Mark Naison: The Duke Rape Case ... A Drama With No Heroes, and Many Victims

Since several people on my listservs have posted their opinions on the Duke"Rape" Case and its aftermath, I thought I might put my two cents in about what has happened here.

At latest count, the tally of people who have had their reputations sullied and their lives ruined by this case includes the exotic dancer who made the accusation, the three young man she accused of raping her, and the district attorney who decided to prosecute them. Truly, everyone associated with this case has managed, in New York City subway system vernacular, to" touch the Third Rail," and all of them have been burned

Why did this happen? In my humble opinion ( though of course some people would say I have never been humble!) this case brought together three indendiary variables, each of which has life ruining potential when it becomes the subject of legal action or accusations of bias- race, gender and class. Everyone associated with this case underestimated how perilous a path they were travelling on and now are paying a far worse price then they ever imagined

Let's look at the lacrosse players. Inviting a stripper to a team party at a school like Duke is an act of arrogance and stupidity so extraordinary it staggers the imagination. Duke is a school with a substantial number of students, faculty members and administrators who would regard such an action, and rightly so, as an insult to all women on campus. Either the students who did this regarded themselves as"untouchable," or they thought they were launching a personal protest against political correctness" on campus. Even if no accusations of rape took place, the athletic department should have cancelled the lacrosse team's season, or at least suspended all lacrosse players who were at that party

But hiring the strippers was only the first, and not the worst, of the mistakes made by the lacrosse players that fateful evening. When two Black strippers showed up, a red flag should have gone up among the people at the party that they had entered a zone of even greater danger. Only people who live in their own privileged cocoon would not have understood that the racial dynamics in the city of Durham, which has a black majority, would have placed a group of rich white boys from Duke in a perilous position if anything negative happened to the two young women who showed up to"entertain" them.

As anyone who is familiar with"exotic dancing" knows, the relationship between the dancer and her audience is fraught with tension. Even in relatively"tame" encounters, audiences shout out encouragement, and make vulgar requests, in language that mirrors the most explicit hop hop jams; but exotic dancing also involves significant physical contact, from patrons putting bills into g strings and body crevices, to lap dances which are a form of sex without intercourse. When you add race and class differences to the mix, along with the loosening of inhibitions due to alcolhol, you have a scenario where the dancers are likely to feel humiliated, demeaned and possibly physically and sexually assaulted.

Now we come to the dancers. These were young women who chose to make money by acting out the sexual fantasies of men. They had probably done this before in Durham's Black community and had developed a set of responses to handle men who"got out of line." But nothing they had done before could prepare them for the feelings of humiliation they were going to experience when they performed for rich white kids from Duke. There was no common culture to mediate the gender tensions inherent in the exotic dancer's relationship to her audience- no background of common language, experience and knowledge of space and territory to set limits on what was acceptable behavior. From the dancer's point of view, what they experienced was a form of withering contempt devoid of compassion and understanding that transformed them into crude caricatures of"video ho's," something so humiliating that it made them ashamed of how they made a living. So off putting was the atmosphere that it made everything the boys asked for seem offensive and what's worse, racist. Did the boys use racial slurs? Maybe, but even if they didn't, they made the young women who danced for them feel like objects of contempt and when some kind of physical encounter took place- what kind the new court proceedings will probably reveal-- contempt turned to anger.

Feeling justly humiliated by what they considered racist and demeaning treatment, one of the dancers told her father what happened and decided to file a complaint with the District Attorney. This was a fateful step with consequences for the dancer that someone should have told her about. Accusing a group of Duke lacrosse players of sexual assault was not only going to make the front pages of every newspaper in the nation, it was going to make every detail of the dancer's life a matter of public record. Everything this young woman ever did that might shed negative light on her character, from the children she had out of wedlock, to the men she had consensual sex with, to the jobs she had been fired from, or the courses she had failed, was going to be uncovered and publicized by reporters or private investigators. This can happen to any woman who files a sexual assault charge against a wealthy or powerful person, but in this instance, it was going to be magnified by the race and class issues inherent in the original encounter. It is possible the young woman may feel satisfaction in the results of the legal proceedings or collect some funds from the defendent in civil court, but whether any of that is worth the negative exposure she has received is a very serious question.

Now comes the district attorney, a white attorney up for re election in a black majority city. This case seemed a wonderful opportunity, at first glance, to assure justice was done on behalf of a working class woman attacked by wealthy, well connected white men. That fact that the Duke Lacrosse Team was hated for its arrogance and sexist behavior even by many people on the Duke campus made the case seem like a"win win" for District Attorney Nifong- to make himself a hero in his community and the nation, by defending the underdog, and showing that the a group of the country's richest, most privileged people was not immune to prosecution.

Unfortunately, Mr Nifong quest for hero status, and re-election, proved to be his undoing. He failed to do the kind of rigorous investigation a case like this required, and decided to attack the defendents in the press before he put together a rigorous legal case against them. The old statement,"pride cometh before a fall" applies here. Once the case became this public, every single one of the prosecutor's actions would be scrutinized, not only by the lawyers for the defendents, but by every legal scholar in the nation that networks and newspapers decided to hire as their resident"experts." In addition, because Duke University was placed in such a negative light by this incident, Duke would inevitably do its own investigation of the incident, drawing on far greater resources that the District Attorney had at its displosal.

As it turned out, Nifong's carelessness and lack of professionalism in the early stages of investigation was so pronounced that it would place his entire career in jeopardy. The first sign of this come during the summer, when an independent investigator by an African American law professor, issued a report that accused the District Attorney of malicious prosecution, of manufacturing a case without the most minimal evidence, and of withholding essential evidence from the defendents and their lawyers during the discovery process. But the most deadly blow came when the North Carolina Bar Association called for Nifong's resignation from the case and launched an investigation that could result in his disbarment

What lessons, if any, should be drawn form this. It is that people, no matter what their social position, live in a society where issues of race, class and gender are objects of division, misunderstanding and conflict. When you find yourself in an encounter where your race, class, or gender are at issue in a conflict, be it in school, in the workplace, in your recreational activities, or even in your personal life, proceed with extreme caution. Make sure you understand the force of the emotions such factors can inspire in youself as well as others, and try to do everything possible to defuse misunderstandings that arise as a result.

There is no guarantee that doing this will solve the problem at hand, but it may prevent it from escalating into something far bigger than anybody bargained for, or any body wanted