Essential Questions
 What stereotypes and prejudices exist in our world?
 What influences gender roles in our society?
 What is equality? How can we work to achieve it?
 What is the difference between moral and physical courage?
 Why is it so difficult for people to stand up and do what is
right?
 Would I have the courage to do what is right?
 Is it possible for one person to make a difference?
 Who am I and how do I find my place in the world?
June 11, 2006
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Jocks and Prejudice
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
As more facts come out about the Duke lacrosse scandal, it should prompt some deep
reflection.
No, not just about racism and sexism, but also about the perniciousness of any kind of
prejudice that reduces people — yes, even white jocks — to racial caricatures. This has
not been the finest hour of either the news media or academia: too many rushed to make
the Duke case part of the 300-year-old narrative of white men brutalizing black women.
That narrative is real, but any incident needs to be examined on its own merits rather than
simply glimpsed through the prisms of race and class.
Racism runs through American history — African-American men still risk arrest for the
de facto offense of "being black near a crime scene." But the lesson of that wretched past
should be to look beyond race and focus relentlessly on facts.
So let's look at facts. Time-stamped photos show the accuser dancing at a lacrosse team
party at 12:04 a.m. and slumped outside the house where the party was taking place at
12:30 a.m., so the alleged beating, gang rape and sodomy would have had to occur during
that interval. Stuart Taylor Jr., the legal writer once for this newspaper and now for
National Journal, has noted that the later photo shows her looking relaxed, with her
clothes in good order.
Mr. Taylor, who has covered this case meticulously, told me he was more than 90 percent
confident that the defendants were innocent.
One of the defendants is Reade Seligmann, whose cellphone made at least seven calls
between 12:05 and 12:14. The last was to a taxi driver, who picked up Mr. Seligmann at
12:19. That's a pretty good alibi.
Meanwhile, no DNA evidence has turned up to confirm that the accuser had any sex with
the lacrosse players (she said no condoms were used). It also turns out that the accuser is
herself a bundle of complexities: a Navy veteran and full-time university honor student
but one who moonlights for an escort service, has a criminal record and in the past has
accused three men of gang-raping her.
I've been poring over a half-dozen police reports and witness reports filed in court in
dribs and drabs, the latest just a few days ago. The initial police report by Sgt. J. C.
Shelton shows that the accuser didn't raise the issue of rape until she was about to be
locked up in a mental health center. Then when she said she had been raped, she was
transported instead to a hospital, where the same police report says she recanted the rape
charge, and finally reinstated it.
A different report by a police investigator says that the other dancer at the party initially
scoffed that the allegation of rape was a "crock."
Granted, traumatized victims and witnesses can be terrified and confused. We don't know
what happened, and we should avoid stereotyping the accuser because of her job — but
we should also avoid stereotypes of lacrosse players as "hooligans."
That's what the district attorney, Mike Nifong, called the Duke athletes. As I see it, he
may be the real culprit here. For starters, his many public statements seem to violate the
North Carolina rules of professional conduct; Section 3.8f bars prosecutors from "making
extrajudicial comments that have a substantial likelihood of heightening public
condemnation of the accused."
Mr. Nifong may have had a motive for prosecuting a case that wouldn't otherwise merit
it: using it as a campaign tool. Heavily outspent in a tough three-way election race, he
was the lone white man on the ballot, and he needed both media attention and black votes
to win. In the end, he got twice as many black votes as his closest opponent, and that put
him over the top.
Unfortunately, many in the commentariat started by assuming that the lacrosse players
were thugs. Prof. Houston Baker, who is now leaving Duke, demanded that the university
dismiss the coaches and players as a response to "abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial
violence, and drunken white male privilege loosed among us."
Look, we have a shameful history in this country of racial prejudice. One of the low
points came in the 1930's when the Scottsboro Boys were pulled off a train in Alabama
and charged with rape because of the lies of two white women. The crowds and media
began a witch hunt (one headline: "Nine Black Fiends Committed Revolting Crime")
because they could not see past the teenagers' skin color.
So let's take a deep breath and step back. Black hobos shouldn't have been stereotyped
then, and neither should white jocks today.
SPORTS DESK
Duke Men's Lacrosse Team Is Reinstated, and Warned
By VIV BERNSTEIN AND JULIET MACUR; VIV BERNSTEIN REPORTED FROM DURHAM,
N.C., FOR THIS ARTICLE, AND JULIET MACUR FROM NEW YORK. (NYT) 778 words
Published: June 6, 2006
DURHAM, N.C., June 5 - After two months in limbo, the Duke University men's
lacrosse team was given a second chance Monday.
The Duke president, Richard H. Brodhead, who in April canceled the team's season after
a woman accused three players of rape, said the men's lacrosse team would be reinstated,
with strict stipulations.
The team, one of the best in the nation, will be monitored more closely by administrators
and play under a new code of conduct written by the players, Brodhead said in a news
conference.
''I am, I know, taking something of a risk in reinstating men's lacrosse,'' Brodhead said.
''The reinstatement is inevitably probationary. If we begin to see patterns of irresponsible
individual or team behaviors familiar from the past, the athletics director and I will have
no choice but to revisit this decision.''
Three Duke lacrosse players were charged with raping a local woman during a party
March 13. They have denied the charges. The rest of the team was all but cleared by
Michael B. Nifong, the Durham County district attorney. A faculty committee had
recommended that the team be reinstated.
Brodhead said he made his decision about the team Saturday, after the players pledged to
follow the new standards.
A university investigation found that the team had ''established a pattern of irresponsible
behavior, much of it aggravated by drink,'' Brodhead said.
Violations of the team's new code of conduct include underage drinking, disorderly
conduct and harassment. The penalties for breaking the rules are counseling and
community service for a first offense, a three-game suspension for a second offense and a
season-long suspension for a third offense.
''If we did not allow these players the chance to take responsibility to make a new history
for their sport at Duke, we would be denying another fundamental value, namely the
belief in the possibility of learning through experience, the belief in education itself,''
Brodhead said.
The Duke athletic director, Joe Alleva, said none of the team's current players had
transferred to other universities, which ''sends a strong statement for their commitment to
rebuilding this program.'' Alleva also acknowledged that three of the team's nine
incoming freshmen recruits had chosen to go elsewhere.
The sports information director, Art Chase, said those players were Scott Kocis of
Huntington, N.Y., who will join Georgetown; Tom Dodge of Manhasset, N.Y., who will
go to Penn; and Ken Clausen of Downingtown, Pa., who will attend Virginia.
And others may join them. Craig Dowd, a recruit from East Northport, N.Y., has not
decided whether he will play at Duke, his mother, Patricia Dowd, said. He is the younger
brother of Kyle Dowd, who played at Duke this season and graduated last month.
''We're still working through all the emotional issues after what happened, and there's
been no relief,'' Patricia Dowd said. ''It's been a very difficult time, and there will be no
relief until those three boys are exonerated. We still don't know what we're going to do.''
Kevin Cassese, 25, a United States national team player and a former Duke lacrosse
captain, was named the interim coach at Duke while the university searches for a new
head coach. He was an assistant under Mike Pressler, who resigned April 5.
Pressler, who was at Duke for 16 seasons, will not be considered for the position.
Although there was no evidence that Pressler knew about the party at the center of the
scandal, Brodhead said, the university wanted to start the program anew.
A woman hired to dance at the party said that three lacrosse players raped and assaulted
her. In April, the sophomores Collin Finnerty of Garden City, N.Y., and Reade
Seligmann of Essex Fells, N.J., were charged with first-degree forcible rape, first-degree
sexual offense and kidnapping. Last month, a team co-captain, David Evans of Bethesda,
Md., was charged with the same offenses.
Another team member, Matthew Wilson, was charged with driving while intoxicated in
Chapel Hill, N.C., on May 24. His blood alcohol content was 0.21, nearly three times the
limit of 0.08 in North Carolina, according to the police. He was also charged with
misdemeanor possession of marijuana and misdemeanor possession of drug
paraphernalia.
Alleva said Wilson, from Durham, was suspended from the team last week. But the
charge, which came at a crucial time in the lacrosse program's future, did not change
Brodhead's mind about letting the team play.
''I was very disappointed, you can imagine,'' Brodhead said. ''I did not, at the end, feel it
was right to hold the whole program hostage to the behavior of any single player.''
Tough Questions in Durham
By Eugene Robinson
Tuesday, April 25, 2006; A23
The Duke University scandal is murky, like many cases of alleged rape -- especially
cases of alleged rape in which the accused can afford top-shelf legal counsel. It will be
some time before we know what really happened that night between a house full of
rowdy lacrosse players and the two "exotic dancers" they hired as entertainment, and it's
quite possible we'll never have a truly satisfactory answer. What we do have are
disturbing questions and a rich historical context. Those, for the moment, are more than
enough to ponder.
The context? A bunch of jocks at an elite university in the once-segregated South -privileged white kids who play lacrosse, a sport that conjures images of impossibly green
suburban playing fields surrounded by the Range Rovers of doting parents -- decide to
have a party, so they call an escort service and hire a couple of strippers. The hired help
arrives: two black women, one of them a 27-year-old single mother who is working her
way through North Carolina Central University, a decidedly proletarian institution across
town. Within a few hours the woman becomes simply "the accuser" when she tells police
she was raped by some of those white jocks.
That's the basic scenario, and it's impossible to avoid thinking of all the black women
who were violated by drunken white men in the American South over the centuries. The
master-slave relationship, the tradition of droit du seigneur , the use of sexual possession
as an instrument of domination -- all this ugliness floods the mind, unbidden, and refuses
to leave.
Then there's the fact that the incident happened at Duke, which has never been able to
shake its aura of preppy privilege, its reputation as a place where students are downright
arrogant in their sense of superiority.
A couple of basic questions tend to get overlooked. What's the deal with any group of
college students thinking it's a perfectly normal thing to hire strippers for a party? What
do their parents say when they see that charge on the credit card bill? For that matter,
what's the deal with a college student, whatever financial pressure she might be under,
thinking that working at night as an outcall stripper is a perfectly acceptable -- and safe -way to support herself? It's not blaming the victim to ask if she couldn't have made better
choices.
Those questions have to wait, however, while we pore over DNA test results, witness
statements and dueling accounts of the evening's events from prosecutors and defense
lawyers.
For now, all we can do is expand the context somewhat. Not much attention has been
paid to the fact that Duke has done much better than most of the nation's elite universities
in promoting diversity in its student body. Around 30 percent of Duke students are
minorities, including more than 11 percent who are African American -- approximately
the percentage of blacks in the general population. It's also true that the most esteemed,
almost revered, member of the Duke faculty is the African American historian John Hope
Franklin.
Yet Duke is still a place where the lacrosse team, which has but one black player, hires
two black strippers for an alcohol-fueled house party. Was this just another night in
Durham?
The university's president, Richard H. Brodhead, may emerge from this awful mess as a
true hero, because he seems to understand the need to deal not only with the specific
allegations but with the context and the questions as well. In an extraordinary letter to the
Duke community, Brodhead noted that some troubling issues have suddenly been brought
to "glaring visibility" and must be dealt with.
"They include concerns about the culture of certain student groups that regularly abuse
alcohol and the attitudes these groups promote," Brodhead wrote. "They include concerns
about the survival of the legacy of racism, the most hateful feature American history has
produced. . . . [They] include concerns about the deep structures of inequality in our
society . . . and the attitudes of superiority those inequalities breed."
Brodhead wrote of "an attitude of arrogant inconsiderateness that reached its peak in the
alleged event but that had long preceded it" -- an attitude that, to many outsiders, "has
seemed to be the face of Duke."
He announced an immediate set of responses, among them a "campus culture initiative"
designed to get at these underlying issues of race, privilege and alcohol. It will be
fascinating to watch as Duke attempts some educating that parents should have taken care
of long ago.
eugenerobinson@washpost.com
At Duke, a Scandal In Search of Meaning
By Anne Applebaum
Wednesday, April 26, 2006; A25
Just like everybody else, apparently, I've followed the twists and turns of the Duke
lacrosse team scandal with rapt attention. The exotic dancer's charge that several team
members raped and abused her; the subsequent discovery of time-stamped photographs
allegedly showing she was abused before she arrived; the testimony of the security guard;
the shifting claims of the other dancer; the mixed DNA evidence; the district attorney
running for reelection; the criminal records of both the alleged victim and the alleged
perpetrators; the angry black community in Durham; and the presumably angry,
presumably white, online community that has already made "Duke Lacrosse" T-shirts a
best-selling item on eBay and elsewhere.
But -- just like everybody else -- I've found that every shift and change in the story, or,
rather, every shift and change in what the public is told about the story, have also led me
to draw different conclusions about what it all means . At different times over the past
few weeks this story has looked like the War Against Boys made real: innocent young
men being lynched for the sake of a DA's reelection campaign! At other moments, it has
looked like a dark, porn-and-alcohol-laced saga of the Corrupt Youth of Today: Back in
the day we had keg parties, not strippers! At still other times, it seemed an even darker
tale of Old Racism in the Old South. Or New Racism in the New South. Or some
combination thereof.
It seems I'm not alone in this pursuit of deeper meaning. A quick trawl of the airwaves
and the Internet produces one columnist who sees in this story a moral about the
disappearance of chivalry and honor among boys in contemporary America; another who
sees in the same story a moral about the disappearance of modesty and caution among
girls in contemporary America; and several others who believe, one way or another, that
all of this has something to do with President Bill Clinton. Within just a few weeks the
case has become -- as another writer has already put it -- "an ink-blot test, not a legal
proceeding." The right sees the story it wants to see, the left sees the story it wants to see,
Jesse Jackson sees the story he wants to see and Rush Limbaugh sees the story he wants
to see.
I suppose this rush to judgment, absent the facts, is deplorable, and indeed many are
already deploring it. Or deploring the media that are paying too much attention to it and
twisting the evidence and ignoring the truth for their own reasons and so on. But I've also
come to the conclusion that these periodic national moments of intense obsession with
hyped-up criminal cases and celebrity trials are somehow necessary in this country, and
the media haven't invented that need out of whole cloth.
In June 1994, after O.J. Simpson's wife was found murdered and Simpson tried to run
from the law in his Ford Bronco, followed by police cars, helicopters and reporters from
nearly every television station in the country, I sat up most of the night with a group of
friends arguing about the case: whether an innocent man would ever try to escape and
whether, having made such an attempt, he could ever get a fair trial, particularly given
that he was black and his murdered wife was white -- and this was before the trial had
begun.
The rest is history. Our argument became a national argument. The trial was not only
televised, it was also covered by 2,000 reporters. It produced dozens of books and made
celebrities out of the prosecutors, the defense lawyers and the judge. Some 90 percent of
Americans said they had seen part of it. About 142 million people are thought to have
watched or listened as the verdict was delivered. Not since January 1953, when 71
percent of television-watching Americans saw Lucy Ricardo bring a baby home from the
hospital (more than had watched President Eisenhower's inauguration), had there been an
event that so many Americans could discuss so easily in bars, coffee shops or
supermarkets with so many other Americans on the following day.
Which is the point, of course. Particularly now that there is no more "I Love Lucy" -- and
very little of anything that everyone watches at the same time and can discuss around the
water cooler on the following day -- the O.J. Simpson trial and the Duke lacrosse case,
truly horrible though they are, serve that function. They contain elements that everyone
can relate to, black or white, rich or poor, male or female. They involve sports. They
involve sex. At the deepest level, they involve human evil -- murder, rape, jealousy and
pride. No wonder so many people are trying to figure out what it all means .
applebaumanne@washpost.com
Appendix #10f
Keeping the Duke Scandal in Context
Tuesday, May 2, 2006; A20
Both Anne Applebaum ["At Duke, a Scandal in Search of Meaning," op-ed, April 26]
and Eugene Robinson ["Tough Questions in Durham," op-ed, April 25] made excellent
points in their opinion pieces about the Duke lacrosse team fiasco.
On one count, however, both were off the mark: This situation has nothing to do with
Southern culture. While Duke University is in North Carolina, only the accuser is local.
The alleged attackers come from the Northeast.
With so much emphasis placed upon the South's admittedly horrific history of racism, it
is too easy to forget that the last and arguably bloodiest school desegregation case took
place in Boston, not Birmingham. Problems of race, class and misogyny plague the
country, not just the South.
TARA MOORE SKELTON
Silver Spring
Eugene Robinson said he is "not blaming the victim" when he wrote that the woman who
reported being assaulted at the Duke University lacrosse team's party should have made
"better choices" about earning money than to be an exotic dancer. I disagree. He was
blaming her. Her work choices should not be an issue, just whether a crime occurred.
Mr. Robinson said he's trying to put the incident in context. But why does he stress
Duke's outreach effort and not the economic realities of some women? I know women
who chose stripping as a job in college because it had all the advantages that most work
available to young women does not have: flexible hours, high wages and some
opportunity for self-expression.
Risky, yes. But so is working at bars with drunks, managing picky customers in retail and
dodging lecherous bosses in low-wage office jobs.
For a single mother who needs to support her family and try to finish college, stripping
might have been the right choice.
LUCY BARBER
Washington
Eugene Robinson's column was full of unsubstantiated and insulting generalizations
about Duke presented under the guise of a "rich historical context."
The allegations facing members of the lacrosse team are serious. If true, several are guilty
of a despicable crime, but let us not condemn anyone until the legal process has run its
course. And, certainly, let us not condemn a student body guilty of nothing more than
working hard at one of the most challenging educational institutions in the nation.
As an alumnus and former teacher at Duke, I found Mr. Robinson's caricature of the
university laughable. While a graduate student there, I taught some of the brightest, most
motivated and idealistic undergraduates I have ever met, hardly students who were
"downright arrogant in their sense of superiority."
To get a real sense of the character of this "elite university in the once-segregated South,"
perhaps Mr. Robinson should take a class there. No doubt, he would benefit from the
$21,592 a year in grant money that the average student receives.
MICHAEL E.S. HOFFMAN
Washington
© 2006 The Washington Post Company