The Boy Who Cried Racism: How Overuse Is Destroying a Necessary Word

On a Tuesday afternoon in September 2019, a Black man named Elijah McClain was walking home from a convenience store in Aurora, Colorado. He was wearing a ski mask because he was anemic and got cold easily. He was carrying iced tea. Someone called the police to report a “suspicious person,” and within minutes, officers had placed Elijah in a carotid hold so severe that he vomited into his mask. Paramedics arrived and injected him with 500 milligrams of ketamine — a dose calculated for a person of 220 pounds, though Elijah weighed 140. He went into cardiac arrest and died three days later. He was twenty-three years old. He played violin for kittens at the local animal shelter because he believed it calmed them. His last recorded words were: “I’m an introvert. I’m just different. That’s all. I’m so sorry.”

Elijah McClain’s death should have been the story that defined 2019’s conversation about race and policing. It had every element: an unarmed, nonviolent man, a disproportionate police response, a medical intervention that killed him, and a system that initially cleared all officers involved. It was, by any definition, a case where the charge of racism — systemic, institutional, lethal — was not merely appropriate but necessary. And yet, for months, almost nobody heard about it. The story received minimal national coverage. No marches materialized. No cable news panels convened. The outrage machine, which could mobilize millions of social media impressions in hours, was largely silent.

Why? Because the outrage machine was busy elsewhere. It was busy with Jussie Smollett.

The Smollett Catastrophe

On January 29, 2019, actor Jussie Smollett — then a cast member on the Fox television series Empire — reported to Chicago police that he had been attacked at 2:00 a.m. in the Streeterville neighborhood by two men who shouted racial and homophobic slurs, poured a chemical substance on him, and placed a noose around his neck. The attackers, he claimed, had shouted “This is MAGA country.” The story was extraordinary, and it was treated as such. Within hours, every major news outlet in America was covering it. ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, CNN, MSNBC — every anchor, every correspondent, every panel delivered the story with the gravity it appeared to deserve. Democratic presidential candidates issued statements. Kamala Harris called it “a modern-day lynching.” Cory Booker used the same phrase. The story was shared millions of times across social media with hashtags of solidarity.

Three weeks later, it collapsed. Chicago police determined that Smollett had paid two Nigerian brothers, Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundairo, $3,500 to stage the attack. He had orchestrated the entire event — the slurs, the bleach, the noose — as a publicity stunt to raise his public profile and leverage a salary increase. In December 2021, a jury convicted him on five of six counts of disorderly conduct for filing false police reports. He was sentenced to 150 days in jail and 30 months of felony probation.

The retraction coverage was a fraction of the original coverage. A study by the Media Research Center found that ABC, CBS, and NBC devoted nearly four times more coverage to the initial allegations than to the revelation that they were fabricated. The imbalance is not surprising. False allegations are, by their nature, less dramatic than the original story, and media organizations have no financial incentive to dwell on their own credulity. But the damage was done. Every person in America who had been skeptical of hate crime reports now had their skepticism validated. Every person who had been inclined to believe victims now had a reason to hesitate. And somewhere in Aurora, Colorado, a twenty-three-year-old violinist was dead, and nobody was talking about it.

The Pattern of Fabrication

Smollett was not an isolated case. He was the most famous case in a pattern that has been documented with uncomfortable thoroughness. Wilfred Reilly, a political scientist at Kentucky State University — himself a Black man — published Hate Crime Hoax in 2019, in which he examined 409 hate crime cases that had received significant media attention. His finding: a substantial number of these cases were confirmed or likely hoaxes — fabricated incidents reported as real, amplified by media, and often not corrected with equivalent prominence when the truth emerged.

The cases are specific and documented. In November 2016, a Muslim student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette reported that two white men, one wearing a Trump hat, had ripped off her hijab and attacked her. She later admitted she had fabricated the entire incident. In November 2018, a Black student at Goucher College in Maryland reported finding racist graffiti targeting Black students; the perpetrator was later identified as the student himself. In 2017, an African American student at St. Olaf College in Minnesota reported finding a threatening racist note on her car windshield; she later admitted she had written the note herself. In 2016, a Black church in Greenville, Mississippi, was set on fire and spray-painted with “Vote Trump”; the arsonist was a Black church member. In 2019, a Black NASCAR driver named Bubba Wallace reported that a noose had been found in his garage stall at Talladega Superspeedway; a subsequent FBI investigation involving fifteen agents determined that the rope — a garage door pull — had been in that configuration since at least October 2019, months before Wallace was assigned to that stall.

I list these cases not because hate crimes are not real. Hate crimes are real. I list them because false reports of hate crimes are also real, and the refusal to acknowledge this reality has created a credibility crisis that harms the people it claims to protect.

The Inflation of a Word

But the hoaxes, damaging as they are, represent only one dimension of the problem. The deeper crisis is semantic: the word “racism” has been expanded to cover so vast a territory that it has lost the precision necessary to do its essential work. When everything is racist, nothing is racist, because the word no longer distinguishes between the lynching of Emmett Till and a disagreement about tax policy.

Consider the documented trajectory. In 2020, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture published an infographic titled “Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness and White Culture in the United States.” Among the characteristics it identified as expressions of “white culture” were: emphasis on the scientific method, objective, rational linear thinking, hard work is the key to success, plan for the future, delayed gratification, and be polite. The implication — that rational thinking and punctuality are racially coded behaviors — was so staggering that the museum retracted the infographic within days. But the logic behind it persists: the notion that any standard, any expectation, any norm that produces disparate outcomes is, by definition, an expression of white supremacy.

This logic has been applied to mathematics. In 2021, the Oregon Department of Education promoted a toolkit called A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction, which identified the expectation that students “show their work” and arrive at “correct answers” as characteristics of “white supremacy culture.” It has been applied to punctuality: a 2019 Clemson University diversity training program identified the expectation that people arrive on time as a potential expression of racial bias. It has been applied to grammar, to standardized testing, to dress codes, to the criminal justice system’s expectation that laws be followed equally by all citizens.

Each of these expansions dilutes the word. Each additional application stretches the definition thinner. And with each stretch, the word loses a little more of its power to describe the thing it was invented to describe: the systematic dehumanization of people based on the color of their skin.

The Cost to Real Victims

The real cost of this inflation is not abstract. It is measured in the delayed justice for people like Elijah McClain. It is measured in the initial skepticism that greeted the killing of Ahmaud Arbery in February 2020 — a twenty-five-year-old Black man who was chased and shot to death by three white men while jogging in Satilla Shores, Georgia. The local district attorney initially declined to prosecute. It took seventy-four days, a leaked video, and a national outcry before arrests were made. The defense attempted to portray Arbery as a burglar. The skepticism that allowed that delay — the reflexive doubt that maybe this wasn’t what it appeared to be — was nourished by every false report that had come before.

It is measured in the nine lives lost at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17, 2015, when a white supremacist sat through a Bible study before opening fire. The Reverend Clementa Pinckney. Cynthia Marie Graham Hurd. Susie Jackson. Ethel Lee Lance. Depayne Middleton-Doctor. Tywanza Sanders. Daniel L. Simmons. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton. Myra Thompson. Nine people murdered in a house of God by a man who had written a manifesto about his belief in white racial superiority. That was racism. Not a microaggression. Not an insensitive comment. Not a disagreement about policy. Racism — the real thing, the lethal thing, the thing the word was made for.

And every time the word is deployed to describe a math curriculum, or a workplace dress code, or a policy disagreement, the distance between the word and the Charleston church grows a little wider, and the dead grow a little more invisible.

What Real Racism Looks Like — In the Data

This is the terrible irony: real, documented, systemic racism continues to operate in American life, and it does not need to be invented or exaggerated because the evidence is overwhelming on its own merits.

In housing: a 2012 study by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the most comprehensive paired-testing study of housing discrimination ever conducted, found that Black renters were shown 11.4 percent fewer units than equally qualified white renters, and Black homebuyers were shown 17.7 percent fewer homes. This was not in 1960. This was in 2012.

In lending: analysis of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition found that in 2019, Black applicants were denied conventional mortgage loans at a rate 80 percent higher than white applicants, even after controlling for income, loan amount, and property location. This disparity has remained essentially unchanged for two decades.

In criminal sentencing: a 2017 study by the United States Sentencing Commission found that Black male offenders received sentences approximately 19.1 percent longer than similarly situated white male offenders between fiscal years 2012 and 2016, even after controlling for offense severity, criminal history, and other legally relevant factors.

This is the data. It is not ambiguous. It does not require interpretation or creative framing. Black Americans face documented discrimination in where they can live, how they can borrow, and how they are sentenced. These are facts. They are real. They deserve the full moral weight of the word “racism” — and that weight is diminished every single time the word is borrowed for a purpose it was not built to serve.

Both Truths Must Coexist

I am asking you to hold two truths in your mind simultaneously, because the failure to do so is the source of the crisis. Truth one: racism is real. It is documented, it is measurable, it operates in housing and lending and sentencing and policing, and it costs Black lives and Black livelihoods every day. Anyone who denies this is either ignorant of the data or lying about it. Truth two: the overdiagnosis of racism is also real. It manifests in fabricated hate crimes, in the semantic expansion of the word to cover every disparity and every disagreement, in the transformation of a moral category into a political weapon. Anyone who denies this is also either ignorant of the data or lying about it.

These truths are not in conflict. They are complementary. In fact, the second truth is the greatest threat to the first, because every false accusation, every inflated claim, every deployment of the word for political leverage rather than moral clarity, makes it harder to fight the real thing. The boy who cried wolf did not create a world without wolves. He created a world where the wolves could hunt unopposed, because nobody believed the warnings anymore.

James Baldwin, who spent his life bearing witness to American racism in all its brutality and subtlety, also understood the danger of dishonesty in the service of justice. He wrote: “I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.” That sentence cuts in every direction. It indicts the white liberal who speaks of equality while living in a segregated suburb. But it also indicts the activist who manufactures racism for personal gain, the university administrator who labels mathematics white supremacy, the media personality who reflexively cries racism at every inconvenience while ignoring the documented, grinding, systemic racism that operates in silence.

“I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.” — James Baldwin, from a 1963 television interview

What are we doing? We are taking the most powerful word in the American moral vocabulary — a word that, when deployed with precision and backed by evidence, has the power to move courts and legislatures and human consciences — and we are spending it like counterfeit currency, flooding the market until the real bills are indistinguishable from the fake. We are ensuring, through our own carelessness, that the next Elijah McClain, the next Ahmaud Arbery, the next congregation at Mother Emanuel, will face not only the violence of racism but the additional violence of disbelief.

The Work of Precision

So here is what I am proposing, and it is not comfortable, and it will not be popular, and I do not care about either of those things because the stakes are too high for comfort and popularity. I am proposing that we treat the word “racism” the way a doctor treats a diagnosis: with precision, with evidence, with an understanding that misdiagnosis does not merely waste resources but actively harms the patient. When a doctor calls every headache a brain tumor, two things happen: the real brain tumors get lost in the noise, and the patients stop trusting the doctor. Both outcomes are catastrophic. Both are happening now.

I am proposing that we demand evidence before endorsement. That when a hate crime is reported, we extend the presumption of good faith to the alleged victim while also insisting on investigation before amplification. That we distinguish, with ruthless clarity, between the racism documented in HUD studies and Sentencing Commission reports and the discomfort of encountering a disagreement. That we refuse to participate in the inflation of the word, because that inflation is not a victimless act — it is an act of violence against every Black person who will ever need that word to describe what actually happened to them.

And I am proposing that we hold accountable those who fabricate racism for personal gain. Not with the cruelty that the right-wing media brings to these cases, but with the moral seriousness that the offense deserves. Jussie Smollett did not commit a minor infraction. He committed a betrayal of every Black person in America who has ever been beaten, denied, humiliated, or killed because of their race. He took their suffering and used it as a prop. He took their credibility and spent it on his career. The community he harmed most was his own, and the least we owe that community is the honesty to say so.

Racism is the wolf. It is real. It has teeth. It is in the housing data and the lending data and the sentencing data and the graveyards. But the boy who keeps crying wolf when there is no wolf is not fighting the wolf. He is feeding it. He is ensuring that when the wolf comes — and it always comes — nobody will be listening anymore. And the silence that follows the last false alarm is the most dangerous silence of all, because in that silence, the wolf does its work undisturbed, and the dead accumulate, and the living wonder why nobody came when they called for help.

They did not come because they had been lied to too many times. And the liars were not the racists. The liars were us.