Race, privilege, power -- but no crime so far

ACCUSATIONS ARE not evidence, except when we want them to be. In the university town of Durham, N.C., sharply divided by class and riven by race, many people went straight from accusation to presumption of guilt a month ago. That was when an exotic dancer told police she was raped, sodomized and choked by members of the Duke University men’s lacrosse team at a party.

The dancer is black. She is also a part-time student at North Carolina Central University, a predominantly black school that shares a few ZIP Code digits but little else with the famous university a few miles away.

The lacrosse players are white. The picture was clear: Prep schools. Privilege. Power.

And with that, the three gears of academic epistemology -- race, class and gender -- were fully synchronized.

In its tabloid tawdriness, the story was catnip for two otherwise disparate constituencies: violence-against-women activists and the shove-it-to-Duke crowd. Locally, it fired up newspaper front pages, gave lethargic columnists badly needed fodder and elicited words of solemn concern from the wise men of the editorial pages. The subject was both hot and serious.

The only thing it lacks is charges, because it lacks evidence sufficient to take someone to court. Durham County Dist. Atty. Mike Nifong -- up for reelection and up to his gills in criticism and conjecture -- vows they’re coming, they’re coming. But when?

The team’s 46 white players were ordered to submit to DNA testing (the team’s sole black player was exempted), and DNA results came back negative. Nifong’s chagrin was palpable. He was not alone. In the letters-to-the-editor section of newspapers, readers expressed vexation. It was frustrating, one reader wrote, that “legal technicalities” should stand in the way of justice.

One of those technicalities is that conviction demands credible testimony and evidence. Even then, as in the O.J. Simpson case, conviction is far from assured. So far, Nifong has only the accusation of the woman -- one of two dancers hired for $800 to perform at a party -- and the testimony of hospital workers who told police she bore marks consistent with rape and sodomy. But by whom, and when?

What is unsaid is that many people have a psychological and moral investment in the lacrosse players’ guilt. These were not basketball or football players, athletes who make frequent appearances in court. These were suburb-bred athletes who grew up playing a sport most Americans have never seen. If the white and privileged Duke lacrosse players were not culpable, only two possibilities remain: She had been assaulted by someone else, or the hospital workers were mistaken and she was not assaulted at all.

The latter possibility, remote or not, has prompted many of Nifong’s critics to resurrect the story of Tawana Brawley, the New York teenager who, in 1987, falsely accused six white police officers of raping her. Then, as now, support rallies erupted and guilt was presumed. The only difference is that the Rev. Al Sharpton, Brawley’s most flamboyant apologist, has not reported for duty in Durham. He may yet, of course.

Then again, Sharpton might have learned a lesson. As Brawley’s case against the six white officers began to unravel, her lawyer, William Kunstler, was reduced to arguing that the facts were immaterial. “It makes no difference whether the attack ... really happened,” he claimed. “The black community knows that there are a lot of Tawanas out there.”

The level of discourse in Durham has not reached that point in sheer fatuousness -- a sign, perhaps, that the Brawley case dealt a grievous blow to all who take violence against women seriously. Even so, with more than a month having passed since the woman first accused the lacrosse players, suspicions of a rush to judgment are not abating. To the contrary, they are building.

In some ways, it is easy to see why it might have been tempting to judge even in the absence of compelling evidence. The players -- many of them anyway -- did not comport themselves in the NCAA’s poster-boy manner. One-third of them have had run-ins with police, mostly for drinking and rowdiness.

And then there is the question of Duke itself. It is not an easy university to love. Few universities do as much to enroll minority students, and yet its public face is one of arrogance and elitism. Surrounded on most sides by down-at-the-heels black neighborhoods, the school sits like a fortress amid privation, its faux Gothic architecture all but declaring wealth and entitlement.

It stands in contrast not only to its surroundings but also N.C. Central, where the lacrosse players’ 27-year-old accuser was studying political science. At rallies in her defense, N.C. Central students demanded to know why the media described her as an exotic dancer rather than as a student. The point in rebuttal seems almost too obvious: She did not show up at the lacrosse players’ house to study voting behavior. She showed up to dance.

None of this, it goes without saying, indicts her. But nothing yet indicts the players either. They may well be louts and cads. Whether any of them is a rapist is quite another matter, and one whose seriousness demands something more than pep rally assertions and the willingness to believe they must be.