Re:harmonized

This post about the Duke lacrosse case is the last of three parts about how KC Johnson produced his cast of extremists—you can go back to the introduction or the part about Karla Holloway.

Most of Mark Anthony Neal’s (disclaimer) appearances in Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW) are pinned to one of three things. The first is his appearance at the April 2006 Conversation on Campus Culture. The second is an article he posted on his blog about the lacrosse case, and the third is an interview that Duke’s alumni magazine ran in the summer of 2006. The two texts each yield one really useful nugget of evidence, and the rest is incidental. In the article it’s the paragraph about how the team was “hoping to consume something that they felt that a black woman uniquely possessed.” In the interview it’s the exchange where Neal talks about the “hard-core intellectual thuggery” of his “alter ego… thugniggerintellectual.” It’s perfectly fair for Johnson to single those two passages out, but it matters what’s left out. Since he reads the “listening” statement as an announcement from Neal and the other 87 who signed it that some lacrosse players were guilty of rape, a little attention needed to be paid to Neal’s forthright statement in the second paragraph of the article that “[t]he results of a DNA analysis taken after the alleged attack suggest that the members of the Duke lacrosse team were not involved in the attack.” Then there’s the rest of the article (the bulk of it doesn’t related directly to the lacrosse team), the less outrageous parts of the interview, and the rest of Neal’s published writings—all potentially relevant since Johnson is prosecuting Neal on the basis of his character and beliefs.

I don’t think any single word has been as useful to Johnson as the one Neal handed to him on a platter. Continue reading ›

After a very long break, I’m picking up where I left off in my analysis of the Duke lacrosse case, still concentrating on the role Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW) played in framing and setting the tone of the debate about academic culture at Duke. This time I’m turning from KC Johnson’s criticism of the Duke faculty who endorsed the “listening” statement, taken as a whole (the so-called “Group of 88”), to his criticism of two professors from the group—Mark Anthony Neal and Karla Holloway. Turning from group to individual, the reflexes I’ve already pointed out of a cutthroat prosecutor dead set on securing the conviction are even clearer. My little project has snowballed as I’ve added bits and pieces over the past few months, gotten fed up and set it aside, pulled it out and added a little more, etc. What’s made it interesting enough to finally pull together into something more or less readable is the view it gives of the inner workings of a parallel reality—a product of language that’s quite convincing on its own terms but deeply deceptive. Johnson hit the nail on the head when he set it in Wonderland.

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This is the fourth in a series of posts looking at the crusades mounted on both sides of the Duke lacrosse case. The first has an introduction and overview. The second and third are about the potbanging protest and its connection to and impact on the controversy surrounding the “listening” statement. This one turns to the other side of the coin—KC Johnson and his blog Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW).

DIW has its virtues. Johnson has a remarkable ability to synthesize information coming in from all sides and quickly turn it into cogent text. And what he writes about is well documented and well linked, so the blog is a tremendous resource for anyone interested in tracking down a document, an event, or a quote from this or that phase of the scandal. Gathering and organizing all the detail and technicality of a legal proceeding is something he seems well suited for, and as far as I can tell his coverage of Nifong and the judicial and law enforcement aspects of the case is thorough and accurate. He’s thanked personally in the statements Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty made when they were exonerated—something he can justly be proud of.

Roughly half of the blog [correction: roughly a quarter] is devoted to the way the case played out at Duke, and there is, in my opinion, much less to be proud of on that side. Under his blog title, Johnson promises “comments and analysis about the Duke/Nifong case.” No matter what aspect of the case he’s writing about, though, he approaches it more as a prosecutor than an analyst (at times inquisitor is probably more apt). An analyst explains and explores and maybe even illuminates, if you’re lucky. Prosecution is by comparison much more focussed, selective, and agenda-driven. While the job of a criminal prosecutor is to build a case against the defendant(s), as I understand it his ultimate goal is not supposed to be conviction but the correct verdict. The big villain of the lacrosse case was a prosecutor who cared about nothing but the conviction. Johnson has prosecuted the so-called “Group of 88” Duke faculty in the court of public opinion with a similarly narrow and self-serving commitment to doing what it takes to get that guilty verdict, and he’s proven to be much better at it than Nifong. Given all the scorn he heaped on the now-disgraced criminal prosecutor, with good reason—for ignoring exculpatory evidence, manipulating public opinion and various other shoddy maneuvers—you’d think Johnson would be more principled in taking on his own chosen wrongdoers. If he is, it’s not by much.

That’s not to say that there’s any ethical equivalence—Nifong betrayed the trust he held as a public servant, and if he had been successful the consequences would have been catastrophic for the people effected. Even his failed prosecution turned lives upside down. The worst Johnson can do to any individual is trivial by comparison, but he still has enough influence on opinion and discussion of the case to do widespread damage. Continue reading ›

This is my email exchange with KC Johnson before he posted in answer to my first three posts in my Duke Lacrosse case series. References to Claire Potter are explained, more or less, in this entry and the entries it links to.

[Dec. 11: I originally posted only paraphrases of Johnson’s emails to me but have replaced them with his full text. Here is the first post backing up the claims I made about DIW.]

From: KC Johnson
Date: November 29, 2007 7:16:49 AM EST

Professor Zimmerman:

I noticed your two recent blog postings on the lacrosse case.

I was particuarly struck by your statement about “efforts when the ad was written to make much different points in a much different way than the protestors.” As far as I could tell, that statement constituted the only specific evidence you supplied to justify your assertion that I had engaged in “insidiously polarizing,” “irrational,” and “anti-intellectual” behavior—strong charges, indeed, against a fellow academic.

I therefore was—and remain—surprised that you did not cite or provide a link to evidence to describe these heretofore unrevealed “efforts when the ad was written to make much different points in a much different way than the protestors.” I plan to write on the issue Monday; before doing so, I wanted to ask if you could point me to the clause in the Group of 88’s statement in which the signatories made “efforts when the ad was written to make much different points in a much different way than the protestors,” especially given that the ad said “thank you for not waiting and for making yourselves heard” to the “protesters making collective noise.” Failing that, I wonder if you could point me to a statement in which even one member of the Group has publicly criticized the “castrate” banner or the potbangers’ protest.

By the way, I commend you for deeming the banner inappropriate. If only more Duke faculty members shared your courage in criticizing the potbangers, perhaps even by speaking out immediately after the protest occurred—

KC Johnson

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This is the second in a series of posts looking at the crusades mounted on both sides of the Duke lacrosse case, in the hope of shedding some light on the way they’ve overshadowed meaningful debate about the incident and its aftermath. You can click back to the first post for an introduction and overview. Here I’ll take on the potbanging protest—the rally on Sunday morning, March 26, 2006 at the scene of the party that led to the rape allegation. I’m writing, I think, mostly for people who are inclined to approve of or rationalize this protest as uncompromising and forceful advocacy and the speaking of truth to power. That was more or less my first impression as I ran across references to it in articles and discussions about the case (this was months after they happened for reasons I explain in my introduction). My reaction was probably defensive as much as anything else, because what I came across first, mostly, was dismissive or derisive comments from liestoppers—those on Liestoppers and similar web forums who see the case only in terms of the injustice done to the lacrosse team. That kind of defensiveness is all too typical of polarized debates like this one and all it does is perpetuate and accentuate the divisiveness. After taking a closer look, I believe this protest was ill-conceived and self-defeating. It’s a shame that those who have pushed for a broad discussion of social or gender or racial equity have let the issues raised by this and similar protests fester.

How did protesters espousing an end to not only sexual violence but all violence convince themselves that it was a good idea to stand in front of the lacrosse players’ house on Buchanan Blvd. with a banner screaming “Castrate!!”? Even given the rally’s aim of confronting the lacrosse team to get them to talk, it’s hard to see what purpose such a vile but empty threat could serve, and also hard to imagine that no one involved realized how much it made them look like hypocritical, bloodthirsty zealots. Of course that’s all ridiculously easy to point out in retrospect. I don’t at all discount the genuine concern for victims of sexual assault—a terrible, debilitating crime—that motivated most if not all the protestors. I expect that some of the outrage came from brutally real personal experience of assault, something that far too many women have to live with. I can only go on what I can see and read, though, and in that the action is represented not only as a denunciation of the team but also righteous support for the woman alleging rape and for other assault survivors. The “Castrate” banner, which was likely the work of only a few of those present but was apparently tolerated all around, shows how much the action was ultimately defined by what was opposed rather than what was supported.

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