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We
don’t know exactly what happened that night. Initial
DNA tests came back negative, incriminating no one.
But something happened on the night of March 13th –
something so compelling that Durham District Attorney
Michael Nifong was prompted to say, “This case
is not going away”. Indeed, he asserts that the
lack of DNA evidence "doesn't mean nothing happened.
It just means nothing was left behind." The District
Attorney is putting the case before a grand jury. And,
while unresolved racial, gender and class issues dictate
and divide perspectives, these facts are not in dispute.
The
players say that they used aliases to hire strippers
for a team party at the house rented by the team captains.
The accuser goes to school full-time at North Carolina
Central, and for the past two months has worked at an
escort service to help pay her way through school and
support her two children. This was the first time she
had been hired to dance for a party, but she expected
it to be a bachelor party of five men. She and her partner
found themselves in a party of more than 30 white male
lacrosse players. The one African American on the team
wasn’t there.
We
know that the two women were abused. The accuser says
they were met with racial slurs, and stopped dancing
and decided to leave. “We started to cry,”
she said, “we were so scared.” They left,
but team members came out, apologized, and convinced
them to come back. A neighbor reports seeing them leave
and then come back, and confirms hearing racial slurs.
The
accuser says once they returned, they were separated
and she was pushed into a bathroom by three men, strangled,
raped, kicked and beaten. The players deny that that
happened, but they immediately retained lawyers and
stopped talking. The woman was picked up afterward by
police, who reported her as “passed out drunk.”
Admitted to a hospital, tests showed injuries consistent
with rape and physical assault.
The
team was notorious for its gross behavior. 15 of the
47 players had been previously charged with misdemeanors
ranging from underage drinking to public urination.
After the party one player sent out an email saying
that he planned on inviting strippers over and then
“killing the b…. as soon as they walk in
and proceeding to cut their skin off,” an act
he said would be sexually satisfying.
Black
women; white men. A stripper; and a team blowout. The
wealthy white athletes – many from prep schools
– of Duke; and the working class woman from historically
black North Carolina Central. Race and class and sex.
What happened? We don’t know for sure because
the Duke players are maintaining a code of silence.
The
history of white men and black women – the special
fantasies and realities of exploitation – goes
back to the nation’s beginning and the arrival
of slaves from Africa. The patterns associated with
this history arouse fears and evoke too many bad memories.
Duke
University is clearly embarrassed by the incident. The
president cancelled the lacrosse team’s season,
and accepted the resignation of its coach, who had taken
the team to the national championship last year. He
convened five panels to look into various aspects of
the incident. At Duke, North Carolina Central, and schools
across the country students and administrators began
discussing once more the combustible realities of racial
and sexual harassment on campus.
Durham,
North Carolina where Duke is located is not the old
South. Its Mayor is black, as is its police chief, and
the majority of its city council. It is relatively prosperous,
with low unemployment, home of high-tech companies.
The largest black owned insurance company is located
there as are two black owned banks. There is also poverty,
disproportionately African American. And there is Duke,
a private school stocked with affluent, mostly white
kids, often referred to as the plantation.
But
Duke is alas probably no worse than other schools in
the way African American women are too often perceived.
As Rebecca Hall of the University of California in Berkeley,
who studies images of African American women in the
culture, states, “Turn on a music video. A black
woman is somebody who has excess sexuality….It’s
excess sexuality that white men are entitled to.”
In
the wake of the Duke scandal, black women across the
country report on how often they are harassed or treated
as simply objects available to hit on by white men.
This image is magnified in our culture – and not
simply by white producers, but on black music videos
and black networks as well.
The
Duke scandal should lead colleges across the country
to hold searching discussions about racial and sexual
stereotypes, exposing the myths that entrap so many.
But it shouldn’t take the brutalizing of a mother
of two to raise these issues. Justice must be pursued
at Duke. But Duke should not be treated as an isolated
extreme – but as a goad to probing discussion
and concerted action to lift students above the hatreds,
the fears and the fantasies that still plague our society.
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