Jim Sleeper: …and Outrage:

Since the international outcry against false charges that the black “Scottsboro Boys” had raped a white woman in the South in 1931, liberals, at least, have been reluctant to acknowledge the ugly entanglement of race and rape in our national experience.

America’s original racial sin was a long trail of rapes of black women by white men, especially slave masters. Many African Americans’ “white blood” and lighter skins marked these violations and other illicit intimacies, some of them gentler, perhaps, but most of them palpably coerced in the shadow of white omnipotence.

The Central Park jogger trial of 1989, in which five black and Latino teenagers were convicted of assaulting and raping a young, white investment banker, seemed to turn the tables on Scottsboro: This time, the “black” boys were indeed guilty, everyone agreed, with liberals and feminists at the head of that consensus.

Now comes Manhattan Dist. Atty. Robert Morgenthau’s recommendation that the teens’ convictions be vacated. Morgenthau had to respond after Matias Reyes, an imprisoned serial rapist who had never been charged or convicted in the jogger case, came forward this year and established that it was he who raped her that night in 1989. LA Times commentary