Hey Stupid, There is a Big Difference

I read a post a while back on The Field Negro about Toby Keith's new song that celebrates the glory of stringing up gangstas.

I digested the new info, shook my head at the stupidity and then decided to move on with my life. It's my standard response to garden variety racism.

Unfortunately, this act of racial stupidity involved nooses. In recent months I've been slapped in the face with the fact that issues involving nooses bring out a special type of stupid in many white people. That means that when I saw the topic discussed at other venues, I also saw a lot of comments that really pissed me off.

Objective studies have shown that white people in America are actually not as dumb as many black people think. In fact, they have the highest levels of education on average of any non-immigrant group in the country. (Certain immigrants have higher education levels because we only let the smart ones in legally.)

Sadly, despite their education, many white people suffer from a disorder that causes them to compare horrible acts of violence committed against minorities to vaguely similar, less horrific acts committed against white people. This typically occurs during discussions about the present day impact of historical racism.

This disorder is called Compulsive Comparison Dementia.

CCD is like an involuntarily spasm of the sphincter that causes feces to fly from your butt. Only it's your mouth that's plagued with the spasms even if you are still spewing shit.

People are often struck by the disorder without warning and they tend to spout ridiculous comparisons that have no basis in reality:

"Asians immigrants succeed; why can't blacks?"
"Italian and Irish immigrants were discriminated against too, you don't see them still complaining like black people."
"Africans held slaves too, and slavery used to exist in Eastern Europe as well."
"White people got lynched in the West just like black people got lynched in the South, so why is talking about lynching somebody such a big deal?"

That last hypothetical comment brings me back to the initial thrust of this blog post, Mr. Toby Keith.

Keith's new song advocates vigilante violence and is accompanied by a video showing a black youth dressed in typical urban fashion as a potential target for that violence. In a shocker, Keith's video is becoming quite popular among conservatives, and has garnered the singer lots of media attention. He's been cheered for setting the record straight and giving Americans some advice they can finally use.

Shockingly, his song has made some black people unhappy. We tend to view songs about nooses and death by hanging as warnings, not good dancing music. In fact, we don't call it death by hanging, we call it lynching. As black people have made their unhappiness known, many white people have found themselves struck by Compulsive Comparison Dementia, which has forced them to say things like the aforementioned comments about lynching.

The lynching comment is both idiotic and inaccurate. White people in the West did not get lynched. They were hanged. There is a difference between those two things, a massive, enormous, colossal difference.

Getting hanged means a jury of your peers found you guilty of a crime and decided to hang you for it.

Getting lynched means somebody pulled you from bed for an impromptu, midnight picnic where the main thing going on the grill is you.

Big difference.

Now, I understand that white people sometimes organized themselves into a posse and hunted down particularly bad criminals to hang them. I know that frontier justice could be brutal and capricious.

I also know that the cats getting strung up in the West weren't getting their testicles and ears cut off before they met the rope. I know their crimes were more egregious than looking at a white woman. I know the people getting killed typically were not children.

I know they weren't getting lynched.

So, like many black people, I tend to bristle when I hear someone complain that all the fuss about lynching and nooses is unnecessary. Then I realize that person probably suffers from CCD and they can't help being an idiot.

That helps most of the time.

(Sidenote: Since creating his ode to lynching Toby Keith also had this to say:
"I think the black people would say he [Obama] don't talk, act or carry himself as a black person."

"What does that even mean?" the audibly shocked Beck replied.

"Well, I don't know what that means," Keith drawled, "but I think that that's what they would say. Even though the black society would pull for him I still think that they think in the back of their mind that the only reason he is in [the general election] is because he talks, acts and carries himself as a Caucasian."

Toby Keith is a dumbass. Yes he is.)