Editors at National Review Online place recent revelations about the 2006 Duke lacrosse scandal in perspective.
Slowly and quite reluctantly, Democratic political operatives are coming around to the notion that the misfortune that befell their party on November 5 is attributable to the excesses of identity politics in the age of “wokeness.” But it shouldn’t have taken an electoral shellacking to see the injustice encouraged by a movement that strips individuals of their agency and treats them as abstract avatars of a particular tribe. Indeed, Democrats could have learned that lesson nearly two decades ago.
In 2006, Duke University men’s lacrosse team members hired Crystal Mangum, an erotic dancer, to entertain a private party. Mangum later claimed that she was raped by several attendees, including university students. The allegation proved a sensation. It captured the attention of the national press and the political class alike, the members of which appeared to take Mangum’s accusations at face value.
The students were portrayed in the press as “privileged, racist brutes prone to binge drinking,” according to the Washington Post, who were as titillated by Mangum’s performance as they were by the opportunity to degrade a young black woman. …
… Sixteen months after the infamous party, Duke University agreed to settle a dispute with the players it had disparaged.
That should have been the end of this saga. But rather than admit that their worldview had misled them so, those who are partial to a collectivist theory of justice insisted that the Duke lacrosse players took advantage of the inequities inherent to the American justice system. Those intrepid few who still clung to the belief that American perfidy shielded Duke’s players from true justice just had the rug pulled out from under them by Mangum herself. …
… We can only hope her pursuit of penance is sincere. But the tragedy she engineered would not have been possible in the absence of the incentives for “validation” at large in the culture that Mangum correctly identified.
