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How We Remember Lynching

I n his recent book, Legacies of Lynching, Jonathan Markowitz explores the way lynching continues to pervade our collective memory, evolving from concrete and literal spectacles of white supremacist violence to one of the most vivid symbols of race oppression and a continuing metaphor for racial relations in the United States. Markowitz refers to Clarence Thomas's use of lynching as a metaphor for contemporary political drama. Similarly, he cites the cases of Susan Smith and Charles Stuart, who manipulated stereotypes used to justify lynchings in the past to invoke racist hysteria as a screen for their own killing of family members. 1 However, the link Sontag and Sante draw between the two groups of photographs is less symbolic than structural. They see the photographs as partaking in the same action, the unabashed exhibitionism of racially motivated torture, in the latter instance translated to an international setting. In capturing the joy of wielding absolute power over abject and dehumanized victims, each group of photographs reveals something we are not meant to see about ourselves as United States citizens—and as human beings. As Sontag points out, "the horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken—with the perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless captives." The dialectic between memory and forgetting that characterizes public commemorat ion of the past has been especially fraught when it comes to the lynching habit in the United States. One reason they were immediately invoked in relation to the Abu Ghraib images is that the lynching photographs had reemerged into the cultural imaginary with force just a few years earlier in the widely publicized exhibit of James Allen's collection of lynching postcards and photographs. Seen throughout the country, this exhibit and accompanying text, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, served to unsettle the narrative of American innocence and progress that the dominant U.S. culture prefers to tell about itself. The torture photographs from Abu Ghraib emerged with even greater force—atavistic, terrible, yet bringing the shock of the familiar, of what we had been dreading to see. As Sontag says, "people do these things to other people." Rape, murder, humiliation, and torture are practices as old as love. These men and women—as with the mobs in the lynching photographs—betray no sense of doing anything wrong, seem, rather, to enjoy what they are doing, to enjoy being photographed and to enjoy circulating the photographs among friends. 3 As with the images from Abu Ghraib, the viewing of lynching photography raises questions about the ethics of looking and the danger of voyeurism, of reproducing the original pleasures of the visual consumption of the black body in pain. Yet it also raises the ethics of not looking, of choosing not to acknowledge or take responsibility for what is plainly before one's eyes. Shawn Michele Smith argues that lynching "photographs present a spectacle of whiteness," representing "a gruesome ritual of white identification that many white scholars, like myself, would, perhaps, rather not see." Given white power's