Elena, I beg to differ. In the hood, “snitchin” means telling whatever you know. Whether or not it’s incriminating. It’s just spilling the beans, whether you’re a witness, receiver of hearsay, etc. and if you tell you are done. Period.

The term wilding (properly pronounced “whylin”) is an early hiphop term that was in use way before the police used it, for just someone acting out of control. Similiar to the term “buggin” but with a different connotation.

I remember the Central park jogger case, and i don’t know if anyone else has brought this up - lot of comments here - but many years later the accused boys were found innocent - http://www.nodeathpenalty.org/newab027/index.html

It is quite often the fact that some members of the “group” would come forward willingly if not under the unspoken threat of physical retalliation. This is what makes silence the norm in abusive families, etc.

First a quote from Carl Rowan: “A minority group has ‘arrived’ only when it has the right to produce some fools and scoundrels without the entire group paying for it.”

Second, I want to comment on the whole Code of Silence thing you address. It’s sick and dysfunctional, and doesn’t belong anywhere in a healthy society. That seems to me self-evident, but I guess in THIS sick and dysfunctional society, it’s something that needs to be pointed out and explained.

The most important thing about it is that it (obviously) protects the guilty. It protects the guilty wherever it’s in place. That plus keeping “the family” intact are its primary reasons for existing inthe first place.

“Keeping Family Secrets,” which is the form in which it makes its original appearance in our society, keeps sick and dysfunctional families from being exposed and getting help for the incest and/or regular child abuse and/or alcoholism and/or substance abuse going on within.

It keeps bad and absuive and corrups cops safe within the boundaries of the Code of Silence.

It keeps bad and corrupt members of the military safe from exposure and prosecution or expulsion.

It keeps bad and corrupt members of the government, or the corporation, or the university, or anyplace bad people are found, safe from exposure and prosecution or expulsion.

Nothing protects the guilty as well as the Code of Silence. It is one of Patriarchy’s most imporant tools for protecting its abusers and enforcers.

All of which is why the Code of Silence itself must be exposed — as a threat to law and order, a threat to society, a threat to decent human beings as individuals, a threat to democracy itself when found in government and business — and eradicated.

Quite simply: THERE IS NOTHING HONORABLE OR GOOD OR RIGHT ABOUT PROTECTING WRONGDOERS. There are plenty of people the world over who understand and agree with this; all the others must be made to.

There are arguably problems with the way news is reported—personally, I don’t see why murders or rapes should ever be considered national news unless they involve public figures—but just to chalk it up to racism is, I think, to oversimplify the issue, if not to miss the point altogether.

And since when are lacrosse players idolized by anyone?

The reason the Duke case (and the other gang-rape cases that have been in the news lately) have been treated in a more nuanced way is that they were not stranger rapes. The media simply treat non-stranger rapes differently. It has nothing to do with race. Look at the scorn heaped on Kobe Bryant’s accuser.

While it is true that we do tend to treat acquaintance rape differently from stranger rape, I honestly don’t see that dichotomy being all that operative in this case. The Duke case–as well as the Central Park case before it–has been conceptualized as a GANG RAPE, and I think that this largely trumps the acquaintance/stranger issue (and not to bog us down in semantics, but two women hired to strip for a group of guys are only “acquaintances” according to the loosest possible definition, in my lexicon anyway).

So I still believe that the most relevant comparison is between the media’s treatment of black men accused of GANG RAPE versus its treatment of white men accused of GANG RAPE. And no, I don’t believe that the hysterical response to the Central Park rape was motivated by mere “concern about rape.” Again, you’re assigning a fairly passive role to the principals involved. Feminists have been laboring for decades to make “concern about rape” a normative social value that doesn’t depend on sensationalistic cases, and they can tell you how hard it’s been.

And there are all kinds of things wrong with using the Kobe Bryant case as a model. To my own admittedly jaundiced eye, that case said to me that ONLY by being a famous athlete will a black man accused of rape be given the benefit of the doubt.

The reason the Duke case (and the other gang-rape cases that have been in the news lately) have been treated in a more nuanced way is that they were not stranger rapes. The media simply treat non-stranger rapes differently. It has nothing to do with race. Look at the scorn heaped on Kobe Bryant’s accuser.

And if you are disappointed you’re disappointed to be disabused of your prejudiced notions.

I haven’t attacked you personally in any way. This is really foul.

This just ruined my entire day.

I was watching The Abrams Report on MSNBC and saw the two lawyers ( the black man and the white female) who represented two of the Lacrosse players. The white woman acted professional, just like you would expect her to. The black guy just couldn’t get enough of making grandious predictions.

Does anyone else get the impression that the black lawyer is just a front?

There was nothing innocent or “it just happened” about any of it. It was like a mob moving in slow motion on national television and nothing could stop it until science intervened a dozen years later.

I still don’t see just cause to conclude that there was actually manufactured hysteria in the service of demonizing black men. Here’s what seems more likely to me:

The police found the jogger, picked up some thugs who had been harassing and mugging other park visitors (correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think anyone contests that), and, honestly believing that they were responsible for the rape, pushed too hard for a confession. Then the media took the police report at face value and ran with it.

Of course, it was wrong for the police to pursue a confession as aggressively as they did, but that doesn’t mean that there was any deliberate conspiracy to foment hysteria against black men.

The problem with such an account is that it seems to rely too much on a “things just happened and nobody’s to blame” framework. I would like to humbly suggest another reading–the Central Park Jogger case is in large part the story of how various institutional actors (i.e. the police, the national media, grandstanding politicians, etc.) each contributed their share to a manifestly racist outcome: five innocent young men locked up for years until the actual rapist finally came forward.

I was only 12 or 13 years when it went down originally, and have had to piece together what I know from retrospectives and after-the-fact apologias. My biases being what they are, you’ll have to try mightily to sell me any interpretation of this travesty that portrays the principal actors as mere victims of the situation, rather than active shapers of it.

The police, for example, did not merely “push too hard” for a confession; they coerced the ones they got. The media did not merely “run with” the story; through deliberate choices of metaphor and imagery, they made the story what it was.

Take a look at this excerpt from a 1989 New York Post column, which I found in this online edition of Columbia Journalism Review:

In his April 23, 1989, piece in the Post, a savage disease, Pete Hamill, the celebrated city columnist, painted a menacing backdrop that would color the coverage to come:

They were coming downtown from a world of crack, welfare, guns, knives, indifference and ignorance. They were coming from a land with no fathers . . . . They were coming from the anarchic province of the poor.
And driven by a collective fury, brimming with the rippling energies of youth, their minds teeming with the violent images of the streets and the movies, they had only one goal: to smash, hurt, rob, stomp, rape. The enemies were rich. The enemies were white.

The above is a fairly breathtaking example of fabulous discourse, not “running with the story.” While the alleged Duke rapists have been strongly condemned by many, I have yet to see ANYTHING like the phantasmagoric language used by the NYP columnist quoted above. Similarly, the lacrosse players can expect to benefit from the (no doubt well-meaning) infusions of skepticism from our libertarians and 5th Amendment fundamentalists, while many a black person has learned the folly of expecting some abstract thing called “the Constitution” to protect him from the policeman’s billy club. Hell, the fact that these white boys have found anti-lynching rhetoric to be more serviceable to their cause than most actual, historic victims of lynching speaks volumes.

And we shouldn’t forget what could end up being the biggest difference of all: the Central Park case resulted in five speedy convictions (the wrong ones, but one can’t be picky). Someone connected with the incident at Duke may yet wind up behind bars, but it will be in spite of the advantages of money, white skin, and what has thus far been a fairly nuanced response from the commentariat. Or they could walk. The difference is the same in either case.

Oh and btw, I’m a long-time lurker, first-time poster. Kudos to Amp for creating this fine blog, and to Rachel for initiating this discussion.

In the two *years* from April 1 2004 to the present, it gets 8 hits.

It is not a phrase that is going to die of over-work, but this cite from New Orleans was interesting:

A lot more music went on in the city at night after the fairgrounds closed at 7; New Orleanians construct their own festival during vampire hours. The Soul Rebels, one of the better new brass bands, rolled into Le Bon Temps Roule, in the Uptown district, Saturday night after playing at a sorority party. They were missing two members who had early-morning jobs, and it was a casual gig. ”We just wilding out,” said the bass drummer Derrick Moss, killing time outside on the street at 3 a.m.

As to the reporting in April 1989, here is a Times excerpt:

The youths who raped and savagely beat a young investment banker as she jogged in Central Park Wednesday night were part of a loosely organized gang of 32 schoolboys whose random, motiveless assaults terrorized at least eight other people over nearly two hours, senior police investigators said yesterday.

Seven youths were charged as adults yesterday with rape, assault and attempted murder in the attack on the 28-year-old Salomon Brothers banker, who detectives said had been beaten with fists, a rock and the pipe. Chief Colangelo said that the police had obtained statements indicating that the woman had been set upon by 12 youths. He said the police hoped other arrests would follow.

Again FWIW - a number of the youths involved cooperated with the police and walked.

The police found the jogger, picked up some thugs who had been harassing and mugging other park visitors (correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think anyone contests that), and, honestly believing that they were responsible for the rape, pushed too hard for a confession. Then the media took the police report at face value and ran with it.

Of course, it was wrong for the police to pursue a confession as aggressively as they did, but that doesn’t mean that there was any deliberate conspiracy to foment hysteria against black men.

The15th:
Why does this, specifically, disappoint you? I think Alas is a great blog, but looking for some sort of “ism” under every stone and behind every tree is a regular feature here, and I don’t see that this is a particularly egregious example.