ABSTRACT

In many times and places, black people have been cut, beaten, hanged, and burned to death. The times came often; lynching is old and new. The places have been in the American South and West, Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa. Mobs were white, black, or sometimes mixed; killers and victims looked alike or different. White people have been lynched in the US and Europe, sometimes in especially repulsive ways. In recent years, brown people have met death at the hands of people like themselves in Guatemala, Bolivia, Mexico, Indonesia, and India. The ways of destruction in these settings have often been no less cruel than the practices of American mobs.