It’s always a bad sign when the main debating subject of Washington punditry fits neatly into the Word of the Week. So, it seemed like bad news to me when a big, dumb fight over the word “lynching” swallowed a couple news cycles, as if it were some predictable political play.
Act I: President Trump tweets, “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.”
I don’t wish to defend this tweet at all. Instead, I want to be precise about why I don’t wish to defend it. It’s not that employing the word “lynching” is inherently racist (it’s not). It’s that Trump is being histrionic, historically illiterate, and pathetically self-pitying.
Yes, Trump is comparing himself to black victims of extrajudicial terror killings. Perhaps, being generous, Trump was recalling not so much the history of actual American lynchings as he was the metaphorical “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks” Clarence Thomas said he was being subjected to during his Supreme Court confirmation in 1991. At the very least, Thomas’s complaint about a “lynching” was that he was being treated unfairly for being black.
You can understand and admit all of this while, at the same time, thinking the questions barked at deputy White House press secretary Hogan Gidley by a press gaggle were illiterate.
Act II: Assembled chorus: “He used the word ‘lynching,’ which has a dark record in America’s history … 4,700 deaths.” Does using the word have a dark history, though? Or does the practice the word describes?
“Can you at least admit that ‘lynching’ is a bad word?” Is it? Wasn’t it a bad word choice?
“Hogan, can you understand why every African American in the country is upset right now?”
Is this true? Obviously not. Why does a white reporter think this so confidently? Is it ever accurate to speak for every member of a multimillion strong group — even one you are part of, much less one you are not?
Find the video of this exchange. Notice how weirdly about words the questioning is, how completely made-up-on-the-day the consensus.
If you search way back in your memory, perhaps you can remember that it’s never really been a thing to condemn uttering the word. The word may apply well or apply badly, but it was never a bad word to say until it became a way to impugn Trump for saying it.
Act III: Annoyed conservatives prove as much, finding Democrats such as Joe Biden and Jerry Nadler and plenty of other white and black people using the word “lynching” about various issues, including Bill Clinton’s impeachment.
Since we don’t really hate saying “lynching,” then, what do we hate? Well, actual lynchings, obviously! And also whiny, self-pitying comparisons that try to program our feelings about present events using how seriously we take the evils of the past.
Twist ending: It’s secretly been a sequel all along! Remember the June brouhaha over “concentration camps”? The one that had the teams exactly flipped on this exact issue of using words coded to historical evils to evoke emotions about current political matters? The one that distracted from substantive policy discussions and changed nothing? Exactly.
