“He Should Be Tarred and Feathered”

How the Speaker of the House Openly Gets Away with Klan Language

From the Detroit Free Press from 1971, the Klan leader was a theologian, grand dragon, and apparently weapons expert, as he was convicted for his involvement in planning the bombing of school buses intended for desegregation.

That’s not headline-grabbing clickbait but a quote from the mouth of Congressman and House Speaker Mike Johnson of Northern Louisiana. Is this a “slip of the tongue” to speak in the vilest white Ku Klux Klan language possible?

Tar and feathering was applied to whites to make them look black as a form of humiliation, terrorist fear-instilling, and marking the white man as a target, as non-white, as someone is a “negro-lover” [except with the other n word]. It made that person into a permanent enemy of white Aryan militiamen.

It also served as a deterrent for other whites who might also “take the side” of negroes, or work “with them.” It created a chilling effect on solidarity “between the races,” or, as it might be described, between humans with different outward appearances, or humans who see that the unalienable rights of each individual are more important than any outward appearances or ethnic beliefs.

Yes, tar and feathering was applied to black Americans as well. But it is a form of humiliation used on whites to mentally mark them from the white community politically. It made them somehow distrustful of other whites, leaving a stigma of a perceptual otherness on them.