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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.

What Chinese College Students Think About Race

As an English teacher at a Chinese university, I spend a lot of time with young people. As a result of friendships I’ve developed, I have learned a lot about what they think about race and ethnicity.I’m particularly well positioned because my university has an especially large number of students from Pakistan and sub-Saharan Africa. Most identitarians believe the Chinese are traditional and realistic in their attitudes towards race. For now, this is true, but the Western mentality is rapidly infiltrating Chinese society and corrupting the minds of young people. The old ethnonationalism that protected Chinese identity is evaporating under the pervasive forces of globalization and liberalism.

The girls’ disgust is often combined with fear, and they associate blacks with crime. This gut attitude from Chinese girls can be perplexing because it arises from those who have often never met a black person, or have seen them only in passing. It seems to me this association of black people with danger and violence is almost innate for Chinese people, especially women. I’ve also noticed that black African young men have absolutely no luck trying to date Chinese girls, who see them as weird, ugly, and aggressive.

This contrasts sharply with Chinese girls’ typical reaction to whites. From my own observation, and from what I hear from others, they practically throw themselves at white guys. In our class introductions at the beginning of the semester, I usually have at least four or five ask if I will date them—they flirt with me right in front of the class. Many more make advances privately. The Pakistani boys have mixed results. Some of them are successful, but if they are too traditional in their Islamic behavior, the Chinese girls reject them.

My male students mainly see blacks as basketball players and hip-hop rap artists, and they often describe them as “cool,” “fashionable,” and “strong.” Many of them idolize black people. However, Chinese boys are not attracted to black women and would never think of marrying one. I was once in a group discussion in which it was jokingly suggested China should invade Africa to acquire women to fill the sex gap plaguing China (thirty million Chinese boys have no girl to marry). One of the Chinese men in the group looked perplexed, and said: “But there are no women in Africa for us to marry; there are only dark-skinned people there.”

Although there is basic agreement that blacks are not attractive, I am still amazed by how differently Chinese boys and girls think of blacks, especially of black men. In part, this may be because Chinese young people are more segregated by sex than American young people, so they may have different ideas about other things as well. Many boys are afraid to talk to the girls, which keeps them even further apart.

What I’ve described is the Chinese “gut reaction” to black people, but the issue is becoming more complex as the Chinese government “opens up,” as my students call it. As a foreigner, I don’t see everything that goes on within the Chinese education system, but I gather from my students that the government’s approach is a contradictory combination of an enthusiastic embrace of globalism with a form of nationalism that protects the government. The results can be surprising.

Despite their obviously low opinion of blacks, when I ask my students whether blacks are as intelligent as whites and Asians, they almost universally reply, “Yes.” This is because of their schooling. Almost all of them cite the phrase “all men are created equal,” even though many of them don’t know where it comes from. They tell me their teachers taught them racial equality when they were in school. When I ask them why they believe this, they cite the line from the Declaration of Independence as if were scientific proof of equality.

I often get interesting reactions when I explain the actual IQ scores for each race. My students’ first reaction is laughingly to celebrate the Asian results: “Ha! We’re smarter than white people!” After we joke about this, I ask them what they think about blacks being so far below whites and Asians. Almost without exception, they cite the arguments made by the American Left: “It’s because of white racism,” “It’s because of European colonialism,” “It’s because they have bad nutrition,” or “It’s because they don’t have proper education.”

I was initially shocked by this. I couldn’t imagine how they’d been trained to say these things when they spent their whole lives in Chinese schools. Many of them say their teachers taught them Africa was poor because white people stole all the natural resources. It seems that racial egalitarianism has spread farther and deeper than most of us would have imagined.

Part of this can be blamed on Chinese government media (which is almost all media). In an effort to delegitimize American society and inspire nationalism, the authorities portray the United States in a bad light. This includes reporting on gun violence, and constant coverage of “police shootings of young black men,” which they portray as evidence of American “racism.” At the same time, Chinese seem to equate globalism with Western culture and, especially, Americanism. All things American are fashionable and cool.

Increasing Chinese globalization will probably accentuate these contradictory trends, and the Chinese government is not consistent on race. It teaches that America is evil because of “racism,” while simultaneously making it impossible for non-Chinese foreigners to get permanent residency. Allegedly, there is a way to get it, but no one, to my knowledge, has ever successfully done so. The government condemns Europe for not taking in more refugees while enforcing some of the strictest border controls and visa restrictions in the world. To us foreign residents, this is highly hypocritical.

My students sometimes claim America and Europe are “racist” for not allowing mass immigration, or they suggest I must be “prejudiced” against Mr. Obama because he’s black. When I ask them if they want the Chinese president to be black, or China to invite millions of Japanese immigrants, they react with horror and bewilderment. Their common response is something timid and confused, such as, “That’s just not the Chinese way.”

This deligitimizing of America is coupled with officially encouraged hatred of the Japanese. The Japanese are denigrated every year on the annual Anti-Japanese Day—yes, it’s really called that—which was created to memorialize the Nanking Massacre. My students often say shocking things, such as, “Why didn’t America kill all the Japanese people in WWII?” or “Please nuke the Japanese again,” within the same conversation in which they criticize American “racism.” I’ve heard this same, inconsistent attitude echoed by senior university officials.

My race-realist perspective is almost always vindicated when my students travel to America with foreign work programs. One of my students worked in Ohio over the summer. When he returned, I met him in a tea shop and asked him what he thought of America. The first thing out of his mouth was: “The black people . . . they’re so . . . dangerous.” I got a similar unprovoked reaction while I was sitting at a gate in the Shanghai airport. A complete stranger was returning from Massachusetts and suddenly delivered a rant about how blacks were brutish and weird.

When African students began arriving at my university in higher numbers last year, the Pakistani and Chinese students were initially excited about getting to know them. I watched the excitement turn to confusion and disgust.

A Pakistani friend decided to have an African as his roommate. I warned him against it, but he went ahead with his plan. For the next six months, he enlivened our conversation with horror stories about the absurd and outrageous incompetence of his apartment mate.

Unfortunately, academics will probably grow to adopt the liberal American perspective on racial equality and compatibility, but actual exposure to diversity is usually a cure. There are ways to speed up the process. One of my Chinese friends couldn’t believe there was evidence for blacks having lower IQs and higher crime rates than whites and Asians. I pulled up Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance video “Race Differences in Intelligence” on YouTube and let her watch. I then showed her videos of the Ferguson riots, flash mobs carried out by “youths,” and videos of the knockout game. Her perspective changed in a single evening. She was shocked, and told me her whole perception of America and race relations had changed. She’s been “red-pilled” ever since.

Egalitarian illusions are taking root in China, but they are not as firmly implanted as in the United States. Direct experience or a dose of countervailing evidence is often an effective cure. But the cultural influence goes only one way: Illusions flow from the West to China. It is impossible to know how badly they may eventually poison the minds of young Chinese.

As in the West, older Chinese seem to have a stronger instinctive dislike for blacks than young people. I’ve been told by friends that African students have trouble renting apartments from older and middle-aged Chinese landlords. Personally, I have very limited interaction with older people, so my impressions are mainly second hand.

Young Chinese who do not attend college have more traditional racial views than the more educated, but they are still influenced to a great degree by American pop culture, and are instructed in primary school by teachers who have been influenced to some extent by American thinking. Their beliefs are still moving towards egalitarianism, though more slowly.

The long-term solution, of course, is to eradicate the illusions at their source, which is the United States. I have come to realize the importance of this effort, not just for whites but for the entire world.