Sistas Are Fakin’ It For Themselves

Those of a certain vintage may remember the case of Tawana Brawley, who was allegedly kidnapped and raped by the local branch of the Ku Klux Klan. Curiously, no one saw them riding off into the night clad in white sheets, because that sort of thing seldom happened in New York State, certainly not in the 1980s.

Although the hoax was soon exposed, it turned the small time race hustler Al Sharpton into the big time race hustler he is today. Hate crime hoaxes or just plain hoaxes are surprisingly common, some are incredibly sophisticated, others are just dumb.

For whatever reason, young black women who perpetrate such hoaxes fall largely into the dumb category. If they are believed uncritically it is because there are no plaudits to be won for calling them out.

Eleven years ago, a young black woman in Louisiana attempted to perpetrate a hoax that was less absurd than insane. Sharmeka Moffitt set herself on fire and blamed the attack on the Ku Klux Klan, literally. It took no time at all for the FBI to solve the case, although solving her mental state is probably a lifetime’s work.

Unlike Tawana Brawley, Rachel Richardson didn’t smear herself with faeces, and she certainly didn’t set herself on fire, but somebody shouting a racial slur, one word in particular, can be enough to set the Internet on fire. Last year, Richardson claimed to have heard such a slur being shouted by the crowd while she was playing in an away volleyball match at Brigham Young University. Strangely, no one else heard it, and after an extensive investigation, even the well-known race hustler Stephen A. Smith was forced to concede it hadn’t happened. Or perhaps it did, but only in Rachel’s head.

The latest hoax by a young black woman has no racial angle, although some people have attempted to find one. The story told by Carlee Russell is bizarre in the extreme. Just because a story is bizarre doesn’t mean it is untrue; most of us have at least one bizarre story to tell, but bizarre stories that defy the laws of physics require a lot more evidence. On July 13, Carlee was driving home along  a busy main road in Alabama when she made a 911 call. She claimed to have seen a very young child, apparently a white boy, walking by the side of the road. The police arrived promptly, and found her car. In it were her wig and her phone. Two days later she turned up at the parental home, and here is where we enter the Twilight Zone. 

Carlee’s car was caught on camera, and owing to the speed at which she was driving it was impossible to reconcile the timing of her call with her sighting of the young boy and her pulling over. The rest of her story is too bizarre to relate here; suffice it to say that her actions, including her Internet searches, undermine it big time.

Black conservatives were among the first to cover this story. Candace Owens could hardly stop laughing when she pointed out that in the first instance it was racist not to talk about the case, then it was racist to talk about it. AK Nation has discussed it at length in a live hangout which includes footage of a briefing by law enforcement. AK doesn’t claim to be any kind of psychic, but he predicted confidently that Carlee will be arrested at some point.