Just a reminder: We meet in the Kupferberg Holocaust Resource Center classroom tomorrow (Tuesday) to screen the film The Central Park Five. I've got the flu so I won't be there, but there will be someone at the screening who will have an attendance sheet. Please try to show up about five minutes early. We will discuss the film on Thursday, making connections between it and Picking Cotton. I urge you to take notes during the screening so that you remember key moments.
This week on the blog, I'd like you to make connections between Picking Cotton and The Central Park Five. What similarities do you see? Both narratives deal with a particularly vicious rape, a black man raping a white woman, a black man (or men) being scapegoated for the crime. What conclusions do you draw from this?
Both Picking Cotton and the Central Park 5 show instances where you have people from a minority group being accused by a more privileged person of fairer skin. Both stories show how messed up the criminal justice system is and how minorities are always treated with less respect than white people. In one case you have a " Wolf Pack " of TEENAGERS(as the media potrayed it) who were accused of raping a wall street investment banker and leaving her for dead. On the other hand in Picking Cotton we have a black male who has been accused of breaking and entering somebody's home and also raping the victim. In both cases, the people being accused come from a low income area or the "ghetto" as many like to put it. Even though a few from the central park 5 admitted to partaking into the rape, that was after hours of being intimidated, lied to and coerced by the cops to make a confession while being interrogated for 16hrs. In Picking Cotton the police already had their own bias thoughts about Ronald. To them he was already guilty, just like how the central park 5 was a group of black/Hispanic males from the projects which made the perfect scapegoats for the crime. From both scenarios it just shows how the criminal justice system is messed up and how institutional racism is well dominant in proceedings. If the suspects in both cases would've been white im sure both cases would've gone differently.
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