Duke lacrosse team case gets uglier every moment

The alleged rape and terrorizing of two African American women by three members of the Duke University lacrosse team is one of those stories that, the more you peel away, the uglier the view gets. The best resource for learning everything you wish you had never learned is the blog, Justice 4 Two Sisters. Another good source is Alas (a blog).

The alleged incident is like a mini-movie of everything that is wrong in America. The victims were female; the perpetrators male. The victims were black; the perpetrators white. The victims were exotic dancers (read "sluts"); the perpetrators were holy athletes.

But these generalizations only begin to tell the ugly story. The team members have formed a tight circle of silence, and it turns out that 15 of them have police records. The coach, as Justice 4 Two Sisters points out, is nowhere to be seen or heard, and the national media is ignoring the story.

From Black Feminism:

I’ll put the race issue aside. This is also the result of universities allowing a negative athlete culture. More than a few studies have shown that athletes and frat boys are more likely to rape than other men, in part because all-male environments encourage aggressive and violent displays of manhood. I suspect that campuses that force athletes to live with everyone else (shout outs to AU) have less of a problem with Athletes Gone Wild.