The Central Park Birdwatching Incident, as it turns out, wasn't about race or class.

Very interesting new information.  Bari Weiss has an article on her substack, The Real Story of “The Central Park Karen” by Megan Phelps-Roper.  This is about the Central Park Birdwatching Incident back on May 25th, 2020.   Two or three months into all the disruption and uncertainty surrounding Covid-19 and the same day as George Floyd's death.  

Amy Cooper (a white woman) had her dog off-leash in Central Park and Christian Cooper (a black man birding in the park) confronted her in Central Park.  [They are unrelated].  He made a 45 second video of the encounter which made Amy Cooper appear as the "Central Park Karen" histrionically threatening a black man for holding her to account for following the community rules by keeping her dog on-leash.  This was posted online within a couple of hours of the incident.  Everyone saw whatever story they wished to see but the mob turned against Amy Cooper and she was in short order fired from her job, effectively homeless owing to the death threats made against her and suffering several news cycles in which she was the framed as the privileged white woman.  She fled New York City and is still in hiding a year later after one of the most strident cancellings of the social justice and critical race theory mobs.

And, as so often happens, evidence is emerging now that this was a much more complex confrontation than the mainstream news media represented.  Apparently this evidence has been available from since near the beginning.  Kmele Foster is the New York based journalist who actually investigated the story and shares it with Bari Weiss in her podcast, The Real Story of the "Central Park Karen".  

Seeing this new evidence made me go back and search this blog.  I recall posting about the incident.  I write this blog in part to keep track of my own evolving interpretation of things.  How did I do reading the mainstream media a year ago.  Was I part of the mob?

My posts are here, two of them, Misattribution of root causes, and What a poisonous ignorant little putz.  In both, my criticism is on how the mainstream media was making a race issue out of what appeared to be more of a class issue.  Fortunately, the putz in the second post was the NYT Charles Blow flaming race flames and not directed at Amy Cooper.  

None the less, in both cases, it is clear that I accorded some responsibility to Amy Cooper as someone ignoring the law (off-leash dog), almost certainly influenced in part because I am president of a neighborhood volunteer group which protects and conserves the environment of a City Nature Preserve in our neighborhood.  We routinely deal with selfish individuals who allow their dogs to roam free through the preserve, despite all the signage, tearing up work we have done and not infrequently accosting or attacking other on-leash dogs, children and the elderly.  I have little sympathy for those who regard themselves as above the law.

Weiss and Foster do skewer the mainstream media for turning a quotidian incident into some symbolic race crime when it never was that.  Among the things I learned from Weiss and Foster:

• Christian Cooper was a Harvard grad.
• His career was first in creative content for Marvel for nearly a decade and then 20 years with a media communications agency.
• Christian Cooper had a sustained campaign of confronting off-leash dog walkers.
• He had been involved in a number of other Central Park physical confrontations.
• Part of his campaign included always carrying dog-treats to lure the dogs away from their owners.
• Other dog walkers had had encounters with him in which they felt threatened and menaced.
• In his own Facebook account of the incident, Christian Cooper admitted to verbally threatening Amy Cooper.  
• Amy Cooper's call to the police included thrice identifying him as a black man, not because of her trying to emphasize that he was a black man but because the call had such static on it that the emergency operator and Amy Cooper could not hear one another.

Amy Cooper's histrionic response to him on the video takes on a lot more nuance in this context.   

I am not a fan of podcasts.  Love the variety of their content but I can read far faster than I can listen and so it is a slow channel for information absorption.  The Weiss and Foster podcast is worth the time, though, for a much more holistic view of the incident.

My skepticism and criticism of the mainstream media is sustained by Weiss and Foster.  The MSM manufactured an inflaming incident with disastrous personal consequences to a human not completely at fault and certainly far in excess of the crime (off-leash dog-walking).  And they did so while studiously ignoring available evidence which contradicted their version of events.  

This was never particularly about race and against my interpretation at the time, this was not really about class.  Amy Cooper and Christian Cooper are both members of the Mandarin Class, those credentialed denizens of left leaning urban enclaves with reasonably secure livelihoods and strong professional networks which protect them from normal tribulations which are far more serious for ordinary Americans.  This was an intra-class dispute between racialists wanting to see everything through the lens of race and Me-too feminists who initially wanted to defend Amy Cooper with a woman's perspective.  They quickly lost the battle to the critical race theorist and social justice mobsters and abandoned Amy Cooper to her fate.  

There is a deeper lesson in here not addressed by Foster or Weiss.  Amy Cooper was wrong for ignoring the leash law.  Christian Cooper was wrong for engineering the conflict and escalating it.  They werute both wrong.

But Christian Cooper was right in this sense.  Laws need to be enforced.  If the city is unwilling to enforce little laws like leashed dogs, then it quickly becomes difficult to enforce more consequential laws.  Laws should not be enforced selectively but equally.  The accused should benefit from due process.  District Attorneys should not politicize the law to pursue political vengeance cases (as was done against Amy Cooper).  

Law enforcement is critical.  Political leadership and governance is critical.  The Central Park Birdwatching Incident, as it turns out, wasn't about race or class.  It was about bad personal behavior,  inadequate policing and bad governmental leadership.  Bad personal behavior will be with us always, but inadequate policing and bad governmental leadership are two conditions from which we are now, a year later, suffering from all across the country.  We can do something about them.

As to consistently erroneous, partisan and malicious reporting?  Not sure what we can do about that other than starve the beasts of revenue by not consuming what is rapidly becoming not just bad product but evil product.