Duke President Richard Brodhead issued a letter to faculty yesterday calling for civility. One sentence grated like nails on a chalkboard:

More recently, a group of Duke faculty members (including a number of African American faculty) have been widely attacked in blogs and emails – and in some cases personally attacked in highly repugnant and vicious terms – based on caricatured accounts of their statements on the lacrosse event.

Why did Brodhead feel the need to parenthetically single out African-Americans. What did that add to the sentence? Why are they special? Why not “feminist lesbians” or “Marxist dependency theorists”? As John in Carolina points out, this was Brodhead playing the race card:

The most self-revealing and disgusting part of Brodhead’s letter involves his claim that “critics,” none of whom he bothers to name, attacked “a number of African American faculty.” Not only does Brodhead fail to name any critics, he fails to cite a single example of what he calls the critics’ attacks in “repugnant and vicious terms.”

Did you ever think you’d see the day a President of Duke University would so shamelessly play the race card?

Did you ever think you’d see the day a President of Duke University would play the race card in a letter to the faculty?

Liberal white guilt has been the fuel that has fired the rush to judgment in this case, including Brodhead’s. His gratuitous mention of black faculty in his letter shows that it is still burning away.