Recently there have been a flurry of news stories about news hung in public places or drawn as graffiti in public places. Some people view such displays to be incredibly offensive displays of hatred towards African Americans.

Nooses depict the device used for lynching in the post-civil war south during reconstruction, used for killing blacks that white wealthy landowners felt had gotten out of their place. Many southerners where resentful for the unjust conditions applied upon them by northern states and took it out on African Americans.

It’s difficult to defend the way some southerners took out their aggression against the north on blacks. No person should be killed or harmed in retaliation towards another person. Lynchings where terrible things, but fortunately they are largely a thing of past, languishing on only as part of our painful collective memories as Americans. No community in our country would publicly allow lynching of blacks today.

Displaying a noose is not the same as lynching a person. When a person is lynched, they are killed in an extremely painful and degrading hanging, to the enjoyment of the public. A noose is little more then a symbol of a terrible historic practice—displaying such a symbol will not bring back public lynch mobs. It may be offensive to African Americans to see such a symbol, but it’s very unlikely that seeing the symbol will kill them or hurt anything but their ego.

As a seventh grader in Junior High School, another kid in my school wrote “IBM” on my locker. A Power Macintosh fan myself, I found it deeply offensive. I responded by smashing the kid’s face into the locker who wrote it. We both got one day in-school suspension for fighting in school. My response was probably as mature as some anti-noose activists—I hurt somebody else for something as silly as graffiti. That kid probably should have been made to pay for it’s removal, but nothing was hurt but my ego. It was painful, but not the end of the world by any means.

African American activists who are concerned about hate symbols, should be turning their concerns elsewhere. They should be fighting discrimination, particularly institutional discrimination. They should be fighting blight, and working to improve inner-city schools. If there ever was a crime against blacks in modern society, it was the lack of education and social structures to allow them to grow up in a healthy way. The fact that so many African Americans don’t get the necessary resources to grow up healthy, is far more offensive then some symbolic acts by people who want to make crude remarks about the historic treatment of blacks.