American Atrocity: The Types of Violence in Lynching by Guy Lancaster

Abstract

Reviewed by: American Atrocity: The Types of Violence in Lynching by Guy Lancaster Matthew E. Stanley American Atrocity: The Types of Violence in Lynching. By Guy Lancaster. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2021. Pp. vi, 193. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-1-68226-186-6.) The term lynching has been used in contemporary culture to describe everything from racist police violence to perceived persecution on the part of elites. On the one hand, there has been a recent uptick in lynching scholarship and public commemoration, embodied by the Equal Justice Initiative’s 2015 study Lynching in America and the opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. Anniversaries of mass racialized violence, including the centennial of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, have also renewed popular interest in the history of lynching. On the other hand, the term lynching remains given to abuse, imprecision, and exaggerated metaphor. This is most evident in the pathetic victimization hyperbole of Ronald Reagan, Joe Biden, and, most recently and notoriously, Donald Trump. Combining history, sociology, philosophy, and cognitive science, Guy Lancaster’s concise and thought-provoking American Atrocity: The Types of Violence in Lynching is a response to the mutability of definitions and lack of unifying theory in lynching studies. Lancaster’s interdisciplinary work helps readers make sense of what he calls “the limits of typology,” or the various forms of violence within the category of lynching, as well as the language we use to describe racialized violence (p. 2). Lancaster is intimately familiar with the history of lynching in Arkansas, and he culls harrowing case studies from the state to make several novel and crucial points. First, Lancaster argues that because lynching is a social act designed to terrorize entire communities, it is best understood through the framework of “group violence” rather than “collective violence” (p. 18). Lynching in this sense was structural, meaning that, in the case of the Jim Crow South, it emerged from far-reaching conditions of segregation, oppression, and inequality, or what philosopher Paul Dumouchel has called “the good violence of peace” (p. 57). Segregation and disenfranchisement—which kept African Americans poor and immobile and “decreased the potential for cross-racial solidarity”—were legal types of violence, and the state’s acceptance of public reinforcement of those laws through direct violence meant that lynching was, in effect, a configuration of state policy (p. 60). Just as intriguingly, Lancaster contends that lynching constituted a form of “humanistic violence” (p. 4). Although scholarship often underscores the process of dehumanization as enabling acts of group violence, Lancaster shows that perpetrators typically recognized and often reveled in the humanity of the lynched, acknowledging African Americans as potential competitors and taking great care to maximize or prolong the human qualities of their victims. They did so, he maintains, out of a conviction that their actions were morally justifiable, or even “‘divinely sanctioned,’” and in honorable defense of (white) community (p. 100). Finally, the author posits that white-on-Black lynching in the South constituted an expression of mimetic violence in which whites from different class and gender positions projected their desires against an accepted scapegoat, thus becoming temporarily “equal” under the banner of violence [End Page 177] against a racialized other. In sum, lynching was broader and more deeply rooted in social structures than is typically acknowledged. Rather than attempting an exhaustive definition of lynching, this book provides something more useful: an attempt at theoretical coherence, as well as confirmation that lynching persists and continues to evolve. American Atrocity is an engrossing and important book. Matthew E. Stanley University of Arkansas, Fayetteville Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association