And you are lynching Negroes

"And you are lynching Negroes" (Russian: "А у вас негров вешают", romanized: A u vas negrov veshaut; which also means "Yet, in your [country], [they] hang Negroes") is a catchphrase that describes or satirizes Soviet responses to US criticisms of Soviet human rights violations.^[1][2]

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 supposedly erased by state socialism.^[3] Lynchings of African Americans were brought up as an embarrassing skeleton in the closet for the US, which the Soviets used as a form of rhetorical ammunition when reproached for their own economic and social failings.^[4] After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the phrase became widespread as a reference to Russian information-warfare tactics.^[5] Its use subsequently became widespread in Russia to criticize any form of US policy.^[6]

Former Czech president and writer Václav Havel placed the phrase among "commonly canonized demagogical tricks".^[7] The Economist described it as a form of whataboutism that became ubiquitous after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.^[5] The book Exit from Communism by author Stephen Richards Graubard wrote that it symbolized a divorce from reality.^[8]

Author Michael Dobson compared it to the idiom the pot calling the kettle black, and called the phrase a "famous example" of tu quoque reasoning.^[9] The conservative magazine National Review called it "a bitter Soviet-era punch line",^[10] and added "there were a million Cold War variations on the joke".^[10] The Israeli newspaper Haaretz described use of the idiom as a form of Soviet propaganda.^[11] The British liberal political website Open Democracy called the phrase "a prime example of whataboutism".^[6] In her work Security Threats and Public Perception, Elizaveta Gaufman described the fallacy as a tool to reverse someone's argument against them.^[12]