Humanity Makes Me Question "Humanity"

I found this image in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. This photography is titled “Public Lynching. Date: August 30, 1930.” Post-Reconstruction and during Jim Crow, public lynchings were a pervading, realistic threat and danger to Black people. In educational contexts, a fact that’s often omitted when talking about lynchings was their inherent social nature; people considered lynchings as a community event, one in which families attended, white community members attended, and they were celebrated. People would have barbeques at a lynching, or mail postcards with a lynching photograph. In this particular piece, Rankine photoshops out the body of the two men who were lynched; in this way, our eyes are not drawn to the murdered bodies, but the perpetrators. People are gathered in front of a tree, the scene of the lynching. This tree is the gathering spot, and the lynching is the act of racism, desecration of the body, that affirms their collective gathering. People knew this was a photograph; their eyes are collectively drawn to the lens, and we capture what their faces look like. Roughly half of the people are smiling or gazing at the photographer; others have their heads tilted upwards, likely staring at the corpses of the two men. We see men and women, old and young people, and all gathered as white people. Their possible differences are negated in this photograph. All of these individuals were united by being participants in the lynching: who either did the murder themselves, or watched. More specifically, what binds them is not just the lynching, but how this lynching creates what they consider their white supremacy.


Karen Fields is exploring how a dialogue between the works of Durkheim and Du Bois could yield a conversation about racism; specifically, Fields is concerned with how acts of racism–in demonstrating collective effervescence and complexifying the notion of a common humanity–yields race. Durkheim details how groups construct a common identity that separates them from another: “What makes [the Kangaroos] alike is the abstract notion of common essence (kangaroo-ness)....special affinities and moral obligations of various kinds derive from it” (438).” Fields states how “Durkheim depicts these shared identifications as becoming immediately real to the participants in frenzied rites, which he calls effervescences collectives” (439). In other words, individuals construct what gives them a common essence, but that common essence–in order for it to have and construct meaning–is practiced, displayed, and reaffirmed through effervescence collectives. Du Bois may have applied this as the construction of racialization, and an example of lynching as a collective act united by the degredation and murder of a body marked as different. And while Fields highlights how both theorists did believe in a common humanity, they diverged in what this common humanity implied, and how it is reflected in society. Fields illustrates Du Bois challenging Durkheim, posing ““[Y]ou seem to assume, rather than demonstrate, that l’homme can possibly recognize l’homme in the abstract;” in other words, if there is something that binds men together, how do we know when one man recognizes another as a man? (453). Particularly as they would discuss the violence in ritual acts that affirm the status of certain groups, Durkheim would maintain the importance of this collective humanity in response to this violence; by assuming a common humanity, “such attacks cannot go on with impunity without compromising the nation’s existence” (455). Du Bois finishes this conversation: “Such attacks can’t be made, you thought, ‘without arousing the sentiments that were violated” (455).

In this particular image, what was the sentiment that was violated in the existence of these two Black men? Fields uses the example of lynching because of it’s analytical expansiveness in connecting both Durkheimian and Du Boisian arguments. The construction of whiteness is affirmed in the act of lynching: the different demographics in gender and age are negligible in the act of lynching when it is race–the perception of whiteness–that differentiates the lynched men and the white spectators. The crowd of white people in this Jim Crow society–despite the inhumanity of their actions and beliefs–are still embraced as citizens of the U.S as a nation. Despite the violent act done on these Black men, Black people were continuously dehumanized, and this dehumanization served as justifications for racial violence and oppression. The difference–the belief in racial superiority–is what allowed for lynching to occur, but the act reaffirms it. This image forces us to pay close attention to the detail of the white mob’s faces; they are humans, people, considered civilians, and yet, they can take away life in manners they considered justified because of their whiteness. In order for their whiteness to have any kind of desirability, they needed to actively oppress Black people. The lynching as a ritual act not only evokes group unity, but also affirms to them that they don’t want to be Black, or even consider the humanity of Black people. Doing so would call their own humanity into question. Both Du Bois and Durkheim believed in a common humanity, yet when we zero in on a inhumane act such as lynching, it becomes rather difficult to acknowledge any humanity in the violent perpetrators in this photograph. I’m left wondering, instead of what holds us together, why do we differentiate? Even at a violent concession against others?




Works Cited





Fields, Karen E. 2002. "Individuality and the Intellectuals: An Imaginary Conversation between W.E.B. Du Bois and Emile Durkheim." Theory and Society 31(4):435-462.






Asokan, Ratik. 2014. "I am invested in keeping present the forgotten bodies." Retrieved April 3, 2024. https://www.thebeliever.net/logger/2014-12-10-i-am-invested-in-keeping-present-the-forgotten/