From Newsweek:
Across town, at NCCU, the mostly black college where the alleged victim is enrolled, students seemed bitterly resigned to the players’ beating the rap. “This is a race issue,” said Candice Shaw, 20. “People at Duke have a lot of money on their side.” Chan Hall, 22, said, “It’s the same old story. Duke up, Central down.” Hall said he wanted to see the Duke students prosecuted “whether it happened or not. It would be justice for things that happened in the past.”
Of course, they are merely college students saying stupid things; however, despite being enrolled in a university, they are not being disabused of those stupid ideas, as one would expect from a university education. If anything, those stupid ideas are given a dangerous appearance of legitimacy on campus.
Consider: what they said was right in line with the initial reaction at Duke (it’s a “perfect storm” of race, class, etc.), Duke’s Prof. Houston Baker’s open letter to the administration (“agents, perpetrators and abettors of white privilegee”), nearby NC State’s African American Cultural Center director Fred Horn’s comments (“I think it’s definitely – even if it turns out to be not true – racial”), and of course Duke visiting professor and race-baiting socialist Tim Tyson’s op-ed (“The spirit of the lynch mob lived in that house on Buchanan Boulevard, regardless of the truth of the most serious charges” and “the dynamics of race, power and violence that have marred our history … “power and privilege” ad nauseam).
