A Few Obvious Questions about the Duke Lacrosse Case (that no one seems willing to ask)
If the answer is that this case involves race and class, my response is: why does that matter? Race and class are essentially irrelevant to ascertaining the facts of a case or offering a judgment on guilt or punitive desert. Why then should race and class assume such colossal proportions by otherwise intelligent people discussing a criminal accusation? For that matter, how does even race and class differentiate the Duke case from the thousands of cases out there?
We are told that there is something unjust about the way the accused lacrosse players are being treated. There is a judicial presumption of innocence, goes the argument, and yet they (or the students recently arrested) are being treated as though they were guilty. True enough. How does that differ from thousands and thousands of cases splashed over daily newspapers every day in every town, city and county in the country? Every day people are arrested and treated in the press as though they were guilty when no one knows their guilt or innocence. When was the last time we had a national debate about the in-principle propriety of this practice?
Likewise the university practice of suspending students for being arrested is old as the hills. It didn't come into existence with this case. For years, I've read nothing but self-serving crap from academics and administrators about the self-regulating features of the modern academy. Well, what happened? Have they just recently discovered that this sort of thing happens all the time, at all levels of American universities? Why the fuss now about this?
We are told with great sanctimoniousness that there is something deeply repulsive about white, wealthy, privileged sportsmen hiring strippers for their amusement. Pardon me, but isn't a little consistency in order? If it's repulsive to hire a stripper, isn't it repulsive to be one? And please don't dredge up sob stories about how tough it is to be a poor student scrounging for money, as though stripping was the only way out. It isn't, and anyone who thinks it is, is simply on the wrong planet.
Moving back to the consumers: If it's repulsive for rich kids to hire strippers, isn't it repulsive for less-than-rich kids to do so? If it's repulsive for white kids, isn't it repulsive for"kids of color"? Is the contention here that only rich white boys hire strippers? How then do strippers stay in business in North Carolina? Do they make all (or even the bulk) of their earnings from rich white lacrosse players? Since the answers to these questions are patently obvious, the real question to ask here is: why aren't we have a nationwide debate about the moral impropriety of stripping as such? Imagine what such a debate would look like--if your imaginative powers are powerful enough to get you that far.
However absurd that debate would look, it wouldn't look half as absurd as the spectacle of people combing assiduously through shards of forensic evidence like do-it-yourself Perry Masons, trying to make profound claims about race, class, gender and the American university system.
The key to understanding the Duke lacrosse case is this: It has no great significance whatever. It is a banal pseudo-event in Boorstin's sense. But precisely that explains the need to discuss it. American cultural and political discourse is set up in such a way as deliberately to avoid any discussion of fundamental issues. It is also set up so that stereotypes and images replace rational principles as items of debate. The Duke lacrosse controversy simply abets that state of affairs. The more we let this case consume our attention, the more we allow the trivial to trump the fundamental. The question to ask is: is that what we want?