Duke Does Duke - Badly
Tom Bevan
Thu May 25, 1:49 PM ET
Yahoo!News
Lynne Duke's article in the Washington Post on the Duke rape
case is a noxious mix of racial innuendo and political correctness:
In the sordid but contested details of the case, African American women
have heard echoes of a history of some white men sexually abusing black
women -- and a stereotype of black women as hypersexual beings and thus
fair game.
The mainstream media have largely tiptoed around the brutal truth that
has been discussed among black women in private conversations, in the
blogosphere and on college campuses. It is that the Duke case is in
some ways reminiscent of a black woman's vulnerability to a white man
during the days of slavery, reconstruction and Jim Crow, when sex was
used as a tool of racial domination.
But of course. And if we switched the race of alleged offenders and
victims in the case, Lynne Duke would no doubt churn out a 1,453-word
front-page article examining the "brutal truth" and the echoes of
"slavery, reconstruction, and Jim Crow" of a rush to judgment against
black men who were suspected of sexually assaulting a white woman.
This case really shouldn't be about race, and Lynn Duke's effort to
shoehorn it into a metaphor for the devaluation and exploitation of
black women in modern America borders on the pathetic. The reason the
alleged victim is getting "no benefit of any doubt" - as Julianne
Malveaux is quoted as saying in the article - isn't because of the
color of her skin but because nearly all the evidence publicly
available in the case points to the very real possibility she's lying.
Duke pushes her agenda further by quoting Durham community activist
Victoria Peterson:
"White men have always been fascinated with black women over the years.
That's nothing new," says Peterson, who launched Durham Citizens
Against Rape and Sexual Abuse in response to this case. With outlets
such as BET and others portraying African American women as highly
sexed, "young white boys, they want to touch, they want to see,"
Peterson says.
Where's the evidence for that claim? Even if Ms. Peterson's general,
presumably non-expert opinion about the attitudes of young white males
toward African-American women happens to be correct, fascination is
still a long way from rape.
Facts can be inconvenient things, and based on the data available the
facts are that the vast majority of rapes and/or sexual assaults are
not interracial. According to statistics from the Department of
Justice, the estimated number of rape and sexual assault cases in 2003
involving a white offender and a black victim was 0.0%. Over the course
of the last eight years white-on-black rape/sexual assault cases
averaged 6.9%, while black-on-white rape/sexual assault cases over the
same period were slightly higher at 10.8%.
Clearly, this doesn't rule out the possibility that three white college
students gang raped an African-American woman back in March, as
alleged. But it does add some perspective to Lynne Duke's article in
the Post. The particulars of this case are bad enough without dredging
up and promoting ancient, racially divisive ghosts - especially if it
turns out the rape charge is a lie.
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