Smollett emerges from the Cook County Court complex in Chicago, February 21, 2019.
By TANNEN MAURY/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock.
First, let’s start with the facts. The United States has a hate-crime problem. There are, per the Southern Poverty Law Center, over 1,000 active hate groups in our country, and that number is rising. So is bigoted violence: in the country’s largest cities, hate crimes rose by 12 percent in 2017. In New York, where I live, hate crimes overall have risen by 72 percent in 2019, compared to the same time period last year, and the majority of those crimes have been against Jewish people. These statistics do not necessarily include the crimes that populate our everyday news: against unarmed black people, against the undocumented and their children, against trans people, and so on. The anxiety is real.
Now: let’s talk about Jussie Smollett. On the night of January 29, news broke that the Empire actor—who’s black and, as every article on this subject has pointed out, openly gay—had been attacked on the streets of Chicago. There was a noose involved, we heard, and two guys cheering “MAGA country!” Earlier this year, reports frequently noted, the actor had also received a threatening letter that was contaminated with a white substance of some kind, making the later attack seem more dire for having likely been coordinated.
This was all believable—not least because the Chicago Police Department seemed to be approaching the incident in a manner that belied any funny business. “Given the severity of the allegations,” said the Chicago P.D. in an early statement, “we are taking this investigation very seriously and treating it as a possible hate crime.” The statement also confirmed details that had only, to that point, become public through piecemeal updates on sites like TMZ: that Smollett had been approached by two unknown men who yelled racist and homophobic slurs, that they doused him in a substance of some kind, that they hung a noose around his neck.
Over the three weeks that followed, the case unraveled. Suspicions grew as rumors of Smollett’s involvement in the incident were “leaked” to local reporters, only to be walked back by the police department. But then a video was found in which two brothers, Olabinjo and Abimbola Osundairo—neither a likely match for the presumptive assailants—were seen walking in the area of the attack on the night it occurred. From there, Smollett’s apparent scheme swiftly collapsed. At a press conference on Thursday morning, police alleged that Smollett planned the attack himself. The evidence would seem to support their case: communications between Smollett and the brothers; reported video of the brothers buying the supplies for the attack. The authorities presented the case as the monumentally stupid, harebrained scheme it appears to be.
Smollett himself would have to admit that as fake crimes go, this one wasn’t particularly genius. Smollett allegedly paid the brothers with a physical check, for example—which means that even by merely writing about it, I’ve apparently thought through this crime more rigorously than Smollett allegedly ever did. And as soon as the biggest questions, including Smollett’s motivation (in short: money), appear to be answered, it all sort of fizzled out. Ideally, this case would now disappear, going down as the minute blip on the cultural radar, the priggish act of egomania, that it ultimately is. Ideally, we’d realize that even those of us who were initially pulled in by this story, willing to take it at face value, are only so culpable—because if a victim says it and the media confirms it and, most importantly, the investigating detectives give that testimony credence, you’d be perfectly reasonable to believe it.
But of course none of us will get off so easily. Because there are lessons to be learned here, and scolding to be done. For some, such as John McWhorter of The Atlantic, this is just another chapter in the nefarious and increasingly rampant trend known as “victimhood chic”: a means of gaining cultural capital by claiming martyr status. To McWhorter’s point, Smollett was already on his comeback tour by the week after his alleged attack, making the rounds on television and elsewhere with a pointed attitude of: I survived this.
He used the sort of stance that tends to take on communal overtones: we survived this. It’s us—black people—who can persist against phobic idiots screaming “MAGA!” It’s not at all difficult to imagine how easily an apparent performance like his, a grotesque imitation of black survivorhood and resistance, can lapse into self-serving brand management. Smollett wasn’t the first; he won’t be the last. It still hurts that critiques like McWhorter’s—and by the likes of the Trumps and their supporters, who are ever-eager to call out liberal-media bias and gullibility, and even more eager to use a case like this to discredit any similar claims made in the future—have a ring of truth to them, in this case. It hurts that Smollett is a public figure, which makes this incident more notable and feel more representative than it should.
People lie about being various forms of victim all the time, and for various reasons that may or may not apply here. But what hurts most of all is that in the process of grappling with Smollett’s alleged actions and copping to our culpability, we’ve lost sight of the specific image that gave Smollett’s story its peculiar power: the noose.
On Twitter, before the case fell apart, Senator Kamala Harris likened the attack to “an attempted modern-day lynching.” The alleged attack evoked the literal image of a black man dead and dangling, the specific form of violent racial spectacle that is said to have claimed over 4,500 lives in the late 19th and early 20th centuries alone. This wasn’t Kanye West’s metaphorical digital lynch mob come to distort his language and take hold of his public image. This was a black queer man claiming that an actual noose—an antiquated but unmistakable tool with a loaded visual and cultural history—had resurfaced in our own time, on his own body, in the middle of an urban center as diverse (and complicated) as Chicago, Illinois: a city at the heart of the country.
Smart choice, that noose. Because in a moment when so much of the country’s social violence feels archaic, resurrected from a brand of outspoken, pre–Civil Rights Era bigotry that we thought had been shuffled off to the margins of social and political respectability, it should only make sense that the weapons of those previous eras would be resurrected as well. That’s how the experience of living through the Trump era has felt for many of us, like a Twilight Zone in which our nation’s oldest miseries and prejudices made their way back into the realms of acceptable discourse. So pardon the raw nerves. It’s barely been a year and a half since a league of white men gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, under the guise of what was called the “Unite the Right” rally, only to be heard screaming, “Jews will not replace us.” Which means it’s barely been a year and a half since the young activist Heather Heyer was killed at the same event by a white supremacist among their ranks.
The Charleston church shooting—an unabashed racial attack that claimed nine lives—was only four years ago. And just this week, a small-time newspaper in Alabama published a pro-K.K.K. editorial, which suggested, among other things, that the Klan “get the hemp ropes out, loop them over a tall limb, and hang all of them”—them being “socialist-communists.” In 2017, in New York City, a white supremacist armed with a sword stabbed a black man to death in Times Square. It wasn’t even until December 2018—two months ago!—that the Senate finally passed a bill making lynching a federal crime, after 200 failed attempts to do so. Lynching—racial violence, broadly speaking—is so essential to the fabric of our country that just last year, we opened a museum in its dishonor.
I have a hunch—more than a hunch—that the Smollett incident will be used as a cudgel against those of us who continue to push for greater accountability for the hatred being spewed in our current political and cultural climate. It will not be enough to say that Smollett is the exception—though he is. Per Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, false reports of hate crimes account for only 0.2–0.3 percent of all hate crimes reported in the last three years. The F.B.I.’s hate-crime data, which relies on disparate local law enforcement to report and record crimes as motivated by bias, is ultimately not totally reliable for this reason.
But we rightly believe it because we see it all the time. It’s not enough to reject the notion that the compassionate initial reaction to his case, particularly on the left, was merely a matter of widespread liberal gullibility. If anything, we ought to give Smollett this much credit: this was a dumb scheme, but in the image it provoked and in the histories it dredged up, it was an effective, tellingly manipulative one. He apparently played a card he knew many of us cannot resist—and we shouldn’t. Acknowledging that history, believing that it can resurface, and fearing that possibility, which is at this point more than a mere possibility, doesn’t make us fools. It makes us human. It makes us better.
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