In Miami, too, white lies put black lives in danger. They’re reprehensible — and racist | Editorial
“The tragic story of a Miami-Dade mother who led her autistic son to a golf course lake and, police say she admitted, let him drown is horrific. Unfortunately, there’s another tragedy, an enduring American tragedy, underlying the first.
Before her arrest in her son’s death, Patricia Ripley wove a tired, cynical tale featuring the “usual suspects” that she thought would be most readily believed. Ripley told police that two black men ambushed her car and kidnapped her son.
The lie relies on the same racist tropes denigrating African-American men that, this one week alone, have dominated national news.
Ripley originally told police that “two black men” had kidnapped her 9-year-old son, Alejandro. “Two black men” sideswiped her car, ran her off the road and demanded drugs.
Mom told a lie
Because of her accusation, authorities launched a statewide manhunt for those “two black men” in a blue sedan who had kidnapped an autistic white boy. How might that have ended? Unfortunately, trust in the police has deteriorated in some quarters to the point that even enlightened whites ask that question.
Maybe the same way it ended in Minneapolis for an African-American man, George Floyd, who was thrown to the ground by police, one of whom knelt on his neck for interminably long minutes. Floyd later died.
Monday, in New York’s Central Park, Christian Cooper asked Amy Cooper to leash her dog, as it rambunctiously ran through an area birdwatchers frequent. White Amy Cooper took offense at black Christian Cooper’s audacity to ask her to follow the law and, ultimately, called police, calmly telling him that she was going to say that “an African-American man” was threatening her. Only when speaking to the dispatcher did she do her best to sound panicked. The African-American man’s video, of course, told the real story. Cooper’s lie, like Ripley’s, was cynical and deliberate. They both wielded racism like the weapon that it is.
In Miami-Dade, police dismantled Ripley’s story. The boy’s body was found the following day floating in a golf course lake.
Racism a ‘dark place’
Christian Cooper told ABC’s “The View” that Amy Cooper “was trying to bring death by cops on my head. This was an incident between a bird watcher and a dog walker, and she took it to a very dark place.”
Americans only recently learned of another act fueled by the same evil sense of privilege, though so much more bloodthirsty. In February, Ahmaud Arbery a black jogger in Georgia, was shot and killed by a father-son team of vigilantes who decided Arbery was a burglary suspect. They confronted him as he ran. Ultimately, Arbery was shot to death when he dared try to defend himself. The town’s police wanted to arrest the pair. The top prosecutor, however, didn’t see a problem. Only video released months later has made justice a possibility — maybe. And, it turns out, few, if any, burglaries had been reported in the neighborhood.
Alejandro Ripley did nothing to deserve to die. His survivors are suffering, are in pain. It’s very possible that his mother was in a different “dark place,” overwhelmed by her non-verbal special-needs son. Still, her offensive cover story is bizarrely echo the stories of other people who did not deserve to die the way they did: black men killed by the power of the deadly white lie.
This story was originally published May 29, 2020 at 9:51 AM.
