Is "Lynch" a Dirty Word?

"The word lynch was not born after slavery nor is it exclusive to race.  It is a common law "slang word" that was coined in very early 1800's after a white Virginia man named William Lynch."

As Karen said, the majority of those who were and continue to be victims of lynching are blacks, therefore that word has implied racial connotations that you cannot take out of the conversation, no matter how hard you may want to. In fact, at least 3/4 of the people who were and continue to be lynched are black. (http://www.tikkun.org/rabbi_lerner/news_item.2005-06-16.4482156665) Does that matter to you? Was it some coincedence, or was it the "lefty media"'s doing? The word slavery is not singular to blacks either, should slavery be of no issue to us too?

"When you first heard "lynch", was your HONEST immediate reaction race?  Or did you let Sharpton and the lefty media decide that for you?" 

 Go back to the O'Reilly factor with your conspiracy theories about "lefty media". It doesn't exist, no matter how much you're convinced it does because you think it lends some credability to your weak arguments to throw in some talk about "the liberal media". Many who (like myself) actually do media studies recognize how futile it is to argue with people who talk about the "lefty media" because of the ignorance of these people, but I apparently am in a masochistic mood.

And yes when I heard the word 'lynch' my immediate response was race. In fact, I thought about a specific event regarding racism (the Jena 6). I also thought of Emmett Till, James Byrd Jr, Isaiah Clyburn and Micheal Donald. And if you don't know who any of them are, not only should you wikipedia them now, but you shouldn't even be having this conversation, because obviously you know nothing. (Not that you'd own up to not knowing about any of these people now.) But you wouldn't think of these people because it's not really an actual threat to you, whereas it is something that could happen to a person of color, just for being a person of color.  

"Your flippant remark about the fact that I am white and blonde has nothing to do with my opinion on the word lynch and does nothing to back your argument."

Actually it has a lot to do with your argument, because due to your adherence to a privileged social group you do not know how other people of less privileged social groups experience life, yet your voice is valued over the people of these social groups, so you think it gives you the right to speak for people of less privileged social groups. Hence your immediate assumption that Al Sharpton and the "lefty media" made me think of race instead of the truth: that when I hear that word, I think of Billy Holiday's song about 'strange fruit', I think about the images from countless civil rights documents where families with small children are smiling next to the desemated corpses of black individuals. You would not know that, likely because of your white, mid-Western upbringing. So yes it does have a bearing, a huge one in fact. Yet your opinion is the accepted one because it is the norm. "Oh! Why are black people getting so upset! Lynching has other meaning too!" Why is it so important to you to disregard how that term has been mainly used in practice for hundreds of years in favor of other older, less used meanings and fictionalized accounts such as those seen in movies? Yes, maybe once every couple years a rapist or someone else may be lynched. But lynching is something that has been almost exclusively used towards blacks for hundreds of years in America, with a couple cases here and there of other forms of lynching. Plus, rapists and pedophiles have done something wrong, while most victims of black lynching have not. Why is it so necessary to you to disregard the struggles of the group of people that have been the majority of the victims of this evil practice? 

And I wouldn't use the word lynching to describe the history of sexual violence against women, but I think it's a good analogy to describe joking about lynching to be similar in its loadedness to joking about rape. Imagine if it was a non-incarcerated man making that joke, knowing he'd statistically be unlikely to be raped, and then getting all huffy about the women around him (who are under more or less continual fear of rape) who get angry about his inappropriate usage of the word.  Would you side with the man? Or would you side with the women whose concerns about rape you can relate you? Think about that for a second before you decided this whole issue is some Al Sharpton/"lefty media" conspiracy.

Oh year, I am as right wing conservative as you can get, and I am pretty certain, Michelle is not a Racist, just someone who is reporting what she sees and hears.  Oh yeah, and she is a sweetheart to boot, regardless of her politics.