White Fear / Black Apprehension

The issue of the lynchings of Africans and African Americans in the United States is a sensitive subject for historical perpetrators and victims alike. Past and present scholars have done and continue to do a remarkable job in exposing, documenting and educating laypersons about the horrors of the physical and mental acts of lynchings and the resulting trauma experienced by those survivors left behind. My analysis has been researched and documented here to analyze white fear of black and/or African Americans. The primary basis of my research is aligned with the medical and scientific works of Dr. Francis Cress Welsing (1968) and Dr. Bobby Wright (1984). Moreover, it includes general and specific discussions on the radical agency needed for lasting and permeant change. My goal and academic contribution are to make aware to individuals and society in general that institutionalized racism, white supremacy ideologies, white privilege, and racism must be eradicated through active agency. My intention is not to analyze the plethora of evidence of white fear in the numerous archival historical documents. Rather, my intention is to demonstrate that the lynchings of African Americans and continued acts of violence against them may be apprehended on the basis of an understanding of the similarities of these acts, which I theorize, stem from the fear of losing white privilege. I argue that it is imperative to understand and interrupt the pattern of the ongoing literal and metaphorical lynching of African Americans. The legacy of lynching continues to plague our educational, political and legal systems, as well as other aspects of everyday life in the U.S. I contend that the root cause of lynching is white fear. Throughout this analysis my intention is to demonstrate that white fear is primarily the fear of dismantling white privilege. I defend this position in the literature review section of Chapter 1. I also analyze there what is missing in the scholarship on the lynching of African Americans, particularly the omission or minimization of its horrors as Allen (2000) and others have made evident.