Thread by @tressiemcphd

I reviewed Jim DeRogatis' book about his 20 years following R. Kelly's many legal cases, for the @chicagotribune chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/boo…

That's why I am getting a few death threats, which is normal and fine. But I would like to add a few more observations from DeRogatis' book that couldn't make the (already longer than the agreed upon word count) cut:

I had a couple hundred words on @nvancleve work on Cook County in her book "Crook County", which you should all read. Her work resolved for me something that seems to underpin a lot of the incredulousness that JD explores in his book

Namely: how do we explain how a rich black man got so much preferential treatment in one of the largest, most racist court districts in the country?

Nicole talks about how the very busy Crook County system, its structure and its actors, achieve their remarkable efficiency. They use racial tropes to speed up adjudication. One such trope she describes is the "mope".

See Nicole's explanation of how the "mope" facilitates court efficiency stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2016/06/o…

What's stumping people is how Kelly got so much leeway in that kind of system. DeRogatis is amazed by it and his facts are amazing. A racist Irish American judge with his own criminal history sets up a kangaroo trial for the ages in Kelly's first major trial.

I mean, you have to read this to believe it. He narrows the allowable evidence to the point of making evidence irrlevant. He allows the defense a ludicrous amount of leeway in their case. He drags out pretrial for six years. He effectively gave Kelly the white boy deal

It's easy to see it that way. Thus the conundrum. But if we think about the mope as cultural toolkit that this court districts has used for ages, to great effect, then the conundrum is resolved. For all the celebrity fetish in the trial they ultimately treated Kelly like a mope

He is treated like a simpleton who performed the kind of immoral acts that a mope from a culture of poverty performs. He lived down to the expectations that court has for a mope and despite his wealth and fame, nothing more could be expected of him

Even more, he performed his racialized poor culture on people from the same poor culture. In crook county that is barely a crime.

A detail I relished in this book is how gross Kelly is. He stinks and I started to imagine him as that man who always has dirty fingernails even though he works in a call center. He is a boor.

We only imagine him as a sex God because of low expectations, not high ones - Just like his celebrity perversely augmented his mope-ness.

I recommend @nvancleve book paired with DeRogatis' "Soul-less". Also, stop sending me death threats. They bore me. Thank you.