Brawley Case Betrays One-Sided Justice

New York’s highly publicized Tawana Brawley case, after a long period of rhetorical spluttering, has finally metamorphosed into a developing assault on the inequities of the state’s criminal-justice system.

The black teen-ager from the Hudson Valley claims to have been abducted, raped and sodomized by six white men, one of whom might have been a police officer. The case has generated headlines for more than half a year, and Brawley herself is still at storm center. Yet it is obvious that Brawley’s attorneys and supporters are hunting far bigger game now than just her vindication. Her ordeal--whether actual, imagined or fictitious--has now become an opportune springboard from which to mount a frontal attack on the institutionalized white racism of the judicial branch itself.

The issue no longer is the credibility of Brawley’s charges. Rather, it is the belief that blacks and other minorities never do get a fair shake from the criminal-justice system; that the system is willing to expend all of its energy to prove Brawley a liar, yet was reluctant to even seek out those whom she claimed to be her attackers.

This transformation of what initially originated as the complaint of an aggrieved individual into the articulation of those of an entire underclass is hardly novel in American history.

The Dred Scott case, as one example, began as a vehicle to ensure the freedom of a single slave who had been emancipated long before the litigation had run its course. It eventually changed into a legal crusade to sustain the power of Congress to outlaw human bondage in newly admitted states. The effort proved unsuccessful, and it took a bloody Civil War to resolve the issue, but it reaffirmed De Toqueville’s earlier perceptive observation that, on these shores, every political question ultimately finds its way into the courts.

This is not to say that Brawley and Scott are linked in any significant way but by the color of their skin. Yet to many blacks (and some whites), she is currently regarded as the more or less passive fulcrum of a burgeoning struggle to expose the perceived racial inequities of the legal system in particular and all of the dominant society’s political institutions in general. This is precisely why one of the Brawley family’s advisers recently called for “a great assault against racial injustice in New York state,” and why another signaled the organization of “a coalition among black people” to end “400 years of oppression.”

Of course, there have been some on both sides of the color line who have sharply and persistently pilloried Brawley’s two black lawyers and others who have rallied around her for, as one NAACP official recently put it, “disregarding Tawana the person, the human being, the young woman who is being stigmatized in a pretty horrible way.”

In one sense these critics might well be right. But in another, and infinitely more significant one, they are abysmally wrong. The media attention focused on the ups and downs and ins and outs of Brawley’s case has created an enormous opportunity for the public airing of black grievances that include, but go far beyond, the sexual abuses allegedly inflicted on her, and certainly on many of her prototypes, past and present.

To seize that nettle in as strident and dramatic a fashion as possible not only makes excellent political sense but raises her case, as one black observer put it, “to a higher level because they are taking on top officials.”

Predictably, most of the attacks on the Brawley family’s legal and lay advisers have emanated, by and large, from white public officials and the Establishment press. The lawyers have been referred to as “legal terrorists,” and the family’s chief consultant denominated as a “charlatan” and a “hustler.”

Blacks who have somewhat more restrainedly joined this chorus are for the most part members of the middle class and/or the occupiers of government posts. Those who eke out their deprived lives in the ghettos of Harlem, the South Bronx or Bedford-Stuyvesant, if not openly supportive of the Brawley circle’s rhetoric, subscribe in one way or another to much of its content.

Naturally, if Brawley’s version of what happened to her on the day before Thanksgiving last year proves to be false and fabricated, there will be a substantial loss of credibility for future black claims of racially oriented white violence. This reaction, however, cannot be permitted to disguise the sorry fact that there are legions of such accusations that are, unfortunately, true, and that one false cry of wolf cannot hide the presence of plenty of like predators out there.

Additionally, if in the end she is proved to be nothing more than a frightened teen-ager who tried to parlay her own inner fears into a shield from parental punishment, her sins of commission may have provoked what has been far too long overdue in New York and elsewhere. That, namely, is a thorough and dispassionate review of criminal-justice systems, on both the state and federal levels, that serve mainly as a conduit for the enforced passage of minority youths from the street to the penitentiary, over and over and over again.

If her case’s notoriety serves to inhibit that insidious and destructive process even one whit, all of its Sturm und Drang will have accomplished a great deal more than to sell newspapers and air time.