Blog entry 1

Typically in historical texts, we read about how black men were lynched for "committing" rapes or murders against white people. We never really hear about women being lynched, especially colored women. In my Women Studies 190 class, we are currently reading Southern Horrors by Crystal N. Feimster. I was surprised when I saw there was a chapter on women being lynched during the late 19th and early 20th century. I also noticed how there was only one chapter on female lynching, and that the previous chapters and the ones that followed after continued to focus on men, for the most part. Within the chapter, I did learn a lot about women being lynched, especially women of color. I was still surprised though, before reading the chapter, I had this naive view that women weren't lynched, psh, what man could harm a woman like that. But then I thought more about it as I read and came to the conclusion that, if they could do it to black men, what would stop them from doing it to women, or even kids. If they could abuse women physically and sexually, who was to say they wouldn't lynch a women. I was disgusted at the way both these men and women were treated before their death, during their torture, and even after they had died. I came upon a passage within the chapter that discussed how women were lynched for doing things such as poisoning the family that they worked for and how "Poison held a special place in the arsenal of black resistance and in the white imagination, and like witchcraft, was linked to women" (Feimster, Souther Horrors, 165). I made an instant connection between witchcraft and women, especially black women. There seems to be this stereotype and image attached to black women being "magical." It is still prevalent today, especially in media. For example, look at the Pirates of the Caribbean, the "witch" in the movie who helps Jack Sparrow countless times just happens to be black, or look at the hit tv show Vampire Diaries, the witch in the show is black as well and there are a couple of episodes where a few warlocks pop in and they happen to be black as well. This is all connects back to the history and image that was placed upon Black women of being these "magical" beings. Within the witchcraft image, I've noticed that the witch is always helping white people, always taking care of them and making sure they are not in harms way or help them achieve something that they need.

Something that really disturbed me was the description of a black pregnant women being lynched. The book says that "Mary Turner, pregnant Black women, is hanged to a tree, doused with gasoline and motor oil and burned. As she dangled from the rope, a man stepped forward with a pocket knife and ripped open her abdomen in a crude Cesarean operation. Out tumbled the prematurely born child...two feeble cries it gave- and received for the answer the heel of a stalwart man, as life was ground out of the tiny form" (Feimster, Southern Horrors, 174). The passage wants to make me vomit and makes me cringe as I think about how a human being could possibly do that to another human being, especially when that person is also holding another person within them. I continued to read the passage and found out that there was evidence that "at least seven black women were visibly pregnant when they were lynched" (Feimster, Southern Horrors, 174). One is already bad enough, but seven?! This passage opened my eyes up even more as to how cruel white people were to black people, especially women. The passage in my opinion, by far is the most significant one in the book, it truly shows the brutality that was set upon the black community. It shows a pivotal moment in our country's history, it shows how cruel any human being can be to another. In the context that it was given, one would say that the mob was fueled not really because of what the person did, but because she was black, because according to them, she was "inferior" simply due to the color of her skin and that the crime that she "committed" was a threat to society that privileged their whiteness. You can still see this type of brutality today, for example, Guantanamo Bay, is a detention and interrogation facility where the United States military holds prisoners who are a threat. There was much controversy as to when a woman and man prisoner guard forced some of the prisoners to strip naked and tortured them physically, emotionally, and psychologically. What those guards did strongly parallels to the lynching of the black pregnant woman and how those guards saw those prisoners as "inferior" to what I believe, due to the color of their skin(the prisoners were dark skinned and the guards white). Both passages that I discussed within this entry show society that history repeats itself, maybe not in the same ways, but in different ways that still parallel with the past.