The Ideology of Citizen Control
To begin to understand the dynamics of control in a capitalist society, one must first understand Karl Marx’s critique of labor production. Marx argued that the creation of surplus value, or the difference between what is produced and what is needed for subsistence, resulted in the creation of two classes: the ruled and the ruling. The ruled class is composed of the workers, or the property-less laborers, and the ruling class is composed of the owners who organize the workers and reap the benefits of the surplus. These two classes are always in conflict. However, since the ruling class is in political power, they are in a position to shape the consciousness of society and its citizens.
America was founded upon this idea of a propertied class ruling over a class of property-less laboring citizens. The earliest European settlers seized land from Native Americans in order to gain a position of economic control. Settlers, driven by a desire to produce surplus to sell to increase their wealth, acquired more and more land, which necessitated the establishment of chattel slavery as an American institution. The African slaves comprised a substantial portion of the population of the country. As property-less laborers, they became the economic backbone upon which the ruling class of the nation benefited.
At the commencement of the Civil War, the economy of the South still depended upon the capital produced by black slaves, while the North derived its economy from industrial production and wage-laborers. The abolition of slavery in the South led to an insurmountable number of anxieties for the South’s ruling class. Louis Althusser, in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” describes this typical ruling class anxiety as an issue of production. Southerners knew they had to retain their relations of production in order to maintain their power. This maintenance of production was coupled with the white ruling class convincing the majority of its citizens that its interest were in the best interests of everyone. In the context of changing relations of production, the ruling class of the South still sought to perpetuate their ideologies of white superiority through lynching (this occurred also in the North, but predominately in the South) and other Jim Crow practices.
Althusser states further, that the ruling class perpetuates their ideologies to ensure control through the institution of state apparatuses, of which there are two kinds: Repressive and Ideological. As the name implies, the Repressive State Apparatus works to control the citizenry by means of violence. The Repressive State Apparatus includes the police, the military, and even lynching, as it was an institution of violence which was sanctioned by the state—in that it was often encouraged by the state and went vastly unpunished. Be it to suppress the black vote, eliminate black business or the black competition in the job market, destroy a labor union, or to seize land, lynching sought to violently control blacks and sustain white control both politically and economically. More subtle, but more effective, is the Ideological State Apparatuses’ use of intellectual means to convince the population to believe in the ideology of the ruling class. Instruments of this ideological control include religion, education, family, politics, and culture, all of which mostly rich whites controlled. In the context of lynching culture this state apparatus model operated on three ideological levels.
First, Ideological State Apparatuses were used by ruling class whites to manipulate lower class whites by justifying the practice of lynching as a necessity. Threatened by shifting labor relations after the Civil War, the white ruling class sought to maintain their position of power by spreading the ideology of white superiority. Ideological institutions often portrayed whites, who were equated with morality and civilization, as under attack by the uncivilized, barbaric, immoral blacks—this is exemplified in D.W. Griffith’s notorious 1915 film, “The Birth of a Nation.” Another ideology which justified the lynching of blacks as a necessity was the protection of the virtue of white women. According to the Southern Commission on the Study of Lynching, over five-sixths of blacks lynched were accused of raping white women. The Ideological State Apparatus of the press played a substantial role in perpetuating the image of the black rapist.Second, lynching was used to instill a sense of inferiority into African Americans, to create an ideology that they were sub-human and did not belong in America.
Finally, and most tragically, some blacks of the era attempted to co-opt lynching as an ideological tool. They thought it actually necessary to allow lynching. They hoped that the atrocities of the postcard culture and mercilessly consistent press would inevitably force the American population to examine issues of race in the U.S. and motivate blacks to desire a battle against such abhorrent, state-sanctioned racism.
[1] Engels, Friedrich, and Karl Marx. From “The German Ideology.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001)767.
[2] Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Lenin and Philosophy. Trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971)152.
[3] Wells, Ida B. “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.” 1892. Selected works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)37.
[4] Wells, Ida B. “The Reason Why the Colored American is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition.” 1893. Selected works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)68.
[5] The History of Lynching in the US. Spartacus Educational. 13 Nov 2004. <http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAlynching.htm>
[6] Wells, Ida B. “A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States” 1895. Selected works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)209.
African American Lynchings and
the Ideology of Citizen Control
Historically, lynchings have occurred with the informal permission of the State, and typically occurred when the formal or legal prohibitions against normative social code violations did not mandate a penalty which satisfied the community in power. In this essay we will argue that the practice of lynching is often similar to a folk ritual and is used as an ideological state apparatus to preserve a cultural status quo. A look at lynchings in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveals how this cultural ritual was used to maintain the mindset of the white racial hegemony, which was institutionally supported prior to the Civil War and which carried over into the post-bellum period.
During the antebellum period in the United States the ideology of white racial superiority went all but unquestioned in the southern states. After the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the equal humanity and citizenship of blacks began to be more widely recognized. To maintain the oppressive atmosphere of the antebellum period in the southern states it became necessary for white citizens to intervene where the hands of the law were tied. This intervention took the form of lynchings. James R. McGovern has written in Anatomy of a Lynching that “[w]hen the secure rewards of white supremacy were threatened by abolitionists and the Civil War, and then undermined during Reconstruction, whites fought back . . . and quickly reestablished their supremacy.”
[1]
McGovern’s observations confirm that lynching was not only a violent method of correction, but a tool used to maintain a dying racial superiority ideology.
Evidence for lynching as ideological apparatus can be seen in the causes for particular lynchings as well as the community atmosphere under which lynchings were frequently acted out. Besides the notorious and exaggerated charges against blacks of murder and rape--which we associate with the repressive apparatus and vigilantism of a vengeful citizenry--there were a plethora of other comparatively minor violations of the popular notions concerning how blacks should act. The following examples show how lynchings were more about maintaining citizen control than preserving a reasonable social order. In 1915 Caesar Sheffield, an African American male, was lynched in Valdosta, Georgia, after being charged with stealing meat from a smokehouse.
[2]
In Osceola, Arkansas, in 1926, Albert Blades was lynched for attacking a white child who later claimed she was only startled by Blades.
[3]
In 1906 in Planquemines, Louisiana, William Carr was lynched after being accused of killing a white man’s cow. In 1921 in Little Rock, Arkansas, Robert Hicks was riddled with bullets after writing a note to a white girl.
[4]
In 1921 in McGhee, Arkansas, Leroy Smith, 14, tried to hitch a ride and was found shot and hanging to a tree. In 1919 in Blakely, Georgia, Private William Little was beaten to death after refusing to doff his army uniform.
[5]
In 1912 in Alabama, Willis Perkins was lynched--for being black--while he was walking peacefully along railroad tracks. This is a representative sample of the petty accusations that led to numerous lynchings in American history.
The way in which many of these lynchings were carried out is reminiscent of a kind of carnival atmosphere: “Onlookers sometimes fired rifles and handguns hundreds of times into the corpse while people cheered and children played during the festivities. Pieces of the corpse were taken by onlookers as souvenirs of the event.”
[6]
In Leesburg, Texas, in 1921, mob leaders drew lots for the choicest souvenirs from the anatomy of Wylie McNeely before burning him alive.
[7]
Planned lynchings were sometimes advertised, as with the newspaper and radio notice of the lynching of Claude Neal. “All white folks are invited to the party,” a public announcement read.
[8]
It was also popular to make postcards of graphic lynching images, such as the photograph of Neal’s naked and castrated body hanging from a tree.
[9]
In these historical artifacts we see how lynchings were not merely a pseudo-legal procedure but a cultural ritual.
Indeed, even the definition of lynching suggests that it is about more than just the preservation of order in a society. The NAACP defines one of the four necessary conditions of lynching as “the group [doing the lynching] must have acted under the pretext of service to justice or tradition.”
[10]
It is tradition here that is supported by the ideological apparatus. The ritual of lynching, the argument goes, both symbolized the social cohesion of white southerners and acted as a vehicle for bringing about that solidarity. Lynchings were rife with symbolic representations, were like a text that white southerners read to themselves about themselves.
[11]
Through lynchings the bonds cohering white communal values were strengthened, the ideology of racial hierarchy became more solidified, and ethnic groups more polarized.
It is obvious that passive ideologies will, one way or another, cause forceful repression. Likewise, this use of force, in turn, perpetuates a social structure with its own ideological apparatus. Our point is that the repressive and ideological apparatuses of the institution of lynching are not as much for the maintenance of a social and legal code, as for the preservation of a more deeply rooted ideology of racial superiority--which transcends the offense itself. McGovern states that “[t]he new social order, which was firmly established [through lynchings] by 1900 assured continuous gains [...] of obtaining a menial work force, enjoying feelings of social superiority, and using black women sexually.”
[12]
In this case, violence for the sake of punishment is not as important as the fear and submission that the violence produces, which in turn serves to preserve a social caste system.
Works Cited
Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. Lynching in the New South. Chicago: U. Illinois Press, 1993.
Gado, Mark. Carnival of Death. 2004. 4 Nov. 2004
<http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/mass/lynching/index_1.html?sect=8>
Ginzburg, Ralph. 100 Years of Lynchings. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1988.
McGovern, James R.. Anatomy of a Lynching. Baton Rouge: Louisiana St. UP, 1982.
Waldrep, Christopher. The Many Faces of Judge Lynch. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
[1]
McGovern, Anatomy of a Lynching, 149.
[2]
Ginzburg, 100 Years of Lynchings, 95.
[9]
Gado, Carnival of Death, 2, our emphasis.
[11]
Brundage, Lynching in the New South, 17, our emphasis.
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