Wednesday, June 07, 2006
Witch Hunt at Duke? Really?
Conservative columnist David Brooks of The New York Times has really outdone himself this time with his latest column on the scandal over the alleged violent sexual assault of a Black woman at a lacrosse team party at
When the story first broke, the details were indeed scandalously unsavory. “Officials are investigating the incident as first-degree forcible rape, common law robbery, first-degree kidnapping, first-degree sexual offense and felonious strangulation,” reported The Times on May 16, 2006.
That’s right, forcible rape and strangulation. If you remember, the woman (a dancer who was paid to perform at a party held at a house rented by three team members) was forced into the bathroom and held in place by her neck while several lacrosse team members brutally gang-banged her.
According to The Times, “The woman told the police that she and another woman went to the house expecting to dance for 5 men at a bachelor party and instead found more than 40....She said that almost immediately upon performing, the men started taunting them with racial epithets. The women left shortly thereafter…but they were persuaded to return after one of the men apologized.”
When they returned to the house, The Times reported, "Someone closed the door to the bathroom where she was and said, 'Sweetheart you can't leave.' "
Enter David Brooks. “We now know,” he proclaims sententiously, “that the Duke lacrosse players were not the dumb jocks they were portrayed to be. The team has a 100 percent graduation rate.” This is hardly persuasive information to those of us in academia, who know how common grade inflation is, and how athletes can be fawned upon at schools like Duke where sports reign supreme.
But wait, there’s more: these upstanding young men have also been praised by “the groundskeeper and the equipment manager,” Brooks announces; these individuals “described the current team as among the best groups of young men they have worked with during their long tenures at Duke.”
Here we see Brooks busying himself with digging up unimpressive praise from the custodial staff at Duke, while wasting no ink whatsoever on the Black rape victim. Incredibly, Brooks has managed to write a full-length column with only one buried reference to the crime for which three team players, including the captain, have now been indicted.
His only mention of the word “rape” is in paragraph eleven (of 14 paragraphs total), where he says offhandedly: “There may have been a rape that night, but it didn’t grow out of a culture of depravity.”
Who said anything about “a culture of depravity,” Mr. Brooks?
If anyone is engaging in a witch hunt, it’s Brooks himself. Listen to his Inquisitor’s snarl:
“When you look at the hyper-politicized assertions made by Jesse Jackson, Houston Baker and dozens of activists and professors, you see how mighty social causes like the civil rights movement, feminism and the labor movement have spun off a series of narrow social prejudices among the privileged class.”
With one masterful stroke of his pen, Brooks dismisses the work of the three most important social movements of modern times, as having apparently degenerated into no more than “narrow social prejudices” against poor, misunderstood kids like the lacrosse players at Duke.
The fine, upstanding members of the lacrosse team, Brooks says, “were male, mostly white and mostly members of the suburban bourgeois middle class (39 of 54 recent graduates went on to careers in finance. For many on the tenured left, bashing people like that is all that’s left of their once-great activism.”
Well excuse me! In my book, holding young men accountable for their actions is simply the ethical thing to do, and it happens to be the legal thing to do as well. It has nothing to do with “bashing” anyone, and last I looked, there were no witches burning on any pyres.
Dare I suggest that if it had been a golden-haired suburban bourgeois middle class white girl who was raped at the team party, David Brooks and his ilk might not be quite so cavalier about the whole thing? And heaven forbid, if it had been a Black athlete who had done the strangling and raping and sodomizing—Brooks would undoubtedly be singing quite a different tune!
As it stands, the boys’ defenders, Brooks included, are following the standard procedure in these situations: start out by smearing and blaming the victim; then ignore her while glorifying the perpetrators; and above all, slow things down until the case loses momentum, the unpleasantness blows over, and the boys can get on with their gilded lives.
It turns out that the mother of David Evans, the indicted team captain, is chairwoman of the Ladies Professional Golf Association board of directors and founder of the Evans Capitol Group, a Washington lobbying firm. David’s dad is a
You can just hear the sweet sound of Scotch glasses clinking at the club, as the old boys’ and girls’ network rallies around the kiddies, who were, after all, “just having some fun.”
Tell that to their victim, a single mother who was dancing to support her two children while attending classes at the state university. Fun is hardly the word.
: 10:21 PM Also, the defense did not slow down the case, Nifong and the judge did. Further, if Nifong had not put a rush order on the DNA tests and had allowed the lab to process them normally, those results would not have been ready until the end of June at the earliest.
BTW, I am not defending the jocks. I think something in the way of a sexual assault did occur that night, but twisting the facts helps no one.
: 2:35 AM I would like to see an enterprising reporter go down to North Carolina and find out more about the alleged victim. Why did she turn to prostitution and dancing to make a living? One thing we know is that she was raped at least once before, at age 18, but at that time she did not press charges.
Women who fall into prostitution as a "profession" rarely do so by choice--they are almost always girls who have few perceived choices in life, and often have been subjected to physical and emotional abuse in childhood. We also know that this young woman was taking classes at the state university, which indicates to me that she was aspiring to something other than the life of a call girl or dancer.
To dismiss this rape because the victim was a prostitute is to say that it's okay to rape prostitutes--is that what we really want to be arguing? Is rape ever okay?
I don't think the woman is making it up. What she wanted that night was to dance, make money to feed her two children, and go home. What would she possibly have to gain by making up a story about a gang-banging in the bathroom?
We will see what happens with those DNA tests, and how the rest of the case unfolds. Meanwhile, I don't think it behooves us to let people like Brooks get away with a kneejerk defense of the indicted team players, while the victim is entirely ignored or smeared with epithets like "prostitute."
I have always given her the benefit of the doubt but I have yet to see any evidence that she has ever told the truth about rapes and attacks that she claims to have been victim of.
If she really was raped by the people she accuses, I hope they go into the cooler for a long time, else I hope she does.
: 5:28 PM << Home
