Sanctuary

A friend directed me to this project. It's an online flash film based on the book Without Sanctuary, a collection of lynching postcards from the reconstruction era and beyond. The book arrived in 2000 amid much publicity. The website was posted early this year, as far as I can tell. It has obvious teaching value.

The "forum" section of the website is most interesting. The first thing to strike me was that it had been spammed with phentermine and porn ads. This was striking given that I had just watched the slideshow with James Allen's narration. "In America," he says referring to the grisly memorabilia of the lynchings, "everything is for sale." The whole machinic aspect of the scene really got to me. A continuation of the sale by other means. The weekend lynchings - the 'barbecue,' as one participant scrawled on the back of a card - and the pack mentality of the lynching culture, the automaticity of it all...seemed as ruthlessly banal and mechanical as the roving spambot that seized on the site. Allen's remarks during the slideshow - that these are pictures of the "steel trigger" in every heart - captured this sense for me. I'm sorry that the site's creators must continue with that undignified task of shoveling the spam.

The comments from real "people" were interesting too. They range from the racist to the reflective. Though condemnation is the easy route, it is much more difficult to ask how we are pulling that trigger today. After all, it only takes a couple of people to do the dirty work. The rest are spectators. Even today, we are comfortable spectators. As Susan Sontag wrote, no matter what the subject, the camera aestheticizes, distances, gives sanctuary. I was inspired by those who, in their comments, broke through the lens of this bias, those who could look beyond the past and see the everpresent.