Invisible Lynching and What It Says About the Fight for Justice

Trigger warning: Before you continue reading these show notes or listening to this episode, please be aware that it discusses lynching and white supremacist violence.

Lynching is a reality both now and in the past. Yet despite the fact that lynching continues to happen, it took more than 120 years to get an anti-lynching bill passed. 

In that time, more than 200 iterations of bills that would make lynching a federal crime were introduced and failed to pass over and over again — including one that was voted down only three days before Ahmaud Arbery was lynched in February 2020.

It wasn’t until May of 2020 that Ahmaud Arbery’s story became national news. Before then, it was an invisible lynching — one that wasn’t widely known. But that doesn’t mean it should just be ignored, and the fact that these “invisible lynchings” still happen says a lot about what still needs to be done in the fight for justice.

In this episode, I talk more about:

• The work I’m doing with a company called Litby that sparked the research for this episode.
• The struggle to pass an anti-lynching bill
• The importance of continuing to fight against lynching and other acts of racism — both the ones that make big headlines and those that don’t.