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you can't escape history: you can't escape that glorious tradition of lynching---one of the ironies is that many lynchings were carried out to "protect the honor" of white women...because you can't escape history, you cannot control the resonances that it generates.
that's one problem.
the other is that you are presupposing that the palin effigy is in fact a "hate crime"---on that, i am not sure at all.
i think it's stupid, like i said above, and i think the folk who put it up were and probably still are stupid for having done it.
is any effigy hung by the neck from a rope a hate crime?
why would that be true?
isn't what's at issue here really a question of resonances, and so a question of differential echoes with the past?
because unless i am mistaken, hanging a dummy is not in itself a crime--i mean, dummies aren't alive, right?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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