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Jussie Smollett and a Perfect Crime

An object lesson in what happens when people in positions of political and cultural authority indulge their biases by suspending disbelief.

Mr. Rothman is the author of “Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America.”

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Police in Chicago are reviewing whether the attack Jussie Smollett reported last month was a hoax.Credit...Scott Dudelson/Getty Images

The details of the Jan. 29 attack on the “Empire” star Jussie Smollett were horrifying. While returning to his Chicago home around 2 a.m., the actor said, he was beaten and doused with bleach. His assailants tied a noose around his neck and shouted racial and homophobic slurs. “This is MAGA country,” Mr. Smollett said the attackers yelled.

These details also strained credulity from the very start. There was the idea that downtown Chicago was Trump country. Then that Mr. Smollett reportedly hung onto the Subway sandwich he picked up before the attack. The rope his attackers placed around his neck remained there even when he arrived in the lobby of his building. His assailants were roaming the streets for high-profile targets at 2 a.m. during a historic cold front. And Mr. Smollett reportedly refused to cooperate with law enforcement officials by withholding evidence from the police.

If you are inclined to believe that America — especially in the age of Donald Trump — is plagued by racism and homophobia, none of these extremely fishy details seemed to register. Indeed, many politicians and journalists seemed to suspend all critical thought in a campaign to indict not just Mr. Smollett’s attackers but the country as a whole.

Two presidential hopefuls, Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, independently called the attack a “modern-day lynching.” Senator Bernie Sanders said that “the racist and homophobic attack on Jussie Smollett is a horrific instance of the surging hostility toward minorities around the country.” The N.A.A.C.P. president, Derrick Johnson, said on Twitter, “The rise in hate crimes is directly linked to President Donald J. Trump’s racist and xenophobic rhetoric.”

When some observers pleaded for caution in the Smollett case, their prudence was condemned as bigotry. Rewire’s Kieran Scarlett called “the avalanche of speculation that he’s lying” an “attack” on Mr. Smollett’s black and gay identities. GQ’s Joshua Rivera said “America’s choice to embrace the blind rage of late-stage whiteness in decline is an explicit longing for this kind of crime.”

Sarah Kate Ellis, the president and chief executive of Glaad, said the actor had been “doubly victimized” by the police investigation. When the conservative columnist Cameron Gray compiled a list of prominent politicians and entertainers blaming America’s political culture for Mr. Smollett’s ordeal, Representative Bobby Rush called it an attempt “to trivialize the attack.” As Mr. Rivera wrote in GQ, when the police described the attack as a “possible hate crime,” it was just another “wound inflicted on Smollett’s battered body.”

Indeed, Mr. Smollett himself implied that anything other than deference to his claims was evidence of prejudice. “It feels like if I had said it was a Muslim or a Mexican or someone black, I feel like the doubters would have supported me a lot much more,” he told ABC News. “And that says a lot about the place where we are as a country right now.”

We do not yet know the full truth of what happened on that night in January. But on Saturday, local law enforcement sources told CNN that investigators now believed that Mr. Smollett paid two acquaintances to stage the attack. Chicago authorities told a local CBS television affiliate that the acquaintances, brothers who appeared as extras on “Empire,” had even rehearsed the attack with Mr. Smollett.

This case is an object lesson in what happens when people in positions of political and cultural authority abandon critical thinking and pressure those who don’t abandon their circumspection under pain of being smeared as bigots. It also exemplifies the tendency of those arbiters to amplify “perfect crimes” that advance their political agenda — and to ignore crimes that don’t.

Consider some of the “hate crimes” that have garnered tremendous attention in the past two years.

A week before the 2016 presidential vote, a historic black church in Mississippi was spray-painted with pro-Trump graffiti and set ablaze, prompting a national spasm of anxiety amid the prospect that the bad old days were back. The Republican Party was hounded for comment on the episode, and reporters attributed the event to the “tense” state of “American politics.” The person charged in this crime was, however, a parishioner, and an official said the arson was designed to appear “politically motivated,” but was not.

Shortly after Mr. Trump’s election, a woman in Ann Arbor, Mich., insisted that she was approached by a white man who threatened to set her on fire if she did not remove her hijab. A Michigan lawmaker tied the case to the president-elect, who he said empowered “devastating racism, sexism and xenophobia.” But the police came to the conclusion that the whole thing was a hoax.

A week after the election, an Episcopal church in Indiana gained national attention when it was painted with homophobic slurs, swastikas and pro-Trump language. The self-identified gay man who later confessed to the crime was the church’s organist. Investigators said he hoped to “mobilize a movement after being disappointed” by the election results.

A few weeks later, an 18-year-old Muslim woman alleged that a group of the president’s supporters attacked her at a New York City subway station and tried to rip her hijab off her head. New Yorkers rallied to her defense. Anti-racist demonstrations in Grand Central Station were organized, and significant police resources were devoted to investigating the case. She was later charged with misleading investigators.

All of these events occasioned deep dives by the press into the forces of racial animus Mr. Trump unleashed during his campaign. But there was no chastened soul-searching when the deceptions were exposed. And few entertain the possibility that the attention these allegations generate has created an incentive structure for prospective hoaxers.

Perhaps most damningly, the kind of scrutiny and anger reserved for incidents of racial hatred seem limited to episodes that confirm what social justice activists believe should constitute American bigotry. There have been no similar national paroxysms amid a sharp uptick in violence targeting New York City’s Jewish population. Maybe that’s because Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn don’t register for these activists as prototypical victims of violent prejudice.

The real tragedy in all of this is that hate crimes are, in fact, on the rise in the Trump era, particularly against Jews and Muslims. It is natural and noble to want to respond proactively to that condition. But well-intended observers risk indulging their biases by suspending disbelief. Whether it is Donald Trump implying that the criminal acts of one illegal immigrant are indicative of a plague of migrant violence or establishment Democrats citing one dubious story to indict half the country, there is no justice in treating individuals not as individuals but as representatives of their tribe.

False claims of victimization taint legitimate episodes of violent bigotry and discrimination, which is perhaps why those who are honorably committed to confronting prejudice seem loath to acknowledge hoaxes when they occur. But those who are inclined to dismiss prejudice in America as a manufactured crisis will only be emboldened by episodes like these. That is why it’s incumbent on responsible Americans — especially those with large platforms — to treat alleged crimes as just that: alleged.

Noah Rothman (@noahcrothman) is the associate editor of Commentary magazine and the author of “Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America.”

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