The Stuart Case Explains It All

From the Apostle Paul to Angela Y. Davis, social analysts of every era have wrestled with the three categorical building blocks of human oppression -- class, race, and sex -- and with their infinite variety of shadings, interminglings, and interrelations. In our day, that intellectual wrestling match has too often come down to a chicken-or-the-egg debate about which oppression came first and is thusly the root of all evil. The only thing such debate has revealed is that the only appropriate answer to the chicken-or-egg question is to insist, loudly, that it is the wrong question. These days, correct opinion perceives the relationship among the three categories of oppression as dialectical, dynamic, symbiotic, anything but a relationship of cause and effect. The three oppressions clearly affect, and are affected by, each other and feed upon each other. Clearly they all have to be combated together, with varying degrees of emphasis and priority in different times and places.

Unfortunately this conceptual symbiosis, once arrived at, still won't fit in to a bumper sticker phrase, a sound bite, or a single evocative visual image. There are no made-for-TV stories, or myths, to communicate this woefully abstracted concept to the pre- and post-literate among us. And in this or any other era, an idea, or ideology, without slogans, images, or myths is one without politico-cultural legs.

BUT AT THE TURNING of the decade, the Stuart murder case provided America with an ongoing, multimedia, winter-term seminar in the interwoven nature of sex, race, and class in American life. As it enters the culture in the form of the inevitable best sellers, biopics, and docudramas, the Stuart case could provide us with the central story, or myth, that sums up the most important truths about the way our society works.

Unfortunately, the critical content of our winter media seminar was left mostly between the lines of a true crime story. And the myth-making of quickie books and grade-B movies is, while more real than reality, usually an unconscious and unexplicated process. So right here and now let's say it, once and for all, right out loud. The Stuart case explains it all, and here's why.

Men kill women in America. It happens all the time. And short, often just short, of killing them, they even more frequently whip and abuse them in the home; degrade, exploit, and harass them in the workplace; and sexually assault them just about anywhere. Men do these things to women at every level of our society. The cold-blooded murder of a wife by a husband is thus the distilled and emblematic expression of a whole system of domination.

Black men in America have the grim misfortune to serve as the object of white men's projected sexual fears and as the scapegoat for all other manner of white inadequacies and discontents. Thus, when a white man kills a woman, and blames it on a black man, he is only saying out loud what the dominant (i.e., white, male) culture already secretly believes: "They are after our women."

For centuries this wolf-cry against black men has served as a very efficient diversionary strategy for powerful white men faced with the consequences of their wrongs or with any apparent threat to their power and status. So when Charles Stuart blamed a black man for the murder of his wife and baby, he was enacting, again, a psychodramatic depiction of a core American sociocultural truth.

In America, class-based discontents and resentments are denied open and healthy expression, so they get acted out in all kinds of sick and twisted ways on the terrain of race and sex. White working-class guys like Chuck Stuart believe, at the conscious or ideological level, that they can attain anything in America and that it's their own fault if they don't. But only semiconsciously do they also know that there is a whole world above them to which they are, for all practical purposes, denied entry.

Chuck Stuart, in his own sick, twisted way, was clearly determined to make it through those locked doors of wealth and status. His sex-and-race-obsessed murder plot was, to all appearances, driven by a desire to cash in on insurance megabucks, avoid the financial drain of supporting a child, and, maybe, clear the decks for his budding relationship with a younger, blond, WASPy, Ivy-League womanfriend. That is to say, it was an especially deadly and distorted expression of class striving.

And with that, the archetypal circle is completed, and the murderer murders himself. Sex, race, and class feed each other, and everybody dies. But, and this is the strangest thing of all, the Stuart case also explains the way out of this deadly cycle. The future arrives when the victims reach out in their suffering and find each other. And the Stuart case comes complete with a real-life denouement that acts out just such a liberating, and deeply thrilling, image of solidarity and hope.

The surprise ending came from the De Maiti family, the parents and brother of Carol De Maiti Stuart. This Italian-American, Catholic, working-class family had every right to close their hearts off to the world and pickle themselves in private grief and spite. But instead they became the only white principals of the whole tragedy to undeniably do the right thing. They used their moment in the spotlight to start a college scholarship for the young black people of the Mission Hill neighborhood stigmatized and brought under fire by Chuck Stuart's lies.

Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.