Lessons From the Central Park Five

Hey all!

Here is a great article by Patricia Williams about the Central Park 5.  Recently on PBS, a documentary was shown about this travesty of justice.

Ms. Williams raises one important question I want you all to think about, because it is so relevant to the way race, and by extension gender, are looked at through society.  What I mean by that is what I say in my "unlearning" workshops: reference determines value.  The reference point you put on an experience will determine the value you put on that experience.  The question: If this film had been made by a black filmmaker, would it have gotten as much publicity or looked at as objectively as it has been because a white man made this documentary film?

And with that, read this article...take a trip back through time and realize that, in relationship to my question, the more things change, the more they remain the same?  


Patricia J. Williams  A professor of law at Columbia University

Lessons From the Central Park Five

On April 16, PBS broadcast The Central Park Five, a film by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon. The documentary, based on Sarah’s book of the same name, reviews the hysteria that accompanied the 1990 trial of five young men accused of raping and beating Trisha Meili as she was jogging. Those young men ­Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Antron McCray, Korey Wise and Kevin Richardson­ were exonerated in 2002 when convicted murderer Matias Reyes confessed, and his DNA was found to match the evidence from Meili’s rape and a string of other unsolved rapes in or near the park.

I sat in on the trial and have written in these pages about my concern that there was no evidence linking the defendants to the crime (“Reasons for Doubt,” December 12, 2002). The footprints and semen didn’t match; there was no blood or mud on the defendants’ clothing; their supposed confessions were factually wrong; and one police officer testified that the wording in three of the written confessions was his own. A forensic expert testified that the hair samples were “more consistent” with Caucasian than African-American hair, but the prosecution successfully argued that this meant they were not inconsistent. Even after their exoneration, prosecutor Linda Fairstein maintained that the young men had to have been responsible for a number of other park muggings that night, but the timeline does not add up, and none of the victims of those muggings were able to conclusively identify any of the defendants. Finally, no less than Bob Herbert called the victim “the single most effective and sympathetic witness I have ever seen.” Sympathetic she surely was. Except that she didn’t “witness” anything related to the defendants; her injuries were so severe she could remember nothing about the attack.

If ever there was a cautionary tale about why our system presumes innocence, this was it. Yet as Herbert has reflected, in 1990 New Yorkers, including himself, “wanted them to be guilty. And when a desire is strong enough it can overwhelm such flimsy stuff as facts and truth. Reality is a funny thing. It is what we say it is.” Alas, that’s not the definition of reality: it’s the definition of a lie, imposed violently, carelessly, with the full power of the state. So what is the takeaway from the ruined lives of five young men?

First, in direct response to the case, Donald Trump mounted a successful campaign to reinstate the death penalty in New York. But the only thing that could have made this miscarriage of justice worse is if the defendants had been executed with the dispatch Trump howled for. We must rethink myths about the infallible catharsis of the death penalty.

Second, the convictions resulted from a corrupt process. In a clear breach of ethics, the prosecution directed the police investigation from the moment Meili was found, even questioning the defendants before they were charged and in the absence of counsel. The police, too, broke more rules on collecting evidence and questioning suspects than I can list here: but, most unusual, they also testified to much of it­s right there in the court record.

Worst of all, the defense attorneys were beyond dismal. Only one was a public defender with real criminal experience. Like many unfamiliar with the criminal justice marketplace, the defendants mistakenly believed that a private attorney is better than a (generally more practiced) public defender. At one point in the film, Yusef Salaam recalls his alarm when he saw Robert Burns, his lawyer, sleeping through crucial testimony. Indeed, Burns fell asleep nearly every day. He slept in full view of the judge and the press. He slept so hard, he once woke up and objected to himself. I fault the judge in this: no responsible officer of the court should have allowed Burns to continue. Competency of counsel is a basic constitutional right. At a moment when law, lawyers and even law schools are under political assault, we ignore their role in a democratic system at our collective peril.

Third, why is it still so hard to make this case the focus of serious public reflection? Given that it was one of the best-covered criminal trials in our history, the 2002 exoneration slipped by with relatively little notice. There is also a great deal of hand-wringing about why “no one” saw the flaws in the case when it was prosecuted. This ignores the fact that the courtroom was visited daily by throngs of people who did see those flaws ­and proclaimed them loudly: family, friends, neighbors, residents of Harlem. But they were poor and black and relentlessly mocked in the media as deluded apologists. There were also small cadres of activists who marched in the streets for the defendants, most visibly Al Sharpton. But sadly, a number of them, including Sharpton, squandered that spotlight by blaming the jogger’s boyfriend, for which there was no evidence.

Ultimately, identities of raced gender and gendered race mediated who was heard saying what. Bob Herbert, writing for the Daily News, was hailed not just for his belief that the defendants were guilty, but for his exemplary black manhood, a finger-wagging counterpoint to Sharpton. I got calls from reporters who wanted to know what I “as a black feminist” thought but who hung up when I expressed concern about the strength of the case. To worry that the state had arrested the wrong people was called knee-jerk and Afrocentric; it was heard as an indictment of the victim, as siding with race over gender, rather than as a concern that the real perpetrator might still be loose. Even today, I wonder if this film would be having the same reception had a black filmmaker made it. Would a Charles Burnett or John Singleton have had to negotiate suspicion about motives and sympathies that white directors, positioned in not a few minds as inherently neutral and unbiased, do not? That’s a terrible thought all by itself: if in 2013 we remain as quietly committed to the same counterfactual presumptions of veracity, guilt and “reality” that we did in 1990, then this film documents only a terrible history repeating itself over and over again.

Dave Zirin's Analysis of "42" The Jackie Robinson Story

Hi all!

I have not seen this movie yet, but intend to.  I wanted to share my blog followers Dave Zirin's analysis of the film and the larger questions it poses.  As soon as I see the film, I will write my own analysis and share with you.

Dave Zirin 

April 17, 2013

This week in Major League Baseball was Jackie Robinson Day. This is when Commissioner Bud Selig honors the man who broke the color line in 1947 and pats MLB on the back for being “a leader in the Civil Rights Movement.” It’s possible to appreciate that Selig honors one of the 20th Century’s great anti-racist heroes. It’s also possible, out of respect for Jackie Robinson, to resent the hell out of it.

Ignored on Jackie Robinson Day are baseball’s decades of racism before Jackie broke the color line. Ignored are Robinson’s own critiques of baseball’s bigoted front office hiring policies. Ignored is the continuance of the racism that surrounds the game in 2013. Ignored is the fact that today in Arizona, Latino players live in fear of being stopped by police for not having their papers in order.

The recent film 42 about Jackie Robinson’s entry into the Major Leagues shares this contradiction. I can certainly understand why many people I respect love this film. I can understand why a teacher I know thinks it’s a great primer for young people who don’t know Jackie’s story. I understand why, given the high production values and loving depictions, Jackie Robinson’s family has been outspoken in their appreciation. But I didn’t like it, and with all respect, I want to make the case that I don’t believe Jackie Robinson would have liked it either.

Early in the film, Jackie Robinson, played by newcomer Chadwick Boseman, says, "I don't think it matters what I believe. Only what I do." Unfortunately that quote is like a guiding compass for all that follows. The filmmakers don't seem to care what Robinson­a deeply political human being­believed either. Instead 42 rests on the classical Hollywood formula of “Heroic individual sees obstacle. Obstacle is overcome. The End.” That works for Die Hard or American Pie. It doesn’t work for a story about an individual deeply immersed and affected by the grand social movements and events of his time. Jackie Robinson's experience was shaped by the Dixiecrats who ruled his Georgia birthplace, the mass struggles of the 1930s, World War II, the anti-communist witch-hunts and later the Civil Rights and Black Freedom struggles. To tell his tale as one of individual triumph through his singular greatness is to not tell the story at all.

This is particularly ironic since Jackie Robinson spent the last years of his life in a grueling fight against his own mythos. He hated that his tribulations from the 1940s were used to sell a story about an individualistic, Booker T. Washington approach to fighting racism.

As he said in a speech, “All these guys who were saying that we've got it made through athletics, it's just not so. You as an individual can make it, but I think we've got to concern ourselves with the masses of the people­ not by what happens as an individual, so I merely tell these youngsters when I go out: certainly I've had opportunities that they haven't had, but because I've had these opportunities doesn't mean that I've forgotten.”

This was a man tortured by the fact that his own experience was used as a cudgel against building a public, fighting movement against racial injustice. He wanted to shift the discussion of his own narrative from one of individual achievement to the stubborn continuance of institutionalized racism in the United States. The film, however, is a celebration of the individual and if you know how that pained Mr. Robinson, that is indeed a bitter pill.

The film's original sin was to set the action entirely in 1946 and 1947. Imagine if Spike Lee had chosen to tell the story of Malcolm X by only focusing on 1959-1960 when he was a leader in the Nation of Islam, with no mention of his troubled past or the way his own politics changed later in life. Malcolm X without an “arc” isn’t Malcolm X. Jackie Robinson without an “arc” is just Frodo Baggins in a baseball uniform. The absence of an arc means we don’t get the labor marches in the 1930s to integrate baseball. We don’t get his court martial while in the army (alluded to in the film without detail). We don’t get Jackie Robinson’s testimony in 1949 at the House of Un-American Activities Committee against Paul Robeson. We don’t get his later anguish over what he did to Robeson. We don’t get his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement when he was a barnstorming speaker across the south. We don’t get his public feud with Malcolm X, where Malcolm derided him as a “White man’s hero” and he gave it right back saying, "Malcolm is very militant on Harlem street corners where militancy is not that dangerous. I don't see him in Birmingham.” We don’t get his daring, loving obituary to Malcolm after his 1965 assassination at a time when the press­black and white­was throwing dirt on his grave. We don’t get his support of the 1968 Olympic boycotters. We don’t get the way his wife Rachel became an educated political figure who cared deeply about Africa, as well as racial and gender justice in America. We don’t get the Jackie Robinson who died at 52, looking 20 years older, broken by the weight of his own myth. We don’t get Raging Bull. We get Rocky III.

But if the focus of 42 is only going to be on 1946 and 1947, then there is still a lot to cover: namely Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey, Jackie Robinson and their relationship to the Negro Leagues. Rickey ­with Robinson’s support ­established a pattern followed by other owners (with the notable exception of Bill Veeck), of refusing to compensate them for their players. On the day Robinson signed with the Dodgers, Rickey said, "There is no Negro League as such as far as I'm concerned. [They] are not leagues and have no right to expect organized baseball to respect them." This led to the destruction of the largest national black owned business in the United States.

You would never know this from 42. Instead, the film chooses to affix a halo to Branch Rickey’s head. Instead, under a prosthetic mask, Harrison Ford plays Rickey as a great white savior, and not even Han Solo can make that go down smoothly. Fairing better than Ford is the terrific performance of Chadwick Boseman as Robinson. Jackie Robinson could be sensitive about his voice, which was clipped and somewhat high-pitched. Boseman’s voice is so smoky it could cure a ham, and his eyes and manner give hints of an internal life the film otherwise ignores.

There is no doubt in my mind that Jackie Robinson, if alive, would call on Bud Selig and Major League Baseball to stop using his history as an excuse to do nothing about the racial issues that currently plague the game. But there is also no doubt in my mind that Jackie Robinson, ever the pragmatist, also would support this film publicly. He was an honorable person who would have been humbled by the effort made to make him look like a hero. He would have seen the value in being a role model of pride and perseverance for the young. But at home, alone, he would have thought about it. And he would have seethed. 

Another Boston Tragedy to Look At?

Yesterday in Boston was a sad day.  I don't need to go into all the thoughts and feelings, because I'm sure we all feel sad and most likely, outraged.

But I was thinking about another tragedy that happened yesterday that not many people were talking about.  And that was when it was reported that a person or group of people tackled a "Saudi" man who was seen running away from the scene, and ultimately held him there for the police.  It was also reporting that he was "cooperating."  What choice do you think he really had?

That, to me, was sad.  That to me, was an outrage.  Gee, I thought, there were more white people running from the scene than Saudi men.  Why weren't more white people tackled and held for police?

The answer is pretty obvious, but yet invisible and manifests the existential reluctance that exists in our country around telling the truth, to ourselves and each other.  And that is this: racial profiling is alive and well and rears its ugly head exactly in situations like this.  Also, Boston is far from the standard of racial harmony and co-existence, so in that sense, profiling is par for the course.

I can only imagine what went through that man's mind.  Here he was running from a horrible scene, for his own safety, running from terror, and then another form of terror in the form of a white mob is coming toward him at high speed.  Hmm, do I stop? Do I keep running?  Who knows what happened.  I wasn't there.  But nevertheless, he gets tackled and held for police.  What a sad irony.

You can run, but you can't hide.  Racial profiling is so alive and well, just like the memories of 9/11 and yesterday in Boston.

"When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn?"