The Duke Lacrosse Fiasco

These are dark days for the Duke University athletic department. Let's forget about performance on the field and the courts. Several lacrosse players have been accused of a host of crimes, the worst of which include rape and assault, against exotic dancers hired to work a party hosted by much of the lax team. To make matters worse, there is a racial dynamic that plays a major role in the case. If you are unfamiliar with the story as it has played out so far, go here and here.

The Thunderstick is a Duke alum and a former Blue Devil athlete. Here is his take:

Of course, the Duke stuff is big news. I hate the lacrosse guys. When I was at Duke they were your standard lacrosse players, but I think they've gotten [. . .] worse. When we go down every year for a football game, we see them because for every football game they show up dressed in leather and all this S&M gear. It's really fucked up. The first time we were down there, a bunch of them [. . .] were bombed [and] came by our tailgate and tried to steal our beer. So I'm not shocked to see those assholes do something like this. At least it seems the general consensus is that the university is handling this well by letting the investigation take its [course] before deciding on the guilt of the students, which I think you have to do, but they pretty much suspended the lax season to send a strong message that even if this didn't happen, the behavior that led to this even becoming a possibility isn't acceptable and deserves serious repercussions. The flip side of this is that now we get bombarded with the annoying fembots that are going to be a huge pain in the ass and won't be happy unless the [blood of the] people that did this [. . .] is spilled. One of those women was on the Abrams report or something and she said she was appalled by the university's response and the guy said "they've pretty much cancelled the lax season and are waiting for the investigation to take place--what more do you want them to do?" and she couldn't offer [anything] and just babbled for another 4 minutes about how there's not enough awareness about sexual offenses. Those people drive me nuts as well. I guess I'm always one of these people that says let the investigation take place and then kick whoever is guilty out of school and send them to jail for a long, long time, but don't sit there screaming about punishing people when you don't know what went on yet.

While I might quibble with a few of his points, I think TS is spot-on in terms of how he addresses the major issue.

First off, let me be clear -- I know it may not be fair, but I have never quite understood the inflated sense of self-esteem that the vast majority of lacrosse players on elite college campuses (pretty much the only places it is played collegiately) seem to possess. Lacrosse has always struck me as affirmative action for affluent white kids from the suburbs of Mid-Atlantic States. They are the best spring athletes who don't play baseball, run track, or in some states play soccer, that money can buy. (Lacrosse is largely -- overwhelmingly -- a prep-school sport.) There is nothing wrong with any of this, per se, except that in coming from this cloistered world, many college lacrosse players do have an inflated sense of both entitlement and their own self worth.

I also tend to agree with TS about the rush to judgment and the outrage that some people are expressing that something isn't being done RIGHT NOW. It seems that some people are pretty selective in their concern for fundamental rights, such as due process. Whatever my criticisms of lacrosse, I do not believe that the vast majority of them would ever engage in felonious activities. Most are not racists or rapists. Yet those who want to accelerate a process that in reality has moved at an incredibly fast pace, apparently want to tarnish everyone affiliated with Duke lacrosse. Every white player in the program -- and there is only one black player (let that one sink in if you deny my characterization of the demographics of lacrosse -- 46 of the 47 members of the Duke men's program are white) has already taken a DNA test. Even the most extreme allegations only point to the involvement of a handful of players. It is one thing to be upset, and to recognize that even on college campuses we have much work to do with regard to matters of race and sex; it is quite another to vent your righteous outrage simply because you can. Duke is pretty much a bastion of liberalism and in some cases radicalism. It is pretty hard to take someone seriously who tries to argue that the leaders of the institution are somehow retrograde. This speaks to the larger sense of priviledge at a place like Duke -- an out of touch sense of where life on an elite campus fits into the larger world, a mindset to which in many ways the lacrosse team also fell victim.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all of this is the racial dynamic. In the world of liberal elite privilege, these things are not supposed to happen. The fact that the victims were black and had been picked out by the guys who threw the party, the rampant use of racial epithets, the violence that ensued -- this is maybe most alarming of all. And it should remind us of how far we still have to go with regard to race in America. Furthermore, those unfamiliar with the Duke demographic should be wary of sloughing this off as merely retrograde behavior by southern students. Duke is in the South; it is not of the South. In other words, Duke is a school in the South. It is not a Southern school. In fact, the university's makeup is pretty close to that of most lacrosse teams, but with more consciously honed racial diversity. Once the bombast fades and the righteous vent their spleens, the university community will have a lot of questions to answer. But Duke is certainly not alone -- this event happened at Duke; it likely could have occurred just about anyplace.