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Ms Rachel has to ask the world to investigate hanging black people
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this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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How many people hang themselves on trees in the US?
Suicide method is highly preferential, meaning that if someone is prevented from their chosen method, the vast majority simply do not commit suicide. We've seen this over and over - not just on a personal level, if you install prevention measures on a popular suicide spot the local rate of suicide goes down
For men in the US, guns are the most common method (pills for women). Hanging isn't uncommon, but doing so outside is
It's also highly cultural. In more collectivist countries, public suicide happens much more. The US is very individualistic, so while people will jump from bridges and such, it tends to be done in private spaces. Doing it as a public display just isn't as common here
Not to mention the fact that the cases I've read about have been sketchy as hell... Very speedy investigation, ignoring signs like bruising and contusions, no mention of alcohol or drugs
And finally, it's lynching. There's certainly cultural weight to lynching as a method of group murder, especially of certain groups
So no... Seven people choosing is too few for it to be a new chosen method in the zeitgeist - if it were dozens, that would be far more convincing. This is sketchy as hell
Point of clarification: lynching is not a method of killing, but a kind of murder. Hanging stands out in the popular imagination as the form of lynching in America but it isn't the only form and the terms aren't equivalent.
A method of killing and a method of murder are the same damn thing.
Lynching doesn't have to end by hanging, but that's a traditional Hallmark
It's group murder. Or group killing, I guess if you want to phrase it in a less charged manner for some reason
This is the question I'd like the answer to before I'm going to get too worked up about this one. What are the stats that have led to this statement? Hanging from a tree certainly isn't the way I'd do it and seems like it'd be fairly difficult to pull off on your own compared to other methods but I'm not knowledgeable enough to claim a conspiracy over that. All hangings/deaths should of course be investigated thoroughly.
Elsewhere in this thread someone was citing the CDC and it was a lot. Looking it up myself, 48,824 total in 2024, and 11,453 were by suffocation (including hanging, but not just hanging), so that's 23.5%. Suicide rate for Black Americans is about 8.7 per 100k, Black population is about 51.6 million (or 516 100ks) so figure 4489 completed suicides per year. If the number carries, that's 1055 by suffocation. But a paper by Choi et al from 2022 seems to say Black people are about 10% less likely to use this method than White people, so maybe it's closer to 950. A paper by Yau and Paschall from 2018 gives trees as the most popular anchor points for suicide by hanging, though that is a bare plurality at 9.7%. Still, Yau says 90.7% of suicide by suffocation is hanging, and from my look at the numbers that's 8.8% of suicide by suffocation. So based on all that, if 950 Black Americans commit suicide by suffocation per year, we'd expect about 83.6 to do so by hanging themselves from a tree. Also there are known patterns of physical trauma that one will typically see in a body when someone deliberately hangs themself vs when this is done as an attack on a person (Kryezi 2022 mentions some). None of this is to say that every death we believe is a suicide actually is, but this particular method is not so rare or hard to identify that even half a dozen a month would seem improbable.