Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

COLUMN: 21st century witch hunt
By Alex Frey
The Diamondback (U. Maryland)
04/21/2006

(U-WIRE) COLLEGE PARK, Md. — Imagine the following scenario: A group of black lacrosse players at a historically black college holds a team-only party and hires a white stripper from the prestigious university next door. Afterward, the stripper ends up in the hospital and claims she was gang raped by three black men.

Without knowing any of the evidence, predominantly white crowds gather outside the lacrosse team's house and call them rapists and criminals. The president of the university cancels their season. The black coach is forced to resign. The team is demonized by the national media. An e-mail sent by one team member that included a crude parody of a movie passage is displayed out of context on the front page of newspapers nationwide.

The team remains united in the claim there was no wrongdoing that night. Test results seem to help their case by failing to produce any foreign DNA on the alleged victim's body. The district attorney claims that some 70 percent of rape cases are prosecuted without DNA, but several legal commentators point out this is because many rapes are not reported until weeks afterwards. To not exhibit DNA anywhere on the body only hours after being violently gang raped by three men would seem highly unlikely.

Photographs also emerge that indicate the stripper had injuries even before entering the house. A police officer who handled her 911 call reports she was "passed out drunk" and possibly high on something. It turns out the stripper also has a criminal history. While intoxicated, she once stole a taxi from a man she was giving a lap dance to and then led police on a high-speed car chase that culminated in her trying to run over a police officer in an alley.

The district attorney of the predominantly white town is up for re-election in two weeks, and the rape case emerges as the No. 1 issue. Ignoring contrary evidence, the district attorney pushes through the indictments of two players. Unlike the alleged victim, the players have their names and pictures displayed on every major news channel. Some who were not even implicated reportedly lose jobs and summer internships. White community members applaud, telling reporters they "just know" the black lacrosse players are lying.

After the indictment, defense lawyers show ABC News time-dated photographs that indicate a rape could have only occurred between 12:10 a.m. and 12:30 a.m. Yet in that timeframe, one of the two suspects the stripper claims to have identified with "100 percent certainty" has ATM receipts, cell phone records and an eyewitness account from a taxi driver that show he was elsewhere. The news media focus instead on the lacrosse players' upbringings in traditionally black neighborhoods and schools.

If this situation were actually to unfold, the Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and every other civil rights leader in the country would rightly be holding marches to condemn the racist district attorney and the grave violations of the rights of the defendants.

Yet if you switch the words white and black, the nightmarish scenario described above is precisely what is happening right now in Durham, N.C., to the members of Duke University's men's lacrosse team. And instead of protests, unjust public persecution is being greeted with silence or approval from those who should know better.

What is going on here is clear. Wherever the elite in this country find an issue of race, class or sex, they will inevitably spin it as the powerful exploiting the poor. Question the logic or the methods employed and you will quickly find yourself siding with the racists.

The reality is discrimination is but the latest witchcraft. The only way to avoid burning at the stake is to sanctimoniously accuse as many people of it as possible. Bonus points are awarded if they happen to be privileged athletes.

It is fashionable among those who see themselves as members of an enlightened elite to complain about the barbarism of the McCarthy era. If the Duke rape case teaches us anything, perhaps it is that we do not need to go back so far in history to find such a miscarriage of justice.

Alex Frey is a senior electrical engineering major. He can be reached at frey@umd.edu.

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