Hello, and welcome back to the Civic Flame, a Mother of Democracy podcast where we take a deep dive into the US Constitution and look at how it is and is not being taken seriously by the US government today. This weekÕs episode is one of our campfire episodes, and for those of you new here, campfires are where we step out from the strict Constitutional exploration and touch on some hot topic issues. Today, weÕre going to have a talk about lynchingÑtechnically referred to as extrajudicial killing, but in reality a form of white supremacist terror that has a long history in the United States. A trigger warning for all of our listeners, we will be talking about violence and in particular racialized violence both interpersonal and structural. While weÕre all meant to be conditioned that racist violence and lynching are Black history and we donÕt need to teach it because it DEI (ooh, scary) the reality is that lynching and racist violence are White history. It is white people who do it, white people who promote it, and white people who protect the perpetrators. Rather than identifying whose history lynching belongs to by who has been victimized, letÕs put the focus on the responsible parties here: White supremacists and ÒniceÓ white folks, or whom Dr. King called Òthe white moderateÓ in whom he was very disappointed. Now that youÕre clear where I stand on that and where this podcast is going to go, you can orient your listening posture accordingly. If youÕre still in, grab your anger management snuggie because youÕre gonna need it. (transition music) I was going to write this episode a few times over the summer, but I kept opening up my Instagram to find another Black person had died mysteriously or another majority Black city had experienced a serious public health crisis. And itÕs important to know that I saw it on Instagram and not the legacy media whose actual job it is to report on this stuff. In case youÕre looking for sources, I highly recommend @dear girl fridday for international news and Brittney Packnett Cunningham (aka @mspackyetti on Instagram) for good overviews and resources to dig further into these kinds of stories. IÕd also suggest checking out the NBC News Article, ÒRecent, sudden deaths of Black people in Mississippi provoke fear and doubt,Ó by Senior Breaking News Reporter Minyvonne Burke. She notes Trey Reed and Nolan Welles are just two of a number of young Black people who have died under mysterious circumstances in the last year, and the handling of both cases has left continued legacies of skepticism and fear in the Magnolia State. Trey Reed just about a year ago in September was the first case that got my radar alarms going. Reed was a student at Delta State in Mississippi, and since IÕm from the generation that watched movies like The Ghosts of Mississippi and A Time to Kill instead of the generation that listens to brain polluters like the Tate brothers, I was immediately suspicious. Mississippi does not have what we would call a positive track record with investigating and local law enforcement taking racial violence seriously (not that I can think of a state thatÕs great at that, but they have a deep history of problems). Reed was discovered hanging from a tree, and the news immediately went to Òit was a suicide.Ó But hereÕs the thing, and please imagine me screaming this at you because I know my audience is mostly white and white people have a hard time understanding this, but IÕm writing it in all caps, ok: BLACK PEOPLE DO NOT HANG THEMSELVES FROM TREES. You know who hangs Black people from trees? White people. ThereÕs a whole ass history of this. And I recommend Timothy EganÕs Fever in the Heartland (which IÕm going to try to get our friend Dr. B on here to talk about with me soon) that details the second KKK in the US and the way a White Supremacist pyramid scheme turned into a lynching free-for-all where nice White ladies and their children would take pictures with dead Black people their husbands had tortured and lynched. Why? Because Black people do not hang themselves from trees. White people do that. Nolan Welles, and if you havenÕt heard about this case, you need to listen to more Black people. But Nolan Welles died during an Independence Day trip, and there is the most stereotypical good olÕ boy network level problems going on here. One of the alleged assailants is related to a judge, there were discrepancies in the original coroners report, there is social media data that indicates a different story than the white boys originally claimed, and when an independent autopsy was performed they could not rule out foul play. But the cause of death was indeterminant because the second autopsy was so far after the first autopsy and was not given access to all of the information the ME needed to make the decision. To make matters worse those nice folks in Mississippi have been using state resources to attack Welles mother for questioning the original autopsy. WhatÕs interesting to note is that both Reed and Welles had the same medical examiner, which has renewed questions about their reports. While Americans are reticent to deal with their recent and past history with lynching, thereÕs also a larger history of structural violence at play signified by what is going on in places like Gary, Indiana. Gary, Indiana, has been without power for almost two weeks. And I went through Indiana on my road trip earlier this month, and it was hot and humid and NOT a time people need to be without power for any length of time. But Gary, Indiana, is almost 80% Black. Just like Flint, Michigan, when it went without water. Just like Jackson, Mississippi, when it went without clean water, and just like the cultural genocide that took place in New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina, these cities with large Black populations are completely left to whatever horrors devastate them. Still separate. Still unequal. It is important to also acknowledge that the data centers (better known as surveillance centers, since thatÕs what they are) in these areas are still pulling from the power grid. Over and over, weÕve seen a rise in data centers, not because your grandma is on Facebook sharing AI generated videos of cats throwing tuna cans at criminals, but these tech companies are trying to consolidate their power now before the US government and global governments actually start to regulate them. The tech bros are speed running us into ecological and resource collapse on purpose (this was all part of Project 2025, a 920 page manifesto that JD Vance associates wrote). The lynching here is structural, institutional, and deliberate. From red lining that poured Black people into housing complexes with lead paint or neighborhoods where leaded gas leaked from the highways into Black communities, to the government flooding Black communities with Crack and then declaring and epidemic and over policing them, the legacy of one-on-one lynching is almost small potatoes. When the institutional violence gets involved, or rather the White supremacists get ahold of the institutions to do violence, the numbers of harmed and dead rise exponentially. (And donÕt get me started on Black maternal mortality which is 3-4 times higher than White women for no medical reason.) Again for this we can turn to Fever in the Heartland, you can check out our episode on the Kerner Commission Report, you can read James BaldwinÕs The Fire Next Time or Michael DysonÕs What Truth Sounds Like or Kristen E. Jeffers The Defying Gentrification Playbook, or Doulgas BrinkleyÕs The Great Deluge, or so many other books that address this issue. But the fact is that a legacy of racialized violence does not go away on its own. And it really does not go away when White supremacists have control of the federal government, a lot of state governments, and the legacy and social media. Our country is leaving Black people to die or actively killing them. And this is the moral wound of the United States. ItÕs not that we are a nation built on indigenous genocide. ItÕs that we are still not honoring our apologies or commitments to those communities because weÕre continuing to take their land and pollute their water (for the record, I recommend turning over all the federal wildlife areas and national parks to tribal communities and making them tribal lands). ItÕs not just that slavery happened or that Jim Crow happened or that the KKK happened. It is that they are still happening. The invisible empire doesnÕt even have to be invisible anymore. ItÕs not just that we herded Americans into concentration camps because we didnÕt like their race in the 1940s, itÕs that weÕre still herding people into concentration camps because we donÕt like their race. The past is not the past as long as the same people with the same horrible ideologies are the ones in power. And in the US, a lot of White folks do not want to reckon with this, and it doesnÕt necessarily have anything to do with Black or Brown folks. It is that to do so would mean to reckon with the lies they have been told by their parents, their churches, their government, and themselves. ItÕs a lifetime of existential unpacking, and it kinda sucks, trust me, IÕm still working on it. (transition) IÕm not trying to bum you out, but the only way through this is through it. The only way to have a meaningful protection against this kind of discriminatory violence is by looking at democracy as an action word: itÕs what we do. And we canÕt just do it by checking off a box every two to four years. We have to hold politicians accountable when they fail to do their jobs. We have to call out our friends and family and faith leaders when they promote harmful ideologies. We have to be as ruthlessly committed to justice and liberation as the bad guys are to injustice and supremacy. Other peopleÕs lives have to matter more to us than our own comfort. And the problem is that for too many Americans, they donÕt. Start by caring. ItÕll drive you crazy, but microdose empathy for a few weeks, and youÕll start to get the hang of it. And, like John Lews says, Òget out there and make good trouble.Ó And keep the civic flame burning bright. (Outro) This has been a campfire edition of the civic flame, a mother of democracy podcast with writer Amber Vayo and sound producer Matt Munyon. Thanks for listening.