The story of Jussie Smollett had the effect of sucking one individual into a near-perfect storm of discursive tripwires. The “Empire” actor first being believed the victim of a hate crime in 2019, then charged with having faked it, was a case that touched on race, sexuality and fame, all at a moment where America was primed for a reckoning. (Smollett’s claim of having been attacked with a noose on the streets of Chicago, and then the legal consequences as law enforcement believed he was lying, fell a year and change before the George Floyd protests of 2020 made clear how much tension had been crackling underneath the nation.)

The case was, in other words, perhaps too charged to see clearly in its moment. And with the benefit of hindsight — with Smollett now free and with his conviction

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