Race, Lies, and Videotape

The middle of the night. New York City, the borough of Queens. December 1986. A steaming car, disabled on the highway. A dog barks eerily in the distance. Tinkly background music gives way to dark, menacing chords as three young black men start down the road on foot. Headlights loom. Another car almost runs them down—deliberately—as they walk slowly down the street, and we hear a snarling voice: “Get out of the neighborhood, niggers.”

The car drives off, and what follows is pure horror: The blacks find an open pizzeria, fail to reach a friend on the phone, and walk back out into the night—to mayhem and death. Because the young whites in the car have come back, after picking up reinforcements at a kinky teenage party. In a sequence of surpassing ugliness, they threaten the three blacks with a baseball bat, chase them through the streets by car and on foot, drive one of them to his death on a parkway—he’s hit by a speeding car—then corner another, beating him mercilessly. The third black escapes with his life.

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Lorrin Anderson

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The middle of the night. New York City, the borough of Queens. December 1986. A steaming car, disabled on the highway. A dog barks eerily in the distance. Tinkly background music gives way to dark, menacing chords as three young black men start down the road on foot. Headlights loom. Another car almost runs them down—deliberately—as they walk slowly down the street, and we hear a snarling voice: “Get out of the neighborhood, niggers.”

The car drives off, and what follows is pure horror: The blacks find an open pizzeria, fail to reach a friend on the phone, and walk back out into the night—to mayhem and death. Because the young whites in the car have come back, after picking up reinforcements at a kinky teenage party. In a sequence of surpassing ugliness, they threaten the three blacks with a baseball bat, chase them through the streets by car and on foot, drive one of them to his death on a parkway—he’s hit by a speeding car—then corner another, beating him mercilessly. The third black escapes with his life.