“The lynching itself was the explanation. The adults who were participating in a communal homicide are the curriculum.” — Stacey Patton
For Halloween, a true American horror story. Last week, Joseph Kelly came on the show to argue that racialized American fascism has a prehistory running back to 1818. But today’s guest goes much, much further — both in time and in criminality. Stacey Patton wrote her doctorate on the racialization of American childhood and her new book is entitled Strung Up. It’s the story of how white America learned to lynch Black children.
“Learned” is key. Patton writes about the people who turned up to watch the lynchings so endemic in American history. She traces the practice back across the Atlantic, to a Europe with centuries of history of public execution and the punishment of children as theater. And she sets out the two versions of 19th-century American childhood. The Lockean child to be nurtured and rewarded. The fallen child to be corrected and punished. White childhood and Black childhood. Trick or treat. No candy for guessing who got what in America.
Patton describes an image from Waco, Texas in 1916, then a supposedly modern and progressive town. The first people to reach the lynching of Jesse Washington were children, running as though to a parade. Small boys were paid to gather kindling. A reporter asked a father why he had a toddler on his shoulders and was told the child could not learn the “proper way” too young.
There will be those who say that Patton exaggerates in order to vilify American history. But last night I saw Once Upon a Time in Harlem, the excellent documentary by David Greaves, built from his father William’s 1972 footage. It’s not really about racial crimes, but there’s one scene in the movie featuring photos of White kids at the lynching of Black people. Stacey Patton’s Strung Up is already a USA Today best-seller. It’s not hard to understand why. Happy Halloween.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Stacey Patton is a journalist and academic in the School of Communications at Howard University. Her doctorate in African American history examined the racialization of childhood in America between 1880 and 1954. She is the author of That Mean Old Yesterday and Spare the Kids, and writes a widely read newsletter on race, childhood and violence.
ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.
CHAPTERS
00:00 — Intro
02:00 — From what was done to children to what happened to the watchers
02:57 — Punishment as theater, and the European inheritance
05:19 — Original sin, Locke, Rousseau
09:30 — Elevating childhood while ranking humans
11:48 — Two competing traditions of childhood
14:22 — How many children were lynched?
18:36 — Why does the killing of a child horrify us more?
22:00 — The girl punished by being kept home
22:25 — Waco, 1916, and Jesse Washington
25:38 — Birth of a Nation and the trained audience
29:25 — White resistance, and its limits
33:58 — The Central Park Five, and January 6
37:03 — The police killing of Kohen Wiley
41:55 — An unfinished moral record
45:13 — Closing