6 pages
no outside sources, only use the materials I posted below.
Papper 1: Race and Rumor – Race, Crime, and Morality
Reading Response of – Whispers on the Color Line, “Cries and Whispers: Race and False Accusations,” pp. 191-209.
Additional Readings in this section (for question 4 to do the comparison):
1. The Global Grapevine, “There Goes the Neighborhood: Latino Migrants and Immigration Rumors,” pp.95-122.
2. “The ‘Knockout Game’: Moral Panic and the Politics of White Victimhood,” pp. 85-94.
Writing Guidelines:
11 or 12 point Times New Roman or Calibri font only
Double-spaced
One-inch margins on all sides
Numbered pages in upper right corner
Proper Citations Required (You may use footnotes, endnotes, and in-text citations)
Your name, course number, and date on a separate cover sheet.
Separate works cited page
(Response papers that do not meet these guidelines will be penalized)
Format:
This paper should not merely be a summary of the reading itself. Rather, the paper will be graded based on the following inclusions:
1. An overview of the author’s main arguments (Approximately 3 or more pages)
2. What overall argument is the author making? What specific examples does the author focus on in the reading?
3. How is this argument being made? (e.g., What kind of data is being used by the author to support her argument?)
4. How does this argument support or refute arguments made by other authors in the section?
2. Your personal critical response to the reading (Approximately 2 pages)
3. What, if anything, do you find convincing about the argument being made?
4. What problems and/or oversights do you see in the reading?
5. What, specifically, do you think this article contributes to broader discussions of the topic?
Your essay should include:
1) an introductory paragraph providing a general overview (preview) of the main body of your essay and your conclusions
2) main body (summary and critical response)
3) concluding paragraph
Grading Rubric:
Response papers will be graded according to the following criteria:
1. Content and Development (Total points: 80)
1. Paper addresses the main arguments and issue(s) raised: 50 Points
1. Critical response is substantive: 30 Points (Well-formed, thoughtful, and detailed responses to the reading. Minimum total of 5 double-spaced pages per paper.)
2. Mechanics (Total points: 10)
1. Rules of spelling, grammar, usage, and punctuation are followed: 10 Points
3. Readability and Style (Total points: 10)
1. Sentences are complete, clear, and concise, and the tone is appropriate to the content and assignment: 10 Points
100 points total per paper, 30% of your over grade.
SAGE
Los Angeles,
London,
New Delhi,
Singapore,
Washington DC
Race & Class
Copyright © 2015 Institute of Race Relations, Vol. 56(4): 85 –94
10.1177/0306396814567411 http://rac.sagepub.com
The ‘knockout game’: moral
panic and the politics of white
victimhood
MIKE KING
Abstract: In the fall of 2013, the ‘knockout game’ – random black-on-white
assaults – became the dominant storyline in the US media. Despite no measurable
increase in these types of attacks, a moral panic emerged that drew from and
amplified numerous previous panics around race and violent crime. While
in many ways the ‘knockout game’ is the latest iteration of exaggerated and
projected white fears of black violence in the US, the current racial formation is
one that increasingly promotes the idea that white Americans are systematically
subordinated. In spite of a lack of material evidence to support this claim, media
outlets have played a key role in stoking racialised moral panics and normalising
what had once been fringe theories of white racial victimhood – to the extent
that more than half of white working-class Americans feel they are part of an
oppressed racial group.
Keywords: black criminalisation, Fox News, knockout game, media, moral panic,
political correctness, racial media representation, Tea Party, Trayvon Martin,
white victimhood
Mike King is in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, SUNY – Oneonta. His
research focuses primarily on the policing of protest, and he is currently writing on the policing
of Occupy Oakland, as well as the Ferguson, MO protests that followed the police killing of
Mike Brown.
567411 RAC0010.1177/0306396814567411Race & ClassKing
research-article2015
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1177%2F0306396814567411&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2015-03-30
86 Race & Class 56(4)
Within a span of about one week, in late November 2013, the ‘knockout game’ –
young black men randomly attacking white strangers for fun – became the domi-
nant storyline across the American news media. This previously unheard of
phenomenon became an overnight epidemic. Reports of ‘knockout game’ attacks
emerged daily – in Philadelphia, New York, Syracuse, Saint Louis, Washington
DC, Chicago and elsewhere. The same collection of video clips could be seen on
all the major cable news outlets and many local nightly news programmes. The
videos, taken mostly from surveillance cameras and cellphone videos posted on
the internet, showed groups of black men casually walking down the street and
sucker-punching a white passerby, without a word and for no apparent reason.
What had started as a far-right trope in a self-published book by Colin Flaherty,
discussed in more detail below, was picked up and persistently amplified by Fox
News, becoming the latest in a long line of racialised moral panics.1 Within days,
CNN was answering its own question of whether the ‘knockout game’ was real or
not, saying that it must be real because CNN was talking about it. Al Sharpton heeded
a call from Bill O’Reilly, FOX TV host and political commentator, for an apology.
Since then, ‘knockout game’ legislation has been introduced in a number of states.
New York City’s chief of police, Raymond Kelly, issued a public statement
solely addressing this issue, saying that there was no evidence of these types of
random assaults increasing, while calling on the media to engage in responsible
journalism, check their facts, and refrain from creating a crime wave where there
was none. At no point was the existence of such a formal or informal game or
growing trend shown to be real. The video clips, graphic and disturbing as they
are, were an anecdotal amalgam of footage selected from all over the country
over a span of years. In contrast to the alarm raised by the ‘knockout game’, the
most recent available data from the Bureau of Justice shows a marked decrease in
random assaults, including black assaults on white strangers, not to mention the
far greater likelihood of white-on-white stranger attacks.
While the epidemic is a hoax, unsupported by empirical evidence, it is also part
of a long lineage of projected white fear of black violence that dates back to slav-
ery. The current sociopolitical foundation upon which this crisis was formulated
needs to be examined more closely. This moral panic shines a concentrated spot-
light onto the state of race relations in ‘post-racial’ America, particularly the per-
petuation of the trope of white people as racialised victims, as well as the more
general foundations of knowledge and power in an increasingly reactionary and
postmodern American political landscape.
Manufacturing panic
Stanley Cohen’s 1972 Folk Devils and Moral Panics,2 and Stuart Hall et al.’s 1978
analysis of the racialised media constructions of crime panics,3 provide a useful
theoretical background to understanding the intersection of race, crime and moral
panic in and through the media. The extent to which new panics – based on events
real, exaggerated or imagined – can emerge, resonate and spread, in spite of little
King: The ‘knockout game’: moral panic and the politics of white victimhood 87
substantiation in the case of the ‘knockout game’, is both disturbing and of long
standing. Cohen shows how moral panics often draw upon, and also reproduce,
longstanding racialised conceptions, fears and anxieties: ‘The process of spurious
attribution is not, of course, random. The audience has existing stereotypes of
other folk devils to draw upon and, as with racial stereotyping, there is a readily
available composite image which the new picture can be grafted on to.’4 Moral
panics like the ‘knockout game’ have historically been a core part of the repro-
duction of white supremacist ideas, practices and structures in the US. The course
of development of the ‘knockout game’ moral panic evidences many elements of
white racism, fear and violence against African Americans that stretch back to the
days of slavery.
United States history is rife with examples of moral panics regarding real and
imagined black deviance and criminality and, often, responses of vigilante, white
mob violence or disproportionate state punishment. The relationship between per-
ceptions of crime and white supremacist ideology 100 years ago, as analysed by
Khalil Muhammad in The Condemnation of Blackness, have surely evolved, but one
would be hard-pressed to find ways in which they have fundamentally changed:
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the statistical rhetoric of the ‘Negro
criminal’ became a proxy for a national discourse on black inferiority. As an
‘objective’ measure, it also became a tool to shield white Americans from the
charge of racism when they used black crime statistics to support discrimina-
tory public policies and social welfare practices.5
What should have been a primary question among responsible journalists
before the story was ever covered in November 2013 – ‘Is the knockout game a
real and increasing trend?’ – was one that was eventually raised by the New York
Times and CNN.6 Neither resolved the question by drawing on crime statistics, or
using sceptical police officials as the last word on the subject, as they would have
done in relation to almost any other crime story. Far from there being any statisti-
cal basis, even in local contexts, for the claim that the ‘knockout game’ is a real
and increasing trend, the official statistics on assault that account for race paint a
very different picture from the isolated anecdotes that fuelled this panic.
The most recent data reported by the Bureau of Justice illustrate that violent
crime overall is about 25 per cent of what it was twenty years ago.7 More specific
to the ‘knockout game’, in terms of assault (under which the knockout attacks
would be classified), white people are five times as likely to be assaulted by another white
person as by a black person.8 The overall likelihood of a white person being a victim
more generally of violent crime is down 22 per cent from what it was ten years
ago.9 No police department came forward with recent data suggesting there had
been a spike in ‘knockout’ attacks, with NYPD chief Kelly stating very clearly that
there was no increase in these types of attacks. How did the media come to give so
much credence to a crime theory that was supported by neither data nor police
officials? In tracing this moral panic, it is essential to interrogate its origins.
88 Race & Class 56(4)
These lie in what had been an obscure self-published book called White Girl
Bleed A Lot: the return of racial violence to America by Colin Flaherty. Flaherty con-
tributes to the far-right WorldNetDaily. The book has since become an Amazon
bestseller in the category of Civil Rights & Liberties. After the release of the book
in 2012, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups in the
US, released a profile of Flaherty that concluded he was a ‘White Nationalist
propagandist’:
In July [2012], Flaherty appeared as a guest on the Lowell, Mass.-based
Malevolent Freedom Radio, a white nationalist show whose motto is ‘embrace
white culture’ and whose logo is the Schwartze Sonne, or black sun, a Nazi
occult symbol. Telling Malevolent Freedom host Dean Anderson that he’s not
part of ‘the [White Nationalist] movement,’ Flaherty declared, ‘I’m just a guy
that likes to write … I just have my eyes open. My attitude is, I’m going to tell
you what’s happening now, and if you want to freak out about it, I really don’t
care.’10
Flaherty’s book is over 400 pages and is devoted to exposing ‘racial violence’,
by which he means solely highlighting instances of black-on-white crime, as well
as ‘black mob behavior’, including, for example, flashmobs. He devotes an entire
chapter to the ‘knockout game’ (made available for free by Brietbart News in the
middle of this November 2013 panic).11 Using anectodal data, and premising his
research as committed to uncovering the widespread white victimhood that the
liberal media refuses to cover, it is easy to see how his theses might resonate with
many Tea Party white Americans, with varying fears, hostility, anger and insecu-
rity related to (or projected onto) racial minorities.
Of the many questions that arise regarding the way the ‘knockout game’
became a dominant news story (and one that is currently reshaping laws in many
states), is, how did this ‘White Nationalist writer’, writing for a fringe, conspiracy
theory-laden website, come to dominate the media, social and political landscape,
positing a crime trend that had no statistical support whatsoever?
Fox News played an integral role in making the ‘knockout game’ a major news
story in the wider mainstream media. Like a bully, browbeating other kids into
fighting by calling them ‘chicken’, Fox News has on several occasions forced its
competitors onto its terrain by covering similarly questionable ‘news stories’
while constantly and aggressively reiterating that it was bringing the ‘truth to the
people’, and insisting that CNN and others, the so-called ‘liberal media’ estab-
lishment, were too afraid, duplicitous or biased to do so.
Race, knowledge, power and the emerging ‘white victim’
The widespread combination of pervasive ahistoricism and concentration on
individuals as victims or villains in modern race politics, a combination devoid of
any analysis of social structure, has opened the door for white people to label
King: The ‘knockout game’: moral panic and the politics of white victimhood 89
themselves a racialised group – a group that is systematically discriminated
against because of their race. They point to (often imaginary) affirmative action or
welfare programmes, political correctness, and successful individuals of colour
(of whom Obama is a figurehead) to posit an economic, political and cultural
system that gives unfair advantage to people of colour. A Public Religion Research
Institute survey in 2012 found that 47 per cent of all Americans and 60 per cent of
the white working class thought that discrimination against whites was just as
great as discrimination against racial minorities.12 These findings were confirmed
by Michael Norton and Samuel Sommers, whose research found a majority of
whites believed that anti-white racism was greater than anti-black racism.13
The degree to which this has anything to do with reality is dubious, unless
looked at in terms of a longer historical view of lost privileges in relation to pre-
Civil Rights era racial formations. Many white people don’t see the wages of
whiteness as their ‘side-deal with Capital’, they see it as their inherent birthright.
Despite the fact that, since 2008, the current economic crisis has only increased
the wealth gap between whites and blacks/latinos (on average white families
have twenty times the level of wealth of black or latino families), in absolute eco-
nomic terms white median family wealth fell almost $22,000.14 The average white
working family has lost economic ground more generally relative to the previous
generation. Despite the fact that other racial groups have certainly fared worse,
white anger and anxiety is easily mobilised against racial minorities – and has
been, consistently, for the past three decades.
Cohen, in his discussion of the elements of a moral panic, outlines the need for a
suitable enemy (with little cultural/political capital with which to fight back), a suit-
able victim (vulnerable yet generalised), and a call for social control (under a false
pretence of social equality, with social control creating greater social cohesion gener-
ally).15 While US history is full of moral panics around black men and crime, the
long period of economic contraction we are now living through, combined with the
current media/knowledge landscape, is producing racist panics that not only rein-
force conceptualisations of black bodies as necessary sites of social control, but do so
on a very particular politico-discursive terrain. This terrain conceives of itself as
post-racial, but is increasingly shaped towards avenging the imagined structural
subordination of white people in contemporary America. Both the underlying
premise of the ‘knockout game’ panic and the ease with which it creates widespread
social hysteria are the latest iteration of a centuries-old projected white fear of black
violence. To make sense of the ‘knockout game’ panic, we need to look back at the
long history of racialised moral panics, as well as examining the current contexts of
race, politics and media in which it is embedded.
Over the last thirty years there have been numerous rearticulations of racialised
stereotypes of criminality, which have had significant bearing on, and resonance
in, dominant discourse and policy. The mid-1980s through mid-1990s saw a spate
of racialised moral panics around crime. The exaggerated panic around crack
cocaine in the late 1980s vastly aided the militarisation of urban policing in
America, as well as racialised disproportionate drug sentencing.16 George Bush
90 Race & Class 56(4)
Sr’s Willie Horton attack advert17 during the 1988 presidential campaign played
a crucial role in painting Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis as ‘soft’ on crime
and, implicitly, African Americans, stoking white fears of the ensuing chaos and
death that would surely follow from the adoption of less punitive norms of incar-
ceration – like the furlough programme that had temporarily released Horton,
enabling him to commit rape, assault and armed robbery.18 By the early 1990s the
‘superpredator’ discourse emerged to promote the ‘imminent threat’ posed by
every young black and brown kid from the city.19 More specifically, and extremely
similar to the ‘knockout game’, was the panic around ‘wilding’ in the late 1980s
and early 1990s. A rape in New York City’s Central Park led to the wrongful con-
viction of five black juveniles who, police argued, had been part of a wilding
crime spree that included a violent rape.20 The boys eventually had their sen-
tences vacated, based on new evidence, but only after all of them had served their
terms. While this ten-year period did see a marked rise in violent crime, what
passed for analyses of crime, gangs and drugs were simplistic, racialised, panic-
driven stereotypes, developed alongside a social control logic according to which
the only conceivable political response was to get tougher on crime.
‘Two, three, many George Zimmermans’
Aside from the effect of insinuating or reinforcing the idea that every black man
walking by you on the street may be an imminent threat, made more pronounced
by the violent and random nature of the ‘knockout game’ presentation, the news
coverage quickly shifted to the glorification of self-defence or vigilante violence
among the game’s victims. Four cases gained a great deal of attention, three of
them gaining more when it became clear that they had been fabricated. For
decades, lynching was an extra-legal tool of terror and social control (primarily
but not exclusively in the South) of white mob violence prompted simply by accu-
sations ranging from major crimes to perceived minor personal slights or devia-
tions from the expected behaviour of blacks under Jim Crow. The recent vigilante
revenge fantasies are intrinsically imbued with the vestiges of lynching, but were
also clearly articulated as an ex post facto defence for George Zimmerman, by Fox
News and its commentator Bill O’Reilly. Zimmerman had shot dead an unarmed
black teenager, Trayvon Martin, as he was walking in his neighbourhood.
Throughout this period, Fox News drew links to the purported failure of black
leaders like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to help the channel demand that some-
thing be done about the ‘knockout game’. Another facet of the coverage drew
explicit linkages to the shooting of Trayvon Martin by Zimmerman, who had
been acquitted of murder months earlier. Bill O’Reilly made plain that the killing
of Martin was (all the more) justified in the context of the asserted rampant,
unchecked criminality of black youth. Guest Bernie Goldberg, a journalist and
political pundit, agreed with O’Reilly’s analysis of the Justice for Trayvon move-
ment in light of the ‘knockout game’:
King: The ‘knockout game’: moral panic and the politics of white victimhood 91
You had [Jesse] Jackson, you had [Al] Sharpton, you had sanctimonious Tavis
Smiley all going on television … painting a fairy-tale picture about how young
black males are being hunted down by white people. It was absurd, but they
went on doing that . . . And on this [black-on-white violence], they say nothing
because – this is important – because it speaks to their failure as black leaders.
They don’t know what to do about this.21
As the ‘knockout game’ continued to garner mainstream media attention, sto-
ries emerged that fitted within the ‘stand your ground’ framework of the
Zimmerman trial and acquittal, which featured those purported to have been
targets of the ‘knockout game’ who shot and killed their assailants. The frame-
work within which the ‘knockout game’ coverage sits goes beyond the criminali-
sation of black youth or the validation of anti-black vigilantism. It lays bare a
more comprehensive effort not only to block efforts for racial justice, but also to
attempt to render unintelligible the simple articulation of black pain.
Slipping down the Tea Party rabbit hole
Fox News’ call for prominent long-time Civil Rights figures to ‘answer for’ or
apologise for the ‘knockout game’ did not go unheeded. According to Oliver
Willis of Media Matters,22 Fox News called upon Al Sharpton at least seven times,
between 19 and 24 November, to make a public statement condemning the
‘knockout game’. As the issue was still boiling on the front burner of the national
news media, Sharpton came forward to amplify the condemnation of this illusory
epidemic. In a public statement on 23 November 2013, Sharpton said the ‘knock-
out game’ was:
An alarming trend that is spurring outrageous incidents across the country. It is
deplorable, reprehensible and inexcusable. It is insane thuggery, and it is
unequivocally wrong. We would not be silent if it were the other way around,
and we will not be silent now. This is racist, period. And we will not tolerate it.23
A central aspect of any moral panic is its ability to forge political polarisa-
tion – to manufacture a commonsense positing of a ‘folk devil’ that needs to be
exorcised in the service of a ‘good public’, which condemns and demands action
to mitigate the threat – leaving little coherent middle ground under the terms in
which the panic is framed.24 In an advanced capitalist society these values are
most commonly formalised in the law. In the months that have passed since the
peak of this moral panic, new legislation, specifically targeting the ‘knockout
game’, has emerged in over a half-dozen states.
Within days of the panic peaking in the media, legislators in New York, New
Jersey, Illinois, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Washington State and South Carolina
began drafting and putting forward legislation specifically targeting the ‘knock-
out game’. Of course, punching people in the face is already a crime, easily
92 Race & Class 56(4)
charged as a felony in every state in the Union. The laws that are being drafted,
and the one that passed the Washington State Senate (where there was not even
a single report of this type of crime having taken place), mostly set a mandatory
felony charge for random assaults on strangers. The Washington State legislation,
which passed in the Senate, and is currently being debated in the Washington
House of Representatives, makes random assaults on strangers a mandatory fel-
ony charge.25 Other states, like New Jersey, are trying to establish minimum
prison terms for assaults that meet the ‘knockout game’ profile.26 Despite not
having even a shred of empirical evidence, of any measurable significance, to
indicate an upsurge in these types of assaults, laws are being recodified to either
appease or take advantage of a socially and politically fabricated trend.
In late December 2013, as the ‘knockout game’ was fading from the prominent
position it had secured a month earlier, hate crime charges were brought against
a 27-year-old white Texan who had videotaped himself randomly assaulting a
79-year-old black man, and then saying ‘knockout’. Other videos on the man’s
phone allegedly feature him making racist comments and asking whether he
would get national news coverage if he attacked a black person. In spite of their
feat in fabricating a crime trend and success in generating a racialised national
panic around it, prompting a wave of more stringent crime legislation, Fox News
and WorldNetDaily (home to Colin Flaherty who had conceived of the ‘knockout
game’) were less than pleased with the Department of Justice, which was also
now taking this seriously. Fox quickly asked ‘why the federal government just
now was getting involved and whether a double standard was at play, consider-
ing that in many prior cases, the race of the suspect and victim was reversed’.27
WorldNetDaily was less coy: ‘Attorney General Eric Holder’s treatment of the
“knockout game” phenomenon is revealing the White House’s racial agenda is
more concerned with retribution than reconciliation.’28 The sentiment made it
clear that the targets of social control were intended to be, specifically and exclu-
sively, young black males.
The ‘knockout game’ was certainly not America’s first or greatest racialised
moral panic. However, what is fundamentally different about racial panics in the
current moment is how they are articulated alongside and within a growing senti-
ment of white aggrievement – a political belief system that argues, against all
existing evidence, that white people are subject to systematic racial oppression.
The ‘knockout game’ is both a product of white aggrievement and a cause of its
further entrenchment in the popular imaginary. Since Obama’s election in 2008,
Fox News has played the role of laundering far-right and overtly white suprema-
cist initiatives, brow-beating them into the rest of the mainstream media, and quite
often meeting their political objectives. As this postmodern dialectic of mythical
scapegoats and the demand for racial justice for white America progresses, a new
white supremacy is being constructed that not only opposes efforts at racial jus-
tice, but fundamentally erodes the political and discursive space upon which
actual, materialist claims about racial inequality can even be coherently expressed.
King: The ‘knockout game’: moral panic and the politics of white victimhood 93
References
1 Stanley Cohen defines moral panic as a situation where, ‘a condition, episode, person or
group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests’.
See Folk Devils and Moral Panics: the creation of the Mods and Rockers (New York, Routledge,
1972), p. 1.
2 Cohen, op. cit.
3 Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis:
mugging, the state, and law and order (New York, Palgrave MacMillan, 1978).
4 Cohen, op. cit., p. 56.
5 Khalil Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: race, crime, and the making of modern urban
America (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 8.
6 Cara Buckley, ‘Police unsure if random attacks are rising threat or urban myth’, New York
Times (22 November 2013); CNN, ‘Knock out game: real or not?’ (25 November 2013), available
at:
7 Lynn Langton, Michael Planty and Jennifer Truman, Crime Victimization 2012, Bureau of Justice
Statistics (US Department of Justice, 2013), p. 1, available at:
8 Bureau of Justice Statistics, ‘Percent distribution of single-offender victimizations, by type of
crime, race of victim, and perceived race of offender’ (US Department of Justice, 2011), avail-
able at:
9 Bureau of Justice Statistics, Crime Victimization 2012, op. cit., p. 7.
10 Leah Nelson, ‘WorldNetDaily now peddling White Nationalism’, Southern Poverty Law
Center (23 October 2012), available at:
11 ‘The knockout game, Saint Louis style: an excerpt from “White girl bleed a lot”’, Breitbart (23
November 2013).
12 Robert Jones and Daniel Cox, Beyond Guns and God: understanding the complexities of the white
working class in America (Public Religion Research Institute, 2012), p. 53.
13 Michael Norton and Samuel Sommers, ‘Whites see racism as a zero-sum game that they are
now losing’, Perspectives on Psychological Science (Vol. 6, no. 3, 2011), pp. 215–18.
14 Rakesh Kochhar, Richard Fry and Paul Taylor, Twenty-to-One: wealth gaps rise to record highs
between whites, blacks and hispanics (Pew Research Center, 2011), pp. 1, 13, available at:
15 Cohen, op. cit., p. xii.
16 Craig Reinarman and Harry Levine, Crack in America: demon drugs and social justice (Berkeley,
University of California Press, 1997).
17 Willie Horton was a convicted murderer, who had committed rape while on weekend parole
from Massachusetts prison when Dukakis was state governor, and whose case was used in
a Republican campaign advert implying that, whereas Bush supported the death penalty,
Dukakis’ weakness on crime had been responsible for Horton’s release.
18 David Anderson, Crime and the Politics of Hysteria: how the Willie Horton story changed American
justice (New York, Crown, 1995).
19 Franklin Gilliam and Shanto Iyengar, ‘The superpredator script’, Nieman Foundation for
Journalism at Harvard University (Vol. 52, no. 4, 1998), pp. 1–3.
20 Jeremi Duru, ‘The Central Park Five, The Scottsboro Boys, and the myth of the bestial black
man’, Cordoza Law Review …
1
Response Paper Guidelines
Urban Legends
Winter 2021
Over the course of the quarter, you are required to submit a written response (fully five pages) to TWO
of the readings discussed in class. You will be assigned a group number (1-10) during the first week of
class. For these two assignments, each person in the group will be required to submit their response paper
on the corresponding due date listed on the syllabus and Canvas.
**You will need to submit these responses in your assignment folder as a PDF or Word Document**
**AGAIN, PLEASE SUBMIT YOUR RESPONSE PAPERS AS EITHER A WORD DOCUMENT OR
PDF**
**We are happy to provide feedback on your essay drafts. If you would like feedback, please submit your
draft to us at least 48 hours before the due date**
Writing Guidelines:
11 or 12 point Times New Roman or Calibri font only
Double-spaced
One-inch margins on all sides
Numbered pages in upper right corner
Proper Citations Required (You may use footnotes, endnotes, and in-text citations)
Your name, course number, and date on a separate cover sheet.
Separate works cited page
(Response papers that do not meet these guidelines will be penalized)
Format:
This paper should not merely be a summary of the reading itself. Rather, the paper will be graded based
on the following inclusions:
1. An overview of the author’s main arguments (Approximately three or more pages)
a. What overall argument is the author making? What specific examples does the author focus on in the
reading?
b. How is this argument being made? (e.g., What kind of data is being used by the author to support her
argument?)
PLEASE NOTE: Your group number is for grading purposes only. You must write and
submit your own individual response paper.
To find your group number, go to the course Canvas site, select “People” on the menu on the
left side of your screen, then select the “Essay Groups” tab. If you do not see you name on
any of the group lists, please inform me and/or the TAs.
2
c. How does this argument support or refute arguments made by other authors in the section?
(DON’T FORGET THIS!!)
2. Your personal critical response to the reading (Approximately two pages)
a. What, if anything, do you find convincing about the argument being made?
b. What problems and/or oversights do you see in the reading?
c. What, specifically, do you think this article contributes to broader discussions of the topic?
Your essay should include:
1) an introductory paragraph providing a general overview (preview) of the main body of your essay and
your conclusions
2) main body (summary and critical response)
3) concluding paragraph
Writing Tips:
1) Carefully proofread your final draft to minimize any spelling and grammatical errors
2) Avoid long, direct quotes from the reading. Paraphrase whenever possible
3) Book titles should be italicized (e.g., The Colossal Book of Urban Legends), whereas chapter and
article titles should be placed in quotations (e.g., “How Rumor Works”).
4) Don’t forget to provide a comparison to another reading from the course!
Grading Rubric:
Response papers will be graded according to the following criteria:
1. Content and Development (Total points: 80)
a. Paper addresses the main arguments and issue(s) raised: 50 Points
b. Critical response is substantive: 30 Points (Well-formed, thoughtful, and detailed responses to the
reading. Minimum total of 5 double-spaced pages per paper.)
2. Mechanics (Total points: 10)
a. Rules of spelling, grammar, usage, and punctuation are followed: 10 Points
3. Readability and Style (Total points: 10)
a. Sentences are complete, clear, and concise, and the tone is appropriate to the content and assignment:
10 Points
100 points total per paper
Since this course is heavily reliant on discussion, it is equally important that you be prepared to discuss
your reaction to your assigned readings in class. You should try to base your questions and reactions for
group discussion on broader issues that the article may or may not touch upon.
**These in-class discussions will only be useful if students come prepared to class having read the
assigned articles. Even if you are not assigned a paper response for the reading, you are obligated to come
to class prepared.**
3
190 I On the Road Again
discourse, coupled with the historical conditions of the relationships
between blacks and whites, leads to the specific content of these ru-
mors-the invasions, malicious attacks, and violent gang initiations-as
suggested in the folklore diamond.
Crime rumors represent a set of core images that, acquired in child-
hood and reinforced through folk ideas of politics, are difficult to erase.
For whites, while racially unpleasant images can be denied vigorously
and sincerely, they sometimes appear when least expected. Their pres-
ence-the recognition that they are not totally erased and cannot be as
long as statistics and authenticated incidents give them credence-
makes a free and comfortable racial dialogue difficult.
SEVEN
Cries and Whispers
Race and False Accusations
On October 2 5, 1994, a surly black man wearing a dark ski
mask stopped a compact car in a small South Carolina town,
forcing the white woman out of the vehicle, kidnapping
her two young children, and driving away. The woman
appeared on national television to plead for the safe return
of her toddlers. The woman was Susan Smith.
On November 28, 1987, a black teenager was found in a large
garbage bag in a small town in upstate New York. When
she was discovered, her face and body were smeared with dog
feces, and the words “KKK” and “Nigger” were scrawled
across her chest. She said she had been raped by four white
men, including a police officer and a member of the district
attorney’s office. Supporters demanded the appointment of
a special prosecutor to investigate the police and law
enforcement agencies. The girl was Tawana Brawley.
As these two infamous examples attest, some of the saddest indicators
of racial Inistrust are the all-too-frequent and often well-publicized at-
tempts of malefactors to escape blame by accusing a mysterious figure
of a racial attack. In exainining false racial accusations we turn briefly-
191
192 I Cries and Whispers
but not too far-from the consideration of rumors to examine those
truth claims that operate much like rumor: the motivated lie. In the
previous chapter we examined rumors about imaginary crime; in this
closely related chapter we keep our attention on criminal acts, examining
real crimes and powerful, but false, claims.
Like rumor, a false accusation gains its credibility from assumptions
about how the world operates; indeed, for its audience, the false accu-
sation has the same standing as a rumor. For its audience, a false accu-
sation is, like a rumor, a truth claim. It is a public claim about the world
that makes sense. That these false accusations should be so common
and should mirror rumor themes so closely provides a depressing win-
dow on American race relations. We find a disturbing pattern in which
members of one race can generate sympathy and potentially escape
blame by claiming that a member of the other race has caused them or
their loved ones grievous harm. Again we see, in the willingness to be-
lieve the worst of others, echoes of white racial bias and black paranoia.
In this dynamic, false accusations are part of the same pattern of rela-
tions that this book addresses.
In one sense it does not matter much whether the accusations are
true. For a time the relevant audiences treat these accusations as true
and act upon them as true, reinforcing other, noxious beliefs. Yet, of
course, in another sense, nothing could be more important than whether
the stories are true or false. First, innocent citizens can have their rep-
utations destroyed, spend money defending themselves, and possibly
even have their lives threatened. This is dramatically exemplified in the
case of lynchings, in which an accusation from a white citizen was tan-
tamount to proof. White women could blame black men for a variety
of real or imagined attacks and have their claims accepted without ques-
tion. Black men were, for whites, totally believable perpetrators.
A troubling finding, whose full implications are unclear and perhaps
indicate several problems, is that a study of 1 30 incidents of serious
police brutality against citizens found that in 97 percent of these cases
black or Latino citizens were the victims; white police officers were
Cries and Whispers I 193
centrally involved in 93 percent of the cases. Yet officers were punished
for brutality in only 13 percent of these incidents. Does this mean that
many guilty officers were let off without punishment or that many in-
nocent officers were falsely accused-or both? 1
The spate of racial claims of black propensity to criminal activity
derives from a deep historical tradition. The cultural logic on which
these claims depend has remained vigorous. Because whites have easier
access to the forces of social control, many of the claims insist that blacks
have perpetrated dastardly crimes. Recently the accusations have begun
to flow in the other direction. With the increasing power of the black
community in urban areas and the importance of blacks as voters, claims
such as that of Tawana Brawley are taken seriously. On college cam-
puses, black students have claimed that they have been the victims of
white racial harassment, only for it to be discovered later that their
harassment was at their own hands. Most recently, the rash of black
church burnings in the South have been accompanied by charges that
the fires were the work of the Ku Klux Klan and other racist scoundrels.
Although federal law officials emphasize, after an exhaustive study, that
there was no large-scale racist conspiracy, some of the fires were racially
motivated, and for some the denials of conspiracy ring false given the
history of southern racial violence.
The prevalence of false charges increases the distrust of all claims in
much the same way that false accusations of child sexual abuse in divorce
cases cast a suspicious pall on all such allegations. These lies provide a
blanket defense. Thus, when we are told that racial harassment is in-
creasing on campuses and that in most instances no perpetrator has been
caught, one can wonder whether the “victims” are themselves victims
or perpetrators. Could ministers be setting their own churches on fire?
In his book Race, Studs Terkel tells a small, yet emblematic, story
that crystallizes this concern:
The eleven-year-old black kid, with his comrade-in-mischief, a
twelve-year-old white boy, cracked the window of an elderly neighbor.
194 I Cries and Whispers
It was a small stone, sprung from a slingshot. When the woman
confronted them, he was an indignant counsel for the defense. “You’re
accusing me just because I’m black.” Why do I think he had heard
this somewhere before?2
These charges multiply the harm of the original act because they serve
to inflame and infect our hearts and souls.
In this chapter we describe four accounts of false accusations in detail:
two in which whites were falsely accused, and two in which blacks were
the target. There have been other cases, of course, but these well-
publicized incidents have received the largest amount of publicity and
entered public discourse.3 Part of our argument is that these accusations
gain their power because of the willingness of the mass media to pub-
licize and amplify the claims. Particularly in the early days of the stories,
the claims are typically taken at face value, exacerbating the tension and
in the process gaining a larger audience. While one can sympathize with
media that have no easy way of checking a story without considerable
background work and that operate in a competitive market, we argue
that a more critical judgment, greater decorum, and more public re-
sponsibility could diminish the circuslike atmosphere that sometimes
prevails.
Whenever a crime “victim” (or a “witness”) maliciously and dishon-
estly accuses someone as the perpetrator, we have a false accusation. No
statistics exist to indicate how common these claims are. Criminologists
have surprisingly, to our knowledge, not conducted research on “false
accusations.” We begin by examining two cases in which black women
accused whites of attacking them verbally and physically; both Sabrina
Collins and Tawana Brawley were taken seriously by officials and black
leaders, but neither was able to demonstrate that her claims had any
validity. In the next two cases, whites-Charles Stuart and Susan
Smith-murdered relatives (respectively, a pregnant wife and two young
children) and then accused blacks of committing the crime.
Although we can describe Susan Smith and Tawana Brawley as sisters
Cries and Whispers I 195
in crime, in an important sense this is misleading. Blacks construct sto-
ries in which they are the victims; in contrast, for whites it is their family
members who are victims. It is hard to know how to balance Tawana
Brawley’s claim of rape with Susan Smith’s tale of kidnapping as stories.
However, it is important to remember that aside from the false accu-
sations, there were no crimes committed in the cases of allegations made
by blacks, whereas the two cases involving whites were murders with
actual bodies.4 The two cases involving African Americans involved
women who wanted attention and attempted to avoid blame; the two
white cases involved individuals who did not want to suffer the conse-
quences of their crimes.
SABRINA COLLINS
On Sunday, April 22, 1990, readers of the New York Times were shocked
to learn of racial attacks on an Emory University freshman. According
to the story:
Repeated written and verbal racial attacks, varying from epithets
scrawled around her dormitory room to death threats sent through
the campus mail, have rendered an Emory University freshman
almost mute. Sabrina Collins, a premed student on the dean’s list
and a varsity soccer player, has spoken little since her April 11
hospitalization, said William Fox, a vice president of the university
and dean of campus life …. But if Ms. Collins has been silent,
different factions at Emory have been vocal, variously deploring the
incident and, in one case, saying it represented a festering issue of
racism on campus. “To my knowledge, we have not experienced
a harassment case against another person of any race like this in
recent history,” Mr. Fox said.5
This incident had a traumatic effect on the Emory community, an At-
lanta university that prided itself on tolerance. Yet within a few weeks
stories began to circulate that Ms. Collins was seen as a suspect, that
196 I Cries and Whispers
she had poured bleach on her own clothing, mutilated her stuffed ani-
mals, and scrawled “Die, nigger, die” on the walls of her room in lipstick.
Her white roommate’s notebook had been stolen and later returned with
the words “Nigger lover” scrawled on it.
By May 3 1, based on a handwriting analysis, fingerprints, and a pat-
tern of misspellings, the incident was being described as a hoax, staged
by Collins herself, perhaps to divert attention from accusations that she
had cheated in a chemistry class. The monthlong campaign of racial
harassment permitted her to blame her poor grades on stress. Even with
the results from the Emory security force and the Georgia Bureau of
Investigation, some black students continued to assert that Collins was
a victim, pointing to certain ambiguities in the investigation and to her
nearly catatonic behavior in a mental institution. Despite the false ac-
cusations, neither the state of Georgia nor Emory University chose to
prosecute Collins, and Emory indicated that it would pay her medical
bills.6
This incident is, by itself, fairly minor. Apparently no white student
was seriously investigated, and perhaps only Collins’s white roommate
was seriously inconvenienced. Yet the earnest attention given to the
charge reveals just how attuned institutions can be to the possibility of
racism. Suddenly Emory University felt the need to discuss the racial
climate on campus, previously a secondary issue. Perhaps this was a
necessary debate, but surely one would have wished for a more produc-
tive context. Black students and their white allies went on the attack
with claims of racism, and the administration adopted a defensive pos-
ture. Despite accusations of cheating, the university attempted to be
supportive of this student, at least as much in its own interest as for
reasons of compassion. The possibility of racism was sufficiently plau-
sible in the university setting that the charges, however frivolous they
turned out to be, had to be taken seriously. Students often perceive their
campuses as hotbeds of racism, and while we would have to be foolish
or naive to claim that there are no racist students in a large student
Cries and Whispers I 197
body, universities are less subject to overt racial attacks than many other
locations. 7
TAWANA BRAWLEY
Sabrina Collins flickered across public memory for a few weeks and then
disappeared into obscurity. The same cannot be said of Tawana Braw-
ley. One of the most dramatic and disturbing incidents of false accusa-
tion concerns this African-American teenager, invariably described as a
cheerleader, from Wappingers Falls, New York, a village of six thousand
located fifty-five miles north of New York City. Ms. Brawley was dis-
covered on November 28, 1987, in a large plastic garbage bag, in a grassy
area near an apartment where she had previously lived. She had been
missing for four days. She claimed (partly in her own statements and
more explicitly through those of her advisers) that she had been raped
and assaulted by four white men, including a police officer and a member
of the district attorney’s office. Her face and body were smeared with
dog feces, her hair was matted, her jeans had been burned, and the words
“KKK” and “Nigger” were scrawled across her chest. Subsequent in-
vestigations over the course of the next year painted a picture that was
considerably different and that connected this young woman to a trou-
bled home life and some unsavory companions. 8
Shortly after Brawley was discovered, three black activists took up
her cause and served as her advisers and spokespersons. In the process,
these three-the Reverend Al Sharpton, and two militant attorneys, C.
Vernon Mason and Alton Maddox Jr.-through effective use of the
media shaped public knowledge of the case. These men had become
famous in the African-American community in New York (and infamous
for many whites) through their provocative but successful insistence on
obtaining a special prosecutor in the Howard Beach case (in which a
young black man was chased into highway traffic in a white Brooklyn
neighborhood). They attempted a similar strategy here, claiming a
198 I Cries and Whispers
massive cover-up and refusing to allow either Tawana Brawley or her
mother to testify to a grand jury. They successfully forced New York
governor Mario Cuomo to appoint Attorney General Robert Abrams
as a special prosecutor, but relations between the activists and Abrams
quickly soured into unpleasant, and some claimed anti-Semitic, attacks.
Governor Cuomo was likened to Lester Maddox and Attorney General
Abrams to Hitler; the Brawleys’ refusal to testify was compared to the
actions of Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.9
It now appears that Brawley, perhaps with the connivance of her
mother, created the story of her attack to avoid the rage of her common-
law stepfather, a man who was on parole after serving time for the shoot-
ing of his first wife. 10 Sadly, this small family drama, poorly conceived
and executed, was picked up by black activists and later by the media,
and it became blown out of proportion. One certainly imagines that in
this case the goal was to deflect blame rather than to target a specific
other person, although here, as in the case of Charles Stuart, actual
people (notably an assistant district attorney) were placed under suspi-
cion because of the seriousness of the charges. Some years later this man
won a highly publicized libel suit against Brawley’s advisers.
Because of the charges and countercharges in the Brawley incident,
for a time many blacks and some whites saw the judicial system as having
broken down, even though investigating without a complaining witness
surely placed enormous constraints on the detectives. At first it was
widely assumed that someone must have done something to Tawana
Brawley. As Newsday commented in an article entitled “It’s Time to
Show Concern for Tawana Brawley,” “With all the incriminating detail
that only she has, the criminal justice system could then go swiftly to
work so that the perpetrators are found and punished.”11 The New York
Times investigated the case intensively because it was convinced that
Brawley had been victimized, and perhaps not incidentally because it
wanted to sell papers and demonstrate its commitment to the African-
American community. 12 Early in Brawley’s ordeal, Bill Cosby and Ed-
Cries and Whispers I I 99
ward Lewis, the publisher of &sence magazine, offered a reward of
$z 5 ,ooo for information about the case, and later heavyweight champion
Mike Tyson visited her, giving her his diamond-studded Rolex watch
and promising that he would pay for her college education. 13 The Black
Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan arrived to demonstrate in support of
Brawley. While after a year the grand jury did conclude that no crime
had occurred, for much of the year the Brawley story was a hot topic,
persuading many African Americans that the claims of black victims
would not be thoroughly investigated and making the case “a paradigm
of racism in America.”
At its start the incident quickly entered into racial politics. People
interpreted Brawley’s injuries given their own frame of reference. Noel.
Tepper, the attorney for the Dutchess County Committee against Ra-
cism, noted, “A good number of whites automatically suspect her story.
A good number of blacks automatically believe it.”14 One New York
Times/CBS News poll taken in July 1988 found that 62 percent of New
York City residents felt that Brawley was lying, but that only about one-
third of black residents felt that way.15 One young white put it, “I think
one of her own kind did it. Maybe one of her friends worked her over.”16
On the other side, supporters of Brawley claimed that Ku Klux Klan
members, whom they believed had infiltrated Dutchess County law en-
forcement agencies, were involved in the incident. 17 Laura Blackburne,
counsel to the New York State NAACP, noted, “There is so much rage
and anger and frustration in the black community over the relentless
racism blacks are subjected to in New York on a daily basis. It’s not
hard to harness that anger. If you say the right things and have the right
hook, you can get people to follow you.”18 As Stanley Diamond, a Co-
lumbia University anthropologist, noted in the Nation, a liberal journal,
“In cultural perspective, if not in fact, it doesn’t matter whether the
crime occurred or not …. False charges [frequently] rationalize the
maiming and murder of countless blacks in the United States …. The
crime that did not occur was described with skill and controlled hysteria
200 I Cries and Whispers
by the black actors as the epitome of degradation, a repellent model of
what actually happens to too many black women.”19 The charges made
cultural sense within the African-American community. Obviously, the
belief in these charges created a milieu of racial hostility and paranoia
throughout Dutchess County. Even after the grand jury announced
its findings, many blacks, feeling powerless, remained skeptical or even
rejected them.20 The conservative National Review, linking the story to
Janet Cooke’s fraudulent Pulitzer Prize-winning account of a nonexis-
tent eight-year-old heroin addict, noted that “there’s a ready market for
these yams of black ‘victims’ of Our Society.”21
As is often the case with media-saturated stories, copycats soon
emerge. Thus, “A 33-year-old black therapist at the Hudson River Psy-
chiatric Center reported being kidnapped by two white men who tried
to rape her. A quick investigation proved the story a hoax-she had
spent most of the time drinking with friends.”22 Another black woman
in Wappingers Falls claimed that whites were smearing excrement on
her door. A police videotape eventually caught her in the act.23 In still
another case, the attorney for a white Harlem pastor, accused of sexually
assaulting his black female parishioners, claimed that the pastor’s main
accuser filed the charges after reading about Tawana Brawley, a strategy
labeled the “Tawana Brawley defense. “24 These incidents remind us that
well-publicized cases may be just the tip of the iceberg of false accusa-
tions.
Interestingly, Brawley’s claims may themselves have been an example
of the copycat effect, based on another false claim of a racial attack:
A friend [of Tawana Brawley], sixteen-year-old Tawana Ward
Dempsey, had tried to conceal a late night escapade with a boy.
Tawana Dempsey had gone to the police and told them that, as she
was walking home one night along a quiet road in Poughkeepsie,
two white men in a green car had pulled up, dragged her inside,
driven her into the woods, and raped her. The police discovered
discrepancies in the story, and an investigation revealed that she had
fabricated the tale to cover up her rendezvous with a boy.25
Cries and Whispers I 201
After the Brawley grand jury report, some black commentators, such
as Clarence Page, lamented that this case only served to trivialize legit-
imate cases of injustice, leading to suspicion of those claims.26 Within
the context of black paranoia, any charge aimed at black men can be
presumed false (e.g., the claims that the rape and assault charges of the
Central Park jogger were a hoax),27 and any claim made by a black is
accorded belief. For an African American to reject such racial claims is
seen by some as an act of disloyalty; such skeptics are seen as “less
black.”28 For whites, the problem is what New York Times reporter Craig
Wolff refers to as “the tiptoe effect.”29 Whites are afraid, perhaps for
fear of being labeled racists, to confront false accusations made by
blacks. Thus, even though there was early suspicion that Brawley’s story
was false, officials and observers were careful to avoid saying so explicitly
and were afraid to claim that this young woman who falsely accused
others as rapists and torturers was “evil”-a compunction not seen in
discussions of white accusers. At least in cases of white accusers, once
the accusations are proven false, their previous community support is
replaced by scorn and anger.
CHARLES STUART
On the night of October 2 3, 1989, Boston police dispatchers received
a frantic call from a driver who claimed that he and his pregnant wife
had been shot by a black man as they were returning home from a
childbirth class at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Police
traced the call to a car parked in the predominantly black Mission Hill
neighborhood. Within a few hours the wife died; her baby, delivered
by cesarean section, died seventeen days later. The man who made the
call, Charles Stuart, had been shot in the abdomen, but after several
weeks in the hospital, he recovered.30
With an injury that serious, at first there seemed little reason to doubt
Stuart’s story. Indeed, the earliest information about the family to
emerge suggested that Charles and his wife, Carol, an attorney, had a
202 I Cries and Whispers
storybook life. Charles had risen from working-class origins to work for
a prominent Boston furrier. The couple seemed prosperous and ap-
peared to be eagerly awaiting the birth of their first child. So, when
Stuart claimed that a raspy-voiced black man had committed the crime,
and provided a description of the perpetrator, the police went to work
immediately, questioning men throughout the area. Boston’s mayor,
Raymond Flynn, ordered all available police detectives to help in the
hunt. Within a day, over a hundred policemen had fanned out over the
Mission Hill projects using their stop-and-search technique to confront
and question (and some said to humiliate and harass) any likely looking
young black man. Flynn and other Boston politicians attended the fu-
neral of Carol Stuart. Her husband sent a moving poem from his hos-
pital bed to his dear departed wife. At one point, after having detained
several black men, the police came close to arresting one suspect, Wil-
liam “Willie” Bennett, a man with a record of violent crimes, who had
previously shot a police officer. Stuart had identified him in a lineup,
and Bennett reportedly had bragged to a relative about having robbed
the Stuarts.31
The problem was that Stuart’s story was a lie. With the help of his
brother and a friend (both subsequently convicted), he had murdered
his wife, shot himself, and lied about it. Stuart never directly confessed,
but when he learned in January that he had become a prime suspect, he
committed suicide by jumping off the Tobin Bridge. Apparently he had
a lengthy conversation with his attorney immediately before his death,
a conversation which the attorney, pleading lawyer-client confidential-
ity, has never detailed. Theories that developed included the possibility
that Stuart wanted the insurance money from his wife’s death, that he
felt tied down by the prospect of becoming a father, and that he had a
girlfriend. As more information was revealed about Stuart, particularly
after his suicide, the more apparent it was that his life was built on lies.
For example, although he claimed to have attended Brown University
on an athletic scholarship, he actually had graduated from a vocational
technical institute.
Cries and Whispers I 203
In retrospect, police should have recalled that most female homicide
victims are murdered by husbands or lovers; the perpetrator often fakes
an injury.32 Yet the information Stuart provided about a black male in
a black running suit with red stripes, coupled with his extensive, life-
threatening injuries, made too much cultural sense. As it happened, the
emergency medical technicians who discovered Stuart and his wife that
night were accompanied by a television crew from the CBS program
Rescue gn. Within days Stuart had become a media icon, a symbol of
the danger of street crime and urban decay.
Shortly after the shooting, the Boston Globe noted, “Coming after a
recent wave of shootings that have involved innocent bystanders, the
attack on the Stuarts … sparked particular outrage yesterday in Bos-
ton. “33 A radio station set up a tip line for information, and a Boston
businessman offered a $10,000 reward for the arrest of the killer. The
police were convinced that the attacker lived in or routinely committed
) crimes around the Mission Hill housing project.34 Boston politicians
hurried to provide support to the Stuarts and to assure the Boston public
that they supported the police. Others advocated reinstating the death
penalty. One councilman proposed to provide the police with a $10
million supplement. A black councilman noted that the Stuarts had “be-
come a symbol” of the “carnage” on the streets of Boston.35 The city
was fascinated by the story, as newspaper circulation and television rat-
ings increased dramatically and the media competed to describe the
Stuarts’ idyllic life and to contrast it with the evil on the streets. Despite
the reduction in the Boston crime rate the previous year, there was talk
of the need to call a “crime emergency.”36
After Stuart’s suicide the holes in his story became clear.37 Perhaps a
circulation war among Boston newspapers was responsible for the mas-
sive attention given to the story. Perhaps the situation was exacerbated
by Boston police pressuring witnesses to provide false statements to the
police and the grand jury, a claim made in a 1991 report by U.S. At-
torney Wayne Budd and subsequently admitted to by the police.
38
Nearly half of all Bostonians polled in the aftermath of the case felt
204 I Cries and Whispers
that race relations had declined, and that both blacks and whites used
the case to support their own racial attitudes.39 However, it must be
recognized that in this instance it was a white criminal who made the
false accusation, and it was quickly accepted by a largely white power
structure. While no black man was charged, several were targets of the
investigation, and many were viewed with increased suspicion.
Stuart’s story made sense culturally, as Robert Maynard noted:
Stuart knew America and Americans better than we know ourselves.
He knew he could rely on two key institutions, the police and the
news media, to swallow his lurid story hook, line and sinker ….
It was based on his understanding of racism in American …