Genre Blog Post: Poetry

The theme I am going to focus on in this blog post would be dehumanization in the poem "The Lynching". In the poem there are several lines I would really want to focus on. The first one would be "Hung pitifully o'er the swinging char."(8) and "the ghastly body swaying in the sun". (10) I think this poem really shows off the theme of dehumanization since its all about a lynching anyways.

Well with this theme we recently were talking about discrimination in history and in this class as well. In this class we would go over ways the US in the South would try and disenfranchise the black southerners. They would discourage them by also threatening them or scaring them by lynching them. Then in our class we talked about slavery with Uncle Toms Cabin in which slavery was the ultimate show of dehumanization. In my past blogs I talked about dehumanization in which that during a slave auction they would treat these human beings were treated as objects to sell.In that essay I used they talked about just that and that they were polished and trimmed and tested on their physical traits. Then they would be ripped away from their families like they were nothing to the buyers and they didn't care if they ripped away a mother and child. This is they stuff that show dehumanization that's also showed in this poem.

In these quotes it really shows the dehumanization of a human by lynching them for show. It talks about hung over the swinging char, which I assume is maybe charcoal which means they burned the body or had a fire going underneath them making the lynching so much more gruesome. Then the quote where it talks about the body swaying in a ghastly state. I think this is very spooky and one of the most powerful descriptive lines of the poem. It paints a picture in my mind that it just overall spooky and horrifying. I almost think of a scene from scooby doo with the spookiness but obviously the lynching is way more horrifying than any episode could produce. There was another line in the poem that I would want to touch up on. It states "And the little lads, lynchers that were to be,"(13). I think this line is very powerful and shows the characteristics of the time in the south. It means two things. The first is that these children were born white southerners and would be raised to terrify these black southerns, but I find something more powerful in the second thing I thought of. I was thinking these are children who are witnessing this. Usually children arent meant to see such terrible things you would think. So what makes it so that the children are there? Well it was made to be a public event. This was a spectacle that anyone would go to and would go see it as entertainment or something else. This shows the characteristics of these southerners treating something like this, like its no big deal. Almost like its a circus act, which in its own way is dehumanization towards the African American. They arent concerned with this lynching of this man because they are better and they treat him like an animal to be slaughtered in front of men, women and even children.

With this poem you can really see the discrimination of African Americans even after slavery was abolished. Lynching usually happened more after slavery but it did happen during slavery dont get me wrong but in most history classes we talk about in more in the years after slavery was abolished. These problems of dehumanization has taken new forms in the later years such as segregated facilities and hosing of African Americans. Things like this towards African Americans show dehumanization. All these acts make them seem less than the person in the act and this poem shows such thing.