Great White Defendant

This work is a proposed Trope, Tropers can vote and offer feedback in the comments section below.

Proposed By: isitkin on Oct 6th 2011 at 9:49:47 AM
Last Edited By: isitkin on Oct 7th 2011 at 6:23:01 AM

Name Space: Main
Page Type: Trope

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it was not pleasant to go through life telling yourself “What I Do for a living, I pack blacks and Latins off to jail”–> The Bonfire Of The Vanities”’

Trope Namer is The Bonfire Of The Vanities, written by Tom Wolfe. In the novel, the District Attorney, Abe Weiss, is nicknamed Captain Ahab because he obsessively hunts for the Great White Defendant, a hoped-for criminal that will assuage his sense of impropriety and guilt over being a non-minority, but required by his job to prosecute minority criminals. Because of the way the Great White Defendant fills a physchological and political need of the prosecutor, he will pursue the case obsessively, even though it becomes clear the defendant is not actually, y’know, guilty. He’s an Acceptable Target.

The defendant has usually done something, or is accused of having done something to harmed someone who is a racially Once Acceptable Target.

Compare Missing White Woman Syndrome.

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Examples:

Literature

• The Bonfire Of The Vanities : the trope namer.

Real life

• The district attorney in the Duke lacrosse case [1], Mike Nifong [2], seems to have thought he’d found one in the lacrosse team

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Feedback: 6 replies

Bisected8

Oct 6th 2011 at 10:13:01 AM

It might be a good idea to avoid Real Life examples in this trope. Rule Of Cautious Editing Judgement and all.

• In CSI this happens to Sanders in the aftermath of the episode Fannysmackin‘. More precisely he runs over one of the gang of teenagers who’ve been assaulting tourists (and people who don’t look local enough). The boy’s family sway the jury emotionally meaning the hearing finds his actions lawful, but not justified and allowing them to sue (the city settles for a large amount of money). It’s not helped by the fact that he feels quite guilty about it himself.
• In an episode of Ghost In The Shell Stand Alone Complex this accusation is reversed somewhat. Togusa ends up trying to stop a young man (and full body cyborg) from killing a girl who turned him down (he fails since the man plays dead and then shoots her out of spite) and he ( colluding with the defence and the procecuter, who wants to blackmail Section 9) tries to accuse Togusa of being prejudiced against cyborgs.

TwinBird

Oct 6th 2011 at 2:57:20 PM

Yeah, definitely stay away from Real Life examples. Especially since it’s still kind of contentious whether the Duke boys are in fact innocent.

I think this may be Too Rare To Trope.

Fanra

Oct 6th 2011 at 6:21:32 PM

Especially since it’s still kind of contentious whether the Duke boys are in fact innocent.

The DA who took over after Mike Nifong resigned (Nifong was later convicted of lying and disbarred because of this) announced that they are totally innocent. There is zero contentiousness about their innocence.

69BookWorM69

Oct 6th 2011 at 7:44:52 PM

Hmm. Surely there’s a Law And Order example, since the show’s been on so long.

OmarKarindu

Oct 6th 2011 at 8:18:27 PM

Yeah, it seems to me that this is the very rare inverse of a common trope* in which a minority scapegoat is sought by the police when a significant crime goes down. In any case, the wiki does seem to lack a trope for mundane race-based legal scapegoating. Maybe that’s a place to start, and if lots of examples accrue, a split could be considered down the line.

• In fiction, of course. I don’t want to debate supposed Real Life Examples of either side of this one, and I doubt anyone else does either.