Lifestyles of the Rich and White

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This Issue...

(Full PDF of the issue)

Editorial by: Andy G. on February 3rd, 2007 at 8:58 AM

Despite all of the obvious wealth, status, power, and privilege these men hold, however, they still remain charged for kidnapping and sexual offense—apparently all it takes is one woman crying rape and a maniac district attorney to cancel out all of that whiteness.

For almost a year now, every time I thought the Duke lacrosse case couldn’t get any more ridiculous it consistently proved me wrong. From the very first false accusations of rape and kidnapping thrown at members of the team, the only things to come out of it have been trumped up race issues and shameless dishonesty, and all at the expense of three men who happened to be white.

What many in North Carolina wanted was the high-profile gang rape of a young, victimized black woman by privileged, racist white males to confirm what everyone suspects—blatant “prejudice and inequality in the society at large.” Fortunately for them, all it took was one woman crying “rape” and a district attorney, Mike Nifong, who would stop at nothing to advance his own career.

As soon as Crystal Mangum, the stripper invited to the Duke team’s house party, decided she was going with rape instead of reporting only the argument that actually took place there, the lacrosse players immediately denied it and even voluntarily submitted their DNA knowing full well it would prove their innocence. After a first round of tests cleared all 46 of them, a second round proved that she had been with multiple men, none of whom were on Duke’s team. Such information would have been very helpful in speeding the case along if not for the agreement between the lab and the district attorney to withhold it...

With the DNA from five other men in her, it would seem obvious that Mangum’s claims—not only did she not have sex with anyone during the prior week but that she was raped by as many as twenty lacrosse players—would raise more than a few eyebrows. In fact, in cases like rape that rest so squarely on the credibility of the accuser, it’s remarkable that it was ever pursued.

Throughout the following months, Mangum gave no less than five different versions of the alleged rape to police and medical interviewers, all dealing with the number of attackers, how she was attacked, when it happened, and other key details that, despite them, still place the defendants free from her accusations. Every eye-witness that night said she wasn’t raped, and a medical exam administered only hours after the alleged attack found no evidence of sexual assault.

If that wasn’t enough, it was found that she made similar claims in the past while each time failing to even show up at court, that she frequently passed out, had a history of male abuse, that she had nearly half a dozen drinks that night, and that less than two weeks later she was found dancing at her club, raising doubts as to just how “traumatized” she actually was. It’s impossible to come up with a less credible story than this, yet the rape charges lived.

If the case were about evidence instead of race, a political career, and a blind condemnation of anyone merely accused of rape, it would have been dropped nine months ago. Time-stamped photos were taken, clearing at least one of the three defendants from anything having to do with Mangum’s claims, and a lack of any DNA should have cleared the rest. Instead we have a giant mess that’s costing taxpayers more and more each day and forever branding the Duke lacrosse team as sex offenders.

It must have been music to Nifong’s ears when a white-on-black rape case fell into his hands, especially with rich white males and a poor black woman involved. A laundry list of slip-ups, however, formed when his election-time campaigning took over: there were repeated public lies about certain facts crucial to the case, he often exaggerated racial tensions, he tried to manipulate and intimidate potential witnesses, he never spoke directly with the alleged victim and accuser, and of course his plot with the DNA lab.

What’s more, the entire case immediately showed its bias in some of the first public statements the district attorney made, obviously pandering to the black community in saying, “I’m going to go out there and defend your interests in seeing these hooligans who committed the crime are prosecuted. I’m not going to let their fathers, with all of their money, buy…big time lawyers and get them off. I’m doing this for you.” And this certainly didn’t help the racial tension surrounding the case either—defendants were often jeered at and taunted in the courtroom, even receiving death threats.

With such a potentially devastating racial mess, Duke predictably overreacted by cancelling the lacrosse season, firing the head coach, and suspending the defendants without any notice (though they did offer re-admittance later on). What’s most disturbing, however, is how quickly a large part of the faculty turned on their own students based solely on shaky allegations. 

Soon after the charges were made, 88 Duke professors from their school of Arts & Sciences ran an ad supporting the alleged victim and highlighting the rampant racism and sexism in the Duke community. Interestingly, nearly eighty percent of the African and African-American Studies as well as the Women’s Studies departments signed the statement, while no one from the engineering and law schools signed. Once it turned out that maybe Crystal was lying, they maintained that they weren’t criticizing the Duke students but instead calling attention to the “all too evident” racial and gender attitudes present at Duke.

Despite the fact that they have yet to come up with one case exemplifying such widespread abuse of power by upper-class white men, Duke English professor, Houston Baker, went so far as to distribute a derisive letter soon after the allegations. Not only did he presume the players’ guilt, he predicted their eventual win because, after all, white male privilege is always a bulletproof defense.

Baker went on to write that the team members were “safe under the cover of silent whiteness” and that these “young, white, violent, drunken men [are] implicitly boasted by our athletic directors and administrators.” He claimed that Duke was issuing a blind-eye to male athletes, who are “veritably given license to rape, maraud, deploy hate speech, and feel proud of themselves in the bargain.” Perhaps most unfair was his explicit avowal that the lacrosse players displayed “abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence, and drunken white male privilege loosed amongst us.”

Despite all of this obvious wealth, status, power, and privilege these men hold, however, they still remain charged for kidnapping and sexual offense (rape has finally been dropped) as apparently all it takes is one woman crying rape and a maniac district attorney to cancel out all of that whiteness. So while three men try to avoid thirty-year prison sentences and shake off the label “sex offender” their whole lives, a “powerless” black woman gets off without so much as a slap on the wrist.

Of course those Duke lacrosse players made some very poor decisions that night, but the fact that they are still being charged shows just how easy it is for crazy women to exploit rape. No matter how disturbed Mangum is or how far deep she and Nifong have gotten themselves, they deserve to be punished fully for their false accusations. Maybe once there’s a penalty for casually throwing around rape charges, especially when it’s out of personal gain, we’ll start chipping away at this kind of unfair abuse.

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