Hanging chairs raise ghosts of racism
<dl style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; float: left; "><dt class="hiddenVisually" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: none; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; position: absolute; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); height: 1px; width: 1px; overflow: hidden; ">Date</dt><dd class="updated dtstamp" style="margin: 0px 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 0.9em; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(102, 102, 102); "><time datetime="October 7, 2012">October 7, 2012</time></dd></dl>
Kim Murphy
Hung ... empty lawn chairs suspended from trees are a political statement against the US President. Photo: Michel O'Sullivan
The debate on whether lawn chairs with the President's name on them and hanging from trees are innocent references to Clint Eastwood's famous ''empty chair'' rant at the Republican National Convention - or symbolic lynchings of America's first black president - now spans the country.
A plastic chair suspended above a yard in Camas, Washington, is the latest exhibit. Like the others before it, including in Austin, Texas and Centreville, Virginia, the chair is marked ''No-Bama''. Next to it, a large chalkboard says: ''Are you better off now than 4 years ago?''
Critics have said the so-called chair lynchings are an obvious reference to mob executions targeting black Americans; the chair-stringers tend to say they're innocent and humorous replays of Eastwood's address to Mr Obama, represented by an empty chair.
In the case of the chair in the yard of George and Kathryn Maxwell in Camas, the couple told their local paper: ''The reason we hung it up was because people kept stealing it … We just have to take extra precautions.''
But Katherine Haenschen, writing in the progressive, pro-Democrat Texas blog Burnt Orange Report, wrote that the sentiment was unmistakable. ''The image of the chair is associated with the President,'' Haenschen wrote. ''Now, lynch that chair from a tree, and you've got a pretty awful racist sentiment calling for lynching the first African-American President!''
