Parallel Worlds: A Black Man's Perspective of the Duke Rape Case
Washington, DC -- July 15, 2006 -- (BlackPressMagazine.com)
619 miles. That is the distance between Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida.
The relevance of this tad bit of information may seem minute at best but both institutions have dealt with rape cases in the past two years. The lesser is an incident that occurred at UCF in April of 2005 and is relativity unknown outside of Florida. A female student said she was kidnapped from a campus parking lot and raped. UCF police reported that the young women was walking to the Academic Village, on-campus housing, when she was snatched from behind, forced into her own car and taken to a location northeast of campus and raped.
The suspect was believed to be a Black male, and at one point police believed to have surveillance of the suspect getting change at a car wash. However the victim was not directly threatened with a weapon. Also, even with the police’s discovery of the surveillance video, the case has gone pretty cold since.
Although that was an open and un-shut case; however this situation at one of our countries great institutions is a much different beast of burden. Duke’s case reads like a twilight zone episode with role reversals, but with the same result. As of now, the case has fallen off in the interest of the national eye, however every once in a while either the case itself, or one the suspects pushes it ugly head back on the front page. I am not going to detail about the case at Duke (if you don’t know what is going on, you been under a very big rock for the past 4 months), but I will break down difference between the issue at Duke and UCF.
One difference is size. Duke is a private university with 13,000 students compared to UCF, a public university with over 45,000 students. The question then is how did the Duke case become so big on the national media scene? One is that the savage account was done at one of the highest profiled schools in the nation done by members of one of the most prestigious sports programs on that campus. Mixture of the school’s and student’s prestige, subtle racial segregation on both the Duke’s campus, and the Durham community was a powder keg ready to explode for years. And this case has shed a bright light on race in Durham, the relationship of the locals, and students, and even the relationship between Duke, and North Carolina Central University, its HBCU sister down the road in the same city.
Exposure of Duke’s covert superior complex in relation to NCCU caused a rift in the community since the victims were students of NCCU, and suspects were members of the very successful Duke Lacrosse Team. As a observer Black male observer to be exact, I think race will forever be the number factor in rape cases, and traditionally, historically, and sadly stereotypically, majority of all rape cases involved a Black male and white female, and a lot of times the victim was giving false accounts.
This puts an unusual spin on everything, making the victim a lower income Black student, and the suspect a privileged student at the great university that is Duke. The pure Afro-Centric side of me is yelling, he is guilty no matter what, and you should defend your sister; however my educated side is telling to wait to see everything involved and make a decision when the case is closed. But that may take months, so in due time for this article, I will side with the victim (even with her sketchy background with police reports involving her in a previous account of rape), but I pray to god that she is rightful, and truthful on her account that happened on that faithful night in that house near the Duke campus.
Michael Byrd is an editorial intern for the Historical Black Press Foundation. He is a junior majoring in engineering at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida. Here are just a few of the articles that the our Black Press Magazine summer interns have completed:
