More than a month after 29-year-old Tasia Fortune was found hanging from a tree outside an abandoned house in Jackson, Mississippi, police have charged 51-year-old Jarques Ratliff with murder.
The circumstances are horrifying. A Black woman found hanging from a tree in Mississippi immediately brings to mind America’s history of lynching.
But there is a glaring question that deserves to be asked:
If the accused murderer were white, would the media and political establishment be telling a very different story?
Ratliff is Black. Authorities have charged him with murder, but have not publicly established a motive or classified Fortune’s death as a lynching.
And that’s where the conversation gets uncomfortable.
Had a white man been arrested under the same circumstances, it is easy to imagine headlines invoking Mississippi’s history of lynching, racial terror and America’s past. Politicians and activists would be demanding answers about whether a Black woman had become the victim of a modern-day lynching.
Where’s Black Lives Matter? Where’s Al Sharpton? Where’s The SPLC or the ACLU?
Would those same voices be as eager to raise the word lynching when the accused is Black?
That question is not racist. It is a question about whether we apply the same standards regardless of who is involved.
To be clear, the fact that Ratliff is Black does not prove this wasn’t racially motivated. Race alone does not establish motive in either direction. Investigators still need to determine exactly what happened, why Fortune was killed and whether anyone else was involved.
But the reverse is equally true: the fact that a Black woman was found hanging from a tree does not automatically make the killing a lynching.
That’s the problem with allowing politics and historical imagery to get ahead of the evidence.
If the facts establish a racially motivated killing, then call it a lynching. If they establish another motive, call it murder.
But don’t change the definition depending on the race of the suspect.
America has spent decades trying to move toward a justice system in which people are judged by their actions rather than the color of their skin.
That principle should apply to the narrative surrounding this case, too.
If the suspect were white, would we be hearing a completely different story?
It’s a legitimate question.
And the only fair answer is this:
The race of the accused should never determine the narrative. The evidence should.
Tasia Fortune deserves justice. Her family deserves answers. And the public deserves the truth—regardless of whether that truth fits someone’s preferred racial or political narrative.
