Psychoanalytic Ethnography, Racist Violence, and Jasper, Texas: An Introduction

In the summer of 1998, three white men dragged James Byrd Jr, a 46-year-old unemployed African-American man, to his death in Jasper, Texas. The murder quickly drew national and international attention as a “modern day lynching”. The brutality of the crime (Byrd had been chained by the ankles and dragged for three miles behind a pickup truck), and the racial hatred reflected in it (two of the men eventually convicted of the murder were members of a White supremacist gang which they had joined while in prison and a cache of racist material was discovered in the apartment shared by the men), shocked the nation. The murder also created an immediate sense of crisis within Jasper itself. There were rampant rumors within this remote, East Texas community of 8,000 inhabitants that the murder was perhaps part of a broader Ku Klux Klan conspiracy. Many African Americans were fearful of leaving their homes. Many whites feared that the racial themes that defined the murder, some of whose details conformed with a well-known lynching that had taken place in the neighboring county in the 1920s when an African-American victim had been tied to the back of a pickup truck and dragged around the courthouse before being hanged in front of his house, might result in reprisals against whites.

Beginning in 1999, members of my Psychoanalysis and Culture research team and I made repeated ethnographic visits to Jasper over the course of