Wesley Dempster 29 November 2007Race, Class, and the Case of Brenda Nesselroad-SlabyOn August 23, 2007, two-year-old Cecelia Slaby died of a heat stroke in the parking lotof Glen Este Middle School in Clermont County, Ohio—located just east of Cincinnati—whereher mother was Assistant Principle. Cecelia’s mother, Brenda Nesselroad-Slaby, a forty-year-old,affluent white woman, had left the girl in her car for eight hours on a day when “the temperaturesoared into the upper 90s” (Kinney). Nesselroad-Slaby, who claimed to have forgotten her childwas in her car, was not charged with a crime. The decision of (the aptly named) ClermontCounty Prosecutor, Don White, not to file charges met with a maelstrom of controversythroughout the Greater Cincinnati area. Some supported White’s decision, arguing that Nesselroad-Slaby simply made a tragic mistake that could have happened to anyone. Others,outraged that Cecelia’s death would go unpunished, expressed disbelief that a mother couldforget her child for an entire day. In this paper, however, I do not engage these aspects of the Nesselroad-Slaby controversy. Rather, I focus on the role that race—and, to a lesser extent,class—played in both the decision not to prosecute Nesselroad-Slaby and the discourse whichthat decision engendered. I deploy the tools of critical theory

to argue that, regardless of whether Nesselroad-Slaby ultimately should have been prosecuted for the death of her child,when considered alongside similar cases involving black women, it is evident that Nesselroad-Slaby’s position within the economic and racial hegemony afforded her preferential treatment by both the mainstream media and white Cincinnati area prosecutors.

As I understand it, critical theory is an approach to rhetorical analysis that seeks to unmask thevarious ways in which social, political, and economic systems of power operate in support of dominant ideologies while marginalizing nonfavored groups and ideas.

Dempster 2Cincinnati’s atmosphere of racial tension supplies the backdrop against which the Nesselroad-Slaby case played out. The geographical position Cincinnati occupies, on the border of a former slave state,

mirrors its complex and ambivalent history with respect to race relations between whites and blacks. In recent years, Cincinnati—which, according to the U.S. CensusBureau, “is the sixth most segregated city in the nation” (Maag)—has been a nexus of racialantagonism between whites and blacks. For example, throughout the 1990’s, the Ku Klux Klan

would mark the winter holiday season by placing a cross on Cincinnati’s Fountain Square. Earlyin the new millennium, Cincinnati’s racial discord manifested in a nationally publicized race riotthat broke out after a white Cincinnati police officer shot and killed the unarmed, nineteen-year-old black man, Timothy Thomas. The Timothy Thomas killing was the culmination of a series of fifteen shooting deaths—from 1995 to 2001—of black men by Cincinnati police officers. (Onlyseven of these fifteen men were armed with guns when they were shot.) Critics of the Cincinnati police department noted that its officers were more likely to use deadly force against armed black men than against armed white men (CCD).Some claim that, since 2001, progress has been made toward deinstitutionalizing racismin Cincinnati. They note, for example, the inclusion of blacks in the city’s visible power structure. Witness the selection of Marvin Lewis as the Bengals’ first black head coach in 2003;the election of Mark Mallory, the city’s first black strong-mayor, in 2005; and, in October of 2007, the selection of Dusty Baker as the first black manager of the Reds.

However, associologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva notes, “Systems of racial domination […] are not static. Muchlike capitalism and patriarchy, they change due to external and internal pressures” (Bonilla-Silva

Kentucky.

The KKK has deep historical roots in Ohio.

The Cincinnati Reds were once owned by the notoriously racist Marge Schott, who infamouslycalled the team’s star center fielder, Eric Davis, her “million-dollar nigger.”

Dempster 3485). In his article, ‘“New Racism,’ Color-Blind Racism, and the Future of Whiteness inAmerica,” Bonilla-Silva argues that in response to such pressures as might result from, say,nationally publicized race scandals, systems of racial domination will morph into something lesseasy to recognize, but equally pernicious. A system of racial domination, then, might preserveitself through “the incorporation of ‘safe minorities’ (e.g., Clarence Thomas, Condeleeza Rice, or Colin Powell) to signify the nonracialism of the polity” (485). The question of whether Lewis,Mallory, and Baker are the sort of safe minorities of whom Bonilla-Silva writes lies beyond thescope of the present paper. Nevertheless, the Nesselroad-Slaby case suggests that Cincinnati’ssystem of racial domination persists while blacks occupy ostensibly powerful—and highlyvisible—positions within the city.Race was not a focal point in the media’s interest in the Nesselroad-Slaby case until thehead of the Cincinnati chapter of the NAACP, Christopher Smitherman, publicly contrasted thecase with one in which a black woman, Lavonn Smith, had been jailed for leaving a dog to die inthe heat of her back yard.

Smitherman said,It’s outrageous, because it shows you have a justice process that has one face for theAfrican-American community and another face for the white community [….] If (Nesselroad-Slaby) was African-American she would be locked up right now, but insteadhere we have Miss Smith locked up for two weeks because of a stray dog somebody had brought onto her property. (qtd. in Coolidge)In the Cincinnati Enquirer article in which Smitherman’s comparison between the Nesselroad-Slaby case and the Smith case was reported, it was further noted that NAACP members “saidthat Smith is a single mother of four, works long hours at a fast-food restaurant and would never

Reported in The Cincinnati Enquirer on September 7, 2007—2 weeks after Cecelia Slaby’sdeath.