While the skit was certainly funny in its own right, it was built on a very serious set of functional inequities in America's justice system: black men are more likely to be searched, arrested, convicted and incarcerated for crimes, even when they didn't do anything wrong. While we've heard about the cases of the Scott Sisters and Kelley Williams-Bolar, there are thousands of other men and women in prison after being found guilty of simply being black.
The inequities of the justice system are rooted in perceptions of juries and citizens leading them to believe that black men are less ethical and more criminal than the rest of our society. A nun in Brooklyn used these biased perceptions to her advantage after lying to police and stating that she was raped and choked by a black man.
Sister Mary Turcotte of the Apostles of Infinite Love, a sect that has no affiliation with the Catholic Church, went to police to tell her tale in dramatic fashion. Turcotte told police that the man who attacked her was a 6-foot-4, 250 pound black man who dragged her and left her in a snowbank with her breasts exposed. Police then released a sketch of the suspect to the public to get help in solving the crime.
"I'm pissed off," said 33-year old Brooklyn resident, Reggie Antoine. "It makes me paranoid. It makes women paranoid of us."
This is not the first case of phantom black people being accused of committing heinous crimes: Charles Stuart, in 1990, killed his pregnant wife and then said that a black man did it. Susan Smith killed her two sons in 1995 and said that a black man did it. In 2009, Bonnie Sweeten said that black men kidnapped her, when in reality, she'd actually taken her daughter to Disney World.
There are other cases of black people being falsely accused of crime, but it would take a while to list them all. Perhaps cases like this one will remind us to take a deep and serious look at the state of our criminal justice system. There are thousands of men and women incarcerated for crimes they did not commit, and our society enjoys living under the presumption that every man and woman in the prison industrial complex is somehow evil and unworthy of even the most basic of human rights. The truth is that for every case we uncover where someone has falsely accused a black man of a crime he didn't commit, there are likely several others where the liar got away with the hoax.
Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition and a Scholarship in Action Resident of the Institute for Black Public Policy. To have Dr. Boyce commentary delivered to your email, please click here.