Voices: The US, New York City, And The Central Park Five–Then And Now

What’s certain is that the Central Park Jogger story is at once a subject and an ongoing symptom: Talking about it and making a documentary about it adds another story, another bias, to the palimpsest. In focusing on the Five, the victim necessarily falls to one side; in retelling a received narrative of 1980s New York as “under siege,” the documentary reinforces old divisions and Manhattan-centric assumptions about which New Yorkers are New Yorkers. (Cf. Hurricane Sandy coverage and aid treatment of many in the “outer boroughs.”) One detail in the film demonstrates the somewhat privileged attention this horrible incident received: That same year, a woman was raped and tossed off a roof in the Bronx, but without garnering anywhere near the same attention.

Even within the exoneration project of the Central Park Five, you can discern differences across racial lines in the apparent consensus. Koch harbors little regret about feeding the frenzy over the assault; Wilder comes to the stunningly grim conclusion that “what we really need to realize is we’re not really good people. And we’re often not.”

–Nicholas Rapold, “The Central Park Five Reminds Us There’s No Singular New York,” The Village Voice

[T]hink about all that stuff. Its just coded words for race. It’s there. It’s in this case. The language of a liberal, progressive city in the late twentieth century, the language of the ‘wolfpack’ and the ‘wilding’ is the language of Jim Crow South. Ecclesiastes said what has been, will be again. What has been done, will be done again. There’s nothing new under the sun. That basically says that human nature never changes. So you can expect the present to resonate with the past and the past to resonate with the present […] You can take a headline as we do in the film, a Jim Crow newspaper headline about negro brutes, and it doesn’t look very different from the marauding band of wolfpack, separated by almost a century and by a thousand miles between the liberal Northeast and the supposedly conservative South.

…

Things have changed. We have an African American president, we have made more progress than any other country but part of that progress is the movement of groups that gets exploited by other groups in whose interest it is to keep people apart and so we play on fears that are religious, we play on fears that are racial, we play on fears that are sexual, we play on lots of fears just to keep people apart when most of us share the same self interest. Progress has been made, not enough progress has been made. Could this happen again? Yes, it’s happening every day in America. Someone, usually because of color, is charged for the crime they did not do, confessions are coerced all the time because of the techniques and pressures that the cops are able to do, should we record things from the very beginning when they walk into the [police] station house? You bet.  There’s a lot of things we can do. The media was hugely complicit in this story, they took this hook, line and sinker and it now seems like it’s the media’s turn to amplify what we’ve said and go in and look. There’s a lot of great stories embedded in this that need the light of day.

Ken Burns, “Justice Delayed, Justice Denied: The Central Park Five Interviews,” Crave Online

If you’re in the New York City area, friends of the R Shadow and Act are giving away *free* tickets–four tickets to two lucky winners–to a screening sponsored by the Maysles Cinema on Sunday, November 25, at 4PM at the Oberia D. Dempsey Center Auditorium. The deadline is *midnight tonight* to enter the contest. Check for details here!

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