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3 The Position of the Black Male in the Cult of White Womanhood Tears and Fears MARLENE WAS NOT the first and will not be the last white woman to be reduced to tears and fears based on the alleged actions of black men. Her emotions were not simply related to issues of crime and violence. Those fears and tears are related somehow to the ways in which we socially construct the meaning of people’s race, class, and gender categories. On that first day when I heard the news of the attack on the jogger, I knew right off the bat that the story of a white female possibly raped by black males would resonate differently than a story of a white female raped by white males, or of a black female raped by black or white males. A week after the city awoke to news of the attack, three of the accused teens went before Justice Carol Berkman, a no-nonsense, Harvard-educated white woman. At an arraignment hearing the New York Times described as “raucous ,” the prosecutor stood before the judge and argued that what had happened to the jogger was the “‘most vicious and brutal assault’ ever committed in New York City” (R. Sullivan 1989a). In the prosecutor’s estimation, the suspects should be denied bail. Whether the prosecutor spoke with an eye on the long lens of history or was simply comparing the attack with more recent events, it appears she found that the assault represented some extreme event in the city’s history.1 The teens’ attorneys countered that in the 1986 murder case involving the infamous Robert Chambers—the white, preppy-looking youth who eventually pled guilty to strangling Jennifer Levin in Central Park, supposedly during “rough sex”—the defendant still managed to get bail (R. Sullivan 1989a). Chambers’s case remained part of the context of the period, because it had drawn to a close only about a year earlier. The defense attorneys also referenced the notorious 1986 case in which a black man had died after being chased The Position of the Black Male in the Cult of White Womanhood 47 onto a highway by a group of white youths from Howard Beach, a white ethnic enclave in the city’s borough of Queens. In that case, the court had also granted bail to the accused teens. It is possible that the prosecutor’s words were courtroom theatrics, but what is clear is that there was a disparity in treatment. No death occurred in the Central Park attack, yet the suspects were denied bail. By this time, vigils were being held across the city with white and black participants . Everyone, white and black alike, wanted to make clear that they too were outraged—everyone, that is, except some supporters of the suspects who reportedly behaved “raucously” at the hearing. With rancor, some mainstream press reports noted, the supporters questioned the veracity of all that was being reported by the media—the rape, the beating, the jogger’s reason for being in Central Park late at night—all of it. Reporting in the Middle of a Feeding Frenzy The media competition to get information about the jogger and about what had transpired in Central Park could be summed up in a word: fierce. The blanket coverage meant that reporters had been dispatched to find out about the jogger ’s personal life back home in Pennsylvania and in the places she had been educated, her life in the city, her family’s background, anything that could help to paint a picture of this person. My assignment, working out of Metropolitan Hospital and contending with the competition, was difficult on its own. But I also had to deal with the reactions from various quarters in the city, some of whom I had not encountered before. Some members of black communities across the city developed a growing distaste for the approach of the mainstream press to the coverage of the case. The City Sun, a Brooklyn-based weekly newspaper that served the black community , termed the mainstream media coverage an “outrage.” They charged that the mainstream media were exploiting the beating and rape of the jogger “to accomplish their own base agendas” (City Sun 1989). Some of the supporters of the young suspects were quoted in the mainstream papers questioning just about everything about the case. “Has anyone seen the jogger? How do we know she actually exists? How do we know if she was...

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