"American Bloodlines: Reckoning with Lynch Culture" (Author Interview)
Rowan Tetro
Sonya Lea's first book, Wondering Who You Are, about her husband’s memory loss, has won several awards including from Oprah Magazine, People, and the BBC. Her essays have appeared in Brevity, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Salon, and the Southern Review. She is also the creator and host of the podcast BITCHCONOCLAST and the writer/director of the short film “Every Beautiful Thing,” which won awards for both direction and score. Her new book is American Bloodlines: Reckoning with Lynch Culture.
American Bloodlines follows Lea as she discovers her family’s connection to the murder of Rainey Bethea, a Black man accused of raping and killing a white woman, and the victim of the last public lynching in the United States. Exploring the societal institutions that are founded on and perpetuate racism, white supremacy, and colonization, Lea’s book details her journey in moving beyond the racism ingrained in her family’s lineage and environment. Ultimately, American Bloodlines is about human connection and how kinship is our weapon against hate.
As a white person myself, American Bloodlines was a very poignant and, at times, uncomfortable read — as it should be. Lea’s sharing of such a personal story allowed white people an opportunity of self-reflection and highlights the importance of discussing whiteness and coming to terms with the ways in which we perpetuate racism, even when unintentional.
This interview was conducted over a shared Google doc.
Rowan Tetro: Can you expand a bit on what your title, American Bloodlines, means?
Sonya Lea: “Bloodlines” refers to what it means to carry a genetic story, and relates to the ancestral story one carries, sometimes without knowing what that history is. On its opposite, I think it’s a reflection toward those who concern themselves with birthright and “purity of blood” in white supremacist and white nationalist ideologies, as well as those ideologies historically and presently in our government.
RT: What is lynch culture?
SL: My definition of lynch culture is a system that makes it easier to punish Indigenous, Black people, people of color, and other marginalized groups rather than to create and sustain a culture of justice.
RT: Your book discusses themes of racism, whiteness, and colonization. You go through the discovery of your family’s involvement in Rainey Bethea’s legal lynching: Your grandparents were present at the lynching, as well as being related to the prosecuting attorney of the trial. How did you reconcile with your family history? And what do you view as your responsibility with that knowledge moving forward?
SL: I think this is a question that’s answered by the direction of a life, and not by anything I could say in my words.
First, I don’t think what happened can necessarily be reconciled in my generation. I feel like this is a story that moves from me to descendants, and then each generation builds upon what came before, in the ways they’re able to do so. Secondly, I think my work is to find the truth, and to rouse it from where it's been suppressed. And then my work is to do the rebuilding that I write about in the final chapter, to correct relationships, to think about and make a plan for familial and communal reparations. My responsibility is to completely transform my life so that I can walk in integrity. There’s repair, ritual, and offerings here and now, and I believe in my days ahead. The title of the final chapter is “Truth, Grief, and Reconciliation,” because one can’t jump to being reconciled. There’s quite a lot of grief if we’re really able to be with what happened, and what continues to happen because we haven’t addressed our past.
RT: While reading, I felt this book was very relevant given the United States’ current political and social climate. Not only is this a very personal journey you're sharing with us, but a journey that, now more than ever, I think we all need to go on. Do you have any advice for us readers as we travel our own paths of deconstruction and reconciliation?
SL: This is such a fascinating statement, and I want to recognize how important it is for each of us to decide what’s authentic to ourselves before heading out on a path.
I’m leery of being in a place of offering “advice” for others. I’m not the good white person who has done things right; I’m someone who is out there allowing herself to be deconstructed, as you say, and surprising things are happening as a result. I’ll share my experience of reviewing my whiteness as a sacred act.
I found myself inside a years-long process of respecting the ways my whiteness was shown to me through my history, my family life, through institutions I was bonded to, inside friendship gatherings, and in so many ways that I related to others. There isn’t an end to this experience, no finishing line where I can say that I’ve arrived. And the intensity of the experience isn’t as challenging as it once was; it’s just part of what happens when a part of my identity sloughs off, and I can no longer use it for status or gain.
A lot of whiteness is an invisible positionality, and so I think it’s tough to notice unless we bring it to the forefront and allow that perception to lead. On the other side of what at first appears to be a loss or a despair, there is a tremendous connection with others that isn’t visible inside white supremacist assumptions and views. But in my experience, that change to seeing how things have been constructed, or acting for change, isn’t like flipping a switch. I first had to experience years of grief for having lived in a way that wasn’t true to the nature of this diverse, interconnected human and interspecies existence. There was a lot of crying and rage involved. This personal change can then be free to support institutional change because there is less fear about what might be lost if one gives up the association with whiteness.
RT: You write, “We were conditioned to see ourselves as victims and survivors, but rarely as perpetrators” (176). This made me think back to the first chapter, “The Legal Lynching of Rainey Bethea,” in which you discuss Florence Shoemaker Thompson, a white woman, sheriff, widow, and mother who wanted to be the executioner of Rainey Bethea’s trial. In fact, she goes so far as to call it her “duty.” This sparked controversy at the time, with her opponents saying she was stealing a man’s job and questioning her competency as a woman, and supporters saying she was simply trying to do her best to care for her children. Can you talk a little about your perception of white women, both historically and contemporary, and their role within white supremacy?
SL: Florence Thompson took the role after the death of her husband, as was customary for widows of those in sheriff positions at that time.
White women have a significant role in upholding white supremacy, one that isn’t acknowledged, except perhaps when we witness them in very overt, cruel actions. One thing about Thompson is that she was a victim of patriarchy, as well as an upholder of patriarchal and white supremacy, as well as existing inside a system that asserted racialized violence, and often as a kind of trade for status and acceptance. I write, “To be fully in the human condition, white women must recognize that the white female body is leveraged — including by white women — for the purposes of racist, patriarchal systems.” And by that, I mean addressing how this leverage happens specifically, personally, communally, systemically, and in our families.
RT: Bethea’s murder wasn’t simply a result of an impassioned mob taking justice into their own hands; on the contrary, Bethea’s lynching was legally endorsed. Do you think our contemporary carceral and justice systems are truly any better than during Bethea’s time? In other words, do you think “legal lynchings” are still happening?
SL: I think “legal lynchings” continue to happen through many mechanisms in our justice system. With a white-centered government, there also arises legitimacy for murderous police actions, the law-ignoring ICE officers, the enabling of the modern-day vigilante, the empowerment of “citizen” whites and others outside the justice system whose purpose it is to deny rights to others and lay claim that their justice is what’s righteous. Systems also create “legal lynchings” by making private prisons and erecting ways to fill them disproportionally with people who usually are not white.
RT: Were there any books, media, or people in particular to whom you looked for knowledge and/or inspiration when writing American Bloodlines?
SL: So many! I have a bibliography in the book, and I’ll name a few here.
Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy was a significant read early in my process to show me that there were many voices that aren’t centered in stories of a region and a people. I had a chance to mentor with Lacy M. Johnson, who wrote The Reckonings: Essays on Justice for the Twenty-First Century, and I’ll always be indebted to her for the ways she helped me interrogate the ways I came to this book, so that I could see this history and myself more fully. Imani Perry’s South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation came to me at an important time, when I was thinking about Kentucky, and all that happened around the murder of Breonna Taylor.
And I remain inspired by the people in my community who are doing this work alongside me. It isn’t necessarily in the form of the intellect, or even of language, but instead in a kind of love that moves through awareness, in a sense of moving with god, by whatever name you have for that force.
RT: Indigenous history and philosophy play a significant role throughout your book. I was hoping you could give us some insight into how you engage with Indigenous teachings, philosophies, and scholars when it comes to healing the traumas resulting from lynch culture, both for victims and perpetuators.
SL: I am learning. I don’t know much, and I’m trying to listen and open my mind to experiences and ways of being beyond those I was raised in. This doesn’t just come from books or philosophies, though stories can open me to where I’m being placed. I admire scholars like Zoe Todd, Métis anthropologist and researcher-artist of Critical Indigenous studies. Kim TallBear, Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate professor at the University of Alberta, who specializes in racial politics in science, says that “making kin is to make people into familiars in order to relate.” Much of my relationship to Indigenous ways came through listening to Elders in the Canadian Rockies, where I once lived, and which is still a home to me. Canada is involved in a truth and reconciliation process, and even though it’s slower than it needs to be, that process brings other ways of being into what we call a nation.
RT: You open chapter six, “Truth, Grief, and Reconciliation,” with the sentence, “The antithesis of lynch culture is kinship.” What does kinship look like for you?
SL: Colonial practices and capitalistic ways disadvantage settlers toward knowing the real meaning of kinship. This is what I say in American Bloodlines: “Even though we are settlers living at the height of capitalistic excess and with the powerful influence of an untaxed multimillion/billionaire class, we might still consider the ways in which we can organize systems open to kinship.
To become a familiar, to invite into familiarity, we must collectively disarm habitual ways of reacting and knowing, especially when those are based in holding dominant our beliefs, stories, and governing traditions.”
I left Canada to live in the U.S. Pacific Northwest because several years ago we asked our children what we could do to support them as adults. We discovered that we all wanted to be physically closer, that technology didn’t provide the kind of kinship that being near each other on land and making home tended to offer. For me, kinship isn’t a concept, but a way of being, and I imagine that everyone I’m kin with, including the more-than-humans, to shape me and move me toward where and with whom I am to exist.
RT: After everything involved in writing this book, do you feel hopeful?
SL: This may sound strange, but I don’t really construct myself around the notion of hope. Hope lies in the future, and much of my practice is oriented to staying in the present. I want to fully see what’s happening right now, and I don’t sense that I need hope to show up or to make things right.
