"And you are lynching Negroes" () is a catchphrase that describes or satirizes the political rhetoric of the Soviet Union towards the United States in any instance of bilateral discourse in which the latter reproached the former's human rights violations. The remark also highlights a trend among Soviet media to frequently cover stumbling blocks in American internal affairs, such as financial crises and unemployment or racial discrimination and civil unrest, which were all presented as inherent failings of the capitalist system that had supposedly been erased by state communism.
Lynchings of African Americans were brought up as a "skeleton in the closet" for the United States—one that served as ammunition for Soviet propaganda in deflecting criticism of stumbling blocks in Soviet internal affairs. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the phrase has become widespread as a retrospective reference that reveals the ongoing like-minded tactics of Russian disinformation campaigns against the United States, namely during periods of social or political upheaval among Americans.
Former Czech president and writer Václav Havel placed the phrase among "commonly canonized demagogical tricks"; the British newspaper The Economist described it as a form of whataboutism that became ubiquitous after the Soviet Union's dissolution; and the 1993 book Exit from Communism by American historian Stephen Richards Graubard identifies it as symbolizing a divorce from reality.
American author Michael Dobson compared usage of the phrase to the common Spanish-derived idiom "the pot calling the kettle black" and called it a "famous example" of tu quoque reasoning. The American conservative magazine National Review called it "a bitter Soviet-era punch line" and added "there were a million Cold War variations on the joke". The Israeli newspaper Haaretz described use of the idiom as a form of Soviet propaganda. The British liberal political website Open Democracy called the phrase "a prime example of whataboutism". In her 2017 work Security Threats and Public Perception, Dutch professor Elizaveta Gaufman described it as a tool to reverse someone's argument against them.
History
Origin in the Russian Empire
The phrase was used as a Russian political joke about a dispute between an American and a Soviet man.
After receiving criticism of his country because of the deaths caused by the 1903 anti-Jewish Kishinev pogrom, the Russian Minister of the Interior Vyacheslav von Plehve pointed out "The Russian peasants were driven to frenzy. Excited by race and religious hatred, and under the influence of alcohol, they were worse than the people of the Southern States of America when they lynch negroes."
In a 1905 interview with The Century magazine, Leo Tolstoy criticised American culture, where despite "virtually no hindrances to individual development", yet "you lynch negroes, form trusts, and adopt imperialism."
Early usage by the Soviet Union Soviet artist Dmitri Moor produced the lithograph Freedom to the Prisoners of Scottsboro!, after the 1931 trial of the Scottsboro Boys of Alabama. The treatment of the Scottsboro Boys popularized the phrase in usage by the Soviet Union against the US as a form of criticism against those who themselves criticized human rights abuses. In his 1934 book Russia Today: What Can We Learn from It?, Sherwood Eddy wrote: "In the most remote villages of Russia today Americans are frequently asked what they are going to do to the Scottsboro Negro boys and why they lynch Negroes."
In a 1930s argument with black student Pierre Kalmek, Bolshevik politician Dmitry Manuilsky said that in the United States "whites have the privilege to lynch Negroes, but Negroes do not have the privilege to lynch whites." He called this a form of white chauvinism, asking: "Do we have a difference here between the salaries of Negro and white workers? Do we have the right to lynch Negro citizens?"
During the Stalin era, praise for the quality of any aspect of US life prompted the rejoinder "Yes, but they lynch Blacks, don't they?" Throughout the 1930s, white men traveling from the US to the Soviet Union on business reported to the US consulate in Riga, Latvia, that locals asked them about the dichotomy between living in a free society and "the 'lynching' of blacks." The term worked its way into fiction literature books written in the country, and was seen in this context as criticism of foreigners. Years later a science fiction comic, Technique - The Youth1948.No. 2 titled "In a world of crazy fantasy" () featured a poem of political attacks on the cover which included a similar line: "Every planet's Negroes are being lynched there."
The phrase became a common witticism used among Soviet citizens; a parable involved a call-in program on Radio Moscow where any question about their living conditions was met with the answer: "In America, they lynch Negroes." A US citizen living in the Soviet Union in 1949 was arrested after complaining the government barred him from work; a local paper made fun of his expectation of fair treatment, writing of the US as "the country where they lynch Negroes." In 1949 Soviet author and war poet Konstantin Simonov gave a speech at a Soviet jubilee event honoring poet Alexander Pushkin (who had African ancestry), where he delineated between the Soviet Union and the Western world by simply using the phrase to refer to English speakers: "There is no need for those who hang Negroes to commemorate Pushkin!" Historian Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov wrote in his 1953 book The Reign of Stalin that Soviet media put forth the notion that US citizens "are unanimous in pursuing an anti-colour policy, and that the average American spends his time lynching negroes." Perpetuation of the phrase during the Soviet period engendered negative feelings towards the US from members of the working class.
Growth during the Cold War During the Cold War, the leftist French publication Combat used the phrase to criticize the operations of the House Un-American Activities Committee, pointing out what it saw as corruption of "a nation that lynched blacks and hounded anyone accused of 'un-American' activities." Use of the phrase as a tu quoque fallacy grew in popularity in Russia during the 1960s, and was used as a widespread quip between Russians. In this version, an American and a Soviet car salesman argue which country makes better cars. Finally, the American asks: "How many decades does it take an average Soviet man to earn enough money to buy a Soviet car?" After a thoughtful pause, the Soviet replies: "And you are lynching Negroes!" The phrase garnered numerous iterations during the Cold War period. Its pervasiveness in Russian society reflected a strong sense of Soviet patriotism. When the government faced criticism for discrimination against Jews in the Soviet Union, the idiom was used with excessively sentimental tone to complain about racism in the United States. It was used as an aphorism among fellow Soviets during the Mikhail Gorbachev period, as an answer to complaints about the lack of civil and political rights including freedom of movement. A variant used during this time as a form of reciprocity when faced with criticism over imprisonment and treatment of Refuseniks, was to put the focus on race in the United States criminal justice system. A similar phrase was used to counter complaints about Soviet transportation inefficiency.
In 1980 then dissident and later president of the Czech Republic and writer Václav Havel characterized the phrase among "commonly canonized demagogical tricks." In scholarly research it has been described as "an increasingly powerful propaganda tool with the intensification of the Cold War".
Usage by Soviet satellite states Alternate versions of the phrase have been used in Eastern European Soviet Republics and several Central European countries, then-controlled by the Soviet Union, such, that it was ported for usage in Poland. The phrase also saw usage in other languages, including Czech, Hungarian, and Romanian.
Similar phrases in the languages of Eastern Europe and Central Europe include: ("And, in turn, you beat up blacks!") ("And in America, they beat up Negroes") ("And at your place, they beat up Negroes!") ("Yes, but you are lynching Negroes!") ("Yes, but you are beating up Negroes!")
In Westernized, high-income Central European countries that have cut their ties to the Russian cultural sphere following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, like Poland and Czech Republic, the phrase ceased to be used as the anti-American sentiment died down. In modern Poland, the context of the phrase is no longer understood.
Usage in post-1991 Russia
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the term had become a synecdoche in Russia, as a reference referring to all of Soviet propaganda. During a trip to Washington, D.C., in 1999, then-prime minister of Russia Sergei Stepashin attempted to tell a joke using the phrase as a punchline at a speech before the National Press Club. He faced a disturbing quiet from the audience in response to his attempt at humor, and he later observed those in the US have difficulty understanding the Russian perspective on comedy.
In a January 2008 article, The Economist popularized the term whataboutism for the repeated usage of this rhetorical tactic in the Soviet Union. The magazine wrote, that the tactic became overused, and by the time of the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, it had become a figure of speech which was used in reference to the entirety of Soviet propaganda.
With the election of Barack Obama as US president in November 2008, The New York Times expressed the hope that the tactic could see decreased usage: "In Russia, for example, where Soviet leaders used to respond to any American criticism of human rights violations with 'But you hang Negroes,' analysts note that the election of Mr. Obama removes a stain."
In a 2009 article, journalist George Feifer recounted that when he traveled to Moscow to cover the American National Exhibition in 1959, he faced those who were using the phrase against him. Feifer believed that: "Skilled propagandists stationed among the listeners regularly interrupted to repeat questions intended to discredit me. Why did America tolerate shameful poverty and lynch Negroes?" In 2011, author Michael Dobson wrote that the phrase was a form of the pot calling the kettle black, and a "famous example" of the tu quoque fallacy derived from a "famous 1960s era Russian joke."
During the Ferguson unrest in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, after a white policeman who shot and killed an unarmed black adolescent was not indicted, state-controlled press coverage in Russia was highly critical of racism in the United States. Writing for The Moscow Times, journalist Allison Quinn posited that coverage of the protests in Ferguson served as an optimal method to distract media from the Russo-Ukrainian war. Quinn said, "American racism provided a go-to argument of American hypocrisy for years under the Soviet Union, with phrases like 'Well, you lynch negroes' hurled back at the U.S. in response to any allegations of human rights violations in the Soviet Union." She compared the Ferguson unrest coverage by Russia state-controlled media to prior use of this phrase as a form of Soviet propaganda. Writing in March 2014 for the American liberal magazine The New Republic, Julia Ioffe made a similar comparison as Quinn regarding Soviet versus the 2014 use of the technique. Ioffe wrote that the phrase took the form of a "cartoonish reply", and had been extended after the fall of Soviet Russia to a similar strategy used by Vladimir Putin.