The Noose
Every junior high kid has a “talent,” something they can do that other kids can’t. Some can cross their eyes, some wiggle their ears, some are double jointed and can pull their shoulders together. I had a couple: I could “roll” my tongue like a wave, and I could tie a “legal” noose.
A “legal” noose is one with thirteen wraps. It was something I must have looked up; in all of my Boy Scout training in knots and lashings, I don’t ever remember the “noose” class. But somehow I learned how to tie one, along with a bowline-on-a-bite and a diagonal hitch. In junior high you could usually tell what classrooms I was in; the drawstrings for the blinds would often have one of my knots tied into the ends. A noose was part of the repertoire.
In 1969 in Kettering, Ohio outside of Dayton, I never thought of the “noose” as a racist symbol. I thought of it as a cool knot with a symbolic history in the American West; that’s where the horse thieves and the murderers would find themselves, literally, at the end. And I could make a “legal” one.
Kettering was a very, very, white community in the late 1960’s. It was a residential suburb of Dayton, a town that was booming with Delco, National Cash Register, Frigidaire, and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. In my junior high there was one black family, my two friends from Scouts, but no one else. I don’t know what they thought of nooses, or whether they knew they were mine.
It’s a different world today, fifty years later. We have a much greater understanding of the symbolism in racism, from calling someone a “boy” or worse, to “driving while black,” and to the “noose.” We now know, and should have realized even back in 1969, that a noose is the symbol of lynching, of enforcing racist standards by torture and murder. While in 1969 I didn’t have any idea of that, in 2019 one would have to be willfully ignorant not to make the connection. I wish that someone had told me of the racial significance then, I would have stopped in a second. I didn’t believe that message then, or now, and I wouldn’t have wanted to send it.
This week in an elementary school in Palmdale, teachers found a noose tied into a length of rope. Palmdale is a community in Southern California. Diversity is a big part of Palmdale, with 24.5% of the population white-Hispanic, 24.5% non-Hispanic white, and 15% black. In 2019, finding a noose in a length of rope, even in an elementary school, sends a message. The teachers should have read it.
Instead, they took a group picture, four elementary teachers, smiling, pointing at the noose held up by one of them. The photographer was their principal. And like all such pictures, taken as a “joke” for the inner circle of teacher-friends, it got out. The local TV station picked up the story (CBS 9) and the whole community blew up.
The community is right. Even though these are veteran and respected teachers, they have, at the least, revealed an ignorance and insensitivity to racism. At the worst, they are in fact insensitive racists. Either way, they have brought into question their twenty-year careers, and shaken the confidence of the community in their classes, and their school system.
As for the Principal behind the camera, she was applying to become Superintendent. Now she, and her four staff members, are on paid administrative leave. Whether they keep their jobs or not, they have displayed incredibly poor judgment, and lost the trust of the parents in Palmdale.
It wasn’t right for a thirteen year old back in 1969, even though there was no “intent.” For five seasoned educators in 2019 California, or anywhere else in the United States, it is unacceptable. We all need to get the message.
