In our sad, sick, and stupid times, individual justice administered in a court of law has evidently been sidelined for the collectivist cult of social justice. Such is the case with Amy Cooper, the Manhattan woman made famous from a viral video showing her lying to 911 that a black bystander, Christian Cooper (no relation), was threatening her.
In the Washington Post opinion pages, Christian, an ardent birder who had asked Amy to abide by Central Park rules that dogs in certain areas be kept on a leash, explained his much-lauded decision not to cooperate with the district attorney’s investigation charging Amy with a misdemeanor for filing a false police report. Quite frankly, his defense renders a seemingly inexplicable decision even less understandable. Christian writes:
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Focusing on charging Amy Cooper lets white people off the hook from all that. They can scream for her head while leaving their own prejudices unexamined. They can push for her prosecution and pat themselves on the back for having done something about racism, when they’ve actually done nothing, and their own Amy Cooper remains only one purse-clutch in the presence of a black man away.
To translate, Christian is declining to aid the investigation into Amy’s undeniably criminal conduct, effectively ending the case, because… social justice? Because there are other racists? Or perhaps in a more prescient mantra for the moment, we’re all subliminally racist, just quiet Karens waiting to be caught on a viral video and punished in the court of public opinion.
Fans of this race riot-ridden moment have likened it to the #MeToo movement, so let’s draw a parallel: Would it make any sense for a victim of criminal sexual assault or harassment in the autumn of 2017 not to seek justice in an actual courtroom just because sexual violence is a broader problem than one perpetrator? That would be patently absurd, and that Christian sees some sort of equivalence between what Amy did — potentially put his life in danger by telling the cops that a black man was threatening her, a white woman — and the laundry list of grievances posited by trigger-happy protesters just goes to demonstrate the fundamental unseriousness of this moment.
The truth is that Amy Cooper is potentially a criminal, and the punishment for putting anyone in danger by filing a false police report, especially when motivated by and weaponizing racism, should be some selection or combination of a steep fine, probation, and even jail time. Instead, she’s getting off with the same sentence a million other innocent folks have been subjected to: fifteen minutes of infamy on social media. That does nothing to deter would-be Amys in the future and only convinces the rest of us to regard the next viral claim of Karenism with even more cynicism and disregard than before.
