Postcards from the past

Somewhere, in dusty attics and cramped basements, there are postcards, tucked in shoe boxes or barely remembered family papers.  They are postcards of lynchings. From the end of the Civil War through the 1940s, the brutality of the Jim Crow South was captured in photographs. Centering on smiling white faces and brutalized black people’s bodies, these postcards circulated through communities. They were carried across the country by US postal workers, delivering messages about crops, children, and the folks back home. For some, the production and sale of these postcards became a “money-making venture.”

These postcards have been on my mind lately, as I watch the spectacles of brutality unfolding around us. The tell us something about our capacity for brutality, the role of spectacle, and the ease of making money off of violence, terror, and the control of bodies.

Most often, the mob scenes on the cards show families, smiling, celebrating, posing for the camera in front of scenes of unspeakable violence and brutality.  After the great movements for human rights and freedom in the late 20th Century, these cards became no longer normal. They were sources of shame, destroyed, hidden, erased from our collective memory.

Professor Shane Bolles Walsh, of the University of Maryland’s department of African American Studies, explains the impact of these images on the formation of white supremacy in the US. Walsh said:

 “The act of white parents taking their children to lynchings played a direct role in developing generations of overt, aggressive, racial violent hostility, ultimately normalizing the violence and terror inflicted on Black Americans.

“These are social ideologies reinforced in an intergenerational context,” Walsh said. “You see all the children in so many of these lynching postcard photographs.”  

While white families felt empowered, justified, and protected from reprisal, Black community members responded viscerally. These postcards are symbols of the white supremacist social ideology being reinforced throughout this period, Walsh said.

“I think it’s a way not just to reinforce, but a way to socialize people to find this type of behavior acceptable.” 

Trump and his enablers are the inheritors of this history. They have broken through the shame that relegated these postcards to hidden corners of our past. They understand the power of spectacle to shape consciousness and actions. For them, the bombs blowing up small fishing boats, parading heads of state and once powerful officials before hearings, breaking into homes with masked men, putting people in cages, and strutting in front of them with guns, humiliating human beings, and killing them are tried and true ways to establish power.

These are the ways brutality is normalized. The ways people come to shape their own behaviors.  

Behind the spectacle are the countless acts of violence given license because of them. In quiet corners across this land, people who share the white nationalist views of this administration are emboldened. From comments shouted from passing cars to mass shootings, the point of spectacle is to legitimize individual acts of hate and violence.

Thus, we have Trump insulting women, posting horrific images of the Obamas, and ordering the arrests of elected officials, all in public view. Some among us love to see these images. Some among us love to share them with our families and friends. Some among us revel in the pain of others.

And this is the truth we have to face.  The brutality that shaped this country, that continues every day around us must be named and acknowledged. We also have to name and acknowledge that it is also done so that some can make money. Monstrous behavior is a source of profit. This pattern goes far beyond Trump.

Understanding this is why the resistance is critical.  We know what we are capable of doing to one another. 

In a thoughtful article probing the development of concentration camps, including in this country, Jamelle Bouie observed that there is “a tremendous hatred movement that’s actively being pushed,” drawing on “deep historical fissures.”  What is new in this current moment is that Trump is “externalizing that violence.” Bouie explains:

“Trump is seizing the tools that he’s been left. And he and his allies are working together to do the purging of people of color. The purging of anyone who’s deemed the outsider or the foreigner. It has been weaponized into this much, much more dangerous state.” 

Until we as a people are able to acknowledge this monstrous part of ourselves, we will not be able to truly create the kinds of transformations we need to survive and create a just society that affirms and protects life.

We have stark choices in front of us. In opposition to these spectacles of brutality, we the people are meeting in town halls to reject detention centers, demand non-cooperation with ICE, and gathering in churches, living rooms, community centers, and street corners to sing in resistance to what is happening.  We have neighbors protecting neighbors. We have hundreds of thousands of us finding ways to resist dehumanization and reach toward each other.

The pathways to a society based on compassion and love are not easy to see in these times. But we know that every step we take to affirm life, dignity, and justice moves us closer to who we can yet become.  We can write a new future.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/opinion/concentration-camp-andrea-pitzer.html