Re:harmonized

{ 50 } Comments

1. William L. Anderson | June 21, 2008 at 18:15 | Permalink

   It is hard to know where to begin when one is the subject of an attack, so I will start by saying that when this case began, there was only one “permissible narrative” in Durham and at Duke University: Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and David Evans raped Crystal Mangum for 30 minutes in a bathroom at a drunken party of the Duke lacrosse team.

   That was the “narrative” from the city government, the police, the media, the NAACP, NCCU, the black churches in Durham, the Duke chaplain’s office, and the editorial page of the Herald-Sun, not to mention the Wilmington Journal. (The Journal had a big picture on the front page of its web version with “Believe Her!”)

   Furthermore, any electronic alibis were immediately dismissed as bogus, and the lack of any player’s DNA on Mangum was said to be a situation, to quote a student from NCCU as, “They left nothing behind.” (There was no evidence of the kind of chemicals that would have been needed to remove DNA, but that, too, was dismissed, since it messed with the dominant “narrative.”)

   Anyone who disagreed was labeled a racist. (Yes, I read Our Hearts World from time to time.) The black community of Durham was quite happy to see African immigrant Moez Elmostafa arrested and charged with bogus charges, as anyone who might provide information that disturbed the “narrative” had to be destroyed. (I remember reading comments from African-Americans in Durham that Elmostafa and the late Ed Bradley were “Uncle Toms.”)

   In fact, even after Roy Cooper declared the three young men to be “innocent,” the NAACP left the dominant Durham “narrative” on its website for several months, despite the fact that what it had posted was not true. So, before you attack me because I have been outspoken about this case, please remember that the reason I am outspoken is that the powers that be in Durham actively were trying to have innocent people thrown into prison. Since people like you were not willing to stand up, it took “outsiders” like me to speak out.

   As far as I am concerned, there is no other “narrative” than the one in which Durham police lied and a corrupt prosecutor, with support of the African-American voters (who gave him more than 90 percent of their votes in November, 2006) and white council members like Diane Catotti, almost succeeded in knowingly bringing innocent people to trial where a Durham jury almost certainly would have ignored evidence and convicted them.

   Now, if you don’t like what I am saying, then come up with a reasonable rebuttal. Yes, the kids hired strippers, which I think is bad, but hardly sets them apart from the modern college set. And, yes, some of them were engaged in “underage” drinking, which does not separate them from the students who sit in my classrooms.

   Yes, a couple of lacrosse players made racial remarks — in response to racial remarks made by Kim Roberts — and they were wrong, but I also can recall being called a “white mother-fucking racist” because I “would not believe a black woman.” No, I did not believe THAT woman, and still don’t.

   To me, the central issue always has been about the guilt and innocence of the three young men charged with terrible crimes. To me, it is about the police and prosecutor lying and fabricating false evidence, something that anyone who is concerned with justice should be against.

   When a law professor from NCCU, working as a “monitor” for the NAACP, openly applauds an obvious attempt by the prosecutor to save his case by re-inventing the entire thing — as Nifong did on December 21, 2006 — then I have to wonder about what kind of people teach there. A law professor should care about due process and, most of all, the truth.

   As for my points about the hard left, let us not forget that the people who STILL insist that Cooper whitewashed the case and that the three young men are guilty of raping Crystal Mangum are part of the hard left of the Triangle Area. I have read the website of Yolanda Carrington, who openly is a Marxist, and I have corresponded with one area leftist who still insists that there was a rape. Hal Crowther of Indy Week declared that Cooper’s declaration of innocence made him “sick,” and Diane Catotti is still part of the “something happened” crowd, as well as Sarah Deutsch, who is a faculty member AND a dean at Duke University.

   The Nation DID give uncritical support to Josef Stalin in the 1930s (as did many communist and hard-left publications), and it never published one criticism of Pol Pot while he was wiping out more than a million people in Cambodia. I was a regular reader of The Nation during that period and remember how that publication always has shilled for the communist dictators of the world.

   So, I think I was within my rights to mention the latent Marxism of Counterpunch and The Nation, as the hard left has stuck to the dominant “narrative” of the lacrosse case, or at least the “narrative” that was in Durham for more than a year.

   The Johnson-Taylor book was about the lacrosse case, not Darryl Hunt or others. Perkinson in his review said that they had not mentioned Hunt’s case because, in his opinion, it would have gone against the “narrative” of the book. Well, Perkinson was wrong and I stand by my comments.

   It seems that you were bitterly disappointed that the entire lacrosse case was a fabrication. Certainly, many elements of Durham did not want to let go of what obviously was a lie, and I believe wholeheartedly that had this case gone to trial in Durham, there would have been a conviction despite the fact that the defense would have destroyed every element of what the prosecution would have presented.

   I am not sure as to what other “narrative” is supposed to be in play. That the players were drinking? Wow! I’ll bet that never happens elsewhere!

   That two of the captains hired strippers? (Most of the players did not even know strippers were coming until they arrived.) Gee, no one else in Durham ever has hired strippers. Right.

   As for demonizing the players, all one has to do is to have read the Wilmington Journal, the NAACP’s website, the Herald-Sun, the N&O, the New York Times, WRAL, and the infamous “We’re Listening” ad. I recently read a letter in the H-S by a Durham musician that was a vicious attack on the lacrosse players and their families.

   So, maybe you don’t like my standing up for people who were falsely accused of rape. Where were you when it became painfully clear that Nifong was lying?

   So, attack me if you will. That is part of the territory when one makes public comments. However, I will not apologize for what I have said. By the way, if I had said that YOU were a “slave to the metanarrative,” would you have accused me of using “racist” language, since I had used the word “slaves”?

   It is one thing to deal with racism and race relations in this country, and I come from an era in which it was de facto legal in some parts of the country for a white person to murder an African-American. The fact that this country imprisons more than two million people, many of them black, is an abomination and that, too, should be up for discussion. (The main narrative in that one is the Drug War, which I contend is immoral and illegal.)

   But, I do not back down in the lacrosse case. The powers that be in Durham decided to take a page from Scottsboro, Alabama, of the early 1930s. It was wrong, and I will say it was wrong, whether or not you approve.

   ~   ~   ~

   No, I wouldn’t accuse you of being a racist for using the word “slave” metaphorically. If I did, it would show that I’m a narrow-minded dope, so why would you take it seriously? And you have a real martyr complex if you think I “attack [you] because [you] have been outspoken about this case” or that I “don’t like [you] standing up for people who were falsely accused of rape.” I criticized your article for being irrational when it isn’t just plain wrong. You can take it as personally as you want, but it has nothing to do with how and when and for whom you’ve been outspoken in the past.

   It’s definitely not a matter of “bitter disappointment” on my part over the exoneration of the lacrosse players, because there was none. I was never sold on what you call the one “permissible narrative.” If I had any reason to take your opinion seriously I might be insulted that you seem to think I’m so narrow-minded and mean-spirited that I care more about propping up a story than about the fate of three young men.

   I do appreciate that you think of me with the same kind of familiarity you showed towards Perkinson—I can say without a trace of doubt that, in my case, you have no idea what you’re talking about. But really, how would you know what Perkinson thinks about the lacrosse team or what the “black community of Durham” thinks about Moez Elmostafa or what goes through the minds of a typical Durham jury? The habit of drawing sweeping conclusions about people you’ve never met from a collection of outrageous and offensive incidents is the essence of tribalism, and I appreciate the fine example you’ve given me of that mindset.

   And then you seem to be confused about the nature of the criticism and (ideally) debate that you invite by taking a public stand. Of course you’re “within [your] rights to mention the latent Marxism of Counterpunch and The Nation,” just as I’m within my rights to point out that it’s cheap rhetoric that shifts the reader’s attention to the messenger and away from the text. A sensible thing to do, since your reading of the article is utterly superficial and self-serving. And I’m sure you’ll continue to get applause for outing another hard-left lacrosse hater, so at least have the good grace to accept that it has nothing to do with your “rights” when someone points out that your product is intellectually vacuous.

   Finally, it doesn’t seem that you are standing by your comments about the Darryl Hunt business. You said that the case is highlighted in UPI, so much so that you concluded that Perkinson hadn’t actually read the book. Now you’re objecting to the conclusion Perkinson draws from the lack of attention to the Hunt case in UPI—that “it would have gone against the ‘narrative’ of the book.” I doubt that I’d agree, but it’s at least an objection you could make a reasonable case for.

   Why the scare quotes on “narrative,” though? Doesn’t UPI have a point of view and a narrative? Or is it just the Truth? My experience since starting to write about the case late last year is of constantly butting heads with intolerant apostles of the Truth (aka the one permissible narrative), so it seems that we have at least that much in common.

2. Ralph DuBose | June 22, 2008 at 05:25 | Permalink

   Your repeated emphasis on the negative “tribal” aspects of this saga would lose all point as soon as an observer grasps the reality that the actual behavior of the principle actors can be seen from the perspective, not just from that of the actors themselves, but on camera and in print. The Party, Durham and Dukes conspiracies are abundantly documented by dis-interested machines. If one is addicted to pointing to “tribes” at least use the right names for them. Instead of saying both sides are “inflexibly certain” why not say that one group has seen the data and would not back down and another group acted as if the data did not exist. Even if both camps exhibit equal intransigence that hardly adds up to similarity of mindset. One group opened their minds up to be influenced by observable facts and the other group did something else.

   People who like to bleat on about how the notion of observable reality is no more than the ravings of silly people who have not been thru the Right Courses are in fact what are called on the Internet, “Trolls”. A Troll is someone who argues a position just for the sake of the disruption and distress it will stir up - but without really believing it themselves. See, if an Airline Pilot announced before take off that there may or may not be enough fuel in the tanks to get all the way across the ocean, there are afterall just varieties of perspectives and so he saw no reason to measure the thing itself - there is no one who would not run for the exit. And no one believes that if it were a kid of yours that fell into the grip of human reptiles like Nifong and Brodhead who plainly were willing to destroy that young life for their own career needs that you would not going at them without mercy or restraint. And if a “tribe” of brave folks saw what was happening and gathered to help you would not celebrate the moment. You are simply a Troll… which makes the rest of us fools for being here, in a way. But I have been a fool for lesser matters.

   ~   ~   ~

   I haven’t been pointing to tribes, I’ve been pointing to tribalists. You seem to have the tribes angle pretty well covered. And like Anderson, you seem to think you know a lot about me when in fact you don’t. The same is true when it comes to the “human reptiles” at Duke. There are plenty of people who have criticized Duke’s handling of the lacrosse case and know what they’re talking about. I’ve written about one essential difference between the opinions I respect and those I don’t.

   Finally, if I’m the troll, wouldn’t that make you the goat? And I’m the one bleating?

3. William L. Anderson | June 22, 2008 at 14:02 | Permalink

   I will be issuing a correction regarding UPI. However, K.C. Johnson mentioned the Hunt case many times on his DIW website, so if K.C. were trying to ignore this case, he would have done a poor job of it.

   Second, Ch. 23 in UPI was about prosecutorial misconduct, and the situations of some African-Americans who were victims of such misconduct were highlighted in that book. The Hunt case, which never should have gone to trial, nonetheless ultimately turned on DNA testing, which was not available at the time he was first tried.

   People disagreed with the prosecutor, but he did not hide evidence, nor did he lie to a judge, as did Nifong. He did not make prejudicial statements before the trial, nor did he fabricate evidence, as did the prosecutor elected by the voters of Durham.

   In fact, the original Hunt prosecutor lost his next election in large part because he pursued this case. Now, I hold that there is no excuse for wrongful convictions, but nonetheless there are some that occur that are made by people who honestly believe they are doing the right thing. From what I can tell, the Hunt prosecution fell into that category.

   Also, the hard left of the Triangle area (as well as in the rest of the country) stayed with the original “narrative” long after Roy Cooper announced the young men were innocent. Even today, many people who identify themselves as Marxists or leftists have not wavered from that point of view, and I have heard from some of them.

   Thus, I would think that the ideology behind their way of thinking should have significance in the way that they view the facts of a case. I stand behind those comments.

   Now, if you were one of the few people in Durham who really were saying “let us wait until the facts come in” and meant it, then I certainly would apologize for misjudging you and your intentions. For a long time, I was bombarded with emails and threats from people in Durham who wanted to believe with all their hearts that Reade, Collin, and David were guilty. They wanted to believe Crystal and did everything they could to promote what would be a huge and damaging lie.

   One of the most difficult things for white Americans to do is to look racism squarely in the face. You are right to point out that fact, and you certainly are not wrong in noting the existence of racism today.

   However, I also contend that many of the people of Durham need to look squarely at what what they did in the lacrosse case. Please don’t tell me that it just was big, bad Mike Nifong. People WANTED to believe and even when the facts from the DNA onward came out, there were people standing in line to create what I call Harry Potter Scenarios to explain everything.

   These young men were railroaded because the voters of Durham demanded nothing less. And until people there are willing to admit what they did and that it was wrong, I will continue to make the comments I am making.

   ~   ~   ~

   It’s clear that you’re far far more sensitive than me to voices from “the hard left of the Triangle area.” If you’re thinking about groups like Ubuntu, they seem to have been moribund for quite a while now. My perception (and I’m not claiming to be objective) is that people speaking up for that one “permissible narrative” are voices in the wilderness at this point. They never respond to my blog, anyways, which isn’t saying a whole lot, but it’s definitely picked up here and there around Duke and Durham. One of my earliest posts on the case was quite critical of the potbangers, and I’ve haven’t heard a peep in their defense. The only people who’ve complained about it were bothered that I was too understanding. I have standing search for the phrase “Duke lacrosse” in my Google reader. Setting aside the spam—and there’s quite a bit of that—almost everything that it picks up is more or less angry, self-righteous, or indignant comments about a hoax. I wrote about one of the few exceptions a few weeks ago—a perspective on it from the left, but not one stubbornly insisting that the lacrosse players got away with rape.

   You mention angry, threatening letters. That seems to be a plague of the internet age. The position I set out in my first post on the lacrosse case was that that sort of communication has been a two-way street, and poisonous all around. I came back to the point some months later, in response to some helpful feedback.

   It’s a fact that I think Perkinson’s review is consistently insightful and right on target, not to mention a fine piece of writing. But I’m clearly on the same wavelength as him, and not likely to be one of his most critical readers. That means the reaction of someone who finds the article more abrasive than I do is likely to be informative and valuable to me—that’s what I go in hoping for, anyways. And you do claim to be rebutting the review, not nailing the Left into its coffin. Perkinson’s text, which is a model of clarity, has to be the starting point and the touchstone, doesn’t it? Where in the article does it say “hard left”? I don’t see it, and even allowing for my sympathetic reading, I can’t imagine what relevance there is to a list of sins of the “hard left” that Perkinson surely had no part in—what The Nation printed about Stalin and didn’t print about Pol Pot, an obscure article by an obscure (to me, at least) writer, various things that “people who identify themselves as Marxists or leftists” email to you, letters to the editor from Durham musicians, etc.

   What you’re saying now about the way Perkinson uses the Hunt case is finally connecting in a useful way. An argument might be made that it’s a gratuitous partisan jab and/or he’s misunderstood or misrepresented the focus of chapter 23. In my opinion (and it really is just an opinion), the complaint about the “drumbeat about reverse racism” would be fully justified if it was aimed at DIW—whether I’d think the same about the book, I don’t know. Perkinson’s parenthetical line about the Hunt case isn’t a point that his review hinges on, anyways. Tim Tyson’s recent attempt to use Hunt as a smackdown is a different matter.

   I think it’s fine for you to make the comments you’re making—it’s not at all my habit to tell people they should shut up. I don’t see how you’ll ever get satisfaction from something as nebulous as “Durham voters,” though.

4. Matthew | June 23, 2008 at 02:59 | Permalink

   Matthew’s comment has been moved to my extra comments page. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s really about “the whole mess,” and isn’t in any clear way a response to this post or any others on my blog.

5. d gannon | June 23, 2008 at 03:39 | Permalink

   Let me be upfront -I do not hold a Ph.D. in anything from anywhere. Perhaps this inexoribly undermines my ability to analyze life experiences but I notoriously continue to do so anyway. And yes, I take sides while engaging in that analysis although I seldom act against others based on my opinions as I know how fallible we all are-myself as well.
   I would like to respond to the use the words “privileged white boys”. To be privileged means to not be subject to the usual rules or penalties due to special circumstances. (Yes, the old bore of using the dictionary…but words do have meanings, do they not?)The Duke Lacrosse case would seem to prove that in Durham the Lacrosse team were not “privileged” under the law nor were they “privileged” under Duke administrative rules. Although clearly this privilege under the law did not exist in Durham, is it the idea that the fact that they were at Duke means ipso facto that somehow they enjoyed “privileges”, that rules were broken and they were given places at a good institution of learning over others who were more intellectually deserving because of their “privileged” position?
   Are you inferring that they were accepted at Duke because they were white? In that case, that is the essence of your problem with them, a general resentment of what you consider to be representative of a greater evil in the world. This is called scapegoating.
   Perhaps the word that is wanted is “advantaged”-but then anyone with the intelligence to win a place over someone else would also be advantaged by nature-equality does not reign in nature. Some have talent, some do not. Equality under the law was the issue despite individual circumstances.

   The use of the word boy is just meant to be insulting. I have read diatribes insisting that “they were not boys” but racist men when that is convenient to the argument for harsh treatment but in this case the boy word supports the idea that they offer little on their own apart from their “daddys” and as such is an insulting diminutive.
   Onward. To compare what occurs in another fraternity on the same campus or another athletic group at the same university does have far more relevance to the discussion than to undermine the entire relevance of an investigation because another one was not included. The subject was The Duke Lacrosse Case , not every case of injustice.
   Now to the point. An essential difference in this case is that it appeared that those who professed to abhor injustice and used that principle of the abhorrence of injustice to underpin entire lives and careers were either unable or unwilling to abandon position and support principle. These were not ignorant or poor or disadvantaged individuals but University Professors
   That was what was so disheartening and appalling.
   There is great irony in this case in that one of the students is the grandson of a Holocaust survivor and his scholarship to Duke was heralded as part of the great promise of hard work and opportunity in America-I guess such privilege deserves some sort of punishment in the eyes of some.

   ~   ~   ~

   I’m not sure who/what this criticism is directed at—it seems to be some vague composite of a lot of people who said and did obnoxious things. If gannon’s “you” refers to me specifically, he’s not much of a reader. The phrase “privileged white boys” (in quotes) is used to convey a mindset—I haven’t and wouldn’t write about the lacrosse team so dismissively, and I don’t believe that Perkinson would either.

   In my opinion, what the lacrosse team brought to their ill-conceived party was an excessive sense of entitlement. If I wanted to assign responsibility and/or guilt, I’d have to unpack “lacrosse team”—some had little or nothing to do with it, others contributed quite a bit. I have no interest in prosecuting the people who were at the party, though. I do believe that it’s reasonable and appropriate for people at Duke to discuss and debate the sense of entitlement that the incident highlighted. How that could have walled off from the legal proceedings, I’m not sure. It surely could have been handled better than it was.

6. William L. Anderson | June 23, 2008 at 08:12 | Permalink

   “I think it’s fine for you to make the comments you’re making–it’s not at all my habit to tell people they should shut up. I don’t see how you’ll ever get satisfaction from something as nebulous as “Durham voters,” though.”

   You are correct. To be honest, I don’t want to be at war with you, as I perceive you to be much more thoughtful than a lot of people with whom I have had contact from Durham.

   The Duke case was (and still is) one of these situations in which a lot of things intersect. Somehow, I seriously doubt that when the captains hired strippers, they had in mind what Mark Neal was accusing them of doing.

   And, when the two players retorted with racial slurs to Kim Roberts’ insults, they most likely had no idea that they were going to help set off a firestorm. Furthermore, I don’t think that a lot of people from Durham had any idea that this would turn into something that had parallels with the Scottsboro Boys case.

   My sense is that because blacks have suffered real injustices throughout history, it never occurred to the people in Durham that they even were capable of doing what those racist whites of Scottsboro had done 75 years before. Ironically, right after the 2006 election, Harris Johnson made a statement that almost was word-for-word what the assistant prosecutor in the Scottsboro case said in comments to the jury. If one substitutes “white boys” for “Jews,” the statements are nearly identical.

   One lesson from this affair is that even reasonable people can fall prey to their fears and prejudices and turn into monsters. All of us are capable of doing these things; it is not just “those” people are “these” people. It is all of us.

   I read accounts from soldiers and others involved with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they speak of becoming what they had despised in others. Many of them did not join the armed forces or government service to torture others or to do things they had not dreamed that they morally were capable of doing. That is a warning to us all.

   I agree that not everything Perkinson wrote was bad or even wrong. I’ll have to make a correction regarding the omission of the Darryl Hunt case from UPI, but it was an honest mistake and K.C. had put it on his blog even before the book was released.

   But I also have little use for many of the Duke faculty members who cheered on the potbangers, who called out the lacrosse players in class and accused them of things they did not do. I have no use for Karla Holloway, who several years ago when she was in administration served as a “fixer” for one of the ad’s signees who was accused of sexual assault by a female graduate student, thus quietly making the charges go away.

   I have no use for William Chafe, who wanted me to believe that Reade Seligmann, who by all accounts is a very upstanding young man, was the second coming of Roy Bryant, who murdered Emmett Till in 1955. What Chafe did was execrable, and there is no excusing his words and the words of others who supported him.

   The mentality of the G88 was really no different than that of the mob in Scottsboro in 1931. They were not interested in hearing what might have happened; they had fixed on their own “narrative,” and nothing was going to shake their belief.

   Furthermore, when they began uttering nonsense that totally contradicts everything we know about forensic science, I knew I did not want to live in a world where people like them are in charge. Darryl Hunt was set free because his DNA was not found on Debra Sykes, which contradicted nearly everything that the prosecution accused him of doing, as a man could not have done those things and NOT left DNA.

   However, people with earned doctorates were telling us that three drunken young men could beat, rape, and ejaculate on and in a woman for 30 minutes and not leave a trace of DNA anywhere on her. We were supposed to believe that there was a “magic towel” that could wipe off Crystal’s DNA but collect the DNA of David Evans.

   Remember that the only way to remove DNA is to use certain chemicals like bleach, none of which were used on Crystal that night. Even had they used condoms (Mike Stark’s theory), what they did would have left some DNA on her, and their DNA would have been in the bathroom.

   And don’t forget that the players had not cleaned up the bathroom after the party, which meant if there was DNA available, it would have shown up. Furthermore, the G88, Nifong, and the Durham police expected me to believe that after three intelligent young men (who everyone knows watch CSI, so they knew EVERYTHING there is to know about forensics) beat and raped a woman, they did nothing to clean up the scene afterward.

   These are things that anyone can see and understand, yet they were beyond supposedly educated people. On their face, these things were obvious, yet no one in any position of trust and authority in Durham or at Duke University was willing to state what clearly was true. As someone who does have an earned doctorate and a background in statistics and scientific method, this makes me disgusted.

   I would urge you to read the comments and the case narratives of the Scottsboro Boys case, and then compare the comments made by locals to the comments that came in the Duke case. You may want to believe that African-Americans, because of their own confrontations with injustice, are incapable of doing what these racists in Scottsboro did. Yet, the parallels are uncanny, and they speak to matters of the heart.

   When people are committed to doing what is wrong, nothing can stop them. They can rationalize all they want, but in the end they still are wrong.

   ~   ~   ~

   The case has definitely proved (as if we really needed it to be) how cruel, stubborn, and irrational educated and apparently intelligent people can be when they’re in the grip of a self-righteous agenda. And I certainly agree that it’s a terrible mistake to close your mind to evidence that goes against a “metanarrative” or some other fixed idea about how the world should be. Among other things it tends to be self-defeating, ultimately discrediting the people who do it and the causes they stand for. And it’s striking how poorly the “larger issues” raised by Duke faculty critical of the lacrosse team were served. It’s all the more upsetting to me because when it comes to social equity, in general and on campus, I’m in broad agreement with many of the goals and values that were staked out. It sure seems like some soul-searching is called for, and I’m disappointed that I don’t see any signs of it—I can only hope that it’s at least going on in private.

   You lose me, though, when you start generalizing about the “G88.” It seems to me that the typical liestopper thinks that a great deal can be inferred about the 88 from the LS. I disagree, and I’ve argued that KC Johnson’s construction of a so-called “Group of 88” on the basis of the ad is vastly deceptive. The fundamental difference there, about what the LS means about the people who signed it, doesn’t seem to be amenable to debate, and I’m definitely not interested in starting another round of parsing and interpreting the ad.

   Johnson has presented a body of evidence and analysis that is supposed to support the conclusions he drew from the ad, and I’ve written at length about the deep and fundamental flaws in that analysis. It seems to me that virtually all of it is based on assumptions about what kind of people those professors are—much more a matter of faith than of rationality and evidence. At the very least, the case against the Group is almost entirely a matter of confirming the expectations—there is no real interest in looking for where the model might break down, not to mention a shortage of skepticism and basic reality checks. In the few cases I’ve gone through in detail (Holloway, Neal, and to a lesser extent Lubiano), when they’re disentangled from the presumptions and misrepresentations that Johnson brings to bear, they no longer look like raving, irrational, vindictive monsters, which isn’t to say that they look perfect or blameless. So far no one, including Johnson, has objected to any of the specific points I make about Holloway or Neal, though I’m routinely dismissed as an apologist who’s totally blind to the obvious. That’s not really evidence that I’m right, but it does suggest that not very much is backing up the opinions of those who disagree with me.

   I’m afraid I’m not that impressed by the parallels between the accounts of the Scottsboro case and the lacrosse case. Yes, the spirit of vigilantism is overwhelming in the Scottsboro case, and, though considerably toned down, it’s clearly a factor in the lacrosse case, too. And at a rhetorical level, yes, there are too many echos, especially turning back to the first few weeks after the news—the slogans shouted by the potbangers, etc. But in Quasimodo’s bracketed commentary in the recent Liestoppers thread there are also parallels, since he’s working from simplistic, disparaging, mindless assumptions about what “those kind of people” are like. The thing about 19 NCCU students apparently not questioning Mangum’s allegations is depressing, but as a teacher I’m skeptical about how much insight you can get into that community or even those specific students by asking them to raise their hands in class. In terms of rhetoric and knee-jerk typecasting, plenty of dismal stuff has come from all sides of the lacrosse controversy.

   Rhetoric isn’t everything, though. The Scottsboro boys represented a whole population of people who were systematically despised and deprived. The lacrosse players don’t. Like virtually all undergrads at Duke, in terms of material comfort and opportunity, they are among the most fortunate people in the world (and of course those of us on the faculty are in the same boat). Even in the supposedly topsy-turvy world of Duke, the immediate aftermath of the lacrosse incident was a huge aberration. White lacrosse players from east-coast prep schools had been thriving at Duke for years, and they’re thriving again, as far as I can tell. And they go out into the world and thrive some more. It’s ludicrous to act as if the hounding and scapegoating of the lacrosse team at Duke is part of a pattern of prejudice that puts a whole category of young white men in peril, or to think that it represents a new front in the battle for social equity.

7. RedMountain | June 23, 2008 at 14:50 | Permalink

   Sad indeed, Robert. Today LieStoppers has a post asking for the ‘naysayers’ to speak up on their ‘theory’ of the ‘non-frame’. Unfortunately the naysayers have been either run off or excluded so they are reduced to offering up lame ‘they would probably say this but it is stupid’ responses to that challenge. The tribe that remains is growing closer to being of one mind. Even your good buddy KC is not seen as perfect over there as he is a supporter of that Obama guy. They have managed to run off some other Obama types that did make the cut to the new and improved meeting place. The once mighty Gaynor is often reviled because he dares to speak his mind on what the defense lawyers knew about the ‘hidden’ DNA and when he/they knew it as well as being of the opinion that Meehan and DNASI will emerge unscathed from the various lawsuits.
   Bill Anderson has avoided such controversy as Meehan and Gaynor have sustained by sticking to the program of preaching to the choir and not disagreeing too strongly with the majority. In my opinion he is a fine writer and was a good supporter of the Duke Lacrosse players at a time when they needed that type of public support. He is by no means a racist of any kind (I don’t believe you implied that in your post). Still, I don’t believe he or KC have countered the 2 main points I made about the book review in question at another site.

   ~   ~   ~

   I’ve never actively followed the Liestoppers forums, so I don’t want to pretend to know anything about the personalities involved, or what seems to be a recent history of internecine struggle. My impression of the forums from maybe a year ago was that there was some real debate, and some critical opinions that gave me something interesting to confront. I think at this point the only interest would be sociological.

   The thread you refer to is kind of funny, yes. I see that it’s partly directed at me, because of my sarcastic reply to Sidney Carton, which is apparently all joan foster needs to know to answer a whole bunch of questions on my behalf. Based on the next comment, that seems to be the theme of the day.

8. Ralph DuBose | June 23, 2008 at 23:02 | Permalink

   I find your response to dgannon to be extra-ordinarily revealing. It is an un disputed fact that at Duke that year there were some 20 odd stripper parties held by Frats, Sports teams, and Soroities. It is also undisputed that no LAX guy did anything more hurtful to Mangum than what was experienced by legions of strippers at those other parties. Yet, in your estimation, they are guilty of “an excessive sense of entitlement”; enough so to warrant a campus wide discussion of their misdeeds. Why not subject every other group that hired strippers that they did not abuse to the same tribunal? What is so special and unsavory about the LAX party? To ask the question is to point towards the answer: They are white guys presumed to be from monied families. That is all it could be. Nothing else is different. Everybody must have known there were lots of stripper parties but it seems to have been taken for granted that women and minorities can pay strippers and ogle their bodies and display no “excessive priviledge” whereas LAX guys cannot. Apparently, in your world, that is a given. A kind of background noise. Excuse me for noticing that this is no more than tautalogical reasoning, as in - The LAX guys are by definition excessively priviledged and the others aren’t. Therefore, looking at strippers represents bad behavior for the LAX guys but not the others. - That was easy. One doesn’t need a brain at all to sort good from bad if you know their race and gender.
   The other clue is that “excessive sense of entitlement” is not an action but a state of mind. How can one prove that one is innocent of such a “thought crime” after being accused? Other than groveling and submitting to re[education I cannot think of a way.
   But I am being too nice. Here is mytake on the real attitudes driving this train-wreck. The social and sexual success of some elite male atheletes offended the PC crowds sense of how the world SHOULD work and made a lot of others intensely jealous So, of course, they must be brought down to salve the shriveling egos of the “marginalized” hordes. Human Nature 101.
   You mentioned the legal arena. May I remind you that that part of this story is not even half over and it is way too late for anyone at dook to “wall off the legal proceedings” from what the Administration did or allowed to happen under its imprimatur. It is all “evidence” now and its baleful echoes will haunt the un-deserved sleep of Brodhead et al for years to come.

   ~   ~   ~

   Well, Ralph, you could have asked. Why pick on the lacrosse team when there were a bunch of other stripper parties? It’s a good question. But instead you figured that my mind works just like yours does. In fact you don’t have a clue, and apparently you don’t have either the reading skills or the imagination to get one. You need to come up with something less stupid and insulting or find somewhere else to comment.

9. d gannon | June 24, 2008 at 10:22 | Permalink

   Why pick on the Lacrosse team when there were a bunch of other stripper parties?

   “Three obvious but oft-overlooked attributes of the case”
   “The well known line Perkinson quotes……”
   “privileged white boys….”
   It was a phrase bandied about quite a bit and quoted in your article above so I responded to it.
   You say that the Lacrosse team brought to the party an “excessive” sense of “entitlement”.Put aside the fact that you are attributing feelings to at least one of them, all those over the age of 21 had the right (entitlement) to drink. I believe those over the age of 18 had the right(entitlement) to hire a girl to take off her clothes and wiggle around in a lewd and licentious manner if she so chose to enter into the agreement. They had a right to have a party. These rights extend to anyone in the country and are exercised a great deal.
   It could have been walled off from the legal proceedings by not discussing the legal proceedings that turned out to be not so legal after all.The incident as it was discussed did not occur. A different incident did occur but in my opinion the real incident was of no interest to anyone as it was useless to the agenda.
   Do you remember Fred Fisher? When behaviour finally
   threatens to damage the young of the powerful-who by definition are those who can offer some protection-the powerful move to stop it. What a revelation.

   Correction: I meant lascivious, not licentious-come on , I’m cooking dinner at the same time
   as I write this and also the dog and cat are fighting so I got confused…..

   ~   ~   ~

   I’ve combined three successive comments from gannon into one. Here’s something I wrote last December in a comment thread on another blog:

   It has to be possible to talk frankly about how and why the party was objectionable. It needn’t and shouldn’t be an exercise in judging the lacrosse team, especially since it’s now well known that they were not the first or only student group to hire strippers. I agree with [a previous comment] that the big issue is entitlement—specifically, the sense of entitlement that comes with having money to burn. As a way for people with cash to deal with people who need it, the transaction that night was grotesque, starting with the call to an “escort” (i.e., prostitution) service in which the caller lied about how large the party would be. It would, in my opinion, have been a much different thing if an effort had been made to find performers with the talent and experience to really put on an erotic show—women they cared to know something about and could treat as professional entertainers. They would have saved themselves and the rest of us a whole lot of trouble. Duke, according to its mission statement, is committed to its students’ “development as adults committed to high ethical standards and full participation as leaders in their communities.” I don’t see any way to reconcile that with furtive dips into the sex industry’s trade of dollars for desperation.

   I’m clearly not talking about legal entitlements, and perhaps there is a better word, but it’s common usage to say things like “after a hard week at work, she felt entitled to her Saturday nap.”

   It’s one of Ralph’s many misconceptions that “everybody must have known there were lots of stripper parties.” It was news to many of us, though some in the administration did know what was going on. “Stripper party,” “gang rape,” “racial slurs,” and “privileged white boys” got tangled up in an undifferentiated mass of outrage when the news broke, and that’s nothing to be proud of, but I think that’s a typical crowd reaction to outrageous news. It seems to me that before any kind of “campus culture” debate was formally initiated, cooler heads should have been at work untangling. That didn’t happen.

   I had no role in what did happen, and I don’t have the information or the interest to do a big retrospective exercise in what should have happened. It’s my personal opinion that students at Duke shouldn’t be both clueless and dishonest when they enter into a transaction with another person, and what was being bought in this case makes it all the more important, for many reasons, including the strictly pragmatic one of avoiding trouble. If a black fraternity or a sorority did the same thing, it would have exactly the same significance and raise the same issues. And I’d think it would be obvious that the lacrosse team’s stripper party has to be considered alongside all the other ones.

   If you think the students have their money and can be as foolish as they want with it, fine. It’s a common opinion, and I assume one that can be reasonable and thoughtful. In my experience, though, it’s generally self-righteous, defensive, smug, or trivializing.

   I’m not sure what the relevance of Fred Fisher is. Who corresponds to Welch?

10. Andy | June 24, 2008 at 16:32 | Permalink

    Anderson is wrong about Holloway as the “fixer” of that event. Fact, it was she who argued without effect for the other outcome.

    ~   ~   ~

    I don’t know what the basis for this comment is or who it’s from, but it reminds me that I meant to say something about Anderson’s claim when I replied to him. For Karla Holloway to quash a sexual assault charge would require a stunning level of hypocrisy. I assume it’s the matter Anderson commented on a number of times on DIW, and also here:

    Don’t forget that when [Houston Baker] was at Duke, a female graduate student accused Baker of sexual assault while they were at a conference in New York.
    
    
    Karla Holloway was a dean at the time, and she flew up to New York to “fix” the situation. In the end, Duke was able to hush-hush the whole thing, but one of the reasons that Baker never was elected chair of the English Department was this situation.

    This strikes me as hearsay or worse. Anderson is welcome to pass on whatever evidence he has that I should take it more seriously. Any further comment on the matter will probably be deleted.

11. Ralph DuBose | June 24, 2008 at 18:24 | Permalink

    If my comments are sometimes stupid I guess I am who I am but “insulting” is a different concept. For one thing, you have relentlessly reminded us that you have not revealed your truest feelings or positions regarding this case. Therefore, if I offer a negative interpretation of the mindset of the enablers of this hoax there should be no reason for the owner of this Blog to take that personally since I have no basis to attach those criticisms to him.
    I have complete sympathy with those whose first reaction to this story was anger and revulsion toward the LAX team. Most people I associate with would assume that Sexual Assault Nursing Specialists and DAs basically never say confidently that there is a strong case when they have nothing at all. Indeed, the early desciptions of the party were stomach turning. And decent minded people would, I think, always give the benefit of the doubt to a poor woman who appeared to have been brutalized.
    However… there was a torrent of information almost from the first week or so that if paid close attention to was devastating to the original picture and indeed to the whole idea that a crime had occured. That torrent really became un-answerable after the DNA results came back comprehensively exculpatory. (See Prof. Andersons excellent post). That was on April 10 2006. Everyone who made a public statement ascribing rape-guilt to the players after that date was either too lazy or too dense to cope with the plain meaning of that information. Or, of course, they understood it but were not going to let it get in the way of their agenda. Those are the only options.
    One reason that so many people got so emotionally involved with this story is that no amount of screaming about obvious facts seemed make the slightest impression on M. Nifong or Duke Administration. It was a lot like a bad horror movie for the observers and must have been a living nighmare for the accused.
    The first impulse towards ostracizing the LAX guys acted like a Tsunami; no ordinary structure could stop it.
    So now, it is more than 2 years later, despite everything,, they are still deemed guilty of something: being examples of rich Duke students in general who think nothing of hiring strippers because they (like rich college students in general) have “an excessive sense of entitlement”.
    For what its worth, I do not claim to know what the organizers of the strippers intended to take place. But I can explain why they lied about the size of the party - they did not want a thug bouncer type to show up. That is morally insignificant, as far as I care.
    Shit, maybe they did have an excessive sense of entitlement. But the response of a great leading University was to lose their collective minds. The damage done was immense - to real victims of rape, to the reputation of law enforcement. Durham N.C. faces bankrupcy, and Duke will lose a noticable chunk of their endowment.
    Please tell us again how to apportion responsibility for this outcome How much goes to the organizers of a routine stripper party and how much to the supposed grown ups who ignored massive public evidence that no prosecutable crime had occured?

    ~   ~   ~

    Alright, I think it’s clear that the failure of folks down here to face facts like grown-ups tells you that Duke and Durham are dominated by a tribe (or tribes) of Cowards and Criminals. Or of PC wimps who got sand kicked in their face one too many times. You’re right that damage is tragic and a lot could have been avoided if there was less foolishness along the way. I wasn’t in a position to do anything about it at the time, and there’s definitely nothing I can do about it now. I’ve never apportioned responsibility, though, and I don’t have any plans to do so.

12. A Reader | June 24, 2008 at 21:02 | Permalink

    You say…“It seems to me that virtually all of it is based on assumptions about what kind of people those professors are–much more a matter of faith than of rationality and evidence. At the very least, the case against the Group is almost entirely a matter of confirming the expectations–there is no real interest in looking for where the model might break down, not to mention a shortage of skepticism and basic reality checks.”

    Could not the same thing be said about the assumptions about “The Lacrosse” team? Did this concern you? Weren’t numerous “simplistic, disparaging, mindless assumptions “made about them? Were they not lumped together in this category of swaggering callous, privileged white racists? How many Duke Faculty wrote op-eds in the Herald-Sun or Letters to the Editor in the N&O or appeared on Nancy Grace to protest this kind of all-inclusive generalization…especially at a time when it was so terribly dangerous to three individual kids: Collin, Reade, and Dave. Instead…how many wrote to expound further and elaborate on those damning “assumptions.”

    Were these three kids NOT REAL? Did the jeopardy they faced not resonate in academia?

    You say, “In the few cases I’ve gone through in detail (Holloway, Neal, and to a lesser extent Lubiano), when they’re disentangled from the presumptions and misrepresentations that Johnson brings to bear, they no longer look like raving, irrational, vindictive monsters, which isn’t to say that they look perfect or blameless”

    Again, true of the individual members of the team. But I ask you respectfully…where was your concern, when, not the academic REPUTATIONS of those sullied were at stake…but thirty odd years of a young man’s life. Where was your voice? Where was this blog? It’s nice that your colleagues’ reputation spurred you on to debate KC. But, in fairness, you must understand…to some of us this was never an academic exercise or about faculty friends. It was about three kids facing jail on a false accusation.

    Put all the “isms” aside for a moment and just look at your own kid and let yourself channel a bit of the fear and frustration that lasted well over a year. Then you may return, to de-personalizing them and disparaging the rest of us. I just want you to see US as individuals too. Like those you champion.
    To me, it was about a kid (Reade) having to tell his Mother..”Mom, she picked me;”it was about Phil Seligmann falling to his knees when given the news this really good kid of his had been indicted ;it was about Rae Evans’ Dad dying before his grandson was cleared; it was about the desperation of your child victimized by false reporting, flipped witness, rigged line-ups. It was about stress-related illness. It was reading the “listening ad” in the context of all this…watching your kid read the names signed there…professors he ADMIRED..thanking the protestors for not waiting. Have you thought about the families reading through those names…reading the wording they chose?

    Do you really think a young man experiences something like this and goes on “to thrive” emotionally unscathed?. Think of the cacophony of lies, hate and contempt (some still in place) Think of the revelation of institutional corruption. What zombie state does one have to attain to just brush all that off like a bad date and..”thrive.”

    This is not some assigned reading we are discussing here. It’s what these families endured on a daily basis. And extrapolating it out to demean their suffering by naming others who suffered more…is a cheap sidestep.. . This was happening to YOUR students, in the city where YOU live, on a campus where YOUR voice might have resonated. There is suffering and injustice everywhere, but here was the homegrown variety. Here it was on your turf.
    I’m sorry I can’t write about “tribalism” or intellectualize all this into a pleasant diversion. There was real suffering here.To the families, there were few voices that supported them in the early dark days..when Brodhead’s door was closed to them and reporters got “off the record” comments from Duke “officials” that fed the flames. There was Kc, and Gaynor and Bill and a few internet nobodies who called themselves Liestoppers and showed up every day to do whatever little they could.

    But, think what it might have meant to those families to have a few strong articulate voices at Duke speaking loudly and forcibly for them instead. You write and parse very well. You might have unclouded a few minds and even, provided a little comfort. You might have made a difference. Think about it.

    ~   ~   ~

    The first part is easy. I agree that there are striking similarities between the way I suggest Johnson characterizes certain Duke faculty members and the way the lacrosse team was characterized. I’ve been making more or less the same point since my first post on the case.

    There’s not much I can say about the middle part, though. Of course what kept me from speaking out is trivial compared to the suffering of the players and their families. If you want to know what I was doing at the time, you can find it early in my series of posts about the case. I do appreciate the sentiment behind your comment about unclouding a few minds. The alienation and anger between Duke and the players and their families was ultimately a lose-lose proposition, and it’s hard not to feel like the right person taking the right stand at the right time might have steered things in better direction for everyone concerned (except perhaps the lawyers who are beavering away these days on the various lawsuits).

    You misconstrue what I said about lacrosse players thriving. I’m explicitly referring to the players who left before the debacle and the new ones coming in now, in order to point out how wrong it is to think of the lacrosse case as a “reverse racism” version of the framing and persecution of the Scottsboro boys. That far-fetched parallel is a sample of the mass of grudges and agendas riding on the back of the “Duke hoax” at this point, and in the thick of it there’s a very high tolerance for the same kind of narrow-minded, self-serving typecasting that was so offensive when it was hurled at the team from the other side. For me the human element that you find so moving is very hard to pick out of the mix. If more people sounded like you it would be easier.

    One other misunderstanding is your suggestion that I “intellectualize all this into a pleasant diversion.” Either you have a very odd idea of “pleasant” or you think I do. The intellectualizing is ultimately about the difference between criticism that’s constructive and criticism that’s dishonest and destructive. It’s a serious subject, though what I’m writing might well be wrongheaded and pointless.

13. v | June 24, 2008 at 21:28 | Permalink

    Glad to see d gannon call you on your use of the phrase “excessive sense of entitlement”but I still don’t understand exactly what you are trying to say.

    Please explain.

    You did not mean “entitlement” in the legal sense but in the “sense of entitlement that comes with having money to burn.”

    Who was “entitled” to exactly what? Who had “money to burn”? How was attending a “stripper party” evidence of such a “sense of entitlement?” I may not agree with the team’s decision to hire strippers but I simply don’t see any “sense of entitlement” here …. in any sense at all. Just a bad decision.

    The lacrosse players were stranded in Durham for Spring Break and at the time, the stripper party, at about $20 per person, probably seemed like a good and cheap alternative to a night at some place like the Platinum Club. Nothing more. Nothing less. No “sense of entitlement that comes with having money to burn.”

    We all know how that turned out.

    ~   ~   ~

    Since none of what I’ve written so far has made any sense to you, and you’ve got the whole thing pegged anyways, I think I’ll pass. If you want to know you can figure it out.

14. William L. Anderson | June 25, 2008 at 08:38 | Permalink

    No one has said that the lacrosse players had faced the same kind of discrimination that African-Americans were facing in this country in 1931. We have referred to the facts of the case itself, and the correlation of the quote by Harris Johnson of Durham after the election and the quote in court by an assistant prosecutor.

    We know that in both cases, rape charges were made by women of questionable backgrounds, and we know that there was no medical evidence in either case for the charges. We also know that the people of the two cities did not wish to deal with the fact that no rape had occurred and demanded to push the legal process forward and were determined to gain guilty verdicts.

    I have no doubt that a Durham jury would have voted guilty on all charges. One person who has been an expert witness and has been involved in rape cases told me personally that never in this person’s history with the courts had this person ever seen a community more anxious and ready to convict than was Durham.

    Those are the cold facts. As an African-American, you seem to believe that you have an exclusive right to the results of racially-based injustice. Such injustices can happen only to you and to other African-Americans.

    Furthermore, you seem to indicate that African-Americans are incapable of acting in an unjust manner. My comparison of the two cases is that when people have made up their minds, and when racial issues are involved, facts go out the window.

    When I see people in Durham STILL saying there was a rape, or that “something happened,” even after everything that we now know, I think I can stand by my account. You may not like it, but that does not change the fact that the African-American community, and their hard-left political allies, embraced the charges and were not interested in letting them go.

    By November, 2006, the case had been discredited publicly, yet Nifong was elected by African-American voters in Durham. Furthermore, Harris Johnson proudly made his statement after the election. Johnson was not interested in the truth; he was interested in railroading innocent people into prison because of his own racial hatreds.

    There really is no dialog left here. A large number of people in Durham who constantly go on about “justice” and other such matters banded together to act in a thoroughly unjust manner, and they still are trying to justify their actions. The NAACP, which has done heroic work in all areas of dealing with the effects of prosecutorial abuse from gag orders to the use of DNA to questionable identification procedures, was anxious to throw out everything — and I mean everything — in order to railroad a conviction.

    I am not moved by Barber’s comments on “due process,” for his ACTIONS were very different than his words. Likewise, I saw a law professor at NCCU endorse an illegal lineup and also endorse Nifong’s attempt to change the timelines and everything else after his lies were exposed in court testimony.

    This case has convinced me that the NAACP no longer is an organization whose members care about justice. This is an organization whose members willingly endorsed some of the worst practices that police and prosecutors could do in the hopes that innocent people would be railroaded into prison.

    I know these are hard words, and I also know that blacks for centuries have been the victims of the very kinds of things I have described above. But those experiences do not make people moral; people who are victims also can be victimizers, and that is a sad fact of life.

    As for the “sense of entitlement” issue, I think that is nonsense. The captains did what people at a lot of parties in Durham had done: call strippers. Are you saying that there are no black strip clubs, or that no black group in Durham ever has had a party with strippers? Or, do they have a “sense of entitlement,” too?

    ~   ~   ~

    You’ve obviously paid much more attention than I have to the various statements and positions taken by people in Durham (and the focus on Durham, Durham, Durham strikes me as a little odd). I agree that many NAACP and many figures from the African American community have nothing to be proud of when it comes to the lacrosse scandal—there’s been plenty of hypocrisy and a stubborn insistence that the case be understood in terms of the old familiar narratives of oppression despite clear evidence to the contrary. But frankly, I just can’t get that worked up about it—it seems to me to be a pretty typical manifestation of the political and social tribalism that’s all around us.

    You say in the next comment that you have the sense that “in Durham that whites like me have no right to lecture anyone there about race and race relations.” My first reaction is, who’s stopping you? It seems like you’re really saying that you should have a right to a particular reaction—to be listened to respectfully, I guess—and I don’t think you do. My opinion (not, as you seem to think, speaking as a black person) is that it’s perfectly legitimate for an outsider to criticize the African American community and the individuals in it. I feel like I’ve done that a number of times (for instance). Criticism can be more or less respectful, constructive, informed, accurate, illuminating, etc., and it seems to me that yours falls short on several counts. That you think in terms of a “right to lecture” suggests what the root of the problem might be.

15. William L. Anderson | June 25, 2008 at 09:06 | Permalink

    I will add one more point, and then be quiet. There is a sense — and I think legitimate, in part — in Durham that whites like me have no right to lecture anyone there about race and race relations. Certainly, I have not experienced the kind of raw racial discrimination that many in Durham and elsewhere have experienced, and I am no expert in such things.

    What I can say, however, is that if people are going to make the appeal to racial justice, then they have no right to turn around and do the very same thing to others. One is reminded of the parable in the Bible in which Jesus speaks of a person who is forgiven a huge debt, and then turns around and tries to force someone with a small debt to pay up.

    For years, the NAACP has told us that DNA results do matter, and that eyewitness accounts can be very unreliable. The NAACP also has endorsed changes of venue of the local jury pool seems bent on conviction no matter what. Furthermore, the NAACP has spoken out against police coercion and manipulation of evidence in order to gain convictions.

    What happened in Durham? The NAACP and its allies declared that DNA did not matter, that there was nothing wrong in the way that Crystal identified her alleged attackers, and that there was no reason for change of venue because, as Irving Joyner told Sports Illustrated, a Durham jury would be more likely to convict because it would have more African-Americans on it.

    Can you see why I would have trouble with a civil rights organization standing against civil rights? What was the reason? It certainly was not the evidence of this case?

    Do you think that for one second that the NAACP and Irving Joyner would have supported rape charges against African-American males based on the “evidence” we saw in the Duke case? I think that is a legitimate question.

    As for the G88 faculty members, I have had contact with one of the signees, and the exchanges have been pleasant. I don’t think that these people are “monsters” per se. What I do think, however, is that they were unwilling to see the facts of the case as being relevant and their early actions did send a signal to Nifong that he could proceed without opposition.

    Now, some of them, like Sally Deutsch, STILL believe that these young men were guilty of rape. However, I believe she is in the minority of that group. But, so far none of them has admitted to engaging in misconduct, and I think that what they did was wrong. I wish that people like Wahneema Lubiano and Karla Holloway could admit that they rushed to judgment instead of trying to justify their actions in second-rate papers that pass as “scholarship.”

16. William L. Anderson | June 25, 2008 at 09:31 | Permalink

    I also wish to thank you for providing a forum, and for your own comments. You seem to be a fair person, and while I know the give-and-take here has been contentious, nonetheless I do appreciate the fact that it has gone on unabated.

    I also know that my comments regarding the alleged actions of a certain professor were harsh, but I think it is instructive that this particular person was the most outspoken person at Duke against the lacrosse team, and in a subsequent email to a mother of one of the players called them “farm animals.” And I do find it interesting that Duke’s administration would protect this person, but not afford similar protections to its students.

    ~   ~   ~

    Any semblance of dialog is good, as far as I’m concerned. I appreciate your comments as well.

17. d gannon | June 25, 2008 at 11:34 | Permalink

    When one says a person is entitled to a nap after working all day it means that person has earned the right to sleep. One is still talking about rights, although that one would be determined by the individual’s personal standards which are irrelevant to the discussion at hand. I am interested in the right that it appears some would deny in the name of political or personal morality-that is, the right to do what one wants as a free human being if that thing is not against the law. You may find stripping offensive and exploitative as may all the members of the Women’s Studies department-but that distaste is irrelevant as the basis to undermine the civil rights of a citizen or of a student at a university.
    If the teachers and administrators at Duke didn’t know about strippers, drugs and drinking as common practices at parties-and parties are REALLY IMPORTANT to many young people- then they are not in touch with their students.How can they truly educate those they know so little about and even seem to dislike? I would suggest that these schools take a less moralistic and judgemental approach to these problems and ask why indeed such self-destructive behaviour is so prevalent. I don’t think the answer would necessarily be that some kids have too much money and too little regard for anyone else. Personal alienation within a large institutional environment and the need to escape come to mind as issues. The sex and drug trade market these campuses very profitably as solutions to life’s problems.
    I mentioned the Fred Fisher story only in relation to the bitterness expressed about the fact that these students had parents able to help them beat the rap. It has sometimes been understood that when the communist witch hunt attacked Fred Fisher it was attacking the establishment itself in the form of one of its sons and that this was going too far and undermined the agenda of the Committee on Un-american Activities. I obviously view
    the behaviour of many at Duke and in Durham to be politically motivated in the broadest sense and pointed out that in attacks from the right powerful family connections are also helpful. In this case there was no Welch.

    ~   ~   ~

    Apparently you can’t read a single paragraph from someone like me (left-wing Duke professor, or whatever it is I represent to you) without turning me into a cliché from some imaginary Women’s Studies department. If you really want to know what I think, read more carefully.

18. Ken Duke | June 25, 2008 at 12:52 | Permalink

    Re: “Put all the “isms” aside for a moment and just look at your own kid and let yourself channel a bit of the fear and frustration that lasted well over a year.”

    Those who might want to get a feel for what it must have been like may view Reade Seligman’s and Dave Evans, Sr.’s testimony at the Bar hearing.

    Would someone who is more web-savy than I please post the links? Thanks.

    Ken Duke

    ~   ~   ~

    All the videos are on this page at WRAL. Here’s the heart of Reade Seligmann’s testimony, and this is Dave Evans, Sr.’s.

19. d gannon | June 25, 2008 at 16:28 | Permalink

    Write more clearly.

    ~   ~   ~

    I’m not that bad a writer. Clarity is only an issue if the words on the screen register.

20. RRH | June 25, 2008 at 16:55 | Permalink

    The more Prof. Anderson talks about the Scottsboro case, the more I wonder if he knows anything about it. Suffice to say, what happened in Durham in 2006 was ten-times more outrageous than what happened in Scottsboro in 1931. For instance, there was no “mob action” in Scottsboro — no shouts of “dead man walking!” or banners reading “CASTRATE” or racist groups marching into courtrooms. There was no “spirit of vigilantism” in Scottsboro — the only “mobs and riots” related to the Scottsboro case were those of the Boys’ supporters in places like Harlem and, ironically, Berlin, Germany. And while the Boys’ defense lawyers (like the 88ers) claimed to have received death threats, the only evidence of real death threats were those made against the prosecutor and the judge.

    And no, Prof. Anderson, it is not true that there was “no medical evidence” to support the charges in the Scottsboro case. You keep saying “we all know this” and “we all know that” about the Scottsboro case and yet you seem to have learned everything you know about it from To Kill a Mockingbird, a movie made about a fictional — fic.tion-al! — book in 1962.

    Finally, consider this: Even if we agree to disbelieve all the testimony of Victoria Price, Ruby Bates, Orvil Gilley, Lester Carter, and every other witness in the case — we must disbelieve the Boys as well, since they initially testified that the girls were raped before changing (and changing and changing) their testimonies in subsequent trials and re-trials and re-re-trials — we are still left with the fact that the other crimes the Boys’ admitted committing were sufficient to justify an imprisonment of many years if not decades.

    No, Durham 2006 was not Scottsboro 1931. It was something much, much worse.

    RRH

    ~   ~   ~

    This is quite a stretch, to put it mildly. The thread on Liestoppers referred to a first-hand account of the initial trials in 1931 written by Hollace Ransdell. I’m pretty confident it wasn’t influenced by To Kill a Mockingbird. Your claims are hard to reconcile with Ransdell’s observations, or with the essay by law professor Douglas O. Linder on the same site.

21. d gannon | June 25, 2008 at 18:12 | Permalink

    Clarity is always an issue if your goal is communication, which is a prerequisite to dialogue.

    ~   ~   ~

    Sorry, my last response really was unclear. What your 11:35 comment shows is that you’ve picked out a few keywords in what I’ve written and filled in the rest yourself. There are no signs that you’ve paid enough attention to my actual words to be confused by them. Anyway, I’m content with what I’ve said—take it or leave it.

22. Jim | June 25, 2008 at 19:18 | Permalink

    You see “striking similarities” between the way “Johnson characterizes certain Duke faculty members and the way the lacrosse team was characterized.” There are also what seems to me to be some interesting parallels between the Duke men’s lacrosse team (LAX) and the Duke faculty members who signed the “listening” ad (Gang):

    • Both LAX and Gang have suffered retribution as defined groups. For LAX, 46 (the 47th was excluded based on race) faced criminal penalties based not on what they actually did, but on their being members of the team that hired the strippers (the “line up” consisted of team pictures; the accuser could have picked any of them). For Gang, the 88 signatures on the ad essentially created the group. For LAX, documented air-tight alibis did not extricate members. For Gang, they faced criticism not for what they actually thought, but for what readers interpreted the ad as saying was what they thought, and after-the-fact statements of benign intentions did not extricate members. With curious symmetry, the Gang would also be reduced by one when only 87 would sign a later document.

    • Some LAX were not cognizant of the plans for strippers, and some were not even there while the strippers were there. Some Gang probably did not know or share whatever might or might not have prompted the originator of the ad to propose and champion it. Such individuals of the two groups were not exempted from retribution due to their physical absence (LAX) or their absence of knowledge (Gang).

    • LAX members, especially the leaders, promptly and publically apologized. One Gang member expressed strong regrets and some others made less strong statements, and the Group (minus one) publically issued a “clarifying” statement. These actions did not satisfy the decriers of either group.

    • Accused LAX members - though objectively innocent - faced prison sentences and, even if found not guilty, faced life-long taint. The Gang leaders – though subjectively innocent - faced the burdens (as you recounted in earlier posts) of being put on committees and, even when committee duties ended, some faced the permanent burdens of additional responsibilities due to promotions.

    • LAX members experienced threats, both electronic and otherwise, were castigated in classes (except the accused who simply were suspended), and suffered grade retaliation (one egregious case even resulted in a grade-changing legal settlement), while those who supported them (e.g., Duke women’s LAX, see Harvey Araton’s NY Times May 26, 2006 column) suffered insults and criticism. Gang members attested to electronic harassment and also suffered, including the scrutiny of their syllabi (per Lee Baker, March 13, 2007 AP article sill on-line at Rutland Herald). Supporters of the Gang met criticism, also.

    • LAX members still encounter “something happened” folk who disbelieve their innocence of guilt. Gang members still have detractors who disbelieve their innocence of intent. Nonetheless, the members of both groups seem to have generally retained positive reputations among their closest peers (family and lacrosse players for LAX, family and similar faculty members for Gang), especially once the criminal case began to collapse.

    • LAX and Gang both were victims of Nifong and his allies and will long be associated with their actions in this case. Both will likely retain detractors on a permanent basis, and both will likely see their deeds and statements surfacing, re-surfacing, and re-re-surfacing thanks to the web.

    ~   ~   ~

    Clever, but with a distinct aroma of sour grapes. I’ve never pushed the idea of the “Gang” suffering, and my guess is that the long term repercussions will be minimal.

    One factual point—of the 87 who signed the “concerned faculty” statement, only about 2/3 had signed the “listening” statement. So the “curious symmetry” is kind of weak.

23. lumpenproldgannon | June 26, 2008 at 00:26 | Permalink

    I have always found your position unclear. Your style of writing also vacillates.Your responses are often snide and flippant and dismissive . Your content calls for reason and thoughtfulness. It seems to me that style rebukes content in many places and this leads me to think there is some conflict within the writer about the issues.Probably I’m wrong because I can’t read well enough or overcome my prejudices but I think you are stuck trying to defend the indefensible- and why bother?
    Thank you for your time and blog space. I will now return permanently to my menial tasks.

    ~   ~   ~

    I don’t believe for a minute that you can’t read well enough, and my guess is that you can set aside your prejudices, too. I think what you sense as inner conflict is more a matter of being at cross-purposes with virtually all of my commentors. Hopefully you’ve come away with something worth thinking about anyway.

24. Ralph K. DuBose | June 26, 2008 at 00:57 | Permalink

    Regarding Jim and his perception of parallels between the LAX guys and the Faculty Gang of 88. I see some large differences. The Lax guys did not go out of their way to endanger fellow members of the University Community. Along the same lines, none of the Gang of 88 were looking at 30 years in the hole for a crime that never happened.
    In other words, many at Duke seemed to have treated this whole matter as if it were a debate about a work of fiction instead of an emergency involving real life danger to some kids for which they had at least some responsibility to protect.
    Another difference: The enablers of this hoax will certainly feel the need to go on making up endless falsehoods in an attempt to justify the decisions they made in the spring of 06. They have no choice, really. The Lax guys and their supporters will have no need to do that and can tell the same solid, true story and will sleep soundly into a ripe old age.

25. JF, A Reader | June 26, 2008 at 11:15 | Permalink

    JF’s comment is in with the extras—I can’t actually speak for the entire Duke faculty. There’s some overlap with an earlier comment, though. Beyond that, there might be some answers in all these other posts.

26. Ralph DuBose | June 26, 2008 at 23:22 | Permalink

    Regarding JF A Reader, Let’s face it head-on, you do not have an answer to his comments. So, if I were you, I would also want to bury it Somewhere Else. ( That is just what post-modernists always do with unwanted data). On the other hand, all he did (very well, btw) was to elucidate what a lot of us have thought and felt with fierce intensity from the very day that it became obvious that the prosecution of this kids was simply a criminal enterprise.

27. JF, A Reader | June 27, 2008 at 08:19 | Permalink

    You are not being asked to “speak for the entire Duke faculty.” When one discusses, say,…. the My Lai Massacre, one does not need to understand the individual thought processes of each platoon member as he fired his gun. Instead do we not try to understand what motivates group behavior? Don’t “intellectuals” discuss such things this way all the time? Then, why play coy, when the topic is your own peer group?

    Why are you exempt?

    There was “group behavior” here all right. Stunningly so. As a platoon, Duke facultys “first line” fired all their shots IN ONE DIRECTION…a loud, vicious barrage. Then…silence….not just from the sergeants, but almost every grunt as well.

    Is this not a subject worth pondering?

    How odd, with a faculty as large as Duke, in a travesty that went on for months, in the most public and scrutinized fashion….that ALL these unspoken, opinionated, authors and teachers….no longer had ANYTHING to say.

    Have you no opinion , as one of the Silent, as to why that was?

    How very odd, that although individual faculty members were driven by concern and caring for their students…to run a Listening ad…to embrace their suffering…that no suffering by these boys and families…required any response. As a “Father of two” who I am certain …has the capacity to feel…loving them as you must do….just a taste of the fear and pain these families endured…how odd that you seem unwilling to give that pain a little space on the front page of your blog.

    You seem uncomfortable acknowledging what these “privileged boys” suffered. Something about them makes the “not qualify.” Over and over again, as Nifong’s abuses went on…individual Duke professors decided to give their pain a pass. Not to write or speak or opine. Each day, when faced with new facts of INNOCENCE…Duke professors decided again…these kids were unworthy of effort.

    You made this decision too. Why?

    Are these questions too uncomfortable for your diversion? Why were you moved to confront the “Second Duke Prosecutor” …KC… and give your wit and time and reason to challenging HIM…but never felt moved to do the same with the FIRST Duke prosecutor…the now disbarred Nifong? Have you asked yourself THAT?

    Do these questions seem unkind? Do they make you feel uncomfortable? Well, buck up..they are nothing compared to what Kathy, or Rae, or Mary Ellen might read on the Internet about their boys on any given day.

    If you are just playing here, and not serious about facing ALL that was endured, by all means, banish me to wherever makes you comfortable. I have other venues to “answer” you….some better trafficked than this Blog. But if you are really writing with constructive purpose, if you are looking for some common place of understanding..put on your Big Boy pants and answer honestly.

    ~   ~   ~

    I don’t have the energy or interest, and certainly not the obligation, to have a dialog with everyone who shows up here with a chip on their shoulder. On the whole I’ve been open to criticism and contrary points of view, and I’ve spent quite a bit of time replying to comments that have been left here (in earlier threads as well as this one). A lot of time has gone into writing the posts, too—some of it spent thinking about things that you’ve convinced yourself I’m not willing to face up to. I’ve addressed many of the points you raise, and I’m not going to start at square one because you don’t have the interest or patience to read what I’ve already written. If you want to berate me, you’re right—there are more trafficed venues where you’ll be cheered on.
    

28. JF, A Reader | June 27, 2008 at 16:32 | Permalink

    I am neither interested in berating you nor being cheered on. I am interested in understanding . I give you credit, in fact, that you do make some attempt to address these painful issues….that you contend with some of the pain and resentment in our posts. I find that, when you move past the dismissive sarcasm…you display a sort of honor in your attempt.

    Can you not see that the unanswered , ignored, dismissed question of “WHY???” blocks any opportunity for decent folks to move forward?

    Do you understand the moral dishonesty of the Kathy Davidson”exaggeration”? She’s not some foriegn correspondent reporting on an event unwitnessed by her audience. How sickening as she preens and applauds her sensitivity. The weak denials and revisionist history do not work here. Widespread Lacrosse support in the early weeks! What a moral affront to push a lie making oneself a little hero in the mix!

    “Something happened here” but it manifested itself among the self-muzzled Duke faculty not the Lacrosse Team. It manifested itself in the lame excuses and outright lies that followed.

    I am not expecting you to have the full and final answers…but you know these people. What is your best guess why the silence was so pervasive? SO many strong, articulate, independent voices….. So many “individuals, as you say. How can it be that these boys were deemed day after day so unworthy of a public comment, or media column, any crumb of support… by each of these? Could no one address the absence of DNA in GENERAL, or the media farce IN GENERAL? Nothing?

    I cannot imagine such a silence could be imposed by any authority on such a large group from academia. The only sense I can make of it..is similar to the racial bias of 50 years ago..where “certain” folks were deemed not quite human enough that we need trouble ourselves with their pain. These kids and families were beneath your concern, your “listening.”

    Again, why would 88 faculty lend their names to an ad listening to the sociological problems of one set of students ON AN UNPROVEN ALLEGATION using language that would put the very freedom of other students at risk?

    Why did you decide to “take on” with long and detailed posts the SECOND Duke Prosecutor and NOT Nifong, the First.

    Help us understand.

    Would it be too politically difficult to have done the latter? I am curious what moved you to action in one instance and not another. Attacking KC and calling out Bill Anderson can hardly be unpopular among your colleagues. It doesn’t take much courage.

    All the chatter, and isms and academic prattle can not bandage the reality of the group silence here. Whether you choose to tackle these questions or not..I’m glad to have put them in front of you. I’m sorry that the pain here resonates so little with you that it does not move you to a true examination or the time and effort you gave to your anti-KC/sneering Liestopper posts. As you say, on this topic you have neither “energy or interest.”

    Maybe there’s a little bit of the answer in that.

    ~   ~   ~

    Interested or not, what you’re doing is berating me—look it up. And it’s not that I care at a personal level, but it’s not the starting point for any kind of debate or conversation that I want to have. I don’t fully understand the way other Duke faculty reacted to the incident (and since you don’t seem to have gleaned anything about my status at Duke from what I’ve written, I’ll just say that (a) at the time of the incident and into the fall all of my time and attention went into meeting a dissertation deadline, and the dissertation itself was my main focus until this past September, and (b) my position at Duke has always been part-time and, quite frankly, marginal). I have no short or easy answers to the things that have angered you, and no interest at all in discussing how (un)courageous I am or defending my choice to do this instead of that.

29. Robert Zimmerman | June 27, 2008 at 16:38 | Permalink

    Incidentally, I’ve emailed several commenters whose comments haven’t been cleared yet (including Bill about that OT question).

30. RedMountain | June 28, 2008 at 09:23 | Permalink

    I see a lot of whys in Joan’s post that I would like to address. Most of the Duke faculty (and students for that matter) didn’t come out on a side of innocence or guilt in the early going. The media was not interested in the middle ground and highlighted those that were outspoken on the case. I am sure that most adopted a wait and see approach (in respect to our justice system). They were bombarded by a prosecutor that insisted a crime occurred and many false and misleading news reports. Some (not all, in my opinion) of the so-called group of 88 did use this case to promote an agenda and the listening ad was flawed in the fact that it did (again my opinion) promote an opinion of guilt on the part of the Lacrosse players. I believe that the majority of the faculty were silent on the issue simply because they had not the slightest idea if an assault happened. The Lacrosse players did have a certain reputation (deserved or not) of wild parties and rowdiness. I am sure that many had doubts that these young men would be capable of doing something like what they were accused of but unfortunately, sometimes the best of kids from the best of families do things that are completely out of character. I am sure that many students and faculty had a lot of things going on and did not follow this case as closely as the members of some of the blogs like TalkLeft and Liestoppers.

    One of the other whys here concerns our host, RZ. If you have read his previous posts, his focus is different that that of the two boards that I mentioned. He has not attempted to come out on one side or the other as far as the case goes, he has focused on the blogs in relation to Duke and the Duke faculty. I see it as a fair attempt to be impartial despite the fact of his membership in that group. His main points of “attack” (as you describe it) regarding KC revolve around KC’s agenda and “attack” (as I see it) of a stereotyped group of certain faculty members not just at Duke but at a lot of major universities. He has not written about the pain and suffering of the falsely accused or the evil Nifong or corrupt LE in Durham because he is interested in writing on other subjects, not that he doesn’t agree with the players innocence. He is going to write about what he wants to (just as you do) and not as others would have him write. He has been critical of faculty members as well but has not ‘grouped’ them into a corner from which there is no possibility of debating the motive and meaning of certain actions and statements that were made. You may be waiting across that moat for him as well but he is not that knight in shining armor either.

    I don’t see that he has “called out” Bill Anderson. The fact that they don’t agree with a review of UPI is just that, a lack of agreement and a good debate (in my opinion). This topic and it’s many comments (mostly civil) seem to reflect that. Bill also seemed to indicate to me that I was ‘having fun” at his expense. That was not my intention, nor do I thing it was RZ’s intention.

    Slightly OT, Robert, but I do miss my discussions with JF. Thank you for the opportunity in providing this forum for comments. Any comments I have made about what my opinion of your motives are in writing as you do, are just that (my opinion).

    ~   ~   ~

    This is definitely an improvement on the stubborn and prickly answers I’ve been posting, and I’m happy to give you the chance to take up those old discussions again.

31. William L. Anderson | June 28, 2008 at 10:19 | Permalink

    In regards to the previous poster’s point on the Scottsboro Boys trials, we can say unequivocally that they were travesties of justice. Given the mentality that existed in places like Scottsboro in 1931, I can guarantee you that those defendants’ lives were in jeopardy not only from the state, but also from the mobs there.

    Having lived close to there for more than 30 years, I can attest to the mentality that once existed in places like Scottsboro. Furthermore, even the lead prosecutor at the end admitted that there was no rape, but insisted that the boys do time because of the fight on the train. A medical exam of Victoria Peterson found, at best, “non-motile” semen in her, which meant that her story could not have been true.

    The parallel I have drawn is with the cases themselves, not the attitudes of race. Now, in both cases, race played the major role in the attitudes of the people in Scottsboro and Durham, and I have no doubt that Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and David Evans were indicted because the black voters of Durham made it clear to Nifong that if he did not indict these “white boys,” he would not win the primary.

    Furthermore, Harris Johnson’s statement after the November 6 election was in line with what was uttered in Scottsboro at the time.

    In both cases, the townspeople believed the accusers because they wanted to believe them, not because of the evidence. That is a sorry fact of life. However, in the Scottsboro case, all of those young men served time in prison for this non-event, one for 20 years, while none of the Duke Three spent a day in jail, although they certainly were in peril of doing so.

    The system of justice is supposed to be able to separate facts from emotion, prejudice, and a rush to judgment. We assume — indeed, EXPECT — that prosecutors and police will follow procedures that will highlight the facts as they are, and not as certain people wished them to be.

    Such expectations never fit the actions of police and prosecutors in the Duke case, but that hardly is new. The prisons are full of men and women who have been railroaded by people who cared only for convictions, and not the truth.

    People who believe that the justice system should be about the truth need to speak out. The NAACP over the years has spoken out for the truth, but in the Duke case was one of the first entities to demand that truth be hidden. Like the people of Scottsboro, many people in Durham believed that they were entitled to a conviction not matter what the truth might have been.

    Truth cannot be about black or white or male or female or straight or gay. If we insist on making all of our institutions run according to “different truths for different groups,” then all is lost. We have no truth at all.

32. Debrah | June 28, 2008 at 13:27 | Permalink

    I am leaving a link to this post inside The Diva World to further illustrate how very illogical some other bloggers are anytime KC does anything outside what they view as “the box”.

    KC gets strong criticism from both sides—-the left and the right.

    Further testament to his independent brilliance.

    ~   ~   ~

    With comments to DIW on hold for a few days, Debrah is having a hard time, so I’ll go ahead and pass this on. I suppose that the remark that got her attention, from John in Carolina, might be a veiled jab at KC, but it’s also so much a part of the election-cycle routine of mindless hypocritical partisan hackery that it’s hard to take very seriously.
    

33. A Reader | June 30, 2008 at 14:55 | Permalink

    To Mark’s comments, I‘ve momentarily left the comfy confines of the “gated community” to crash the oh-so sterile and civilized little tete-a-tete here at the Ivory Tower. Nice to see you too.

    ….I’m a tad uncomfortable though, of course,…. impressed…. with all the high tone talk here of tribalism’s and tribalists, etc. etc. Easy to subtract out the real and lasting emotional ravages with all these academic abstracts. But I think some plain ole common sense needs to be applied too. That’s why Mark’s Faculty “benign neglect” theory does not ring true to me.

    First, I will admit to applying some “generalizations.” You may critcise, but, sometimes, especially when it comes to what kind of folks gravitate to what professions…I think some generalizing is okay . For example, if one’s idea of “roughing it” is the Ritz Carlton, one does not usual choose the rigors and lifestyle of a National Park Ranger. Likewise, extremely shy people with a fear of water do not train the be cruise ship social directors. There are certain personality characteristics and skill sets that send a person in certain “directions” career wise, wouldn’t you agree?

    In that way, I think most people who attain a teaching position at a prestigious University like Duke have some general qualities across the board in common. Like our Host, I believe most are articulate, opinionated and, by nature, enamored of sharing those opinions. These are often benchmarks of an effective “teacher.” Secondly, the attainment of such prestigious employ would hint at an exceptional ability of “communication.” Thirdly, I do believe most are intensely interested in their students and whatever might impact their students. .

    I suspect, as scholars, that most Duke Faculty read and read MUCH and often. And one might assume that if their workplace and their “town” were the ground zero for a intense national scandal, dominating every form of media….that we could safely generalize that MOST of these people would have more than a passing interest in keeping abreast of the general HIGHLIGHTS of the case (if not the minutiae.) I also suspect many prize their own intellectual “freedom” and ability to speak out as suits them.

    That is not to deny their individuality, of course. All this is to say that most enjoy “speaking out.” As quite a few did AGAINST the Lacrosse team..in class, in the newspapers, on television, in a printed ad. Then, most all “speaking” stopped. Odd, that.

    Now to this case, or Hoax, as we at LS like to call it. I view the actions and inactions of the Duke faculty a lot like the DNA evidence. Remember there was not JUST absence of Lacrosse DNA …there was ALSO the presence of other various male DNA. None of one; lots of the other. Nada vs. Rah-rah-rah! Well, the Duke faculty silence strikes me a lot like that. Outrage versus Out-to-Lunch. . The Big Squawk vs No Talk. “Listening” vs. “Not-Listening Anymore.”

    When , on an allegation and no evidence, this appeared to be a crime against a Black girl perpetrated by white Duke students, the rush to comment , to be in print on the topic was mind-boggling. You are correct that most “had not the slightest idea if an assault happened” but that did not dampen the rush to condemn. The email recruiting signatures for the Listening statement referenced the rush to get an ad out “about this case.” It would appear that, if they are truthful, some Faculty lent their names without understanding what would be written as the rush to get “on the record” ensued.

    WOW! Alrighty then. But then the absence of DNA was revealed.

    I will grant you that the Team had a reputation (deserved or not) for showing up on the party scene, but most educated folks understand DNA has a reputation for showing up in 30 minute brutal rapes that involve a woman’s every available orifice. Do you think the news of the absence of DNA or the implication of this discovery was lost on the Intellectuals employed at Duke? Did some still see a possible no DNA rape scenario? Did they not “GET IT?”Does Brodhead need to schedule a remedial summer science session? No matter WHAT Nifong was saying, THIS , folks, is what the SCIENCE was saying. NO RAPE.

    So… if there was no rape, then the CRIME was now one by a Black woman perpetrated on some of THEIR own white students.

    So what happened?

    Did we get a new round of op-eds,TV appearances, classroom lectures about False Accusation? Did we see new Listening statements, new outrage from the Articulate and Concerned and Opinionated Faculty of Duke? Somebody? Anybody? Did we?

    What does a “social Disaster” happening to a bunch of White Boys sound like at Duke? I CAN”T HEAR YOU????? Coupled with the cacophonous start to the case, where was the outrage now? No one had a topic, an interest to address? No one could find a theme?

    Jim Coleman spoke up (my respect for him remains immense.) Some other Prof put out a statement and mistakenly used the (“can-not-be-applied-to-whites-even if-swinging-from-tree”) word “lynching” and was beaten with the race stick back into submission and apology. How could there be so much benign “wait and see” silence NOW…when no one felt tempered to “wait and See” when the first accusation was made?

    No, Mark, the difference is just too extreme.

    I also do not buy into simple “benign neglect” simply because there were so many egregious elements to this case. So egregious, that EVEN IF Faculty were waiting to see if these kids were guilty…should have driven SOMEBODY here or there to opine BECAUSE THIS STUFF SHOULDN”T HAPPEN EVEN TO GUILTY KIDS. Can you imagine no one commenting if the races had been reversed? Be fair here…really? For example…NO COMMENT IF:

    1. Brodhead were considering letting an armed branch of the KKK on campus to interview Black students accused of a crime on a white girl?

    2. Local media had taken pictures of the Black students’ homes to show their “different-ness”, quoted neighbors who didn’t like them , used code words like “swagger” and “homeboy” (hooligan), and reinvented the accuser as the “Sister Survivor”, the sweet little white “VICTIM” (as they called her in the N&O) “new to dancing?

    3. A Sister Survivor Website filled with furious repitition of BLACK on WHITE crime and tying all that to the “guilt” of the untried Duke Black defendants was in sway?

    4. The arrest of Mr. Elmostafa after he abilbied one of the Black defendants?

    5. A respected mostly White organization ran a Case Description so filled with error and inaccuracy that it was SHAMEFUL and left it up for months after the case closed to influence anyone who might TRUST the integrity of that organization?

    6. A prosecution against these Black students so flawed that the Prosecutor eventually lost both his license AND his job. All happening, right there: your school, your town, your kids. YOUR DOORSTEP.

    7. Houston Baker’s “Farm animal” Email to Ben Dowd’s Mom. Did any of you read her Email that prompted that vitriol? It was kind, not confrontational. Can you imagine silence if a white Professor had sent that to a Black Mom in a reverse situation? Yet no faculty found need to address it.

    How could there have been almost a complete absence of comment, of caring, of involvement No, it’s too complete to be circumstantial. There had to be other factors, pressures, complexities at work. And they must be pretty powerful.

    The message: Feel Free to wail when it’s White on Black. Fold our hands and be silent when it’s Black (Crystal Mangum) on White (the Team)

    Mark, many people had “a lot of things going on” in those days. Time was found to try and help. Compassion compelled it. Outrage compelled it. Some faculty MADE TIME when they thought they had a White on Black crime here. Then, no interest.

    Was there no compassion or outrage once it became apparent that the victims were probably these white kids? The victimizer: a black Durham Stripper. Is there a certain “victim status” one must possess to be seen as human, to be cared about, in the way Duke faculty cared about Crystal Mangum and OTHER FAVORED students at the first?

    Is “skin hue” once more what determines whose kids are worth OR not worth our time? Didn’t folks march in the Old Days and every step was to stomp that kind of ignorance out? But I see it again. I see it in the “difference” of approach when the story of the crime changed. I see it in the lack of outrage or involvement to what was occurring all around their school once the “victims” were white. I see it in the lack of apology or even the decency of HONESTY in review….because these boys don’t count. I see it in the Oppressive Sounds of Silence among the Faculty at Duke.

    ~   ~   ~

    I’m guessing that the “other Prof [who] put out a statement and mistakenly used the (can-not-be-applied-to-whites-even if-swinging-from-tree) word ‘lynching’” is Steven Baldwin, but you’ve mixed up some details. He wrote about “tarring and feathering” some of his colleagues, and in reply Robyn Weigman wrote that “[b]eing tarred and feathered is the language of lynching.” I’ve written about the incident several times, most recently a few months ago when it became clear to me how little evidence and much faith is behind the story that he “was beaten with the race stick back into submission and apology.”

    Also, what in the world stops you (or anyone) from saying that a white person has been lynched, either literally or figuratively?

34. RedMountain | June 30, 2008 at 17:49 | Permalink

    Joan,
    You write beautifully (as usual) and your prose shows even in a comment like this one. Mine may be a common sense “Idiots guide to the Duke Lacrosse case” but that does not make it flawed. My opinion on the silence issue is that most in the Duke faculty were not going to rush to an opinion of guilt or innocence until they had all the facts. Most don’t mind having their voices heard on issues covering their area of expertise. The few that spoke out with their listening ad were in the minority and were using the case to promote an agenda. The leaders of Duke spoke out about cooperating with the investigation and letting the justice system sort it out. Most took that advice. Most believe our system worked despite a rogue prosecutor with the help of a few bad cops. Many in the Duke community don’t see the ‘frame’ or ‘hoax’ going much further than that and many in Durham see the many lawsuits as the players desire for money and payback for not doing something or speaking out about it. Some that are named in these lawsuits probably even believed the players were innocent from the beginning and are now facing an emotional and financial burdon in having to prove that they were not part of some consortium of conspirators.

    Duke University made some stupid mistakes in giving bad legal advice, giving away key card info without a court order, and in over-cooperating with Durham LE. Duke medical made a big mistake in letting a very inexperienced SANE nurse handle this patient. What would have happened early in the case if Brodhead backed the players version and stated that the DPD had it wrong? Or if Brodhead insisted that Duke police would be in charge of investigating an accusation by a student at another school against one of their own students? When that initial DNA report hit, should the mayor have come out and said, OMG, Nifong insists on continuing this case for political reasons?

    After that initial DNA report came out, there were plenty of folks speaking out on behalf of the players, and as more information came out the media started to focus more on probability of innocence. There was quite a bit of trash talk about the accuser, the prosecutor, and the Durham police and in my opinion, it exceeded the level of trash talk being thrown at the players just a few months into the case.

    The players put together a strong legal team and that team’s focus was to have the case dropped before it could get to trial. That was the goal and they accomplished that. Some feel that they were too conservative in their approach and took to long to accomplish that end. Others felt they had information regarding the ‘hidden’ DNA well before they
    indicated they had it and some question why one of the alibi’s was not made public.
    Many felt the defense team did not make an effort to speak to the higher ups in the Durham police department about the problems they were having with the investigation. And some felt that they overstated the chances of not getting a fair trial and made some unfair allegations against the Black communities view of this case in the change of venue motion.

    I have seen a good many opinions about Meehan’s role in this and my opinion is that he did nothing illegal and he gave as much of a report as he was required to, it was Nifong’s call as to the additional information and the expense involved in preparing a report with more information.

    I believe Duke settled with the three that were charged in this case because they did make some mistakes and felt that they should be compensated for it. I believe they will continue to fight the lawsuits brought by the uncharged players.

    As far as the Black on White vs White on Black handling of this case, I felt from the beginning this case could have been used as a starting point in a discussion about race and our justice system. Unfortunately, I believe both sides took issue early on with they way things were portrayed by the
    other and that led to some extreme emotions and stereotyping.

    There is more to say from both of us. Good to discuss things with you as well.
    All of this is really not on topic with the review or the review of the review, so to speak.

    My opinion, UPI (I did read it and even paid for a copy) makes the players seem all good and Durham, the DPD, the evil Nifong, and Duke University all bad. I think the real story is somewhere in between and has yet to be told.

    ~   ~   ~

    I don’t think there was going to be any on-topic discussion of this post anyways, and if there is it can go on the next post. I’m happy to let this exchange go on for a while. I’ll definitely read it even if I don’t write much.

    I will say that I like your last point, Mark. I can’t speak to UPI because I’ve only skimmed it, but in DIW not only is the sorting into good guys and bad guys too neat and complete, but there’s very little interest in anyone who isn’t firmly on one side or the other—which is to say, most everyone.

    I’ve just added a little note to the comment before this one, too.

35. Jim | June 30, 2008 at 18:14 | Permalink

    On the “Duke professoriate” and the apparent absence of nuanced treatment of them by DiW and others, I’d like to offer some observations. Certainly the minds and motives for all of the 88 (their “Listening” ad would be printed on April 6, 2006) cannot be definitively determined, but there is corroborative evidence for some. Three examples follow:

    • Houston Baker (one of the 88) had already released a public letter on March 29, 2006 denouncing the “abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence, and drunken white male privilege loosed among us” and made other similar statements,

    • William Chafe (one of the 88) had already published a column in the Duke Chronicle (March 31, 2006) that claimed that “the events that occurred on Buchanan Boulevard” were “part of a deep and troubling history” where “sex and race have always interacted in a vicious chemistry of power. Emmet Till was brutalized and lynched in Mississippi in 1954 for allegedly speaking with too easy familiarity to a white woman storekeeper”, and

    • Karla Hollaway (one of the 88) would make her position clear also when she posted on a Duke website “Coda: Bodies of Evidence” which included, “At Duke University this past spring, the bodies left to the trauma of a campus brought to its knees by members of the Duke University’s Lacrosse team were African American and women.” Her assertions went on at some length, but I believe the above excerpt to be typical.

    Other Duke faculty members not of the 88 would publish additional statements; some of which were cited in the change in venue motion. It is not provable that the earlier and widely-distributed 88’s statement(s) affected them, but I would not rule it out. Still, not all of the Duke faculty behaved “badly”. Professor James Coleman did not jump on the bandwagon at all. Professor Thomas Crowley would publish a suggestive, accusatory letter in the Herald-Sun on November 14, 2006, “Don’t be too quick to toss lacrosse case”. Professor Crowley would later publicly recant in another letter on December 1, 2006, including the statements, “I have subsequently been informed of errors in that letter. … I apologize for this and any other errors.”

    Professor Crowley showed great moral courage, and I applauded him then and still do today. I just wish I had a few score more reasons to clap my hands. I would guess many others feel similarly. Denials or obfuscations, such as I judged the “Clarifying Statement” to have been, were and remain insufficient for me to “grant them nuance” (my phrase), let alone applaud.

    (I can’t write as well as “A Reader” did in his comment (#33) to your previous post, but I went ahead anyway because I think my point is somewhat different. BTW, I tip my hat to you for letting that one through your filter.)

36. Bertie | July 1, 2008 at 03:17 | Permalink

    Okay, I spent far too much time reading all of this (to not comment) and I must give you credit for at times sounding reasonable. I even understand the smart*** remarks since I am prone to them myself.

    Ultimately it seems to boil down to your objection to people judging the gang of 88 (and there are actually more) as a group. Problem is they are a group. Whether they signed the LS or the CS or agreed with or defended those who did, they have a connection, something in common.

    Just as every one of us who voted for Bush has something in common. Not everything but something. For balance how about, every one of us who voted for Jimmy Carter had something in common.

    Now, I would like to try an analogy and ask was I wrong to judge the group. It was only a group of 3 but I think it still works.

    I went to high school in a small Southeast Texas town and we integrated my freshman year.

    To make a long story shorter I jump to senior year when a black girl came to school and told me what had happened on Saturday. I don’t know what she thought I would do about. Don’t know why she chose to tell me.

    She had asked to ride with three other girls in our class to take the ACT exam. She got ready and she waited but they never came to pick her up.

    I was only 17 and not nearly smart enough or nuanced enough to realize this was just “a typical manifestation of the poltical and social tribalism” that was all around us.

    I confronted each of the three, called them liars when they said they just forgot her. Told them they were disgusting (they could have had the decency to just tell her no) and they owed her the money she had lost on her registration fee.

    I doubt they ever gave her any money, I signed up for the ACT (I’d already taken the SAT for the college I planned to attend) and she and I took the ACT another day.

    Was I wrong to judge them as a group? Should I have only blamed and chastized the driver? Should I have made certain each of the three were aware that she was supposed to go with them? Or should I have only blasted the rider who I knew (from a different incident) refused to ride in the same vehicle as a black person? Should I have been more forgiving of the third girl who I knew was a follower, not a leader. Actually, a sweet girl who was just happy that popular people let her hang out with them.

    By your standards, you might say I was wrong. By mine, I disagree. What they did was wrong, very wrong (just as I believe the 88+ were/are wrong … Petters being the only one I can distinguish at all). Individual culpabilty was and is irrelevant.

    I still know all four of these women and have reasons to believe they would agree with me.

    ~   ~   ~

    I appreciate the effort you’ve made to try a more constructive approach. I’ll give it a try too.

    I don’t object to calling the 88 a group. The fact that they all endorsed the same controversial text makes them one, and as a group they’ve handled that controversy quite poorly, in my opinion. And it would be foolish (and pointless) to deny that they have a lot on common ideologically and politically. But the word “group” covers a lot of ground, and the way the term “Group of 88” is used in DIW seriously misrepresents the cohesiveness and significance of that collection of 88 people (more about that). KC believes that the LS says a lot about the 88 who signed it, including that they prejudged the truth of the rape allegations. I disagree, for reasons I go into here and Brian Leiter lays out here.

    My fundamental complaint, anyways, isn’t that the 88 are treated as a group, it’s that KC has gone after the “Group” like a prosecutor and a demagogue, determined to prove his case no matter what. That’s the point I try to make in this post. In this series of three posts I point out (to my satisfaction, if no one else’s) how shoddy his reasoning can be. My response to this comment summarizes some of the same points.

    I see big differences between your reaction to that “Group of 3,” and the DIW reaction to the “Group of 88.” You knew all three schoolmates personally and you shared a common social context with them—it seems to me that in the lacrosse case there’s a sense of proportion to the judgments passed by people who were on campus as things played out, a sense of proportion that’s often missing from judgments based on second- and third-hand information. And you confronted your group members personally, not with a 2-year-long campaign of demagoguery that turned them into poster girls for segregationism.

37. A Reader | July 1, 2008 at 08:13 | Permalink

    You say, Mark…”My opinion on the silence issue is that most in the Duke faculty were not going to rush to an opinion of guilt or innocence until they had all the facts.”

    Eighty eight were willing to “rush an opinion.”Mark. They have never apologized and one ( Davidson) was moved to swan about in print congratulating herself on her compassionate “listening” and recount how marvelous others think she is for participating. She and the 87 others never even offered the decency of some honesty in retrospect to these kids. How self-involved does one have to be to primp one’s academic reputation in the face of all this pain? The danger, real danger that those thoughtless PUBLIC comments by 88 DUKE Professors added to the situation of Collin, Reade and Dave are lost to her and her co-signees. Or perhaps, is the danger (because of who it targeted) of ….no consequence. Davidson is the cover-girl for the heartless cluelessness of the whole set …who could only “listen” to the pain of certain students… and have never acknowledged the other REAL pain THEY caused. NEVER. Is it because skin hue made certain pain so special, and made others a “So-what?”

    Address that please. Speaking as just a simple Mom…I wrote my sorrow about it many times but especially here:

    http://liestoppers.blogspot.com/2007/03/kimmy-factor.html

    Said more eloquently…“So the question is not whether we will be extremist but what kind of extremist will we be. Will we be extremists for hate or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice—or will we be extremists for the cause of justice? “ (Martin Luther King)

    You say: “Most don’t mind having their voices heard on issues covering their area of expertise.”
    So if someone is being railroaded in my community and the abuses are so obvious and egregious as this…if my area of expertise is 16th century British poets…I get a moral pass on getting involved? Is that the code we live by today.

    Once again…that goofy MLK was sure off the mark when he said:
    “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it. “
    Martin Luther King, Jr.”

    You say: “The few that spoke out with their listening ad were in the minority and were using the case to promote an agenda.”

    Yes. Yes. And Yes. And who in the Duke Faculty community had the courage to call them out on that? Who stood up to and rebutted language as in Jim’s quotes (thank you, Jim) Who spoke “TRUTH” to the power in the Duke Faculty ranks when:

    •Houston Baker (one of the 88) had already released a public letter on March 29, 2006 denouncing the “abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence, and drunken white male privilege loosed among us” and made other similar statements,

    •William Chafe (one of the 88) had already published a column in the Duke Chronicle (March 31, 2006) that claimed that “the events that occurred on Buchanan Boulevard” were “part of a deep and troubling history” where “sex and race have always interacted in a vicious chemistry of power. Emmet Till was brutalized and lynched in Mississippi in 1954 for allegedly speaking with too easy familiarity to a white woman storekeeper”, and

    •Karla Hollaway (one of the 88) would make her position clear also when she posted on a Duke website “Coda: Bodies of Evidence” which included, “At Duke University this past spring, the bodies left to the trauma of a campus brought to its knees by members of the Duke University’s Lacrosse team were African American and women.” Her assertions went on at some length, but I believe the above excerpt to be typical.

    “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. “
    Martin Luther King, Jr.

    You say: “The leaders of Duke spoke out about cooperating with the investigation and letting the justice system sort it out. Most took that advice. “

    Again, just a a Mom observing all this I gave my opinion here:

    http://liestoppers.blogspot.com/2008/02/best-for-duke.html

    But , Mark, THINK…in the face of NO DNA and an investigation and a prosecution so flawed that the prosecutor lost his license and his job, Duke Leaders “cooperated.” THEY COOPERATED??? What powerful forces were at work here that demanded silence and “cooperation.” Even if it BROKE THE LAW? What is going on here? What is the FEAR?
    Is this a little historical bounce back to Nazi Germany?….how comforting.

    “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. “
    Martin Luther King, Jr.

    You say: “Most believe our system worked despite a rogue prosecutor with the help of a few bad cops.”

    Mark, Nifong had the “help” of Patrick Baker who lied to the Press that Crystal had only told one consistent story. He had the help of the media who re-invented her and smeared the team. He had the help of Tara Levicy’s superiors who never spoke up that there was no “blunt-force” trauma.” He had the help of the “off-the-record” SHAMELESS quotes from Duke that reporters are now (in THEIR disgust) willing to divulge. He had the help of the NCNAACP who kept that screed on their website long after the case died. He had the help of The Duke clergy and Durham clergy who excoriated these “racist” kids. He had the help of everyone so offended by slurs in response to slurs…that they thought THREE non-involved kids should spend thirty years in jail to assuage THEIR dignity. He had the help of every Durham citizen who voted for him as his excesses were in plain view and the help of every Duke Faculty member who stood silent…. not involved, cooperating, “waiting:….

    “Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice, and… when they fail to do this purpose they become dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.
    Martin Luther King, Jr.

    Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’
    Martin Luther King, Jr.”

    You say: “Many in the Duke community don’t see the ‘frame’ or ‘hoax’ going much further than that and many in Durham see the many lawsuits as the players desire for money and payback for not doing something or speaking out about it.”

    I had a few opinions in a reply to Barry Saunders here:
    http://liestoppers.blogspot.com/2007/09/joan-foster-comes-out-swinging.html

    The lawsuits are about accountability. It’s about who did what and how …and that exposure serving as an education in prevention. No one wishes to be accountable here. THEY ALL MUST BE. Let’s look at how a frame is built. Let’s look at the new biases and racism that fueled this and allowed Nifong to “play” a community into electing him even as his excesses and abuses were OBVIOUS.. I wrote long ago, that the tragedy here is that this should have been an “AHA!” moment …when the affluent white community painfully faced what most often occurs to folks other than themselves….to minorities and the disadvantaged. It should have been such a moment to move forward in unity. NO ONE SHOULD STAND TRIAL FOR AN ALLEGATION WITH NO EVIDENCE…NO MATTER HOW ODIOUS HE MAY SEEM TO YOU.But the poorest aspects of human nature decided to hijack that opportunity. The lawsuits will be stunning in what they expose. The discovery will be shamefully illuminating.

    There is moral and legal ROT here and you cannot stick pink paint on it, Mark, and say it’s pretty. We have to expunge it, examine it, learn from the past…reaffirm the “moral foundations” and “precious values” That SHOULD have put a brake on all this. We need to start working TOGETHER for the world MLK had in mind…not replacing new biases with old…the post-racial world not the Payback world. If folks don’t start treating Hooligans and Homeboys all the same…in a generation or two, todays powerful VICTIM clas will have created another…as angry and vengeful as they. The cycle will never end.

    “If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values - that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control.
    Martin Luther King, Jr.”

    P.S. To our host. Numerous times, throughout this case, I was told in comments, that I had “no right” to quote MLK. Interesting, no? A sign of the times?

    ~   ~   ~

    I think we’d all be better off if we stopped telling other people what they have a right to say. I think it seriously trivializes King’s message, though, to quote him so self-righteously on the basis of concerns that are awfully narrow, no matter how human—that seem at this point to have lapsed into something more like a vendetta.

    There was a response to Houston Baker’s letter—a pretty forceful one from provost Peter Lange.

38. A Reader | July 1, 2008 at 08:40 | Permalink

    To our host: thank you for correcting my error. It seems to be that though you put copious amounts of time in composing rebuttals to KC, and, busy as he is, he DOES address you points…you, when confronted with something you can’t answer…nibble around the edges factually, duck and move on.

    I point this out because obviously you are an intelligent. articulate man and I would be honored to hear your respoinses to a simple Mom like myself.

    If the circumstances I described in my post (Number 33) were reversed…would so many Faculty at Duke had no comment?

    What is YOUR feeling about the “silence.”

    Let’s say YOU and your children move into my gated community. There is vandalism and your little ones are falsely accused. Neighbors are picketing your house. You are afraid, rightfully for your kids…and traumatised by the outpouring of your neighbors bile. They print an ad in the WEEKLY Shopper thanking the protestors for not waiting to call out your kids. They look at your kids and see all the need to know.

    What would you expect of me , just a decent HUMAN inthat circumstance? Can I tell you I was too busy? Work was SUCH a stress? I was waiting for information. ALLEGATION, NO EVIDENCE.

    See the neighbors talking on the local news about your kids. They are “homeboys.” They “swagger.”

    What would you just hope, just hope, in reason and decency I might do?

    ~   ~   ~

    For what it’s worth, I’ll explain a little bit about why I shy away from the kinds of questions you’re asking. Unlike many of the people expressing their strong opinions about what happened at Duke, what I say could have real consequences for me. As various cynical commenters have pointed out, the consequences could actually be good—some kind of reward for my diligent work as an apologist. That’s hardly the only possibility, though. I’m way down at the bottom of the faculty hierarchy—I don’t have tenure and I never will. That’s one reason that most everything I write about the case is closely tied to other texts—to DIW, to things written by or about Duke faculty, etc. I try to be consistent about that across the board, but there’s no question that when it comes to people at Duke I’m extra careful—I stick to what I feel is constructive criticism that doesn’t involve a lot of speculation about motives or character.

    If I did try to explain the behavior of “so many Faculty at Duke” I would become a “Group apologist” for sure. So instead of giving you hedged answers, here are links to a few of the things I’ve written that connect to your questions and concerns:

    • Potbangers (especially this part)
    • Perfecting and listening (especially here and here)
    • Symmetry and the lack of reflection
    • Black, public intellectuals
39. Locomotive Breath | July 1, 2008 at 14:10 | Permalink

    the old forum imploded a couple months ago

    What a mendacious choice of words. The old forum did not collapse from within. It was intentionally and maliciously destroyed by a hacker who managed to get a privileged login. Which goes a long way to explain why the new forum is being very careful who is let in.

    ~   ~   ~

    I don’t have enough solid information to be “mendacious” about what happened to the LS forums.

40. dgannon | July 1, 2008 at 14:39 | Permalink

    It’s not really necessary to possess great writing skills to cover this kind of material. It was a revelation to me to read the things said by some of the professors in explaining how there could be a rational expectation of such barbaric behaviour from Duke students. The concept of the “other” was bandied about in scholarly terms like some really weird distortion of French ideas oddly applied in some universal fashion to the American landscape. I myself, did some very successful time at the Sorbonne but I never took them seriously! Apparently, lots of my generation did.
    I just don’t think this case is so complicated.
    There were students charged with a crime that was never committed. There were teachers who acted as though that crime were proven without having any evidence as to that fact beyond a charge made and the decision of the state to prosecute. Anyone who thinks they were harmed can sue, including all the people who signed the letters in question and the other side can settle or go to court or counter-sue. That’s the system.

    There is a very interesting question here about the relationship between students and teachers in the University of today and between the University and the parents who pay the tuition of a child of majority age.There is some confusion among the parties as to what that relationship entails-and what it ought to entail.I would like to see some research to determine if anyone is on the same page along the lines of “Can this marriage be saved”?He says, she says,…….
    I would also posit that the University no longer serves as a center of learning but as a clearing house that determines what economic and social class this new generation will enter and this is producing a lot of tension as the power relationship changes between the University, the student and the teacher. Those who think of themselves as powerless have moved to positions of peculiar power in the demographics where getting into a “good” college is so fundamental to surviving in the work world. Does this affect the teacher
    student relationship and if so in what ways? Is it useful, is it not? Does more or less learning occur ? Does it matter? Why do people get grades in humanities courses anyway-it’s not like they can kill anyone if they didn’t go to all the Anthropology lectures.

    ~   ~   ~

    “I would also posit that the University no longer serves as a center of learning but as a clearing house….” Don’t you think “the University” can be more than one thing, and always has been more than one thing? Universities have been playing a big role in determining economic and social class for several generations, at least. I’m sure the issues you touch on here have been kicked around quite a bit in the blogosphere and the press. One of my recent posts looks at one thread of the debate.
    

41. BeMused | July 1, 2008 at 17:39 | Permalink

    It is ironic that Mark R and Joan Foster are having this conversation here and not on LieStoppers or TalkLeft.

    Has anyone ever gotten to the bottom of what exactly happened to the LieStoppers forum? I know the party line is that the forum was hacked. Where’s the proof of this crime? Have arrests been made, or was the story of a hack just another hoax, now woven into the fabric of the LieStoppers metanarrative?

    ~   ~   ~

    It is ironic, which seems like a pretty good reason to let it happen. I also wonder about what happened to the old forums, but I don’t expect to ever know. Anyone who wants to scratch their heads over the possibilities can follow the links in the first paragraph for one side and then check out the batcave for another. I’m likely to be pretty heavy-handed about any attempts to sort it out here, though.

42. m.d. | July 1, 2008 at 21:23 | Permalink

    Hi Robert, one factual point: There were actually 89 Duke faculty members who signed the “concerned faculty” statement, not 87. Almost everyone including Prof. Johnson has used the incorrect number of 87 when discussing the January 2007 clarifying letter. The 87 number was first used in a News & Observer article entitled, “Duke post seeks to defuse ‘88’ ad” dated January 17, 2007. It is unclear if the reporter just miscounted or if two Duke faculty members added their names to the list shortly after the article was written.

    It looks like 62 members of the 89 “concerned faculty” had also signed the Group of 88 “Listening Statement,” that is a retention rate of 70.45% (62/88) . Therefore, twenty-six members of the Group of 88 did not sign the clarifying letter as “concerned faculty.” One of them Houston Baker (G88 member) had left Duke for Vanderbilt in May 2006. So obviously he wasn’t around to join the new initiative. Is it possible that a few others (who were visiting, retired, on vacation, or on sabbatical) were not available to confirm their April 2006 position in early to mid-January 2007?

    Two members of the Group of 88 and also the Group of 89/Concerned Faculty, Louise Meintjes and Paul Berliner, were listed as being in the Music department. I don’t know if you have already addressed this, but do you have any personal or professional associations with them or any other of the G88/89 members that might be perceived as a conflict of interest in your analysis of their actions.

    Appreciate your attempts to analyze the undercurrents that buffeted the Duke lacrosse case. It’s the ultimate worms nest isn’t it?

    ~   ~   ~

    Thanks for that correction to my correction of Jim’s comment. My guesstimate that 2/3 of the 88 signed the “concerned faculty” (CF) statement holds up pretty well. Another detail that gets lost in the shuffle is that a handful of the 88 weren’t faculty—there are a few nurses and at least one student and one administrator.

    As to “conflict of interest,” what I said in my first post about the case was “I haven’t been involved in any faculty or institutional response or discussion of the case, and none of the people at Duke who have played a public role in the controversies are friends or acquaintances of mine.” I believe the only person I’ve written about who I’ve actually met is Mark Anthony Neal—in the past few months I’ve spoken to him in passing a few times because our daughters are involved in some of the same school activities. The music department is small, so of course I know the two colleagues you mentioned.

    The response I just gave to “A Reader” applies here, too. My interpretation is definitely colored by my general sense of what goes on at Duke, and what I write about is somewhat constrained because I’m part of the community and don’t particularly want to poison my own well. But I’m writing about the same texts as everyone else, and I don’t claim to have any special inside scoop about them. What I conclude from those texts either makes sense or it doesn’t.

43. RedMountain | July 2, 2008 at 07:52 | Permalink

    Joan,
    Perhaps one of your own posters, Duke parent 2004, gave you a response based on reality and not wishful thinking. My opinion is I was not surprised at all that an uncivil war of words did not develop between the ‘hard sciences’ and certain members of other departments. Should we condemn them for being what they are. Most took the advise of Brodhead and others in the administration of Duke.

    The truth of Duke faculty silence is, in my opinion, not an indicator that they had an opinion of guilt early in the case. Having been raised by a college professor, I can tell you that one of your own nailed it in better words than I can hope to give you.

    ~   ~   ~

    If you have a link to the post I’d be interested to read it.

44. A Reader | July 2, 2008 at 09:04 | Permalink

    Well, you have given an honest reply. I respect you for it. Truly.

    Honesty, sensitivity from those who demand sensitivity, and some true acceptance of responsibility would have gone a long way to dampen down emotions in this case.

    I can understand your position…I have been there myself. Over the years, we all encounter folks who have our admiration in so many ways; who are generous and kind to us and ours; who, perhaps hold some sway in our personal or professional lives. Then comes the testing..the racist joke, the overt discrimination, the biased situation that our conscience says demands OUR confrontation. We ask ourselves…do we REALLY need to speak up? What does this one situation really matter? He is otherwise such a “great person!” Why me?

    If I always, always passed the test myself, I’d lecture you..but honesty won’t allow that. But, Professor Zimmermann, I do look back happily at the certain moments when I did rise, speak up or walk out. But, lest you think me the Kathy Davidson of the Liestopper crowd, let me say that doing the decent thing, the right thing should not be a matter for self-adoration…just the opposite. I hope all of us, when we hold back, for whatever “good-for-us” reason… at least privately feel shame.

    I hope some of the 88 feel shame.

    Remember When Prof. Baldwin was chastised for his insensitive racial language. (Have you found anything similar addressing the “farm animal” Email to Tricia Dowd from Houston Baker? Nothing? Really? No one at all offended? No one?) Remember Prof. Baldwin’s apology: He said…

    In particular, in the next-to-last paragraph of the editorial I used some terms that I have now learned have racial connotations for some. I certainly did not intend them that way. … […]
    
    

    I am very sorry that my naivety has offended any members of the Duke community. That was entirely unintentional and I should have been more careful in my selection of words.

    Baldwin went BACK into print to apologize, didn’t he?. Doing so, he showed some sensitivity to a “racial” connotation he may have inadvertently used with the term “tar and feather.” He goes so far as to say..”I should have been more careful in the selection of my words.”

    Now, not to lessen the pain of reading the words “tarred and feathered” and the ensuing angst it might have caused in some…but this wasn’t about THIRTY YEARS IN JAIL on a false accusation, was it? The misinterpretation of his words might have driven some faculty to a second martini, but not driven the outrage that might put them IN JAIL!!!

    Yet, Baldwin went back into print, accepted responsilbility and apologized.

    Suppose the “Clarifying letter” had used Baldwin’s letter as a model. Suppose it had just stated the wish that “Other language had been used.” Suppose it had acknowledged that those unfortunate words had unadvertently added to the burden the Lacrosse team had to bear at a very dangerous time for them.

    Suppose it had shown just a portion of the humility and humanity that Baldwin showed to his offended colleagues. Suppose the offended, the “sensitive” could pull the mote out of his own eye and feel BEYOND themselves and certain students with favored skin hues.

    Instead

    There have been public calls to the authors to retract the ad or apologize for it, as well as calls for action against them and attacks on their character. We reject all of these,” the letter stated. “We think the ad’s authors were right to give voice to the students quoted, whose suffering is real. We also acknowledge the pain that has been generated by what we believe is a misperception that the authors of the ad prejudged the rape case.

    Unlike Baldwin, they acknowledge but take no responsibility. The “pain” is all the fault of “misperception.”not anything THEY did.

    Would they have accepted with grace such pomposity in Baldwin’s reply?

    Professor Lee D. Baker wrote:

    We had a long discussion about what the word ‘regret’ means, and philosophy professors weighed in and we had a whole range of very detailed discussions in terms of the etymology of specific words. We were disappointed people did not understand the intention — it was never to rush to judgment, it was about listening to our students who have been trying to make their way in a not only racist and sexist campus, but country.

    So with an allegation and nothing more, this “sensitivity” lead them to sign their names to an ad “thanking the protestors” for “not waiting.” and PILE UP all of our nation and Duke’s racial and social problems on the shoulders of the suspected students!!

    As if the jeopardy, REAL JEOPARDY, of students trying to make their way through a corrupt and frenzied Durham justice system needed to be secondary to addressing JUST AT THAT TIME, the racist and sexist anxieties of others!

    But, I’m off my topic here. So much might have been diffused with a little humility, sensitivity and remorse. We all make mistakes. Old hurts, old loyalties, fear, outrage…hey, who hasn’t let all that obscure from us a larger picture? Who hasn’t “emoted in haste? (yes, me!)

    But, IMO, the blow-off reply of the Clarifying letter,…. the self-righteous, pomposity and insensitivity of it, the denial, the refusal to apologise (from people of an ideology that seems ALWAYS to be demanding apologies of others) ….was another missed moment to move forward to something better here. The “tribalists” ( as you call them) just hardened up against the other, creating new wounds and war stories…. that will be repeated around the campfires that keep us separated for many more moons ahead.

    Thanks for your honesty and the decency of your reply. But don’t try to monopolize MLK. His words, those quotes are mine too…in private ways that I will not demean to “make a point.”on the Internet. So quit that.

    ~   ~   ~

    There’s a lot here that I agree with. You can really see from what happened in January 2007 that the wagons were circled at Duke. I agree that the “clarifying” letter (aka “concerned faculty” statement) is a big disappointment. It reads like it was written by a committee that whittled it down to bland generalities. The quote from Baker backs that impression up. Earlier in the month, Karla Holloway made her dramatic exit from the CCI committee and Kathy Davidson wrote her editorial. To be honest, I don’t see what’s so bad about Davidson’s editorial as a whole, but misrepresentation of history at the beginning of it is hard to understand or excuse.

    And Baldwin’s quick and gracious apology was a model of how that kind of situation should be handled. It’s a shame that instead of much needed debate and dialog, the exchange between Baldwin and Weigman degenerated into recriminations about whose rhetoric was most outrageous and uncalled-for. I think both sides share the blame for that. Baldwin’s frankness and quick turnaround isn’t something that’s going to come from a loose coalition of 88 people (least of all if they’re college professors), but some individuals in the group could have risen to the occasion more like Baldwin did.

    As to MLK, I couldn’t possibly monopolize him even if I wanted to. You raised the issue of how people react when you quote him, I told you how the quotes strike me in the context you were using them. If you’re going to quote him freely, you need to have the courage of your convictions. People can and will disagree with you about whether King’s words apply in the way you’re using them—that’s how debate works. But nobody can dictate what meaning or significance they have for you.

    I compacted the comment a little by trimming the Baldwin quote (the link brings up the whole thing), and did a little formatting while I was at it.

45. Locomotive Breath | July 2, 2008 at 11:13 | Permalink

    I don’t have enough solid information to be “mendacious” about what happened to the LS forums.

    It is ironic, which seems like a pretty good reason to let it happen. I also wonder about what happened to the old forums…

    You suggest it was done by LS itself but you “don’t want to sort it out here” which presumably means you will squash any comments to the contrary. Months of work ferreting out details and record keeping gone in a flash but you want to believe that the old LS site destroyed itself on purpose? If you had been involved with site on a daily basis or had access to some of the private emails that went back and forth, you’d know better. Your admitted ignorance on the matter didn’t keep you from characterizing the event now did it? But you go ahead and keep on being a slave to your metanarrative.

    For what it’s worth, I’ll explain a little bit about why I shy away from the kinds of questions you’re asking. Unlike many of the people expressing their strong opinions about what happened at Duke, what I say could have real consequences for me….

    Well, well, an honest admission that fear of retribution has silenced you when talking about the actions of your colleagues. I guess that’s progress. But haven’t you been saying that no such effect exists and that it couldn’t possibly have anything to with why more mainstream faculty didn’t speak out against the abuses of the few?

    ~   ~   ~

    Right. I should have written all this anonymously so I could say whatever I wanted and no one could get me for it.

46. Locomotive Breath | July 3, 2008 at 11:13 | Permalink

    Well we would be genuinely interested in your unfettered opinion.

    ~   ~   ~

    That’s well said. Thank you.

47. A Reader | July 3, 2008 at 17:26 | Permalink

    Professor Zimmerman…thank you for re-formatting my post. I don’t know what my posting problem is…but I appreciate it.

    I be;ieve this is the post to which Mark refers:

    “Joan,

    There is no excusing the conduct of the Duke faculty in the rape hoax. But there may be some helpful contributions to explaining it. The italicized text below is from a post I left at “Durham-in-Wonderland” in May of 2007.

    In the mid 1970s I taught political science for a year at Carleton College in Minnesota. When hired, I knew that my appointment was good for only that year, as the husband-wife team whom I replaced would likely return from their leave, which they spent teaching at another college.

    Soon I found myself in controversy with another member of my own department, Paul Wellstone, later to become the most liberal member of the U. S. Senate. At Carleton, Wellstone carried the banner of radical students and faculty. Although we maintained cordial relations, the shells we lobbed at each other in the student newspaper left no doubt of our ideological differences. Throughout that year, “mainstream” members of the faculty privately encouraged me to “keep at him.” But never once did any of them line up beside me in a public forum. Perhaps they understood that because I’d be leaving soon I could strap on the armor without fear of being shunned forever after by the bien-pensants on campus.

    With few exceptions (Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, Jeremy Rabkin at Cornell, for example), college professors of traditional or conservative bent will never be mistaken for soldiers. Many of them are simply too involved in their research (that is, the real deal rather than the bilge produced in “angry studies”) to engage the anti-intellectuals who in the past forty years have found sanctuary in our elite colleges and universities. Many professors in engineering and the hard sciences will privately snarl at their ideologically besotted colleagues in the humanities but will only reluctantly challenge them publicly. After all, they’ve seen what happens to the Steve Baldwins in their ranks. I suspect many of them fear that their own plain English will be derided by obscurantist ideologues as hopelessly unsophisticated, as incapable of addressing the “secret racism” and other chimeras posited by the Grant Farreds who have corrupted not only their own universities but also the language of discourse itself.

    Since my own disappointing experience of more than thirty years ago, that portion of the liberal-arts professoriate not enamored of the race, class, gender theory of everything has seen its numbers dwindle—and therefore has become even more chary of resisting the infamy. I have received e-mail from some very consequential members of the Duke faculty who leave no doubt about their disgust at the spectacle. Yet, they refrain from publicly upbraiding the barbarians in their midst. In these matters, the ideologues and the moral exhibitionists, more accustomed to engaging in polemics and the stampede, will always seem unpredictably dangerous to their more thoughtful and restrained colleagues.

    You have raised the central question: at what point does decency itself require taking up the sword? Alas, the answer is not an easy one for folks temperamentally more disposed to defining “regret” than to avoiding it. In some (perhaps not useful) ways, the conduct of the Duke faculty these past two years instantiates the hoary adage that more pain and suffering in the world results from indifference and timidity than from malice and bellicosity. At least I hope so. . . .

    Dukeparent2004

48. A Reader | July 3, 2008 at 17:57 | Permalink

    I grew up in a time when people were taught to debate. You prepared your ideas; your “opponent”… his. Along the way, you conceded where necessary and accepted concession where appropriate. But it was always about a better understanding of ideas, about opening your mind, not eviscerating your opponent personally. To intellectually defend a point and then to have to yield was… not a loss, but a gain in perspective…a refinement of ideas that led to a mutual understanding and appreciation of another’s viewpoint. But honesty was required and a humility that allowed one to reassess, to concede. No side was allowed a “trump card” to be played when his debate response came up short.

    Whatever. “I grow old. I shall wear my stockings rolled.”

    You don’t like the word “metanarrative” so I’ll skip it, but there seems to be a foggy belief system clouding academia these days that demands a purging of any ideas that don’t fall into some party line. And I mean PURGING. No debate. Get those ideas OUT OF HERE. Likewise certain ideas spouted by certain people with certain unassailable “status” are just…untouchable. I think a slight revision of Professor Neal’s term … “Thugintellectual” fits well here. In the Thugintellectual world , Thugs (of all hues) cannot share “turf.” They brook no debate; nope, they want to DEBASE any one and anything not wearing the “Gang (of 88?)” colors. They carry concealed “code words” and high-powered “trump cards” they may brandish at any time that they feel intellectually threatened. They shout down speakers; silence the non-initiated who hang in the academic doorways and should know better than to get involved. It works, but let’s just say, a lot of us in the neighborhood see them for the lightweight bullies they are.

    All this “Thugintellectual” macho strikes me as a manifestation of fear or insecurity. Because if the “rival” ideas are so wrong, why the need to bully them out of the neighborhood? Because, there’s no better way to kill bad ideas (if you think they are) than to debate them with your better ideas. Just bloody the street with them…if you can. But you must, of course, first let them share the street corner or the podium with you…and must have honesty and lay down your automatic… umm-m-m… trump cards.

    There really is a proliferation of trump cards these days, especially among academics and politicians. The Trump card not only obscures any oppositional point, muddies any moral point, it flips the conversation to whatever works for the Trumper. The big trump card in this case, of course, was “Racism.” Reading the comments under a post, I often thought of that comedian who does the “Redneck” routine. With modifications, he could have gotten great mileage out of this case:

    How to know if you’re a Racist?

    1. You don’t believe a thirty minute all-orifice rape can be achieved leaving no DNA? Then-n-n: YOU’RE A RACIST!

    2. You don’t believe three kids should stand trial on an allegation and no evidence? Then-n-n YOU’RE A RACIST!

    3. You think the NCNAACP website “case description” is outrageous? Then-n-n YOU’RE A RACIST!

    It must be an exhilarating power to have a big buzz word that can give you a “PASS GO!” in any intellectual argument you are losing. More and more that important word seems to be wasted that way. Folks who really, really should protect, honor and use that word sparingly…. and with respect and meaning…throw it around like paper confetti. After awhile it will have about as much weight and sting as confetti. From the mayor of Detroit to the mayor of Baltimore now, to folks of all colors all over this case…the extravagant use of this word by those in a verbal or legal corner was and is so obvious ..it borders on amusing. Except it’s an important word and we still have need of it….if the poor exhausted thing can still be saved.

    @@@@@@@

    Thanks for the link to Professor Neal’s website. I actually found a girlfriend there who thinks like me! Anyway, remember my (always unanswered) questions… posted before, asking if FACULTY SILENCE would have greeted each of the outrages that these Lacrosse kids endured…. if their skin hue had been different? Again…just to review….imagine…some white faculty member telling a distraught Black student’s mother that her kid is a “farm animal.” Or Brodhead dickering as to whether to allow armed KKK members on campus to interview accused Black students? Wanted posters with 46 Black faces all over campus? Nifong’s hinky prosecution tactics? Intimidation of witnesses?

    I think (having read more of your posts) …that whether you will admit it or not…you know the answer is “No.” Every one of that loose coalition of 88 knows the answer is “No.” Mark knows the answer is “No.”And all this “straw man” nonsense…come on….each and every one of those incidents would have been a BARN BURNER if the races were reversed. We can play games here, but the same “loose coalition” that fell over themselves to get something in print on the Lacrosse case would have been in full raging Rumpelstiltskin mode on any ONE of those points!

    Come on, dear Host, we KNOW YOU KNOW.

    This is what makes their SILENCE so revealing…so illuminating…so offensive….so racist. (and I’m using the word with care)

    @@@@@@@@@@@@@

    Anyway…While on Prof Neal’s Blog , I found a piece by Stephanie Dunn. It said, in part…

    “So, let me get this straight. If you’re a big shot Professor at Duke University with a rep for being “politically correct”, you can defame the character of a whole group of young men and in effect a whole race and class of young men because you’re protected by the leftist ideological racy intellectual thing? And if you’re a big University President somehow not in charge, later issue a hey-Duke-is-sorry-but-we-don’t-exactly-control-the-insults-false accusations and-insinuations-of-our-faculty.”

    Okay,I’m kidding… she didn’t say THAT…she said THIS about the Imus incident.

    “So, let me get this straight. If you’re a Hall of Fame Broadcaster with a rep for saying the ‘politically incorrect’, you can defame the character of a whole group of young women and in effect a whole race of women because you’re protected by the white male racy commentator thing, right? If you’re the big network somehow not in charge, quickly issue a hey-MSNBC-is-sorry-but-we-don’t-directly-own-the-radio personality-or-show declaration. “

    @@@@@@@@@@@

    See, Ms. Dunn and I are right there on the same street corner, or page, whatever. We are outraged by the casual cruelty, the de-personalization, the recklessness of words and phrase. Some thought they were being funny; some thought they were proving a point. Some were laughing; some claimed to be “listening.” In both cases, careless words rebounded on others. Some gave a false impression of lovely young women ; some aided a false accusation and legal jeopardy of innocent young men. Some had big words; both had BIG egos. Ms. Dunn decries the confidence of those who do such things with ” blissful ease and with no expectation of severe consequence or sustained public censure. ” Uh-huh.
    Of course, yes, there are differences in the two “cases.”. The Rutgers girls attended no offensive party. Imus’ words were an unprovoked ignorant attack. Granted. On the other hand, Imus was fired and discredited and exposed as a dope…whereas Collin, Reade, and Dave will have to shoulder that infamy of “thank you for Not Waiting” and “Something Happened” for the rest of their lives.

    And it wasn’t ONE incident, one op-ed, one TV appearance, one interview, one letter-to-the-Editor, one listening statement……it was the culmative effect of many, by people they knew, who knew them …repeated …over many months.

    And Imus groveled. Duke’s loose coalition never even apologized. Imus was fired; the 88 are professionally flying high. On that, there is no…debate.

    ~   ~   ~

    This comment was originally attached to the next entry, but I moved it back into this thread, which seems like the right place for it.

    There’s some interesting stuff here. I’m often struck when I read complaints from the other side at how much they sound like my own complaints. When it comes to debates that have been purged of unacceptable ideas, for instance, it seems to me that the performance has been consistently dismal on all sides. I have a hard time believing that the race-card-playing leftists stand out from everyone else.

    I think what you say about value of honest debate in the first paragraph is exactly right. A while back I wrote about an article by Alan Kors that starts out making much the same point, and making it eloquently—the scholarly ethos he learned and wants to pass on values the open-minded dialog and debate between diverse perspectives, sharpening ideas across the board. Then he gets around to the mealy-mouthed professors of “oppression studies.” They don’t seem to have any perspective—not any that Kors cares to take seriously, anyway. All they have is bias. It’s a refined version of an attitude I come across again and again—you can’t debate with those dopes in “angry studies,” they’ll just call you a racist, and they’re idiots anyways. What a cop-out!
    

    I agree that the charge of racism is thrown around gratuitously, to the point of trivializing the word. And I agree that it played like a trump card to cut people down or shut them up, a practice I have no tolerance for. I’m mystified that the charge seems to strike you and Bill Anderson and, it seems, quite a few others like a lightning bolt. Depending on the source and the context, it could definitely hit hard, like if someone loudly called you out as a racist in room full of strangers (I mean a real room, not a virtual one). But I don’t know why you’d take anyone seriously who labelled you (or whoever else) a racist for the three reasons you list. It’s also not clear to me where I’d go on the web to find those kinds of answers. The only forum I can think of offhand is the Duke Chronicle, where I’ve come across comment threads that seem to be equal-opportunity rhetorical cesspools.

    Your reworking of Dunn’s comment is clever, and it makes a good point. In quite a few more ways than you mention the parallels aren’t perfect, though. For instance 88 people is different from 1 person, a college president doesn’t have nearly the latitude to fire or discipline that a network executive has, Imus was broadcasting far and wide on the public airwaves, while much of what’s held against Duke faculty (especially the “listening” statement) was directed to people in their own community. And when it comes to the real-life consequences of race and gender stereotyping, white men are still far more likely to benefit from it than be harmed by it while for black women it’s still the opposite.

    Listing those things puts me in touch with some of the reasons I avoid trying to explain, much less rationalize, the “Group’s” perspective on the controversy. Things look pretty simple to you, and to take the other side is to keep coming back with “well, it’s actually more complicated than that….” In my experience people really don’t want to be argued out of simple and morally unambiguous positions—trying to do that tends to be a waste of time. And it doesn’t take much questioning of those unambiguous positions before it looks to some people like I’m just trying to let everyone off the hook. And then there’s your trump card, and it’s a really effective one—don’t you know how those poor boys suffered, and are still suffering? What were you doing when they were cowering in court? Don’t you, as a father, have any feeling for the agony those families endured? Yes of course it was horrible! Far worse than any ordeal I’ve faced. There’s no arguing with that. In fact, it takes things out of the realm of debate, and that means the discussion is pretty much over.

49. RedMountain | July 4, 2008 at 07:30 | Permalink

    Thank You Joan.
    I wanted to address your earlier post on one more point. That of the ‘if the races were reversed one’. The examples you give and the questions you ask are hard to argue. Yet, I can’t help but think that that is still not the reality of the situation and you are missing what may have really happened if the races were reversed, not this would not have happened if the races were reversed.

    I believe that if it was a black on white crime the reality may have been that the accused would have been arrested and jailed prior to the bail hearing. The bail would have been much lower, that is certain, yet the accused may still have not been able to make bail and would have spent well over a year in jail awaiting trial. The accused would have been assigned a public defender who did not have the time or resources to fight this case the way the Duke Lacrosse defense team did. Because the accused would be black, many would now assume their guilt and they would have been fortunate if the a jury had found them innocent. Nifong would have endured far less scrutiny and questioning of his methods and his real evidence. The media would have generally ignored the case for long stretches of time. The most likely outcome would have been a plea bargain, even if the accused were innocent.

    Again, just my opinion. As I said earlier, I felt this would be a good case to start a discussion of race and our system of justice. Perhaps that is still possible on some level.

    ~   ~   ~

    A more general point that I’ll add is that simplistic race-reversal arguments have become a tiresome cliche in this debate. They seem to make for effective rhetoric, but there’s very little thought behind them. Mark’s scenario is a plausible alternative to the more familiar scenarios. More than that, it highlights some of the ways that switching races isn’t just a matter of turning everything on its head, so that whatever worked against the lacrosse team would work for the hypothetical black men facing the same kinds of allegations.
    

50. A Reader | July 4, 2008 at 10:28 | Permalink

    I want to thank you for your courtesy during my visit. I agree we have pretty much come to the end. But before I head back to what Mark calls “The Gated Community”… just a last thought as to why some of us get a little huffy when we see KC Johnson criticized here or elsewhere in the Blogosphere. You may pick apart his logic or presentation or condemn his “tribalism.” But here’s a fact you cannot deny: he was there every morning, EVERY MORNING for those innocent kids and their families.

    There was no book deal when he started, NOTHING IN IT FOR HIM… no personal motive to embrace such a time-consuming, unpopular “cause.” These innocent boys were considered, at that time, “hooligans”… “racists”….” rapists”…or guys covering for rapists. They were the public-urinating spawn of privileged parents in Big Houses (there were pictures!) who terrorized a “shy, young Mom, struggling student, new to dancing.” Who would want to devote the effort it took to see the truth? These were not Brooklyn College students. He was not sitting at a computer in Durham. But KC got involved, didn’t he? He “listened”, didn’t he…not to popular, public, hysterical opinion but to the evidence and the lack thereof. Day after day, he provided a counterpoint, a contrasting view to all the madness, the lies, the agendas, the hysterical hype.

    No one at Duke made such an effort for their own.

    On any given morning, a Lacrosse Mom or Dad could pick up the Herald Sun and perhaps find an op-ed from some Professor at Duke about how their son was the embodiment of “white privilege.” …or how their son is just the latest abhorrent example of historical evil. Then there might be a letter to the Editor demanding long jail terms because women NEVER lie about rape. Ruth (“WE KNOW YOU KNOW”) Sheehan might be directing readers to Cash Michaels “Sister Survivor” website where they could comfort the “victim.” (A term the N&O employed often in the early days.) Maybe today, the N&O would run their lengthy piece “The Swagger Started Long Ago” or maybe today they see their child’s face gracing a “Wanted Poster” right there on the N&O pages. “WE ARE INVESTIGATING A BRUTAL RAPE.” Oh, here’s another article about a Black militant yelling “You’re a dead man walking!!!” at Reade Seligmann. On TV, some blonde is opining that these boys will face “jailhouse justice.” Nifong is quoted as saying this DEMANDS a Durham jury.

    It’s just your average day in the Hoax.

    But, without fail, morning after morning, they could count on this Professor up in Brooklyn College, to do some forceful pushback against all this insanity. KC never failed them. Can you even imagine what his effort must have meant to them?

    To the “Hooligans”, words fail us in describing the generosity, the humanity, the goodness of what he did. Do you think I exaggerate? Well, ask the families..those who had to endure all this. As to the “fairness” of his treatment of the 88…I might paraphrase the second stripper, Kim Roberts, and say…. if some Duke Professors got their widdle feelings hurt along the way “Sorry, Fellas.”

    No one and nothing can diminish KC Johnson or his contribution to these innocent kids, to these families, to exposing the truth, to justice. We wonder why you try. Please consider all that… if we Hooligans seem a little out of sorts when we drop by.

    Good luck with your music…and truly I wish you the best. I’ll be heading back “home” now.Thanks for the fair treatment, the honesty and the hospitality. Joan Foster

    ~   ~   ~

    You’re right, Johnson was there with a forceful counterattack at a time when people at Duke, in the media, and most ominously in law enforcement had declared open season on the Duke lacrosse team. They deserved a strong advocate, and it’s a disgrace that no one at Duke stepped up to the plate.

    It’s a little silly and simplistic to say that there was nothing in it for him. What became DIW grew seamlessly out of his blogging on Cliopatria. Initially there was nothing more or less in it for him to write about the Duke case than to write about some other academic or historical matter. Historians join Cliopatria because it’s a good forum for them to say things they want to say, and Johnson’s interest in the general issues and concerns raised by the Duke case was clear long before April 2006. He didn’t take it up as a selfless, humanitarian act, nor was it just cynical opportunism. It was always a good platform for him to pursue his own agenda, and there’s nothing sinister about that—it’s a pretty typical motivation to get into intensive blogging. But he’s used the leverage and exposure to inflict whatever damage he can on those he’s singled out as opponents. Far more than any other professor who’s taken a public position on the case, he’s consistently and repeatedly lived up to the title of thugintellectual. From my perspective, no one’s done more to “diminish KC Johnson or his contribution to these innocent kids” than Johnson himself.

    Thanks for taking the time to speak your mind and to listen, and for challenging me to set aside the sarcasm. You’ve given me some good stuff to think about, and I appreciate that too.