October 2007, the Times got caught up in a racial hoax—as it had several times in the 1990s—because it was eager to break news of rampant white racism. The story involved the discovery of a four-foot-long hangman’s noose on the doorknob of a black professor’s office at Columbia University’s Teachers College. The victim was Madonna G. Constantine, a professor of psychology and education, whose specialty is race, racial identity, multiculturalism and racial justice. The noose was particularly upsetting for Teachers College, which prides itself as “a bastion of liberalism and multiculturalism.” The local police said that their hate-crimes unit had mounted a full investigation, including testing the rope for DNA. The Department of Justice opened an investigation.
Professor Constantine called the episode “an unbelievably blatant act of racism,” telling about two hundred supporters who had gathered outside Teachers College that she would not be intimidated. “I want to let the perpetrator know that I will not be silenced.” The Times gave ample space to accusations of racism. “This incident really gives you a new perspective on the state of race relations in this country,” said Michael J. Feyen, a doctoral student at Teachers College. Another student insisted to the Times that “It’s the latest and maybe most visible and extreme case of a climate of racism that we face in our entire society but of course is manifested at Columbia as well.”
Yet the more street-smart New York Post and Daily News, citing unnamed sources, said the noose might have been the result of an academic dispute with a rival professor, who was white, which had led Constantine to file a lawsuit in May 2007 charging her with defamation. The investigation mounted by the Hate Crime Task Force of the New York Police Department yielded few leads or clues. But in June 2008, more than a year after the incident, the Times was forced to reveal that the university had fired Constantine after what was reported to have been an eighteen-month investigation found that charges of plagiarism against her were accurate. According to the school, Constantine had lifted material from two former students and a former colleague prior to the noose incident. In fact, Columbia had sanctioned the professor in February, but allowed her to stay in her job to appeal the ruling. Columbia, however, had never released that information, and the Times, which has close contacts and good sources at the school, either never found out about it or chose not to report it. To date, the Times has still never performed a postmortem, acknowledged its role in yet another racial hoax, or followed up in any way to determine who exactly was behind the noose, or whether Constantine should have been charged criminally.
Meanwhile, as responsive as the paper is to allegations of hate crimes against blacks, it has not demonstrated the same responsiveness in cases where the races are reversed and whites are the victims. In December 2000, for instance, Jonathan and Reginald Carr went on a heinous rape and killing spree in Wichita, Kansas. The two brothers were black; their victims were all white. After breaking into the residence of three young men, the Carr brothers forced the two women who were their guests to perform sexual acts on each other, and then forced the men to participate. The Carrs raped the women, and then drove the five victims to an ATM machine for money. Next they headed to a soccer field, where the victims were made to kneel in the snow and beg for their lives. All five were shot in the head, before the Carrs ran over them with their truck. One of the women survived and walked more than a mile in the snow for help; her fiancé was among those killed.
Two years later, the Carr brothers were found guilty of four counts of capital murder, along with rape, aggravated robbery, burglary and theft. As Michelle Malkin wrote in her account of the case, “The horrific James Byrd dragging case in Texas and the Matthew Shepard murder in Wyoming, for example, garnered front-page headlines and continuous coverage,” yet there was little national coverage of the Wichita murders, and none at all from the New York Times. Malkin quoted one Wichita resident in a letter to the local paper: “If this had been two white males accused of killing four black individuals, the media would be on a feeding frenzy and every satellite news organization would be in Wichita doing live reports.” Malkin concluded: “If you read The New York Times or The Washington Post or watched the evening news this week, the Wichita Massacre never happened.”
In October 2004, in New York’s East Village, a black man from Brooklyn shot three people and terrorized patrons in a bar, threatening to burn the place with kerosene and a lighter. At one point he held fifteen people hostage. At trial, prosecutors charged that the man was “on a mission of hate” to kill white people, and explained that the police had found tapes of anti-white rap music interspersed with the man’s own anti-white rants. “Get ready to pull your guns out on these crackers, son. All they do is party and have a good time off of our expense, son,” one tape said. “Blast the first couple you see having a good time. Let them visit your side of the tracks.” If the racial roles were reversed, the Times would have given the case far more attention and used it for a springboard—as it has often done—for pieces that searched for Larger Racial Meanings. Instead, the case was buried in the Metro pages.
In April 2006, a New York University student emerged from the subway for a visit with an old friend who lived in a Harlem neighborhood. A gang of black teens attacked him. Fleeing into traffic, the student was struck by a car and died a few days later. The story was newsworthy: in a gentrifying neighborhood, gangs of black teens (“wolf packs,” as the New York Post called them) were on the loose, systematically preying on people who appeared well-to-do, overwhelmingly white. Indeed, a similar case involving a black man chased into traffic by a white gang in the Howard Beach neighborhood of Queens in the late 1980s was given wall-to-wall coverage by the Times and eventually brought down Mayor Ed Koch. The death of the NYU student was covered by other New York papers. “Harlem Thugs Yuppie Hunting,” read the New York Post headline. The Times mentioned the case in a one-paragraph “Metro Briefing.”
Black crime in general causes skittishness at the Times, leading to classic liberal avoidance and denial. The perpetrators of these crimes are often portrayed as society’s victims, with the high rates of black crime and incarceration blamed on institutional racism and “racial profiling” in the criminal justice system. This representation is actually a disservice to the very minority group that the Times would like to think it is protecting. Although blacks attack whites at a much higher rate than the reverse, the vast majority of victims in black crime are also black.
In January 2007, a young black man named Ronnell Wilson was convicted of killing two undercover police officers on Staten Island several years before. Both of the undercovers were black. Wilson faced a federal death penalty and, as Trymaine Lee put it in a Times report set in Wilson’s neighborhood, “much of the [defense] testimony this week focused on Mr. Wilson’s upbringing, on his struggling existence from an early age that his defense lawyers contend played a role at the moment he pulled the trigger.” Lee’s piece largely echoed the mitigating arguments of the defense attorneys. “While prosecutors paint Mr. Wilson as a cold-blooded killer, bully and gang member who depicted his violent lifestyle in rap lyrics,” Lee wrote, “neighbors who knew him said he was just a young man lost.”
After quoting other residents of the projects on the justice of the death penalty, Lee closed with the perspective of twenty-two-year-old Fred Tuller, who made Wilson seem like a mere victim of his environment. Tuller had told Lee that “it was a rough neighborhood to live in, that violence and poverty are seared into who they are and how they see themselves. He saw his first dead body at age 5 or 6. The victim had been shot and left for dead in the stairwell of his building.” Lee described Tuller looking into the hills where the big houses seemed to be leering down on the neighborhood: “Look at us, in the middle of the projects, down here like lab rats,” he said. “They’re laughing at us.”
Wilson’s death sentence was reversed on appeal in July 2010, a decision the Times seemed to endorse in two news reports. The first one ended with Wilson’s defense attorney saying she was “thrilled.”
Another story that showed a little too much victimology involved the suspended season
