Watching the documentary "The Central Park 5", I'm remembering the craziness of NYC in the mid- to late-1980s, culminating in "The Central Park Jogger" case. I hope we had come further along, but it seems not much has changed. The same thinking that put these five kids in jail 25 years ago with no evidence except forced confessions that had no factual links to the case, also wrongfully imprisoned the so-called West Memphis Three. You think it wouldn't happen in the city. We were more culturally diverse, more open-minded, and every white person I knew bent over backwards to show how "unracist" they were. "We're not like The South", I heard many times, and still do. But that "Central Park Jogger" case played on deep-seeded racial fears and bias, fear that the Wall Streeters would "lose everything" at the hand of poor people, and fear of teenagers that almost bordered on 1950s juvenile-delinquent hysteria. I remember even thinking at the time, "Those kids LOOK guilty", and am ashamed of myself. This was the mindset that led to the stalking and killing of Treyvon Martin. 'Fucking punks. These assholes. They always get away', to quote George Zimmerman.
Growing up in New York in the 70s, in a weird way, it seemed less divisive even in a post-Civil Rights Act struggle for change. It seemed that there was a healthy white, Black and Latino middle- and working- class in the city, we all rode the same graffitied un-airconditioned subways. We all stepped over the trash piled in the streets. The people banded together - us vs. City Hall, for the most part. We were all in the shit. The city was broke and we all suffered. Son of Sam and the blackouts affected us all equally, as did the strikes. The Federal Government's refusal to bail out our city, which the Daily News touted as "Ford to City: Drop Dead", was a rallying cry. Try to keep us down. We'll fight back. New Yorkers were a different breed - New Yorkers first, racial or ethnic affiliation second.
There was a turning point, and I'll link it to Reagan being elected in 1980. There was a change in America, from failure to success, politically with the return of American Hostages in Iran to the end of the Cold War. The young, idealist, progressive had failed, so we fell back on this relic from the 1950s to save the day. "The Moral Majority", previously unheard of, now touted political power and influence. It seemed like we were moving backwards. The relatively newly-won Roe v. Wade was being called into question. Affirmative Action was under attack. The deficit was climbing and we were stockpiling nuclear weapons for imagined threats. The economy was booming so everyone assumed that we were moving in the right direction.
Money started pouring into NYC mainly due to Wall Street, and the creation of new investment instruments, and regulatory changes. Middle and working-class white kids flocked to Wall Street and now had jumped a couple of rungs on the socioeconomic ladder. While the middle class was finding new upward mobility and the Yuppies moved to the top, many poor and working class kids in the ethnic neighborhoods were heading in the other direction due to the advent of crack. Now young kids had a way to get quick and ready cash and temporary success in the eyes of some of their peers, ultimately that path would lead to jail and death. This was not a sustainable way to enjoy the spoils of 80s economy - supplying the Yuppies with cocaine. Working families in neighborhoods hit hard by "the drug wars" had no way to get out, and a stray bullet would occasionally find its way to an innocent bystander, sometimes a child. Cops and the press seemed to turn a blind eye to the drug crime, and same-race crime in general, as there was a tacit sentiment of, "Let them kill each other".
At the same time, the process of de-institutionalization had caught up with the economic boom in NYC, and there was not only a shortage of affordable housing, but a shortage of housing in general. I remember hearing that there was a 1% vacancy rate. Budget cuts by the Federal government on mental health care unleashed a flood of crazy people on the street that had nowhere to go, in addition to the revolving population of street people we always had. People were trying to make a buck any way they could. The "squeegeemen" were at almost every traffic light, offering to make your windshield even more greasy and opaque for a dollar. Some were service minded and actually cared to clean your window. Some were aggressive and behaved like street-corner extortionists. The nouveau riche in their BMWs felt under siege, trapped in their private property while the hand of the poor person, usually of color, came reaching across their window, fearful that their new-found wealth would be snatched away from them, or at least their decompression time in their rolling isolation chamber.
The fear and the widening chasm between the haves and the have nots, rich and poor, educated and uneducated, young and old, and most obviously, black and white was escalating slowly, and would rear its ugly head every once in a while, reminding us how little change there had been over the last 20 years or so. I was in college when Michael Griffith was chased to his death in Howard Beach, Brooklyn in one of the worst hate crimes of that decade. I was ashamed for my race. White people are not all like this, I wanted to shout. Certainly not me. I remember hearing about the rape and kidnap of Tawana Brawley who had racial slurs smeared on her body with feces. Again, I felt ashamed to be white. That's no me. "What year are we in?" I remember saying. People marched. We were outraged. As facts emerged and the incident was determined to be a hoax, we all felt duped. Our white guilt was misplaced - this time. The erosion of the goodwill was palpable.
I was working at an investment bank when "The Central Park Jogger" was raped and beaten nearly to death. There was a feeling that a class war had started from the boom of Wall Street. People were begging in the streets for food while your Patrick Batemans were eating $150 lunches at Gotham Bar & Grill. The hysteria ran so high, and the fear of groups of three or more of young, black men was apparent. The media had latched on to a misinterpretation by the police of "doing the Wild Thing", a reference to the Tone Loc song, into a catchphrase of a "phenomenon" of black youth traveling in "wolf packs" creating mayhem as "wilding". The animal similes were pervasive and no one called out the subtle de-humanization. The police, government officials, and ordinary people on the street referred to "those people" as "animals" on a regular basis.
About a year after the Central Park attack, all of the white fears of "wolf packs" of brown kids on "wilding" rampages were confirmed when a group of 15 to 20 men groped, robbed, assaulted and tore the clothes off random women at the Puerto Rican Day Parade, among other crimes. Much ado was made about the "French" (read "white") couple on their honeymoon who were assaulted and robbed, while Puerto Rican girls that were attacked were just among the numbers. Many of those attacks happened near or in Central Park. The bubble over the idyllic sanctuary had burst. The Park was no longer safe - for white people, that is. Lock up your daughters, and flee to The Hamptons on the next "Insert Ethnicity Here" Parade. Not St. Patrick's Day, though - that's whitey's day to cause mayhem in the streets. They're just drunks, not "animals", right?
"The Central Park 5" brought back those memories of what I call the "Crack Times" of New York - a time of both prosperity and glaring deficiency for those not in a position to ride the wave of success. The five boys, now men, who were wrongly convicted of attacking and nearly killing the woman jogging in Central Park that fateful day didn't stand a chance against the NYPD, the district attorney's office and the system that needed its culprit immediately, even as the East Side Rapist with the same MO was working that neighborhood and seemed the likeliest fit for the assailant, which he was. This five boys became the repository for all the anger and indignation the squeegeemen, the drug gangs, the panhandlers, and groping teens had created. They were going to be locked up no matter when, key tossed away, and we were all going to feel safe again. Wall Street felt there were no racial or class divides as Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky went to jail, even though professional women at my bank were supposed to wear skirts and pantyhose, or be sent home to change. The white Central Park rapist/murderer Robert Chambers was sen to jail for 15 years, so we couldn't be racist, right?
"The Central Park 5" are now remarkably well-spoken, rational adults, considering most of them went to jail in their mid-teens for about a decade. I can't imagine what it would be like to try to rebuild your life when you are a free man at the age when you are supposed to be well on your way to a career. I saw surprisingly little anger and bitterness - mainly sadness and mourning fro their lost time and youth. They were genuinely shocked at the media shitstorm that erupted while they were in jail awaiting trial, which they never thought was going to happen. How could it happen? Not in America. Not in the go-go 80s.
As Rodney King famously stated just a few years later, "Can't we all just get along?" when the white policemen who beat him were acquitted of any wrongdoing and riots broke out. We turned our ire in the 90s and in the new millennium against brown people abroad. We don't have a problem with race in the USA anymore - that's what the Supreme Court said about voting laws recently. "The Central Park 5" wouldn't happen again. There aren't any innocent people of color, any color, in jail now. Certainly not now.
Growing up in New York in the 70s, in a weird way, it seemed less divisive even in a post-Civil Rights Act struggle for change. It seemed that there was a healthy white, Black and Latino middle- and working- class in the city, we all rode the same graffitied un-airconditioned subways. We all stepped over the trash piled in the streets. The people banded together - us vs. City Hall, for the most part. We were all in the shit. The city was broke and we all suffered. Son of Sam and the blackouts affected us all equally, as did the strikes. The Federal Government's refusal to bail out our city, which the Daily News touted as "Ford to City: Drop Dead", was a rallying cry. Try to keep us down. We'll fight back. New Yorkers were a different breed - New Yorkers first, racial or ethnic affiliation second.
There was a turning point, and I'll link it to Reagan being elected in 1980. There was a change in America, from failure to success, politically with the return of American Hostages in Iran to the end of the Cold War. The young, idealist, progressive had failed, so we fell back on this relic from the 1950s to save the day. "The Moral Majority", previously unheard of, now touted political power and influence. It seemed like we were moving backwards. The relatively newly-won Roe v. Wade was being called into question. Affirmative Action was under attack. The deficit was climbing and we were stockpiling nuclear weapons for imagined threats. The economy was booming so everyone assumed that we were moving in the right direction.
Money started pouring into NYC mainly due to Wall Street, and the creation of new investment instruments, and regulatory changes. Middle and working-class white kids flocked to Wall Street and now had jumped a couple of rungs on the socioeconomic ladder. While the middle class was finding new upward mobility and the Yuppies moved to the top, many poor and working class kids in the ethnic neighborhoods were heading in the other direction due to the advent of crack. Now young kids had a way to get quick and ready cash and temporary success in the eyes of some of their peers, ultimately that path would lead to jail and death. This was not a sustainable way to enjoy the spoils of 80s economy - supplying the Yuppies with cocaine. Working families in neighborhoods hit hard by "the drug wars" had no way to get out, and a stray bullet would occasionally find its way to an innocent bystander, sometimes a child. Cops and the press seemed to turn a blind eye to the drug crime, and same-race crime in general, as there was a tacit sentiment of, "Let them kill each other".
At the same time, the process of de-institutionalization had caught up with the economic boom in NYC, and there was not only a shortage of affordable housing, but a shortage of housing in general. I remember hearing that there was a 1% vacancy rate. Budget cuts by the Federal government on mental health care unleashed a flood of crazy people on the street that had nowhere to go, in addition to the revolving population of street people we always had. People were trying to make a buck any way they could. The "squeegeemen" were at almost every traffic light, offering to make your windshield even more greasy and opaque for a dollar. Some were service minded and actually cared to clean your window. Some were aggressive and behaved like street-corner extortionists. The nouveau riche in their BMWs felt under siege, trapped in their private property while the hand of the poor person, usually of color, came reaching across their window, fearful that their new-found wealth would be snatched away from them, or at least their decompression time in their rolling isolation chamber.
The fear and the widening chasm between the haves and the have nots, rich and poor, educated and uneducated, young and old, and most obviously, black and white was escalating slowly, and would rear its ugly head every once in a while, reminding us how little change there had been over the last 20 years or so. I was in college when Michael Griffith was chased to his death in Howard Beach, Brooklyn in one of the worst hate crimes of that decade. I was ashamed for my race. White people are not all like this, I wanted to shout. Certainly not me. I remember hearing about the rape and kidnap of Tawana Brawley who had racial slurs smeared on her body with feces. Again, I felt ashamed to be white. That's no me. "What year are we in?" I remember saying. People marched. We were outraged. As facts emerged and the incident was determined to be a hoax, we all felt duped. Our white guilt was misplaced - this time. The erosion of the goodwill was palpable.
I was working at an investment bank when "The Central Park Jogger" was raped and beaten nearly to death. There was a feeling that a class war had started from the boom of Wall Street. People were begging in the streets for food while your Patrick Batemans were eating $150 lunches at Gotham Bar & Grill. The hysteria ran so high, and the fear of groups of three or more of young, black men was apparent. The media had latched on to a misinterpretation by the police of "doing the Wild Thing", a reference to the Tone Loc song, into a catchphrase of a "phenomenon" of black youth traveling in "wolf packs" creating mayhem as "wilding". The animal similes were pervasive and no one called out the subtle de-humanization. The police, government officials, and ordinary people on the street referred to "those people" as "animals" on a regular basis.
About a year after the Central Park attack, all of the white fears of "wolf packs" of brown kids on "wilding" rampages were confirmed when a group of 15 to 20 men groped, robbed, assaulted and tore the clothes off random women at the Puerto Rican Day Parade, among other crimes. Much ado was made about the "French" (read "white") couple on their honeymoon who were assaulted and robbed, while Puerto Rican girls that were attacked were just among the numbers. Many of those attacks happened near or in Central Park. The bubble over the idyllic sanctuary had burst. The Park was no longer safe - for white people, that is. Lock up your daughters, and flee to The Hamptons on the next "Insert Ethnicity Here" Parade. Not St. Patrick's Day, though - that's whitey's day to cause mayhem in the streets. They're just drunks, not "animals", right?
"The Central Park 5" brought back those memories of what I call the "Crack Times" of New York - a time of both prosperity and glaring deficiency for those not in a position to ride the wave of success. The five boys, now men, who were wrongly convicted of attacking and nearly killing the woman jogging in Central Park that fateful day didn't stand a chance against the NYPD, the district attorney's office and the system that needed its culprit immediately, even as the East Side Rapist with the same MO was working that neighborhood and seemed the likeliest fit for the assailant, which he was. This five boys became the repository for all the anger and indignation the squeegeemen, the drug gangs, the panhandlers, and groping teens had created. They were going to be locked up no matter when, key tossed away, and we were all going to feel safe again. Wall Street felt there were no racial or class divides as Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky went to jail, even though professional women at my bank were supposed to wear skirts and pantyhose, or be sent home to change. The white Central Park rapist/murderer Robert Chambers was sen to jail for 15 years, so we couldn't be racist, right?
"The Central Park 5" are now remarkably well-spoken, rational adults, considering most of them went to jail in their mid-teens for about a decade. I can't imagine what it would be like to try to rebuild your life when you are a free man at the age when you are supposed to be well on your way to a career. I saw surprisingly little anger and bitterness - mainly sadness and mourning fro their lost time and youth. They were genuinely shocked at the media shitstorm that erupted while they were in jail awaiting trial, which they never thought was going to happen. How could it happen? Not in America. Not in the go-go 80s.
As Rodney King famously stated just a few years later, "Can't we all just get along?" when the white policemen who beat him were acquitted of any wrongdoing and riots broke out. We turned our ire in the 90s and in the new millennium against brown people abroad. We don't have a problem with race in the USA anymore - that's what the Supreme Court said about voting laws recently. "The Central Park 5" wouldn't happen again. There aren't any innocent people of color, any color, in jail now. Certainly not now.
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