There are nooses, and then there are nooses. The nooses (noosi?) in the news are at Germantown’s Performing Arts Center and much further south, in Jena, La.
In the local incident, some theater dudes had hung the ropes above a stage. Bad idea, and they were fired for it, unjustly, I”d argue. I didn’t hear any evidence that these theater employees had a history of racial insensitivity, or that any crude comments accompanied the ropes, which apparently are used all the time in theater settings.
My sense is that G’town officials were sensitive to the legacy of nooses - and that is good - but then they got afraid of not being sensitive enough - a legit concern - and then they got nervous and figured the way to avoid further drama would be to fire the employees, which was an unfortunate overreaction.
Then, there’s this noose, definitely designed to intimidate black students in Jena, La. Read more about it in my Thursday column.
September 14th, 2007 at 12:44 am
Wow, looks like no one wants to touch this one. I’ll bite.
If it was intended as an act of intimidation, of course they should have lost their jobs. However, I haven’t seen any evidence that it was.
The story that the stage hands gave makes sense to me. If I had a lot of free time and a bunch of hanging ropes, trying to tie a noose is probably something I would do eventually. Although I would probably untie it before leaving. It wouldn’t have occurred to me, before the publicity connected to this case, that someone would think I was threatening to lynch them. I’d be more likely to think of the Sopranos or the Wild West than a lynching. As far as I can determine, looking it up online, the last lynching by hanging of a black person in America happened in 1968, the year I was born.
On the other hand, they apparently left chairs directly under the nooses, when the other chairs had been cleaned away for the floor sweeper. That doesn’t seem right.
And then there’s this: Usually - as in the Jena case - a noose is a message that a black person is being “uppity” by stepping outside the traditional roles which racists want to limit black people to. We haven’t been told who the black employee who found the nooses was - and I know this is tasteless, but this information makes a huge difference. If it was the janitor, no one threatens to lynch a janitor for cleaning. Not even racists object to black janitors or try to scare them into quitting. Racists are more likely to think cleaning is the proper place for all black people. If it was a highly-paid professional in the theater, that’s a different matter. Someone might try to threaten a director, for example, who was a black person in a traditionally white job.
Clearly we aren’t hearing the whole story. In a case like this, it matters enormously whether or not the people who were fired had a history of racist remarks. The comment made by the alderman that it doesn’t matter what the intention was, a noose is a hate crime even if there’s no hate, is nonsensical.