Mugged (11 page)
The hoax aspect was never what was heavily reported. Part one would be widely broadcast—the lie part. But only obscure right-wingers ever bothered with the follow-up when it turned out to be false. Liberals forgave the act of falsely reporting a crime on the grounds that that even though there wasn’t a wolf, it raised our consciousness of wolves. Ordinary people just wanted to know: But was it true?
A little time would pass and then we’d get an all-new “Got racism?” media campaign. No matter how many times “hate crime” stories were disproved, reporters never tired of credulously reporting every allegation of racism to come down the pike. The media were incapable of remembering to get
all
the facts before launching moral crusades.
A normal person would hear some of the more outlandish allegations and think, “I can’t believe it!”—not meaning, “Wow! What a blockbuster story!” but rather, “I would like to hear the facts because I literally don’t believe it.”
As soon as the truth emerged on each racial incident and the America-is-still-racist thesis collapsed, the story would just quietly disappear from the news pages, like Kennedy’s trouble at the Chappaquiddick bridge. As a result, the official record shows some hate crimes and some unverified hate crimes with no clear resolution one way or another. As long as the fraudulent “hate crimes” didn’t get counted as strike-outs, liberals always looked like Ted Williams. Since they didn’t keep an accurate batting average, I’ll do it for them.
WHITE GANGS AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY—1987
In March 1987, eight months before Tawana Brawley became a household name, black students at Columbia University made the rather incredible charge that mobs of white students were beating up black students on campus. About a dozen blacks claimed to have seen or been victims of these racist attacks.
In the 1980s, American colleges were sturdy sentinels against the merest hint of a racist thought. There were seminars on racism, posters against racism, bake sales against racism, racism “awareness” days, articles denouncing racism, consciousness-raising sessions about racism. More resources were devoted to studying racism than studying history, chemistry or math. It would be hard to find a single person on an American college campus, at least post-1980, who would have one good thing to say about racism.
Moreover, the alleged perpetrators of these racist beatings at Columbia weren’t teenaged toughs with criminal records in a working-class neighborhood: They were college students at an Ivy League school.
But blacks claimed that whites were so terrorizing them that they were afraid to walk alone on campus. According to their spokeswoman, Barnard student Cheryl Derricotte, it was “open season on black people.”
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The usual nonsense ensued. There were sit-ins, administration building take-overs, and noisy rallies outside the fraternity house said to harbor the white racist thugs. Fifty people were arrested as a result of the anti-racism protests. Most of them were white.
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Twenty-three Columbia students staged a sit-in at 1 Police Plaza in lower Manhattan to demand the arrest of the white students they claimed were beating up blacks on campus.
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Black students formed a group to protect themselves from the marauding white mobs and—in what was always a good sign—hired C. Vernon Mason as their lawyer. “The message has gotten out,” Mason said, “that black students are not safe on the Columbia campus and someone is going to have to answer for this.”
4
Newsweek
quoted Frank L. Matthews, publisher of
Black Issues in Higher Education
, saying that he blamed the surge of college racism on white students’ “reading the messages” from the Reagan administration.
5
Of course, another theory is that it was black students “reading the messages” from a media that gave full-court press to even simulated racist incidents and refused to hold black people accountable for false reports.
If you are not a journalist, it will come as no surprise that, after painstaking
investigations by both the police and the very politically correct university, the whole thing turned out to be a hoax. According to dozens of eyewitnesses, it was black students who had started a fight with white students late one night after a dance, and then made up the cock-and-bull story about roving white gangs targeting blacks.
None of the newspapers and magazines that had reported the original story about white racists stampeding through an Ivy League campus ever got around to mentioning that it was a lie—not the
New York Times
, the
Chicago Tribune
,
Newsweek
or
Time
magazine. Careful readers had to wait for this admission in the
Christian Science Monitor
about a year later:
[T]he the university report on the incident, which relied on the signed statements of 22 eyewitnesses…differed substantially from the account given by the blacks and used by the news media in reporting the story. [I]n the Columbia account, the actual brawl was provoked by a group of five to seven blacks outside the hangout. [T]heir story of ‘a white lynch mob’ has since been discredited.
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No charges were brought by the university or the police against the students for filing a false police complaint.
The national news coverage of a story about Ivy Leaguers as latter-day Bull Connors triggered dozens more of these incidents at campuses around the country. These were all hoaxes, too. But no matter how absurd the idea of marauding white students attacking blacks on college campuses, the false charges kept coming and liberals kept believing them.
SABRINA COLLINS, EMORY UNIVERSITY
A few years later, in 1990, Sabrina Collins, a black premed student at Emory College, claimed to have been the victim of a campaign of racial harassment—“die, [N-word], die” had been painted on her floor, bleach poured on her clothes and typed death threats slipped under her door. Even her stuffed animals had been mutilated. As a result of these incidents, Collins fell mute and had to be hospitalized.
Hundreds of students held a rally to protest racism as a result of what had happened to Collins. One student, Leonard Scriven, denounced what he called the “pervasive system of racism” at Emory.
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At a meeting of students
and faculty about the incident, a newly formed black student group, Students Against Racial Inequality, submitted a list of demands, including more black students and faculty members, two new centers for the study of African American culture…and the firing of the director of public safety, Edward A. Medlin.
The public safety office had already responded to Collins’s allegations by equipping her dorm room with additional locks, a portable motion detector and an alarm system. Safety officers patrolled her hallway as well as the area outside her dormitory building. The office of public safety had called in local, state and federal investigators. But the students against racial inequality wanted this poor guy’s head.
After a thorough inquiry, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation concluded that Collins had perpetrated the racist acts on herself. Her fingerprints were the only ones on the letters and were arranged on the page in a pattern indicating that she had put the letter in a typewriter; the letters had been composed on a typewriter in the library she frequented; and, finally, the letters also spelled “you’re” as “your”—as was Sabrina’s habit.
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The incidents had begun just as Collins was being investigated for an honor code violation for cheating in a chemistry class.
9
No charges were pressed against Collins. The story vanished. Let’s just hope the head of public safety was allowed to keep his job.
GILBERT MOORE JR., WILLIAMS COLLEGE—1993
Fake racist incidents on college campuses became as common as Madonna’s music. Against a background of daily lectures against racism, some racist letter or graffiti would materialize, there would be a generalized gnashing of teeth about the pervasiveness of racism and then the perpetrator would always turn out to be a black student.
At Williams College in 1993, hideous racist messages were found on the door of the Black Student Union. An uproar ensued. Two days later, Dean Joan Edwards announced to general relief that the culprit had admitted responsibility and was being punished—but neglected to mention that the student was black until two weeks later, as the rumor mill went wild.
Junior Gilbert Moore Jr. said he had put up the racist notes as a response to actual racism at Williams—of which there was no evidence or he
wouldn’t have needed to fake it—and to encourage more dialogue about racism, because twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week was not enough. The college rose to the challenge—by suspending him for one semester. Enraged that a black student would be held responsible for anything he did, some black students denounced the harsh penalty, threatening to leave Williams. Moore concluded: “The system…has failed me.”
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ALICIA HARDIN, TRINITY INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY—2005
Federal investigators must have been getting bored with the hoax hate crimes on college campuses they kept being asked to investigate. After OJ, even the media’s hysteria was muted. Nonetheless, when three students at Trinity International University, a small Christian college near Chicago, received threatening racist letters in 2005, scores of newspapers across the country ran with the news.
A
New York Times
article on the alleged hate crime was bristling with references to the Christian nature of the school: “Christian College Secludes Students after Hate Letters…a small Evangelical Christian college…a conservative Bible-based school…more than 20 students held hands in a circle to pray…Affiliated with the Evangelical Free Church of America, the university mission statement says that its education is based on ‘the authority of God’s inerrant word, Holy Scripture,’ and that it seeks an international identity with ‘people drawn from every tribe and tongue.’”
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As is required by law, Jesse Jackson met with the victims of the letters, reporting that they “feel like a target is on their back because they are black.” Charlie Dates, a black student getting his masters in divinity, did not sound especially worried. He told the
Times
, “Crazy people do crazy things. It’s nothing to be terrified over.”
There was big coverage for the initial allegation. You would not read in the
New York Times
, however, that the perpetrator turned out to be a black student, Alicia Hardin. She had staged the racist incident because she wanted to switch schools. But as soon as she confessed, the
Times
lost interest in the story.
So did most of the newspapers from around the country that had given banner coverage to the original story. Only a handful bothered informing their readers about the investigation’s results. When the hoax part of the
story was reported at all, it usually showed up in demure, hundred-word items buried deep inside the newspaper.
12
Instead of bemoaning the runaway popularity of Fox News, the liberal media might consider cutting into Fox’s popularity by not aggressively hiding the news.
None of the racist incidents sweeping college campuses ever turned out to be true. They were either the normal bumps and jostles that come with being a human being—or, more often, they were complete frauds perpetrated by wannabe victims.
TAWANA BRAWLEY—1987
After inspiring a rash of hoax hate crimes on college campuses, attorney C. Vernon Mason slipped away from Columbia and popped up in Wappingers Falls, New York, promoting a whopper of a racist hate crime.
One night in November, 1987, fifteen-year-old Tawana Brawley was found curled up in a ball inside a plastic bag, apparently unconscious. (Medical examiners later determined she was faking the unconscious part.) (As well as everything else.) She had feces and racist graffiti on her body. When she was finally able to communicate, she claimed that she had been raped and beaten over several days by three white men, including policemen, who then dumped her in the bag where she was found. Through her advisors, she later added three other white men to the list of her alleged rapists, identifying one by name: local prosecutor Steven Pagones.
The cavalry was called out in response to this shocking hate crime—the Dutchess County Sheriff’s Department, the FBI, local and state police. Governor Mario Cuomo assigned Attorney General Robert Abrams to investigate the case.
But Brawley’s advisors quickly turned the investigation into a clown parade, steadfastly refusing to cooperate and hurling wild invective at anyone trying to find the truth. Among many bon mots from Brawley’s advisors, attorney Alton Maddox accused Abrams of masturbating to photos of Brawley. He suggested that Governor Cuomo was a Klansman, saying, “Mario Cuomo, the sheets have to come off!”
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Al Sharpton called Abrams “Hitler,” Cuomo a racist, and demanded that Cuomo appoint Maddox special prosecutor on the case.
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(Maddox later had his license suspended indefinitely for his conduct in the Brawley case.)
Eight months later, after a ridiculously time-consuming and costly investigation, the purported attack was exposed as a complete fraud.
15
It turned out that Brawley set the whole thing up to avoid explaining to her volatile stepfather why she hadn’t come home for four nights straight. Brawley’s boyfriend later told
Newsday
that she admitted to him she had cooked up the scheme with her mother.
16
Among the suspicious facts noted in the grand jury’s 170-page report were these:
Brawley was well nourished, had clean breath, no bruises or injuries to her body and was not suffering from exposure, despite the temperature having dropped to freezing several times in the previous four days when she said she was being gang-raped in the woods.
Witnesses saw her getting into the plastic bag by herself, and then hopping around in it before curling up into a ball on the ground.
Hospital technicians who examined Brawley soon after she was discovered concluded that she was faking unconsciousness.
The hospital rape tests were negative and no semen was found anyplace on her body.
She had no recent bruises or other marks on her body consistent with a rape.
During the period of the claimed attack, Brawley was seen in the apartment building nearby. Her clothes were in a washing machine in one of those apartments, as well as all the ingredients for her condition.
