Reframing the Duke rape case

The headline of this editorial wouldn't have caught my eye if I had seen it on Znet but a friend forwarded it to me because he knew I was interested in the Duke rape case so I took the time to read the thing.  Wow.  Very thought provoking.  Basically this is a sociologist who was asked to provide commentary on a CNN program about racism and race issues surrounding the Duke Lacrosse team rape case.  I think the second half of the article is the most interesting so I excerpted it here.  The first half talks about her experience on the show.  The second half examines media portrayals of this and other stories and it is so good I want to post it here so more people will see it:

"The case is framed as a "race" issue, which for producers meant that blacks are out for revenge for past misdeeds by whites. Jumping on this bandwagon, so the story goes, was the District Attorney Mike Nifong, who was trying to curry favor with the black community in a re-election year. The consensus on the show was that if anyone is guilty here, it is the lying, immoral black stripper and the amoral, politically motivated DA. The victims here are the upstanding white men who have now had their reputations tarnished first by a stripper and then by gullible fools who believed her. And of course, within the framing of the show, I appeared as not just a gullible fool, but even worse, a gullible fool with a feminist agenda.

My anger at the way the media humanized these men as victims and dehumanized the woman as the perpetrator of a lie clearly stood out from the rest of the show. And this was, I am now convinced, the producer's goal. I was set up in the show to be an example of the problem -- white liberal elites who have taken political correctness too far. I was not brought on as a researcher or activist but as an example of how feminists "rush to judgment" in order to further their man-hating propaganda.

Virtually every email I have received blasts me as a conniving feminist who didn't even bother to know the facts of the case. These men -- yes, they all were from men -- explained to me that the facts show without question that nothing happened that night, which I would have known if I were not so busy trying to further my feminist agenda.

This is truly an example of how mass media construct reality. The so-called "facts" of the case have mainly been planted by the defense as a way to spin the case. The prosecution can't reveal all their evidence by law, but we do know, as law professor Wendy Murphy has pointed out, enough evidence was presented that "police, forensic experts, prosecutors, and a grand jury comprised of citizens, all agreed that charges should be brought." The truth is that we actually have access to very little evidence about that night, yet every man who has emailed me is convinced that all the facts are out there and only a feminist fool would believe otherwise. This is because the "facts," or lack of, speak for themselves and tell their own story in a society where racist and sexist ideology is internalized by a good percentage of the population and subsequently writ large onto a black woman's body. Let's not forget that this woman was bought and sold in the white male marketplace of sexual entertainment.

This obsessive focus on the woman is not particular to this case; routinely the media focus on the women victims, with a certain prurient interest. Instead, we should put some of the focus back on the men in this case, as we know much about their behavior that night that is not under dispute. They saw the hiring of two black women to strip as a legitimate form of male entertainment. They didn't see the commodifying and sexualizing of black women's bodies as problematic in a country that has a long and ugly history of racism.

One of the team buddies, Ryan McFadyen, sent out an email on the night of the event where he wrote "ive decided to have some strippers over and all are welcome …. I plan on killing the bitches as they walk in and proceed to cut their skin off while cumming in my duke spandex." Later that night, 911 got a call from a black college student out walking with her friends who was called "nigger" as she walked past the team's house. And to top it all, not one lacrosse player has come forward to express any regret at that night's events or offered any apology for being part of a drunken strip party that humiliated and degraded two black women.

It would seem to me that all of this undisputed information would make for a compelling CNN program. On such a show, I would be happy to share these emails calling me a bitch, whore, and cunt. That wouldn't be a rush to judgment, but instead an acknowledgement of what women know -- any one of us could be the next victim turned celebrity whore."

Comments

[arvind s grover]

I teach at an all-girls K-12 school. Last year we made it a goal in my department (educational technology) to teach media literacy in all grade levels. Young people, particularly women, need to understand how the media works and particularly how media is constructed with a specific purpose. This along with parent education is the only way we can make substantive inroads towards fighting biased media coverage. People need to start seeing "reputable" media outlets for what they are - salespeople.

[Emmanuelle]

Why does no one get angry over this rape case?

[Hal von Luebbert]

Now that charges have at last been dropped, I'd be very interested in hearing your commentary. You might like to see my website and blog on the matter, too.

In the interests of honesty, I should tell you that I'm engaged in a research projuect, concerning the media and the effect of federal programs like Operation Mockingbird on public opinion.

[Emmanuelle]

http://www.newsobserver.com/145/story/545454.html

where is your outrage in this case?

[barb]

Hal, the reason this case caught public attention so much was because it was so emblematic of racism and sexism in our country. The story rang true with millions of people. That the case was not going to be something that could be proven in the courts doesn't mean that all those stories of racism and sexism in the US that made people so identify with this case are not true. It just means this particular case fell apart.

We must remember that because the case had to be dropped does not mean that these boys are the model of good behaviour. Look at the email one of them wrote the night of the party: "ive decided to have some strippers over and all are welcome …. I plan on killing the bitches as they walk in and proceed to cut their skin off while cumming in my duke spandex."

These are the words of one of the poor little rich boys everyone is feeling sorry for now. Hardly a posterboy of a sweet misunderstood innocent.

We still have a problem with violence against women in the US. We still have a problem with racism in the US. There is still a class divide here that reflects racial divisions especially in towns like the one where Duke is located. All of these are problems that need to be addressed and they don't get wiped off the slate because this one case proved unfounded.

Emmanuelle, that's a good point. We should be outraged over every rape. The reason why many progressive bloggers took up the cause of the woman accusing the Duke-Lacrosse team members is because historically cases like these had even higher probabilities of being ignored because of racism and classism as well as sexism.