Unconventional Wisdom | 'The black guy did it', that reliable scapegoat

When you're a white person in America saying, "The black guy did it," you are screaming "Fire!" in the cineplex.

You are conjuring night fears of the Other, and stoking cell-level hatred that metastasizes.

And if you're a silly little twit like Lindsay Lohan, you're lamely trying to deflect culpability for your own dangerously bizarre behavior.

Last month in California, the troubled 21-year-old actress commandeered a car with three passengers inside and chased after her assistant, who had moments earlier quit working for Lohan.

When the cops tried to sort it out, Lohan was sputtering her lies: "No, no, I wasn't driving, the black kid was driving," referring to one of the passengers she had nearly killed at 80 m.p.h. on the Santa Monica streets.

Oh, the black kid. The black man. Him again.

What's that villainous so-and-so gone and done now?

Lohan's exploitative mendacity is rooted in a hardy American tradition.

Centuries ago, white people learned that if you do some dirt and find a nearby black guy to smear it on, no one could refute you.

A powerless, overwhelmed black man could not defend himself in a white man's court, or in a white man's culture.

And for good measure, the lynched corpses remained hanging from the nice, thick oak branches for a good long while to let the idea sink in.

As it happens, July must have been Blame the Black Man Month, because Lohan wasn't the only white person who used race as a cover.

A Florida state representative named Bob Allen offered a male undercover cop in a Titusville park $20 for a sex act, investigators said.

But Allen told police that the man - the black man - had actually offered him sex. And Allen was afraid to refuse.

"This was a pretty stocky black guy," Allen said in a police interview that was recorded, "and there were a lot of other black guys around in the park, and, you know. . . . "

Tasteless as they were, neither of these cases was as egregious as that of Susan Smith, the South Carolina white woman who set off a nine-day nationwide manhunt for the African American she said carjacked her two sons in October 1994.

It turned out, of course, that Smith herself had allowed her 1990 Mazda Protege to roll into a lake, drowning her own kids.

At the time, the case reminded everyone of Charles Stuart, the white Massachusetts man who had shot his wife to death in their car in 1989, then said a black man did it.

And on it goes. "The black guy did it" remains a viable alibi for misbehaving whites. Unkillable prejudice is the source of its potency.

As long as whites believe that black men are endlessly coming for their property, their women, and their mortal souls, "The black guy did it" will continue to have resonance.

Someone will always buy it.