Linda Fairstein and The Persecuting Spirit

America has inherited “the persecuting spirit” that Nathanial Hawthorne attributed to his unrepentant ancestor, a judge at the Salem witch trials. That Puritan lust to punish a scapegoat, “the ecstasy of sanctimony,” Philip Roth called it, has come and gone throughout American history, examples including the McCarthy era, the herding of Japanese-Americans into internment camps in World War Two, and attacks on Arab-Americans after 9/11.

And now Linda Fairstein, tried and condemned in the court of Twitterdom: “The fact that Linda Fairstein writes crime novels for a living is proof that she has the capacity to make up stories in her mind as she did with the Central Park Five narrative,” someone tweets at #cancelLindaFairstein. So all novelists are cheaters and liars? Fairstein is “a devil!” cries another. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

Fairstein was always known for being deeply concerned with justice, devoted to reforming the treatment of rape victims. Not as one so bent on success that she’d engineer the sacrifice of five young men in order to solidify her professional authority. Why are we forgetting that Eric Reynolds who is black and was the lead detective on the case, along with David N. Dinkins, who is black and the former mayor of New York, believed in the guilt of the Central Park Five? The claim that the boys had never said they were “wilding” but only “wilin’” or hanging out was unheard by many, including Dinkins, who proposed “anti-wilding” measures. Multiethnic witnesses were reeling from other assaults in Central park. The sadism of the jogger incident overshadowed all. The now-exonerated five present themselves as the contemporary version of the Scottsboro boys, the nine African-American teenagers, ages 13-20, falsely accused of raping a white woman on a train.

Is it even possible to watch DuVernay’s Netflix series without thinking of Eric Garner’s murder, of white supremacists waving tiki torches in Charlottesville, of black men and teenagers murdered for walking down the street? For sitting in their own homes? In the wake of these tragedies, how many people even consider the possibility that the NYPD investigation of the Central Park jogger may actually have been ethical?

DuVernay’s directorial failure in A Wrinkle in Time, rather than the success of either Selma or When They See Me, suggests some answers. DuVernay always said she planned to “blackify” Madeleine L’Engle’s classic, the idea being that non-white children could better identify with non-white heroes and heroines. The biracial actress playing Meg, Storm Reid, said she felt a responsibility to “uplift” and “empower little African-American girls” by playing a character written as white.

The notion that an African-American girl cannot identify with a white girl reveals an understanding of race as a given, something that cannot be transcended, rather than a product of culture, class and history. But when James Earl Jones played King Lear, he entered into the role as an English old king, not as an African-American. When the 19^th-century African-American actor Ira Aldridge played Shakespearean roles, he played them wearing whiteface. When a racist “Jump Jim Crow” minstrel show arrived as competition, Aldridge appropriated one of the show’s skits into his own act, parodying it. Deflating racist denigration, he offered the same advice as Mrs. Which in L’Engle’s novel:  that the only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly—not to lose one’s sense of humor. Moments of humor intensify the gravity of the contest between the forces of good and evil.

DuVernay’s adaptation of L’Engle’s novel misses the gravity as well as the humor, I believe because DuVernay’s vision of race and power is one-dimensional. The idea that black girls can better appreciate Meg Murry’s challenges when a black actress plays her is problematic. It’s like saying a straight actor can’t play a gay person. Du Vernay’s Meg is a black girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles because apparently black girls would be less able to relate to white girls growing up in a small New England town.

What if the essentialist conception of race that informs DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time plays a role in her demonizing of Linda Fairstein? Justitiae soror fides, or “Faith is the sister of justice,” one of the Latin phrases quoted by L’Engle in her novel, should be our guide: we should not lose faith in Linda Fairstein unless or until someone can demonstrate that she stands guilty of the crimes of which DuVernay’s Netflix production accuses her.