Another “Black Man Did It” Lie

It's an old lie, claiming that The Black Man Did It; but it was trotted out again last week when a White mother from suburban Philadelphia said two Black men snatched her and her 9-year-old daughter from their SUV and abducted them in the trunk of a Cadillac. Black people across the U.S. were skeptical from the very beginning as this same lie has been told on Black men in the U.S. for 500 years or since White women learned that White men had a complex about Black men taking “their” women. That is the track record: White women chase after Black men and when their White husband or boy friend finds out, it turns into the "Black Man Raped Me" lie.
Blacks across the country were outraged after Bonnie Sweeten was found in a luxury hotel at Disney World. Authorities quickly unraveled the hoax, but not before an Amber Alert, frantic searches and national news coverage that played into images of marauding Black men.

The Black Man Did It lie last made news as recently as October, when a John McCain volunteer claimed a 6-foot-4 Black man carved a B into her cheek (For Barack, evidently). Even White men tell the lie; Charles Stuart told it in 1989 after he killed his wife in Boston. Susan Smith told it when she drowned her sons in 1994 in South Carolina. Unknown numbers of Black men were hanged for it back when lynching was a common practice. Law professor Katheryn Russell-Brown documents 67 racial hoaxes in the period between 1987 and 1996 in her book "The Color of Crime."
Not only do people use us as the stereotypical crime problem of America, but the problem is people believe it so easily. The first thing people think of when it comes to crime is a Black man did it. It is rooted in a mixture of psychology, statistics and sociology, amplified by the media's tendency to focus on crimes against White women.

Even Black people lock their car doors when a Black man walks by, no matter how impeccably dressed a brother may be. And look at the parallel of the Black cop who was running after a suspect and was killed by a White cop last week. How many times have you seen a Black man running down the street and thought of something negative? And when you see a White guy running down the street and you think he's running late. A lot of us are guilty of this negative thinking because that's the way the media and society has programmed us.

Black men are convicted of crimes at much higher rates than any other group. So was falling for Sweeten's lie racism, or the normal thing? And does her blond hair have anything to do with the amount of media coverage her story received? Notice the difference in coverage between the killing of a White female college student in Connecticut and the approximately three dozen Chicago public school students, mostly Black, who have been killed this school year.

This latest lie began when she called police, allegedly from a trunk, and said Black men had rear-ended her Yukon Denali at a busy suburban intersection, then abducted her and her daughter in broad daylight. No one at this busy intersection had seen it happen, and Sweeten somehow still had her cell phone. And Black men are scarce in this county which is 92 percent White and 4 percent Black.

Authorities discovered that Sweeten had made the call from miles away, in downtown Philadelphia. Their attention turned to the airport, and Sweeten was soon found. She is free on $1 million bail, facing misdemeanor charges of identity theft and false reporting.

During a news conference after the hoax was exposed, Bucks County District Attorney Michelle Henry explained, "It's a terrifying thing for a community to hear that two Black men in a black Cadillac grabbed a [White] woman and her daughter."