Tyson Must Express Remorse For Crime

Jim Crow has nothing on Don King, who pushed race relations back 150 years with his stunt of June 20.

King and a band of luminaries staged a gala to welcome boxer Mike Tyson back to Harlem. The celebrated pugilist had not visited the realm for three years because he had been in prison for raping a teen named Desiree Washington.

Ward heeler Percy Sutton greeted the champ. Business folks delivered tributes by the bushel. And Maya Angelou, the poet for whom pigment has become a profession, sent regards by mail.

But the prize for best performance went to some men of faith - who may or may not have received some of the $200,000 in moral walking-around money that King had spread through the neighborhood.

The Rev. Al Sharpton embraced the boxer, and Bishop Norman Quick likened Tyson to the prodigal son: “Get the ring and put it on his finger,” he sang. “Get the clothes and put them on his back; get the shoes and put them on his feet. And let all the family shout hallelujah. Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”

Nobody mentioned Desiree Washington, of course. When a reporter asked whether the slugger felt remorse for his misdeed, King intervened: “Sorry for what? Come on!”

Another scribe recalled Tyson’s past habit of slapping around women, prompting boxing manager John Horne to shout: “Mike Tyson is not going to sit up here and answer silly questions. I am not going to let him sit here and be disrespected.”

Tyson, meanwhile, turned down an invitation to meet representatives of a domestic-violence group and went shopping instead.

Attorney Vernon Mason immortalized the occasion with an ethics lecture:

“Did you all hear about the woman in South Carolina who drove her children into the river and drowned them?” he asked. “Mike Tyson didn’t do that. Did you hear about the bomb that was dropped on the building in Oklahoma City? Mike Tyson didn’t do that. Do you all remember Jeffrey Dahmer, who ate all the people and put them in a refrigerator? Mike Tyson didn’t do that either.”

Mason got all his facts wrong, but never mind. The line separating good from evil seems obvious here: Keep your victims out of the fridge - and get a parade.

Americans hate to talk publicly about the relationship between race and crime. But the numbers demand some kind of response.

Blacks commit and suffer from violent crime in numbers far beyond their proportion in society.

John DiIulio noted in the fall 1994 issue of Public Interest that “in 1992, the violent crime victimization rate for blacks was the highest ever recorded. … The chances that a black male teenager would be victimized by violent crime were 6.2 times that of a white adult male, 7.5 times that of a white adult female, 18.8 times that of an elderly white male and 37.6 times that of an elderly white female.” Black teens are being murdered at a rate seven times as high as their white counterparts.

And punishment isn’t a racial conspiracy. More than 80 percent of all black crime victims have black assailants.

Meanwhile, incarceration rates and average prison stays are about the same for criminals of all colors.

Yet, as economist Glen Loury notes, black Americans remain deeply ambivalent about crime and punishment, in part because political parties still treat them like ornaments rather than people. Whenever some white politician screams about throwing criminals in jail, a fair number of black folks think about kissing their young men goodbye.

The Tyson sycophants exploited those fears by claiming that the rich rapist was just a victim of “them.” By depicting their man as a dupe of outside forces, the champ’s entourage echoed oldtime plantation owners who warned that black men could not restrain their rages or priapic passions.

Unfortunately, our political and cultural elite endorse this racial-inferiority canard.

Consider a lyric from the Geto Boys: “Her body’s beautiful, so I’m thinkin’ rape - shouldn’t have had her curtains open, see that’s her fate. Leavin’ out her house, grabbed the (expletive) by her mouth, drug her back in, slam her down on the couch. …” Record-industry moguls call these creeps “artists.”

Anybody who glorifies violence injures the victims again. Mike Tyson served time and seeks praise. But redemption begins with regret.

Had Bishop Quick read all of Luke 15, he would have noticed that the prodigal son embarked upon the road to favor by confessing: “Father, I have sinned before heaven and in thy sight and am no more worthy to be called thy son.”

If Mike Tyson wants respect, he, too, must avow responsibility and express remorse - beginning with a simple statement to Desiree Washington: “I’m sorry.”

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