Just as the summer tourist season swings into full gear, highly-trafficked public spaces on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. are drawing the unwanted attention of thrill-seeking cowards who engage in despicable acts of racist intimidation.
On June 17, police found a noose hanging from a lamp post outside the National Gallery of Art. That disturbing finding came on the heels of similar discoveries just a few weeks earlier — first on the floor of the segregation exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture and, a few days after that, yet another noose appeared on the grounds of the Hirshhorn Museum.
“What is so surprising to me is that these nooses have been left in the Trump era, not the Obama era,” Georgetown law professor Sheryll Cashin said in a recent phone interview. “I might have imagined some racist might have wanted to protest the election of a black president by doing something. But instead, it seems that this president, who was elected with a wink and nod to some people with racist views, has validated some of them to act out their feelings.”
The appearance of the nooses in downtown Washington are individual pieces of a larger, hate-fueled mosaic that has become more apparent since the election of President Donald Trump, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. “Since the day after the 2016 presidential election through March 31, SPLC has documented 1,863 bias incidents,” the group said in a recent national report that highlighted the Washington noose discoveries. “Of these, 292, or 15.67 percent, were anti-black motivated incidents. One of the most pervasive manifestations of these happenings is the display of nooses.”
“It’s a cheap and low-tech symbol that can get a nuclear reaction.”
Cashin, author of of Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy, believes the nooses are a desperate attempt by someone or some group to garner public notice. “My theory about why the nooses are cropping up is that budding white supremacists have discovered how easy it is to create some attention to entertain themselves and to escape their lives by getting a reaction from other people,” she told me. “It’s a cheap and low-tech symbol that can get a nuclear reaction. It’s like, ‘Wow. That was fun and look at how I stirred things up.’ They’re trying to get a reaction and to create an appearance of themselves that’s much larger than the real population of white supremacists.”
To be sure, they’re getting a reaction, as measured by the public denunciations of mayors and civic leaders, and the breathless media coverage. No arrests have been made as of yet, but the acts have been widely reported — and condemned — in local and national media. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said in a statement that such acts aren’t welcomed in Washington. “We are an inclusive city, and we do not tolerate signs of hate, ignorance and fear,” she said. “We do not take these incidents lightly, and we will not accept that signs of hate are signs of our time.”
At the African American museum, founding director Lonnie Bunch noted in a statement that the symbolism of the noose “has long represented a deplorable act of cowardice and depravity… This was a horrible act, but it is a stark reminder of why our work is so important.”
A statement from our Founding Director Lonnie Bunch on the noose found in our history galleries today. pic.twitter.com/sFWVSaobhV
— Smithsonian NMAAHC (@NMAAHC) May 31, 2017
The symbolic imagery of a noose is well-established — harkening back to lawless vigilantism targeted on black Americans and others by the Ku Klux Klan in a darker period of our nation’s history. As Jonathan Smith of the Washington Lawyers Committee explained recently on WAMU-FM, a Washington-area public radio station, that violent history makes the act of leaving a noose in a public place a serious threat. “Given the history of lynching in the United States, think of what a terrorist act it is, particularly in a place [the African American museum] that for so many people is sacred,” he said. “That’s a threat against African Americans of the use of force and that makes it a federal criminal violation.”
My conversations with a dozen experts — including police officers, political scientists, and psychologists — failed to paint a precise portrait of the perpetrator. However, by nearly all accounts, whoever left the nooses wanted to send a retrograde message of white superiority at a time when the nation is becoming increasingly racially and ethnically diverse. And, experts agree, the perpetrator is more interested in the brief rush that comes from making a secret statement than engaging in civil discourse about the nation’s broad and expanding multicultural realities. In other words, the noose-hanging criminal is a race-baiting, thrill-seeking coward.
“It’s the kind of person that is saying to black people, ‘You need to understand that you must get back in your place,’” Carol Anderson, the Charles Howard Candler professor and chair of African American studies at Emory University, told me during a recent phone interview. “It’s the kind of person who is absolutely furious that there was a black man in the White House. It’s the kind of person who is vibrating with anger that on the National Mall, there is this museum about black Americans.”
“It’s the kind of person that is saying to black people, ‘You need to understand that you must get back in your place.’”
Anderson, who travels the nation lecturing on her book White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Nation’s Divide, said she would welcome the chance to engage with people who hold such views. She’s rarely afforded the opportunity, however; such people are unlikely to make themselves visible because they know what they’re doing is outside the boundaries of acceptable behavior, she said.
Condemnation comes easy for those who know and respect history. What’s more difficult to understand is what motivates a person to leave a noose in a museum, particularly one of such significance to African Americans? And, just as important, what should reasonable, rational people do in response to surreptitiously public racist acts designed to shock and offend?
Perhaps Philip Kennicott, the Washington Post’s art and architecture critic, offers a way out of the reflexive feedback loop produced by attention-seeking racists who prey upon public fears and anger for nothing more than their own secretive giggles. Kennicott suggests that the noose be added into the African American museum’s collection and thus its symbolism be made a community-wide teachable opportunity. In a recent column, he wrote:
The museum deflates the symbolic power of the object without diminishing its historical importance. It is frozen in the current moment, detached from its original purpose and neutered as a living symbol of hatred. Yet it retains its power to shock the conscience…
Copycats needn’t bother with more nooses. The museum has what it needs, which is proof of an ongoing history of cultural violence, and that shameful object has already begun its permanent transmogrification into a museum piece.
I like Kennicott’s idea, and I called him to say so. But even our genial conversation left me cold, empty, and uneased by the emotional juices that a noose can wring from even the most intelligent dialogue across the ever-yawning racial divides. Indeed, as Kennicott concluded in our conversation, there already exists places and opportunities, such as museums, universities, libraries, and places of worship, to foster greater racial healing.
“The public has to be more disciplined in seeking it out,” Kennicott told me. “Then we all become empowered by refusing to allow the racists to have the final word.”