Nullus to the fullest re: the above headline.
Right now I am fucking with this crack’dberry as my main blogging tool. Ha, I said tool.
Over twenty years ago I remember a criminal case that polarized New York City like no other has since. The case was that of the Central Park jogger. A white woman had been viciously beaten and raped, then left for dead in the bucolic confines of the city’s largest park.
The case was vigorously prosecuted by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and five(5) Harlem teenagers were tried and convicted of the crime. Nearly fifteen years after the crime these convictions were vacated when the perpetrator confessed to the violent acts.
The fact that his DNA evidence was withheld by the Manhattan D.A. was never examined as an obstruction of justice. Instead the prosecutor, along with New York’s entire media machine was allowed to villify these young men and irrefutably alter their lives forever.
When this case initially popped off I knew something didn’t smell right. Here’s the deal… Any Black kid growing up in America understands what raping a white woman will mean for you if you are caught. That information is carried in the whispers of the ghosts belonging to the souls that have hung from trees like so much strange fruit. For some of those victims their crime was only glancing at a white woman, if even that much. So trust that these young men knew the repercussions of sexual assault.
What the District Attorney and the New York Times employed was the spectre of the boogieman’s black staff.
That is something that strikes more fear in peoples’ minds than even the fear that a Black man is holding a gun. It’s the fear of the Black penis.
Pop culture has used the imagery of the big buck to promote fear and hysteria. I pulled this drop off the trash heap to use the image below from recently deceased illustrator Frank Frazetta.
Even an artist that I admire can’t escape the popular culture prism that objectifies Black men.
