Yet More Ish I Should Have Known

 I had a hard time falling asleep last night: my mind was disturbed. When I did sleep, I dreamed of the Tacky Postcard Contest my dear friend Sarah and embarked upon in college. Wherever either of us went we sought out the tackiest possible postcard and sent it to the other. It went on for a few years, with some remarkably tacky cards, until Sarah went to Florence and mailed me a postcard that was a closeup of the genitalia from Michaelangelo's masterpiece sculpture David, with "I came, I saw, I conquered!" written in Latin across it. We acclaimed this the winner, and the contest ended.

When I woke up I thought immediately of the thing that had made it so hard for me to fall asleep.

Lynching postcards.

I'm in an online writer's group with four Black women. We're diverse in age, experiences, and geography. I fully believe that it is not their responsibility to teach me about being Black in America, and yet, nearly every meeting, they do.

Last night one of the others was telling the group about her involved, beautiful idea for a novel that blended Ghanian folklore, American history, and magical realism. As she was talking, she mentioned 'lynching postcards' in passing. It was clear the other three understood what this meant. I did not. I said, "I'm really sorry--what is a lynching postcard?"

They told me, but in the interests of clarity and full detail I will quote this from Wikipedia, which I read this morning:

Spectators sold one another souvenirs including postcards.^[7] Often the photographer was one of the killers.^[8]

In a typical lynching postcard, the victim is displayed prominently at the center of the shot, while smiling spectators, often including children,^[7] crowd the margins of the frame, posing for the camera to prove their presence. Facial expressions suggesting remorse, guilt, shame, or regret are rare.^[8]

Some purchasers used lynching postcards as ordinary postcards, communicating unrelated events to friends and relatives. Others resold lynching postcards at a profit.^[6] Still others collected them as historical objects or racist paraphernalia: their manufacture and continued distribution was part of white supremacist culture, and has been likened to "bigot pornography".^[9]

Whatever their use, the cultural message embodied in most lynching postcards was one of racial superiority. Historian Amy Louise Wood argues:

Within specific localities, viewers did not disconnect the photographs from the actual lynchings they represented. Through that particularity, the images served as visual proof for the uncontested 'truth' of white civilized morality over and against supposed black bestiality and savagery. ^[9]

Viewed from an outsider's perspective, bereft of local context, the postcards symbolized white power more generally. White citizens were depicted as victorious over powerless dead black victims, and the pictures became part of secular iconography.

Richard Lacayo, writing for Time magazine, noted in 2000:

Even the Nazis did not stoop to selling souvenirs of Auschwitz, but lynching scenes became a burgeoning subdepartment of the postcard industry. By 1908, the trade had grown so large, and the practice of sending postcards featuring the victims of mob murderers had become so repugnant, that the U.S. Postmaster General banned the cards from the mails.^[10]

As late as the 21st century, James Allen was able to acquire a collection of lynching postcards from dealers who offered them in whispered tones and clandestine marketplaces.

Obviously this is repugnant almost beyond belief. But here is what bothers me most, what kept me up at night: I didn't know.

I'm 53 years old, smart, very well educated, and over the past 15 years have tried to read and educate myself about race, particularly in America. When you're writing historical fiction, as I do, the biggest dangers are what you don't know you don't know--the things you never think to question, that you therefore don't bother to research, that therefore leave holes in your story.

I will never write a story about a lynching. But still, I should have known. Somewhere in my history lessons, while I was told about Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks, and that Black and white people couldn't use the same drinking fountains, someone should have taught me that the Civil Rights movement was about more than that. Someone should have explained redlining, told me that the reason having Black people moving into a neighborhood would decrease property values (a fact I vaguely remember hearing from my childhood) wasn't because Black people were intrinsically less valuable, but because white people had rigged the housing market to make it so. Someone should have explained about penal servitude. Someone should have told me about the Tulsa race massacre. These should have been facts presented in my history, not just Dr. King's dream and subsequent assasination.

It is my teacher's fault and it is my fault. 

Now I know better. By reading this, so do you.