The Shame of Being a Dukie

I am a lifelong Duke hater. I hate their smug attitude, I hate the basketball superstars that have played there over the years, I hate the well-known but seldom talked-about racial tension in the town because of Duke's reputation as a southern school for Yankees, I hate the students' sense of entitlement, especially becuase they are usually just the valedictorians of mediocre New Jersey high schools with wealthy parents.

I base this opinion on real life experience: I went to a snotty east coast college too, and I've worked in DC, Boston, and Chicago in a litany of legal and political jobs; I've therefore run into more than my fair share of Duke students and grads. With a couple of notable exceptions, I find that Duke stereotypes are fairly well justified.

Because of my bad attitude about Duke, I usually like it when they get bad press and otherwise look like jerks in front of the rest of the nation. But I am disgusted and appalled by the recent scandal involving the alleged gang rape of two exotic dancers at a Duke lacrosse party, which has led the coach to resign and the rest of the season to be cancelled.

The circumstantial evidence appears to be very strong; medical tests on the alleged victims are consistent with sexual assault and according to documents published by The Smoking Gun, signs of a struggle were found in the bathroom where the alleged assaults occured.

Today, a previously sealed warrant was unsealed and detailed numerous other pieces of evidence on the events at the party, including an email sent by a member of the lacrosse team, Ryan McFadyen, just after the party in question that talked about killing and mutilating strippers in his dorm room the next night.

This is repulsive enough as it is. But what makes it worse is the racial undertones of the entire scandal. The exotic dancers that were allegedly raped and beaten at the party were African-American; all of the lacrosse players are white except one (who has been ruled out of suspicion, as the dancers said that their attackers were white). The alleged victims claim that they were subject to racist abuse, both verbal and physical, throughout the ordeal. The fact that this may have been, at least in part, racially motivated speaks to the amount of blind hate that exists in the prestigious corridors of Durham.


An aside: I don't know if it's a coincidence that the lacrosse team at the snotty east coast college where I attended was comprised of the most chauvinistic, meatheaded, jerks on campus. They always were the most physically confrontational, especially when drunk (they terrorized a good friend of mine after he testified to seeing them mercilessly beat another kid on a Saturday night), aggressive toward women, and in general awful people. I'm not arguing that all lacrosse players are hyper-aggressive rapists, in fact, I know several that are great people, but I do think that lacrosse is a sport that only permeates the higher socioeconomic classes (boarding schools on the east coast in particular) and rewards naked aggression. When you combine a fiercely loyal bunch of kids (such as those on their own at a boarding school), a sense of entitlement that comes from being rich, and a sport that encourages aggression and physicality, I think you get a higher incidence of events like those that allegedly transpired at Duke and the many, many incidents I witnessed at my alma mater. I played rugby and belonged to a social organization that drew from many sports teams, extracurricular organizations, socioeconomic classes, and backgrounds, and nobody that I associated with was a fan of lacrosse players. Maybe I harbor prejudice against these guys because of what I saw in college, but I don't think it's a coincidence that the swim team or the track team wasn't accused of these foul events at Duke.

Let's hope that if a sexual assault, hate crime, or both did indeed occur, those responsible fry for it.