Wednesday, January 24: Hello fellow, Duke case followers. This post is closed to commenting. Resume the discussion at the latest post, Unnatural Selection on Both Sides?
Thursday, January 18: I’m not a big fan of John Podhoretz, but I recommend “Orwell University Duke Profs’ P.C. Travesty.”
Update (1/17 @ 6:12 p.m.): I’ll respond to provost Peter Lange’s statement about the Group of 88 later.
My surface-level reaction: Mr. Lange, vent some of your “free speech” concerns on Mike Nifong, who race-baited his way into a weak case and, hopefully, out of a job.
People are fired up, angry (for the record, I certainly don’t endorse sending people ad hominem-laced e-mail; it’s a shame that some professors are being personally attacked, but that, as I’ve been told, is life), and it’s on Nifong’s head. But bloggers are the ideal scapegoat for Duke’s “African American” professors who endorsed that idiotic and embarrassingly ignorant ad.
That act has consequences. Get it? Deal with it.
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We are listening to our students. We’re also listening to the Durham community, to Duke staff, and to each other. Regardless of the results of the police investigation, what is apparent everyday now is the anger and fear of many students who know themselves to be objects of racism and sexism, who see illuminated in this moment’s extraordinary spotlight what they live with everyday. They know that it isn’t just Duke, it isn’t everybody, and it isn’t just individuals making this disaster…These students are shouting and whispering about what happened to this young woman and to themselves.
So begins the infamous ad displayed in the Duke Chronicle back in April and endorsed by 88 professors at Duke University, previously known as the “Group of 88 (now 87),” in the wake of obviously-phony-from-the-beginning accusations of gang rape by a black stripper against three white lacrosse-playing men at Duke. Read the whole ad.
[Update: The Johnsville News links to a PDF copy at the end of the post. Right-click on it, choose "Save As" and save it to your hard drive. To read, open in a photo viewing or editing program.]
Rewind: The “We Are Listening” Advertisement
Man. Victimologists and other liberals make my job too easy. There’s no challenge to it anymore. Oh, well. Duty calls.
The silly ad, a bunch of quotes uttered by anonymous, victim-minded black students, was a gratuitous, irrelevant, inflammatory piece of trash meant to inflame already high racial tensions and cast Duke’s lacrosse-playing white boys as predatory, drunken brutes who routinely brutalize black women…and look at big black men funny.
Note this very important point: the ad, purported to be about “racism and sexism” on campus, focuses mainly on perceived racism. It is not, as the Group of 88 likes to claim, a statement about violence against women. It’s about the perceived prejudice of whites toward blacks at Duke and black students’ feelings of inadequacy. When a microphone is thrust in their faces, some blacks will always, always drone on about subjective “racist” incidents that may have little, if anything, to do with race or might be legitimate reactions by whites.
The whole ad is maddeningly trite and disingenuous. For instance, check out this line, probably uttered by a black female student: “You go to a party, you get grabbed, you get propositioned, and then you start to question yourself.”
So is this chick trying to say that white boys grab and proposition her at Duke parties, or is she referring to what happens to her at parties attended mainly by blacks? My guess is the latter, but her out-of-context quote is meant to demonize the white male students, particularly the lacrosse players, which is the whole purpose of the ad and why a bunch of privileged professors with grudges against white males signed it in the first place.
The whole ad, the whole concept behind the ad, is a joke.
Fast Forward: Inane Statement #2
Now the very delicate professors are whining about how misunderstood they are, that we’ve “misinterpreted†their signed statement endorsing a gratuitous, irrelevant, inflammatory piece of trash ad. From the News & Observer (emphases added):
That ad has been a subject of heated debate on blogs, and its signers have received angry and sometimes racist e-mail messages…William Chafe, a history professor who signed both the ad and the letter, said the bloggers’ interpretation of the ad has become the version people accepted. And that’s wrong, he said. “We’re trying to simply set the record straight and clarify we never claimed the lacrosse players were guilty,” Chafe said.
The “bloggers” Chafe is referring to is none other than history professor KC Johnson, who started blogging about the case because of the professors’ endorsement. (Thanks!)
For more Duke coverage, see The Johnsville News, LieStoppers, Crystal Mess, and Forensics Talk.
Did the “Group of 88″ learn the first time? No. Instead, they issued another inane (and irritatingly undated) public statement, something else we can parse, mock, dissect, rip to shreds, and call them on. The professors’ new letter is overloaded with CYA, revisionist history backtracking. An excerpt from An Open Letter to the Duke Community (emphasis added):
The ad has been read as a comment on the alleged rape, the team party, or the specific students accused. Worse, it has been read as rendering a judgment in the case. We understand the ad instead as a call to action on important, longstanding issues on and around our campus, an attempt to channel the attention generated by the incident to addressing these. We reject all attempts to try the case outside the courts, and stand firmly by the principle of the presumption of innocence.
I’ll go ahead and call it as I see it: Bullsh**!
A woman levels serious allegations of gang rape against a group of men. The woman happens to be black, and the men white. Some black students decide to use the occasion to vent anger over petty or imaginary slights, and you, esteemed and vaunted “scholars,” thought it was a good idea to sign your names to it, innocently oblivious to the possibility that some people might think you were rushing to judgment against the men, inciting racial strife, and using the opportunity to verbalize your personal race and class envy issues? And you’re surprised by the reaction of rational people?
OK.
My Dearest Professors…
…by signing on to a public ad, especially one filled with unfounded accusations, you thrust yourselves into the public arena. If you can’t take the criticism, shut the heck up. Take it from a blogger who’s had more than her share of invective-filled e-mail. Once you hit “Publish,†you’re fair game. In fact, you, oh esteemed scholars, have a responsibility to be extra careful when making public statements about and endorsing public statements of Duke students, particularly when felony charges are flying around. 
One more jab before I go. In your new letter, you wrote, “The disaster is the atmosphere that allows sexism, racism, and sexual violence to be so prevalent on campus.” So where’s the proof of all this “sexism, racism, and sexual violence” on campus?
Answer: A bunch of embarrassing and juvenile statements, uttered under the cower cover of anonymity, by a handful of disgruntled black students.
I think I’m done here. I’m going for a walk…
Addendum: Can’t.Get.Out.The.Door. Law professor and blogger Ann Althouse notes that the professors dish it out but can’t take it. Bill Anderson, writer and LBC commenter, says this about Chafe, the group member quoted in the N&O:
On top of signing this inane statement, William Chafee declared last spring that the lacrosse team was akin to the two men who murdered Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955. One should think about that statement, and then wonder why he even would want to teach at Duke if it is being overrun by murderous racists.
This is the mentality of these people. They use words like “genocide†and “rape†and have no idea what they are saying. Truly pathetic.
