I sat down curious. I got up stumped. Why didn’t the usual conservative and progressive websites and magazines have anything to say about this momentous event? I’m wondering if the topic is too touchy even for the most brazen of cultural commentators.

Remembering…

Here’s what we know: A new lynching memorial opened this week in Montgomery, Alabama. The mainstream press covered it in detail: NPR, New York Times, The Conversation, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post…newspapers and news outlets rushed to describe the wrenching attempt to remember the brutal legacy of racial violence in America.

Most of the coverage mixed outraged descriptions of the ugly history with hopeful intimations that this memorial might help open ancient festering sores to the bracing effects of sunlight. For me, as both a history teacher and a human being, I’m optimistic that the memorial might fulfill its goal of helping Americans recognize and deal with the fundamental historical facts of slavery, lynching, and their legacy.

As SAGLRROILYBYGTH may recall, we’ve spent our fair share of time wondering why lynching is such a third-rail topic in American culture and education. Teachers have gotten in trouble for introducing the topic in their classrooms. I’ve wondered if we are simply too hamstrung to teach our children the truth about American history.

Is it appropriate for children?

As a teacher, I have always had a difficult time helping students understand why people would send postcards to friends with cheerful mementoes of the lynchings they’d witnessed. It seemed like serial-killer behavior, yet it was fairly commonplace. (I won’t include the images here, because they are truly horrifying. With preparation, though, I’ve introduced students to the grim collection at Without Sanctuary. In particular, I challenged students to try to make sense of image #28.)

As I was flying home recently, I sat next to a very friendly woman. Once she found out I was a history nerd, she mentioned that she had recently seen news of the lynching memorial in Montgomery. And she was shocked. She was in her mid-fifties, she said, and she knew vaguely about racial violence and lynching, but the memorial opened her eyes to the numbers of victims and the peculiarly brutal nature of racial lynchings.

If more and more Americans can have similar experiences with the Montgomery memorial, I think we will have made significant but insufficient progress.

But here’s what I don’t understand: Why don’t the usual pundits have anything to say about it? This morning, I conducted a very unscientific survey of both left and right. I found almost no mention of the Montgomery memorial. Why not?

From the left, I looked at The Progressive, The Nation, and ThinkProgress. From the right, I searched American Conservative, Weekly Standard, National Review, and even Wallbuilders.

Of all those sources, only National Review had anything to say about the new memorial. In its pages, sociologist Gabriel Rossman offered an intelligent analysis of the way racial lynchings differed from other sorts of vigilante hangings.

Why don’t other progressive or conservative commentators have anything to say? Are they waiting for someone to say something provocative about the museum for them to react to? Did I just look in the wrong places?

I’d think this intensely provocative topic would attract a lot of culture-war commentary. Why hasn’t it?