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Propaganda Posing as Documentary

The new Netflix miniseries, When They See Us, brings the Central Park Five back into the limelight.

The Five were convicted of brutally gang raping a white jogger in 1989. Four were black, one Hispanic, and all were between the ages of 14 and 16. The case dominated New York City headlines and inspired Donald Trump to pay for pro-death penalty ads in the New York Times.

In 2002, a convicted serial rapist named Matias Reyes claimed sole responsibility. Mr. Reyes’s DNA was the only match to evidence from the crime scene. The state vacated the Five’s rape convictions, and in 2014, New York City awarded them $41 million. Liberals claim the case proves America’s justice system is racist. Yet many have shown there is plenty of evidence the suspects were involved in the crime.

When They See Us ignores that evidence. For black filmmaker Ava DuVernay, the Five were railroaded by police racism and a criminal prosecution.

The original incident took place on April 19, 1989, when more than 30 young blacks and Hispanics descended on Central Park for an evening of “wilding.” In the series they are just running through the park, having a good time.

Not so. “People were punched in the face and pulled off their bicycles and robbed of their watches,” says New Yorker writer Ken Auletta. They beat one white school teacher so badly police said he looked like he had been “dunked in a bucket of blood.”

The series does show a few people assaulting two people, but the Five are appalled and don’t join in. Brutal police officers chase and catch most of the suspects. One smashes 14-year-old Kevin Richardson’s face with a helmet.

Soon after the arrests, police find Patricia Meili, the raped jogger, almost dead. Sex crimes investigator Linda Fairstein suspects the young men attacked her and orders the police to get confessions. Police use physical force, lie, threaten, and deny food and toilet breaks. The suspects eventually break and confess to the rape; all but one confesses on camera.

Naturally, the justice system is racist. Outmatched in court, outwitted by racist cops, badly served by bungling lawyers, the Five are convicted because of the taped confessions. Four go to juvenile detention, and 16-year-old, Korey Wise, goes to adult prison. Five good-natured boys’ dreams are crushed by a vicious system.

The main villain is Linda Fairstein, an arrogant, blond-haired white woman who ignores evidence to get convictions. She’s what blacks call a “Beckzilla:” a white woman using her “privilege” to destroy non-whites. Miss DuVernay’s miniseries is so effective that the real Linda Fairstein lost her book publisher because of When They See Us—though she has now written her own defense against the series’ reckless portrayal.

The other villain is Donald Trump. He appears in old television interviews about the death penalty ads. The show insists he is racist and partly responsible for the unjust verdict. He personifies America’s racism and injustice.

The actors don’t look like the suspects. The short actor playing then-14-year-old Kevin Richardson looks younger than 14. Mr. Richardson looked much older than 14 in 1989, and was taller than his arresting officers. The series portrays the other four similarly.

The show claims the teenagers learned about the rape during interrogation, but some had mentioned it unprompted earlier. One said he “didn’t do the murder” but he knew who did (initially, the jogger was expected to die). Mr. Richardson told police “Antron [McCray] did it” before authorities even knew about the rape. In response to a joke that he should be out with his girlfriend, one teenager told a cop he “already got some.” As Raymond Santana was driven from one police station to another, he told police, “I had nothing to do with the rape. All I did was feel her tits.” A friend of Mr. Wise said he told her he held the victim down but did not rape her.

None of this is in the series, in which The Five stoutly deny they were involved.

In the series, the “wilding” is good-natured fun, but the Five were convicted of assaults that still stand. In a 2002 story casting doubt on the rape convictions, The Village Voice wrote:

It is important to remember, in any examination of the public record of this flawed investigation and prosecution, that even if these five youths, or at least some of them, were not guilty of rape or sexual assault, they were not innocents—having been convicted of a whole series of other crimes committed in the rampage that night. One need only recall that among those crimes, two men, John Loughlin and Antonio Diaz, were horribly beaten and left bleeding and unconscious.

One of The Five, Yusef Salam, testified in court that he brought a 14-inch metal pipe—a weapon used in the attackers—to the park that night, but the series downplays the “wilding.” In court, a stereotypical “Becky” complains that young blacks made weird sounds as she and her husband bicycled past them. The blacks in the audience guffaw at what is portrayed as petty and racist. In fact, Patricia Malone was almost raped. “It was actually terrifying,” she told ABC News last month. “They were ripping at my arms and legs and clothing. As a woman, you immediately wonder what’s going to happen.” She and her husband managed to get away.

The film gives a false impression of Mr. Wise’s time in prison. According to police, he became a prison gang leader. In the series, he is brutalized by gangs but never joins one.

There are also questions about the relationship between Mr. Wise, and the confessed rapist, Matias Reyes. Authorities think Mr. Wise’s gang may have intimidated Mr. Reyes into claiming sole responsibility. The two got into a fight early in Mr. Wise’s prison term, but in the series this is a dispute over a television.

The series claims Mr. Reyes decided to confess because of his new-found Christian faith, but police are skeptical. His past crimes included an attempted rape in a church. Mr. Reyes was already serving a life sentence for a brutal rape and murder, so an additional conviction made little difference to him.

The show treats Mr. Reyes’s confession as absolute fact, but this story is thin. He claims he caught the jogger on his own. Police doubted this because Miss Meili kept a 7-and-a-half-minute mile pace for her run; Mr. Reyes was chubby and unathletic. Mr. Reyes also claimed he attacked Miss Meili with a tree branch and a rock. She had what looked like cut wounds, but Mr. Reyes said he didn’t use a knife.

The doctors who saved the jogger’s life thought a group of men attacked her. Dr. Robert Kurtz told The Wall Street Journal in 2014 that “there had to be another individual or a group who inflicted injuries with a sharp-edged instrument if he [Reyes] only used a blunt object.” Dr. Jane Haher said there were visible handprints on Miss Meili’s thighs, calves, ankles, and behind her knees. She thinks “people held her legs down while somebody did this horrible act.”

At the time of the trial, authorities knew that at least one attacker had not been caught. As Central Park Five prosecutor Tim Clements explained to the New York Daily News last year, “We told the jury that the DNA that had been analyzed matched someone else. When Reyes came forward it was a relief. . . It’s not surprising that he (perhaps) was with this group or joined it later.”

Mr. Clements thinks the state should not have vacated the Five’s convictions: “I thought there were a lot of factual inaccuracies and some of the logic and the conclusions were faulty. The facts and the law supported the convictions. I was very disappointed that they vacated the convictions without even a hearing, without even an opportunity to question and examine Reyes.”

In When They See Us, aggressive white cops force the suspects to confess. The case’s lead officer, Eric Reynolds—who is black—strongly disputes this. “There was no coercion,” he told the New York Daily News in 2018. “If they all said the same exact things, then maybe I would think that. But they didn’t. Look at the video statements. They stand up and demonstrate [what happened].”

He also noted that the statements were obtained while Miss Meili was in a coma: “If we’re railroading them, how do we know when she comes out of the coma what story she’s going to tell? If you are trying to pin it on someone, why would you risk that she would say something different?”

Mr. Reynolds does not even appear in the series.

The prosecutor, Mr. Clements, also says there was no coercion. “Liz [Lederer, the lead prosecutor] was doing interviews in a room with an open ceiling,” he told the Daily News. “My job was to make sure everyone was quiet so the interviews wouldn’t be interrupted. There were parents present. In that situation, you can’t coach them, you can’t tell them what to do.”

The New York City Police Department re-investigated the case in 2002 and concluded there was no coercion. In the series, the main trick police use is to convince the suspects that if they confess to rape they can go home. Even a low-IQ 14-year-old knows that isn’t true. Why did the Five confess when the other suspects did not?

Mr. Reynolds, like many involved in the case, is incensed that the city settled without a trial. “If we had gone to trial in their lawsuit, we wouldn’t be having this conversation because all the facts would have come out,” he said. “It would have been clear they participated and Reyes didn’t act alone. The evidence supported it. They [the Central Park Five] did not want to go to trial. They just wanted to get paid.”

Prosecutor Clements also thinks that if there had been a new trial, the Five would have lost.

Another person who doesn’t like the settlement is the victim. “I so wish the case hadn’t been settled,” Miss Meili told ABC last month. “I wish that it had gone to court because there’s a lot of information that’s now being released that I’m seeing for the first time.” She still believes she was attacked by a group.

Of course, When They See Us leaves all this out. It has a simple message: our racist justice system framed five innocent young persons of color. It is propaganda posing as a documentary.

The great myth is essentially borne out by whatever one is likely to hear about Indians from non-specialist sources. Professor Clifton devotes several pages to fleshing it out, but it can be quickly summarized: Indians were spiritual, egalitarian, innocent people living in perfect harmony with the earth. They welcomed the white man, taught him the secrets of the wilderness, and shared with him the wisdom of their social institutions. In return, the white man enslaved and slaughtered the Indian, afflicted him with hideous diseases, and tried to destroy his culture.

Nevertheless, runs the myth, the Native American has survived. Though he has been dispossessed and politically emasculated, his spirit remains pure. As the white man begins to acknowledge the horrors he has wrought upon the Indian, so has he begun to study and appreciate the age-old wisdom and natural virtue to which all Indians, everywhere, are heir.

Like all myths, this one leaves certain things out: in this case, cannibalism, infanticide, ritual torture, geronticide, slaughter of prisoners, slavery, and the like. Such practices, though well substantiated, are seldom written about by historians and ethnographers for fear of violating what Prof. Clifton calls the Eleventh Commandment of the Indian business: Never Say No To An Indian. One of the Commandment’s corollaries prohibits writing or saying anything that Indians might not wish to hear. Most Indians know very little about their ancestors of centuries ago, and would vigorously deny accusations of slavery or cannibalism.

In Canada, certain agreeable fictions have semi-legal status. Whenever work crews find human bones at ancient camp sites, for example, they must take special measures not to violate the sacred dead. Broken or burnt human bones — evidence of certain now-embarrassing practices — can be treated like animal bones.

Stressing the Positive

On the stress-the-positive side of the myth we find the wisdom that the white man is supposed to have learned from the Indian. Every school child has heard of Squanto, the Algonquin who taught the Pilgrims to fertilize their corn with fish. As Lynn Ceci points out in a fascinating essay, there is no evidence that any North American tribes used fertilizer of any kind. Squanto, who had a very interesting and well-documented career, probably learned about it in Newfoundland, where he lived for some time among English settlers who routinely fertilized with fish.

School children do not learn that Squanto had lived in both England and Spain, spoke fluent English, and was hardly the noble, simple savage the history books make him out to be. As Dr.Ceci points out, the image of generous Squanto tends to obscure the more accurate picture of Indians who often attacked and killed settlers.

Another part of the great Indian myth that has recently been picking up steam, is that early Americans learned about democracy and the advantages of unity by studying the Iroquois Confederation. One of the authors traces the origins of this myth, and explodes the idea that the Constitution could have been influenced, in any way, by the matrilineal and hereditary form of representation practiced by the Iroquois.

One reason such preposterous notions make any headway at all is that it has become nearly obligatory to describe Indian societies as idyllically egalitarian, even “non-sexist.” Of course, there were hundreds of different tribal societies with different customs, but all of them had well defined sex roles that would horrify Gloria Steinem. Often, women were treated scarcely better than beasts of burden.

As for egalitarianism, it is difficult for bare subsistence-level hunters and gatherers to practice anything else, but as soon as material surplus appeared, some people got more of it than others. Leland Donald writes about the Tutchone of the southern Yukon, who lived on land so harsh as to be nearly uninhabitable. Nevertheless, their society was divided into hereditary classes of rich, poor, and slaves. As Dr. Donald puts it, “even in conditions that seem ideal for the presence of the classic egalitarian Indian society, it is possible for marked inequalities to emerge.”

The potlatches and ruinous gift-giving that were required for status among the more prosperous Northwest Indians are well known, but somehow coexist with the myth that Indians all lived in innocent classlessness. Even well known expressions like “low man on the totem pole” fail to puncture the myth.

Another important part of the image is the perfect harmony with nature in which Indians are said to have lived. Once again, sparsely scattered, stone-age people have very little choice about the matter, but “Mother Earth” is central to the myth. All Indians, it is said, saw the earth as their beloved mother. Hills were her breasts, streams were mother’s milk, and vegetation was her lovely hair.

Astounding as it may seem, one of the authors explains that the entire Mother Earth story can be traced to a single statement made by a single Indian in 1885. There is virtually no other evidence that Indians thought of the earth as mother. Nevertheless, the Mother Earth belief is now so widely attributed not only to American Indians but to all primitive peoples that it is frightful heresy to point out how unsubstantiated it is.

Not surprisingly, there are plenty of entrepreneurs — Indian and non-Indian — who have parlayed the notion of the noble, nature-wise Indian into a means of parting gullible whites from their money. People with names like Rolling Thunder and Spotted Fawn do a brisk business promoting sweat lodges, sun dances, purification ceremonies, or whatever else aging hippies can be made to pay for. These ceremonies bear only a vague resemblance to anything the Indians of the past ever did, but there is a steady market for them.

According to another author, the same can be said for the pottery sold on the Pamunkey Indian reservation in Virginia. The Pamunkey stopped making pottery in the 1890s and started up again in the 1930s only because the state of Virginia paid to establish a pottery school on the reservation. Now tourists happily buy “Indian” pots, decorated with stick figure “writing” that is likewise a 20th century invention.

The High Counters

Minor frauds like these are relatively harmless. Deliberate attempts to manipulate thinking about Indians are more serious. David Henige of the University of Wisconsin reports that there is a small academic industry devoted to inflating the population estimates of Pre-Columbian America. If evidence can be found that tens of millions of healthy, happy Indians were living on the continent before the white man arrived, then the reduction of their numbers through warfare and disease can be made to seem all the more heinous.

The High Counters, as Mr. Henige calls them, pore over ancient accounts, pick the most exaggerated population estimates they can find, and solemnly pass them along as wholly credible. One scholar, for example, believes that a single energetic priest actually baptized, and counted, 14,000 Indians in a single day — one every six seconds, ‘round the clock. Others think that when Cortes said he faced an army of “more than 149,000” men, he can be relied on to have counted them accurately.

As Mr. Henige points out, numbers like these are just another way of saying “a lot,” but it is the scholars who are prepared to believe the worst of the colonizing white man who have the deepest faith in his ability to count people in crowds. Other High Counters would have it that European diseases swept through native tribes before the white man found them, killing up to half the population before Europeans could even start counting them.

If, by whatever means, the High Counters can gin up enough pre-Columbian Indians, they can then trot out the great, anti-white totem word, “genocide,” when they talk about the legacy of Columbus. The University of Oklahoma has even published a book called American Indian Holocaust and Survival.

Indian Givers

Present descendants of invented Indians have woven the strands of myth into a mighty whip with which to beat the white man. They have, for example, mobilized reservoirs of public sympathy for huge land claims. Allan van Gestel, who has defended current owners against such claims, estimates that since 1970, Indian law suits have clouded the title to 35 million acres in the Eastern United States alone. This is an area the size of Austria or Ireland.

Indians can always call on teams of eager whites who will work for them pro bono. Clever lawyers have based most land cases on an obscure Congressional proclamation of 1783 that forbade the states to buy land from Indian tribes without federal permission. This was six years before the Constitution even went into effect, and several state governments had bought land from Indians even before the proclamation. This has not stopped tribes from trying to get back land that was duly purchased — and that has been enormously improved in the last two hundred years.

Public sentiment, stoked by tales about the invented Indian, is such that Indians can virtually monopolize the services of scholars and historians; to testify “against” Indians can ruin a career. Some Indian claims have cost current land-owners hundreds of millions of dollars.

Today, the federal government has primary responsibility for dealing with Indians, but states and Canadian provinces also manage publicly funded Indian programs. According to Steven Feraca, a long-time worker at the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), all of these bureaucracies have long been given over to race-based hiring and promotion. Preferences at the Bureau are so blatant, and career prospects for non-Indians so bleak, that although Indians are only 1/2 percent of the US population, they hold 75 percent of the jobs at BIA.

In the last few decades, the “Indian desks” of virtually all branches of government have been turned over to Indians, so that decisions that are supposed to be made in the names of larger jurisdictions are in the hands of unabashed partisans. Tribal “leaders” are now often indistinguishable from Indian-affairs bureaucrats, with no way to sort out the resulting conflicts of interest. What is more, as another author points out, chronic lateness and absenteeism in these offices are routinely excused by the notion that Indians work according to mysterious earth rhythms rather than by the white man’s clock.

In sum, both in Canada and in the United States, Indians have succeeded in becoming a kind of Uber-citizen. Off the reservation, they have all the usual legal rights, in addition to the strenuous affirmative-action preferences that are now obligatory. On the reservation, they enjoy a kind of extraterritoriality, which exempts them from many taxes and laws, and entitles them to a complete array of Indians-only health and welfare benefits. They have suckled at the public teat for longer than any other group in North America, and bear the stigmata of listlessness and squalor to prove it.

Next year will mark the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of America. What, by all rights, should be a proud celebration of the spread of civilization to the New World, has already been hijacked by cultural relativists who see in the white man nothing but wickedness. The October issue of National Geographic begins a series of “quincentenary” articles, in which the editors flatter themselves on letting Indians write from “the most intimate — and perhaps truest — perspective of all.”

Such a series is likely to be filled with the exploits of invented Indians — more of what Prof. Clifton calls “perfectly enchanting fiction . . . that is both believed by its impresarios and presented as believable to others.” His book, impressively researched and stuffed with fascinating details, is the perfect antidote.