Dr. J.'s 'He Really Said That': Page Thompson, Golf Channel: Suspending Kelly Tilghman for Two Weeks

On Jan. 4, 2008, Kelly Tilghman, a commentator on the Golf Channel, said ("When an Apology is Not Enough," R. Sandomir, The New York Times, 1/11/08): "one way for young golfers to stop Tiger Woods is to lynch him in a back alley." Page Thompson, president of the Golf Channel responded by saying that Tilghman would be suspended for two weeks without pay. This after last spring, when Don Imus was fired by CBS radio for making a racial slur that has nothing to do with murder, a slur commonly made by black rapsters. I guess that neither Thompson nor Tilghman know very much about lynching. At least I hope that that is the case because if they know about it and still get away with what they are in the process of getting away with, that's even worse.

Lynching was a form of extra-judicial execution, supposedly for some crime, real or imaginary, that amounted to nothing more than murder with some gruesome pseudo-legal patina. It was usually carried by hanging, occasionally by burning, sometimes by both. The victims were, for the most part, young African-American men. It occurred about 5,000 times between 1882 and 1968 in the states formerly part of the Confederate States of America. It stood atop the pyramid of oppressive and repressive measures, violent and otherwise, that the Southern power elite used to enforce the continuation of the white supremacy and black segregation in the South that they reintroduced with a vengeance (figurative and literal) after the end of Reconstruction in 1877.

Lynching was widely celebrated in the Old South. As I have pointed out previously on BuzzFlash, over many decades, photographs of public lynchings, with the dead victims surrounded by crowds of laughing and smiling whites of all ages, were made into picture postcards sent through the U.S. mails.

Race is already rearing its ugly head in the Presidential election. It most unfortunately came first on the Democratic side, raised almost certainly by inadvertence (one really does have to pay attention to what one says, Bill) by the Clinton camp, and now blown up all out of proportion by both camps, with the flames fanned by the media as vigorously as they can.

Barack Obama, similar to Tiger Woods in the sense that he is very intelligent, very successful, and of mixed-ancestry, may well win the Democratic nomination. If he does, things will get much worse, as the Republicans become increasingly desperate and make what the Democrats are now doing with the issue seem like the proverbial Sunday school picnic. While the use of a common racial slur lead CBS radio to fire Don Imus, the use of the primary instrument of race-murder in U.S. history as a metaphor is met with a slap on the wrist by the Golf Channel. Oh my. I fear for my country.

Steven Jonas, MD, MPH is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY), a weekly Contributing Author for the Web zine The Political Junkies.net; a Special Contributing Editor for Cyrano's Journal Online; and an invited contributor to the Web log The Daily Scare.