I have a fascination-hate relationship with true crime non-fiction content.

On the one hand, I find the depth and quality of reporting and storytelling refreshing, and possibly, indicating a shift towards a society that acknowledges its own role in its brokenness. On the other hand, it seems as if the bulk of these stories lend complexity and colour to the lives of individual perpetrators. We’re often exploring the dark pasts and trauma of these people who did awful things as a way to explore how context and culture shapes criminals. And that would be alright, if not exactly enough, if all perpetrators were treated equally. In this artform, as in life, white perpetrators are given more airtime and page space from which they emerge as complicated, three-dimensional human beings rather than singularly evil caricatures.

The instances in which perpetrators of colour get this treatment seem few and far between. Often, they get their 15 minutes of podcast or documentary fame after they have been exonerated. Sometimes, they get it because they are public figures. The documentary series chronicling OJ Simpson’s story, the podcast Think Twice which delves into Michael Jackson’s life and (alleged) crimes are two examples. Both do thorough jobs of linking the tragic trajectories of these larger-than-life personalities to the systematic racism and structural inequality that holds much of America in a vice grip.

And yet.

The penultimate episode of Think Twice covers Michael Jackson’s 2003 criminal trial. Included in the interviews are conversations with two white principal players. The first is BJ Hickman, a super-fan of Jackson’s who stood outside the courthouse during the trial, heckling reporters and rallying support for his idol. The second is Melissa Herard who was on the jury that acquitted Jackson. (At some point, we will need to talk about how incredible it is that in the American justice system, it is somehow possible for past jurors to speak on-the-record and publicly about trials in which they participated. WTF?) Bizarrely, both Hickman and Herard seem entirely oblivious to the absurdity of the way in which they center themselves and their own traumas in this already bizarre, traumatic spectacle. At different points in their interviews, both of them speak of how their weight was mocked by news media, leading them both to seek surgical weight-loss interventions. Reader, my jaw dropped. In a story that has so many devastating beats – the alleged victim’s childhood cancer, his contentious relationship with his parents, Jackson’s alleged vulnerability as a survivor of childhood abuse – your own personal weight journey is where you’re going to go?

But of course. Even in an unusually humanising portrait of a black person, here they are – the white redemption arcs. Both Hickman and Herard take up a decent portion of attention and spin that into their own stories of their lives, then and now. It’s a microcosm of what is allowed white people in the stories they tell: complexity, depth and frankly, possible culpability. For white people, being human doesn’t get one written out of our society.

This plays out in life, as well. Consider the flood of empathy and public outcry that has followed the opioid epidemic in the US. No such collective angst accompanied the crack epidemic in the 1980s/90s in the US’s largely black inner cities. Consider the life of the subject of a different podcast: Donna Monticone, the nurse who stole fentanyl and swapped it out for saline which was then used as pain relief in gynecological procedures. For her sins, Monticone received a sentence of four weekends in jail, scheduled and spaced around her shared custody arrangements. She also regained her nursing license.

In our art, in our lives, being white means never having to say you’re sorry.

We will unearth the apology from the debris and mess of your history and your context and all of the societal factors that brought you to this moment.

Photo by Nelson Ndongala on Unsplash