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James Craig Anderson was a 47-year-old gay Black man from Mississippi. One night in 2011, he was standing in a parking lot he was attacked by a roving pack of young white dudes who had gone out to, in their words, “fuck with some niggers.”
They beat him up, robbed him, and for good measure, ran him over with a Ford F-250 as he tried to stagger away.
nytimes.com/2011/08/23/us/…
nytimes.com/2011/08/23/us/…
Two things abt this horrible story:
1) you probably don’t remember getting breaking news alerts on you phone abt *this* case, even as ever my twist in this Smollet case has been obsessively detailed by all kinds of news organizations.
1) you probably don’t remember getting breaking news alerts on you phone abt *this* case, even as ever my twist in this Smollet case has been obsessively detailed by all kinds of news organizations.
2) had he survived — he sadly did not — an awful lot of ppl would have said that the details of his story seemed implausible, that they didn’t add up.
But it’s worth remembering that hate crimes are often random cruel and theatrical; the spectacle is often the whole point.
But it’s worth remembering that hate crimes are often random cruel and theatrical; the spectacle is often the whole point.
Read back on the details of the Matthew Shepard case, perhaps the most notorious murder of a gay man in the US; or the lynching of James Byrd, Jr. in 1998. These crimes were so monstrous and random and thorough that they might seem to defy plausibility.
Smollet’s story is looking real suspect now, but i guess the question is: how can anyone look at the history of racialized violence or hate crimes in America and think some randos with bleach and a noose aint feasible?
Philip Dray’s book, “At The Hands Of Persons Unknown,” a history of lynching in America, contains stories of actual crimes so heinous that they almost sound like they came from some bad screenwriters’ fevered imagination.
those killings were graphic and arbitrary and set against official indifference— the book’s title comes from the boilerplate the white press used to describe how sheriffs would describe *public lynchings* in the town square: “the Negro was killed at the hands of persons unknown.”
The particulars of these killings — and the sheer frequency of them — made the Northern white press dubious that they could have possibly happened as described.
to expand and belabor the point: Chicago quite literally had secret sites for torturing the city’s Black residents up until just a few years ago; it sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it was very real.
theguardian.com/us-news/2015/f…
theguardian.com/us-news/2015/f…
Were any of the details of that story from 2015 feverishly reported on by Good Morning America? Did you get an NYT alert on your phone about any of that?
And if not, why do you think that is?
And if not, why do you think that is?
The historical inclination in this country has been to disbelieve or dismiss racist violence even when it has had literally thousands of witnesses.
thiscruelwar.com/americas-first…
thiscruelwar.com/americas-first…
Sham trials, sham investigations — that’s been the rule when it comes to these stories. Not sham attacks.
Sorry for typos, missing punctuation, etc
To my point:
And also:
The point is that the stories of this violence are seen as illegitimate bc the ppl who are reporting them are seen as illegitimate.
