At Duke, Things Get Worse
Two Duke students getting food early Sunday morning were
surrounded by a group of men saying, "This is Central territory," a reference to North Carolina Central University, the school attended by an alleged victim of rape by three Duke lacrosse players. The men in the hostile group said things like, "Duke kids aren't welcome here because they're all rapists." One of the students was briefly knocked unconscious, and when the two tried to drive away, they were momentarily chased...
I admit that I'm surprised that this alleged act of violence has sparked such town-gown hostility...largely because it suggests that town-gown relations between Duke and Durham are pretty lousy, a fact of which I wasn't aware. (Is this common knowledge?)
Could this be a situation where the mayor of Durham tells people to settle down? After all, Duke students, no matter how white and how privileged they may be, hardly deserve such criticism.
When I was a college student, New Haven locals were far more likely to rape Yale students than the other way around. (It happened to a friend of mine.) But Yale students hardly went around saying that all residents of the city were rapists...and if they had, they would have promptly been rebuked. Just because the roles—and, largely, the races—are now reversed doesn't mean that this kind of language should go unfaulted.
