Originally posted by: Heifetz
...But somehow this has turned into some sort of racial problem because the strippers are black and the players are white. Am I missing something here, because it seems to me that people are just being opportunistic and blowing up the situation for their own agendas.
In the interest of full disclosure: I went to Duke, graduated in 2000. I did not play lacrosse, however.
The basic problem here is that Durham is a poor, southern, majority-black city. Duke, on the other hand, is mostly white, wealthy, and about 50% of the students are from the Northeast. The two entities just don't see eye to eye on most issues.
Even while I was at the school, there was a huge amount of tension between the school and the city. Basically, the city was always complaining about something. "Duke should pay more taxes to the city" (it's a long story, but Duke doesn't pay property taxes to Durham). "Entry-level union wages for school workers weren't good enough." "Duke students don't ever leave the campus and interact with the community." (This last complaint always made me angry, since Duke University at the time had some of the best community volunteer student participation around.)
On campus, the perception of Durham wasn't much better. Periodically there would be reports on campus of students being mugged or robbed at gunpoint (specifically on East campus, where this lacrosse incident occurred), and typically the perpetrator would be a young black man from Durham. On several occasions, I remember school newspaper editorials about how students were "angry that they couldn't feel safe walking around parts of campus at night." In my opinion, these types of statements were always unfounded because I could count on one hand the number of incidents that occurred during my undergrad years. But this perception of the city as "unsafe" was fairly commonplace.
The community's perception of Duke students really comes from a few things, in my opinion. First, there is the admissions difficulty of the school, which effectively places it out of reach as a college choice to the vast majority of Durham residents. So few locals feel connected to the school because they didn't attend, and neither do their friends or family. In fact, the most likely relationship they have to the school is that of EMPLOYEE, because Duke University was by far the largest employer in Durham. Part of the low opinion of Duke students was probably started from the hundreds of groundskeepers, food service workers, janitors, and other service workers who interact with the students every day and resent their seemingly happy-go-lucky lifestyle. (Honestly, who amongst us with a daily job isn't envious of college student freedoms?) After all, most Duke students are not part of work-study programs, so they go to class, study, and pursue extracurricular activities.
In any event, relations have never been good. And when this incident hit the press, the community probably saw it as an affirmation of their underlying perception of Duke students as "white, arrogant, racist, and irresponsible." And couple this with black communities' tendency to react strongly to perceived injustice, and you have a recipe for trouble.
The DA in this case has done absolutely NOTHING to calm the community's fears and stem the racial tension. Whether 3 of the players are actually guilty or not (which at this point it's pretty clear the DA doesn't actually know), district attorney Nifong has publicly stated his belief that the lacrosse players are guilty on several occasions. He could have urged caution with a "wait until the investigation is complete" approach, but he has chosen not to.
Part of this is undoubtedly caused by the fact that the district attorney is up for re-election next month (in May). So he really wants to make sure that the Durham community thinks he is on their side, and doesn't take up the side of some rich white boys from the Northeast. In fact, this is the first case that he has taken personally as a prosecutor in 5 years. (And trust me, rapes in Durham are not uncommon, so this is special treatment.)
Anyway, those are my current thoughts. It may turn out that there is evidence which proves these 3 players are guilty, but nothing I have seen yet indicates that they are. The fact that the DNA evidence came back negative (after Nifong originally told the press that it would "implicate several team members") is certainly starting to point the finger at an irresponsible rape allegation made by an intoxicated and untrustworthy female.
Edit: added quotation marks I forgot.