CARLO ALLEGRI/REUTERS
Joe Lhota listening to his former boss, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Speaking before the Association for a Better New York on Tuesday, mayoral candidate Joe Lhota criticized rival Bill de Blasio’s approach to combating crime. As he’s done before, Lhota raised the specter that de Blasio would return us to the bad old days of the late 1980s, when murders in the city were approaching their all-time peak of over 2,200 in 1990.
In the midst of this fearmongering, Lhota trotted out an iconic expression of that era — one that stirs up old prejudices and suspicions about black-on-white crime. He described the actions of a group of mostly black and Latino motorcyclists who assaulted the Asian-American driver of an SUV after an altercation on the West Side Highway as “wilding” — a term that has its origins in the 1989 Central Park Jogger case, when it instantly became effective code for roving gangs of depraved and violent black youth.
One evening in April 1989, a group of at least 25 teenagers from Harlem went into Central Park. Some in the group engaged in harassing and assaulting joggers and bicyclists. Hours later, a white female jogger was found, near death, having been brutally raped and beaten.
The group in the park was quickly blamed for the rape as well, and intense interrogations by seasoned detectives already convinced of their guilt yielded false confessions from five of the most vulnerable teens. Though the youths hadn’t actually used the word, the police announced to a press hungry for sensational stories that the kids had a name for their rampage in the park: “wilding.”
The media reacted with familiar outrage, seizing the opportunity to splash the salacious details of the story across the front pages of the city’s newspapers. The front-page headline in the Daily News declared “Park marauders call it WILDING . . . and it’s street slang for going berserk.”
Rather than questioning the contradictory details of the rape or the negative DNA results, the press irresponsibly rushed to help the police and prosecutors cement their guilt. Mayor Ed Koch joined in, fanning the flames by scoffing at the idea that the word “alleged” should be used to describe the suspects.
But everyone had gotten it wrong. The five young men who were ultimately convicted of the attack on the jogger turned out to have been completely innocent of the rape, though it wasn’t until after they had served a combined 40 years in prison that the real perpetrator confessed. In 2002, a judge vacated their convictions.
This tragic miscarriage of justice is not the only reason why it is wrong for Lhota, who aspires to lead the whole city, to use the term “wilding.” When they compared the young suspects to animals with language such as “wilding,” “wolfpack” and even “savages,” newspapers and pundits were guilty of employing an age-old racist stereotype, one designed to separate post-emancipation blacks from whites by suggesting that they are somehow less than human — and more prone to violence.
Newspapers reporting on the jogger rape seem to have borrowed their language directly from the coverage of the Scottsboro Boys case. In 1931, nine black teenagers were falsely accused of raping two white women on a train in Alabama, and newspapers at the time called them “fiends,” “brutes” and “beasts unfit to be human.” Nearly 60 years later, the Central Park Five were labeled as “bestial,” and a columnist for the New York Post recommended that “the eldest of the wolf pack [should be] tried, convicted and hanged in Central Park.”
Few lessons have been learned. In April 2010, Mayor Bloomberg referred to the actions of a group of young blacks and Latinos involved in a violent incident in Times Square as “wilding.” And now Lhota is using the word again, conjuring fears of an earlier era and subtly invoking the stereotype of the violent black man.
Let’s not return to the bad old days by using coded language to degrade and indict people of color in the court of public opinion.
Burns is a co-director, with Ken Burns and David McMahon, of “The Central Park Five,” a documentary.
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