Re:harmonized

A few weeks ago I wrote about Tim Tyson’s answers to a reporter’s questions about the lacrosse case, and about KC Johnson’s response (the interview with Tyson, originally on a News & Observer blog, made it into print a few days later). Among other things I was disappointed that Tyson wasn’t willing to think more deeply and self-critically about the hype and misrepresentation from the authorities early in the investigation, and the statements he made because he found it convincing.

Tyson did even worse when he lashed back at criticism from Johnson and others in the comment thread to the interview, fighting fire with fire using one of Johnson’s favorite low budget ad hominem attacks. It’s a device that I’ve noticed in Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW) and elsewhere, so it caught my eye when Michael Bérubé mentioned it in the back-and-forth that followed a post about Phyllis Schlafly on Crooked Timber (a debate I wrote about a while back). “[I]n the midst of a discussion of X [someone] demand[s] that the people criticizing X answer his (or her!) peremptory question as to why people are not also criticizing Y.” I agree with Bérubé that there should be a name for people who do this, or at least a name for the maneuver. Here’s the first of two times Johnson does it in his first blast at Tyson:

Ironically, at almost the same time as the vigil, Mangum was videotaped at the Platinum Pleasures Club, dancing in a most limber fashion. No evidence exists that Tyson has ever protested against the Pleasures Club, or has called for local or state government authorities to shut down exotic dancing establishments, even though the women in such establishments are, presumably, “somebody’s daughter and somebody’s sister and somebody’s mother and somebody’s sweetheart.”

It doesn’t take a very close or sympathetic reading of Tyson’s comments about the lacrosse case to see how vacuous this particular point is (worse than vacuous, actually, with the prim but snide, and ultimately gratuitous, juxtaposition of candlelight vigil and “most limber” pole dancing). Tyson was responding, as someone with a stake in Duke as an institution and a community, to the behavior of a cohesive, high-profile group of Duke students, to choices they made about how people can be used in the interest of having fun. Perhaps he deserves to take some hits for excessive concern with that particular party, or for overextended or self-serving rhetoric, or for agenda-driven hostility to a select group of students, but that doesn’t mean that he’s obligated himself to hit the barricades whenever he finds out that a woman in Durham has been used and demeaned. I suspect that with a little ill-will and selective reading, you can cook up some kind of hypocritical failure to act and hold it against most anyone who’s taken a moral stand.

Here is as good an example as I’m going to find of symmetry between the two sides of the lacrosse-case debate, all the way down to the parallel rhetorical questions that I’ve highlighted. Johnson first, then Tyson.

In spring 2007, another group of Duke students held a party. Underage drinking occurred; there were also allegations of drug use. An attendee at the party claimed that she was raped; police subsequently made an arrest.


Yet a Lexis/Nexis search reveals no comment about the affair by Tyson. Given the highly moralistic worldview he expressed to the N&O, this silence is puzzling. Surely the fact that in the 2007 incident the accuser was white and the accused African-American cannot account for Tyson’s silence?

Darryl Hunt went into prison as a teenager. He came a middle-aged man, robbed of much of his life. The city of Winston-Salem paid him many times less than the accused lacrosse players have received so far, and roughly 28 and a half million dollars less than the players are currently suing Durham for. Did KC Johnson or any of the people indignant about the lacrosse case say one word on behalf of Darryl Hunt?

To some extent, each man is just saying that he cares about the right thing—the thing that really matters—and his opponent doesn’t, in spite of all that other person’s moral posturing. It’s a feel-good message for a friendly audience and, at least in Tyson’s case, obnoxious nonsense to an unfriendly one.

Neither holds up very well under scrutiny, though. The spring 2007 incident is different from the lacrosse party in all sorts of ways. It didn’t involved several dozen student athletes leering at strippers they’d hired (or venting their disappointment when there was nothing worth leering at). The accuser in the later incident is a Duke student and the accused is not, and it’s not an allegation of gang rape. The racial configuration is not even close to the most significant difference, and it’s insulting to insinuate that it’s the driving reason that Tyson and others responded differently. It does seem that the Duke administration handled the spring 2007 incident far better than they handled the lacrosse incident (they could hardly have handled it worse). Comparing the two would be a fine idea if it wasn’t done just for the purpose of grinding axes—this brief article in the N&O is at least a gesture in the right direction.

Tyson answers his own rhetorical question with just the kind of broad brush dismissal that he’s chafing at—“You guessed it. Their concern for racial justice is confined to ‘the vanilla suburbs,’ and always will be.” The fundamental issue for Johnson and many others in his camp is due process and prosecutorial abuse. I believe that many of them would like to see real judicial reforms of a kind that would mostly benefit poor and minority defendants—the people who are routinely mistreated by the system as we know it.

In his review of Johnson’s book Until Proven Innocent (co-written by Stuart Taylor), Robert Perkinson does a fine job of separating Johnson’s constructive agenda from the thin-skinned, reactionary obsession with “reverse racism” and the rest of his culture-war baggage. I think the belated and marginalized good sense he credits the book with is even more marginal in DIW, and DIW has been the more influential and destructive of the two, since it shaped perceptions of the case for more than a year before the book came out. But Perkinson is worth quoting to get some perspective on Johnson’s priorities that, unlike Tyson’s, finds its mark:

[A]mid its ravings about Ebonics, Jesse Jackson, “antiwhite hate groups” and the crucifixion of former Harvard president Larry Summers, the book manages to present an important critique of prosecutorial wrongdoing. The authors’ evidence (if not their rhetoric) serves to illuminate three obvious if oft-overlooked aspects of the case: First, Nifong’s spectacular downfall was more exceptional than his grandstanding and indifference to the truth. Second, “privileged white boys” are not commonly victimized by the criminal justice system, although “minority and poor defendants” are. And third, money makes all the difference; most wrongly targeted defendants, especially indigent ones, fare far worse than the well-heeled Blue Devils. …


Taylor and Johnson belatedly grapple with these inconvenient truths. Prosecutor Nifong disrupted rather than destroyed the lives of his victim-defendants, and in one chapter, sandwiched between jeremiads against Catherine MacKinnon and “desperately politically correct” Duke administrators, the authors catalog several cases that have exacted a stiffer toll.