Classic Race Hoaxes, from Tawana Brawley to Florida 2000

By Nicholas Stix

February, 2001
Middle American News

Perpetrating and supporting increasingly obvious race hoaxes has become the main way that American blacks interact with whites. In a time when white racism is on the wane, hoaxes offer a dramatic way of promoting unfounded black grievances. It will be instructive to examine the biggest race hoaxes, so that those Americans who refuse to be cowed can better prepare themselves, for the hoax next time.

1987: The Tawana Brawley Hoax. Fifteen-year-old Tawana Brawley, a black girl from Wappingers Falls, New York, disappeared for a weekend. When Brawley reappeared, she claimed that “white cops” had kidnapped and gang-raped her.

Brawley was soon joined by a trio of “advisers,” activist attorneys Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason, and the Rev. Al Sharpton, who had her refuse to cooperate with the very authorities seeking to help bring her “attackers” to justice. The Brawley advisors’ perverse combination of strident demands for justice, AND a militant refusal to cooperate with authorities—a position commonly associated with criminals—flummoxed liberal, New York State attorney general Robert Abrams and Gov. Mario Cuomo. The advisors came to be known in some quarters as “The Three Stooges.”

The advisors would invent “rapists” out of thin air, and then charge that anyone alibiing for a “rapist” was himself a “rapist.” When Tawana’s mother, Glenda Brawley, was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury, the advisors spirited her away to the sanctuary of a church, as if she were a victim of persecution. Alton Maddox proclaimed that Attorney General Abrams “masturbated” in front of pictures of Brawley, while the Rev. Sharpton linked the Irish Republican Army to the “abduction” and “rape.”

The media slavishly repeated every wild, unsubstantiated charge made by the Brawley advisors, while refusing to pursue compelling evidence that Brawley had fabricated her charges. That evidence included a witness who had seen Brawley place herself in a garbage bag in the vacant lot where she was found, and the rape technician’s finding, that Brawley showed no physical signs of rape, was faking rape trauma ... and was a terrible actress!

The media also refused to delve into Tawana Brawley’s background, even though her folks more closely resembled a criminal association than a family. Her mother, Glenda, had been convicted of welfare fraud, and her stepfather [actually, her mother’s live-in boyfriend], Ralph King, had calmly fired six bullets into the brain of his sleeping, first wife.

The truth: Brawley had partied with her boyfriend, and concocted the hoax to avoid the wrath of her murderous stepfather, Ralph King. She had been neither kidnapped nor raped, and had never crossed paths with the dead trooper or Steven Pagones. A grand jury voted to throw out Brawley’s charges, with the abstention of its lone black member. Although a case could easily have been made that Brawley and her mother had obstructed justice [not to mention that the mother, boyfriend, advisors, and Brawley had engaged in wire fraud to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars], and that Tawana had lied to the authorities, neither daughter nor mother was ever charged in the case.

1996: The Church Arson Hoax. Black activists, and white civil rights lawyer, Morris Dees’ Southern Poverty Law Center, charged that a conspiracy of white supremacists was committing a wave of arsons against black churches all over the country. The activists were aided immensely by the mainstream media, which parroted their charges, and President William Jefferson Clinton, who pronounced the arsons a “national crisis.”

The truth: Not only was there no network of white supremacist arsonists, there was not even an upsurge in the number of black church arsons, some of which had in fact been set by blacks. Actually, the majority of church arsons continued to hit WHITE churches. And while Morris Dees raised millions for a fund to rebuild black churches, virtually none of the money went to rebuilding black churches.

1996: Texaco. As black employees pursued a frivolous, racial discrimination lawsuit against Texaco Oil, Jesse Jackson claimed that a white Texaco executive had uttered the “n” word, as well as a racist remark involving “black and white jelly beans,” in a private conversation with a white, fellow executive, which the latter had secretly taped. Jackson used the racism charge to justify calling for a national, black boycott of the oil company.

The truth: Jesse lied. The Texaco executive had never said the “n” word. As for the “racist” jelly bean analogy, the white executive was merely quoting the highly paid, black diversity consultant who had been lecturing and hectoring company executives.

But the hoax worked. Texaco’s executives caved in, like a cheap suitcase. Not only did Jackson not apologize, let alone pay for his slanderous charges, but the truth had no effect whatsoever on his demeanor or tactics. He demanded payoffs and promotions for all of Texaco’s black employees, and got both -- including $176 million in reparations.

1997-present: Racial profiling. Across America, black “civil rights leaders” and media pundits have insisted that racist, white policemen routinely round up and arrest, and even murder, innocent black men.

The truth: Police and prosecutors in the urban areas where most blacks are concentrated, have instituted an “affirmative action” program, such that many violent crimes are “disappeared” or “redefined” as non-crimes. The New York City, Philadelphia, and Boca Raton, Florida police departments have been caught systematically undercounting violent felonies.

Additionally, increasing numbers of white police officers—often under explicit orders—routinely avoid confrontations with minority males, who now riot, pillage, and loot in front of police, without fear of arrest. Law enforcement’s racial conflict phobia reached surreal proportions in the race riots in Crown Heights, Brooklyn in 1991; Los Angeles in 1992 and again in 2000; New York’s Central Park in 2000; and most recently, in Seattle during Mardi Gras celebrations in late February, 2001.

In 1997, black New York activists, who had sought to destabilize the mayoralty of white Republican Rudolph Giuliani since Giuliani’s November, 1993 election, latched on to the Brooklyn torture case of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima. NYPD officer Justin Volpe had sodomized Louima with a stick. (During Volpe’s trial, he confessed to the crime, and was sentenced to 30 years in prison.) Activists insisted that the Louima case, which was in fact singular in New York history, was typical of “Giuliani time,” a phrase that Louima had claimed one of the police officers attacking him had used. (Louima later admitted having lied, saying that the brother of one of his nurses had invented the phrase for him.)

The activists were aided by mainstream news editors’ political decision to cease running exposés on the NYPD’s practice of underreporting violent crime, and thus crime by minority males. Editors led instead with stories, many of them fraudulent, insisting that police routinely persecuted innocent, minority males; ran stories suggesting that unrelated police shootings of black suspects across America were part of a murderous, nationwide conspiracy of racist, white policemen; and continued their longstanding policy of refusing to report black-on-white hate crimes.

In 1999, the activist-media alliance exploited the case of Amadou Diallo, the Guinean immigrant accidentally shot to death by four white NYPD officers in The Bronx in 1999. Elected Democratic Party officials carried out a two-month-long civil disobedience campaign, which resulted in over 1,000 arrests. The campaign sought to cripple the NYPD, weaken New York City Mayor rudolph Giuliani’s Senate candidacy (which he eventually gave up, due to prostate cancer), and strengthen the candidacy of his opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Since 1999, while continuing to exploit the Diallo case, the alliance has added every new police shooting of a black man to its indictment of the NYPD.

2000-present: The Florida Disenfranchisement Hoax: Begun by Jesse Jackson, blacks and the media have claimed that tens of thousands of black Floridians were illegally barred from voting by police roadblocks; illegal demands for photo ID; poll workers who insisted to registered, black voters that the latter were not registered; and even by “dogs and guns.” The massive disenfranchisement of black voters allegedly resulted in Mr. Bush’s theft of Florida’s electoral votes, and thus of the Presidency.

The truth: Not only were no black Floridians deliberately disenfranchised, thousands of black felons and unregistered college students, virtually all of whom voted for Vice-President Al Gore, voted illegally.

Although the NAACP has repeatedly asserted that it has thousands of affidavits from disenfranchised black Florida voters, it has produced no affidavits or disenfranchised voters. Zero. No black voters complained to state officials in Florida. And when the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights held hearings in Florida on January 11-12, 2001 on the disenfranchisement charges, only three black voters appeared as witnesses. Under questioning, each in turn admitted that he had successfully voted, without being interfered with. Meanwhile, the Commission ignored evidence of intimidation of voters by Democratic operatives in Miami’s Little Haiti section, and of illegal voting by black felons and illegal or double-voting by black college students. Even the socialist Miami Herald newspaper reported on February 26, that using the most liberal standard, George W. Bush had won the Florida race. Again.