HOPE FOR HAMPTON JUSTICE
Beaten by Meryl Streep’s nephew, teen faces grim recovery — while rich kid roams free
ON a bright Monday morning in August, 18-year-old David Peralta-Mera drove his cherry-red Mustang, his girlfriend in the passenger seat, into a well-trafficked parking lot off Main Street in East Hampton. Life was looking good: Peralta-Mera had two jobs, one in food prep at Dopo La Spiaggia and the other doing maintenance at the Sportime tennis club in Amagansett. He was a rising sophomore at John Jay College. The car was a recent splurge, paid for with his summer wages.
As for what happened next, Peralta-Mera doesn’t really recall. But, according to police, the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office, witness statements and surveillance video, 31-year-old Charles Harrison Streep — nephew of Meryl — drove past Peralta-Mera in his own drop-top Audi and exchanged words.
Within seconds, Streep, much taller and broader than Peralta-Mera, was out of his car and shoved the teen. The two grappled, but Streep quickly got Peralta-Mera in a chokehold, neck squeezed under Streep’s right armpit. Streep hoisted Peralta-Mera’s limp body twice, like a rag doll, then threw him to the pavement.
That afternoon, the 18-year-old was airlifted to a hospital with a Level 1 trauma center, where he underwent emergency surgery, needing part of his skull removed to treat a brain bleed. He was left with a crescent of thick, blood-encrusted staples arcing up from his right ear.
Peralta-Mera’s prognosis, in the short and long term, is unclear. His civil attorney, Edmond Chakmakian, told The Post that the teen has medical bills that climb well over $130,000, but is unable to work, let alone drive his new car. He can’t attend college this fall. Chakmakian says Peralta-Mera is “probably not going to have much of a career.”
Three days after the attack, Streep was arrested at his family’s $5 million dollar Pondview Lane estate, charged with two felonies — second-degree assault and second-degree strangulation — and released on $5,000 bail.
According to an affidavit filed with the New York State Supreme Court, Streep twice attempted to dodge a process server sent by Chakmakian to his Prince Street residence in Manhattan in early September.
“I was told by the doorman of the building [on two separate dates] that no one by the name of Charles Harrison Streep lived there,” process server Frankie Roberson stated.
Charles Harrison Streep did indeed live there. He is represented in this civil suit by Randy Mastro, onetime lawyer to Rudy Giuliani and co-chair with Alec Baldwin of the Hamptons International Film Festival. Streep is required to make his first statement in the civil case Tuesday.
This defendant, it turns out, has something of a violent past.
Chakmakian’s own investigation has dug up a prior disorderly conduct charge against Streep from 2012, his guilty plea entered in a Pennsylvania court.
CARE to guess how this is playing out? The Suffolk County DA recently lowered both charges against Streep to misdemeanors, bail exonerated. Peralta-Mera and his family struggle to understand why.
“I could have died,” Peralta-Mera told me recently.
We were sitting in the living room of the small, immaculate home where he lives with his mother and older brother, situated at the end of a hidden East Hampton road. The kitchen was tiny and utilitarian. Models of classic cars sat on the living room shelves, collected by his father, who works in construction.
Peralta-Mera’s mother takes care of other people’s children. She was about to send her younger son out into the world, but now it’s unclear how long he’ll need her help.
“I was in [the hospital] for a week,” Peralta-Mera said. He’s now very sensitive to bright light and has trouble watching TV. He can’t play video games or read or work out. He struggles to concentrate and sometimes loses his train of thought 10 seconds into a conversation.
Peralta-Mera is athletic, but shorter and slighter than he photographs. His affect is flat and resigned, the huge scar on his skull a daily reminder of how close he came to dying.
“My head was swollen the first month and a half,” he said. Now, “I have to stay inside. Just a lot of doctor appointments and neu
This case gets at two lightning l rods no one in the Hamptons ever wants s to touch: class and race.
rologist appointments.” Last week was another CAT scan and an MRI.
THIS case gets at two lightning rods no one in the Hamptons ever wants to touch: class and race. But the realities of life here, the vast chasm between the haves and have-nots, became unavoidable in the early days of the pandemic, with rich Manhattanites — some knowingly infected — fleeing to their second homes out East, stripping all the grocery stores bare, buying second freezers at the P.C. Richard & Son in Southampton to hoard their food, then bragging online about their plenty.
As spring gave way to summer and the COVID curve flattened, tensions eased. More full-time residents out here means more work for local maids, landscapers and caretakers — manual laborers who, like Peralta-Mera and his family, most often belong to East Hampton’s huge Ecuadorean population. These men and women are visible in the daylight hours pruning trees, cleaning houses or fixing rooftops. At night, they fall into the shadows while the 1 percent comes out to play.
“The Hispanic subpopulation out here is made up of exceedingly hardworking people with deep religious roots,” Chakmakian said. “I have another client injured on the job — a well-known general contractor — dumped out in front of Southampton Hospital unconscious. These people are treated as expendable.”
Streep’s demeanor since the attack has been one of arrogance and entitlement. A few weeks after his arrest, he was photographed shirtless and carefree on the fire escape of his luxury Prince Street apartment, then later that day playing basketball with friends, telling the press to “talk to my lawyer.”
ALONG with three dozen protesters, Peralta-Mera attended a rally outside East Hampton Justice Court on Oct. 8 during a virtual hearing. Streep, who works for a venturecapital firm, was a no-show. He was photographed strolling casually in Manhattan, coffee cup in hand.
A GoFundMe called Help David, established by Kurt Wenzel of his “Dopo family,” has so far raised $29,990 of a $100,000 goal to help pay medical bills. On Oct. 25, supporters again gathered outside the courthouse in East Hampton, chanting, “David, friend, we are with you,” and “What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!”
Yet Charles Streep looks like he’s getting a wrist-slap at best.
“In our view, the recent court proceedings simply confirm what we have said all along — that Mr. Streep was innocent of both of the serious violent felony offenses with which he was charged,” Streep’s lawyer, Andrew J. Weinstein, told The Post. “We are confident that Mr. Streep will be fully vindicated.”
As to why the charges were reduced, the Suffolk County DA’s office said in a statement: “This incident was captured on video, and the charges brought against the defendant are the appropriate charges under the law.”
That video is online for anyone to see. Watch it and ask: If the attacker had been Hispanic, the victim white, and the consequences as grievous, would these charges have been reduced?
For his part, Peralta-Mera says he’d “like to think [more of ] the criminal-justice system” than allowing fame, wealth and connections to influence his case. In fact, he dreams of returning to John Jay and pursuing his dream of working in law enforcement as a detective.
What happened to him, he says, “encourages me more. I feel I have to be out there and be of help.”
IN the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in police custody last May, millions of Americans have been asking the question: How do we best fight racism? Books that give a compelling answer have been flying off the shelves. With the possible exception of Ibram X. Kendi, no writer has seen their profile rise more during this period than Robin DiAngelo (right), whose book “White Fragility” was already a New York Times bestseller; it has been on that list for 110 weeks.
DiAngelo’s book does more than rehearse the familiar tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT) — racism is systemic and pervasive; race-blind standards are really white-supremacist standards in disguise; lived experience confers special knowledge on victims of racism; and so on — it also uses simple and direct language to teach white people how to talk about race from a CRT perspective.
Drawing on her academic work as well as her experience providing corporate diversity training, DiAngelo puts forth her theory of “white fragility” — a set of psychological defense mechanisms that white people use in order to avoid acknowledging their own racism. These defense mechanisms include “silence, defensiveness, argumentation, certitude, and other forms of pushback” in the face of racism accusations.
At first glance, it may be hard to understand why such a punishing message would appeal to a white audience. But on closer inspection, the appeal of DiAngelo’s message derives from her masterful exploitation of white guilt. As Shelby Steele has observed, white guilt is less a guilt than a terror — terror at the thought that one might be racist. If one has never felt this terror, then it may be hard to understand how intolerable it can be, and how welcome any alleviation is.
DiAngelo understands all this and exploits it masterfully. Like most anti-racist literature, “White Fragility” spends considerable time telling white people that they’re racist, but with a crucial twist — it’s not their fault.
“A racism-free upbringing is not possible,” she writes, “because racism is a social system embedded in the culture and its institutions. We are born into this system and have no say in whether we will be affected by it.”
For DiAngelo, white supremacy is like the English language. If you’re born in America, you learn it without trying. Racism, in her view, transforms from a shameful sin to be avoided into a guiltless birthmark to be acknowledged and accepted.
The late writer and atheist Christopher Hitchens had a riff about what he called the “cruel experiment” of Christian Original Sin: “We are created sick,” he would often say, “and commanded to be well.”
In other words, the doctrine lures you in by preemptively forgiving your shortcomings — yes, you’re a miserable sinner, but it’s not your fault — then goes on to demand your compliance with a never-ending program of recovery on pain of eternal hellfire.
If you understand how the doctrine of Original Sin could be seductive, then you should have no trouble understanding the appeal of “White Fragility”; it operates the same way.
DiAngelo expiates guilt by telling white people that they’re not to blame for their racism, then commands them to adopt her version of “antiracism” — on pain of social ostracism and cancellation.
A key element of her program is for whites to eliminate a set of normal behaviors when talking to black people about race: the aforementioned “silence, defensiveness, argumentation, withdrawal, certitude, and other forms of pushback.” Of course, a skilled communicator may want to avoid silence, defensiveness, withdrawal, and certitude. But how exactly does one avoid “argumentation” and “other forms of pushback” as well? If you eliminate all these behaviors, only one option remains: enthusiastic agreement. Try to obey these instructions in a real conversation, and you’ll find at least two things: first, you must utterly shut down your mind and personality in order to accomplish it; and second, developing any kind of emotional intimacy with your conversation partner is simply not possible. That is hardly a recipe for fostering healthy interracial relationships.
“White Fragility” has two unstated assumptions about nonwhite people in general, and black people in particular. The first is that we are a homogenous mass of settled opinion with little, if any, diversity of thought — a kind of CRT-aligned hive mind. I could marshal all the opinion polls in the world to refute this calumny, but it wouldn’t move DiAngelo an inch. She needs nonwhites to think as a unit, or else her thesis falls apart. How could she tell whites to shut up and listen to the consensus view of nonwhites if that consensus doesn’t exist?
The second unstated assumption in “White Fragility” — and this is where the book borders on actual racism — is that black people are emotionally immature and essentially child-like. Blacks, as portrayed in DiAngelo’s writing, can neither be expected to show maturity during disagreement nor to exercise emotional self-control of any kind. The hidden premise of the book is that blacks, not whites, are too fragile.
Some will say that I’m reading DiAngelo too uncharitably — but how else can one make sense of her guidelines for whites? During her CRT training sessions, for example, DiAngelo asks whites to refrain from crying around blacks. Why? Because historically, white tears have often accompanied false rape accusations that led to lynchings. Thus, for black people, she explains, white tears “trigger the terrorism of this history.”
Holding back tears to spare others’ emotions is not something that adults do around their equals; it’s what parents do around children.
Indeed, DiAngelo’s picture of the ideal relationship between whites and blacks bears a disturbing resemblance to the relationship between an exasperated parent and a spoiled child: the one constantly practicing emotional self-control, the other triggered by the smallest things and helplessly expressing every emotion as soon as it comes. These are the roles she expects — even encourages — whites and blacks to play. That people can call this anti-racist with a straight face shows how far language has strayed from reality.
If “White Fragility” is the only book you read about race this year, then you will come away with a horribly one-sided education. You will learn, to take a representative example, that “it has not been African-Americans who resist integration efforts; it has always been whites” — as if Zora Neale Hurston did not exist; as if the Hyde County boycott and similar black anti-integration efforts did not happen all over the South. The book’s fundamental one-sidedness, however, should not be surprising, because “White Fragility” is zealotry disguised as scholarship.
You will read many controversial and unscholarly claims in “White Fragility,” but you will not find any sustained attempt to improve the nation by means of public policy. You will read much about how white people should and should not feel, but you will find scarcely a sentence that puts forth ideas about how to reform the police, for instance. To be fair, improving life for black people living in intergenerational poverty is not the aim of “White Fragility.”
But we should wonder, then, why this book is being held up as the answer to America’s current racial woes, despite offering little by way of concrete solutions. We should worry, in other words, that our national conversation about race has become unmoored from the goal of real progress and attached instead to an unending quest for spiritual absolution.