INC NEWS - Town-gown strain on Salon.com

[John Schelp]

Duke exposed

The rape allegations against the university's lacrosse
team have laid bare racial tensions in Durham, and
united town and gown against the same target: The
"privileged." (By Alice Bumgarner, salon.com, 4/4/06)

For those of us who live close to Duke, the recent
backlash against the university nicknamed the "Gothic
Wonderland" and its students did not come as a
surprise.

Tensions in Durham have heated up in the past three
weeks after a woman, hired to dance at an off-campus
party held by Duke's lacrosse team, accused players of
hurling racial epithets at and sexually assaulting
her. The dancer is black and attends nearby North
Carolina Central University, a historically black
college. All but one of Duke's male lacrosse players
are white.

Fault lines between town and gown, black and white,
the privileged and the poor already existed in Durham.
But rarely have those lines been so deftly exposed,
all at once, as they have by the allegations of what
took place at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. in the early hours
of March 14.

This confluence of events, people say, is the perfect
storm.

"Here's a perfect story of what we've had to deal with
in the past," explains Terrill Bravender, director of
adolescent medicine at Duke University Medical Center,
who lives within a block of the infamous lacrosse
party house.

"Last year, in middle of the baby-oil-wrestling party
that made it to the national news, there were a whole
bunch of people in my yard, milling around, out on the
sidewalk and in the side yard. I went outside to ask
them to leave, and I saw a guy peeing on the side of
my house. So I told him to stop.

"The guy turned around and said, 'What's the matter?'

"I explained that he was peeing on my house.

"He again asked, 'What's the matter?'

"'That's it,' I said. I don't think he really got it.

"So I had my dog there, and I let him go out and sort
of jump on him. Then he started yelling, 'What's your
problem? I didn't hurt anything! If I hurt anything,
I'll pay for it.'

"I said, 'No, you won't pay for it, your dad will. You
don't have any money.'

"Then I saw a guy leaning over our fence vomiting into
the flower bed. I told him to get the guy out of
there, it was unacceptable. Then he tried to have a
conversation with me about why was I so hostile toward
Duke students.

"These kids have never had to own up to anything. It
was more sad than anything."

The antagonistic feelings cut both ways. Students say
they're getting a raw deal. They say that residents of
Trinity Park, the historic, bungalow-filled
neighborhood adjacent to Duke's East Campus, are
intent on spoiling their fun. After all, they're
simply doing what college kids are supposed to do.
When locals call 911 in the wee hours to break up
rowdy mixers, Duke students return fire with Op-Ed
pieces stating that perhaps the curmudgeons shouldn't
have settled down in a neighborhood that's right off
their campus.

Since the accusations of rape against members of the
lacrosse team were made public, though, neighbors and
a segment of students have stood together at vigils
and protests, as annoyance turned to anger. Together
they have found a new target: the most privileged of
Duke's students.

The students in question are "a small number of idiots
who are mind-bogglingly arrogant and never have had to
take responsibility for anything in their lives," says
Bravender, referring, in part, to the fact that
students aren't often held accountable by the
university for disorderly off-campus conduct. "It's
those kids who choose to live off campus, ... so
that's what the larger community sees of Duke kids,"
he says. (Still, plenty of Duke students, those living
both on and off campus, do volunteer work in the
community. You can spot them hammering nails for
Habitat for Humanity houses, reading to kids in public
schools and cleaning up creeks.)

Duke sophomore Fiona O'Sullivan finds that some
students behave in a way that reveals a "we can do no
wrong" attitude.

She searches for an example. "At tailgates," she says,
"there are people who get ridiculously drunk and feel
they can do idiotic things that aren't acceptable in
real life, just because we have this weird sense of
superiority, because we're Duke students and can do
what we want."

When town residents fill neighborhood listservs with
gripes about publicly drunk and disorderly students,
they're invariably referring to a subset of Duke
students who are considered privileged, and no one
seems to represent that stereotypical subset better
than the lacrosse team.

"There's a social hierarchy at Duke, and they're at
the top," explains O'Sullivan. "They must have such a
feeling of power."

Her friend Katie Brehm, also a sophomore, chimes in,
"But we give them that power. Why do we look up to
them?"

"Because they're hot!" says Julia Blessing, a
sophomore from Ann Arbor, Mich. "And they have, like,
the best parties."

The lacrosse team's reputation for "Animal House"-like
parties dates back at least a decade, if not more.
Christopher Johnson, Duke Class of '01, remembers the
Duke lacrosse parties as pure debauchery. "Their
section would be trashed, there would be girls all
around ... There was this machismo, masculine energy,"
says Johnson, who now works on Capitol Hill for North
Carolina's Rep. Mel Watt.

Johnson, who is black, says that lacrosse players have
always been at the top of the university's social
strata because they personify the Duke ideal: rich,
white, athletic, good-looking, prep-school-educated
guys from the Northeast. Duke is indeed elite:
Although Durham itself has almost equal numbers of
black and white residents (with 15 percent living
below the poverty level), blacks make up only 11
percent of Duke's undergraduate student body.

Johnson adds: "I was so intrigued by them. They seemed
so above it all because of who they are, because of
what they were physically."

They also have a reputation for going unchecked. Duke
history professor Peter Wood, who played lacrosse at
Harvard and Oxford and coached the women's lacrosse
club at Duke, told a dean two years ago that the men's
lacrosse team was out of control. During a closed-door
Academic Council meeting between faculty and Duke
president Richard Brodhead last week, another
professor supported Wood's claim, telling the group
that several lacrosse players had shown up drunk for
her summer classes.

Even in the spotlight, two days after all but the one
black member of the team had submitted DNA samples,
team members' behavior reflected a certain
haughtiness. One woman watched with disbelief as
lacrosse players slammed down shot after shot of
alcohol at a local bar, shouting "Duke Lacrosse!" They
seemed unaware, she said, of how poorly their
indifference reflected on the university. (She was
subsequently banned from the bar and its softball team
for writing a letter to the local paper about the
incident.)

Some students, such as sophomore Katie Brehm, have
voiced their disappointment in the way team players
have put up a Blue Devil wall of silence, refusing to
break rank and come forward with information.

"Before I thought they were really cool," she says.
"Now I think they're not."

Another student, who wishes to remain unidentified,
isn't so certain. She feels it would be wrong not to
support the woman who says she was raped, but also
wrong to "betray" her school by rushing to judgment.
Let's just wait and see, she says.

Meanwhile, inside the faux-Gothic walls of Duke's
campus, some faculty members are growing tired of the
lack of action. Houston A. Baker, a professor of
English and African-American studies, says that even
as Duke's esteemed professors are seething, "some
lacrosse players are still donning jerseys and
swaggering about on campus."

"I have never seen a faculty as angry -- I've been
teaching for 38 years -- as angry, as rational and as
creative in its suggestions to the administrators."

At last week's Academic Council meeting, Baker says,
"one of the faculty asked President Brodhead directly,
'Will you say, I condemn Duke's culture of alcohol,
violence and sexual assault, and make that a top-down
statement?'

"He answered, essentially, I will not do that. His
rationale? These things exist at tier one
institutions. Causality is not certain, but we do know
these cultures exist in high school, as well. I'm the
leader, and how can I make that sort of focused
statement for this entire institution?

"I thought, Wow," Baker says.

He gives Brodhead some credit for trying to say the
right things in response to the crisis, but says it
hasn't been enough. Saying that certain acts and
racist language are deplorable may make you sound as
though you're fair-minded, he says, but it should not
be confused with bold, outraged, ethical action.

In Baker's view, the team should be disbanded until
"the culture of lacrosse can be held accountable"
(Duke's president has already suspended games pending
the resolution of the investigation), and the
university should open up more dialogue among students
about race.

Johnson says racial tension was always a problem when
he was at Duke. For the most part, he says, black
students go one way and white students go the other.
The racial separation is palpable.

"It's possible to go through four or five years of
Duke without having to interact with someone different
from you," Johnson says. "You'd see black people in
class, but your only actual interactions with black
people might be with the service people -- the little
old black ladies cleaning up after you and serving
your meals."

Race, in fact, is the behemoth in the room. That
several presumably privileged white lacrosse players
hurled racial epithets at a working-class black mother
of two is, for the moment, one of the few
substantiated facts of the incident.

Racial discomfort could be the reason an overwhelming
number of Duke students say they're afraid for their
safety outside Duke's stone walls. The city of Durham
is 44 percent black, with more poverty than the
national average. The median income of a Durham
household is roughly equal to the annual tuition for a
Duke student (about $44,000).

"I don't think I'd ever live off East [Campus],
because it scares me," says sophomore Julia Blessing.
"When I'm on campus, I feel completely safe. That's my
bubble."

"When you're inside the stone wall that surrounds East
Campus, you think, Wow, I'm so privileged to be at
Duke," says Johnson. "You take that with you for the
rest of your life. You'll always know you're a member
of this club, a part of something exclusive."

Many in Durham say they hope that this experience
brings all sides closer together. At Monday night's
rally on North Carolina Central University's campus,
which drew hundreds of students and Durham residents,
people were able to engage in conversation and respond
peacefully to a tense situation. With each day,
though, another ugly crack threatens to break our
fragile optimism.

On March 31, Duke students expressed concerns for
their safety after vice president for student affairs
Larry Moneta warned them that they could be the target
of drive-by shootings by Durham gang members. Then
around 3 a.m. April 1, two Duke students were
assaulted off campus by a group screaming that the
students were on "[NC] Central territory." According
to Duke student newspaper the Chronicle, the two
undergrads were told, "Duke kids aren't welcome here
because they're all rapists."

And the next night, one Trinity Park resident who has
been quoted in the media received a menacing call from
an unidentified male: "Can I speak with J___ 'the
C**t' M____ who's sticking her nose where it doesn't
belong?"

This week, as Duke students and Durham residents await
the results of the lacrosse team's DNA tests, the low
wall that divides town from gown is showing a steely
hint of barbed wire.


http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/04/04/duke_lacrosse/