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On 18 April 2018, the mutilated bodies of two young African-American men, Alize Ramon Smith and Jarron Keonte Moreland, were found in a pond near Moore, Oklahoma, where they had had been reported missing by relatives a few days earlier. Police said the victims were shot by the younger of two brothers, both white, who had arranged to meet with them in a parking lot to complete a firearms sale initiated on Craigslist. The accused killers, 16-year-old Brett Boettler and his brother, Kevin Don Garcia-Boettler, 22, then took the bodies to their mother's house and, with the help of her boyfriend, Johnny Barker (also white), dismembered them and dumped the weighted remains in a nearby body of water. The brothers, Barker, and Crystal Boettler were arrested and charged with first- and second-degree murder, desecration of human corpses, and illegal possession of a firearm, among other crimes. According to NewsOne.com, Smith and Moreland were the victims of a modern lynching that has gone largely unreported in the mainstream media — despite a recent controversy surrounding the use of that term to describe the public backlash against black male entertainers accused of sexual misconduct: A similarly-focused web site, The Root, also provided aggregated coverage of the incident, referring to it as Lynching 2.0. The article paid particular attention to the gruesome details surrounding the disposal of the victims' bodies. In statements to the press, Smith's mother, Destiny, described the murder of her son as a hate crime, but at least one law enforcement official told Oklahoma City's News 9 that that does not appear to be the case: Were there a demonstrable racial motive behind the attack and/or mistreatment of the victim's remains it would likely be prosecutable as a hate crime, but would still fall short of qualifying as a lynching, says Karlos Hill, Interim Director of African American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Calling it a lynching is going too far, Hill, author of the 2016 volume Beyond the Rope: The Impact of Lynching on Black Culture and Memory (Cambridge University Press, 2016), explained to us in a phone interview: Unlike the murders of Smith and Moreland, which were committed inside a parked van unseen by eyewitnesses, historical lynchings were communal events that invariably took place in public, he said: In describing the killings as a lynching, both The Root and News One echoed sentiments that had already been spreading for at least a week on social media. Writer and Twitter personality Shaun King tweeted the following on 26 April, for example: Writer George M. Johnson tweeted a similar take on 1 May: The claim that the incident was ignored by the mainstream media is an overstatement, though not entirely unfounded. Besides being reported (as one would expect) in local and regional news venues, the story did get national coverage by sources including Newsweek, Associated Press, the New York Daily News, and BuzzFeed. But it wasn't covered by CNN, MSNBC, or other major networks. The implication that it should have been seems to follow from the judgment that the crime was a racially-motivated lynching as opposed to a mere homicide. The use of the word lynching in this context is questionable, at best. Despite vague similarities between the Oklahoma incident and historical lynchings, the comparison strays from the generally accepted definition of the term. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it thus, for example: In the context of race relations in America, it refers more specifically to vigilante-style public executions of black Americans accused of racial transgressions by white mobs, mainly in the Deep South, between the end of the Civil War and the end of the Jim Crow era of racial segregation in the 1950s. But despite the fact that the Oklahoma victims were black and all four of the accused perpetrators were white, it's a stretch to characterize the latter as a mob and the killings as a public execution. Nor, based on the information shared by police thus far, are there solid reasons to presume that race was a primary motivation in the attack. Ethnicity is relevant to determining whether a lynching took place, according to Karlos Hill, but even if evidence comes to light that the 2018 Oklahoma killings constituted a hate crime, that — in and of itself — would not make it a lynching. There's a difference between a racially motivated murder and a lynching, he said. Based on the information shared by police thus far, it is not a given that the incident fits into either category.
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