I discovered Duke University about two years ago. My first exposure to Duke came shortly after moving to North Carolina in 2001, but I never took the time to really explore it until the summer of 2005, when I started thinking deeply about the city we call Durham. Sadly, I’m not the only one thinking hard about Duke right now; I say “sadly”, because it’s not for the right reasons.
My wanderings in and around Durham have taught me that it’s a liminal place of contradictions; a curious juxtaposition of many opposing forces that find a tenuous, if not dynamic equilibrium. The “City of Tobacco” is now the “City of Medicine”, and many of the old tobacco warehouses and cigarette factories are now being converted into trendy apartments and condominiums. The modern suburbia of the Southpoint area is minutes from Hayti - a derogatorily misspelled moniker for a beautiful, historically African-American part of the city that was largely obliterated by the construction of Highway 147. A drive down Fayetteville St. rewards the patient observer with the sights of many old, beautiful homes. It was one such drive that opened me up to the music of blues legends like Blind Boy Fuller and Reverend Gary Davis, thanks to a historic plaque.
It’s impossible to miss Duke University as one heads west from Downtown Durham. The change is almost painful; decrepit blue-collar postwar homes give way to grand, superbly-restored century homes. The stone wall around Duke’s East Campus is darkly symbolic: look, but don’t touch. “We’re inside, and you’re not”, it whispers, like the tall iron gates around the White House. You can’t help but wonder what it’s like on the inside, and I quickly learned that this mystique is the very thing of myths and urban legends.
The biggest surprise about Duke wasn’t that I could stroll around campus and vicariously fulfill my own unfulfilled educational goals, but that the people at Duke are so damn nice. Case in point: when I asked about borrowing a book from the library (and after discovering I didn’t have enough cash on hand to pay the requisite “community borrower” fee of $35 per year), the evening librarian — without hesitation, and certainly not by my asking — lent me the balance owing from her own wallet, and told me to pay her back when I had the cash. These are the kinds of gestures that people remember for a long, long time, and I’m citing only one of many kindnesses that have been extended to someone who is only a member of the community.
What jarred me about the lacrosse rape allegations weren’t so much the charges themselves, but the circumstances surrounding the incident. Frat house behavior wasn’t something I was exposed to in Canada, and Houston Baker’s stinging letter about the “regular underage drinking and out-of-control bacchanalia” hit me hard. Like the City of Durham itself, there were deep contradictions with Duke’s appearance on the surface, and this case had the potential to shake the institution to its core.
That, it did not. The District Attorney screwed up the investigation and prosecution on an unprecedented magnitude, the fallout from which we have only begun to observe. It started as a lynching of three wealthy white kids; now it’s the lynching of a DA who manipulated the case for his own political goals. When the lynch mob is done with the DA, they’ll turn to the police and the “group of 88″ members of the Duke faculty that dared to ask some difficult questions we’re no closer to acknowledging, much less answering.
What remains taboo is the culture that allowed this situation to promulgate in the first place. A culture of economic privilege and deeply-seeded racism, and the “look but don’t touch” airs that bolster the lynch mob’s need for simplicity and focus. George Bush put it best when he said that”you’re with us or against us” - what better way than to distill a situation with such complex socioeconomics and such a long history down to such shallow politicking?
In a Duke University report from 1993 titled “We Work Hard, We Played Hard”, author William Willimon asks a poignant question on page 7: “We say ‘We work hard and we play hard.’ But would we ever claim that we think hard?”
Willimon answers his own question, in part, on page 50: “My main criticism of Greek life is that we have allowed it to monopolize student social life. Not that fraternities want to be the virtually the sole social life on campus. Students need to take more responsibility, and to exercise more creativity for their social life.” Like it or not, a culture that permits this “out-of-control bacchanalia” allowed the circumstances leading up to these terrible allegations to exist in the first place.
In a situation so fraught with complexity, this recipe is remarkably simple: young men, alcohol, the financial wherewithal to hire “exotic dancers”, and two hundred years of racial divide. One need not graduate from a prestigious university to see the potency of this mix.
The DA and the “exotic dancer” both made mistakes on a grand scale. Let’s not forget that these young men also made mistakes, with consequences that could have been avoided by nothing more than some forethought and common sense, and a little restraint. Did they deserve to do a handcuffed perp-walk for it? In retrospect, we say “no” - but imagine for a moment the cries of injustice had the accusation not been taken seriously. In the context of a legal system that presses charges only in the presence of compelling evidence, it was both appropriate and expected.
The damning email sent by one of the lacrosse players (with language I wouldn’t even think about reproducing here) shortly after the evening of the alleged attack was perhaps the most inflammatory, and the most telling. Whether it was meant seriously or as a parody (I’ll leave this debate to the thousands of other blogs that have dissected it) is moot; a thoughtful human being would consider the events of that evening flammable enough to leave unprovoked from these sorts of taunts.
And this is all we’re left with: a gaping hole, once filled by the sophomoric antics of kids too inebriated by the ignorance of youth to think critically about the culmination of the events they orchestrated, and left vacant by the vapid incompetence of a district attorney. With the lynch mob’s attention turned to Nifong’s prosecution, will we ever get any closer to answering the looming questions that remain on the Duke campus?
I really hope the people of this university take the opportunity to “think hard” about the machoism, the privilege of wealth, and the non-thinking conformity that fostered, and even supported this behavior. It’s nothing less than a blight on a fine institution in a fine city; the Durham I know deserves much better.
PS - one of the cries I have heard from the lynch mob is a call-to-action to prosecute the women who made these false accusations. She is due every right to the presumption of innocence that these boys were denied, but I do agree that the matter needs to be investigated. If blame is going to be leveled against the lacrosse players for exercising bad judgment, a healthy dose of blame (and prosecution in a court of law, if true) needs to be shared by a woman who would spread such flagrant lies.
