Those Who Cry “Wolf!”

We all know the Aesop fable about the shepherd boy who took his master’s sheep to a pasture near a dark forest and not too far from a village. One day, feeling bored, he cried “Wolf”. This drew forth the men from the village who rushed out to chase the wolf away. They found the boy doubled over in laughter but no wolf. He would repeat this prank a few days later and again, the men from the village rushed out to find him laughing and no wolf. When a real wolf appeared a few days later, he cried for help but no one showed up and he ended up losing a great deal of his master’s sheep. The men from the village did not believe his cry for help anymore. His cry of “Wolf” had become a symbol of attention-seeking behavior and they were not going to honor that anymore.

Which brings me to the story of Tawana Brawley. In 1987, Brawley, an African-American from Wappinger Falls, NY, claimed that six white men had abducted her, raped her, and left her in the woods covered with feces. They had scrawled racial epithets across her body. The story turned out to be untrue, leading to black eyes for many in the black community who sprang to her support. Reportedly, Brawley lied to escape the wrath of her mother’s boyfriend after she ran away from home for four days to visit her boyfriend. Did Tawana Brawley cry “Wolf”?

Three weeks ago, the black actor and singer, Jussie Smollett, claimed he was the victim of a racist and homophobic attack by two white men who beat him up, hung a noose around his neck and doused him with a liquid. The men also shouted racist and homophobic slurs at him. After days of intense investigations, the Chicago Police Department alleges that Mr. Smollett planned the attack and paid two Nigerian brothers to act it out for $3500. His motives were publicity and a better deal for his role on the series “Empire” on Fox. If the accusations are proven to be true, can one say Jussie Smollett cried “Wolf” too?

In both instances, we see an exploitation of racial animus. Though it may seem so, it is not only blacks who seem to exploit this phenomenon. Let’s take the case of Susan Smith, a white woman, from 1994. She claimed that she’d been carjacked in South Carolina by a black man who drove away with her two young sons (ages 3 years old and 14 months). For nine days, she made dramatic pleas on national television for their rescue only to finally break down and confess that she had drowned the kids herself by leaving them in her car and letting the car roll into John D. Long Lake in Union, S.C.Or the 1989 case of Charles Stuart who shot and killed his pregnant wife, Carol, as they drove home from a childbirth class in Boston. Mr. Stuart as you may guess was white. He blamed the shooting on a black man. Several black men were searched and questioned by the police. One named Willie Bennett, was finally arrested and charged in the killing before Mr. Stuart’s story began to unravel and Mr. Stuart jumped to his death into the Boston Harbor just before he was charged.

Heck, the whole Southern Strategy of the Republican Party, a strategy made popular by Nixon’s political strategist Kevin Phillips is based on crying “Wolf” – appealing to southern white voters by stoking fear for and animosity towards African-Americans.

Even currently, the President has declared a State of Emergency at the southern border based on fear of brown people overrunning the country! “Wolf!”

Though the examples cited may be few, they are but the tip of an iceberg. An iceberg made of racial fears and hostilities that hearken back to the birth of this nation and seem to dog our every step. Racism seems to be a cancer that continually eats at this country’s fabric and gets expressed in many ugly ways. It also gets exploited by the Jussie Smollets, Tawana Brawleys, Susan Smith and Charles Stuarts of this world for selfish and sometimes really evil purposes.
The fear of the other has replaced the fear of the wolf and the danger is, if exploited like in the examples listed above, like the men in the village, we as a society may become even more immune to the true accounts of hate crimes. It is already a fact that many citizens do not believe that there are Americans who are treated differently because of their skin color. The disregard of the attacks on those who are different may go up exponentially, exactly at a time when hate crimes are up.

Like the Chicago Police Superintendent, Eddie Johnson said, “Why would anyone, especially an African-American man, use the symbolism of a noose to make false accusations? How could someone look at the hatred and suffering associated with that symbol and see an opportunity to manipulate that symbol to further his own public profile?”Such a ruse, if indeed that is what Mr. Smollett did, cheapens the daily struggles of many African-Americans and people of the LGBT community and shows a privilege he seems unaware of. It also takes away the goodwill of many people of different races who try each day to do the right thing and treat everyone equally. In the Smollett case, for example, it is disheartening and unfair to many white and straight Americans who strive daily to be color and sexual-orientation-blind.

That is why is important that this country strives to overcome its burden of racism. Until that day where one is “… judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character”, until the day that some leaders do not try to divide us by stoking fear of one group for the other, our modern versions of the Aesop’s shepherd boy will keep crying “Wolf”, when there is none in sight.