Brutal people project their brutality on to others.ĭray classifies the various species of “lynchcraft.” 1.) The targeted, assassination-like killing of blacks by night-riding Klansmen careful to remain anonymous and secretive during Reconstruction, while Federal forces still occupied the south. Such a justification is bullshit but that doesn’t mean it isn’t revealing: white male awareness of their sexual exploitation of black women during slavery and after made it quite natural they would fear payback in kind. And the widespread rape of black females by white men during slavery is no more apparent, Dray writes, than in the nightmares white men entertained of vengeful black men eager to rape white women, a specter always raised in justification of lynching. Dray quotes James Weldon Johnson, the writer, NAACP chair and a near lynching victim himself (on a Jacksonville, Florida streetcar in 1901, Johnson’s light-skinned black female companion was mistaken for a white woman by the conductor, whose alarms instantly formed a mob that almost hanged Johnson in a nearby park) to the effect that lynching was an expression of the same “evil” that fed slavery. If Nazism was a burst of gangrenous, putrescent gas from the German nationalism mortally wounded in 1918, then lynching shows southern white supremacy-the ethos of slavery-in its weakened, desperate, rearguard lashing-out at the once enslaved but now liberated and theoretically dangerous blacks.
This is very much a book about slavery, specifically the drawn out volatile decadence of the society slavery made, of the racial caste hierarchy that chattel slavery wove into the psyche of southerners. Along with Nazi Germany, we should look to the American South (although Dray's scope is not limited the south) for an instructive picture of a society whose moral awareness was put to sleep, and its potential for savagery licensed, by the division of humans into superior and inferior racial castes, the inferior one being a group whose members could be killed with impunity. He concludes that because racism is the purest product of our unreflecting reptilian brain, a racist ideology must represent the worst brand of the political violence our species finds so instrumental (Baudelaire was not overstating things when he equated cosmopolitanism with a “divine grace”).
Somewhere near the end of Koba the Dread, his account of readerly adventures in the Stalin demonology, Martin Amis weighs Hitler and Stalin.
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