The New York Historical Society had (has? I havent been there lately) an exhibit of lynching photos called Without Sanctuary. It showed photographs - many of them postcards with writing on the back - 98% black victims (I think a few were Sicilian, one or two Asian, Jewish and white women). Sea of jeering white faces, bodies hanging, stripped of clothes often charred.
The accumulated horror of seeing these little trophies sold as souvenirs and the gleeful tone of the writing on the backs of the cards which emphasized the normality of these artifacts was overwhelming.
I hate the sense of sanctimonius, self-congratulatory rightgeousness this node may project. Beneath the layers of training and conditioning I'm sure I'm as racist, sexist, etc. as the next...
But the experience of looking at these things was the most haunted feeling I've had. It made me think of Adorno (half read and half-digested in graduate school). The notion of a terminal event which is behind that assertion which is something like 'After Auschwitz, poetry is not possible'.
It was not just the lynching, which horrible as it is happens all over the world. It is the normalcy of it, the celebration of it in the photos - like Rousseau's notion of a spectacle, a communal event which is an affirmation of what the community lives and feels... something that people participated in and then went home to sleep, peacefully. No troubled conscience, no connection made between the act they were supporting and the crucifixion they hold sacred and celebrate every Sunday.
These pictures were from a few generations ago, the bulk of them from 1900-1930 but some earlier and some later. The only thing that roubled me about the exhibition was that it focused on lynching as a Southern practice. The choice of dates and places are determined by the availability of the postcards and photos which make up the exhibit but a true assessment of the practice of lynching would have to expand and include events like the New York City Draft Riot of the 1860's. The New York Historical Society made no reference to lynchings in New York; it is alot easier to see it as a Southern practice.
Leaving the exhibit and walking down to the D train on 72nd Street was a process of reabsorption. Back into the city built on ward politics and ethnically-controlled unions and its racially complex history. A process of forgetting and hardening against imagined and real dangers and threats.
And later walking down Broadway where bodies hung from lamp posts. And I was thinking of that Rilke line
at the end of Archaic Torso of Apollo, "There is no place that does not see you/ You must change your life". There is something inescapable about this. It doesnt matter that my relatives came from Europe about 100 years ago and never owned slaves. It is more to do with a certain blindness that it is to be American, the self-congratulation of being on the right side of WWII and the right side of the Cold War a blindness and lack of insight, a lack of self-reflexivity. A total absence of a critique of who we are and how we got here and what we are doing right now. I dont mean as individuals, individual white guilt (mine or anyone else's) is irrelevant. Critique does not mean to hate oneself or one's country. Critique means to analyse something in terms of its own ethical claims. MLK is the greatest American because he forced us to do this ever so briefly. But we can't bear the scrutiny for very long. To critique something means to love its finest aspects and want them to develop.
Without Sanctuary is an imperfect glimpse at a buried reality which has not been properly expiated. It would take the imagination of Blake or the energy of Whitman to do it justice. Something we as Americans probably didnt even think of before Martin Luther King, Jr. we are haunted by this but our understanding of it is faulty. And secretly we wonder if we would have the strength to act otherwise as we look at these photos of people struggling to get in the frame of the photo to say 'I was here!', 'I did this!'...
It is easy to see fascism and other forms of evil as 'not-us' but it it is hard to recognise actual evil and articulate what is wrong.