Obnoxious as the movie was (”Look at the heroic FBI agents solve racism!”), the one thing that Mississippi Burning got right was the position that women were in during the same time period. The scene where Frances McDormand’s husband attacks her for talking to the FBI is horrifying.

It’s a crappy movie about civil rights, but it’s one of the best portrayals of racist people I’ve seen on the movie screen.

the rope has been quiet for 39 years

Unfortunately, it hasn’t been that long. Michael Donald was lynched in 1981.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Donald

Only 26 yrs ago. I’m 24

Defining women as property has to come first in a situation like this. Women have always been property. In other cultures, such property is easily replaced and so it’s annoying when women start to think they’re people. A few killings here and there and women get the message: you’re not human. Here in the US we have this long history of men proclaiming that they’re the protectors of women—while shouting down women who want to protect themselves, thank you very much—–when what protection means is you’re just paying some strongman in whatever currency you’ve got. The notion that women are property is still strong in the US, but it’s only been lower class women that have been executed in the US for getting uppity—see Women who Kill by Ann Jones. Women are consumer goods here. Other men are potential shoplifters of those goods. White men have always feared black men as other men, maybe fearing in those other men the same mindset of women-as-trophy-to-be-fought-over.

Honor killings are lynchings of women, while lynchings are reverse honor killings. Usually it’s women who die. It seems to be unique to America, too, this killing of a lower-status to revenge a higher status woman—even if she didn’t exist in a lot of the cases. Where there was an actual woman, it’s like the white men in the case couldn’t bear to have another man play with their toys. I’m sure the guys who murdered Emmitt Till were absolute sweethearts at home, too, kind of like Mafia guys who kill and torture during the day and then come home to dinner at night.

I wonder how many lynchings were the result of some white woman and some black guy getting together and realizing they had way more in common than white women and white guys did. I mean, who wants to be that Mafia wife? Who wants to be the wife of the guy who killed a fourteen-year-old boy? How many of these good ole boys were the sort to kill their wives if they were unfaithful? How is this any different from, say, the mob that killed the Iraqi girl in the street a while back? The property is getting rebellious. You can always get more property, but there’s always somebody else who wants it. In the Middle East the property gets destroyed because it’s broken and there’s lots more women out there. In the US, protecting the property or punishing its thief was a big huge production, made the more fearsome by the fact that white guys could and did just make shit up out of whole cloth. White guys always have to think they’re in control and that they own other people. Those nooses in the tree were a reminder that white guys never stop wanting that and remembering that they once had it.

You have a boy hanging out with his friends in the local store, who is dared by his friends to talk to the woman running the store, and who says “Bye baby” and wolf-whistles at the woman. That’s obnoxious and annoying. It’s male entitlement and men-in-groups egging each other on to make clear to a woman that she is there for them, not the other way about.

Saying this is not saying that Emmet Till “provoked” what happened to him - one, if he’d been a white kid, this would have been let go as “boys will be boys” (male privilege to be obnoxious), two, as Amanda noted, Emmet got lynched because he was a black kid who was presuming to a male privilege that only a white kid was “entitled” to - the right to harass and make uncomfortable a white woman. (And the notion that she was only made uncomfortable because he was black? That was obviously a part of it - but if he’d been a white kid, hanging out with his friends and going “hey baby” and wolf-whistling, she might never have complained - but I can’t imagine it wouldn’t have made her feel uncomfortable. That kind of behavior isn’t pleasant for its target.)

Ignoring the male/female privilege axis in this would be a mistake. Arguing that what Emmet Till did was not obnoxious would be a mistake. Trying to leap from that to “he deserved it” would be an inhuman crime: claiming that this is what I’m saying would be a serious misreading. What Emmet Till did was deliberately obnoxious, and it should go without saying that he did not “deserve” to die for it or be beaten for it.

VDARE.COM does not, as it happens, advocate lynching. But it cannot be denied that Till was lynched for what would now be called the sexual harassment of a white woman. And elementary math suggests that, in the almost five decades since his death, up to 1.5 million white women may have been raped by blacks. Perhaps 50,000 whites may have been killed.”

Disclaimer: any parallels to fascist propaganda in the early 20th century are unintentional and purely coincidental.

VDARE clearly advocates lynching or they wouldn’t need to deny it. ”

Even better analogy than the LGF one I used.

It reminds me of how one fella I know (a lawyer from a top-tier educational background who should know better) said “I would never let my daughter date LeBron James because he has an illegitimate child…and no, it has nothing to do with his being black.”

No one in that discussion had even brought up LeBron’s race; the fact the person even pre-emptively mentioned it says all you even need to know.

In fact, it’s worse.

Who would say “I don’t advocate raping women to death, but. . .” unless they were actually rapists?

VDARE clearly advocates lynching or they wouldn’t need to deny it.