The new federal anti-lynching legislation that President Joe Biden proudly signed contains a joke, an irony, and a scheme.
According to Biden, “No federal law expressly prohibited lynching until today.” He gives the impression that lynching has been legal all this time, until he finally sprang into action to make it illegal.
Herein lies the joke. There hasn’t been a lynching in the United States in at least 40 years. This gruesome practice, once common in certain areas of the country, has virtually disappeared from American life. And this, of course, is a good thing. But it also raises the question: Why outlaw something that isn’t actually happening?
Consider a couple of other terrible practices that don’t seem to require new federal legislation. Witch burning was at one time common in certain parts of Europe, and of course in America, we had the notorious Salem Witch Trials. Cannibalism, too, is an ancient practice that can be traced to several tribal cultures; it, too, is largely extinct in modern society.
Is it time to enact federal laws against witch-burning and cannibalism? It would certainly be a comical sight to see Biden declare that “no federal law expressly prohibited witch-burning and cannibalism until today.” The comic element here is the ridiculous posturing, the pompous virtue-signaling, and the obtuse self-righteousness.
But there’s also an irony in this new federal anti-lynching law. To the degree that the law is even necessary, it outlaws a practice that was largely carried out by Democrats. Let’s recall the progressive historian Eric Foner’s telling remark. The Ku Klux Klan, he wrote, was for decades “a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party.”
The Democrats didn’t invent lynching; the practice precedes them. What the Democrats did was use lynching and other forms of racial terrorism to subdue the black population in the American South. They did this starting when slavery ended, around 1865, through the middle of the 20th century, the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The main purpose of lynching was to suppress the black vote, which at the time largely went to the Republican Party. So lynching was a key element for maintaining a tight lock on the Democrats’ “solid South.”
Not a word of this was breathed by Biden during his self-congratulatory ceremony. Not once has the Democratic Party acknowledged its historical role as the party of slavery, segregation, and lynching. Not once have the Democrats apologized for it. Not one penny in restitution has been paid by the party that carried out these horrors. Instead, the very gang of arsonists that perpetrated these crimes now shows up pretending to be the firefighter squad!
Finally, we turn to the scheme. I didn’t catch on to this until I read the measure itself. It marches behind the banner of fighting lynching, but it isn’t really about lynching. The people who wrote the legislation probably realized how foolish it is to ban a practice that no one is engaging in. So they figured, why not use the public outrage against lynching to impose enhanced penalties for so-called hate crimes?
This is what the “anti-lynching” measure is really about. It starts with the notion of a “hate crime.” This itself is problematic, because if a white guy kills a black guy, it’s a hate crime; yet if a black guy kills a white guy, it’s just a murder. In other words, the racial motive seems only to apply in a one-way direction, even though there are many plausible reasons why racial animus might motivate black criminals to attack whites.
Assault and murder are, of course, crimes in every state in the country. It’s not as if we need new federal laws criminalizing what’s already prohibited. So the Democrats’ idea here is to create enhanced penalties for racially motivated crimes, by which they mean racially motivated crimes against minorities. The new law increases maximum sentences for these hate crimes.
Even here, the Democratic framework requires nuance: Black assaults against Asian Americans, for instance, aren’t viewed as hate crimes even though Asian Americans are undoubtedly a minority. To qualify as a victim of a hate crime, you have to be a “disadvantaged minority,” not a “model minority.” Doing well in school and earning above the national average takes you right off the hate crime victims list.
The real problem with hate crime legislation, in general, is that it typically targets thoughts, not actions. It encourages prosecutors to go after people not just for what they did, but also for their social and political attitudes. If a black guy and a white guy get into a fight and the white guy beats up or kills the black guy, he should be punished in proportion to what he did.
No one is saying that motive is irrelevant. Certainly, premeditated crimes are more harshly punished than crimes that arise out of momentary passion. That isn’t the issue here. The issue is whether the white guy can be given enhanced penalties because, say, he made derogatory comments about the black crime rate or wrote social media posts attacking black political activists such as Maxine Waters and Al Sharpton.
The new federal anti-lynching law passed with bipartisan support because Republicans—who recognize the problems I’ve outlined here—were reluctant to vote against a law purporting to be against lynching. This is how the Democrats cunningly used lynching to outlaw something very different from lynching, and this is why I call this law not only a joke and an irony, but also a scheme.
