Central Park: Center of the Moral Universe
RFK, Trump, and the Central Park Five
Only a Kennedy could cook up conduct as absurd and egregious as what Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. shared in advance of an August 5 New Yorker exposé: a grotesque, privilege-laced saga climaxing in the hastily staged dumping of a bear cub carcass in Central Park.
The third-party hopeful’s bewilderingly joyful confession provided for rich dark humor and accelerated his irrelevance. As Kennedy had originally planned to eat his decomposing roadkill for whatever vile nutrients it possessed, Former President Donald Trump has now consumed RFK’s rotting campaign for what twisted benefits he might squeeze out of it.
Whether embracing RFK ultimately helps Trump, hurts Trump, or if he haphazardly dumps RFK’s political corpse in a park, the RFK exposé solved a decade-old cold case, the mystery of an outlandish Central Park crime, which in a morsel of savory irony had in 2014 been reported in the New York Times by none other than Kennedy’s cousin Tatiana Schlossberg.
More grievous Central Park crimes have undergone dramatic public reexamination upon the actual perpetrators’ admission–none more infamous than the 1989 rape and beating of Trisha Meili, a sensationalized case resulting in the wrongful conviction and incarceration of a group of Black and Hispanic teens known as the Central Park Five.
When the initial sentences were handed down, the City and State of New York removed these kids so they wouldn't be seen, as if they didn’t exist.
In 2002 the New York Supreme Court rescinded their convictions following the confession, supported by matching DNA, of convicted serial rapist Matias Reyes. The newly dubbed “Exonerated Five” sued the city and in 2014 received a $41 Million settlement for malicious prosecution, with an additional $3.9 Million from New York State.
Last Tuesday’s debate between Vice President Harris and Trump evoked his essential contribution to the demonization of the Central Park Five, echoing one of the most powerful moments of this year’s Democratic National Convention:
Korey Wise and Dr. Yusef Salaam of the Central Park Five shocked the conscience that has become too numb, too accustomed to the Republican standard-bearer’s hyperbole. Americans, voters, and history itself need these reminders. The former Central Park Five are uniquely qualified to give one, and they delivered–from Wise’s defiant opening, his own deeply personal riff on the Harris campaign refrain: “We won’t go back.”
The Central Park Five are not going back to prison. They are not going back to a life of hateful harassment and incitement to execution from the desk of Donald Trump.
This is but one ugly episode in our sordid national history of collusion between media, mass incarceration and white supremacy. It is also a chapter in Donald Trump’s origin story and rise to fame, told through a full page advertisement in the New York Times (and other publications) calling for vicious policing and the execution of the Central Park Five. Read the text of the ad, which is even more depraved than the giant, bloodthirsty letters commanding half the page.
“Give New York back to the citizens who have earned the right to be New Yorkers.” Who exactly does Trump think “earned the right” to be in New York? Taxpayers? Hardworking immigrants? Wall Street aspirants? Silver spoon socialites like himself?
He doesn’t say. But it’s clear who does not count as a New Yorker: those he considers wild animals, irredeemable and irreformable, worthy only of publicized and celebrated death. A value to society only as fodder for primitive civic deterrence. Trump contrasts a rosy portrait of New York with a nightmare of crime and lawlessness: “roving bands of wild criminals roam our streets, dispensing their own vicious brand of twisted hatred at whomever they encounter.”
Positioning himself firmly in opposition to the idea of restorative justice, Trump rejects the impulse toward empathy for its antithesis: a determination to dehumanize and vilify: “I want to hate these murderers and I always will.”
At the presidential debate a recalcitrant Trump painted the same picture of American carnage with its chief villain the marauding nonwhite criminal outsider. ABC’s David Muir fact-checked Trump and Harris rhetorically hip-checked him, contrasting her tough-on-crime record with the former president’s own history of criminality and racist division.
At the DNC, Salaam offered his own contrast: “When they see us, America will finally say goodbye to that hateful man.” He linked his exoneration and the struggle to discard Trump, eager avatar of police violence and white grievance, with the iconic rallying cry of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr: “free at last, free at last, thank God almighty we are free at last.”
When they see us, we won’t go back to wrongful imprisonment. Won’t go back to stop and frisk, to racial profiling, to wanton police brutality. We won’t go back to a world where men are rewarded for denigrating others and leading a lynch mob. We won’t go back to false, violently extracted confessions, to jury bias overruling the existence of exonerating DNA evidence.
Salaam reminded us that Trump didn’t just lay out the ad in 1989. To the contrary, despite scientific evidence and a full confession he stands by it today. Trump is not just an unrepentant racist, he’s anti-science and anti-truth, a proud champion of both injustice and the fake news that fuels it.
Trump’s cultivation of the disinformation ecosystem threatens the individual and the collective: from his bungling of the COVID crisis, to climate science denialism, to the coup attempt and big stolen election lie that live on as Republican dogma. “Alternative facts” drive the anti-abortion movement unshackled by Trump’s extremist Supreme Court.
In the context of the Trump Court and the MAGA GOP’s efforts to erode democracy and extend a centuries-long disenfranchisement campaign, Salaam tapped into the timeless transcendental well of American patriotism: “We have the constitutional right to vote. In fact, it is a human right. So let us use it.”
From that inalienable moral core, he called on us to join with the Central Park Five: “I want you to walk with us. I want you to march with us. I want you to vote–with us!”
When we vote with the Central Park Five, we’re voting with reality-rooted slates of certified presidential electors. When we march with them, we’re marching with the blessed memories of King and John Lewis and Erica Garner. When we walk with them, we walk alongside the victims of COVID misinformation, women and girls who suffer from extreme abortion bans, and hard-working immigrants vilified for things they would never dream of doing.
If Central Park is the center of the moral universe, the Central Park Five are its moral compass, forged in their distinct American crucible. From the gravest violation to exoneration to exaltation for Salaam as a newly elected member of the New York City Council. Whatever direction these men point, America should follow.
Not for nothing that Korey’s last name is Wise. What wisdom can we absorb from these men? From their suffering and long-deferred triumph? And Yusef Salaam: a word that primarily means peace and exudes respect, Salaam is also a salutation as when saying goodbye. This is what Salaam has invited us to do, not for Kamala Harris but for them: to say goodbye and good riddance to the scourge that is Donald J. Trump.