[1] The term was popularised by Katheryn Russell-Brown in her book The Color of Crime: Racial Hoaxes, White Fear, Black Protectionism, Police Harassment and Other Macroaggressions (1998).
According to Russell-Brown, racial hoaxes where whites falsely accuse African Americans are most likely to receive media attention and create a more acute social problem due to the criminal black man stereotype.
On March 27, 1935, 19-year-old Lois Thompson, who was white, shot a Chinese-American man named Daniel Shaw in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, accusing him of being responsible for a month-long extortion campaign against her.
It was soon established that Thompson and her sister had concocted the extortion plot themselves as a ploy for attention and had attempted to frame Shaw for the crimes by exploiting racial stereotypes.
The killer was later revealed to be a black man, Robert Nixon, who had written the message on the wall in an attempt to implicate white supremacist groups in the crime.
[19] During the 1978 wave of murders of white women in Columbus, Georgia by the African-American Stocking Strangler, a letter was sent to the local police purporting to be from a group of white vigilantes calling themselves the "Forces of Evil" and claiming to be holding an African-American woman named Gail Jackson hostage with the intention of killing her unless the Stocking Strangler was apprehended.
[21] Tawana Brawley, an African-American teenager, was found in a trash bag covered in faeces after being missing from her home in Wappingers Falls, New York for four days.
Anderson blamed two African-American men for attacking him and his wife, and even presented police with a Los Angeles Clippers basketball cap he claimed to have knocked off the head of one of the assailants.
When details of the crime were made public, a university student told police Anderson had purchased the hat from him a few days earlier.
According to employees at a military surplus store, the red-handled fishing knife which was used to murder Barbara was sold to Anderson only a few weeks earlier.
[27] In October 1994, in South Carolina, Susan Smith drowned her sons by putting them in her car and letting it roll into John D. Long Lake.
[28][29][30] Jennifer Wilbanks was a white woman who ran away from home on April 26, 2005, in order to avoid her upcoming wedding with John Mason, her fiancé.
On April 29, Wilbanks called Mason from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and falsely claimed that she had been kidnapped and sexually assaulted by a Hispanic man and a white woman.
[31] Wilbanks told investigators that she was abducted while running, and tied-up with rope in the back of a van, and was raped by a Hispanic man and forced to perform sexual acts with a white woman.
[32] Wilbanks pled no contest to a felony charge of providing false information to law enforcement, and served no time in jail.
[33] The Duke lacrosse case was a criminal investigation into a 2006 false accusation of rape made against three white members of the men's lacrosse team at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina by Crystal Mangum, an African-American student at North Carolina Central University[34][35] who worked as a stripper,[36] dancer and escort.
[49] On March 3, 2022, Sherri Papini was arrested by the FBI, accused of lying to federal agents and faking her kidnapping to spend time with her ex-boyfriend away from her husband and family.
[52] During December 2016, 18-year-old Yasmin Seweid claimed that a group of white men approached her on a New York City subway and stated "Donald Trump!
[2] Smith College immediately issued an apology, while Kanoute held interviews with CBS News and The Boston Globe and receiving high profile legal support from the ACLU.
[3][4] In January 2019, Jussie Smollett, an American actor and singer on the Fox drama series Empire, made national news for fabricating a racially motivated attack against himself.
[59] Smollett was indicted on February 20, 2019, for disorderly conduct consisting of paying two Nigerian-American brothers to stage a fake hate crime assault on him and filing a false police report.
[66] In September 2019, Amari Allen, a black middle-school student in Virginia, claimed that three male white classmates pinned her down on the playground and cut off "chunks" of her dreadlocks.
[67][68] In October 2021, Gil Ofarim, a German-Israeli singer-songwriter, posted a video on Instagram stating that staff at the Leipzig Westin hotel told him he'd only be admitted if he didn't wear his Star of David pendant.
After dissemination of the video and protests outside the hotel, security footage showed Ofraim without such a pendant during the confrontation, and employees regarded him as antagonistic.
[69][70] These charges were dropped in November 2023 after Ofarim admitted in court that he had made up the allegations against the hotel and agreed to pay 10,000 euros to the Jewish Community of Leipzig.