The interim coach’s pronouncement was critical in weighing the significance of this event. In nearly every social context that emerged following the team’s crude conduct, innocence and guilt have been assessed through a metric of race and gender. White innocence means black guilt. Men’s innocence means women’s guilt. These capacious categories, which were in absolute play the night of the team’s drunken debacle, continue their hold on the campus and the Durham community.
After their reinstatement, things for the Duke lacrosse players edged as near to normal as the aftermath of the horrific affair could allow. And ironically, for the rest of the campus, everything else was curiously normal as well. Not so strangely – indeed, predictably – those members of a class who have been exposed to abuse or intolerance or inequity (on this campus, as in the nation, women and black folks) are called once again into service to help remedy the campus culture that these boys’ sports culture created and exploited. Our labor on newly invented committee structures and our availability for public and private consultations, conversations, and often intense confrontations persists despite and amidst the growing acclamation of support for the team.
The irony of this displacement is fully inscribed on the weary bodies of black and women faculty and students at Duke whose visible representativeness placed us, eventually, (after a team of white male administrators decided on the parameters of the university’s response) into membership and leadership roles of committees charged to remedy the damaging culture that was now in evidence. This responsibility emerged despite the fact that neither women nor African Americans were the ones who enabled, permitted, arguably encouraged, or facilitated the cultures of disrespect that had been tolerated. Because otherwise and after all, the Lacrosse team members were stellar academic performers as well as athletic players. Their moral misconduct seemed secondary to the fact – even a righteous ‘release’ – for those who otherwise performed so admirably. And even at this moment of transition of the event – to the courts to handle the charges of rape, sodomy, and assault, and to the university to handle the matter of culture – the team’s athletic agenda proceeds apace, and those most wounded by the event, by direct and indirect association, are left to manage the exploitation they have suffered as the consequences of this particular culture of elite sports and the protections of privilege.
The culture of men’s sports in particular, with its elevations and hierarchies, with its often brutal physical contact, and with its body-intense loyalties remains unindicted in this curious yet predictable aftermath of the men’s lacrosse teams’ documented record of demeaning, brutish, rude, and alcohol-ridden conduct. It is behavior that seems so attached to its winning season and its members’ successful academic performance that the very notion of the choices endemic to the culture of team mentalities and conduct – who plays, who does not, who makes the team, who is varsity, who is second string – has meant we have responded to this as just another form of choice. The ethic of sportsmanship means we have been overly tolerant as well of aberrant conduct as just another choice, merely a dimension of the ways and means of sports.
When Catherine Stimpson reminds us that “boosterism can be boisterous . . . victory will bring ecstasy and too frequently a bullying attitude of superiority [and] defeat will bring pain and too frequently a churlish and belligerent anger,” she indicates precisely the demonstrable after-the-game conduct that has been so destructive in this particular occasion. Stimpson notes how “defeat also tests the character of the fan, for the true fan must remain loyal even during the bad times.” She might well be speaking of the women’s LAX team, who went on to their post season play proclaiming to the media that they would write the word “innocent” on their sweatbands, and who finally decided that their fidelity could be expressed by recording on their sweat bands the jersey numbers of the indicted men. They were athletes themselves, as well as “true fans.” In a moment that called on more action than I had will for, I wanted to write to them to ask if they might, instead, consider writing the word “justice” onto their gear, a word whose connotations run deeper than the team-inspired and morally slender protestations of loyalty that brought the ethic from the field of play onto the field of legal and cultural and gendered battle as well.
I write these thoughts, considering what it would mean to resign from the committee charged with managing the post culture of the Lacrosse team’s assault to the character of the university. My decision is fraught with a personal history that has made me understand the deep ambiguity in loving and caring for someone who has committed an egregious wrong. It is complicated with an administrative history that has made me appreciate the frailties of faculty and students and how a university’s conduct toward those who have abused its privileges as well as protected them is burdened with legal residue, as well as personal empathy. My decision has vacillated between the guilt over my worry that if not me, which other body like mine will be pulled into this service? Who do I render vulnerable if I lose my courage to stay this course? On the other side is my increasingly desperate need to run for cover, to vacate the battlefield, and to seek personal shelter. It does feel like a battle. So when asked to provide the labor, once again, for the aftermath of a conduct that visibly associates me, in terms of race and gender, with the imbalance of power, especially without an appreciable notice of this as the contestatory space that women and black folk are asked to inhabit, I find myself preoccupied with a decision on whether or not to demur from this association in an effort, however feeble, to protect the vulnerability that is inherent to this assigned and necessary meditative role.
Until we recognize that sports reinforces exactly those behaviors of entitlement which have been and can be so abusive to women and girls and those “othered” by their sports’ history of membership, the bodies who will bear evidence and consequence of the field’s conduct will remain, after the fact of the matter, laboring to retrieve the lofty goals of education, to elevate the character of the place, to restore a space where they can do the work they came to the university to accomplish. However, as long as the bodies of women and minorities are evidence as well as restitution, the troubled terrain we labor over is as much a battlefield as it is a sports arena. At this moment, I have little appreciable sense of difference between the requisite conduct and consequence of either space.
