For some reason a few days ago my blog came to the attention of the Liestoppers forum. The referrer links prompted me to take a look at their new digs for the first time since the old forum imploded a couple months ago. Those forums were a copious record of the grim and wacky world of the blog hooligan. A lot of it was pretty dismal, but there were some posts and threads that were informative, and some that forced me to rethink my reflexive opinions. So both as a case study and a resource I was sorry to see the whole thing vanish. There seems to be no problem coming up with more of the same, though.
Apparently the powers that be at Liestoppers decided that if they had to restart their forums from scratch they could at least make lemonade from lemons by keeping certain “predictable annoyers” out of the ranks—on the TalkLeft forum there’s a sad exchange about the new clubbiness. Everyone’s agreeable on the thread that’s sending folks here, but it’s probably not the most representative sample, since it starts with a big smooch for William Anderson’s rebuttal of Robert Perkinson’s review of Until Proven Innocent (UPI) in The Nation online. A little ways down in the thread, lec suggests that Anderson might want to take a swing at me next, since I recently quoted Perkinson with approval. Here’s Anderson’s answer:
I’ll take a pass on this one. The problem is that there is only one “permissible narrative” when something like this comes up: everything has to be framed in the terms of white racism towards blacks (and everyone else who falls into the “color” category).
There can be no other framework of discussion. None. To try to work outside the permissible framework is seen as an act of racism itself.
This framework has benefited a lot of people individually (it has made Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton very wealthy men) and it provides a large number of college faculty jobs and jobs for people in government. As to whether or not it actually benefits the country, or even blacks (and whites) in general is quite another matter. I leave the answer to you.
Say what!? I’m not quite sure how to interpret this—it’s not clear what he’s referring to as “something like this.” My position is that it’s wrongheaded to force the case into any single narrative, and I don’t see how any halfway intelligent person could come away from my blog with the message that I think “everything has to be framed in the terms of white racism towards blacks.” Who’s policing the poor guy’s narratives and frameworks, anyway? And I don’t see any sign that he’s trying to reach outside of his fortified bubble, so what’s the discussion that can have no other framework, and with whom? I know just what it’s like to be told there’s just one “permissible framework” around the case, though—it’s a message I’m constantly getting from people who sound a lot like Anderson. No doubt plenty of the same single-minded, how-dare-you attitude has flowed in the other direction, but in what way has that stopped Anderson from expressing himself? At the moment he seems to have settled comfortably into a sycophantic discussion that’s completely on his own terms.
My experience lately has been of conservatives conjuring up bogeymen (and women) from the Left as a catch-all excuse for intellectual laziness—KC Johnson, Erin O’Connor, Alan Kors, and various commenters here and elsewhere. Anderson is yet another professor debating badly, and he’s about as unsubtle as you can get when it comes to marching out interchangeable ideological automatons from the “hard left.”
The title of Anderson’s article (“Two Angry Men or One Angry Leftist?”) is a play on Perkinson’s, which refers to the book’s coauthors, KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor (“Two Angry Men”). The angry leftist must be Perkinson, though the tone of his review is not at all irate. Roughly the first third of Anderson’s piece is about a different article by a different leftist, Mike Stark, and he really does sound angry. According to Stark, the disbarment of Mike Nifong “reeks of hypocrisy,” since up to that time the state bar had reacted with utter indifference to five death-penalty convictions that were “overturned because of flimsy evidence, unreliable witnesses and the outright illegal actions of prosecutors.” Nifong wasn’t, in Stark’s opinion, singled out because he did worse things than those other prosecutors, he was singled out because he took on people who could afford to fight back, in both the courts of law and of public opinion.
All of that sounds plausible to me, and it seems like Stark has reason to be infuriated. The funny thing is that so far it sounds like a routine post on the Liestoppers’ forum—it could easily be yet another of the symptom-of-a-sick-justice-system stories that are a staple over there if the scenario was moved, say, to Colorado, and the disgraced prosecutor was not Nifong but just some guy. And Stark’s cynical view of the motives behind Nifong’s official disgrace is consistent with the well-known line Perkinson quotes to sum up his “three obvious if oft-overlooked aspects of the case:”
First, Nifong’s spectacular downfall was more exceptional than his grandstanding and indifference to the truth. Second, “privileged white boys” are not commonly victimized by the criminal justice system, although “minority and poor defendants” are. And third, money makes all the difference; most wrongly targeted defendants, especially indigent ones, fare far worse than the well-heeled Blue Devils. Reade Seligmann, one of the exonerated players, makes the point succinctly: “If police officers and a district attorney can systematically railroad us with absolutely no evidence whatsoever, I can’t imagine what they would do to people who do not have the resources to defend themselves.”
For Stark, what adds insult to injury is that he doesn’t think Nifong’s case against the players was so bad after all, even if the prosecutor fumbled pursuing it. Anderson has no trouble shredding Stark’s attempt to show there was credible evidence for a prosecution. But that’s the only part of Stark’s article that Anderson seems to have noticed, and with one angry leftist dispatched to his pigeonhole, Anderson turns to the other. He notes that Perkinson is a slight improvement, since
[a]fter all, he was willing to admit that there was no rape, which is better than Mike Stark did in the hard-left CounterPunch last year, when he claimed that DAMN really was the wronged party and that Reade Seligmann, David Evans, and Collin Finnerty most likely had done everything to Crystal Mangum that DAMN said they did.
DAMN, in case you haven’t guessed, is District Attorney Mike Nifong. In the same spirit of open-mindedness, Anderson cites its “uncritical support [for] Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Castro” when he introduces the Nation in his first paragraph. The rhetorical stew is bubbling along nicely by the time he drops Perkinson in.
Both Stark and Anderson are in the grip of what liestoppers like to call “metanarrative.” It’s a perfectly good word for the over-arching schematic frameworks that are supposed to capture the deep truths about how the world works. In the lacrosse controversy, though, it’s been reduced to little more than a pretentious codeword for the deep-seated need of mindless leftists to milk race, class, and gender bias for all they’re worth and then some. I’m tempted to keep it in scare quotes. Instead, I’ll just note that most of us are using the term loosely.
Among the perspectives I’ve come across on the lacrosse incident, I think it’s the potbangers that offer the best example of what’s conventionally called a metanarrative. What I find most troubling about the use they make of it is the dehumanizing effects both of vilifying the accused and, more insidiously and ironically, of sanctifying the accuser. A general problem when metanarratives are applied to real-world events is that people tend to be turned into puppets or stereotypes. Wahneema Lubiano describes how the actors in an incident or conflict can be “perfected” in order to give the metanarrative its full resonance. If, for instance, in Stark’s metanarrative justice is a luxury reserved for the rich and powerful, his narrative of Nifong’s disgrace is more compelling if the lacrosse players aren’t just relatively lucky victims of an unethical prosecutor but rich kids who’s freedom was bought with daddy’s cash while innocent poor folks were left to rot in jail. Whether or not that’s what’s going on in Stark’s head is pure speculation—all I can say is that I find it plausible, and I think that people with a strong sense of metanarrative tend to do that sort of thing.
That kind of puppeteering is subtle compared to Anderson’s flagrant typecasting. His metanarrative, if it can still be called that, is more like a conspiracy theory involving whoever’s enforcing and prospering from the one “permissible narrative”—the unholy alliance of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and a bunch of lefty professors, for a start. Anderson write as if he’s familiar with Perkinson. It’s a familiarity that can’t come from the article itself, but seems to reflect what Anderson thinks he knows about the sort of person who wrote it. Perkinson might “admit that there was no rape,” but only with regret, because he wants nothing more than to nail the lacrosse team as symbols of “unfettered ‘white privilege’.” His “shots at the players” are efforts at “demonization,” and “anything short of declaring them the Very Spawn of Satan simply will not do for The Nation and its hard-left readership.” Which is to say, there’s no need to pay much attention to Perkinson’s text if you understand his program, and Anderson reads his program loud and clear. KC Johnson is also adept at looking through a text to the agenda and mindset he’s sure is behind it. It seems like it would be embarrassing for men with PhDs to let a crude metanarrative do their thinking for them—kind of like showing up in eighth grade with training wheels on your bicycle—but it doesn’t seem to cause them any trouble.
Really the thing that’s ailing Anderson and Johnson isn’t an out-of-control metanarrative, it’s tribalism—it’s personal identification with a cause and with a group, and facile typecasting of the Other, not an intellectual commitment to a rigid theory. And my guess is that in an emotionally charged scandal like the lacrosse case, what looks like blind faith in a metanarrative is likely to involve a touch of tribalism, or maybe a heaping dollop of it.
Anderson sets the rabble-rousing hyperbole aside to point out that it’s quite misleading for Perkinson to claim that in one year, according to the Coleman report, “25 percent of [Duke’s] disorderly conduct violations” were from lacrosse players—it’s a statistic with a sample size of 4, basically meaningless. That’s Anderson’s single piece of factual criticism that sticks. He doesn’t do so well on another point of fact: Perkinson’s claim that Taylor and Johnson don’t discuss the Darryl Hunt case in their chapter about wrongful convictions. Anderson calls the claim “dishonest,” and seems full of confidence that he knows how these angry leftists go about their business:
Actually, they did highlight the Hunt case, and I did as well. However, to have found out that small but important fact would have required that Perkinson actually have read the book instead of just lambasting it as a right-wing tirade.
I was already wondering about this—in the N&O blog thread berating Tim Tyson a few weeks ago, a commenter mentioned a discussion of the Hunt case in UPI. I don’t own the book, but I happened to be near a bookstore this morning. What I found is that there is no entry in the index for “Hunt, Darryl,” and there’s no section about him in the chapter Perkinson is referring to (the link is to the source notes for UPI, where a search will find you several “witch hunt”s but no “Darryl Hunt”). Johnson himself says that he and Taylor “mentioned the Hunt case,” so it must be in the book somewhere, but to say they highlighted it is quite a stretch. (It’s clear that I’ve spent way too much time with this stuff because I can just hear Johnson’s indignant tirade about “extraordinarily strong charges … against a fellow academic” if the shoe was on his foot—it plays in my head in the voice of David Frye imitating Richard Nixon on a record I used to love when I was a kid).
So… dishonest? Didn’t read the book? As everyone knows, when it comes to the lacrosse case, It’s Not About the Truth.
[KC Johnson has now posted a rebuttal to Perkinson’s review.]
{ 50 } Comments
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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:
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?
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
Write more clearly.
I’m not that bad a writer. Clarity is only an issue if the words on the screen register.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.