We Have To Stop Creating Bogeymen

THEY say Tanya Dacri was crazy.

Just last year, she killed her infant son, Zachary Dacri, because he wouldn't stop crying. She dismembered his body, put it in a bag weighted down with rocks, and - with the help of her husband - threw the remains of her child into a nearby Philadelphia waterway.

Then she went to a shopping mall and called the police. She told them that two African American men had jumped from a car and stolen her child in the mall parking lot.

When the truth came out, people excused Dacri's story, because she was crazy. She may have been crazy, but she understood the state of U.S. race relations. She understood that a white woman raising the specter of crazed, violent black men would strike a responsive chord in the press and with the general public.

Charles Stuart wasn't supposed to be crazy. He lived in the suburbs of Boston, managed a fur store, and had an attractive wife who was an attorney and pregnant with their first child.

On Oct. 23, the Stuarts left a childbirthing class at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Stuart said he and his wife were accosted by an African American assailant, who commandeered their car and forced them to drive to a nearby neighborhood where both Stuarts were shot and robbed.

It was the ultimate urban tragedy, and Charles Stuart's frantic phone call to police was broadcast nationally. It was a heart-rending scene with this man and his pregnant wife wounded, robbed, trapped in the bowels of the inner city, and victimized by a vicious African American thug.

Carol Stuart died. Her son was delivered by Caesarean section and died 17 days later. Charles Stuart was critically wounded and stayed in the hospital for more than a month.

Hate groups around the nation used the tragedy to spread more of the ignorance they thrive on, and a shocked nation continued to worry about just what was wrong with ``those people.''

Stuart even identified a suspect from a police lineup as the man who had killed his wife and unborn child. That was soon after he got out of the hospital, and just before he went on a little shopping spree - spending more than $1,000 on gold jewelry - and right about the time he got a fat wad of money from his wife's insurance policy.

Stuart committed suicide last week. On Oct 23, he apparently had killed his wife, wounded himself, and enlisted the help of his brother, and even done a trial run of the murder to make sure he had all the details down pat.

It was an unspeakable crime. Tayna Dacri and Charles Stuart were obviously very sick. And there's something very wrong with the brother and husband who served as accomplices in these crimes.

But there's also something wrong with a society that readily accepts these stories because they contain all the appropriate racist elements to make them believable.

Then there are vicious bastards who are mailing bombs and murdering people in supposed retaliation for black men raping white women. Such a murder probably sounds like a noble deed to the brain-dead. But even if death by mail were an appropriate penalty for the brutal crime of rape - what about the white men who commit the majority of all rapes, and what about women of other ethnic backgrounds who are rape victims?

It's difficult to find a rational way to argue against such heinous and insane actions, but the point is that in each of these examples, African American men are portrayed as the worst bogeymen imaginable.

It's a portrayal that the society at large seems comfortable with. It explains away drug use and violence and unwanted pregnancies and poverty and homelessness when it relates to minorities in general and African Americans in particular.

It's no wonder that a recent Washington Post article found plenty of support within minority communities for the conspiracy theory about government allowing all manner of evil to exist in nonwhite neighborhoods.

If minorities in general and African Americans in particular are viewed as subhuman, murderous, rape-prone, dope fiends - then it's only logical that they don't work, have too many children, live on the street, kill one another, and disproportionately populate the nation's jails.

This assumption also makes it easy for those who had no intention of making things better to continue doing nothing and ignoring or opposing all attempts to generate a little equity in this country.

It makes it easy to use silly labels such as liberal and conservative and left-leaning or right-leaning or at-risk or incorrigible, and to ignore the late Robert Kennedy's cryptic comment:

``The problems of this nation are not as simple as the difference between black men and white men, but as complex and difficult as the difference between rich men and poor men.''

We have to stop believing in fairy tales and creating bogeymen, and begin understanding that none of us will survive unless we start a sharing process that includes everyone.

Otherwise, people who routinely are thought of as animals will routinely begin acting out the roles invented by the Tanya Dacris and Charles Stuarts of the world.

That's a sad, frightening state of affairs that thinking people can't allow to happen, and the unthinking shouldn't be permitted to perpetuate.

We'll talk more later.

Don Williamson's column appears Tuesday and Friday on The Times' editorial page.