Patrick Thomas Casey: The notion behind this idea is that the relationship of white America to black skin, a relationship of power and numbness, is continuous between the two historical moments, ours and that of the Jim Crow South. While this seems more or less true, the parallel is more dangerous than simple continuity through time would imply. […] It is both reactionary and unsurprising that the bodies of black men are again the ground on which this parade is taking place. In one way, it has always been so. Black skin has always borne American indignities disproportionately; it is, plainly, a fetish. But in another way these acts have a dumbfounded distance to them, a second-tier intentionality, as though our nostalgia has begun to eat itself. We find ourselves half-consciously recreating even the past’s failed attempts to recreate a false past. We have clung in the past months to the idea that these recent murders differ from public lynchings at least in their lack of ritualized spectacle and educational intent. But we watch them, over and over again. We ritualize them for ourselves. And as we do, the photographs of public lynchings we have seen ought to haunt our screens. […] The purpose of lynching is not fear, then, though perhaps that is what one is meant to think. The purpose of lynching is complicity. It is the forced identification of bystanders with those in power. Because the identification of a majority with power is the definition of the status quo. It is for us, for our edification, that these men are murdered. To ensure that we know who we are not, and that we are thankful. […] Sympathy, even indignation, are not countermeasures to this separation. They are not the enemies of lynchings; they are the quibbles of the crowd. They are responses from the position of power. To feel them one must be safe. Otherwise, the only appropriate response is panic. If we are not panicked, the lynchings of our time have achieved their purpose as well as those of the past. They have forced our complicity, our identification with those in power through the acceptance—the hope, even—that we are different from those who could be so easily tormented. The status quo will be built of our indignation. More here.