Words matter

Donald Trump’s recent fall back on his self-victimization strategy to distract everyone on the day Ukraine Ambassador Bill Taylor literally confirmed Trump’s possible criminal behavior with the Ukraine President Volodymyr O. Zelensky is a bridge too far.

“So some day, if a Democrat becomes President and the Republicans win the House, even by a tiny margin, they can impeach the President, without due process or fairness or any legal rights. All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here – a lynching. But we will WIN!” Trump tweeted.

Words matter.

In claiming to be a victim of a lynching, Trump disrespected and diminished the domestic terrorism, horror, and perpetual scars of relatives of African Americans who have been lynched simply because of the color of their skin. His crude comment, once again, exposed his irreverence for the lives of people of color, “the others,” that is Trump’s trump card, his election currency, among his supporters.

From 1882-1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the United States. Of these people that were lynched 3,446 were Black. The Blacks lynched accounted for 72.7 percent of the people lynched, according to an NAACP report on the history of lynching. African Americans were castrated, burned and murdered viciously, without legal protection, by white mobs while white racist onlookers, families, cheered, held picnics, and took pictures.

Trump’s insensitive appropriation of Black pain took a page from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who claimed, during his confirmation hearings, that he was a victim of a “high tech lynching.” Thomas played the race card to put senators on a guilt trip and to distract from the allegations of sexual misconduct by Professor Anita Hill and others. It worked. Senators not only prohibited other witnesses, who could back up Hill’s claims from appearing, but they also put the first “Uncle Tom” on the U.S. Supreme Court. When the SCOTUS was dismantling the Voting Rights Act in 2013, Thomas wrote that the VRA should have been completely abolished.

Presidential candidate and former VP Joe Biden recently apologized for saying in 1998 that the impeachment of then-President Bill Clinton could be viewed as a “partisan lynching.”

Anyone who compares their situation to lynching should be censured and condemned for their innate disrespect for the human suffering Black people have endured under an American legal system that looked away and continues to look away at the senseless murders of Blacks at the hands of racist whites in and outside of law enforcement.

The sanctity of Black life should be as respected as any other human tragedy visited upon a people. For example, the Holocaust, the tragic, senseless slaughter of people of the Jewish faith by Hitler, is sacrosanct. No comparisons to any other brutal, callous, event in history is allowed, understandably. The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the World War II genocide of the European Jews. Between 1941 and 1945, across German-occupied Europe, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews, around two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population.

However, African-American historians say millions of enslaved Africans endured an African Holocaust during Middle Passage journey in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Dr. John Henrik Clarke, the late Pan-Africanist, college professor and historian, maintains that 60 million Africans died in route to destinations in the Americas and Caribbean Islands during the slave trade, which lasted from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Contemporary estimates put the Middle Passage deaths at between 1.2 to four million.

“It is our holocaust because this is a holocaust that started 500 yeas ago and it is not over. We do not start our count at 6 million, we start counting at 60 million and we have just begun to count. Now I do not mean to negate the German and the European Holocaust… There is no comparison between this tragedy and our tragedy which was the greatest single crime in the history of the world. Why haven’t we memorialized our dead?” Clarke asked.

Clarke’s question brings up a distinction between the atrocities that happened to the Jewish Holocaust victims and the African Holocaust victims. Jewish people memorialized their dead with a simple slogan, “We must never forget,” a mantra that puts everyone on notice that the memory of the massacre of millions of their faith will never be forgotten. Yet, what happened and continues to happen to African Americans is forgotten, swept under the rug after a 24-hour news cycle.

This article originally published in the October 28, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.