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How Lynchings Happen

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        If you are from rural white America there’s a fair chance one of your less progressive friends or family have recently posted a viral article about a black kid who beat an elderly man and raped and killed his elderly wife. There is an accompanying obligatory photo of a scary looking young black man with an afro by the name of “Tyrone Woodfork”.

        The wife of my distant cousin shared this article about Tyrone Woodfork. The post eulogizes the victims before adding,

As it is, only Mrs. Strait died, so it's not of interest to Brian Williams and the rest of the main stream media media.(sic)
Think about it. After 65 years of marriage. After serving our country. After 90 years of life, Mr. Strait has lost his wife to a rapist/murderer. NO ONE in the national media gives a flip and neither does Fakebook.

        We’ll call the woman who posted this “Loreen.” Loreen lives in a tiny all white community a few miles from the tiny all white community where I was born and raised.  

        It seemed obvious that the post was meant to stir up racial prejudices, but again, she’s married to my cousin, who’s one of the few progressive voices in that area of North Missouri. He’s a great guy and I didn’t want to attack his wife with a blunt verbal assault.  

        As gently as possible I pointed out the irrelevance of the article/incident: 

It happened in a different state. Tulsa World Arctile about Viral Post

It happened 8 years back! Reuters Article and I asked, “Did his race influence your sharing this aticle?”

        Of course she said “No”, but the very next comment from our rural white neighbor was, “Yes, the media isn’t covering black on white crime.”

        Her article performed as expected, it helped confirm the prejudices of her “noble” rural white neighbors.  

        Here’s the fascinating backstory, that she is almost certainly unaware of.  

        Her husband grew up in another tiny white community, we’ll call “Eastville”, near the tiny white communities where she currently resides and where my Mom still lives on the family farm.  

        About three decades back an incident took place in the tiny community of Eastville where her husband grew up.  

        Someone very closely related to her husband was involved in an extra-marital affair. The husband returned home unexpectedly, apparently finding them in flagrante delicto. The male, we’ll call “Earl” is/was someone I know well. Earl was tied to a tree and left.

        Other people I know/knew found Earl tied to said tree, and asked him, “What happened?!”

        As one could imagine, Earl was reluctant to tell the truth so he blamed….wait for it, “Black people robbed me and tied me to this tree!”

        Earl’s not the smartest kid on the block, but the story was good enough for my other neighbors, who went home for their guns, and started cruising the gravel roads around the tiny little community of Eastville hunting for the black “villains!”

        There are no black people in Eastville today, and there weren’t black people in Eastville three decades back. But Lord forbid, if a black man or two had strayed through or near Eastville on that hot summer day, it’s quite likely they would have been shot for the crime of being black and in the wrong place at the wrong time.  

        Back to Loreen: this embarrassing incident and witch hunt for “black provocateurs” took place well before she met my cousin. I doubt he has shared this dirty laundry with her. When he posts on FB, it’s consistently in support of progressive causes because he’s: not racist, he’s pro-union and an all-around good guy.

        But Loreen is priming her thousand-plus FB followers for the next time a white woman accuses a black man of rape.

        And, as reprehensible as Loreee’s posting was, it is a drop in an olypic-sized swimming pool compared to the racial tensions Trump is stirring. 

        And that’s how lynchings happen.   


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