By Lee A. Daniels

When it came time to flee, she thought racism
would provide the avenue of escape

Is America getting better at this – at figuring out and rejecting the racist scapegoating of black Americans?

I’m sure Bonnie Sweeten wishes it were not so.

Sweeten, a blond, white suburban Philadelphia mother of three, briefly drew national attention last week by falsely claiming she and her 9-year-old daughter had been carjacked and abducted by two black men-thus tying her pretend predicament to the most notorious obsession of America’s racist past: the hulking black brute ravishing the virginal white female.

But her attempt to join the list of “missing white females” which certain cable networks feast on these days was soon exposed. The scheme she concocted had so many holes in it that, in an ironic twist, the once time-tested racist image she sought to use to apparently obscure her own misdeeds quickly unraveled and led to her capture at an upscale hotel at Disney World.

There was no “deliberate” accident on that busy suburban boulevard. There were no black men jumping out of a Cadillac to grab her and her daughter and stuff them in the car’s trunk. Sweeten had not made the desperate-sounding calls to 911 from the trunk of the fictional car as it sped to parts unknown.

It sounded suspicious to me almost from the beginning; and, although they immediately issued an AMBER alert and called in the FBI, now we know the police were suspicious almost from the beginning, too.

And yet, I wonder …

I wonder why within a day of the hoax being exposed, the mainstream media had virtually completely whitewashed the story’s racial element out of its continuing coverage of what had become a minor and sad crime story. By Friday, the news stories I saw had dropped all reference to the fact that Sweeten had claimed her kidnappers were black.

That’s not a good thing. Indeed, it bespeaks a panicked running for cover, a trying to escape the need to consider why this 38-year-old white woman, by all accounts a sterling wife, mother and civic-minded suburbanite, would use an explosive racial charge to cover her flight from responsibility.

Why didn’t Bonnie Sweeten think that claiming her kidnappers were white would be sufficient cover? Why did they have to be black-and in a Cadillac, of all things?

Sweeten was drawing on the most deep-rooted racist images in the American imagination, wasn’t she? I was tempted at first to write dated. But then I realized that’s just it. Those images, those stereotypes, those beliefs aren’t dated. They still have power; they still used by some Americans to not only mold beliefs but motivate behavior as well.

For who can deny that that primal racist image–blond white woman and daughter, on the one hand; the dangerous black males, on the other-was the central factor in Sweeten’s dim-witted plan of escape?

It was all so familiar to me, not only because the history of the lethal use of that charge is the lived experience of every thinking black American but because fourteen years ago, in February 1995, I had written a long report on the deeper meanings of the Susan Smith murder case in South Carolina in 1994 and the Charles Stuart murder case in Boston in 1989.

Both Smith’s and Stuart’s initial claims that a black man was responsible for the crimes provoked a frenzy of media attention (and in Boston, a wholesale police violation of blacks’ constitutional rights). When Smith and Stuart themselves were proven to have killed, respectively, Smith’s two children, and Stuart’s pregnant wife, the media mob quickly melted away.*

The e-mail traffic the Bonnie Sweeten fake abduction provoked when she was arrested is evidence that many blacks remember those sensational cases, and their broader meaning. Now, when the extraordinary vilification of Judge Sonia Sotomayor recalls the vicious charges  once hurled-just last year-against Michelle Obama, there should be no shrinking from facing and exploring the racism that continues to motivate speech and behavior across the spectrum of American society.

Lee A. Daniels is Senior Editor of TheDefendersOnline and Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.

*  [footnote:  "The American Way: Blame a Black Man," EMERGE Magazine, February, 1995; also cf. the same article in The Best of EMERGE Magazine, George E. Curry, ed., pp. 593-4 reprinted below in its entirety]

The American Way: Blame a Black Man

LEE A. DANIELS, FEBRUARY 1995

The crime, as the tearful, young mother reported it, was demonic–a carjacking in which two infants had been swept up by a thief as he roared off with the car. The mother’s pleas for her sons’ safe return, made to a national media who had gathered in the small city of Union, South Carolina, to report the story’s denouement in all its pathos, were wrenching.

Much of the nation was transfixed by the pictures of the angelic infants and by Susan Smith’s mask of grieving motherhood.

Looming as a backdrop to these images of innocence was Smith’s description of the demon figure: The brother in the skullcap. The Black Bogeyman.

But the nation soon discovered there was no Black devil. Smith, the young, White mother of the tear-streaked face, possessed by demons of her own, later confessed to authorities that she strapped her sons into her car and plunged them to their deaths in a nearby lake.

But until the moment when the local police officials bluffed a confession out of her, there was that image, loose again on the surface of the national consciousness-the image out of the warped mind of  the ante-bellum South, out of Thomas Dixon’s 1905 novel, The Clansman, and D.W Griffith’s 1915 film, Birth of a Nation.

There was that image again–the one that had proved so valuable to three generations of White Southern politicians during the era of Grand Apartheid, and to George Bush, the Republican Party’s 1988 standard-bearer, who restored it to a position of “respectability” in the White-centrist discourse on race relations.

There was that image again–the one that a White Boston businessman named Charles Stuart had used in 1989 to try to hide the fact that he had murdered his pregnant wife for her life insurance. Stuart’s story that a Black man killed his wife and also shot him ignited a police state of siege for African-American men in Boston for nearly three weeks. A Black man with a criminal record was eventually arrested and charged with the crime. Not until Stuart killed himself in January 1990 as his ruse unraveled, was that man–and Boston’s Black community–cleared of the crime.

In a bizarre twist, Jesse Anderson, the man killed with Jeffrey Dahmer in Wisconsin prison by a Black inmate, was serving time for the 1992 killing of his wife. He had falsely claimed that two Black men had stabbed and bludgeoned his wife to death.

Susan Smith knew the powerful grip the image of the dangerous Black man has on White Americans’ psyche.

And who can doubt it? In her descent into pathological desperation, that knowledge became for her, as it had for Charles Stuart, the crucial element in calculating that she could commit the gruesome crime and get away with it. The police of Union, South Carolina, to their credit, behaved differently than those of Boston.

They weren’t as gullible, or as willing to trample the rights of Black people based upon the mere word of a White person.

But is there anyone who believes that the story of Susan Smith will be the end of the racist scapegoating of African-Americans, a compulsion that once again suffuses American society?

If so, read the latest tract of respectable racism, The Bell Curve, and think about all those who have said, seemingly with a straight face, that it properly raises the question of whether African-Americans are intellectually inferior to Whites. These are people well-skilled in the art of evading moral responsibility. They are the spiritual descendants of those who rationalized the traffic in chattel slavery, who turned a blind eye to the decimation of Native-Americans and who declared that at least Hitler made the trains run on time while claiming not to know about the human cargo and deadly destination.

These are people who, because the assertion of “inferiority’” is dressed in pseudo-scientific garb, would pretend that it is not what it really is: The declaration by those of one ethnic group that another ethnic group is “inferior” and therefore has no right to exist except by the superior group’s permission. They would pretend that The Bell Curve–the thesis of which could be posed only in a climate of rising intolerance–is not a declaration of war.

And they would pretend that the hidden recess of the White American psyche, out of which these anti-Black images come, does not contain vile images of other groups, as well. They would pretend that the California electorate’s approval last November of the anti-Asian and anti-Hispanic immigration law, Proposition 187, does not prove that other images are also “loose” in the public discourse.

No, racial scapegoating–the dynamic by which those figments of the racist imagination get injected into the public discourse on civil society in America-has returned.

This is an era in which Black male students at predominantly White colleges are sometimes stopped by the campus police and ordered to show their student identification cards–as if it’s inconceivable that young Black men have any legitimate reason to be on a college campus.

This is an era in which one David Milch, the cocreator and an executive producer of the television drama, NYPD Blue, can proclaim to a seminar of Hollywood writers his “unapologetic embrace of racism” and go on to assert that Blacks struggle to attain the necessary “emotional doubleness” to be good screenwriter.

This is an era in which the executives running Denny’s, a one thousand five hundred-restaurant chain, would establish a de facto regime of discrimination against Blacks in hiring and promotion policies and treatment of its Black customers.

This is an era in which the Republican Party candidate for comptroller in the State of New York, seeking to unseat the sitting Black comptroller, ran the most openly racist election campaign seen in a northern state in years. He lost, but still outpolled the African-American candidate in all but seven of the state’s sixty-two counties.

Indeed, because the prism of racism ensures the distortion of reality, racial scapegoating often comes into play even when the people and the incidents are real.

An example is the story of Robert Sandifer Jr., the eleven-year-old Chicago boy whose stray gunfire killed a fourteen-year-old girl instead of the boy gang members had ordered “hit.” Robert, or “Yummy” as he was called, was then allegedly murdered by his teenaged compadres.

Sandifer’s body was discovered by Chicago police on September 1, four days after a burst from the semiautomatic pistol he was carrying had struck and killed Shavon Dean. Reporters, columnists and many of the sociologists, psychologists, politicians, educators and others quoted in the media, invoked the purplest “mean streets of the ghetto” prose as they sifted through the details of the boy’s brief, tragic life, and the poor and dangerous environment in which he lived, killed and died.

But at the same time that the larger society was lavishing so much attention on Robert Sandifer–his pictured graced a Time magazine cover–a spasm of violent acts committed by other children coursed through American society, stunning communities from coast to coast.

In Wenatchee, Washington, police arrested two twelve-year-old boys, Manuel Sancha and John Duncan, for shooting to death a migrant worker. Police said the boys shot the fifty-year-old man eighteen times–continuing to shoot him after he was dead–apparently because the man had yelled at them for firing a gun too close to his house.

On the same day Sandifer’s body was found, in High Bridge, New Jersey, a blue-collar town in the northwest part of the state, a thirteen-year-old boy shot and killed his eleven-year-old friend, Jacob Tracy, because Jacob wouldn’t accept an apology from a third boy.

In the Bronx, New York, also on that same day, a thirteen-year-old boy, Moises Prado, was charged as an adult with four counts of murder in connection with the firebombing of a grocery store in which four people died. Police officials, who said they were seeking three others for questioning, said they did not know why the store had been attacked.

All of these incidents seemed as equally made-to-order for sensationalist coverage as the Robert Sandifer case. But none of them drew anything close to that.

Why?

Because in these other cases, the young killers were not African-American, nor products of the Black ghetto, and therefore not eligible to be neatly boxed in the “mean street” frame-up that is used to implicitly declare the problems of the ghettos a manifestation of Blacks’ pathological attitudes–a “Negro problem”–which has nothing to do with mainstream (White) American society.

In fact, all of these incidents underscore the growing evidence that deeply rooted facet of American culture, which celebrates the recourse to violence as the quickest and best way to resolve problems, has taken hold of the minds of more young people, be they in the ghetto or in the White American “mainstream.”

FBI statistics show that the fastest growth in violent crime in the United States is occurring among teenagers: violent crimes by persons eighteen and under grew by 47 percent from 1988 to 1992, as compared to 18 percent among adults twenty-five and older.

FBI statistics also show that crimes of violence in cities and towns with populations under 1 million are increasing slightly, while such incidents are declining in the densest urban enclaves. In a Time/CNN poll, 30 percent of those surveyed said they felt suburban crime was at least as serious as urban crime–double the number who said that six years earlier.

Where is the propensity and willingness among children–and not just those confined to the ghettos and barrios–to commit acts of horrific violence coming from?

What led the thirteen-year-old White boy in High Bridge, New Jersey, to shoot his friend simply because the boy would not accept an apology? Did he not know that he likely would be killing his friend? Where had he learned that pulling the trigger of a gun was a way to “solve a problem” of someone not doing what one wanted done? What was going through his mind when he was raising the gun and pulling the trigger? Was it so very different from what Robert Sandifer was thinking the moment he released the deadly barrage from his gun?

The same questions can be asked of the two boys in Washington State; and the boy in the Bronx; and of fourteen-year-old Eric Smith, of Bath. New York, a White youth who was convicted of murder as an adult in August for bludgeoning and strangling a four-year-old boy; and of fifteen-year-old Gerard McCra III, a White Massachusetts youth accused of killing his mother, father and e1even-year-old sister, apparently because his parents wouldn’t allow his girlfriend to spend the night with him.

These, of course, are questions that should be posed to a much larger group of males, who overwhelmingly fill the ranks of the violent. After all, what is the real difference between the murderous behavior of an eleven-year-old or a thirteen-year old and the murderous behavior of a sixteen-year-old or a twenty-two-year-old? Why would one be any more shocking?

There are, of course, many things mat have contributed to me explosion of violence among children–and young adults–that have been developing since the 1960s. One of the chief causes is me easy availability of handguns. Thirteen percent of all incidents involving guns in schools occur in preschool and elementary schools.

Sissela Bok, a philosopher and ethicist who has studied violence in America, maintains that during the past three decades television, where “make-believe” violence saturates Saturday morning cartoons as well as prime-time programming, has become a new and dangerous element in me mix of forces which promote violence in the society.

“Never before has [such a stream of violence been] piped into the homes [via television}," says Bok, a fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. Bok's father was Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish social scientist, economist and author of the classic 1944 study of Black-White relations in America, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy.

According to Bok's study, "TV Violence, Children and the Press," there are, on average, five to six violent acts per hour in prime-time programs, and twenty to twenty-five violent acts per hour on Saturday morning children's programs. The effect on children is especially devastating. Before finishing grade school, the average child will have watched 8,000 murders and 100,000 acts of violence on TV, the study says. Children from low-income families watch television the most.

"Children can't tell it's nor real," Bok asserts, "so they are not fully aware that the copying of those violent acts will have real life-and-death consequences. They are numbed by it, socialized to it."

Bok says the exposure of children to television violence must be reduced.  Things can be done," she says. "Look at the campaign mounted against drunk driving. A mobilization occurred and it got results. The same thing can happen in this, too."

A starting point, she says, would be full-fledged discussion, not just about the impact of television, but also about the other "interlocking factors contributing to violence in America."

The linking of Robert Sandifer's case with the other simultaneous incidents of violence committed by White children could have been that starting point.

Thus, what may be most chilling about the recent spasm of child-killers is that the glaring double standard in the news coverage of those incidents indicates how difficult it is to discuss many social problems outside of a racist framework--a framework that demands that the "flaws" of African-Americans be racially categorized and made highly visible but that the "flaws" of Whites never be ethnically referenced.

This is the "invidious gaze" dynamic, the psychological device that enables some to profess their shock at the deaths of Shavon Dean and Robert Sandifer, while they studiously avoid examining the murderous rampages of White youth. It enables them to shed crocodile tears for youth in the nation's ghettos and barrios but not support means to eliminate the virulent discrimination in employment, housing and schooling that keeps them trapped there.

This compulsive, invidious gazing upon African·Americans and the labeling of certain societal problems--drug usage, welfare dependency, relations between men and women, so-called separatism on college campuses, and so on-as  a "Negro problem" produces an extraordinary distortion of reality.

It should come as no surprise that when a Robert Sandifer kills, the public discussion is about why Black children arc killing each other and what is wrong with Black people. But when White children kill, no references arc made to their ethnicity or what their individual actions indicate about the state of White America.

In this, White America continues to follow a deeply ingrained and pathological instinct: to implicitly assert that Whites as a group are "chosen" people who have no flaws and to deny the humanity of African-Americans by pretending their problems are simply "Negro problems," not American problems.

In that sense, the nation's Black ghettos [and Hispanic barrios] serve the same function as slavery did for the first two centuries of the European presence in America: They are places of internal exile, created and maintained by violence, on which the most violent impulses in the society can be brought to bear without affecting White society.

This is why when incidents of violence occur in urban, suburban or rural White communities, someone often will remark “but this isn’t supposed to happen here.” White America has often disguised its own problems, fears and anxieties with a “Black face.”

This is not to deny that the severe problems [hat plague poor Black youth have led some of them to become predators–predators who must be stopped and saved, for their sake and ours. It is to declare, first, that we should recognize they have become predators precisely because Black people continue to be victimized by the systematic violence directed against all of them, especially those trapped in ghettos, and second, that even as we mount programs to reduce all forms of violence in Black communities, we should resist thinking of this as a “Negro problem.” Today’s evidence that the “mean streets” produced by America’s violent culture can be anywhere is too overwhelming.

Thus, to read much of the news stories and commentary about me Robert Sandifer case is to see another vivid example of the dishonesty embedded in the public discourse on race.

As Toni Morrison writes in Playing in the Dark, Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, “language … can powerfully evoke and enforce hidden signs of racial superiority, cultural hegemony, and dismissive ‘othering’ of people.

“Race has become metaphorical,” Morrison writes, “a way of referring to and disguising forces, events, classes, and expressions of social decay and economic division far more threatening to the body politic than biological ‘race’ ever was …. it seems that it has a utility far beyond economy, beyond the sequestering of classes from one another, and has assumed a metaphorical life so completely embedded in daily discourse that it is perhaps more necessary and more on display than ever before.”

Indeed, the media’s coverage of the recent racially tinged cases proves, once again, that Black America remains the “mirror” most White Americans don’t want to look into: They don’t want to acknowledge that, because we really are one nation indivisible, there is no “Negro problem.” There is only, as author Gunnar Myrdal pointed out fifty years ago, an American dilemma which encompasses a wide variety of profound problems. Black America’s burden, unfortunately, is that resolving that dilemma is what frightens White America most of all.