“There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.” – Booker T. Washington After Martin Luther King’s principles were codified as the law of our land many liberal idealists were chagrined by the slowness of Negro social progress. Equality under the law had not produced an equality of outcomes for black people. Liberals found this developmental inertia perplexing because of their unquestioning acceptance of the theory of cultural relativism which posits as an article of faith that all cultures are essentially equal and that no culture is superior to any other.
The patron saint of this article of faith was an anthropologist named Franz Boas. Professor Boas was one of a new generation of immigrant scholars who swept into America in the early Twentieth Century and secured positions of authority and influence at American universities. Like so many of these immigrant scholars, Boas was left-leaning, Jewish and hostile to Anglo-Saxon nativism. He arrived from Germany in 1886, established an academic toehold at Columbia University and proceeded to cultivate a circle of young disciples who would enlarge his assault on the prevailing theory of cultural evolutionism – the notion that cultures might evolve, over time, from savage to barbarian to civilized, and that civilization was superior to savagery.
These disciples, among them the highly influential anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, would amplify the Boasian social agenda and transform the way Americans thought about themselves. Some Boasians went so far as to claim that non-Western cultures were morally superior to Western civilization because they were more intimately entangled in the rhythms and vicissitudes of Nature.
Among the young academics whom Franz Boas nurtured was the black anthropologist Kenneth Clark, who would later present Boasian arguments to the Supreme Court in the landmark school- desegregation case Brown vs. Board of Education. By the time this case was heard, cultural relativism had become the accepted and politically correct point of view in academia and among those who fancied themselves to be among the enlightened. Henceforth it was accepted as an article of faith that no culture was superior to any other. Occasionally a “progressive” would break ranks with the relativists, only to be roundly trounced for his apostasy. When Saul Bellow famously quipped: “Show me the Proust of the Papuans and I’ll read him,” he was denounced as a racist.
In short, Franz Boas and his followers succeeded in dethroning Matthew Arnold’s conception of a proper education as the employment of high standards of reason to apprehend “the best which has been thought and said in the world.” The cultural relativists were appalled by standards. By what right did Westerners stand in judgment of headhunters and cannibals? Weren’t all value judgments just a matter of taste and custom? It is no accident that the cultural relativism so vigorously promoted by the disgruntled left-leaning immigrant radicals also had political implications.
Because the primary relativist assumption is that all cultures are inherently equal, any persistent differences in wealth or power or achievement between two closely associated cultures are assumed to be due to a destructive influence of the more powerful culture on the less powerful culture. Thus, when the realization of Martin Luther King’s entire legislative agenda did not result in the swift social and economic elevation of American blacks, the liberal relativists jumped to the conclusion that the cause of black backwardness must be white racism.
The first casualty of the post-King era was Dr. King’s dream of a color-blind America. Even as liberals invoked King’s name to cloak their radical new agenda with King’s moral authority, they were busy repudiating King’s vision. The emerging civil rights bureaucracies, both private and governmental, began promoting special quotas and set asides for black folks. Jesse Jackson dismissed as “intellectual terrorism” the mere mention of King’s insistence that character, not color, be the basis of our public policy. Eleanor Holmes Norton rubber stamped Jackson’s dismissal of color blindness by snapping: “Stop quoting dead saints.” Any suggestion that black backwardness might be the consequence of counter-productive cultural values that many blacks embrace was denounced as “blaming the victim.”
Liberal relativists argued that blacks needed special color-conscious assistance because they were the “victims” of white racism; black victimhood became the justification for billions of dollars worth of special benefits. Henceforth, the taxpayer-financed gravy train was kept in motion by promoting the notion that black people were the victims of persistent and ever more subtle permutations of white racism. At this moment there are sprawling bureaucracies, personal fortunes, political careers, job promotions, college admissions and billions of dollars worth of taxpayer-funded goodies that depend upon the promulgation of The White Devil Theory of black backwardness.
As de jure racial discrimination faded into history, the liberals felt an urgency to keep the White Devil Theory current by stoking the fires of black racial animosity with lurid tales of white racism. Occasionally, some unlettered knuckle dragger would toss the liberals the priceless gift of a callous act of gratuitous bigotry, but the supply of such acts was dwindling. Worse yet, a younger generation of American blacks were telling pollsters that racism had little or no influence in shaping their lives. For some people it was bad news that race relations were improving. The civil rights professionals sensed that their livelihoods were threatened.
The Truly Invisible Empire
Liberal scribblers are mesmerized by the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan and all things Klanish are the diamond-bright essence of what white racism is all about. There has been no shortage of books about this secret society – all of them describing the Klan as “resurgent.” In his book The Myth of Black Progress, Alphonso Pinkney would have us believe in “the revival of the Klan throughout the country.” He proclaims that, “No one knows exactly what the Klan membership is but it is clear that it is growing in the South and elsewhere.” Really? Pinkney wrote those words a quarter century ago; the “resurgent” Klan should be in evidence everywhere by now.
Here’s the truth: the original Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 by former Confederate soldiers for the purpose of asserting white supremacy by the use of terrorism. The first targets of Klan anger were the Yankee carpetbaggers who had come to the South to influence Dixie politics. Equally detested were the “scalawags” and the “white niggers” – those Southern Republicans who supported the political rights of black freedmen. Floggings and tarring became commonplace. It amused the Klansmen to wrap themselves in sheets to frighten gullible former slaves by pretending to be ghosts from Hell. It was not until blacks began gaining political influence that the Klan began to abuse them as it had the white Yankees and Republicans. Lynching did not become a tool of terrorism until the 1890s; until then the majority of those who got lynched were white folks.
The Klansmen became so promiscuous in the variety and number of their targets that even Southern whites soon wearied of their violence. Congressional investigations of Klan activities resulted in publicity and prosecutions. By 1873 the original Ku Klux Klan was defunct and would have remained that way. It was revived by Art.
In 1905 a racist named Thomas Dixon became a best-selling author – his book, The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, sold more than a hundred thousand copies in only a few months. Dixon had tapped a golden vein of Southern nostalgia. A few years later Dixon would collaborate with the pioneer filmmaker D.W. Griffith on a cinematic version of Dixon’s book. This film, The Birth of a Nation, aroused audiences using innovative cinematic techniques that would later be refined to a science by the Soviet propagandists. This gushing hymn to the original, and by then defunct, Ku Klux Klan aroused sentiments of victimization among Southern whites—especially among the poorest of them.
A newly constituted Ku Klux Klan was organized in Georgia in 1915 – the very year The Birth of a Nation swept America. President Woodrow Wilson arranged a private screening for himself and later declared that, “It’s like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” The “terribly true” motion picture featured sensational scenes of wild-eyed blacks and interloping Northerners defiling the South and it beautiful chaste white women: sanity and decency are restored by the robed horsemen of the Ku Klux Klan.
The Klan promoted itself as a force for Christian rectitude; they were unabashedly for “one-hundred-percent Americanism.” Any white Christian American could join for a ten-dollar fee. The Klan contributed to worthy charities. Klan literature declared: “Every criminal, every gambler, every thug, every libertine, every girl-runner, every home wrecker, every wife-beater, every dope-peddler, every moonshiner, every crooked politician, every pagan Papist priest, every shyster lawyer, every K of C [Knight of Columbus], every white slaver, every Rome-controlled newspaper, every black spider is fighting the Klan. Think it over, which side are you on?”
Lots of nice folks wanted to join the fight against drugs, drunkenness, prostitution, corruption and all0round immorality. And besides, the Klan was garishly theatrical with its firelight nocturnal assemblies, its whiplash disciplinarianism and its call to a more thrilling alternative life. It draped itself in mystery and patriotism. It offered the poorest whites a social platform beneath which they could not fall – as deprived and as hopeless as they might become, the poorest Klansman would never be black. That emotional uplift was a lot for ten dollars.
By 1925 Klan membership had reached two million. That was the year that 40,000 Klansmen held a parade down Pennsylvania Avenue in our nation’s capital city. That was when the Klan peaked. It was all downhill from then on. By the late 1920s Ku Klux Klan membership was in steep decline. Klan leaders had begun quarreling over positions of authority; these internal, and sometimes violent, conflicts tended to weaken and decentralize Klan authority.
Equally debilitating was the Klan’s swollen roster of targets: in addition to the uppity Negro the Klan took on Jews, Catholics, drunkards, Communists, union organizers, adulterers, Chinamen, and all things strange and foreign. The reckless and dogmatic Klansmen were threatening too many average Americans. Klan membership became an embarrassment and a political liability and the Invisible Empire began to dwindle. By the mid-1930s the yearly number of lynchings had dropped to fewer than ten.
Sixteen years ago the Anti Defamation League’s 1991 review of Klan membership pegged the number of Klansmen at 4,000. Since then the Klan has broken into two rival factions, which has further diminished membership. The chief of the ADL’s Atlanta office was quoted in the Washington Times (12/21/94) on his estimate of Klan strength: “The Klan today has nothing left, no influence at all, political or economic. What’s left of the Klan is no more than a nuisance.”
That was over a decade ago. Way back then the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama represented Beulah Mae Donald, whose teenage son was lynched by Klansmen. In 1987 Morris Dees convinced an all-white jury to levy a seven-million-dollar penalty against the grand wizard of the Klan and the United Klans of America for the wrongful death of Ms. Donald’s son. That judgment pretty much wiped out the Klan’s meager assets.
On those rare occasions when Klansmen make a public appearance they are typically outnumbered by counter demonstrators and all the police who are there to protect the Klansmen from their emotional opponents. A case in point: about fifty white separatists demonstrated against the Martin Luther King holiday down in Jena, Louisiana, the little town where, exactly four months before, about 20,000 demonstrators had protested the prosecution of six black teenagers who had viciously stomped an unconscious white classmate. A racially mixed group of counter demonstrators outnumbered the white separatists two-to-one. Louisiana State Police and cops from at least three parish sheriff’s departments were on hand. Snipers kept a watchful eye from the roof tops across the street from the LaSalle Parish Courthouse. At one point dozens of troopers forced back uniformed foot soldiers of the New Black Panther Party. There was one arrest: Black Panther William Winchester, Jr. of New Orleans was booked for battery on a police officer and resisting arrest.
That was it. Michael Brown, a self-proclaimed member of the Ku Klux Klan, held a Klan flag. The rally had been organized by the Nationalist Movement based in Learned, Mississippi. It was 400 times smaller than the Jena Six demonstration in September.
Despite all the evidence that the Klan has been reduced to a shadow of its former self, the civil rights professionals refuse to acknowledge that the Klan’s time has past. Organizations that raise millions of dollars by frightening blacks with the specter of a lurking Klan army are reluctant to admit that they are fear mongering for profit. The power of the Klan is a memory, a memory kept alive by the nostalgia of an aging civil rights gerontocracy whose best years are behind them.
When the Klan announced its intention to patrol the Mexican border to discourage illegal aliens, only eight Klansmen appeared. They were wildly outnumbered by the local TV news crew. Klan members are most likely to be the poorest and poorly educated white folks. They have no power to deny blacks anything – not jobs, not education – nothing. Their Klan affiliation is a function of their frustration, their marginality, their powerlessness. Nonetheless, the Klan, as boogeyman, is alive and well as a catalyst for African-American unity. As Robert Branch observed, “One key to solidarity is to recall and relive our collective history.” For some folks, the thought that white racism has abated is more frightening than racism itself, for it would mean the end of boogeyman-inspired fund raising; it would mean the end of racial preferences and racial quotas. And worst of all, it would mean the end of blaming white racism for the pathologies of the black underclass.
The boogeyman of white racism will not be allowed to die because upper class and middle class blacks depend on the wretched condition of the black underclass as an exhibition of the injurious consequences of white racism. This exhibition is exploited to leverage the creation of “affirmative action” programs that benefit the black upper and middle classes most of all – the black underclass being unprepared to take advantage of most of the employment and educational opportunities these programs create. In short, prosperous blacks have a cash incentive to nurture the myth that the Ku Klux Klan is still a popular and thriving enterprise. Prosperous blacks are the final beneficiaries of lurid Ku Klux Klan mythology.
Jesse Jackson had it right fifteen years ago when, in an unguarded moment, he told an audience of black government employees: “We talked 30 years ago about genocide. It’s now fratricide. At this point, the Klan is not nearly the threat that your next-door neighbors are.” (Washington Post, 8/24/93)
Pretending to be Downtrodden
The ennobling mantel of victimhood has become so central to black identity that many blacks cling tenaciously to nostalgia for the bad old days. This nostalgia is nurtured shamelessly by civil rights careerists who profit handsomely from the endless retelling of racist horror stories. Way back in 1992 the Wall Street Journal noted a flourishing market for slave-trade artifacts and Jim-Crow-era knickknacks. Were white rednecks on a home-decorating spree? Well, . . . no. The eager purchasers of these sorry gimcracks were middle class black folks who couldn’t get enough of the stuff. In the present day, when racism is clearly on the decline, these well-to-do blacks choose to experience that old-time racism vicariously.
A case in point: the Newark Star Ledger featured an article about Diann Kirby’s racist memorabilia collection. “Many wonder why a proud black woman would keep a framed print on her wall picturing black boys jumping into a pool with the caption, ‘Last One In’s a Nigger,’” opined Ms. Kirby.
She defended her collection by observing that, “Just like the Jews don’t want people to forget the Holocaust, I don’t want my son to forget what black people went through.” This seems reasonable until you remember that the Jews don’t decorate their homes with Nazi memorabilia.
Describing her Plainfield, New Jersey home, the disbelieving staff writer tells us that “Seemingly every square inch is covered with items depicting black people, many of them in a stereotypical, derogatory fashion . . . ,” and goes on to tell us that “Kirby is not alone in her penchant for black bric-a-brac. She began collecting 35 years ago, and over the last 10 years, she said, the market has become huge.”
Ms. Kirby recalled that, “When I started collecting, black collectibles were something people had hidden away because it was politically incorrect. Then people like Whoopi Goldberg and Bill Cosby started collecting, and the prices and popularity really skyrocketed.” In this instance the term “politically incorrect” is being used as a euphemism for the words “vulgar” and “trashy.” Well-to-do blacks have created such a fevered market for racist memorabilia that an Internet search using the phrase “black memorabilia” will yield more than 139,000 websites that traffic in this stuff. There are also collector’s clubs, trade shows, magazines and books that cater to collectors of this genre.
We are enlightened to the fact that, “A piece of the slave ship Clothilde can be purchased from the online antique dealer for almost $30,000. Some of the highest priced items relate to slavery – chains, manacles, slave deeds and brass tags used to identify slaves.” Well, that should spice up the den. How big a piece of a slave ship can be had for thirty grand? Is it sold by the pound?
Tens of thousands of prosperous blacks are eager to snap up the most blatantly racist of collectibles – in fact, the more racist the better. Since the 1970s the price of a black lawn jockey has gone from less than thirty bucks to as much as $500. Postcards once priced at half a penny each might fetch fifty dollars or more. Both Christie’s and Sotheby’s have sponsored black memorabilia auctions. The online auction site eBay has up to 4,000 “Black Americana” auctions every day. A scrapbook stuffed with newspaper articles and photos about lynchings sold for $909 on December 6th, 2000. Sheet music with a 1930s Ku Klux Klan theme brought a winning bid of $100.19. Buyers by the thousands flock to black memorabilia shows like the annual sale at the Swann Gallery in Manhattan which grossed $261,556 in February of 2000. According to price guides, truly gruesome items such as human branding irons have sold for $1,000. Then again, an Aunt Jemima cookie jar might bring $1,800.
As this rising demand swept up the available supply of authentic black memorabilia, the market was flooded with counterfeit collectibles – bogus advertising items, fake segregation signs and knock-off slavery-related artifacts are everywhere. Virtually all black-themed postcards, posters and advertisements are counterfeits.
If you are a black person who has spent your hard-earned dollar to purchase Gold Dust Soap boxes, Cream of Wheat advertisements, Coon Chicken Inn hand fans, Bull Durham posters or items featuring Aunt Jemima then you have filled your home with preposterously overpriced trash. Your prized collection was printed in China, aged in a smoke house and maybe roughed up in a clothes dryer.
Because the black folks who purchase racist memorabilia are seeking the thrill of vicarious oppression, the more racist the collectible the better. For example: one of the most popular racist collectibles is the postcard that features naked black boys climbing a fence to get to a swimming hole. The caption reads: “Alligator Bait.” That’s how it appeared in the 1890’s original. But counterfeiters have discovered that the postcard brings higher prices from black collectors when the caption reads, “Last One In’s a Nigger.” That’s the bogus version on Diann Kirby’s wall. Any item including the word nigger will bring higher prices from black collectors. Spike Lee and Oprah Winfrey are avid collectors of racist knickknacks.
It says something truly sad about these black collectors that so many tens of thousands of them sit in their homes surrounded by counterfeit reproductions of racist antiques. It suggests a sickness of the soul. How sad it would be if the survivors of the Holocaust and their children and their grandchildren lived in homes festooned from floor to ceiling with Nazi bric-a-brac, Third Reich propaganda and counterfeit concentration camp mementos. Would the home owner’s assertion that her grim collection was “educational” really justify the photo of Heinrich Himmler in the guest bedroom? Of course not. No healthy person lives in a museum dedicated to the oppression of his ancestors. To experience a vicarious masochistic boost from living with bits of slave ships and reproduction branding irons is to live an unauthentic life.
Perhaps the only thing more pathetic than living in a house haunted by an historical racism that one had not personally experienced would be to make false claims of racist victimization one had not actually experienced. Sadly, thousands of black people have faked racist hate crimes.
Faking White Racism
Every culture binds its members together with a shared mythology, a collection of stories that explains to the members of that culture the defining values of their culture. These stories give the culture its distinctive identity. Sometimes these mythic stories include tales of the culture’s greatest enemy – the foe whose very existence serves to sharpen the community’s sense of self. Among Christians the menacing presence of Satan serves to unify the congregation. Likewise, for those black folks who cling to racial identity for their feelings of self worth, the Satan-substitute of white racism can serve the purpose of enforcing black solidarity and an orthodox black perspective. The frightening boogeyman of white racism affirms their status as victims which, in turn, reinforces their sense of themselves as a noble, embattled minority entitled, by virtue of their tribulations, to special rewards at the expense of their oppressors or anyone of the same race as their imagined oppressors. And finally, the big white boogeyman serves as the best-ever excuse for under achievement and uncivil behavior. As William Raspberry explained:
“Racism has become our all-purpose explanation for every disadvantage. We spend precious resources, time, energy, imagination and political capital searching, always successfully, for evidence of racism, while our problems get worse. . . The difference between us and Asian Americans is that our myth is that racism accounts for our shortcomings. Theirs is that their own efforts can make a difference, no matter what white people think.” (Washington Post, 6/6/90)
Or, more succinctly:
“Sometimes I believe the hype, man,
We mess it up ourselves, and blame the white man. – Ice Cube (Death Certificate, Priority Records, 1991)
Endlessly recycled horror stories featuring white racism are a cultural anchor chain of black American popular culture that firmly moors black identity to the bad old days. Black children are steeped in this fright lore; some of them deftly exploit its lingering power to rattle their elders. Some examples. . .
In early April of 2006 a twelve-year-old black boy in Ansonia, Connecticut scared the wits out of his mom when he returned home with facial burns and a harrowing tale of how he had been abducted by masked and robed white men who took him to Linette Park, splashed his face with flammable liquid and then lit him up like a human torch.
The panicked mom turned straightaway to the NAACP, which gave her instant support. The Ansonia police put detectives on overtime pay to track down the robed boy burners.
When the investigation exposed contradictions in the boy’s story he coughed up the truth: his burns were incurred while fooling around with a flammable liquid at a friend’s house. There were no robed racists to unmask. (WTNH, 4/8/06)
The telling aspect of this incident is how easily a twelve-year-old hoodwinked his mom and the NAACP into believing this tale. Children raised on recycled horror stories of white racism have been taught exactly what will spook the old folks.
A thirteen-year-old African American boy who wanted to bond more closely with other black kids created two “kill lists” that threatened bodily harm to about a dozen black students at the Laredo Middle School in Aurora, Colorado. He spiced up the lists with a racial slur and then posted one copy on a boys’ room wall. He stuffed the other one into the locker of a black classmate. He cleverly included his own name on the lists to increase the sympathy he knew he could expect. Parents scrambled to pull their children from the school; the hoaxer enjoyed the warm glow of victimhood. Clearly, by the age of puberty black kids have been made fully aware of the unifying power of the racism boogeyman and know how to play the victim card. (Denver Post, 3/24/05)
Back in June of 2005, 14-year-old Shacorey Hicks spent a pleasant afternoon buzzing about on a go-cart on the street near his home in Doyline, Louisiana. As the hour of his father’s return approached, Shacorey was stricken with fear that his father would be angry at him for go-carting in the street. It was then that he and his two younger siblings whipped up a story that they knew would garner them the most sympathy. Shacorey damaged the back door of his home at 730 Shiloh Road, and then he fled to the refuge of a friend’s house nearby.
When daddy came home, the younger Hicks children pointed to the damaged door and told daddy the story that the three kids had rehearsed: two white men, each dressed in black and brandishing a semi-automatic pistol, had abducted Shacorey and whisked him away in a small black compact car . . . possibly a Toyota.
The father made an urgent call to the Webster Parish Sheriff’s Office and a state-wide Amber Alert was issued for Shacorey Hicks. Dozens of law enforcement officers were mobilized. The police were impressed by the signs of forced entry.
The principal of Shacorey’s middle school was bewildered: “I just couldn’t hardly believe it. I thought, ‘Why would someone want to do that to him?’” Principal Jimmy Stewart added: “He’s just like any other boy. It doesn’t make any sense. He is just an average student and didn’t get into any trouble.” Just two days shy of retirement, Mr. Stewart was burdened by the thought that one of his students had been abducted.
When the hoax fell apart the Amber Alert was cancelled and Shacorey Hicks was charged with criminal mischief for filing a false police report. Once again, the outstanding feature of this hoax is how effortlessly a black child invoked the boogeyman of white racism to deflect attention from his own misdeeds.
Tawana’s Rape Hoax
The most notorious of the black teen hoaxers was 15-year-old Tawana Brawley. In 1987, Tawana and her mom conspired in the fabrication of a bogus hate crime. Tawana had been warned about her party-girl behavior by her mom’s live-in boyfriend, Ralph King, an ex-con with a nasty temper who had done seven years in the slammer for murdering his wife: Ralph was a convicted woman killer. Now Tawana wanted to return home after days of partying and she needed an amazing cover story to spare herself from a brutal smackdown. Because Ralph King harbored a simmering hatred of the police, the mother and daughter chose to make the cops the demons of their cover story.
From her apartment window, Joyce Lloray witnessed a naked Tawana Brawley appear from behind a building across the street and climb, unassisted, into an over-sized plastic trash bag she had brought with her. Mrs. Lloray sent her husband across the street to see what was up. Tawana was unresponsive; Mr. Lloray called the police.
At the hospital Tawana would claim that she had been repeatedly raped and sodomized by several burly white policemen over a four-day period, somewhere out in the woods. It was all a lie.
A grand jury patiently listened to seven months of testimony. They heard from one hundred eighty witnesses; they examined two hundred fifty exhibits. There were six thousand pages of testimony. Finally, the jury released a one-hundred-seventy-page report that exposed the entire Tawana Brawley abduction-and-rape story for what it was: a carefully staged hoax.
Tawana had claimed that she had been repeatedly raped and sodomized by six burly men over a four-day period and yet not a single sperm cell was found in her vagina and not a single Caucasian pubic hair was found on her body or clothing. Tawana’s claim to have been the victim of repeated violent anal rape by six big men fell flat when a medical examination revealed that her anus was perfectly intact, without the slightest abrasion. Her sex organ was likewise declared to be in honeymoon-fresh condition. The words “NIGGER” and “BITCH” that were written on her torso with some kind of prepared charcoal paste were upside-down, as though Tawana had written the words on her own chest. Investigators could find traces of this paste nowhere else other than under Tawana’s fingernails. The excrement on her body, at first claimed to be of human origin, later proved to be animal waste. DNA testing proved that the poop was from a collie named Remi who frolicked in a yard near Tawana’s home – not in the far-away woods where Tawana claimed to have been defiled. Joyce Lloray had witnessed Tawana climbing, unassisted, into her big trash bag. Tawana had cotton wads in her nostrils to stave off the stench of the dog poop. Were these wads a tender-hearted gift from her mad-dog rapists? An examination of Tawana’s body and clothing did not produce any evidence that Tawana had spent four days in the woods; there was no plant matter whatsoever. Tawana was, however, covered with debris that perfectly matched debris from an apartment that the Brawley clan had recently vacated – an apartment to which Tawana still had a key.
When Tawana and her mother stage crafted their hoax they never imagined that it would make news beyond the local police blotter in Wappenger’s Falls, New York, but the story leaked out and the combustible mix of sex and race and violence attracted journalists who were eager to pass along every scrap of hearsay.
Jesse Jackson was running for president just then. He and the dispirited ranks of the civil rights professionals were hungry for a racist horror story that might revitalize their fading fortunes. For them, Tawana’s tall tale was a gift from heaven. They and their liberal sidekicks in the media shared a radiant vision of making Tawana’s hideous four-day gang rape a metaphor for race relations in AmeriKKKa. The boogeyman of white racism had ridden to their rescue once again.
On December 14, 1987, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan led one thousand chanting marchers through Newburgh, New York, in support of Tawana. On February 10th, Bill Cosby put up a $25,000 reward for information leading to “the truth,” and revealed his darker side with a series of vile generalizations about white people. On April 4th, 1988 the Reverend Al Sharpton and career activist Pete Seeger kept things boiling at the big protest rally in support of Tawana at the State Capitol in Albany. A big women’s march paraded through midtown Manhattan in support of Tawana. Mike Tyson, by then a convicted rapist of a black woman, gave Tawana a diamond-studded Rolex watch. Phil Donahue broadcast live from a pro-Tawana rally. Every day for seven months, while the grand jury was investigating this case, protestors were bussed in to chant and rant outside the courthouse, often led by the Reverend Sharpton.
The street-smart Al Sharpton knew early on that Tawana’s story was total crap; his claim to believe the teenager’s tale of woe was, itself, a hoax. The grand jury found Tawana’s story to be unsupported by any evidence; they found her story to be preposterous; they found it to be defamatory.
Tawana’s brain trust, Sharpton and attorneys C.Vernon Mason and Alton Maddox, had pointed the finger of guilt at a part-time policeman named Harry Crist, Jr. who had committed suicide a few days after Tawana was “found” in her trash bag. Crist had been depressed over a series of career setbacks and he killed himself only hours after the collapse of a relationship with a woman he loved intensely. Based on no evidence whatsoever, the ever reckless Al Sharpton proclaimed that Harry Crist was one of Tawana’s attackers. When alibi witnesses appeared to redeem Harry Crist’s good name, Sharpton instantly declared that these witnesses must also have been participants in Tawana’s alleged gang rape. In a heartbeat, Al Sharpton had accused State Trooper Scott Patterson and Assistant District Attorney Steven Pagones of being sex criminals, based on no evidence at all.
Sharpton strode out before an expectant news media and proclaimed that Pagones had murdered Harry Crist to keep his crime against Tawana a secret. Sharpton was reaching down into his dark little soul and saying whatever he thought would serve his purposes best at that moment. Mason, Maddox and Sharpton declared that there was a connection between Governor Mario Cuomo and organized crime, as well as the Ku Klux Klan. It was Sharpton at his most berserk. “Mr. Pagones and his organized crime cronies are suspects!” he ranted on ABC’s Geraldo Rivera Show. Phil Donahue, Nightline and numerous other programs eagerly gave Sharpton a platform on which to showcase his slanders. Sharpton and his sidekicks repeatedly depicted Steven Pagones, an upright husband, father and law enforcement officer as a depraved racist sexual predator. After describing Pagones as a sex criminal at a nationally covered news conference, the morally decrepit Alton Maddox declared, “If I didn’t have direct evidence, I wouldn’t be sitting here saying that.” It was all a lie.
Sharpton taunted Steven Pagones and dared him to sue the loud-mouthed trio. Pagones had taken enough of their lying crap. He sued.
There was a lengthy civil trial which Sharpton, Mason and Maddox kept at a rolling boil with their signature boastful antics. After an exhaustive review of the evidence, the court found that Tawana’s claim that she had been abducted and raped was complete rubbish. In Judge Hickman’s words: “It is probable that in the history of this state, never has a teenager turned the prosecutorial and judicial systems literally upside-down with such false claims.”
The court awarded punitive damages against the lying Tawana Brawley of $180,000. Alton Maddox was suspended from practicing law in 1990 because he refused to participate in an ethics investigation of his role in the Brawley case. C.Vernon Mason was barred from practicing law in 1995 because of “a pattern of professional misconduct.” When last heard from he was a seminary student. Perhaps he will reappear as a shakedown clergyman in the manner of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton.
In 1998 Sharpton was ordered to pay Steven Pagones $65,000 in damages. Sharpton refused to pay the judgment. With accumulating interest and penalties the judgment swelled to $87,000. By January 2001, Steven Pagones had only collected $15,000 by having Sharpton’s salary garnisheed. It was then that a group of wealthy black men stepped in to pay Sharpton’s debt.
This clutch of rich blacks included veteran race baiter Bill Tatum, publisher of the Amsterdam News and two men who have profited handsomely from Jesse Jackson’s shakedown machine: Percy Sutton, the head of Inner City Broadcasting and attorney Johnnie Cochran, who had spent his professional career dealing from a deck full of race cards. Sutton was quoted in the New York Post as saying, “There were enough people who thought it should be done to insulate [Sharpton] from any further controversy,” which is comical. Al Sharpton thrives on controversy. What Percy Sutton really meant was that Sharpton was one of their soul mates.
And what became of Tawana Brawley? She’s now 35 years old and living in the tiny town of Claremont, Virginia. She goes by the name of Tawana Thompson. Her mom says that Tawana is a devout Muslim, following a conversion that began back in the late 80s when Louis Farrakhan, leader of the mock-Islamic Nation of Islam, gave her the name Maryam Muhammad. Occasionally, Tawana returns to New York as a guest of the United African Movement, an Al Sharpton front group that gives her free flights and limousine rides in return for her guest appearances.
Both Tawana and her complicit mother Glenda continue to assert that Tawana was the victim of white racist sexual violence, a claim that was totally discredited by a mountain of medical evidence. Glenda is still with Ralph King. The graying wife killer told the New York Daily News (11/18/07): “I could be looking at the television any day and they say the ‘Tawana Brawley hoax.’ What hoax? How could we make this up and take down the State of New York? We’re just regular people.” He’s delusional.
Glenda, the veteran hoaxer, said she wanted New York’s Governor Spitzer and Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to reopen the case all these years later. This is the same Glenda Brawley who scurried about under cover of darkness, at the direction of Al Sharpton, from one black church to another to elude process servers who might have forced her into a court of law where she would have to repeat her story under oath. Glenda revealed her true motive when she blurted out: “We should be millionaires.” In truth, the morally bankrupt Tawana Brawley should be working off her $180,000 debt to society.
The Duke Rape Hoax
Almost two decades after Tawana’s phony horror story failed to stick as a metaphor for race relations in America, some of the same feature players from the Tawana debacle were back in the news trying to fashion the very same metaphor from a sordid story told by a drug-addled stripper down in North Carolina.
In the late evening of March 13th, 2006 an intoxicated part-time stripper named Crystal Gail Mangum, 27, showed up for a gig at a rented frat house in Durham. Another stripper, Kim Roberts, 31, who had been sent by the same escort service, had been awaiting her arrival for half an hour. It was their first acquaintance. When they entered the frat house they were greeted and offered alcoholic beverages. Ms. Roberts declined. Ms. Mangum drank half her drink, spilled the rest, and then swallowed Ms. Roberts’ drink.
When their tandem striptease began, Ms. Mangum was clearly impaired. She was awkward and inept; she stumbled through a few minutes of her “act.” Right about then, one of the frat boys made a crude suggestion for spicing up her performance, which prompted Ms. Mangum to slap him across his face. It was all downhill from then on. Angry words were exchanged; the women took momentary refuge in a locked bathroom. Both strippers were African American; all the partygoers were members of the Duke University lacrosse team and white. The strippers had been chosen by their placement service – the frat boys had not expressed any racial preference.
The women were to be paid two hundred dollars each for two hour’s effort, but the whole gig had gone south because Crystal was totally wasted. With some difficulty, the guys managed to coax the two women out of the bathroom and send them on their way with a partial payment and a relieved “good night.” This sorry misadventure was amply captured in time-stamped digital photographs by the frat boys’ ever-handy cell phones.
The wee morning hours found Ms. Mangum slumped in the passenger seat of Ms. Roberts’ car in the parking lot of Kroger’s market. A policeman took her into custody. Later, at a mental health facility she would allege that she was gang raped by members of the Duke lacrosse team.
It is unclear even now whether Crystal Mangum was behaving maliciously or whether she believed her untrue accusation. She had a history of mental health problems. What we know is that her many conflicting versions of what happened at the frat house were never challenged by the acting Durham District Attorney Michael Nifong who, just then, desperately needed lots of black folk’s votes to keep his job. It was Nifong’s first political campaign: he was the erstwhile DA because he had been pulled up from traffic court to replace the former DA who had landed a prized judgeship.
Much later, F. Lane Williamson, chairman of the disciplinary committee that would strip Mike Nifong of his state law license, would observe, “This matter has been a fiasco. There’s no doubt about it.” This committee would declare that Nifong rigged the criminal investigation to enhance his chances of winning his first election to office. Nifong was pandering to black racial prejudice. The committee report called Nifong’s manipulations “a clear case of intentional prosecutorial misconduct” that employed “dishonesty, fraud, deceit and misrepresentation.” The report recalled how, in the early days of the case, Nifong had confidently proclaimed to blacks that he wouldn’t allow Durham to become known for “a bunch of lacrosse players from Duke raping a black girl.” Williamson said that the three-judge panel “. . . can draw no other conclusion that those initial statements he made were to further his political ambitions.” The same could be said for the racially inflammatory statements made by Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, who sought to increase their own political capital by pouring gasoline on the fire and recklessly damaging the reputations of three innocent young men.
Public performances by the liberal media, by the racial racketeers, by the leftist academics and by the chanting demonstrators were so weirdly formulaic and so tribal as to suggest that none of these people was engaged in a search for the truth. Crystal Mangum’s lurid lies had simply offered then an eagerly awaited opportunity to luxuriate in intense emotion, to disguise their class envy behind pompous moralizing and to come together in groups for ritualistic expressions of a shared orthodoxy.
Most entertaining of all was the way in which so many blacks revealed their own deepest insecurities while pontificating about what they imagined to be white men’s fantasies about black women. The truth is that fantasizing about black women is not a big white-guy pastime. That’s why the two most popular skin magazines include no more than enough token black women to make the magazines seem “urbane” and “inclusive.” Jesse Jackson may get palpitations about “the history of white men and black women – the special fantasies and realities of exploitation,” but the age of the average lacrosse player is about twenty years: during his lifetime all the cotton has been harvested by machines and all the black folks he knows drive Volvos.
For over a year, those black radio shows that Al Sharpton calls “the drums of the contemporary black community” aired heartfelt exchanges between black hosts and black callers about the alleged humiliations of Crystal Gail Mangum, who was unfailingly sanctified as “a student” and “a mother of two” (later three, father unknown). For a year, thousands of average black folks had gone on the airwaves and exposed their most deep-seated psycho-sexual fantasies about white folks and slave times and the frightening lurking boogeyman of “exploitation.”
When the lying Crystal Mangum and the rogue prosecutor of Durham County, Michael Nifong, were finally undone by telephone records, time-stamped digital photos, surveillance-camera images, taxi logs, eyewitness accounts and lots of DNA evidence, a big fraction of black America was left embarrassingly exposed as a people sadly obsessed by weird sexual fantasies and a severely twisted vision of the nation in which they live today. For liberals the facts of the case were less important than the golden opportunity the case offered them to luxuriate in soul searching and deep feelings. Liberals “just knew” that the accuser was an endearing victim of bestial white racism. A vigil was held to show solidarity with the accuser by some 200 Duke students and faculty members, as well as religious and neighborhood groups.
On March 29th more than 300 people gathered in the residence hall at North Carolina Central University, about three miles from Duke, in support of the accuser, who attended classes at the historically black college. Democrat candidate Mike Nifong journeyed to N.C. Central to assure blacks that his presence there meant that this case would not fade away. A student at North Carolina Central expressed the mood of the protestors when he told Newsweek that he wanted to see the Duke students prosecuted “whether it happened or not. It would be justice for things that happened in the past.” Durham resident Faye Tate echoed this sentiment when she told the News & Observer that “This thing has so many ‘isms,’ if you will. The racism, the sexism, the elitism. It just takes you so far back.”
Of course it does . . . if you want to go backward. The past is a priceless treasure for some people: black mythology insists on the past. For many blacks, stepping into a brighter future means the frightening prospect of casting off the ennobling mantle of victimhood. Without that nasty past they are just ordinary people.
In a garish bit of street theater a paramilitary contingent of the Black Panther Party rolled into Durham and trooped to the frat house wearing their signature combat fatigues and black berets. There, in a militarized rendition of black-Baptist call-and-response, group leader Malik Zulu Shabazz called out: “How do you find the two defendants in the case?” His troops responded, “Guilty!”
On April 15th, five days after it was revealed that none of the various sperm samples taken from Ms. Mangum’s sex organ matched any of the DNA samples taken from the Duke lacrosse team, Mr. Jesse Jackson, with great fanfare, announced that he and his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition would pay the accuser’s college tuition.
Jesse Jackson just couldn’t stop himself from bringing his dopey racial perspectives to the Tawana Brawley Hoax. Two decades later he brought those same perspectives to the Duke Rape Hoax in an essay titled “Duke: Horror and Truth. Here’s a breathless sample:
“Black women: white men. A stripper and a team blowout. The wealthy white athletes – many from prep schools – of Duke, and the working-class woman from historically black North Carolina Central. Race and class and sex. What happened? We don’t know for sure because the Duke players are maintaining a code of silence.
“The history of white men and black women – the special fantasies and realities of exploitation – goes back to the nation’s beginning and the arrival of slaves from Africa. The patterns associated with this history arouse fears and evoke too many bad memories.”
And:
“But Duke is alas probably no worse than other schools in the way African American women are too often perceived. As Rebecca Hall of the University of California in Berkley, who studies images of African American women in the culture, states, “Turn on a music video. A black woman is somebody who has excess sexuality that white men are entitled to.’”
How sad. Both Jackson and Hall have wildly exaggerated notions of the appeal of trashy blaxploitation videos to white people. These presentations are artifacts of black popular culture; they are tailor-made to appeal to the psyches of black people; to white eyes, the garish, strutting, gyrating, pneumatic females who trick out these silly flicks are caricatures; they are human cartoons. They elicit laughter. These bubble-bottomed floosies and the guys with diamonds in their teeth and machine guns in their limos are jokes. Wake up, Jesse! The minstrel show will never die as long as black folks keep reviving it.
Certainly the Duke frat party is not an example of white guys longing to get close to black women. Let’s review the facts: The strippers were selected by the escort service; the Duke students did not know the strippers would be African Americans. The striptease lasted only a few minutes as drug-addled Crystal Mangum stumbled through her act. The festive mood ended abruptly when Crystal smacked one of the partygoers. After that the white guys couldn’t get the two women out of there fast enough. They locked the door after the women departed and they refused to open it when Crystal returned seeking a lost shoe and insisting that she was a police officer.
Mike Nifong never had a case to make. His star witness was a chemically screwed-up mental case whom he refused to interview; her recollections were constantly changing. Nifong didn’t want to interview the accused students either: they had all passed polygraph tests. The star witness was stained inside and out with the fresh DNA of several men, none of whom had attended the party. Nifong was playing for time to get lots of black votes; Durham’s black community rewarded him with a ten-point margin of victory in the November ’06 election.
When the radiant crusade of the self-righteous Left was finally unmasked as prosecutorial fraudulence, political pandering, racial profiteering and a prostitute’s drug-inspired hallucination, the sanctimonious poseurs who had done so much harm did their best to save their soiled reputations. The North Carolina chapter of the NAACP stopped its fevered yapping. Its erstwhile mouthpiece, law professor Irving Joyner, offered its meek closing statement, “Based on my personal knowledge of him and high respect for him [North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper], I accept his conclusions.”
Al Sharpton hasn’t mentioned the case since Crystal Gail Mangum’s rape accusation was revealed to be just as phony as that of Tawana Brawley. The Black Panther Party’s propaganda minister has fallen silent. Jesse Jackson remarked in parting: “We just hope this traumatic experience for all involved ends with a minimum amount of damage.”
Just to be clear: The only people traumatized by this hoax were the members of the Duke lacrosse team, their families, and their veteran coach of sixteen years, who had been precipitously fired by the university’s panicked president. All of the other spotlight-hogging actors, including Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Michael Nifong and the Duke faculty, were enthusiastic tormentors of the falsely accused.
As for Crystal Gail Mangum – she got away free and unpunished. The stated reason for not pursuing the hoaxer was the perception that Mangum could not distinguish reality from her own fantasies. Some commentators hinted that Roy Cooper’s real purpose was to dampen the racial hysteria of Durham’s black community.
The spectacular collapse of the Duke Rape Hoax left the black community and the liberal press corps cut off in mid sentence. Their poisonous rhetoric was left hanging in the air as the falsely accused defendants emerged as poised and stoic victims of ingrained black racism and liberal class envy. The folks who depend on myths of black victimhood to prop up their notions of black nobility were deeply chagrined. Not since a grand jury unmasked Tawana Brawley, her mother Glenda and their advisor Al Sharpton as liars and hoaxers had the liberal bigots been so deflated. Again and again they had tried to make an obscure news item into a neon metaphor for race relations in America, only to discover each time that there had never been a hate crime – only some faker with a personal motive.
The Magic of Hate-Crime Hoaxes
Every false police report is a real crime, but no bureaucracy puts its computer resources to work sorting out bogus hate crime accusations or building profiles of phony-hate-crime fabricators. The few serious reviews of this subject were done by independent scholars. Based on hundreds of case histories it seems that African Americans are the front runners when it comes to staging fake hate crimes. Just as Sinbad could rub his magic lamp and bring forth a genie to do his bidding, so too can any black person call upon the boogeyman of white racism to garner instant sympathy, to promote any racial agenda or to conceal a crime.
For example: In the pre-dawn darkness of September 4th, 2006, the friends of 19-year-old Eric Young brought him to the emergency room of Petaluma Valley Hospital with a serious shoulder injury. He was given palliative care and then transferred to Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital for surgery.
The young black man claimed that just past midnight he had been accosted by a white man who told him that he didn’t belong in that neighborhood. Mr. Young recalled that the white stranger had showered him with racial slurs and had called him a nigger. Eric described how the white racist had assaulted him and how two other white men had joined their comrade to give the unfortunate black victim a nasty beatdown.
It was a shocking accusation: scary white racists were stalking black folks in Petaluma. “The allegation was serious,” said Lt. Dan Fish of the Petaluma police. “It didn’t sound like the kind of thing that happens in Petaluma, and the community was upset.”
That being said, something about Mr. Young’s story tweaked the policeman’s interest: if young Mr. Young had been the victim of a brutal stompfest administered by three hate-filled white racists, why was he without any injuries except for one injured shoulder? When officers interviewed Eric Young a second time, he confessed that he had fabricated the whole story to avoid arrest for underage drinking. Two witnesses explained that Eric had been very drunk when he wrestled with a friend in Oak Hill Park. The “victim” had injured himself when he rolled onto his shoulder during the tussle. (Petaluma Argus-Courier, 9/15/06)
Nothing about his story seemed preposterous to Eric Young himself – his character was shaped by a culture that steeps its children in frightening stories of the white boogeyman. Sometimes the incentive to conjure up the genie of white racism is the chance to make some unearned money.
Mister Green and Mister White
Back in April of 1999, James Green transformed his home at 7515 Seminole in Baytown into a carefully stage crafted burglary crime scene – complete with racist graffiti. (Houston Chronicle, 9/22/04). He covered his walls with anti-black racial slurs; he spiced up his text with a drawing of someone being dragged by the neck behind a vehicle. Then he filed an insurance claim.
“Why wouldn’t you just leave the race thing out of it?” asked the Harris County Assistant District Attorney. “Why would you make it worse?”
“I don’t know, sir,” answered James Green, 46, at his sentencing hearing. In September of 2001, Mr. Green made a second insurance claim after burning down his house. He was sentenced to ten years for insurance fraud.
Four years later, another black man, Samuel White, also of Harris County, Texas, was facing foreclosure for non-payment of taxes, homeowner’s fees and past-due mortgage payments. It was then that Mr. White decided to scrawl anti-black racial slurs throughout his house and then burn his house to the ground to collect on his homeowner’s insurance. Arson investigators had seen it all before. Mr. White was charged with first-degree felony arson. (KPRC-TV, Houston, 1/18/07)
Exploiting that Ol’ Time Symbolism
For those hoaxers who can’t bring themselves to burn their homes to the ground, a bogus cross burning might work just as well. After a big blazing cross was burned into his lawn, Mr. De’Andre June, 47, of Anoka, Minnesota received the sympathy of his community.
“We really pushed forward with this as a bias crime,” recalled Anoka police Captain Philip Johanson. But a canvassing of the neighborhood turned up no likely suspects. Offers of support kept rolling in.
The nasty bias crime was reported on KSTP-TV news and there was De’Andre June pouring out his tale of woe. That’s when inmates in the Anoka County jail saw him doing his victim act. They informed a deputy that Mr. June had talked of faking a bias crime to get “sympathy and money from the public with a cross burning since he was a black man.” (Star Tribune, 9/29/07). Mr. June had been their fellow inmate only two days before; he had a criminal history that included burglary, auto theft and credit card fraud.
Julie Swiler of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota, which had rushed to denounce the cross burning, opined that “When a hate incident is fabricated, it diminishes the serious message that an act of hate harms individuals and causes harm to society.” She missed the point that a phony racist hate crime is itself a hate crime because it is an intentional slandering of people of another race. Bogus hate crimes provoke needless suspicion; they are a temptation to retribution for no reason.
When police appeared at his home to arrest him on an unrelated felony warrant, De’Andre June became a fountain of profanities. His agitation grew until he threw himself onto the floor and began faking a heart attack.
Hanged by Their Own Noose
On November 21st, 2006, fire department employees at an East Baltimore station house discovered a knotted rope and a threatening handwritten note that included a figure with a noose. The note read, “We can’t hang the cheaters but we can hang the failures. NO EMT-1, NO JOB.”
This discovery caused quite a stir. It prompted a federal investigation of possible civil rights violations. The town’s mayor, Sheila Dixon, was quick to blame the boogeyman of white racism. Stephen G. Fulgate, who heads the city fire officers’ union observed: “The reaction from the NAACP, the mayor and the Vulcan Blazers [representing black firemen] was sickening, and we’re going to demand an apology.”
The mayor had to stifle her indignation when a black fireman named Donald Maynard confessed that he had written the note and planted the rope which he later “discovered.” He was not charged with any crime.
News of the knotted-rope hoax made the newspapers a day after the city’s inspector general released a report that confirmed that the highest scoring test takers on two recent Fire Department promotions examinations had cheated their way to the top of the promotion list. The Vulcan Blazers had denounced accusations of cheating as motivated by white racism, but an investigation revealed that five African-American firemen had crammed for the promotions exam using a forbidden copy of a previous exam. (Baltimore Sun, 12/2/07)
Pretending to be the White Boogeyman
Sometimes black hoaxers are content to frighten their black neighbors the false impression that Ku Klux Klansmen have visited their doorsteps. The residents of Heritage Acres Apartments in Suffolk, Virginia, were startled at finding their neighborhood papered with fliers emblazoned with the headline: “KKK congratulates gang bangers for slaughtering of black people” and lots of anti-black commentary. Tenants complained to the police.
The black woman who distributed this hateful literature was not charged with any crime, nor was she identified by name in the March 3, 2006 Daily News article. (Hampton Roads, Va.) She explained that she wanted to shock young African Americans.
With the Klan tottering on the brink of extinction it is necessary for black hoaxers to pretend to be the vanishing Klan. Without victimizers there can be no victims and that’s really scary news to folks who crave to cast themselves in the role of the saintly suffering victim.
Greetings from the Boogeyman
If counterfeit Klan fliers don’t set the desired tone, then how about hate-packed greeting cards? In November of 2004, three African-American teachers at an Elizabeth, New Jersey, grammar school found Thanksgiving cards in their school mailboxes that were scrawled with threats and anti-black comments. The handwritten messages were left for special ed teacher Rondell Taylor and two of his female colleagues at Peterstown School No. 3. Mr. Taylor said he felt threatened; he requested a transfer to another school and it was granted.
Mr. Taylor was fired on March 1st, 2005, after a handwriting expert determined that Mr. Taylor himself had written all the anti-black hate screeds. (Newark Star Ledger, 3/9/05)
Rondell just wanted a transfer to another school. For him, that was enough reason to poison the school’s work environment with suspicions of closeted racism.
Hate Crime Hoaxing 101
American schools are a hotbed of hate-crime hoaxing. There are several reasons for this: the social tone on most American campuses is set by liberals who are reflexively sympathetic with anyone claiming to be the victim of a bias crime; liberals share the hoaxer’s schema that minority folks are threatened by bigots at every moment, which blunts the liberals’ critical faculties. Young people who are away from home for the first time may seek the comfort of bonding closely with people very much like themselves. There is nothing like the specter of racism to enhance those warm feelings of solidarity among the huddled young minority folk.
The nasty jolt of raw racial hostility has the oddly comforting effect of confirming the minority-group’s shared stereotypes of outsiders. The minority group experiences the thrill of self-righteousness and moral superiority that they imagine is theirs by virtue of their shared victimhood; a dramatic hate crime hoax offers emotional rewards that money can’t buy. A bogus hate crime also sets the stage for lots of wailing and chest pounding and demands for more special programs for the wounded minority and lots more sensitivity training for those insensitive non-minority people, and way more minority hiring, not to mention the pressing need for the sanctuaries of single-race dormitories and single-race student unions and single-race fraternities and sororities.
For minority youngsters who were shaped by local cultures with well-established traditions of anti-intellectualism, close encounters with kids who have been cracking the books since kindergarten can be intimidating. Unfamiliar academic demands can heighten feelings of alienation; it can rattle self confidence; it can spark nagging feelings of inferiority. As many an unhappy minority person has figured out, all these negatives can be turned around with one splashy hate crime hoax.
Mark Potok has researched hate crimes for the Southern Poverty Law Center. He has observed that, “A person who is a victim of a hate crime can probably expect to get almost universal sympathy on a college campus. Out in the world at large, that’s not necessarily true. But on a college campus, you are very likely to get the support of the administration, the faculty and virtually all the students. It tends to put you in the limelight very quickly.” (Associated Press, 4/20/04)
A case in point: Miss Molly Martin was the president of the Student Senate at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina. She was a flaming white liberal. After Molly appointed two black students to the Senate, anonymous letters and fliers appeared on campus cautioning students not to vote for her unless she promised an all-black Student Senate. Miss Martin was already renowned for promoting the creation of a full-time directorship of African-American affairs at Guilford. The student population of about twenty-six hundred included about ninety blacks.
A week after the fliers appeared, an emotional Miss Martin recounted how she had been attacked in her office late in the evening. She had been struck unconscious, she said. Her assailant had unbuttoned her blouse and written the words “NIGGER LOVER” on her chest. With a show of strength, she refused medical attention and asked the campus security not to notify the local police. She was re-elected president of the Student Senate on a wave of sympathy.
A very self-certain Edward LaMont Williams, president of the college’s African-American Cultural Society, declared: “Guilford students weren’t ready to start dealing with the issues we were presenting.” A shaken college administration immediately succumbed to a wave of liberal guilt and jacked up campus security, made a pledge to speed up the selection of a director of African-American affairs, promised spanking new dialogues on race relations, and made plans to expand the Guilford curriculum with a greater focus on race. The college also inaugurated a 24-hour hotline to report racial incidents and lots more diversity training for faculty and staff. Did I mention their new institute for race relations and diversity?
Melvin “Skip” Alston, head of North Carolina’s NAACP chapter, was quick to accuse Guilford’s president Dr. Donald W. McNemar of having a “laid-back attitude” about the racist attack on poor Molly Martin. “Skip” Alston declared that he would demand an investigation by the state Attorney General’s Office if an arrest was not made within two weeks. Liberal college presidents just hate to be criticized by the NAACP.
Miss Martin’s righteous-victim posture began to unravel when police investigators could not recreate the assault she described. No one had seen any damage to her office. No one had seen any writing on her chest. There was no bruise from the blow that she claimed had struck her unconscious. The police also thought it surpassingly queer that an assailant who had just delivered a violent blow to her head would instantly thereafter become someone who would carefully unbutton her blouse rather than rip it open.
As suspicion and speculation increased, Molly Martin, senate president and black-empowerment visionary, abruptly withdrew from Guilford College. In her wake she left an apology “for acts that were inappropriate and that were injurious.”
When reasoned arguments are insufficient to defend students’ political aims, some students are tempted to concoct fictional dramas, complete with fraudulent crime scenes, to achieve their political goals. The temptation is great because the rewards are great and the probability of punishment is slight. They know that like-minded advocates will scramble to their defense – both students and faculty. And besides, weren’t colleges encouraging each and every identity group to express its “voice” or “narrative,” with little regard to whether these narratives were factual? The post-modern theory adored by liberals dismisses the notion that truth exists. If a story packs an emotional wallop, the liberals simply declare that the story is “true” on some more meaningful level. The fraudulent narratives of Tawana Brawley, Rigoberta Menchu and Margaret Mead have all been unmasked as pathetic falsehoods, but liberals cling to them as “truthful” because they fit the template of left-wing theoretical social dynamics. The bogus texts of Menchu and Mead are still required reading on many college campuses.
Exploiting the Hangman’s Noose
At Duke University, in November of 1997, a black figure was hanged in effigy from a tree where members of the Black Student Alliance were scheduled to congregate. A nearby Class of 1948 granite bench was slathered with tar. The mock lynching was instantly characterized as a hate crime by a Duke administrator. Duke’s student newspaper showcased a letter from undergraduate Stephen Poon that branded the dangling black figure with a noose around its neck, a “racial crime.” Members of the Black Student Alliance were quick to claim that the swinging effigy was evidence of just how horrible race relations were at Duke University. Obligatory shock and dismay was expressed by everyone.
Several days after the incident, two black students took prideful credit for the mock lynching. They wanted to make a political statement, which included creating the illusion of anti-black hostility at Duke. Never mind that slandering other races by staging bogus racist hate crimes is an excellent way to provoke anti-black sentiments.
Slandering White People for Small and Obscure Reasons
The motives for hate-crime hoaxing can be trivial. For reasons unknown, Douglas A. Spadey, 18, a black student at Edinboro University, unlawfully accessed another student’s e-mail account and used it as a launching site from which to bombard other black students with threatening racist anti-black messages. He later confessed and was charged with unlawful use of a computer, harassment and making terroristic threats. (AP, 11/16/06) Spreading racial discord is not a chargeable offense.
For three weeks minority students at the University of Iowa’s College of Dentistry were menaced with e-mail messages and a bomb threat. A heap of red noodles was dumped on a black student’s doorstep with an explanatory note: the red noodles represented a dead nigger’s brain. The FBI backtracked the source computer and made an arrest. African-American dental student Tarsha Michelle Claiborne confessed to being the mystery “white racist.” (Jewish World Review)
Two black students at San Francisco State staged separate hate-crime hoaxes in September of 2003. Allison Jackson filed a police report claiming that someone had scrawled a racial slur on her dorm room door. When she was confronted with a handwriting analysis, Allison confessed that she had faked the incident because she wanted “a roommate change,” and the housing staff weren’t moving fast enough to suit her.
That same month, Leah Miller fabricated a racist hate note and scratched a racial epithet into her dorm room door. She fessed up under questioning. She apologized, saying she had “tried to be part of something.” She was spiffing up her street cred with the other black students by pretending to bebooge the target of racists.
Black Students Smear Ole Miss
The year was 2002 and the community that is the University of Mississippi was celebrating the 40th anniversary of the desegregation of its classrooms, which began with the admittance of James Meredith in 1962. The school was rightfully proud of the changes it had weathered and the challenges it had overcome. So you can imagine the shock and dismay that swept the campus when obscene racist slurs were scrawled on the dorm room doors of several African-American Ole Miss students.
On the night of November sixth, black students in the Kincannon Hall dormitory were the seeming targets of white racists who had defaced the fourth, fifth and sixth floor doors and hallways with vulgar racist sentiments such as “Fucking Hoe Nigger” and “Fucking Nigger.” There were vulgar sexual references and a chalk drawing of someone dangling from a tree limb by a hangman’s noose.
The national news media dashed to Mississippi to broadcast this apparent racist hate crime to the entire world. Black activists and white liberals were quick to say that Ole Miss hadn’t really made any progress in four decades: the boogeyman of white racism was still lurking around every corner.
University administrators were quick to form a “Committee on Sensitivity and Respect.” They denounced the nameless white racists. The Office of Minority Affairs rallied a 200-demonstrator protest, showcased as “Say No to Racism: A Call to Action.” The organization’s director demanded new “programs and procedures” to teach white people to be more sensitive to minority sensibilities. All the activists agreed that this racist affront made a mockery of the school’s 40th anniversary of racial desegregation.
School administrators made noises about lodging federal hate crimes charges against the perpetrators. The campus cops said the perps were subject to arrest. The word “felony” was tossed about. University Housing Director Bill McCartney said the culprits could loose the privilege of lodging on campus. Everyone agreed that the knuckle-dragging white racists had spoiled the party and poisoned race relations at the school.
Weeks past without a resolution. Then, as students drifted away from campus for winter break, the school disclosed that three black students had confessed to the crime. The strident tone of the administration had faded; the local police were held at arm’s length; the school elders began referring to the ugly vandalism as “a prank.” The activists who had been demanding felony prosecutions fell silent. Chancellor Robert Khayat called the whole affair “regrettable.”
Of the perpetrators who had vandalized the school and damaged race relations and then given false statements to investigators, the chancellor said, “You are dealing with people who are under 21 . . . who are in college, and when you invoke criminal processes, serious ramifications follow.” He was of the opinion that “. . . this should be handled through our student judiciary. This is a community issue. This is not, at this point, an issue for the courts.” With that said, it was clear to everyone that when the racial provocateurs are black, Ole Miss will apply a softer double standard of condemnation.
People who favored a single standard of judgment for all perpetrators took notice of how the administration had waited until December 12th to disclose that the perps were African American. By then most students had already left the campus for winter break, a month after some students knew the names of the black criminals. (Daily Mississippian)
A growing sense of the administration’s favoritism toward blacks was confirmed when the administration refused to disclose the names of the hate-crime hoaxers who had done $600 worth of damage to the dormitory. By not filing a criminal complaint with the local police, the school could hide the vandals’ identities behind something called the Family Educational Right to Privacy Act. Though the racial provocateurs were compelled to write a letter of apology to be published in the campus newspaper, The Daily Mississippian, the letter was published anonymously.
Though the editors of the paper argued that “Anyone on this campus who would commit such an act as this should be expelled with no exceptions regarding race or creed,” the matter was tossed before the University Judicial Council, which deliberated for four hours and then let the perps off with probation and writing assignments and just enough cash payback to cover the cleanup.
One Kincannon Hall resident summed it all up on the campus newspaper’s message board: “This punishment is a joke. When they met with us about the incident after it happened they told us they knew it was a white resident on our floor; neither of these was true. They also told us that this was a federal offense and that the guilty party would be arrested and charged with a hate crime and at the very least expelled from the university . . . The truth is that when the university was ‘positive’ it was a white student, they were ready to punish them to the fullest extent to send a message of intolerance. This ruling sends the exact opposite message.”
Two years later, the University of Louisville was splashed with racist graffiti. Racist fliers were left on the windshields of cars in the school’s parking lots. These ugly sentiments sparked protest rallies. The indignant defenders of black dignity presented a list of demands to university president Jim Ramsey. Everyone agreed that the white racists must be hunted down and unmasked. But, once again, the poisoning of race relations on campus was dismissed as a mere prank as soon as black students admitted doing all the dirty work.
The Trinity Hoax
When the third minority student received a threatening letter, university president Greg L. Waybright was sufficiently rattled to call for the evacuation of the school’s minority students. After all, the school had its reputation to protect.
Trinity International University is a conservative, Bible-focused, Evangelical Christian college situated in Bannockburn, Illinois, about 30 miles north of Chicago. Of the 1,104 undergraduates, 74% were white, 14% were black and 4% were Hispanic in 2005. The graduate school had 1,101 students that year.
The threatening letters were increasingly menacing. The final message said the author had a gun. A saddened president Waybright said his school could not isolate itself from human frailty. Additional guards and a beefed-up police presence patrolled the campus. Scores of black and Hispanic students were sent away to a nearby hotel. They were joined by an African-American administrator. Other students left the campus to stay with neighboring families.
Police Chief Kevin Tracz said, “We have no leads or suspects.” He said the letters, handwritten on notebook paper, seemed to be the work of one person. He said that local and federal investigators were on the job. The menacing messages were definitely a hate crime, he said, and they were on their way to a crime lab for analysis. School president Waybright said he didn’t know when the minority students would return to class.
Students gathered in a prayer vigil in the April chill. Many took to wearing yellow T-shirts as a show of solidarity with their secluded minority classmates. The shirts were remnants from an African-American festival the previous February. “So many students wanted to wear them that they sent out a campus voicemail today saying that they would begin selling them again,” said Trinity’s director of communications.
The day after president Waybright urged 200 minority students to seek refuge off campus the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson was on the scene to encourage the hate-message recipients, their parents and their professors. In his signature style, Jackson intoned: “What is painful to me today is to talk to these students – so young, so beautiful – who feel like a target is on their back because they are black. Today their faith is tested in real time. Will they face evil with courage or will they face evil with fear?”
Jackson praised the school’s quick response to the threat. President Waybright recalled: “I chose to quickly evacuate all college students of color. Shortly thereafter I decided that we would ‘strongly encourage’ our graduate students of color to also be housed overnight at an undisclosed secure location. The evacuation began immediately. . .”
It was all very emotional. Days later, cops broke the case. The demented white racist with a gun turned out to be a young black woman named Alicia Hardin. Alicia just didn’t like the school; she wanted to be closer to her friends. She figured that if mommy and daddy felt their darling girl was endangered at Trinity, then they would be more receptive to her plea for a change of schools.
Once again a total nobody had created social upheaval and heightened racial tension by conjuring up the boogeyman of white racism. It’s a stereotype that’s just too useful – to magical – to abandon.
With the hoaxer exposed as an unhappy black girl, you’d think that folks would cluck their tongues for one minute about Alicia’s gratuitous exploitation of a nasty racial stereotype, but no . . . Like so many hate-crime hoaxers, Alicia Hardin became an object of sympathy. Trinity students gathered to offer prayers for her. The drunk-on-piety Evangelicals were blind to the fact that Alicia Hardin had done something genuinely evil and she had done it repeatedly.
Before the dithering Christians could come to their senses, the master of racial-conflict exploitation, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, intruded once again. By a clever twist of verbal legerdemain he managed to blame the Trinity hate-crime hoax on white people. “Racism,” he declared, “whether it is actual or manipulated, is morally wrong. We must work to clean up the environment that makes such a hoax believable, a hoax that does harm to so many individuals and the institution.”
Got that? He’s saying that the reason Alicia Hardin’s hoax was taken seriously was because white folks were forever messing up “the environment” with their low-down racist ways. So, if all white people were saints, then black folks would just laugh off racist death threats? Not likely. Trinity’s president didn’t urge his minority students to seek refuge because the threatening messages were racist, he did so because they were threatening. The racist part was just an additional clue that informed him about how nutty the terrorist was. The threat about having a gun was also a clue. It’s pretty hypocritical of Jackson to bemoan “the environment” that he and his fellow racial provocateurs have nurtured for profit for so many decades. Jackson has been a reflexive defender of hate-crime hoaxers and outright criminals since his rush to sanctify the lying Tawana Brawley.
On rare occasions a white person will fake a racist hate crime, but these oddball perpetrators are almost always liberals who blame white racists for their woes. I have already cited the case of liberal Molly Martin. Another example is Kerri Dunn, a liberal psychology professor who was scheduled to address students of Claremont College on the subject of racial tolerance. To puff up her street cred she smeared her own car with spray-painted racist, sexist and anti-Jew slurs, such as “kike” and “nigger lover” and “whore.”
Black people were rightly irked when a white jerk named Charles Stuart fatally shot his wife in their car on a secluded Boston street and then blamed a phantom black man for her death. Likewise, when white mom Susan Smith drowned her sons by rolling her vehicle into a lake and then blamed a phantom black carjacker, black people were not amused. Black crime statistics are bad enough without white criminals blaming their misdeeds on black people. That said, it should be noted that neither Stuart nor Smith ever claimed that they were targeted because of their race; they simply claimed to be the random victims of a couple of random black criminals: they were hoaxing, but they weren’t hate-crime hoaxing. When hate-crime hoaxers claim to be the victims of racists they are cultivating the false impression that white racism is lurking everywhere. It says something encouraging about America that its racial provocateurs must now prop up their sagging enterprise by dashing to the scene of so many “racist” hoax crimes.
Now, let us imagine that white folks suddenly took a hankering to stage crafting totally phony hate crimes, complete with torn blouses and racist “die whitey die” graffiti, demands for special protections for whites and more sensitivity training for black students and black faculty. Would black folks feel unjustly defamed? When the hoaxer was exposed as a fraud, would black folks be irked when the hoaxer became an object of sympathy? To this day, Tawana Brawley receives an annual torrent of birthday cards from sympathetic blacks. Tawana is chauffeured to gatherings at Al Sharpton’s expense to keep alive the lie that Tawana was the victim of the Big White Boogeyman. She is paid by blacks to repeat her anti-white slanders decades after laboratory science proved that Tawana was not a sex-crime victim. But what are black folks going to believe, laboratory science or their cherished mythology of the White Boogeyman? Would liberal journalists and academics establish a parallel tradition of letting anti-black hoaxing by whites just disappear down the memory hole once the hoaxer was exposed as a white phony? Not likely. The liberal world view is rooted in the myth that white Americans thrive at the expense of black Americans. That’s why the media slant on black hoaxers is always one of understanding rather than indignation. Given the fact that hate-crime hoaxes by blacks have provoked revenge attacks on innocent white people, you’d think the media would behave more responsibly, but the media are now show business enterprises and the whites-abusing-blacks scenario is a proven ratings winner.
By now it should be clear that America is being victimized by wannabee victims – publicity seekers desperate for our attention. There is no crime too despicable for them to fake. As we have seen, the race-conscious hothouse atmosphere of the American campus is an ideal environment for hate crime hoaxing. Even at Ole Miss, when blacks shamelessly exploit lynching imagery and paint the walls with “nigger, nigger, nigger . . .” the uproar fades to a whisper when the hoaxers are revealed, once again, to be blacks with a political agenda or a personal problem. The poisonous residue of these hoaxes is then blamed on white people: if whites weren’t so racist no one would believe the tall tales black people tell.
Self Glorification Through Victimhood
The way black American culture glorifies the victim encourages hate-crime hoaxing. The victim achieves a special status if he is the victim of a victimizer of mythical stature, such as the White Racist Boogeyman. The glory of victim status is so strong that it can be shared by close association with any bona fide victim. Here are two examples . . .
In 1963, James Hood broke the color barrier by being the first black student admitted to the University of Alabama. He and another African American integrated the school soon after Democrat Governor George Wallace made his notorious “segregation forever” speech in the schoolhouse doorway. For many years Mr. Hood enhanced his stature in the black community by retelling how he had witnessed Ku Klux Klansmen lynch and burn his uncle in Alabama in the 1950s.
Mr. Hood, who rose to become the chairman of police, firefighting and paramedic training at Madison Area Technical College in Madison, Wisconsin, had been describing his uncle’s horrible murder and mutilation since at least 1989. He would graphically and emotionally bring to life how the Klansmen had lynched his uncle before his terrified young eyes and then set the dead man’s body ablaze. He would tell this tale to crowds numbering in the hundreds.
When journalists questioned the historical accuracy of his uncle’s death, James Hood admitted that the chilling story was a total fabrication. He had invented every detail. (Associated Press)
In early November of 1997, U.S. District Judge James Ware withdrew his nomination to America’s largest appeals court after admitting that he had lied for years about being the brother of a 13-year-old boy slain by a racist in Birmingham, Alabama, back in 1963. Faking victimhood-by-association had cost Judge Ware a coveted seat on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
For years, James Ware had enjoyed moving audiences and interviewers with his eyewitness account of the death of Virgil Ware, who had been fatally shot by a white teenager. The judge never tired of telling folks how Virgil’s death “molded me into a person who was hungry for justice.” In other words, Judge Ware had been using Virgil’s death story as a résumé enhancement. He had been appointed to the federal bench by President Bush in 1990 and nominated for the appeals court by President Clinton. When confronted, he acknowledged that his story was untrue, but only after a newspaper reported that Virgil Ware’s family knew nothing of Judge Ware.
Virgil Ware’s real brother James had rarely spoken of his brother’s murder; he said it was a painful memory made worse by Judge Ware’s impersonation of him. Virgil’s brother said he won’t contact the judge. “No, I won’t bother him if he doesn’t think enough to call me and apologize,” he said. “I think I’ll just let the good Lord handle it.” (Newhouse News Service, 11/7/97)
Conclusion
Segregation is back. It’s the foster child of identity-group politics. “Students of color” clamor for racially exclusive dormitories, race-specific academic departments, one-race-only student unions and segregated graduation ceremonies. Some liberals argue that minority students need these sanctuaries; they blame the same “environment” that Jesse Jackson blamed for the hate-crime hoax at Trinity University. Rather than simply admitting that they are more at ease in segregated comfort zones, some blacks defend their preferences by defaming whites as racists or just plain insensitive. When whites don’t play their assigned roles as racist primitives, phony hate crimes can be stage crafted to shock school administrators into expanding the much-coveted race-exclusive comfort zones. It’s sad to see the beneficiaries of the civil rights revolution squandering the hard-won ideal of racial integration.
The ranks of the politically-driven hate-crime hoaxers have been swelled with insurance swindlers, the emotionally needy and those who use their hoaxes to conceal other crimes. The negative consequences of these hate-crime hoaxes are magnified by the pandering liberal media who embrace every hate-crime hoax as a confirmation of their prejudice that white Americans are bent on crushing the life out of black folks. Rather than offer all Americans some genuine insight on American social dynamics, the liberal media continue to employ news stories to reinforce orthodox liberal schemas. A typical example of how the liberal media works to preserve its cherished paradigms is the way the New York Times mismanaged its reporting of the Duke Rape Hoax. To the very end, long after even the nutty fringe bloggers had conceded that Crystal Gail Mangum was a delusional dope head, the Times struggled to save the rogue prosecutor’s crumbling case against the innocent and maligned Duke lacrosse players, even going so far as to yank a journalist off the story when he deviated from the narrow liberal slant that the story must be all about privileged white guys from “million-dollar homes” defiling a struggling African American mom who was forced to do striptease acts to support her two darling children. The Times did not want to hear about the accumulating body of evidence that defense attorneys were gathering. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. didn’t want to hear about crime-scene evidence, time-stamped cell phone photos, taxi logs, ATM surveillance images, dormitory entry records, eyewitness accounts, or DNA. The man who runs the New York Times urgently wanted to tell a story about white racism and sneering upper-class privilege. He wanted everyone to see America through the prism of liberal prejudice and he wasn’t about to let a little thing like “the evidence” stand in his way.
After the ignominious collapse of Mike Nifong’s case and his expulsion from the legal profession, the New York Times became the subject of withering scrutiny. Sadder still was the way in which the lesser liberal media slavishly mimicked the course set by the flagship of liberal reportage.
The damage done to American society by the liberal talking style has always been magnified by the African-American listening style. Few blacks read the New York Times. Word of mouth and rumor sharing is the way millions of blacks keep up with events. This is especially true in cities like Washington, D.C. where every second black person is illiterate. In 1993 the U.S. Department of Education published the results of a nationwide examination of adult literacy. The test measured the ability of adults to understand the point of a newspaper article, the ability to read a pay stub, to understand a bus schedule – stuff like that. On a scale of zero to 500, whites were more than five times as likely as blacks to score above 325. Blacks were more than twice as likely to score below 225 – the lowest level of reading comprehension. (Adult Literacy in America, Dept. of Education, 1993, p.32-37). Black radio programs, the ones Al Sharpton calls “the drums of the contemporary black community,” add their peculiar spin, as do blogs and websites that cater to blacks.
The special problem with hate-crime hoax reporting is that once a story has been exposed as a hoax, all the activists who were shouting the loudest suddenly feel an urgent need to change the subject – to talk about something else – anything else. The hoax story is suddenly an embarrassment and must be abruptly abandoned. All those people who formed an opinion based on rumors or radio chat or blog-o-sphere buzz are suddenly left with no way to flush the emotion-charged falsehoods from their minds. By this mechanism, bogus hate-crime lore becomes a permanent addition to popular black mythology – a permanent part of contemporary black oral history.
The rubbish that millions of black people believe to be true may alter the destiny of our nation: black people vote. At the very moment when presidential candidate Barack Obama had managed to hoodwink America into believing that he was a special black dude who had stylishly risen above the whole icky race thing, someone in a broadcasting studio spent a few dollars to purchase the ruminations of Obama’s moral mentor, Pastor Jeremiah A. Wright, conveniently preserved for sale as audio recordings. In these recordings the ranting reverend accuses the democratically-elected people who manage America’s affairs of such things as creating the HIV virus to decimate black communities across America, of flooding black communities with illegal drugs and of inoculating black folks with syphilis. What is most striking about these recordings is the boisterous ascent given to these lunatic rants by Obama’s fellow black parishioners. Jeremiah Wright is incapable of substantiating any of his slanderous accusations. His parishioners don’t care. Polling of black folks demonstrates that one in three blacks is utterly uncritical of such twaddle: their paranoia is a kind of binding energy that keeps their cherished racially-exclusive comfort zones intact. Blacks embrace such garbage because it warms their feelings of righteous victimhood: being hated by the White Boogeyman confirms their personal holiness. When Jesse Jackson rushes to throw the white-hot spotlight on every hate-crime hoax he is keeping fear alive. That’s why “comfort-zone” black folks love him; their “ghetto” is a sanctuary where black people’s assumptions remain safely unchallenged.
The testimony of real hate-crime victims is a kind of memoir that derives its moral authority from experience. We are riveted by the testimonials of people who have endured true hardship, be it cancer, mental illness, drug addiction, alcoholism, sexual abuse, an appalling childhood or a hate crime. We listen intently to those witnesses to historical moments – the Holocaust, Vietnam, the civil rights struggle, and such – who want to put their experiences on the record. All of these memoirs pack a wallop because of the moral authority of experience. We warm to these narratives with our disbelief suspended; we have an emotional investment in the narrator’s honesty; our unguarded trust in the narrator renders us vulnerable.
So it brings a special sense of betrayal when those people who have gripped our hearts with wrenching tales of appalling racism are unmasked as lying egoists with petty agendas who have cheapened the dialogue on race in America and who have stained the innocent with their horrid false accusations.
Thomas Clough
Copyright 2008
March 31, 2008