Strange Fruit: The Politics Of Linguistic Lynching

Some days — no, most days — it seems like politics has been reduced to nothing more than cultural invective. No sooner had the dust-up over Howard Dean’s appeal to Confederate flag-wavers settled down (see here, here, and here) than a new flurry of recriminations has risen up to replace it, this one over Sen. Zell Miller’s charge that Judge Janice Rogers Brown is being “lynched” by Democratic opposition to her nomination to the D.C. Court of Appeals.

Miller’s was not the first time this controversial term has come up in the course of the contest over nominations. The first time the Democrats derailed the Charles Pickering nomination Karl Rove called their behavior a “judical lynching,” and Sen. Charles Schumer sanctimoniously replied that the use of that word was “truly inappropriate.”

A summary of the new spat over linguistic lynching appeared in today’s Washington Post, but then it appeared just about everywhere else as well. “Senator Uses Word ‘Lynching,’ Draws Outcrty,” said the Arizona Republic; “Miller’s Talk of Lynching is Criticized,” wrote the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Typical of the criticism was the following from Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Conference for Civil Rights, an umbrella organization that contains virtually every organization that sees itself fighting for civil rights.

“Senator Zell Miller’s comment equating opposition to the nomination of Janice Rogers Brown to a lynching is despicable on its face,” Henderson said. “Either Senator Miller has conveniently forgotten a frightening period of American history, or he is willfully demeaning all those African-Americans who were hung from trees throughout the period of racial segregation in the South,” Henderson continued.

Oh well, here we go again. Shoveling out the demogoguery and hypocrisy (which always seem to go together) is a Sisyphusian, Sorcerer’s Apprentice sort of task, but somebody’s got to do it…. Perhaps the place to start is with the observation that the Hendersons and Schumers are — how shall I put this? — strangely selective and one-sided in expressing their linguistic sensitivities. Following below is a small smattering of comments from their political friends that, somehow, failed to elicit any criticism from them.

I hate to use a charged term, but it’s my heart talking here. I really think it was a political lynching that happened in the United States Senate

• Sen. Barbara Boxer in interview with CBS’s Bob Shieffer on John Ashcroft’s opposing the nomination of Ronnie White to the Circuit Court of Appeals.

“He orchestrated the lynching of an innocent man”

• Sen. Ted Kennedy, commenting on Dominick Dunne’s argument that Kennedy cousin Tommy Skakel was a murderer, USA Today, 1 April 2002

“Hate crimes are modern day lynchings”

• Sen. Ted Kennedy, Associated Press, 19 October 1999

“Why are [African-Americans] sympathetic to Clinton? Because we are against lynching. And when we saw he rope, we said, ‘We’ve got to protest this.'”

• Rev. Al Sharpton, Associated Press, 14 January 1999

“Lynching Vernon Jordan And Laughing All the Way”

• A ranting, left-wing critique of the New York Times (really) for not defending Clinton vigorously enough

Journalists treatment of charges against Clinton are a “journalistic lynching”

Richard Cohen, San Jose Mercury, 28 March 2000

Bob Beckel, former Democratic operative until he got caught at it (and other things) said that “the GOP spent the summer of 1998 on the Clinton lynching bus”

San Jose Mercury, 2 February 1999

Those trying to get Clinton are “a mob scene on a lynching spree”

Ethnic Newswatch, 30 November 1998

It is the strategy of the White House to “keep knocking Starr and then you connect it up to the Republicans nd try to turn them into a lynching party”

David Gergen on Larry King Live, 15 October 1998

The Nation is witnessing “the lynching of President Clinton”

Thomas Buffenbarger, president of the International Association of Machinists, Cleveland Plain Dealer, 23 September 1998

[Note: cites above without URLs were found on Nexis]

Those are just a few representative samples. Interestingly, black writers use the lynching trope at least as often as whites. When Julianne Malveaus, for example, wrote that Charles Pickering “is the South’s outdated fruit,” she was quite clearly calling him a lyncher. “Strange Fruit” was the title of Lillian Smith’s moving anti-lynching novel, and it was also the title of a Billie Holiday song on the same subject. Thus Malveaux said of Judge Pickering that “when I read his record I hear strains of … Billie Holiday crooning notes and crunching hearts over lynching.”

Or one could browse through just about any issue of The Amsterdam News, one of the leading black newspapers now featuring former Sharpton sidekick and disbarred lawyer Alton Maddox as a columnist.

“Ashcroft chose Virginia as the venue for the kangaroo proceedings against Muhammad and the child, John Malvo, since the ‘Cradle of the Confederacy’ has a history of lynching Blacks.” [Note to Maddox: Virginia is not the “cradle of the Confederacy.” That honor is claimed by Montgomery, Ala.]

• Maddox column

“Mayor Ed Koch got in on the lynching”

Maddox on his own critics

“Thirteen years after my unwarranted and unprecedented suspension from the practice of law, many of these stalwarts convened at The Lab on Fulton Street in Brooklyn on May 21 to recognize the 13th anniversary of this legal lynching, brought on by my unwavering and uncompromising commitment to the destruction of racism and white supremacy.”

• More mad Maddox self-pity/promotion

These Amsterdam News examples are from Maddox, but style, and free use of “lynching,” are typical of the paper. The demotion of an assistant warden, for example, was described as an “administrative lynching.” Perhaps style was commanded from the top. Wilbert A. Tatum, publisher emeritus and chairman of the board, wrote in a most peculiar column chastising Hilary Clinton for her apparent inclination to support Andrew Cuomo over Carl McCall for governor:

She cannot afford to pussyfoot around and ignore him or continue to procrastinate while Carl McCall is up against the most formidable opponent of his career – one who, we must remind her, never lifted a finger to help her do anything and who was on the lynching end of the campaign to destroy her family with the tool of impeachment.

Cuomo on the “lynching end of the campaign to destroy her family with the tool of impeachment”? No matter. Tatum’s comment seems to fit right in with the others here.

I have no problem with Schumer, Henderson, et. al. disagreeing with Zell Miller. It would be easy to see why he gets under their skin, even if their skin weren’t so thin. But these days the first resort of Democrats dealing with critics is to accuse them of (horrors!) insensitivity. They seem to get themselves more worked up over words and symbols than over substance, which was also evident in the Dean flag flap.

I wonder if the reason the Schumer/Hendersons spend so much time denouncing the choice of words of people like Miller is that it’s easier to do that than to argue with them.

Say What? (1)

  1. Richard Nieporent November 16, 2003 at 10:10 pm | | Reply

    You left out one of the most famous examples of the use of that word. When the Left tried to prevent Clarence Thomas from being appointed to the Supreme Court by using the trumped up charges from Anita Hill, Justice Thomas defended himself by calling the process a high tech lynching. I believe that is the real context for Zell Miller’s use of the word.

    This is just another case of the Left deciding what conservatives are allowed to say. However, these same folks had no problem with Senator’s Byrd’s use of the term “white nigger”. I guess their sensitivity meter was broken at the time.

    Yes, they are the ultimate hypocrites.

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