Years ago, in the innocent age of 2001, I took my girlfriend to the prom. The accessory to her prom dress was a red leg garter, adorned with a special charm – a tiny pewter noose. The year before, it had been a tiny handcuff. She was kind of weird, to say the least.

Nowadays, though, that innocuous (if odd) accoutrement would have sent Al Sharpton scurrying up her dress to get it. Because, in case you haven’t heard, the noose is a symbol of racism – pretty much the hot item for racists on your Christmas list. It’s the Tickle Me Elmo of the KKK.

The noose hit the big time this year with the Jena 6 debacle, a story of racial awkwardness and conflict I couldn’t possibly untangle while staying under my word count. Since then, noose-related incidents have hit the wires at least once a week, and sometimes two or three. Some examples:

-Two high school band students were suspended for two weeks, because they had a conversation about nooses – one had apparently learned how to make them in Boy Scouts.

-A white male was seen hanging a noose from the third floor of a construction site in Chattanooga, Tenn., and the police suspected it was a hate crime.

-A news editor at the Minneapolis Community and Technical College student newspaper was fired for hanging a noose from the ceiling as a threat to reporters that didn’t get their stories in on time. The noose was up for about 10 minutes. Student groups held protest rallies and were angry about not being told of the incident.

-Someone left a noose around a statue of Tupac Shakur in Georgia.

-A Des Moines woman received complaints about her Halloween display, which included a dummy hanging from a tree. The display also included a bloody guillotine with a decapitated victim and a torso with shredded guts under a lawn mower.

Obviously, it’s not my place to say what should and should not offend people.

But isn’t it possible we’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater here?

Unlike swastikas or white robes with pointy hats or Confederate flags, which are all pretty blatantly racist, a noose will have an entirely different

connotation depending on whom you talk to. In the above instances, some are clearly racially motivated, but some clearly aren’t, and others still are clearly just a cluster bomb of stupidity.

Nooses have been used for racially motivated killings, but they’ve also been used to execute convicted criminals – some inmates on death row still have the option of picking it if they don’t like lethal injection, depending on the state.

It was used to kill suspected witches in Salem, it was how the British executed Revolutionary War hero Nathan Hale, and it forms a key plot point in “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.”

I’m not saying a noose is never a symbol of hatred – they’re used for killing, so they’re obviously anti-people regardless of the sort of people you’re talking about.

But rather than letting this fall into the realm of knee-jerk reactions, let’s try not to forget the context in which something is being used, before we lump everyone who can tie a knot in with Nathan Bedford Forrest?

Remember: All racists are idiots, but not all idiots are necessarily racist.