Good question

[supergee]

Is the True Crime genre too white? [The Appeal]

Comments

[weofodthignen]

Let me preface what I'm about to say with this: until the cops stop wantonly killing black people, we can't have many, many things that are desperately needed in the US, including treating rape with the seriousness it deserves and insisting that someone like Samuel Little gets more time in prison for attempted murder than for robbing a furniture store. Morally, everything has to stop because of murderous, racist cops and a cop culture that places loyalty to colleagues over enforcing the law and protecting the population, even when that loyalty endangers every other cop on the force. We can't even have an examination of everybody else the cops brutalize and murder, because America is so divided by the black/white color line that even other forms of racism, and the misogyny that causes thousands of women to be raped and murdered every year (and that means we have to "Say her name" to get Breonna Taylor included in the list of black victims of cop murders), have to wait their turn. Murderous police racism against black people has to come first, and deflections from it will only mean we have to go right back to this point in the future.

The article states that true crime is "relatively ... small" and notes that publishers don't have dedicated imprints for it (so?) By the end it's making a case for broadening the definition, so I guess I see the rhetorical strategy, but there are indications all through that it has a large readership, which was always my impression, and several of the examples the author believes are not classed as true crime I would have thought of under that heading. And the implication that it only took off as a cultural influence since some video treatments in the middle of last decade is ridiculous. It's been a book publisher's cash cow since forever, and of course the interest in true crime was why yellow journalism began, and built the newspapers in this country as soon as literacy was sufficiently widespread. What I think the author is missing or avoiding talking about is that true crime readers are felt to be kind of skeevy, more so than mystery readers. They often share the mystery reader's preference for law and order, but in a more authoritarian form; on the other hand, some identify with the criminal (many serial killers have been fascinated with serial killers); they all seek out stories with horrific details that in fiction would only be printable in an X-rated publication, often including crime scene photos. (I also get disapproval for choosing to read about plane and train crashes, and reputable newspapers avoid publishing explicit photos from those, two. Journalism these days disavows its Grub Street practises, but the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung leaped out of the starting gate with shocking pictures such as one of the Titanic sinking, and there is still reader demand for shock, gore, and tragedy, as well as for retribution: mugshots, perp walks, and execution photos.) For the feeling that true crime is an indecent form of book, look at the grief Michelle McNamara got for shining a light on the Golden State Killer cases and giving the perp a catchy name.)

Responsible publishers don't want to be seen as racist by publishing books for that kind of reader where the perp is a black man. I had no idea there were proportionally as many black serial killers as white, and am not at all surprised that many people don't know about Samuel Little; I did, and I know they've come in a variety of forms, including The Man from the Train, who was probably a German immigrant; Bruno Lüdtke, a Berlin train worker in Nazi Germany; and more women than I'd expected; and, yes, mass shooters include One L. Goh and also Jeff Weise. But can you imagine a white writer being tone-deaf enough to pitch a book on a black serial killer, especially after the reversal on the Central Park rape case, where the perpetrator, a Latino by the way, would have gone free if he hadn't been gotten for other violent offences against women because of the unbridgeable divide between black youths who went into the park looking for fun which they may have described jocularly using the phrase "the wild thing" in an accent and pop culture reference and white cops and prosecutors who couldn't understand a word of their statements. I read the reports at the time, presumably by Natalie Byfield. Unless the white writer was actually a racist; or a feminist so consumed with the need to write truth about rape and other violence against women that she risked touching this third rail, and if the book got published, she'd be flayed alive by public opinion.

We do need crime exposés to broaden, although I wouldn't redefine it as broadly as the politicized writer would. It is sad and possibly harmful to society that so much investigative reporting, crime writing, and general muckraking is now relegated to the likes of GQ, Esquire, Rolling Stone ... and Buzzfeed. And there is not enough attention paid relatively speaking to crime where victims are minorities, or poor, or both, and yes, too much attention paid relatively speaking to blonde girls of all ages. Especially in the press. It's particularly shameful how little coverage there is of the fact outsiders, presumably mostly white men, are able to rape and murder Native American women on the reservations with impunity. Lissa Yellow-bird Chase, who appears to be working almost single-handedly to investigate disappearances of these women, has no Wikipedia article.

It suits the writer's agenda to frame the problem as one of representation among writers. But I disagree that having people of color tell these stories is either the only or the best way to fix the problem that true crime publishing doesn't cover all the horrific crimes it should. The underlying problem is the criminals, not the victims. Writing the truth about the criminals is the objective, and that should include all the criminals, and that I believe is what we true crime readers would prefer. (The audience has proven it will read about crimes against prostitutes, for example, since Jack the Ripper; even though recent work suggests only one of the Ripper's victims was a prostitute.) But there is no Wikipedia article about Michael Johnson the former collegiate wrestler that I can find, certainly none findable through a "Tiger Mandingo" redirect. One could be indefinitely blocked for such racial insensitivity. And right now, when we have to drop everything because the cops will neither stop wilfully killing black people nor condemn their colleagues for doing so? Nope, we can't have books about black killers, and rightly so, but not because the genre is "too white".

M