page_title: And you are lynching Negroes
section_title: Reception
hierarchical_section_title: And you are lynching Negroes / Reception
caption_attribution_description: Václav Havel na Václavském náměstí 17. listopadu 2009.
context_page_description: "And you are lynching Negroes" and the later "And you are hanging blacks" are catchphrases that describe or satirize Soviet Union response to United States criticisms of Soviet human rights violations.
  The Soviet media frequently covered racial discrimination, financial crises, and unemployment in the United States, which were identified as failings of the capitalist system that had been erased by state socialism. Lynchings of African Americans were brought up as an embarrassing skeleton in the closet for the U.S., which the Soviets used as a form of rhetorical ammunition when reproached for their own perceived economic and social failings. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the phrase became widespread as a reference to Russian information-warfare tactics. Its use subsequently became widespread in Russia to criticize any form of U.S. policy.
  Former Czech president and writer Václav Havel placed the phrase among "commonly canonized demagogical tricks". The Economist described it as a form of whataboutism that grew ubiquitous after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
context_section_description: Journalist George Feifer recounted in a 2009 article how when he traveled to Moscow in 1959 to cover the American National Exhibition, he faced those using the phrase against him. 
  Feifer believed: "Skilled propagandists stationed among the listeners regularly interrupted to repeat questions intended to discredit me. Why did America tolerate shameful poverty and lynch Negroes?"
  Former president of the Czech Republic and writer Václav Havel characterized the phrase among "commonly canonized demagogical tricks."
  In a January 2008 article, The Economist popularized the term whataboutism for the repeated usage of this rhetorical tactic by 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 referring to the entirety of Soviet propaganda.
  The 1993 book Exit from Communism, edited by Stephen Richards Graubard, made a similar point, that the term encapsulated an overall divorce from reality: "Perhaps there are and perhaps there are not prison camps in Siberia, perhaps in the United States they do or perhaps they do not lynch blacks ... Ultimately it does not matter whether we are for real or just pretending: it is all just part of the story."
  With the election of Barack Obama as U.S. president in late 2008, The New York Times reported 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 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 Ukrainian crisis. 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 for American Thinker in February 2014, Kim Zigfeld referenced the phrase in discussing a Soviet tactic of denigrating their detractors.
  Writing in March 2014 for the American liberal magazine The New Republic during the Ukrainian crisis, 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.
  In a 2015 article for the conservative magazine National Review, correspondent Kevin D. Williamson called the phrase "a bitter Soviet-era punch line." Williamson pointed out: "There were a million Cold War variations on the joke".
  Reporter David Volodzko wrote for the international news magazine The Diplomat in 2015 about "the famous tu quoque argument". The piece said that the term was used as a way to criticize capitalism as practiced in the Western world.
  Writing for the British liberal political website Open Democracy in 2015, journalist Maxim Edwards observed: "The phrase 'and you are lynching Negroes' has entered Russian speech as a prime example of whataboutism, a hypothetical response to any American criticism of Soviet policies."
  In her 2016 work Security Threats and Public Perception published in October 2016, Elizaveta Gaufman characterized the phrase as a form of reversing someone's line of reasoning against them. Gaufman wrote, that
caption: Václav Havel placed the idiom among "commonly canonized demagogical tricks".[7]
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