LITTLE ROCK — It was six years ago that Duke University forced its lacrosse coach to resign and canceled the 2006 lacrosse season in caving to a tremendous tsunami of public outcry that, in the end, wound up being a sea of falsity.
It may have all started with the false rape accusations by a black female against some Duke lacrosse team members. But it was propelled and driven by men and women with axes to grind, agendas to advance and-most disgustingly-pockets to be lined.
They embraced the case, and its fantasy cause (white-on-black rape is almost nonexistent, according to National Crime Victimization Survey data), not because of the facts but in spite of them.
It took more than a year-a year of injustice and torment of innocent victims, and high and mighty torch bearing by their righteous and relentless PC inquisitors-for the truth to finally find a voice amid the high-dollar propaganda.
In April 2007, North Carolina’s attorney general dropped all charges and declared the three Duke players innocent, citing them as victims of a “tragic rush to accuse.”
The prosecutor who pressed the case was disbarred, but what of the others who were reckless about ruining innocent college boys’ reputations?
None of the 88 Duke professors who placed an advertisement expressing outrage at the university’s slow-footedness in lowering the boom over “what happened to this young woman” lost their jobs.
On the contrary, one of the “Group of 88’s” most vocal members, Houston Baker (he wailed loudly that a canceled season was a slap on the wrist for the “abhorrent sexual assault . . . loosed amongst us”) is now a Distinguished University Professor at Vanderbilt.
Al Sharpton’s gas-on-the-fire insertion of himself was just the latest-at the time-feat of “facts be damned” race-based grandstanding. Within a week of the players’ arrest, gaping holes in the rape case were already emerging (DNA didn’t match, the woman’s witnessed behavior didn’t sync with her claims, etc.).
But that didn’t stop Sharpton from telling everyone watching Fox television that questioning the woman’s character was evidence of “a lot of racism . . . in the air.”
Sharpton is infamous for fighting racism, especially when it’s imaginary. Lesser figures might have been finished by his Tawana Brawley fiasco; instead, Sharpton has profited mightily from it-and its subsequent iterations. As a news network host at MSNBC, he blatantly blurs the line between reporting and activism.
All of which brings us to springtime in Sanford, Fla., and the latest example of racial-polarization profiteering.
Like Duke, where the story was tailor-made for media hype (privileged white boys rape black stripper), the shooting of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin by gun-toting neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman is easy to manipulate for gain.
The most common picture pairing of the two shows a younger, fresh faced Martin, and a surly-looking Zimmerman in an arrest photo. But images from Martin’s Facebook page depict a much more ominous image, with his baseball hat cocked, biting his lower lip rather than smiling as he poses in front of a mirror.
Like Duke, where the initial “victim” turned out to be a lot less innocent than originally portrayed (she’s currently behind bars facing a murder charge in her boyfriend’s death), unflattering details about Trayvon Martin’s life keep unfolding.
U.S. Department of Education data show that at Dr. Michael Krop Senior High School, where Martin was a junior, out-of-school suspensions are rare. Only 200 students out of a total enrollment of 3,245 were given such suspensions in 2009.
Martin had already been suspended three times this year.
Like Duke, the frenzy for action overruns the importance of being right, fair or just. In Durham back in 2006, the rape case spurred the infamous “We’re Listening” ad by the Group of 88, in which the signatories proudly said:
“We’re turning up the volume in a moment when some of the most vulnerable among us are being asked to quiet down while we wait.”
But who ultimately benefited from the increased volume? Not the university, which wound up paying out millions to settle civil lawsuits. Not the prosecutor’s office, which ended up egg-faced and embarrassed. Certainly not the lacrosse players, who were the only ones truly innocent in the whole mess. And not even the black stripper, whose brief flirtation with fame did nothing to detour her from further entanglements with the law.
Like Duke, where the fabricated rape incident incited outrage and distrust between the races, Trayvon Martin’s case has sparked divisiveness that is harmful to the nation,but profitable to a select few.
The truth in this tragic case will eventually come out, with justice for the deserving parties (I’ll be the first to call for the death penalty if Zimmerman is guilty of cold-blooded murder).
But at what cost? The Duke case turned out to be a loss for everyone except the race hustlers precisely because publicized racial polarization pays big dividends for them.
The rush to accuse now only benefits those same race hustlers, for whom racial harmony presents a financial and vocational conflict of interest.
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Dana Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.
Editorial, Pages 15 on 03/30/2012