You were lynched, Sir? Really? So now we’re cosplaying lynching victims?

As a scholar of lynching, I find this grotesque and spiritually rotten. Lynching was not “I got jumped.” Lynching was not “I needed stitches.” Lynching was not “the cops didn’t protect me fast enough.”

Lynching was ritualized torture. It was public theater. It was crowds bringing their children. It was bodies being mutilated slowly, deliberately, ceremonially, stabbed and cooked over pyres to send a message that you are not human and your suffering is entertainment.

“I was lynched.”

Were you castrated and your genitals passed around as souvenirs? Are your fingers still on your hands, or were they cut off and pocketed by onlookers? Are your teeth still in your mouth, or were they smashed out and collected and sold?

Are your ears still attached, or were they sliced off and mailed as keepsakes? Is your skin intact, or was it burned, blistered, peeled, and charred while people posed for photographs beneath your body?

Tell me, did your corpse hang for hours or days while crowds picnicked, laughed, and sold postcards?

Because that is what lynching was. It was not a damn metaphor. Or rhetoric. It was not a feeling of being politically persecuted. It was not a bruised ego wrapped in Christian melodrama.

Lynching was a technology of racial terror that involved slow death, mutilation, sexual violence, fire, dismemberment, and crowd spectacle. It was meant to destroy the body and the soul, and to terrorize an entire community through horror.