year old cousin was lynched, yes by whites. My great grandfather was lynched by the klan, over a basket of laundry. It is estimated that at least 117,000 black people have been lynched since the
founding of this nation. The pervasiveness of lynchings in the south, instigated The Great Migration. This was a communal sport all over the nation. The kids were brought out to see black men castrated, burned alive,skinned alive, tarred and feathered, their tongues cut out.(Google Lynching images to see a taste of this all American blood sport for yourself.) Black women were not exempt. In colonial times they even lynched pregnant and cut the babies out their stomachs as beat them to death. Ida B. Well, in the 1920's started the newspaper The Red Tide to record the backgrounds of the victims, the towns that proudly participated, and to appeal to the government to stop this routine form of terrorism that was used to "keep niggers in line." It was the lynching of Emmett Till that sparked the already smoldering civil rights movement. This does not include the "legal" acts of cops who have routinely shot down thousands of innocent black boys and men from plantation times to the present. Black Americans throughout this nation's history has witnessed newspaper accounts of hundreds of trials of white murders of black people, where the white jury routinely let the white offender go, no matter how heavy the evidence against the white defendants. "To Kill A Mockingbird" was one of the literary accounts pertaining to this type of issue. The forced prostitution, rape and murder of black girls and women has been a white privilege from slavery. These issues plus the egregious "legal" disenfranchisement and stripping of black people of hundreds of thousands of acres of their land was/is the source of the much examined concept of "Black Rage"(read the book). It was just a fact of life that Black people in America lived in a state of perpetual fear of whites until relatively recently. In my childhood, I experienced many occasions of whites physically assaulting me and or my friends or other black strangers, out of the blue. The very sight of us, mind you children, would send them into life-threatening rock attacks. As an adult, I have been physically attacked by virtual white strangers in Boston and Cambridge. Once when I was a teenager, I saw a white man hit a black woman with a metal lunch pail because she sat down in a seat on the bus that he wanted - this was in Chicago. Who has perpetrated more violence than black Americans? - white Americans my man, white Americans.
Excerpts and Replies (Verner’s statements are in quotes)________________________________________
“I don't know how old you are, but you are obviously ignorant, uneducated, or intentionally deluding yourself with selective amnesia. Lynching of black people was a common community activity in America until the 1980's.”
You lie!“Still in 1974, while I was at Harvard University, my 18 year old cousin was lynched, yes by whites.”
Provide a name, date, and location, and I’ll check it out. Otherwise, I’ll have to assume, based on your track record, that you are lying again.“My great grandfather was lynched by the klan, over a basket of laundry.”
Name, date, location. “It is estimated that at least 117,000 black people have been lynched since the founding of this nation.”
You lie!
(See the section after these letters on lynchings.) “The pervasiveness of lynchings in the south, instigated The Great Migration.”
The Great Migration was about economics, not lynchings. Otherwise, it would have begun ca. 1890, rather than during World War I. You lie!“In colonial times they even lynched pregnant [sic] and cut the babies out their stomachs as [sic] beat them to death.”
Prove it, or be condemned as a liar.“It was the lynching of Emmett Till that sparked the already smoldering civil rights movement.”
Brown vs. Board of Education preceded the lynching of Emmett Till by a year, the Jackie Robinson case by another ten years, and the founding of the NAACP by yet 35 years more. The Niagara Movement was still older.
Speaking of lynchings and civil rights, when do whites get some redress for the thousands of ever more gruesome black lynchings of whites? When do we get our civil rights movement?
DOJ stats on interracial murders, 1976-2005. “This does not include the ‘legal’ acts of cops who have routinely shot down thousands of innocent black boys and men from plantation times to the present.”
Prove it, or be condemned as a liar.“Black Americans throughout this nation's history has witnessed newspaper accounts of hundreds of trials of white murders of black people, where the white jury routinely let the white offender go, no matter how heavy the evidence against the white defendants. ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ was one of the literary accounts pertaining to this type of issue.”
You lie! To Kill a Mockingbird was inspired by the Scottsboro Boys case. If you’re going to lie, can’t you at least put some skill and effort into it? “The forced prostitution, rape and murder of black girls and women has been a white privilege from slavery.”
You lie! This particular lie has been so frequently and widely broadcast that until recently, even I assumed it was true. Rather, “the forced prostitution, rape and murder of black girls and women” has been a privilege of black men since time immemorial. Although I have encountered many black females whom I considered beautiful and desirable, and dated quite a few in my youth (I dated many women from each main racial group—I’m no great lover, but I love women), the historical fact of the matter is that going back to slave days, few white men have found any black women attractive. There is a certain symmetry between white men and black women: Most black women find white men unattractive.
However, historically in America there has been a much different relation between black men and white women. While some white women have always been attracted to some black men, most black men have long been sexually obsessed with white women, regardless of one's desirability or beauty.“These issues plus the egregious ‘legal’ disenfranchisement and stripping of black people of hundreds of thousands of acres of their land was/is the source of the much examined concept of "Black Rage"(read the book).”
Prove it. “Black Rage” is b.s., so don’t try and use one hoax to sell another one.
As for the rest of your charges, you’ve set off my b.s. meter so many times, that due to your complete lack of credibility, if you were to accidentally tell the truth, I would have to assume you were lying yet again. Like most blacks, you have a history of crying wolf.
Three hours later on the same day, Verner sent me the following e-mail.In a message dated 8/27/2009 1:18:05 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, bjverner writes:
Please do not publish my first or second response to your post.
They were for your consumption only.
Here’s how it works, Brenda. If you don’t want me publishing your racist, dishonest e-mails, don’t send them. But if you send them, I will publish them. Slavery was abolished 144 years ago, and you are not my owner.
On Lynching
The following section is from Michael Keene, who says that it is based on statistics collected by the Tuskegee Institute, a black organization that would hardly be interested in low-balling lynching statistics. I could not find any direct link to Tuskegee, and the other blogs and Web sites I found combined amateurishness with pc. Though I can’t vouch for their precision, the statistics that Keene cites sound like the ones I’m used to reading.
Lynching in America
Lynching Statistics, by Race, State and Year:
*From 1882 to 1964, there were 4,742 documented cases of lynchings in America.
*Of these cases, 3,445 blacks and 1,297 whites were victimes of lynching.
*The vast proponderous of lynching cases occurred from 1882 to 1935
*The year which saw the most number of lynchings was 1892 with 230
*From 1882 to 1885 more whites were lynched than blacks 315 to 227
*By the 1950's lynching had all but disappeared
*Mississippi, Texas, Georgia, Louisiana and Alabama saw the most instances of lynching, accounting for 50 percent of all cases.
*Arizona, California, Colorado,Idaho, Indiana, Iowa,KansasMichigan, Minnesota,Montana, Nebraska,Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South dakota, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming, had more cases of whites lynched than blacks
Source:
Tuskegee Institute
(The only scholarly article I could find on the phenomenon was “Rough Justice: Was lynching a scandal or a system of justice or both?,” a review of Dwight Murphey’s monograph, Lynching — History and Analysis, by Thomas Jackson, in American Renaissance. As Murphey and Jackson emphasize, blacks were not typically randomly lynched, nor were whites. The vast majority of lynchees were criminal suspects, and a large though indeterminate percentage of both groups (white and black) was guilty as hell, and got what was coming to them under the justice of the time, which was not necessarily inferior to what passes for criminal justice today. Criminal justice has always been a brutal business; pick your poison.
Other postings may pretend to scholarly rigor, but prove to be racial socialist propaganda, like the two linked below:
“Lynching in America: Carnival of Death,” by Mark Gado, in TruTV’s Crime Library, and
“Lynching”: Information from Answers.com.)