Mugged (28 page)
During the same time period, blacks were raping whites at a clip of several thousand per year—and raping black women at a rate of many multiple thousand per year, according to Department of Justice victimization surveys. (Victimization surveys are obviously the most accurate measure of who is committing crimes because someone who has just been beaten or raped is not going to lie about the race of his assailant for the good of the race.)
When a black stripper, Crystal Mangum, accused members of the Duke University lacrosse team of gang-raping her, no one in the media paused to consider the likelihood of her having been the victim of a nonexistent crime. At no point did liberals say, “Wait a minute, maybe there wasn’t a rape.” As soon as the charge was made, they said, “Well, we know there was a rape. Now let’s psychoanalyze the perpetrators and draw larger conclusions about it.”
Mangum’s alleged rape instantly inspired rafts of articles about “frat boys,” “patriarchy” and “white male power.” One white male sports columnist managed to use the phrase “frat boys” five times in a single column about “good old frat boys having a good old frat-boy time…rich-boy, frat-boy arrogance and entitlement.”
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Certain words always say more about the speaker than the person being described. People who call others “entitled,” “privileged” or a “frat boy” or refer to someone’s “daddy” are fantasists who enjoy imagining Thurston Howell chasing them with his polo mallet. Liberals treat WASPdom as an obscure and mysterious cult instead of the ethnic background of a majority of Americans at least into the 1990s. “Frat boys” haven’t held any kind of power since at least the 1920s.
There isn’t even a Protestant on the Supreme Court, much less an Eastern establishment, old money, Ivy League, social club Protestant. The only traditional WASPS in the presidency in the past century have been FDR and the two Bushes—the second raised in Texas. As Richard Brookhiser, author of
The Way of the WASP
, puts it, these days, the very phrase, “the Protestant establishment” sounds like a joke.
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Consequently, for Duke professors, Mangum’s putative rape was like Christmas morning. Within a few weeks of Mangum leveling her charge, eighty-eight professors had rushed out with a full-page newspaper ad titled,
“This Is What A Social Disaster Looks Like,” that simply assumed the lacrosse players’ guilt. It was too good a story to wait for the facts.
One hint of the turn civil rights had taken was given by the signatories to the advertisement. Obviously, the African American Studies Department was overrepresented, with 80 percent of the department signing, but they have to justify their existence somehow. Nipping at the heels of the African American Studies Department was the Program in Women’s Studies, with 72 percent represented, followed by the Department of Cultural Anthropology, coming in at 60 percent.
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Among the more prominent professors signing the letter were:
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Anne Allison, white feminist nut. Her work includes the book
Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club
(1994). After the rape charge, she began teaching a new class titled, “Hook-up Culture at Duke” that would explore what “the lacrossse scandal tell[s] us about power, difference and raced, classed, gendered and sexed normativity in the U.S.”
30
William Chafe, white male. On the Duke faculty page, he describes his research as reflecting his “long-term interest in issues of race and gender equality.” Perhaps barking up the wrong tree, he also enjoys women’s soccer, flannel shirts, the LPGA, the Indigo Girls, and Jodie Foster movies.
Miriam Cooke, white feminist nut. Her specialty is providing a feminist interpretation of the Koran. (Her entire doctoral dissertation was a single sentence that read,
Women: shut up or be killed.
)
Kim Curtis, white feminist nut and political-science professor, promptly failed two of her students on the lacrosse team, for which the university ended up having to make a cash settlement with the players, in addition to giving them passing grades.
Cathy Davidson, white feminist nut. Her books include
The Book of Love: Writers and Their Love Letters
,
The Oxford Book of Women’s Writing in the United States
and
The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States
. She’s currently working on
The Oxford Companion to the Oxford Companion to the Oxford Book of Women’s Writings on Women’s Love Letters in the United States
, which she will require all her students to buy.
Ariel Dorfman, white male. His “most famous” play, according to Wikipedia, is
Death and the Maiden
, a light romantic comedy about a former torture victim meeting the man she believes tortured her.
Michael Hardt, white male, specializing in class oppression and imperialism, with a minor in advanced victimology. His book
Empire
has been called the new “Communist Manifesto,”
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because the original wasn’t communisty enough.
Alice Kaplan, white feminist nut. Her most recent work of scholarship is a book about the Paris years of Jackie O., Angela Davis and Susan Sontag.
Claudia Ann Koonz, white feminist nut. Her area of expertise is women during the Nazi era.
Pedro Lasch (born Gerry Rivers), white male. He describes himself as: “artist, researcher, educator, activist, cultural organizer.”
Walter Mignolo, white male. His latest book is the captivating thriller,
The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Latin America Otherwise).
Diane Nelson, white feminist nut, Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and Women’s Studies. She urges students to “actively make alternative histories.” (Hey—let’s start one now with a fake rape story!)
Kathy Rudy, white feminist nut in the Women’s Studies Department. Her work includes “anti-speciesism” and an essay, in which she describes coming to Duke as an undergraduate and moving “quickly into the lesbian community because there was a growing sentiment in feminist discourse that lesbianism was the most legitimate way to act out our politics.…I managed to live most of my daily life avoiding men all together [
sic
], and spent most of my social time reading, dreaming, planning, talking, and writing about the beauty of a world run only by women,…free of [men’s] patronizing dominance.” Then one day she couldn’t change a flat tire and reconsidered everything.
Pete Sigal, white male. He teaches “Sexual History Around the Globe.”
Rebecca Stein, white feminist, whose Duke Web page states that her work on Israeli cultural politics has appeared in such journals as
Journal
of Palestine Studies
,
GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies
and
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.
One begins to understand why today’s students don’t enjoy reading. Also why the Duke University Press is referred to as “the laughingstock of the publishing world.”
32
As is evident, the rush to judgment in the Duke case was led by the chroniclers of white-male patriarchy, anti-speciesism and the gender-power-and-privilege crowd—not the descendants of slaves. The stripper could have been white for all they cared. The race angle gave the story a little frisson, but the main point was that a member of the lower class had been raped by white male oppressors—from
the lacrosse team
, no less. Cathy Davidson, one of the signatories, later explained that the “social disaster” referred to in the ad included the fact that “women’s salaries for similar jobs are substantially less than men’s.”
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The black experience in America had been ripped off by feminists.
White female termigants Nancy Grace and her partner in righteous anger, Wendy Murphy were the Alton Maddox and Al Sharpton of the Duke lacrosse case. After it was established that none of the players’ DNA was found on the accuser, Nancy Grace had this exchange with a Duke student on her Headline News show:
STEPHEN MILLER, DUKE CONSERVATIVE UNION:
Well, I think I speak for many students when I say that we’re very, very concerned that two innocent people may have possibly—
GRACE:
Oh, good lord!
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In April 2006, Wendy Murphy explained that the lacrosse players see “women as objects, that they would degrade a woman, rape her, strangle her, beat her senseless. Why wouldn’t they, then, write an e-mail saying, ‘And, oh, by the way, the next time I do this, I think I’ll just cut right to the chase and kill her outright.’ I think it shows a state of mind of utter disrespect for that woman in particular, for women in general.”
She said the players were “thinking, ‘I was entitled to do this. I’m a member of a wealthy white boy’s school in a community that allows me to do what I want when I want. They’ve gotten away with a lot for a very long time. Why not go home and celebrate?’…The e-mail shows that these guys were of the mind that whatever had happened to this woman was just
another day at the beach. They’ll rape her, sodomize her and tomorrow they’ll kill her.”
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A month later, as the case continued to disintegrate, Murphy said, “I never, ever met a false rape claim, by the way. My own statistics speak to the truth.”
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She said: “Over 99 percent of cases indicted are in fact legitimate,” adding, “the guys are guilty. I have scientific, statistical proof.”
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Even feminists only claim that 2 percent of rape claims are false, which itself is an unsubstantiated factoid from Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 book,
Against Our Will
.
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Brownmiller’s only “source” is a mimeograph of a speech by a state court judge, to the New York State Bar Association, in which he made a passing remark about a single New York precinct with an all-female rape squad. Nothing more is known about what the rape squad studied, how it analyzed the information or the precise results. No trace of it exists.
According to the FBI, a higher percentage of rape claims are false than any other criminal complaint, 8 percent compared to 2 percent for other crimes.
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More detailed studies have found much higher rates of false rape charges. A study of all rape allegations in a Midwestern city over nine years found 41 percent were false
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and a study of more than a thousand rape allegations on air force bases over the course of four years concluded that 46 percent were false. In 27 percent of the cases, the accuser recanted.
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Even after Jesse Jackson had thrown in the towel, Murphy was still convinced the stripper was telling the truth. Nine months into the investigation, prosecutor Mike Nifong amended his filing to say there was no rape, and he further admitted to the court that Mangum had the DNA of at least five other men in or on her—but none from any of the lacrosse players. Murphy responded by hypothesizing nonexistent evidence, saying Nifong might have photos from cooperating witnesses at the party. Yes, and he might also have photos of Big Foot and the Easter bunny dancing the Charleston at the Loch Ness monster’s house. He might have had photos of Wendy Murphy assaulting the stripper.
Murphy said that dropping the rape charge from a rape prosecution was a brilliant strategic move, because by dumping the vaginal rape charge, we’re not going to hear about the sex she had with five or ten or fifteen other guys, and that’s a good thing for the prosecution.”
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Feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte (the potty-mouthed activist briefly hired by the John Edwards presidential campaign) was still going strong long after the rape had been exposed as a fraud. At the point when Nifong had been removed from the case and ethics charges brought against him by the state bar, she blogged:
I’ve been sort of casually listening to CNN blaring throughout the waiting area and good fucking god is that channel pure evil. For awhile, I had to listen to how the poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and fucked her against her will—not rape, of course, because the charges have been thrown out. Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair.
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Demonstrating her deep sensitivity to racial issues, Marcotte’s book,
It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments
had to be pulled and reissued because the illustrations were so laughably racist. The book’s drawings portrayed various scenes of a buxom blonde battling African savages in loin cloths.
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Hysteria over the alleged rape by Duke lacrosse players was entirely a feminist enterprise. That’s modern civil rights.
It’s not about Democratic governors blocking the schoolhouse door: It’s about giving women the right to make false charges of rape. It’s about “equal pay” for women with education degrees, compared to men with engineering degrees. It’s about the Augusta National Golf Club not admitting women as members. And it’s about bringing “nationally recognized speakers on sexual harassment” to speak at universities at least twice a year to supplement the speeches on sexual harassment already given every hour of every day on college campuses.
And it’s about abortion, gay marriage and amnesty for illegal aliens.
It’s fantastic that the Democrats have finally come out in favor of civil rights. It would have been a lot more help, though, if they had done so when their own party was denying blacks the right to vote, to go to school, to sit in nonsegregated diners and to use the same water fountains as whites. But Democrats’ commitment to civil rights has always been directly proportional to how much it helps them politically. These days, blacks are nothing more than window dressing for the issues liberals really care about.
And the left’s most important political cause since sometime in 2007 has been Barack Obama. Even he doesn’t take the legacy of slavery seriously. As the cover of
Newsweek
proclaimed, Obama is our “first gay president.”