Savage Portrayals: Race, Media and the Central Park Jogger Story

1. Reconnecting New Forms of Inequality to their Roots

1 Reconnecting New Forms of Inequality to their Roots Measuring the Distance between the Eras of Color-Blind Racism and Jim Crow Racism THE PERSONAL and professional agendas I pursue in this book grew from a desire to right a wrong. In 1989, members of the media, as well as portions of the political establishment and elements of the criminal justice system in New York City, wrongfully accused a group of black and Latino male teens of sexually assaulting a white female who had been jogging in Central Park. She would become known simply as “the jogger.” Six teenage boys were charged with the crime. Five of them would eventually be convicted in two trials; the sixth would settle the charges against him in a plea bargain. About thirteen years after the prosecutions, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office petitioned the court to vacate the convictions because the actual rapist had stepped forward admitting his guilt. This person, a known and convicted serial rapist and murderer already serving a life sentence, confessed to the attack and said that he had acted alone. Only his DNA could be connected to the jogger. Despite these developments in the case in 2002, some members of the political establishment and the criminal justice system continue to support the wrongful convictions of the young men. The rape of Trisha Meili, a twenty-eight-year-old investment banker working in Manhattan’s financial district, drew international media attention through a narrative focused on an allegedly new type of street crime called “wilding.” Simply put, the term meant intentionally behaving in a crazy manner, causing harm to others, and damaging property. According to police, the rape of Meili was the culmination of an evening of wilding in Central Park that began with other incidents of physical assault and harassment. With that police declaration, rape and wilding would become joined in the public consciousness. Although 2 Chapter 1 the other incidents mentioned in the police description of the evening’s events included assaults that caused various degrees of injury, one thing can be said for certain: It is unlikely the public at large would ever have heard about the other incidents in the park that night had the jogger not been raped. Meili’s sexual assault became the central issue in any discussion of wilding in Central Park on the night of April 19, 1989. I heard about the rape the same way most New Yorkers did—early the following morning from the news media. But this story affected me differently than it did most people because I worked as a journalist. I wrote for the Daily News, and I covered the city for a living. When I arrived in the newsroom the day after the attack, it was clear this would be a big story. I had already suspected as much, but I never imagined on that first day that I would end up spending almost two months working on the story, let alone that I would still be involved with the case nearly a quarter century later. This rape was different. Despite my young age and relative inexperience, the jogger incident stood out to me as an important moment because of the reaction that unfolded in my newsroom and in the city. The incident seemed to galvanize the media and the public because the teens charged with raping Meili—a white woman—were black and Latino. Even in 1989, when the civil rights gains since 1965 were supposed to have erased racial hierarchies and overt discrimination, the incident revived fears of black men preying on white women and engaging in random acts of violence. Such fears and assumptions were rarely expressed or acknowledged in mainstream discourse as the unapologetic racism of slavery and the Jim Crow era, which ended in 1965, gave way to a more subtle expression of many of the same attitudes , dubbed “color-blind racism” by Bonilla-Silva (2006: 28–29). The sexual assault of Trisha Meili tapped into intractable racist ideas that linked people of color and the underclass with social pathology and sexual transgression. New York City and other metropolitan areas were in the grip of rising crime rates, some of which were attributed to the spread of crack cocaine (Grogger and Willis 2000). This drug, which is a cheaper form of cocaine, spread in the inner cities, and with the media’s help, became associated with blacks and Latinos. Although the use of both powder and crack cocaine grew across...