1636. The house system was established in the 1930s. That Harvard took more than seventy years to confer the honor of master upon black faculty members but in the blink of an eye, relative to its history, endorsed suspicion of the pair’s continued presence in the house; that it made Robinson invisible and effectively forced Sullivan to profess his worthiness, to cite his bona fides as an advocate for victims, the downtrodden, the family of Michael Brown, killed by police in Ferguson; that it terminated their contract immediately after named and unnamed sources in a newspaper accused them of long being high-handed, incompetent and scary; that, in rebuffing reasoned argument and indulging feelings, vandalism and innuendo, Harvard chose to “police certain ideas and [not] police others,” to borrow Sullivan’s words—these elements of the story were subject to little analysis taken together. After Sullivan told an interviewer that he thought race was a factor in the administration’s decision to order a climate review over a clash of ideas, his opponents said that claim was ridiculous: ideas were not at issue; his ability to make a home for students was. Maybe Sullivan had a feeling. Maybe it related to unspoken knowledge of white professors whose hands-on relations with students haven’t precipitated investigations. And maybe the dean of Harvard College was correct in saying by May 11 that the situation at Winthrop House had become “untenable.” But gripped by emotion for months, the school became a rough court, and Sullivan and Robinson defendants, guilty as charged.
The anthropologist Roger Lancaster has a term for communal feeling forged from the negative energies of fear, suspicion, vigilance, mutual identification against the demon—and all his works and associations—and for shunning and punishment as empowering, unifying goals. He calls it a “poisoned solidarity.” Anti-black racism at the crude level of group expression qualifies, as does the vast public’s post-9/11 accommodation to guilt by association, torture, Guantánamo, endless war, assassination by drone, and other masquerades of protection, excepting “torture for fun” (the government’s argument against “deviant” low-level soldiers at Abu Ghraib, examined in this book). Trump’s scare campaign against immigrants as invaders, rapists and thieves is a latter-day iteration of his contribution to the chorus howling for revenge against the five boys in 1989. “It’s more than anger,” he said then, “it’s hatred … I want society to hate them.” It is important to recognize that Trump had a minor solo in that chorus, if a memorable and loathsome one. As an entrepreneur of enjoyment in the dehumanization of others, he understands that unity through vengeance sells—and has sold since before he took the main stage with his signature bombastic exploitation of real and imagined fears. He did not, however, create the conditions that would be ripe for that exploitation. For the average person living in New York in 1989 Trump’s intervention in the jogger case didn’t particularly stand out, maybe because he and those who despise him now—great swathes of white feminist New York, white liberal media New York, white political New York—were all on the same side then. It was the power side, and its instant dehumanization of the accused, accented by a fervent belief in confessions, ignited a reaction, sometimes ugly in its insensitivity to the jogger, among the boys’ backers, called “the black side” by some reporters in court.
As so often, the power side won, but society was diminished in that victory, and women were no safer: five were raped and bloodied by Matias Reyes after the jogger; one of them, Lourdes Gonzalez, was murdered, while her children listened behind a locked door. Reason—pursuing Reyes from the unnamed woman’s April 17 lead—might have saved them; rage could not. Lancaster describes this poisoned solidarity as a feature in America’s long-running moral panic over sex as a source of unparalleled danger from monsters among us—panic that sometimes explodes in the public square but by now has been normalized in the social conscience, habitual, ready to burst out in tweetstorms that may gather like hurricanes or disperse like a passing rain, but either way hit their mark. The inciting events vary. The instigators may be on the political right, but often they are liberals or professed progressives. The demon may be guilty or not; the crime, grievous, nonexistent or anywhere on a scale of harm. Rage unites them. Bombast is the conventional linguistic mood. Falling in line is the objective. And instead of a positive spirit of organic social solidarity to take concerted action for the common good, there is the perverse thrill of simultaneously quaking together in fear and sticking it to the devil.
So comes the third story. On July 3, 2019, a New York Times front-page headline read, “He Is Accused of Rape but Has ‘a Good Family’.” The report that follows does not explore the cluttered pathways of wrongdoing and redress. It, too, is a story of tropes. She is sixteen, “visibly intoxicated, her speech slurred.” He is sixteen, also drunk, how badly we aren’t told. They are at an “alcohol-fueled pajama party.” They are in New Jersey. “The boy filmed himself penetrating her from behind, her torso exposed, her head hanging down, prosecutors said.” It is important that we are voyeurs from the start. She is sixteen and drunk. He is sixteen and drunk. He later shares the video by text, according to investigators, with the message “When your first time having sex was rape.” Prosecutors move to try the boy as an adult. The judge in family court says, No, this is a juvenile case. He says a lot of other things. He says what happened wasn’t rape. His definition requires strangers with weapons in a dark alley. Such a case, he suggests, would fit the profile for adult prosecution. This does not: the youngsters staggered to a dark place holding hands; the boy comes from a good family, is an Eagle Scout, at a terrific school, with terrific grades. “He is clearly a candidate for not just college but probably for a good college.” Is the girl aware that prosecuting him as an adult would destroy the boy’s life? All of this happened in 2017 and 2018. The story is news because an appeals court rebuked the judge. It is front-page news, two weeks after the fact, because the Times wished to celebrate the rebuke. “A judge’s rationale for leniency is rejected,” a subtitle crowed. It is easy, with the disturbing details firmly in mind, to overlook what was being celebrated: the go-ahead to prosecute a sixteen-year-old as an adult.
The judge was arguably not the best equipped to decide this case, but we cannot know what would have happened if the prosecutor had entered family court in 2017 seeking swift accountability, correction and restitution. GMC, as the boy is called in court papers, was sixteen and drunk, but also, if the facts set out so far be true, or even mostly true, sixteen and mean, sixteen and selfish, sixteen and stupid, sixteen and dishonest, sixteen and in need of a lesson. Mary, as the girl is called, told her mother the next day that she worried that “sexual things had happened at the party,” according to the appellate court summary of the case. Also according to court papers, before the video was made several boys sprayed Febreze on her butt and slapped it. Later, as Mary vomited on the floor, GMC had already left the room. The next day he texted friends, “I fucked her, not raped her. Calm down. If you have the video, get rid of it.” When Mary asked him whether he’d made a video, he denied it. When she discovered he had lied, she asked him to stop sharing the video and destroy it, and he did not. Her mother called the police. An officer told GMC and his friends to delete the video, which they did.
Two years after that alcohol-fueled desert of the senses, there had been no lesson that might have mattered to a high-schooler. No consequences to make GMC take responsibility. No restorative justice in response to actions that, legal determinations aside, were wrong. No attention to the concerns of Mary. For her, the case goes on with only vituperative action, because the state was not interested in harm reduction or amends or correction in the realm of sixteen-year-olds. It was not interested in ensuring that GMC grow mindful of the ways that boys are acculturated to carelessness and violence, that he understand the harmful, capturing effect of technology. It said GMC’s behavior was beyond his years, adult behavior, really, “sophisticated and predatory.” The judge called that nonsense. Separate from everything else he had to say, this was the determinative rationale for rejecting the motion to treat the boy as an adult. The law in New Jersey is silent on good grades and test scores and Eagle Scoutery, but it does stipulate that a charged action must be sophisticated and predatory to meet the criteria for waiving a juvenile case out of family court. What the Times called leniency was affirmation of adjudication in the juvenile system. That is what the newspaper has advocated as appropriate treatment in general—and for years, ever since mass incarceration became a strain on the liberal conscience that once enabled it—for accused teenagers and children,
