Nooses

This post originally at Oliverwillis.com:

Seriously, people, this is 2007. We are in the 21st century. We've got to do better.

Law enforcement authorities, including the Justice Department, are expressing concern over a recent spate of noose sightings in the aftermath of events in Jena, the small Louisiana town that has been engulfed by racial strife and was the scene of a recent civil rights demonstration.

Nooses have been looped over a tree at the University of Maryland, knotted to the end of stage-rigging ropes at a suburban Memphis theater, slung on the doorknob of a black professor's office at Columbia University in New York, hung in a locker room at a Long Island police station, stuffed in the duffel bag of a black Coast Guard cadet aboard a historic ship, and draped around the necks of black dolls in the Pittsburgh suburbs. The hangman's rope has become so prolific, some say, it could replace the Nazi swastika and the Ku Klux Klan's fiery cross as the nation's reigning symbol of hate.

"I think the noose is replacing the burning cross in the minds of many white people as the primary symbol of the Klan," said Mark Potok, editor of Intelligence Report, a magazine published by the Southern Poverty Law Center that examines hate groups.