Never Having To Say You're Sorry
By Bob Parks (04/12/07)
I’ve declined to talk much about the Duke rape case as, for me, it was a little personal. I didn’t want to come off like a local affiliate TV station that had to find the local angle of a tsunami that hit Indonesia. But as the case began to fall apart, some aspects became all too familiar.
In my early 20’s, I was falsely accused of rape in Boston. As it turned out, I was told by the police I came within three hours from being indicted by an over-zealous district attorney when the “victim” recanted her story. A story made up to hide her disloyal escapades from her boyfriend. So when it comes to this subject, I’m not objective.
We all know how the Duke case has concluded, but one aspect remains raw….
In April of 2006, a cadre of closed-minded, guilty by race and class, politically correct, we’re smarter than you poor saps, Duke faculty members created a website called Concerned Duke Faculty.
In “An Open Letter to the Duke Community“, the faculty showed the depths of their self-righteousness and arrogance….
In the spring of 2006, the Duke community was rocked by terrible news. We heard that a woman hired to perform at a party thrown by our lacrosse team had accused members of the team of raping her. Neighbors, we were told, heard racial epithets called out at the woman as she departed the party. The criminal proceedings and the media frenzy which followed are perhaps beginning to wind down. For us at Duke, the issues raised by the incident, and by our community’s responses to it, are not.
In April, a group of Duke faculty members published an advertisement in The Chronicle. The ad, titled “What does a Social Disaster Sound Like?” was mostly a compilation of statements made by Duke students in response to the incident and its immediate aftermath. This ad has figured in many discussions of the event and of the University’s response. It has been broadly, and often intentionally, misread. We urge everyone to read the original ad. We have. Some of us were among the ad’s signers.
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.
As a statement about campus culture, the ad deplores a “Social Disaster,” as described in the student statements, which feature racism, segregation, isolation, and sexism as ongoing problems before the scandal broke, exacerbated by the heightened tensions in its immediate aftermath. The disaster is the atmosphere that allows sexism, racism, and sexual violence to be so prevalent on campus. The ad’s statement that the problem “won’t end with what the police say or the court decides” is as clearly true now as it was then. Whatever its conclusions, the legal process will not resolve these problems.
The ad thanked “the students speaking individually and…the protesters making collective noise.” We do not endorse every demonstration that took place at the time. We appreciate the efforts of those who used the attention the incident generated to raise issues of discrimination and violence.
There have been public calls to the authors to retract the ad or apologize for it, as well as calls for action against them and attacks on their character. We reject all of these. We think the ad’s authors were right to give voice to the students quoted, whose suffering is real. We also acknowledge the pain that has been generated by what we believe is a misperception that the authors of the ad prejudged the rape case.
As we all now know for sure, the open letter’s first paragraph is bullsh*t.
Despite the fact the rape case was falling apart, some of the Duke faculty remained stubborn in their own superior intelligencia, and were too damn liberal to admit they were (heaven forbid) … wrong.
Instead, they indicted their entire campus. They considered the predator male students a microcosm of our society and that all men were truly rapists. It was just a matter of time…. Some of those faculty members tarnished the on-campus reputations of innocent students who paid for the priviledge of supporting the lifestyle of the tenured.
So the next time any liberal tells you Republicans play the race card and bring up Willie Horton, please remind them of a Democrat district attorney named Mike Nifong who was willing to send innocent college students to jail for decades, just so he could use his Black constituents get re-elected.
Also remember the college faculty members who indicted an entire gender just to pacify the shrill squealings of campus feminists.
Remember this when a brochure from Duke University comes in the mail for your college-bound son. What’s really disturbing is that Duke is just the tip of the iceberg.
Original: http://blackandright.mensnewsdaily.com/2007/04/11/never-having-to-say-youre-sorry/
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