Duke rape case inspires racist pseudo-science
Having been warned about stepping into the tempest that is the blogospheric discussion of the Duke lacrosse rape case, I can't say I'm surprised that my writing about it has drawn angry comments to Facing South. Though I don't plan to cover the case extensively going forward, there are some comments that I'd like to address before moving on.
One controversial aspect of my reporting has been my focus on the accuser's long history of serious mental problems. According to the latest revelations from the Raleigh News & Observer, unsealed records from UNC Healthcare contained in Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong's files show the woman was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was taking Depakote and Seroquel, drugs used to treat manic episodes associated with that disorder; Seroquel is also used to treat schizophrenia. Apparently, my pointing out these facts upsets the narrative of those who want to make the accuser out to be the villainous responsible party in the case.
But that narrative fails to hold up under scrutiny. Clearly, it was Nifong's responsibility to check out the credibility of his sole witness before dragging her, three criminally innocent men and the broader community through hell and back. He failed to do that and should be held to account.
The other controversial aspect of my reporting has been my effort to understand why some civil rights leaders were so inclined to believe the narrative offered by Nifong -- that of the poor black woman sexually abused by privileged white men. As I pointed out, there's a long and ugly history in the United States of sexualized violence being used in the service of white supremacy, in a way that has certain parallels with lynching. As historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall wrote in her essay "'The Mind That Burns in Each Body': Women, Rape, and Racial Violence":
My reporting on this troubling aspect of U.S. history has sparked a particularly strong reaction from one Anonymous, who challenges these facts by asserting -- much as white supremacists once did in order to impose and uphold Jim Crow -- that today there's actually an epidemic of black men raping white women. As he wrote in one comment:
As it turns out, the passage comes from an article on the Duke case originally published on VDARE.com, a paleoconservative Web site that focuses on limiting immigration to the United States. The site is supported by the VDARE Foundation, created by former Forbes and National Review editor Peter Brimelow and named for the first English child born in the Americas. It used to be part of the Virginia-based Center for American Unity, which opposes "mass immigration, multiculturalism, multilingualism, and affirmative action."
While VDARE offers articles on immigration policy by well-known commentators including Pat Buchanan and Michelle Malkin, it also publishes articles that veer into racist territory. After Hurricane Katrina, for example, VDARE contributor Steve Sailer argued (and outrageously enough quoted the Institute's Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch contributor Bill Quigley in doing so) that racial differences in intelligence were to blame for the fact that so many of the city's residents were unable to evacuate. Indeed, the Southern Poverty Law Center several years ago classed VDARE as a hate group:
This racist pseudo-science also fails to account for the fact that blacks are a minority in the United States and therefore represent a minority of potential victims for a white rapist, while whites are the majority and thus represent a majority of potential victims for a black rapist. Nor does it account for problems with crime reporting. Studies have shown that sexual assault tends to be under-reported in general; for example, the 1999 U.S. National Crime Victimization Survey found that only 39 percent of rapes and sexual assaults were reported to law enforcement authorities. At the same time, under-reporting of crime in general is more likely within minority communities.
Let me be clear that I'm not arguing the converse of Anonymous: I'm not trying to make the case that there's an epidemic of whites raping blacks. As I learned firsthand from my experience working with rape survivors, the overwhelming majority of rapes are not only intra-racial but are perpetrated upon victims by people they know. But I am arguing that until we as a nation begin grappling seriously with our troubled history of race, and until we grasp the way that sexualized violence has been used to bolster white supremacy, we won't understand the reaction some Americans had to the initial Duke rape charges. And until we understand that reaction, it will be that much harder for us to heal the racial rifts so tragically deepened by this case.
One controversial aspect of my reporting has been my focus on the accuser's long history of serious mental problems. According to the latest revelations from the Raleigh News & Observer, unsealed records from UNC Healthcare contained in Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong's files show the woman was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was taking Depakote and Seroquel, drugs used to treat manic episodes associated with that disorder; Seroquel is also used to treat schizophrenia. Apparently, my pointing out these facts upsets the narrative of those who want to make the accuser out to be the villainous responsible party in the case.
But that narrative fails to hold up under scrutiny. Clearly, it was Nifong's responsibility to check out the credibility of his sole witness before dragging her, three criminally innocent men and the broader community through hell and back. He failed to do that and should be held to account.
The other controversial aspect of my reporting has been my effort to understand why some civil rights leaders were so inclined to believe the narrative offered by Nifong -- that of the poor black woman sexually abused by privileged white men. As I pointed out, there's a long and ugly history in the United States of sexualized violence being used in the service of white supremacy, in a way that has certain parallels with lynching. As historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall wrote in her essay "'The Mind That Burns in Each Body': Women, Rape, and Racial Violence":
The association between lynching and rape appears most clearly in their parallel use in racial subordination. As Diane K. Lewis has pointed out, in a patriarchal society, black men, as men, constituted a potential challenge to the established order. Laws were formulated primarily to exclude black men from adult male prerogatives in the public sphere and lynching meshed with these legal mechanisms of exclusion. Black women represented a more ambiguous threat. They too were denied access to the politico-juridical domain, but since they shared this exclusion with women in general, its maintenance engendered less anxiety and required less force. Lynching served primarily to dramatize hierarchies among men. In contrast, the violence directed at black women illustrates the double jeopardy of race and sex. The records of the Freedmen's Bureau and the oral histories collected by the Federal Writers' Project testify to the sexual atrocities endured by black women as whites sought to reassert their command over the newly freed slaves. Black women were sometimes executed by lynch mobs, but more routinely they served as targets of sexual assault.I noted that this sexualized violence directed against black women to uphold white supremacy continued well into the modern civil rights era, as discussed by historian Danielle L. McGuire in her essay "'It Was Like All of Us Had Been Raped': Sexual Violence, Community Mobilization, and the African-American Freedom Struggle".
My reporting on this troubling aspect of U.S. history has sparked a particularly strong reaction from one Anonymous, who challenges these facts by asserting -- much as white supremacists once did in order to impose and uphold Jim Crow -- that today there's actually an epidemic of black men raping white women. As he wrote in one comment:
The U.S. Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Study (NCVS) has shown, between 2001 and 2003, there were, on average, 15,400 black-on-white rapes per year, while whites averaged only 900 white-on-black rapes per year (a black-white ratio of 17.1:1). As Parker noted, the proportion of single-attacker white-on-black rape is so rare as to be statistically non-existent (less than one-half of one percent). ...Since there are five-and-one-half times as many whites as blacks in America, that means that blacks rape whites over ninety times as frequently as whites rape blacks. Except that the black-white interracial gap is actually much higher. The ‘white’ figure (900) is inflated by Hispanic offenders being counted as white. And no reliable statistics for interracial prison rape were included in the NCVS. Thus, the real black-white ratio is likely 200:1 or higher.This data struck me as dubious, since I spent several years volunteering as a counselor in a rape crisis center at a large urban hospital and can't recall encountering any cases of interracial rape, let alone the sort of disparity Anonymous asserts. Since he didn't include citations for his claims, I did some checking, guessing that his post was drawn from another source. So I entered into a search engine the first bit of his comment -- "The U.S. Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Study (NCVS) has shown, between 2001 and 2003, there were, on average, 15,400 black-on-white rapes per year" -- to see what came up.
As it turns out, the passage comes from an article on the Duke case originally published on VDARE.com, a paleoconservative Web site that focuses on limiting immigration to the United States. The site is supported by the VDARE Foundation, created by former Forbes and National Review editor Peter Brimelow and named for the first English child born in the Americas. It used to be part of the Virginia-based Center for American Unity, which opposes "mass immigration, multiculturalism, multilingualism, and affirmative action."
While VDARE offers articles on immigration policy by well-known commentators including Pat Buchanan and Michelle Malkin, it also publishes articles that veer into racist territory. After Hurricane Katrina, for example, VDARE contributor Steve Sailer argued (and outrageously enough quoted the Institute's Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch contributor Bill Quigley in doing so) that racial differences in intelligence were to blame for the fact that so many of the city's residents were unable to evacuate. Indeed, the Southern Poverty Law Center several years ago classed VDARE as a hate group:
Reviving a favorite theme of early nativists and the Ku Klux Klan, Brimelow attacks 19th-century Catholic immigrants for being supposedly subservient to popes and monarchs, and thus incompatible with democratic self-rule.Meanwhile, the "Parker" to which Sailer refers is conservative syndicated Orlando Sentinel columnist Kathleen Parker. In an April 2006 column titled "Fact and myth Duke it out," she wrote:
The VDARE Web site also contains an archive of columns by Sam Francis, the immigrant-bashing editor of the newspaper of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens. In his columns, Francis rails against the "emerging Hispanic majority," plugs conspiracy theories, and promotes white racial consciousness.
In April, VDARE took one more step toward the racist right, publishing an essay on its Web site by white supremacist Jared Taylor that dismisses "the fantasy of racial equality," claims the Civil Rights Act of 1964 "stripped Americans of the right to make free decisions," and says that "[b]lacks, in particular, riot with little provocation," unlike the far more peaceable white race.
The U.S. Department of Justice's 2003 National Crime Victimization Survey, which breaks down crime victims and perpetrators by race, indicates that the vast majority of violent crimes, including rape, are intra-racial. Blacks tend to attack blacks, and whites tend to attack whites.Note what Parker actually says: That the "vast majority of rapes are intra-racial," and that the samples she uses to suggest that slightly more rapes of whites are perpetrated by blacks "are considered too small to draw any solid conclusions." Unfortunately, that didn't stop Sailer and VDARE from drawing questionable conclusions anyway, and it didn't stop Anonymous from repeating them here.
There is no current trend of white men raping black women, in other words. In fact, though sample sizes are considered too small to draw any solid conclusions, the most recent figures show that among white rape victims, 15.5 percent of those rapes were perpetrated by blacks, while 0.0 percent of black victims were raped by white males. (Zero in this case is a rounded figure meaning that the total number of black women raped by white men is between 0 and half of 1 percent of the total.)
Not that anyone's counting. But if we're going to talk about race and crime, we may as well rely on facts rather than ancient memories that serve only to sensationalize and emotionalize what is already a painful episode in Southern history.
This racist pseudo-science also fails to account for the fact that blacks are a minority in the United States and therefore represent a minority of potential victims for a white rapist, while whites are the majority and thus represent a majority of potential victims for a black rapist. Nor does it account for problems with crime reporting. Studies have shown that sexual assault tends to be under-reported in general; for example, the 1999 U.S. National Crime Victimization Survey found that only 39 percent of rapes and sexual assaults were reported to law enforcement authorities. At the same time, under-reporting of crime in general is more likely within minority communities.
Let me be clear that I'm not arguing the converse of Anonymous: I'm not trying to make the case that there's an epidemic of whites raping blacks. As I learned firsthand from my experience working with rape survivors, the overwhelming majority of rapes are not only intra-racial but are perpetrated upon victims by people they know. But I am arguing that until we as a nation begin grappling seriously with our troubled history of race, and until we grasp the way that sexualized violence has been used to bolster white supremacy, we won't understand the reaction some Americans had to the initial Duke rape charges. And until we understand that reaction, it will be that much harder for us to heal the racial rifts so tragically deepened by this case.
Labels: criminal justice, duke lacrosse rape case, durham, mike nifong, north carolina
18 Comments:
Rather than try to denigrate as bad people those of us who figured out early on that the Duke charges were a hoax and thus helped, in a small way, to prevent further injustice, why don't you try to figure out why you got snookered by the charlatans in Durham and how you could learn from your mistake to be less dangerously fatuous in the future?
I reject the idea that in order to see there was a problem with the charges in this case one needed to engage in racially motivated pseudo-science, as Sailer did in his VDARE.com article. I also reject his idea that I got "snookered" by anyone. I've been skeptical of the charges from the outset of the case due to the many serious inconsistencies in the reported witness accounts, but I did not begin contributing to the Facing South blog until last fall, by which time the media hysteria surrounding the case had led us to decide against writing about it until there was something factually definitive to report. For me, that came with the Attorney General's findings.
Further, I fail to see how engaging in questionable science somehow prevented injustice. If anything stopped an injustice from being committed in this case, it was the hard work of excellent reporters like Joe Neff at the Raleigh News & Observer, careful investigators like Mary Winstead and James Coman of the N.C. Department of Justice, the ethical attorneys of the North Carolina bar, and of course the finest defense attorneys money could buy.
Ms Sturgis- You either stand up for injustice or you don't.
You didn't...and no you are creating some revisionist snow-job for reasons known only to you.
By mid-April last year, it was already clear that there were massive violations of police procedures and manufactoring of evidence by the DA's investigator and the DPD.
I will also point out that one of the key players in your organization (Duke Professor Timothy Tyson) took to the airwaves to call the Lacrosse players "white supremacists" and "animals"
In one of the most despicable rant I have ever heard from a professor towards his students.
Where were you then, Ms Sturgis
From article:
"...VDARE ... [published] an essay on its Web site by white supremacist Jared Taylor..."
Anyone notice how easy it is for pretend egalitarians to call white people comic book names like "supremacist," "Nazi," and "racist"?
I say pretend egalitarians, because is anyone in America really against inequality?
Anyone know about the quota system, the systematic and massive discrimination against whites?
How about "La Raza" organizations? -- a common term for Chicanos that means, The Race.
The largest Chicano organization in America is called The Council of the Race.
If Taylor led a white organization called The Council of the Race those in the PC cult would call him a Nazi.
How many blacks go to these Million Man Marches, an event sponsored by the Nation of Islam, a black separatist organization?
You have 100s of black organizations that follow black leaders who promote a black agenda often on black TV....
And didn't Oprha Winfrey just open a blacks only school in South Africa?
I really appreciate your thorough debunking of racist pseudo-science. Unfortunately, this stuff keeps hiding under the rocks of ignorance and bigotry, lurking out of hearing in the periods when obvious white supremacist speech is forced underground. Then it seeps out when it finds an opening.
That D.A.'s grandstanding gave a lot of ugly things an opening, besides hurting some annoying privileged white boys and really sinking that confused woman who apparently falsely claimed rape.
Three totally innocent young men were prosecuted for one year over an incident that didn't happen. All those rallys, all those chants, all those remarks by the Duke 88 were over an incident that didn't happen.
Jason Bissey revealed on Liestoppers Forum that he never heard any players yell the N-Word. No money was stolen, Jim Cooney. Seligmann's Attorney released that CGM took Dave Evans shaving kit(it's in her hand in the picture outside)behind and was so out of it she left her money behind.Dave Evans had ordered no player take the money and it was neatly stacked waiting for her to come back.
But to top it off in the Digital Camera was a picture of CGM & Kim dancing at 12:02 and it was verifable. The Police & Nifong had that March 16.
It was all a huge lie. So this debate about white vs Black rape was all over something that didn't happen.
All the protestors & self righteous making wild claims of white young males taking advantage of this poor woman should be ashamed.
TC, I don't see how using bad science to advance dubious racial theories is "standing up for justice." We'll just have to agree to disagree on that.
As to my not writing about the Duke case earlier, perhaps I was wrong. But honestly, the more I hear from some of y'all, the more I think we made the right call.
TC, when you charge that Professor Tyson "took to the airwaves to call the Lacrosse players 'white supremacists' and 'animals,'" I must confess I don't know what you're talking about. Apparently I missed that broadcast, and I can't seem to find it anywhere on Nexis or the Web. Perhaps you could offer a link?
A public comment he did make on the case with which I am familiar was his essay published in the Raleigh New & Observer on April 2, 2006, titled "Ugly past echoes in Duke case." It makes no mention of "animals" or "white supremacists," and no claims to know that an assault actually occurred that fateful night in Durham. But it does challenge what else happened at the party, which I suspect is what bothers some people so:
"My daddy taught me that God has called us to love people and to use things but that we are often tempted to love things and use people. Rape is one of the deepest and most vicious ways that human beings deny their common humanity. Racism is another. These crimes are intertwined deeply in our history, and that history came off its leash once more on Buchanan Boulevard on March 13, as a few Duke students did great harm to our community.
"The question of whether they also committed rape is one that we must leave to the courts and the police. But regardless of the fog around that question, other matters remain clear. Young white men of privilege deployed their unearned affluence to hire black women to provide live pornography. This is only partly a free market, where people choose to buy and sell themselves. It is also a slave market, where an enduring racial caste system placed those women in a vulnerable position."
A "despicable rant"? Seems to me Tyson speaks the truth.
Finally, to Anonymous, who asks whether anyone in America is "really against inequality," I'd ask what you mean by "against." Lots of people say they're "against" things like "inequality," but their actions sometimes belie their claims. And your analysis of what constitutes racism in America -- the Million Man March? the National Council of La Raza? -- I shan't comment on, as its naivete leaves me almost speechless.
Oprah Winfrey a racist? You've got to be kidding me.
Statistics that "show that among white rape victims, 15.5 percent of those rapes were perpetrated by blacks, while 0.0 percent of black victims were raped by white males" are significant; they cannot be dimissed by saying rapes are under reported or that most rape are intraracial rather than interracial. Since most rapes are "acquaintance" rapes, further investigation would likely prove a higher precentage of interacial rapes were "forcible" or "violent" rapes. If the statistics were reverse, they would be used as "clear evidence" of hate crimes against a minority group.
Ms Sturgis- There is no hope for anyone who is so deluded as to think Tyson is "right" to compare what happened at the party to the slave trade.
That is race-baiting and propaganda of the worst sort.
As for Tyson's month-long vigilante appearances on NC media last March-April, here is one of my favs
http://www.ibiblio.org/wunc_archives/sot/?p=630
Stay til the end and hear Tyson the egostical blowhard having to be reigned in by even the (admitted) leftist Stasio
In case, you haven't gotten it yet, none of us out here believe you are anything but a race-baiting propagandist.
TC, I think Tyson's point is more subtle than your characterization of it, which is that he compared "what happened at the party to the slave trade." If you carefully read his comments in the essay I quoted from, you'll see that he's likening the sex trade -- which was undeniably present at that lacrosse party -- to the slave trade. The comparison is particularly apt since the sex workers we're talking in this case about are black women who live inside the U.S. racial caste system, which limits economic opportunities available to them and their families.
You do agree there's a racial caste system in this country, don't you?
Thanks for the link to the WUNC interview -- I had indeed missed that broadcast. But I listened to it today. And I'd suggest that you should listen to it again, because you seem to be misremembering it. At no point in the conversation does Frank Stasio "rein in" Tyson.
But I invite readers make up their own minds about what was said. I've transcribed the interview and post it below in full.
Frank Stasio: Tim Tyson teaches at Duke and he is the author most recently of Blood Done Sign My Name and joins us now. Hello, Tim.
Tim Tyson: Hello, Frank.
You were one of those who took part in a vigil over the weekend at the house where the alleged rape took place. Why were you there?
Well, I was there as a teacher. I think it's important for us to remember that an investigation is pending, and the police are the only people qualified to figure out what happened in that house altogether, and we have to support them as they do that dirty job of trying to understand what kind of ugly things unfolded there. But it's clear even in the most favorable reading of this that what we have is young men of privilege who have somehow learned that other people could be treated as things. And so I'm disappointed in them, and I'm also disappointed in us, in myself, because somehow these young men have had available to them the best liberal arts education that money can buy, and they yet somehow failed to absorb any of its lessons. And so I guess I was there really because the women in the house that night were somebody's daughter and somebody's sister and somebody's mother and somebody's sweetheart. I think that we have to come together as a community and say this is unacceptable on a number of different levels.
Everything that was going on, though, up until the alleged rape -- no law had been broken until that point. Exotic dancing is legal, and hiring exotic dancers is legal. What is it, then, that you would say about what happened there that we already know that those...
Lots of things are legal that we still ought to know better than. It was an exploitive relationship to begin with. It also smacks of a kind of minstrelsy. You know, rich boys used to hire black people to -- they'd tie their hands behind their back and have them dip around in a barrel of flour for coins and bills. This used to be a thing that rich college boys liked to do. You know, it was legal and nobody got injured, but it was racially degrading. It was immoral. It treated a person as a thing to be used and took advantage of the situation that that other person found themselves in.
One of the things that I find really poignant and compelling about this story is that most of the people there were college students. One of those young women, who is a mother of small children, is a student at North Carolina Central. Our society has not chosen to support people as they try to advance themselves and our economy by pursuing an education, so that people without means find themselves in desperate situations and seek desperate means of supporting themselves, while meanwhile we have this ghastly spectacle of these rich boys wanting her to dance naked, and making racially degrading remarks. The neighbors who have no ax to grind in this, presumably, seem to confirm the charges of the women that there were a lot of racial insults thrown. So how it is that our students can find themselves doing this kind of thing?
How common an occurrence is this ... the idea that exotic dancers are hired at these kind of parties? Is this a common part of campus culture?
Well, I wish I could say that I've never heard of any such thing, but that wouldn't be the case. But I don't think it's common. It certainly doesn't represent the ideals of the university or the views of most of the students.
Duke has forfeited two lacrosse games. We still haven't heard about the rest of the season. And otherwise there has been no action taken. Of course, we should point out no criminal charges have been made... . Do you think Duke as a university is doing all it should at this point in the investigation?
I have a lot of faith in President Brodhead. I think he's a humanist of the first order and a wise man. I'm not content with Duke's response partly because one of the really terrible things about this is that these young men are banding together and refusing to cooperate with the police investigation. I think that may be illegal. It's certainly a violation of the spirit of the honor code of the university. It's a terrible moral miscalculation that I think you have to be utterly blind to pursue. And so I think sometimes it happens on college campuses and other places too, you know, where sometimes all-male organizations especially there tends to be a kind of teammate bonding, a kind of circle the wagons, even if people don't approve of what has happened. But when you're talking about a serious, violent felony, and you're talking about this kind of misuse of human beings, even if the charges of rape -- you know, which is a very serious, violent crime -- even if the charges of rape are not true, there was a terribly degrading spectacle unfolding that night, and I'm quite certain that all of those young men don't approve of that, and I think that it's incumbent upon them to cooperate with the investigation. And I wouldn't, if I were in President Brodhead's shoes, and I think he fills those shoes mighty well, I think I wouldn't let this team continue to exist until the police get some cooperation from them.
Obviously you're not an administrator, you are a faculty member. I wonder if you have any feelings about whether universities should allow -- obviously they can't tell students what to do in their own time, and if they want to go to strip clubs that may be one thing. But it does seem that if you wanted to be a member of a team, universities might have a little more authority in saying what may or may not be done in terms of entertainment. Should the university be a little more strict about this?
Well, I think the question here in my mind is whether or not these young men are just gladiators who are here to glorify the university and entertain us, or whether or not they're students that we have a responsibility to. You know, I think that college athletes -- and I've worked with a lot of college athletes, and I'm very sympathetic to their schedule, for example, and the demands that are made on them -- but sometimes I think athletics programs tend to ignore their responsibility as educators. Because the purpose of athletics is not just to glorify athletes and the universities, but it's part of our educational program. We are willing to pay for athletics. Now, there's a cynical part of it, which is that college athletics produce a lot of money, but I don't think that's true of lacrosse so much. It's simply that the purpose of athletics is to develop human potential, for people to have their gifts flower and for them to grow as people. That's the purpose of college athletics. We think that it's an avenue in which we teach discipline, teamwork and other kinds of good values. But we cannot, when we're educating our students, we cannot ignore the human values, too. And I think that coaches and athletic directors need to think hard about those kinds of things and not just about victory in some game.
Your area of expertise is African-American history, race relations, particularly in North Carolina. Does this case ... reopen some old wounds here in Durham and in the state?
Wounds old and new. Yes, it resonates with me historically, because when you have a racial caste system, in which men on one side of the color line have most of the guns and money and position and power in a society and then inevitably you have these exploitative relationships across the color line. White men have been abusing black women for generations -- you know, since the days of slavery. And this kind of sexualized mistreatment of people has been really at the heart of our racial caste system over the course of its history. I think the spirit of the lynch mob lived in that house on Buchanan Street, frankly, and I think that we prefer to think of white supremacists as ignorant, pot-bellied, tobacco-chewing sheriffs and Ku Klux Klan members from Mississippi, but here we have the sons of power and privilege, the wealthy and well-educated among us, who are acting out this history. You know, James Baldwin said, "We're trapped in history, and history is trapped in us."
The potential to hurt relations between Durham and Duke is certainly obvious in this case. But Tim, do you see a particular avenue for healing? Does the university have an opportunity here to improve relations here that we might not have expected otherwise?
Well the word in Chinese for "crisis" is "opportunity." I think we obviously have a crisis. You know, Duke has been known in the black community for a long time as "Duke Plantation," and there's been a raw racial wound about labor relations between Duke and the black community, which have not always been good; between the idea of white, privileged, rich young people coming to a city with a black majority and sometimes acting as if everybody works for their family. That's a terrible burden for the university that the university has done a lot to offset. And I certainly think that Duke as an institution is trying to have a fruitful and redemptive relationship, and that's just why what these young men have done -- regardless of the serious criminal charges and the truth or lack thereof of those charges -- what these young men have done is a devastating blow to the relationship between Duke and Durham, and we have to as an institution step in an address that.
I appreciate your assistance in exposing this egotistical bore (Tyson) who has no sense of decency or perspective.
(kudos for the accurate transcription- but you dive leave out the tone of incredulity and astonishment in Stasio' voice - when he heard the fatuous bigotry and racist presumption emanating from Tyson)
Tyson: "I think the spirit of the lynch mob lived in that house on Buchanan Street, frankly, and I think that we prefer to think of white supremacists as ignorant, pot-bellied, tobacco-chewing sheriffs and Ku Klux Klan members from Mississippi, but here we have the sons of power and privilege, the wealthy and well-educated among us, who are acting out this history."
I would suggest that anyone who would look around at the cast of characters involved in the Duke lacrosse rape scandal -- a district attorney who concealed exculpatory evidence, an investigator who had a witness for the defense arrested on ridiculous charges apparently to intimidate him, a house full of men who participated in the "thingification" of women, partygoers who hurled cruel insults that aimed to remind the women that their ancestors had been enslaved -- and then decide that Professor Tim Tyson is the problem is actually the one who has lost any sense of decency and perspective. But then, it is already clear that you and I don't see eye to eye on much, TC. Thanks for reading, though.
The Hoax had a thousand authors.
Tim Tyson was an important one.
(it is important to hold opportunistic snakes like Tyson accountable - with things like archived transcripts on the web - or else things get worse)
PS This blog is very productive; I enjoyed reading some of the other posts.
lynp
There is no doubt that poor Crystal is very sick mentally and delusional - as you noted she is on two heavy duty medications, which must have been ordered by a Physician. Nifong used this woman and her delusions - he is the one who wrecked all this havic. There are other folks at fault also and the gang of 88 throw fuel on the fire. His comments about the incident showing racism enflamed many people and had they been true, rightly so.I hope that this event wwill help the cause of justice for all people.
Oprah helping females to become leaders is a good thing no matter what their color. Sad to say but the American school system is in such a mess, it would have been a waste to throw the money into schools here.
BTW, I would also like to point out that the parents Mary and Travis are simple people. Used shamelessly by MSM. These people had no defense against sarcasm etc that was employed against them by lawyers, Phds, etc. this makes me sad. I have made my donations to all Lax fund raising and supported these boys every step of the way, But fair is fair.
" a house full of men who participated in the "thingification" of women"
just to be clear, one of the accused left the party at the time of the dancing.
This sentence is ridiculous, because it tries to make the case that watching strippers is some sort of deviancy, or malaise, and it does so by innuendo. If you wish to make that case, you should state it clearly, and you should excoriate equally all those women who see male strippers.
"partygoers who hurled cruel insults that aimed to remind the women that their ancestors had been enslaved..."
for someone who claims accuracy, this is ridiculous. This statement is based on an allegation from a "neighbour" (which could be anywhere within half a mile), you haven't provided a name, and we don't even know if this allegation is against any of the people at the LAX players party. You are smearing innocent people with second-hand gossip which is merely an allegation.
Of course, if you had wanted to investigate the possibility that the LAX team were racist, you could go look at the Coleman report, which investigated thoroughly, and found clearly that the team were not racist. Doesn't quite fit in with what you want to hear, I guess.
Several things stand out. The first of which was that these lacrosse players were demeaned as "louts" etc even after their innocence was declared. However, much of their private lives were exposed and looking though it, the truth seems just the opposite -- these privileged, athletically gifted, and generally above average students seem to in fact also be even more community minded than average and from reports of blacks on the team, even less racist than average. In short -- pretty good guys in every way.
Second. False rape claims are common, not rare. Rape claims should be treated respectfully but with full skepticism until the evidence is in:
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In 1994, Dr. Eugene J. Kanin of Purdue University investigated the incidences, in one small urban community, of false rape allegations made to the police between 1978 and 1987. Unlike those in many larger jurisdictions, this police department had the resources to "seriously record and pursue to closure all rape complaints, regardless of their merits". The falseness of the allegations was not decided by the police, or by Dr. Kanin; they were "... declared false only because the complainant admitted they are false." The number of false rape allegations in the studied period was 45; this was 41% of the 109 total complaints filed in this period. The figure of 41% forms a lower estimate of the total number of false rape accusations given to the police during this period. It is unlikely that a significant number of valid rape complaints were recanted. All accusers were told that false accusations were a crime and that they faced prosecution upon recantation. An accuser could have simply dropped the case, without formally recanting, and would not have faced the possibility of prosecution. It is possible, however, that some false accusations were never recanted and even resulted in a conviction. In Dr. Kanin's research, the complainants who made false allegations did so (by their own statements during recantation) for one or some combination of three major reasons ...(alibi, revenge, sympathy)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics
In this case, revenge seems to be the reason -- NO, mental health doesn't absolve a person from any responsibility -- the accuser should be charged for a very real crime IMHO and let a jury decide. Sound familiar?
Finally, a good chunk of the faculty at Duke behaved deplorably. Given what happened, it would only seem fair that Duke President Brodhead suspend the school of arts and sciences, fire it's dean and then after a committee studies the school's egregious excesses to put it on probationary reinstatement only after the Professor-players agree to live by a new set of rules, and that their behavior would be closely monitored. PC gone wild.
By the way, stripping allows certain woman to earn quite good money for very little work. You seem to be saying we need to paternalistically protect these poor young things ... who might instead be taking advantage of a damn good deal.
Most of the problems involving the sex trade (as with the drug trade) stem from it's legal status (generally not legal). Bring it above ground and it will get cleaner, safer and ... more satisfying (the stripper in this case seems not to have actually done her job ... and still the team paid them in full).
Moreover, all those strippers are in turn taking advantage of a male evolutionary circuit to be excited by sexual displays. Most unfair.
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