Hung Up

Construction has been halted on the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago after a noose was found at the site.

This isn't the first time that this has happened.

Amazon temporarily halted construction of a new US warehouse again after an eighth noose was found at the site.

Construction stoppages seem to be a really expensive response to someone being a jackass.

And statements like "It is a heart-stopping reminder of the violence and terror inflicted on black Americans for centuries," and "This repeated behavior is calculated, and clearly meant to stoke fear and encourage racism and bigotry. What we have been seeing at this facility is wrong, and we condemn these actions in the strongest of terms," do little but make the Black community as a whole seem brittle and thin-skinned.

Having put up with a decent amount of trash like this when I was in high-school (lo, these many eons past) I came to understand that sometimes, people do this sort of thing because they're seeking to send a message of hate. But sometimes, the goal is simply to get a rise out of someone. And when businesses and politicians take the bait, the tactic works. Of course, that alone isn't necessarily a good reason to always remain stoic in the face of such events, so I also offer this consideration: what do these responses actually change?

When the finding of multiple nooses at the Amazon facility in Connecticut halted construction there, an investigation was launched, but there doesn't appear to have been a resolution of the case. No-one came forward to identify the perpetrator (even with $100,000 on the line), and the news reporting didn't change the mood around "race relations" anywhere. And they don't create more resiliency in the Black community. If anything, they simply reinforce the idea that the United States is, and always will be, a racist place; only the outward manifestations of bigotry change over time.

Some random yahoo who feels powerful in their ability to shut down a construction site by surfacing people's fears of a return to an America gone by is unlikely to escalate things if their actions are ignored. Mainly because the sort of people who do escalate these sorts of things are generally looking for more than the sort of fleeting news coverage that comes from incidents like this. Accordingly, moving on with life (and construction) is a better path that a lot of sound and fury that in the end, signifies nothing.