Smells Like Team Spirit

I had an idea it wasn’t going to be a simple matter when I heard about the LaCosse team of Duke University being accussed of the rape of a dancer/stripper at a private party. I figured that it would be unravelled in time, but it seems to have gotten messier.

The minute race was brought into the equation, this was a guarantee that emotions were going to run high, as the alleged victim is black and the allegged perpetrators are white sutudents from upper middle class backgrounds. The fact that this event took place at Duke University, a North Carolina, and therefore southern, university, doesn’t help; despite the fact that the majority if not all the accussed asaillants may have been from mid-western and northeastern areas of the coutnry. What is particularly troubling is the accussation made by a number of other black female students who were said to be passers-by of the apartment house where the assault in question took place. According to them, a number of the white male students asaulted them with “racist language” as they passed by.

This is itself an inflammaory accussation, and if it ever does come to trial, will probably not be admitted into evidence. It doesn’t take much of a lawyer to understand the reason for this. For one thing, there is no way these “passers-by” could know if these two or three verbal assaillants to them were even members of the LaCrosse team or were visitors at that particular time, nor can they then know for sure whether they were even in the apartment during the time of the alleged assault. They certainly can’t speciify as to whether they themselves were the actual alleged rapists. Racists, yes (and even this is an unproven allegation), but the two words, while similar, are not necessarily synonomous.

I would actually be surpirsed now if there were even a trial at all, seeing as how the DNA evidence collected has ostensibly cleared all members of the Duke team of the charge of rape. The DNA, whatever it was, came from none of them. Yet, the DA, sensing a potential backlash among his African American constituents-and he is indeed up for reelection this year-has promised that he intends to proceed, that he believes that there was indeed a rape.

In the meantime, the Duke LaCrosse teams season has been cancelled, and there has been an outcry from African American and other minority and some white students demanding that justice be done. Why do I have a feeling that justice to them might well be spelled vigilante? All I’ve seen so far seems to indicate this is far from a cry for justice, and more a demand for a human sacrifice to the gods of political correctness.