RE: Rape inquiry highlights dividing lines at Duke

It really is too bad that Winston-Salem's only newspaper isn't even fit to be birdcage liner or fishwrap. It's barely fit to be present in an outhouse.

This article is a maudlin piece of racist, classist trash. Note that there is no byline. Could that be because the author is on staff at the Winston-Salem Journal and wants to hide behind the AP to gain credibility? Or maybe the author is (rightfully) ashamed of this bit of melodramatic agit-prop.

The very first sentence begins the foolishness:

The case seems to fit the stereotypes so perfectly.

Imagine if this article had been written about some offensive black stereotype. The picket lines would be winding their way through Winston-Salem this morning.

The drama continues:

Many on campus and in the streets of this gritty working-class vertex of the famous Research Triangle...

Gritty working-class vertex? Give me a break. I used to live in Durham. I used to walk to work through these neighborhoods. Back in the early 1980s, the city's movers and shakers, black and white, made it abundantly clear that industry, tobacco and otherwise, were not welcome in Durham. They changed the city's motto to "City of Medicine." They courted the yuppie class. They courted the wealthy homosexual community. I would rather walk through the worst neighborhood in Durham in the middle of the night than I would through Waughtown or East Winston in broad daylight. The Journal should look to its own back yard before playing to this race melodrama in Durham.

The whole article smells to high heaven of race-baiting and class-baiting:

She's a 27-year-old divorced mother of two who went to the Duke students' house to do some exotic dancing and make a little extra money.

She's a stripper and she does private parties. I guess we're supposed to think that "exotic dancing" for a "little extra money" gives her the same working-class venerability as scrubbing floors and washing dishes.

The white, three-bedroom house with the crumbling black shutters sits on the edge of Walltown, a predominantly black and poor neighborhood outside the school's low stone wall where many residents still refer to Duke as "the plantation."

Well this is a pretty, but largely useless bit of information. What is the writer trying to do here, channel Faulkner? Does this belong in a "news" article? Probably not, unless you are a racist, classist agitator with journalist credentials. The aim is to paint a picture, romantic no doubt, but the accuracy of which is largely questionable. And it has little to do with the facts or the merits of the story.

She told police that someone had recently defaced a neighborhood car with the letters "KKK."

By all means, the writer certainly couldn't do an adequate job of race-pimping without dusting off the old Klan bogeyman.

In Durham blacks and whites each make up about 45 percent of the population. But Duke does not mirror the community at large - only 11 percent of the 6,244 undergraduates are black.

So what? Duke is a private university. Of what importance is the fact that its racial demographics don't match the city of Durham at large? Why doesn't the Journal run a story about WSSU and its 97% black attendance which doesn't match the 70/30 white/black mix in Winston-Salem? The answer is agenda, and agenda has nothing to do with journalism. The answer is that the Journal is operated by white elites who seek to feel superior by wheeling out, once again, the dusty old skeleton of Southern racism.

What is missing from this article, in a glaringly obvious way, is the fact that the lacrosse team members' lawyers say the DNA evidence will exonerate their clients. Also missing is the fact that police are now saying that the timing of the victim's 911 calls and her subsequent appearance at a nearby store are questionable at best.

Most telling of all is that the regular suspects in the activities of race-pimping are holding fire on this one. They've been burned a few times on incidents like this. I'm sure Sharpton and Jackson are in no mood to suffer through yet another Tawana Brawley. They also came very near to getting burned last year in this very same part of Durham over some cross-burnings that police have still been unable to link to any racist organization or group.

Maybe the girl was raped. Maybe someone from the lacrosse team did it. Maybe not. These are the facts that the Durham police will have to work out and the North Carolina Superior Court system will have to decide. If the members of the lacrosse team were involved, they richly deserve whatever punishment is meted to them. But outlets like the AP and the Journal have already tried and convicted in the case. In the process, they have glorified exactly the same bigoted classism that civil rights advocates fought forty and fifty years ago. That makes the author of this piece and the editors of the Winston-Salem Journal no better than the most reprobate Klansman or skinhead.