Black like me vicious like me: a white lie

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 15, 1996 | by Leonce Gaiter

New York Times reporter Fox Butterfield has written a book entitled All God's Children: The Bosket Family and the American tradition of Violence. The book is a case study of Willie Bosket, a vicious murderer who by age 9 had set a man on fire. A self-described "monster created by the system," by age 15 he had killed two men, committed 25 stabbings and 200 armed robberies. Butterfield is a white Harvard graduate and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize. The murderer, Bosket, is black.

I have read several reviews and articles about Butterfield's work. I will not read the book. I made a vow to read no more books about black murderers and mea culpas from black so-called former rapists. I have had enough of them and the white publishing world's obsession for them.

What the authors of these books have in common is the desire to inextricably entwine the black American ethnic circumstance with their protagonists' viciousness: i.e., to be black is to be vicious. It is inescapable, these books suggest, part of the process of growing up black in America.

What's most fascinating is the interest of white journalists in these monsters. What, I wonder, draws them to sit for countless hours interviewing someone who has killed, maimed and raped? Bosket sits behind Plexiglas to prevent him from throwing excrement at prison guards. What could possess a journalist to sit across from this person? Would you? Would you spend hours of your time talking to an excrement-hurling murderer? I would not.

Then I considered that it was not a person across from whom this white man (and other men and women like him) sat, but a thing -- a black thing -- representing all the black things they have been taught to hold in their minds as substitutes for the black men and women who actually exist all around them. It is just another manifestation of the crushing addiction that grips so many in America. That addiction is refusal to regard black men and women as equals (and to accept someone as your equal means accepting the possibility of their superiority to you in any given endeavor). The feed that addiction, they must constantly reinforce a lie and foist that lie upon black men and women: The lie that race is the decisive factor in any black existence, that compared to it, intelligence, achievements, talents -- they all count for nothing. Accordingly, ignorance, failure and inhumanity count for nothing as well. If you're black, it's all the same. You're black. No more need be said.

Both liberals and conservatives feed this addiction. On the latter side we have the Dinesh D'Souzas and the Charles Murrays, selling books like hotcakes, selling white America another quick fix. Considering the havoc this addiction wreaks -- the riots and the injustice and the healths and the killings -- you'd think mandatory sentencing would be in order. This drug does its work at least as well as crack.

On the liberal side you have the journalists, earnestly searching for explanations as to why these black men killed or raped, and finding the answer: They can't help it. They're black.

The murderers play the game. They portray themselves as victims of circumstance. They tell the earnest white journalists that they kill and maim because ... they're black. The journalists often pay little attention to the murderers' close relatives -- law-abiding, taxpaying citizens, raised in similar circumstances but who did not take to mayhem. No one writes books about them. Their tales don't feed addictions.

Black murderers sell. Books reducing black men and women to sets of cooked statistics, books reducing black culture to an ignorant front-stoop Southerner's racist rants -- they sell. There's a country full of addicts out there -- addicts still in denial.

I suppose we'll have to wait until they hit bottom before they recognize their problem.

My God, what kind of hell will bottom be?