Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Netflix/Hulu
Jeffrey Dahmer is the latest leading man on Netflix. His name is a familiar one to many viewers, especially fans of true crime. But the details of what he did have been obscured by time; I was a very young child when Dahmer was nearing the end of his reign of terror, inflicted primarily on Black people.
Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story is both a standard entry in the true crime genre and a unique one. Instead of unfolding from the killer’s perspective, the Netflix drama details the heinous nature of Dahmer’s actions through the true story of Glenda Cleveland, a Black woman and his former neighbor. It’s heartening to learn that a Black woman was the one to recognize Dahmer for who he was and sought to do something about it. But, it’s also infuriating—and tragically familiar—to know that her reports of Dahmer’s misdeeds repeatedly fell on deaf ears.
After Dahmer’s arrest in 1991, Reverend Jesse Jackson traveled to Milwaukee, where Dahmer lived, and commented on the police’s failure to listen to Cleveland. “Police chose the word of a killer over an innocent woman,” he said in an interview at the time. Perhaps the words “white” and “Black” were implied then, as Jackson referred to the long-held racialized power dynamics of our legal system. But they deserve to be explicitly stated: A white lie often holds more weight than a Black truth.