David Cole: Black America, Summed Up in Four Minutes

PLEASE read the whole thing:

It’s a sad, simple truth of our times. Whites are expected to forgive and ask for forgiveness, while blacks are expected to stay angry. Which brings me to Winston Moseley. Moseley is the African-American gentleman who rather famously raped and murdered Kitty Genovese in Queens in 1964 while “38 witnesses” in her apartment building looked on and did nothing. As Kathy Shaidle pointed out last year, the “38 witnesses” story is complete bunk, an invention of The New York Times. But the actual details of Genovese’s encounter with Moseley are damn near too horrific to imagine. (…)

Also last year, a documentary about the Genovese murder was released, titled The Witness. The film focuses on Kitty’s brother Bill, a Vietnam vet who lost his legs in the war, as he tries to uncover the truth behind the “38 witnesses” myth. A couple of friends recommended the film to me because I wrote about the Genovese case in a previous column, but I just couldn’t bring myself to watch it, because, from the promos I saw, it seemed as though the movie ends with Bill Genovese forgiving Moseley for his sister’s torture-murder (…)

Last week, I finally saw the film. The good news is that Bill Genovese doesn’t end up forgiving Winston Moseley. The bad news is, he interviews Moseley’s son Steven, who, like the NAACP’s Gatewood, is another supposed “reverend,” and what we see in the four-minute Moseley/Genovese exchange is a condensation of everything that is unhealthy, everything that is wrong, with black America today.