At Least Casey Anthony Had the Good Taste Not to Blame the Murder of Her Child on a Black Man

See what you all made me do, with all of you egging me on about the history of white women (and men) claiming that black men giant negroes black rapists highwaymen killed their kids (or wives and husbands)?

Why do you have to let the facts, history, and weight of social and political context get in the way of a good moral panic about white children living in immediate peril? Unsafe even in their own homes? Always at risk, and for a panoply of reasons?

You folks can be so callous and cruel with all of your race obsessions.

Way back in the 1990s, Emerge Magazine had a great story on the fixation in the White Mind with black criminality and how the go to excuse--the updated version of the myth of the black rapist white women's tears get black folks hung from a tree Rosewood moment--remained a person of color.

Emerge Magazine's cover story on Clarence Thomas that depicted him as a lawn jockey is to this day the go to, classic, "boot on throat" attack against Black Conservatives. For my dollar, Lee Daniels' essay "The American Way" is a close second in Emerge Magazine's portfolio.

White women are a protected class in this country. White children even more so. Black folks the most vulnerable. Daniels captures this dynamic perfectly in the following essay from 1995.

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The American Way

The crime, as the tearful, young mother reported it, was demonic–a carjacking in which two infants had been swept up by a thief as he roared off with the car. The mother’s pleas for her sons’ safe return, made to a national media who had gathered in the small city of Union, South Carolina, to report the story’s denouement in all its pathos, were wrenching.

Much of the nation was transfixed by the pictures of the angelic infants and by Susan Smith’s mask of grieving motherhood.

Looming as a backdrop to these images of innocence was Smith’s description of the demon figure: The brother in the skullcap. The Black Bogeyman.

But the nation soon discovered there was no Black devil. Smith, the young, White mother of the tear-streaked face, possessed by demons of her own, later confessed to authorities that she strapped her sons into her car and plunged them to their deaths in a nearby lake.

But until the moment when the local police officials bluffed a confession out of her, there was that image, loose again on the surface of the national consciousness-the image out of the warped mind of the ante-bellum South, out of Thomas Dixon’s 1905 novel, The Clansman, and D.W Griffith’s 1915 film, Birth of a Nation.

There was that image again–the one that had proved so valuable to three generations of White Southern politicians during the era of Grand Apartheid, and to George Bush, the Republican Party’s 1988 standard-bearer, who restored it to a position of “respectability” in the White-centrist discourse on race relations.

There was that image again–the one that a White Boston businessman named Charles Stuart had used in 1989 to try to hide the fact that he had murdered his pregnant wife for her life insurance. Stuart’s story that a Black man killed his wife and also shot him ignited a police state of siege for African-American men in Boston for nearly three weeks. A Black man with a criminal record was eventually arrested and charged with the crime. Not until Stuart killed himself in January 1990 as his ruse unraveled, was that man–and Boston’s Black community–cleared of the crime.

In a bizarre twist, Jesse Anderson, the man killed with Jeffrey Dahmer in Wisconsin prison by a Black inmate, was serving time for the 1992 killing of his wife. He had falsely claimed that two Black men had stabbed and bludgeoned his wife to death.

Susan Smith knew the powerful grip the image of the dangerous Black man has on White Americans’ psyche.

And who can doubt it? In her descent into pathological desperation, that knowledge became for her, as it had for Charles Stuart, the crucial element in calculating that she could commit the gruesome crime and get away with it. The police of Union, South Carolina, to their credit, behaved differently than those of Boston.

They weren’t as gullible, or as willing to trample the rights of Black people based upon the mere word of a White person.

But is there anyone who believes that the story of Susan Smith will be the end of the racist scapegoating of African-Americans, a compulsion that once again suffuses American society?...

The full piece continues here.