A team of distinguished athletes at an elite and highly respected university hired two local women to strip at a house filled with men (including those underage) who had been drinking too much. That's sleazy, to say the least. That those women were women of color underscores the appalling power dynamics of the situation.

As a professor at Duke, I felt shame when the media's account of the behavior in the lacrosse house came to stand for all Duke students and the institution itself. So many students, faculty and administrators here work hard to live down our unflattering old segregation nickname, "the Plantation." Yet after March 13, Duke again came to symbolize (seemingly for the entire world) the most lurid and sexualized form of race privilege.

Cathy Davidson bends over backwards, perhaps so far as to perform her own colonoscopy, to characterize the actions of the 88 as noble, compassionate and correct.

Well, you can't blame her for trying.

What never seems to have occurred to Professor Davidson (of English of course...) is that her "sensitivity" to the feelings of emotionally-crippled students is indistinguishable from mob lynchings of black men because of community outrage at the besmirching of some white woman's "honor".

On a cool, spring day in March 1931, two white women hitched a ride on a freight train in Alabama in the hopes of finding work in a neighboring state. When authorities stopped the train some time later, both women, fearing arrest for violating the Mann Act, which prohibited transporting even willing women across state lines for illicit purposes, told police that they had been raped by nine black men who were also scattered along the train.[1] Their accusation caused a furor, and a mob that gathered to lynch the men dispersed only with promises of a speedy trial. Despite little evidence of rape, the men were convicted based on the women's testimony and sentenced to death. As the case meandered through four separate trials and two supreme court decisions, local whites continued to support the women's charges, even though one recanted her claim of rape after the second trial. Allegations eventually surfaced that the women were no paragons of virtue. Both had occasionally resorted to prostitution to support themselves and apparently had engaged in sexual relations with unmarried white men in the days before they made their accusations. Nevertheless, in an early articulation of what would come to be rape shield laws, which, in the 1970s, attempted to protect against attacks on the character of a rape victim, white southerners argued that the two women's sordid sexual past should have no bearing on the case. As one spectator told a reporter, the victim "might be a fallen woman, but by God she is a white woman."[2] Though the nine accused men eventually won their freedom, the Scottsboro case, as it came to be known, has become the paradigm for all black-on-white rape cases in the twentieth century, in which the accuser's whiteness overrode any consideration of her gender, sexual history, or class status. As one song about the case insisted, "Messin' white women / Snake lyin' tale / Dat hang and burn / And jail wit' no bail."[3] This case seemingly proved the power of the "rape myth": that white southerners accepted all white women's accounts of rape when they accused black men, thereby instigating a united effort to seek revenge. The myth insisted that black men were driven to assault white women and that, as a deterrent, "black beast rapists" should pay with their lives, even if white women's charges were little more than "snake lyin' tales."

The parallels are striking and disturbing.

No single aspect of the liberal character defines it as much as the truncated perspective. I'm willing to take Ms. Davidson at her word that she meant well, but how could it escape her and the rest of the faculty that their actions bore an uncanny resemblance to a lynch mob's? The reason we have a justice system is precisely to excise the passion from the issue and consider the matter in the context of actual evidence.

The faculty's action is the very definition of arrogance, and you know how arrogant people like to be criticized.

On the other hand, most of my e-mail comes from right-wing "blog hooligans." These hateful, ranting and sometimes even threatening folks don't care about Duke or the lacrosse players. Their aim is to make academics and liberals look ridiculous and uncaring. They deliberately misrepresent the faculty and manipulate the feelings of those who care about the lacrosse players in order to foster their own demagogic political agenda. They contribute to the problem, not to the solution.

Frankly, the Duke 88 don't need much help looking ridiculous and uncaring, and complaining about being misrepresented is just beyond the pale. Folks! You just represented an entire sports team as rapists!

Eighty-eight fools to be remembered as such for the rest of their lives.