When things go wrong, when sports teams beget bawdy behavior and debasement of other human beings, the bodies left on the line often have little in common with those enclosed in the protective veneer of the world of college athletics. At Duke University this past spring, the bodies left to the trauma of a campus brought to its knees by members of Duke University’s Lacrosse team were African American and women. I use the kneeling metaphor with deliberate intent. It was precisely this demeanor towards women and girls that mattered here. The Lacrosse team’s notion of who was in service of whom and the presumption of privilege that their elite sports’ performance had earned seemed their entitlement as well to behaving badly and without concern for consequence.
Justice inevitably has an attendant social construction. And this parallelism means that despite what may be our desire, the seriousness of the matter cannot be finally or fully adjudicated in the courts. The appropriate presumption of innocence that follows the players, however the legal case is determined, is neither the critical social indicator of the event, nor the final measure of its cultural facts. Judgments about the issues of race and gender that the lacrosse team’s sleazy conduct exposed cannot be left to the courtroom. Just as aspects of their conduct that extend into the social realms of character and integrity should not be the parameters of adjudicatory processes, the consequence of that conduct will not be fully resolved within a legal process. Those injured by this affair, including the student and the other young woman who were invited to dance under false pretenses and then racially (at least) abused, as well as Duke’s campus and Durham’s communities, are bodies left on the line – vulnerable to a social review that has been mixed with insensitive ridicule as well as reasoned empathy. Despite the damaging logic that associates the credibility of a socio-cultural context to the outcome of the legal process, we will find that even as the accusations that might be legally processed are confined to a courtroom, the cultural and social issues excavated in this upheaval linger.
Perhaps the most critical, if not the most sustained response of the campus to the rape allegation and the series of incidents of misconduct and the lack of administrative oversight that it has exposed, has focused on the matter of culture. Duke University’s president Richard Brodhead commissioned a series of committees, one of them to review and examine the campus culture. The Campus Culture Initiative has focused on the fault lines – alcohol, gender, race, and athletics – the spaces of university life where problems of community and conduct visibly reside. If athletes with otherwise good grades use alcohol as their reason for laxity, for racial bias and gendered tirade, why is it that public media cultures, and other lay respondents within and outside of campus would elevate good academic performance and subordinate these issues of character? With no blueprint on how to interrogate these broad and deeply entrenched matters of culture, Duke’s commission of this investigatory committee arguably indicates its notice of the inequities and imbalances on the campus – where the “culture” of sports seems for some a reasonable displacement for the cultures of moral conduct, ethical citizenship and personal integrity. But “culture” is also the catch-all for the event, one that contains as much potential to replicate our failures as well as for engaging and sustaining a more progressive and democratic campus community. And it is not the first time Duke has positioned an institutional investigation of a problem of culture.
When, in the last year of President Nannerl Keohane’s presidency, a report on the status of women at Duke discovered evidence of cultural and social practices that disadvantaged women, a commission of women faculty and administrators, a group of women student scholars, and an alumni group of women (legates of the Duke Women’s College) were charged with discovering the “fix” to the problem. This flurry of restructuring and response came after a committee of women faculty, students, and administrators labored to uncover the gendered issues of disparate treatment and its consequences. As if a prelude to the events of spring 2006, the bodies that mattered, those who were the objects of inquiry, were also the bodies whose labor was required to fix the inequity.
At what cost?
How do we measure, value, assess, and document the energy of spirit, body, and intellect expended by those who endure the problems caused by cultures of both masculine and white racial disrespect? In its forms of verbal violence as well as physical, in its presumption that there are some bodies available for taunt and tirade, whim and whisper, the “event” is phased back into the subaltern spaces of university life and culture. Their sporting behaviors, on and off the courts, endure.
At the conclusion of spring semester the lacrosse team, minus three indicted (and one suspended) member, gathered to celebrate their reinstatement on Duke’s campus. Their reinstatement was accompanied by a code of conduct they inexplicably wrote for themselves. At this gathering, their interim coach (who had been, just three years prior, their former team member) vigorously professed his blanket judgment that those who stood indicted for the rape of a student from North Carolina Central University were innocent. As the day drew to a close, every indication was that the remaining team members’ athletic careers would continue nearly uninterrupted except for the scrutiny of the administration and their self-authored code.
- I am grateful to Professors Robyn Wiegman and William Chafe for their generous and careful reading and response to early drafts of this essay, and to Janet Jakobsen for her intuitive and tremendously helpful review. [↩]
