Crisis of the Eternal Opimist and the Case of Lynching

Yesterday in African American literature we discussed lynching. I wish I had something wise and academic to say about the whole matter, but I don't. I can only get at it from an emotional stand point. I'm not going to pretend I understand the African American experience in regards to lynching. I will never know or understand fully what it feels like to live in a country that did this for sport to one's own race. I can only understand it in regards to me. This is not a self absorbed idea, I think it would be minimizing to discuss a feeling that is foreign to me.

I feel disgusted to be a white American. So many of the privileges I receive is a result of heinous treatment African Americans received. I notice I write that in the past-tense by really, it is never ending. You'd think lynching, murder for sport,really, is a thing of the past. In class, we learned about actual accounts of lynching, masses of people would gather to watch the process of an untried man being decapitated, finger by finger, his skull broken, and then hung. What makes it all the more worse, these people who watched treated this as a family outing. People dressed in their Sunday best, with picnic baskets in hand celebrating a hanging of a "Negro." You think this happened decades ago, we have evolved. No, we haven't. In 1998, James Byrd, Jr. was beaten savagely to the point of unconsciousness, chained to the back of a pickup truck by his neck, and dragged for miles over rural roads outside the town of Jasper, TX, and then was decapitated. What does that say about us? What does that say about our society?

I am outraged. I am angry. Never have a felt so helpless. I don't even know what to do. As an advocate for social justice, I always looked on the bright side--the eternal optimistic. Ha, it seems so naiive now.

Never has anything shaken me to my core so much. My thought was always, "even on the worst days, people are still mostly more good than bad." This idea has stayed with me despite knowing the Holocaust, violence against women worldwide, war for greed, mass killings-- horrible, horrible things. Some how I still managed to believe people were mostly good, perhaps misguided, but mostly good. I have put up with extreme realism of professors, and denied that people are evil thus the need for government.

Was I wrong all along? Are people really that horrible? Nothing has ever made me question my world view like this has. I don't know why...why is this so special? I don't like this feeling, the feeling that I was wrong about humanity all along. And if I am wrong, and people are really horrible then what's the point in fighting?