White Healing, Black Suffering

The False Redemption of '60 Minutes'

On Sunday, 60 Minutes featured a follow-up segment entitled Capturing the Emotional Journey of Healing Justice. The program primarily focused on white women who are rape survivors and had falsely accused various Black men as the perpetrators. These men were imprisoned and eventually exonerated.

The premise of the story is that all involved are victims of the criminal justice system because a law enforcement practice they experienced included photographs of Black men that did not contain the actual perpetrator. 60 Minutes producer Shari Finkelstein said studies have repeatedly shown that, when the actual perpetrator is not included in the photo or physical lineup, eyewitnesses will often pick the person who looks most like the assailant. But the research on the unreliability of eyewitness testimony has been available for decades.

The “healing” is facilitated through a group that entails meetings between rape survivors and the exonerated Black men. Some of the white women described feeling “guilty” for falsely accusing the wrong men.

What’s missing from this feel-good story is reality. When I was conducting research for my book, I pulled data from the National Registry of Exonerations*, which lists exonerees who, since 1989 (excluding time spent incarcerated prior to conviction), spent time in prison for crimes they did not commit prior to exoneration. Approximately 51 percent of the exonerees have been Black men. These men served a combined total of approximately 23,792 years incarcerated.

Black Americans who are imprisoned and convicted for murder are 50 percent more likely to be innocent than other convicted murderers. Black Americans imprisoned for murder are more likely to be innocent if they were convicted of killing white victims. Only approximately 15 percent of murders by Black Americans are committed against white victims, but 31 percent of innocent Black murder exonerees were convicted of killing white people.

A Black person convicted of sexual assault is three-and-a-half times more likely to be innocent than a white sexual assault convict. Assaults perpetrated by Black men against white women are a small minority (approximately 11 percent) of all sexual assaults in the U.S., but they account for half of the sexual assaults with eyewitness misidentification that led to exoneration. Approximately 70 percent of white sexual assault victims were attacked by white men.

Innocent Black sexual assault defendants receive harsher sentences—an average of almost 4.5 years longer in prison before exoneration—than whites upon conviction, and they face greater resistance to exoneration, even in cases that ultimately lead to their release. Gross et al. (2017) posit that most wrongful convictions are never discovered, and there is no direct measure of the number of convicted innocent murder defendants. They estimate that the true numbers significantly eclipse known figures (Cooper, 2024, p. 73).

This type of programming is irresponsible and does not address structural racism or anti-Black misandry. Over the past 15 years, I have been acutely aware of the promotion of what I call these white humanizing projects (e.g., white fragility)—promoted through white scholars, the mental health field, and liberal media outlets—alongside the recent growth of the racial trauma enterprise. White humanizing projects continue to humanize white people (e.g. recasting them as victims) while simultaneously dehumanizing Black people. They include a superficial and soft analysis, but do not include a critical analysis.

The racial trauma enterprise has grown exponentially over the past few years with articles, workshops, and trainings touting buzzwords such as anti-racism, decolonizing, and healing (Cooper, 2024, p. 1).

These women were obviously sexually victimized and are victims in that context—but they are not victims in the context of falsely accusing Black men. There is no level playing field between these women and the men they accused, and to suggest so is a false equivalency. These women did not spend decades caged based on a false accusation. This is time that these Black men cannot get back.

White women have been central and instrumental in the co-creation of carceral mechanisms, and it is simply dishonest to now claim victimhood of the same systems and structures that were part of their “protection” from the so-called savage darker races of men. Misidentification or false accusations of Black males by white women are part and parcel of U.S. history and were foundational to the lynching of Black males. Black males are caricatured as rapists and criminals, which justifies their dehumanization and extermination.

Black Americans arrested for violent crime in the U.S. constitute only 1 percent of the Black population and approximately 2 percent of Black males. But the approximate 2 percent of Black males who are arrested for violent crime are used as justification for dominance and discrimination against the Black population at large—and for the deaths of Black males more broadly—where Black maleness equates to criminality (Cooper, 2024, p. 83).

In addition, the “opposing” and antithetical embodiments of Black men and white women have consistently been weaponized in American racial discourse as markers of who is threatening to white patriarchal interests and who represents the greatest “good” of the in-group. Protection of white women is considered paramount, as they are deemed the conservators of the white race (Cooper, 2024, p. 159).

This type of programming is dishonest and promotes benevolent sexism and patriarchal protection, while the Black men are relegated to a secondary cast of characters whose incarceration was simply a “mistake.” Liberal programming that continues to obscure mechanisms of white dominance demonstrates a parasitic dynamic: when white people feel guilty about the harmful institutions they created, they recruit unknowing Black participants to be part of their “healing journey.” This is simply an exorcism of guilt—where a subordinated group is used to help release white guilt. Meanwhile, Black people—especially poor Black people—return to lives structured around anti-Blackness with no systemic changes, just a fleeting moment of white feel-good.

Western media has historically been an apparatus of specific ideological beliefs that shape perception and reality.

The media routinely exaggerates Black male offenders and white female victims even though most homicide is intra-racial crime involving men. Lundman (2003) found that journalists gravitated towards unusual cases where the victims were white women and what is deemed typical cases where the perpetrators were Black men. But reporters choose not to cover the murders of Black Americans by whites or of white men by white women. Therefore, newsworthiness is based on scripted stereotypes grounded in white supremacy and the construction of white fear of Black men (Cooper, 2024, p. 88).

Healing must begin with changes to the material conditions of these men and entail transitional justice—systemic and structural changes in society that include accountability and reparations to the Black men who were victimized.

*To my knowledge, this is the first published analysis to disaggregate data from the National Registry of Exonerations by both race and gender.

References

Cooper, Y. (2024). Black men and racial trauma: Impacts, disparities, and interventions. Routledge.

Gross, S. R., Possley, M., & Stephens, K. (2017). Race and wrongful convictions in the United States. National Registry of Exonerations.

Lundman, R. J. (2003, September). The newsworthiness and selection bias in news about murder: Comparative and relative effects of novelty and race and gender typifications on newspaper coverage of homicide. In Sociological forum (Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 357–386). Kluwer Academic Publishers-Plenum Publishers.

Newman, L. M. (1999). White women's rights: The racial origins of feminism in the United States. Oxford University Press.

Sidanius, J., & Pratto, F. (1999). Social dominance: An intergroup theory of social hierarchy and oppression. Cambridge University Press.