The crime of lynching is something, although brutal, very unique to American history. When analyzing the maps given for this blog, even the larger surface level details were surprising to learn. For example when I think of the word “lynching” I often only think of the context in relation to African American and White tensions after slavery and before the civil rights movement. However by making a quick glance at the White Supremacy Mob Violence Map, it was make clear very fast that lynching is much more than just a two race conflict, and can affect any race although in certain areas is can be more prevalent for particular races (i.e. Latinx in California/West Coast and African Americans in the Deep South). Although lynching can happen to any race, it always involves race and is what drives lynching to occur.
In particular when areas have a large number of lynching’s occurring, those actions become normalized in the population and in Mississippi alone between 1877 and 1950 there were 656 reported lynchings in the Racial Terror Lynching map. The county with the highest number of lynchings had 48 just in one county (Leflore County). However this map only counts the lynching of African Americans so the volume of lynching is presented much different than the map above and primarily focuses on the American South and ignoring states like California as pointed out in the Racism in the Machine: Visualization Ethics in Digital Humanities Projects article.
What happens when you map such a horrific act such as lynching, it can sometimes take away the magnitude and the gruesome nature of the action, making it easier to ignore the ethical implications that come with mapping such a topic. It turns a serious racially driven crime into a a shade of red which can ignore the lives that have been lost from lynching and normalizes the behavior to an extent. The maps are useful in the fact that they demonstrate the amount of lynching occurring but can place the blame on the geographical area instead of looking deeper into the problem. Additionally when mapping out such a significant thing, just using a choropleth map can take out the personification of the event and make it much less humanizing.
The different focuses of both the White Supremacy Mob Violence Map and the Racial Terror Lynching map illustrate two different issues when it comes to lynching and shows the two different definitions of what is classified as lynching. While the Racial Terror Lynching map demonstrates a more rigid definition with lynching involving a white supremacy mob that believes what they are doing is lawful and righteous, additionally knowing that they will get away with murder because what they are performing is a form of justice. The White Supremacy Mob Violence Map on the other hand, still believed that the murder they were performing by mob was serving justice to support white supremacy, but was included much more ethnic groups and had a much more homicidal intentionality and brutality surrounding the lynching, often mutilating the corpse of the victims. While neither is ethical it is important to note that there are differences in the definition of lynching and that can effect how it is mapped onto a map.
Works Cited:
Hepworth, Katherine, and Christopher Church. 2018. “DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: Racism in the Machine: Visualization Ethics in Digital Humanities Projects.” 2018. https://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/12/4/000408/000408.html.
“Explore the Map | Lynching in America.” n.d. https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/explore.
“Monroe & Florence Work Today – Explore the Map.” n.d. Monroe & Florence Work Today. https://plaintalkhistory.com/monroeandflorencework/explore/.
Pretty good, albeit late. Not the most well written post you’ve produced this semester, but it makes solid use of the reading and explores its connection to the maps.