Filed under: News, Politics, Race and Civil Rights
The attack on Storro, which allegedly took place on August 30, grabbed international headlines. She was even scheduled to appear on the Oprah Winfrey Show. That's when reporters started asking a lot of questions.
According to Storro, the injuries to her nose and face did not affect her eyesight because she was wearing sunglasses. But one reporter asked her why she was wearing sunglasses when it was nearly sunset. The reporter also asked how Storro could hear what the woman was saying when she is deaf.
The suspicions of the reporter were accelerated by the fact that many of the homeless people in the park on the night Storro was attacked said that she was all alone when she fell to the ground screaming. While the incident is still under investigation, it is known that Storro did cancel her scheduled appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show without giving producers a reason for her decision.
On her Facebook page, Storro simply said she cancelled her appearance on Oprah because "The show was going to possibly turn into another direction, so my family and I decided not to go on".
One must sincerely hope that the reports that Storro is making this up are untrue. If it were the case that Storro did indeed fabricate the incident, there is obvious reason for concern. We would also be reminded of the irony in the fact that when many people have lied about being attacked in the past, they were quick to suspect that a black man or black woman did it. Susan Smith, the woman who drown her two children, blamed it on a black man. There was also the famous incident in Boston nearly 20 years ago, when a man killed his pregnant wife and said that a black man did it. Finally, there was the really interesting case where a woman said she'd been kidnapped by a black man, when the truth was that she'd run off to Disney World. The world is a crazy place.
Clearly these accusations link to racial profiling statistics by police. African Americans are more likely to be suspected of crimes, and are therefore more likely to be searched, arrested and incarcerated for crimes, even when they didn't commit them. This is the nature of America and the nation we've been for the past 400 years. Things aren't going to change anytime soon.
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.