https://www.espn.com/racing/nascar/story/_/id/29345568/nasca...
It's disappointing how explicitly and consistently HN responds to discussions of slightly-subtle racism with a very explicit not-at-all-subtly-racist pretension that it doesn't exist. "It doesn't bother me therefore it shouldn't bother you" and "You should look at the context", as if being black isn't a context.
And yes, it was a symbol as well as a reality. Here is a noose carried by a Klansman to threaten Black people and keep them from voting in 1939 [1]. Here is a mock lynching at the University of Mississippi in 1962, to scare off the university's first Black student [2]. Black men at work would find nooses at their stations [3]. Nooses were mailed to NAACP Secretary, and in 1956 a noose was hung in a schoolyard tree during a battle over desegregation [4].
You said yourself you're an "outside observer of American culture." Well, this is a history lesson. The noose has been an extremely potent symbol of terror for over a hundred years.
1. https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/masked-ku-klux-klan...
2. https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/200623111206-noose-do...
3. https://www.adl.org/media/10204/download
4. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-shuler-noose-hat...
I'm sorry, but this is just ignorant of American history. Lynchings were part of a reign of terror that whites, mostly in the South, inflicted on Blacks for over a hundred years.
Between 1882 and 1968 over 3000 black men were lynched by mobs. Families would go and have picnics, bringing their kids so they could watch the lynchings. They would sometimes then carve up the bodies for people to take home a souvenirs, and many of the hanging bodies of the lynched men were photographed and turned into postcards that were sold all over the South. The postcards were usually inscribed with racist text or poems, and people used to send them just as regular postcards -- photos of men hanging on the back of a casual letter. So many were being sent that the postmaster eventually had to ban them being sent through the mail, though they were still produced and sold.
Lynchings of Black men were absolutely a huge part of the American consciousness. They were one of the main ways that the South kept African Americans living in terror, and a major cause of Martin Luther King Jr's movement and the ensuing civil rights era. Songs like "Strange Fruit" were sung in protest of them.
The last black man lynched in Texas was in 1942. The last black man lynched in the US was in 1981. And the noose itself continued to be used as a symbol of terror, just like the burning cross.