Nooses Are More Than Just Pranks
A few years back, on a late Saturday night, a couple of teenage boys were bored with not much to do. They decided to go down to the highway a couple of blocks from their neighborhood. Standing on an overpass, they got the bright idea to drop a chunk of concrete off the bridge onto a car traveling underneath. They timed the drop perfectly. The chunk of concrete went through the windshield and instantly killed the driver. The driver was a woman. She was a Russian who migrated to the city. She had a daughter. The car crashed and the two boys ran. The police had absolutely nothing to go on. But the two boys couldn’t keep quiet about what they had done. Someone dropped a dime on them and they were arrested a couple of weeks later. They had confessed that it all was just a prank and they didn’t mean to kill anyone.
Late last week, nineteen year old MIT student Star Simpson walked into Boston’s Logan Airport with a plastic board fastened with a nine volt battery and attached to the front of her sweatshirt. Standard overzealous procedure required that someone err on the side of caution and assume that the device could have been a bomb. The proper authorities were notified and Ms. Simpson was confronted at gun point by several of Boston’s finest in airport security. Whether a prank or not, innocent mischief or not, people took the threat seriously and Ms. Simpson nearly paid with her life.
Because someone calls something a prank doesn’t automatically dismisses the consequences of their act. Confessing that poor choices were made because someone wanted to play a practical joke is not acceptable at the airport where a book of matches found in the wrong place can shut the airport down for hours on end. A prank doesn’t dismiss the fact that a couple of idiots killed a woman.
No one would find somebody walking into a bank with a fake gun so they could pull a fast one on their friend who happens to be one of the tellers an innocent prank. But it would be easy for someone not in on the prank to mistake the moron with the toy gun as someone attempting to rob the bank. The toy gun could easily be used to threaten someone. Such stupidity should not be condoned. Such stupidity would be justifiably confronted with the firm hand of the law. Guns in banks are not funny. They should not be tolerated.
If a man was in the local city park and running up to women with a rubber knife and a mask he might be trying to get a laugh or two and post the woman’s reaction on YouTube for his friends to see. But the women who were the victim of the prank, who had their adrenaline dumped into their veins, who were humiliated to have their fear exploited for someone else’s entertainment, would more than likely not see the humor and would seek help from the police to stop the deviant behavior. It would not be funny. It would not be dismissed with a wink of an eye and a smile on the face.
But somehow, what could arguably be the single most evil symbol of African subjugation, a noose hanging from a tree, is dismissed as nothing more than a prank and nothing that warrants any serious attention. Why? White men with nooses have a history of using such weapons of murder on the black community. Such a history is a symbol of white American terror against the black community. Anybody who thinks such terror is funny or innocent needs the same severe response and level of education a person walking into a bank with a toy gun would receive.
Some people look at a noose and dismiss it as little more than a piece of rope. If that’s the case, a gun or a knife is little more than a lump of metal. A bat is nothing more than a piece of wood. But in the wrong person’s hand it can do a lot of damage. In the wrong hands it can kill.
But because the white dominating culture sets the standards for what is and for what is not acceptable behavior in America and because the white community has never been terrorized as a collective with the end of a noose, white people are quick to sympathize with the noose hanger and dismiss the entire affair as little more than a prank. In fact, the white community has always been the one hanging the noose. White people have always been the one standing around a tree, smiling, laughing, and patting each other on the back as a limp African American body hanged from one of the branches. Of course they would prefer not to understand why the black community would react with anger at such blatant racial disdain. To acknowledge the hanging noose as the icon of racial hate is one of the first steps to acknowledging one of the biggest skeletons that continues to hang in white America’s closet.
The black community must not let stand the dismissive attitude of white mindset America towards the ugliness of noose hanging. Nooses are a symbol of white racial hate in and of themselves. They do not need to be confirmed by membership in a racist organization or a racist tattoo painted on white skin. A noose is not cute. A noose is not funny. A noose is a prank done in poor taste. A noose is also a symbol of hate. A noose is also a nonverbal threat. All of America will do well to take the prankster hanging a noose a lot more seriously.
