The Duke Lacrosse players accused of the kidnap and sexual assault of a woman hired to “entertain” at a team party have been found innocent, the prosecutor in the case has resigned and will most likely be disbarred, and the players themselves now have an undisclosed settlement with Duke University that surely nets them some serious cash to make up for their having to endure this miscarriage of justice. They are innocent. More than that, they are victims of an unscrupulous prosecutor who was more interested in his own reelection than justice. As the chairman of the disciplinary committee overseeing hearing on Nifong’s actions in this case has said, “We had a prosecutor who was faced with a very unusual situation in which the confluence of his self-interest collided with a very volatile mix of race, sex and class.”
This situation is anything but unusual, of course. The hyping of the Duke lacrosse rape case has done what all hyping does: make it seem as if this case is unique when it just plain isn’t, even if those accused look different from who we expect to be accused. Self-interest and race, sex and class are always in play in the justice system, especially in these sorts of spectacular moments where national anxieties are worked out.
The coverage of this case, from all sides, has worked on the basic assumption that there is something as clear as guilt, innocence, and evidence, as if all these aspects of something we call justice are ontologically real rather than what they are: social projects. What makes this case different, perhaps, is the national demand for redress for these accused players who are constructed as innocent bystanders caught in the media firestorm.
There is nothing particularly unusual in the confluence of social differences that congealed in this case, and nothing unusual about the actions that led to the charges in the first place. Hyperprivileged young men at private colleges throwing drunken team parties imbued with the erotics of sexual violence isn’t anything new. And the individualizing of social disorder through methods of crime and punishment isn’t new either. What is perhaps unusual was that these men, and their lacrosse coach, were made to pay the price for the social disorders caused by racism, sexism and classism that lead to the shocking inequities among people in the same community. The outcry at this injustice is, I think, telling. These young men are figured as the victims of terrible loss. What is lost when these men can’t play their last lacrosse season, can’t enjoy their senior years as big men on campus, is true loss, while the multitudes of poor people and people of color who regularly lose, who daily pay the price for social disorder in prisons, in neighborhoods purposely blighted by white flight, in schools massively underfunded so that others can prosper, is expected loss, and loss that we are increasingly unable to mourn. None of this is to say that this case itself was not terribly botched, or that these individuals did not suffer wrong. But this settlement does expose the difference in value of some lives over others, and that difference means the lacrosse players will get their settlement while others are expected to endure as the necessary cost for others to exercise their privileges.
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This is the first real critique I have seen that analyzes the problem rather than simply hawking the media’s “reporting.”
I have been amazed at the power of the high priced attorneys for these 3 men… please don’t call them boys. These “victims” will get money and a sense that their lives and experiences are more valued than those of others – though I guess they had that point of view when they planned this particular entertainment that night.
Duke University and the families of these athletes have also brought down all of their righteousness on Nifong… who was wrong but does not deserve the total destruction of his life and career. but someone needed to be publicly beaten by both the athletes families and duke – both mightily well-financed compaqred to Mr. N. who didn’t have a chance.
It was interesting to me that this happened right after the publication of Tom Wolfe’s Book, I am Charlotte Simmons, which is really a damning expose of Duke U. and especially the lacrosse team members. the same type of sexual exploitzation goes on… Ugly.
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I really hate this post, John. Mainly, I think, because of the horribly small quid pro quo attitude, when quid does not equal quo. How can you stand for justice when you poo poo those who have been unjustly accused?
You write:
“What is lost when these men can’t play their last lacrosse season, can’t enjoy their senior years as big men on campus…”
as if what was at stake was a sense of entitlement instead of their freedom. Classy.First you minimize the situation (yeah, false rape prosection, BUT), then you attempt to springboard onto what you perceive as more egregious social disorder, while hypocritically engaging in the very “individualizing of social disorder” you purport to be against. This made me a little sick.
I’d be a lot more sympathetic to your point if you stood more absolutely for justice. Don’t even get me started on tomatogirl’s terming a fictional novel a damning expose.
Uh, please tell me if this makes me unwelcome at your blog. (I do feel a bit uncomfortable now.) I probably should have just stuck to the dance critique.
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I, Kate, wrote this post, and your dislike of it surely doesn’t make you unwelcome at this blog.
I wonder here, though, at your sense of strict distinction between a sense of entitlement and a sense of freedom. Freedom is indeed something that in this country some are entitled to and others not, and what counts as a loss of freedom that needs to be mourned differs wildly from person to person, from group to group, and this is all I was trying to point to in what you term my “poo pooing” of the losses these Duke men suffered. I’ll have to rethink how I refer to these different losses–I have my own investments and ways of mourning as well.
Freedom needs to be defined separately from privilege, and what we mean by justice needs to be defined as well. These are, in my mind, tasks, not accomplishments. The Duke case is emblematic of a range of justice questions, about individual justice, social justice, structures of privilege and racism and class ordering that are not simply contained in a call to stand “absolutely for justice.”
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You’re certainly welcome – damn, I’d say encouraged! – to disagree with any and all posts. In fact, I am not totally on-board with Kate’s analysis in this post.
A thought on the “absoluteness” of justice. (Forgive my thinking outloud.) To my thinking, there is an absoluteness to justice. In an academic setting, this is where I’m moved by Jacques Derrida’s claim that justice is un-deconstructable. That justice cannot be put in question.
What does this mean outside of debating philosophical stuff? Well, for me, it means that we always refer to a universal justice when we complicate practices and cultural meanings of justice. In this case, the separation of freedom and privilege refer, in the end, to a sense of justice for both kinds of victims (I do think being accused of rape on a national stage is a fairly brutal thing to undergo). What do they both deserve? And does that “deserve” actually cut through the distinction between freedom and privilege? That is, do we find in the end that we all deserve a lot of (even most of) what goes by names of freedom and privilege?
I think that sort of thing helps us name certain things as unjust.
One thing that’s been lost in this chaos is just how gruesome the original event (pre-alleged crime) actually was. A bunch of white guys hiring a couple of black strippers? That’s not a crime, I know. Not my point. But it restages some really ugly stuff about U.S. history. Putting it in the South only adds an accent (pun intended).
To me, that speaks to a whole environment, one where African-Americans feel a ghostly history of sexual violence and exploitation, yet one where White-Americans largely imagine “just strippers and boys being boys.” So, I mourn, as it were, the loss of that conversation, one where a whole lot could have been learned.
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Sorry, John and Kate for the misattribution both.
Well, now that I’m mostly past my initial emotional abhorrence of the post it’s my turn to say J’accuse, Kate!
I think Kate and I are actually on the same page when it comes to making a distinction between privilege and freedom. It was what I saw as her conflating of these ideas that bothered me. I don’t believe in “absolute freedom” at all and I was a bit dubious about my use of “absolute” at all at the time–good on you, Kate, for picking up on that–which is why I had to settle for using “more” when I was really thinking about privilege versus freedom but coming up with horrible stuff like “relative absolute freedom” in my mind–that is to say, I was speaking specifically of freedom as incarceration for a crime these men didn’t commit and botching it horribly.
But if you look at the original post, Kate doesn’t make these distinctions at one crucial point, and I think tomatogirl rightly (wrongly!) picked up on that. Where it is is in the part I quoted before regarding what is lost to these men. It drives me crazy–absolutely batty–that their losses are put in some sort of competition with the less privileged. To me it revealed a meanness of spirit.
It wouldn’t have cost anything to have said something like “but these men are lucky because they are relatively privileged while others are less fortunate.” Instead, the very “individualizing of social disorder” Kate rails against, the injustice that I rail against, is what Kate perpetuates. Instead, Kate attributes these specific men whom she doesn’t know personally with a feeling of entitlement in order to expiate her broader issues of entitlement. Personally, I don’t know these boys either. For all I know, they do feel entitled, but they shouldn’t be made to pay for crimes we haven’t proved they committed–and here I’m speaking about their alleged feeling of entitlement as well as their alleged rape.
As for John’s point about re-staging, I’m reminded of a segment of SYTYCD wherein the white Lauren talked about her alter-ego Misha Chan. I think most people thought in the same context of re-staging when they were offended by her remarks. I wasn’t terribly offended even though as an Asian woman, I could have been personally outraged by her re-staging of her exploitation of me. I mainly thought she was young and silly, but I think it was possible for me to not be offended because I knew others would be offended on my behalf, heh.
I know to many people, America is horribly backward when it comes to race, but I tend to think we’re moving really fast toward progress in the context of history. The atmosphere for dialog and general cultural awareness in America is pretty terrific to my mind. I visited Japan last year and I knew that there would be almost no Japanese person to be offended by the Japanese people in blackface busting out fake ghetto moves in a beer commercial on TV. They’re horribly homogenized. (In fact, I think the blackface was meant as homage.)
So I tend to think about re-staging as a transforming act rather than a re-forming act. Not only is the stage different, the audience is different, too, and changing, as is the theater.
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Thank you for helping me think through these issues. I do think, though, that these men’s losses have been quite fully accounted for in the media’s coverage of their innocence, though it may have been in response to a gulity feeling on the part of that same media. They have been vindicated, the DA has been fired, they will win civil lawsuits. They cannot not have been treated unjustly–you are absolutely right. And their ordeal is no small thing. I’m asking why our culture marks their losses so extensively while other losses go completely unmarked.
I think you are right that the way I characterize their sufferings pretends that their losses are no big deal and perhaps sets their injustice against those of others in an unhelpful, or, as you put it, “mean” way. I belittle their losses perhaps because I feel anger at the collective guilt and expatiation at their sufferings, a guilt that is rarely felt for the losses of so many others. I am situated somewhere in relation to these dialogues as well. Consider me called out on that.
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While the laxers weren’t convicted, they had fourteen months to contemplate the horror that innocence would not protect them from decades in jail.
But, being white and privileged, I suppose that doesn’t count.I hope none of you are EVER on a jury. The facts of the case seem to range from totally irrelevant to of minimal importance.
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I’m not sure if you’re hoping none of us are on a jury because you don’t care for our reflections or because it is always difficult to be on a jury.
On the latter, sure, it is difficult. It is also how we practice democracy, so the difficulty is worth it.
On the former, well, we’re not playing jury in this series of posts and replies. We’re thinking about what the case means in many senses. The legal question is settled, no? Since we’re neither judges nor attorneys connected to the case, this conversation is obviously not about convicting or not convicting the three men. That’s why this is a cultural theory weblog, not a court of law.
The sarcasm about white and privileged rings a little odd, given that Kate and I are both, well, white and privileged. So we’re all in the same club on that one, Richard.
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