Feminist Professor Lies Like a Whore About the Duke Rape Hoax

By Nicholas Stix

I came across the following pack of lies in the course of some related research. I read this bit of pedantic propaganda when it first soiled the Internet, but I couldn’t help re-reading it. It was written at least four months after DNA testing had proven the innocence of the three falsely accused white Duke lacrosse players.

Note the first five words of the article “The Duke Lacrosse team scandal.” There was no “Duke Lacrosse team scandal.” There was a set of crimes committed against members of the Duke Lacrosse team, starting with strippers Crystal Gail Mangum, then already a prostitute, car thief, and attempted cop-killer, and Kim Roberts Pittman, then already a convicted embezzler, stealing the $800 the teammates had paid for a performance as strippers that the two felonious females cheated them out of. “Duke Lacrosse team scandal” is a cheap sophistic trick designed to switch the frame of reference from the true one, in which the lacrosse team members present at a party on the night of March 13-14, 2006, and then the three false accused white players, were victimized, to one in which the criminal “sex workers,” as the writer, Linda Martin Alcoff, calls them, were victims. Note that Alcoff’s term, “sex worker,” is a euphemism for prostitute.

Next, note the pretentious use, also in the first sentence, of the seven-syllable word “epistemological” (and later its variant, “epistemic”). “Epistemological” refers to the philosophic theory of knowledge, as in, do we know what we know via sense perception, intuition, divine revelation, or some combination of two or all three. Alcoff is not talking about any of those things. She’s not talking about knowledge or how we know what we know. She is merely concerned with bs’ing people about the Duke Rape Hoax, so that she can save its structure of lies for the next race and/or rape hoax against a white heterosexual man. In simple English, she’s lying like a whore, in order to make the world safe for lying, racist whores like Crystal Gail Mangum, the black prostitute who concocted the Duke Rape Hoax. Alcoff goes out of her way to emphasize that we should always believe whores. The phrase “She lies like a whore,” derives from millions, if not billions of the world’s experiences with lying prostitutes.

When people use big words like “epistemological” in such improper contexts, it is often to conjure up a façade of erudition and intelligence, where neither exists. In some cases, such as Alcoff’s, it is also an expression of dishonesty.

Note Alcoff’s statement as to the need for “more empirical studies of team sexual behavior in elite schools” in the following passage.

An almost uniform set of white columnists in the mainstream media have been arguing vociferously that the narrative about privileged white guys abusing their status is wrong, irrelevant, a “rush to judgment” (David Brooks), an unfair stereotype (Nicholas Kristof), a social prejudice. I would argue otherwise; it is both a true narrative and a relevant narrative to this case, even though it obviously does not establish the Lacrosse players [sic] guilt in regard to rape. Clearly, the list of actions given above coheres with the narrative of sports team members given license by their institutions to harass and abuse people, especially racially and sexually. We need more empirical studies of team sexual behavior in elite schools, but there is already a body of work that confirms that the tendency exists.

The last thing that Alcoff and her ilk want are “more empirical studies of team sexual behavior in elite schools.” What she wants is more propaganda against young white, heterosexual men, like lacrosse players, sold as “empirical studies.” Most team sports at elite schools are dominated by young black men, whose abuse of sexual and racial privilege, especially their victimization of young white women, is the last thing Alcoff & Co. want exposed.

Note Alcoff’s title: “On Prejudging the Duke Lacrosse Team Scandal.” As I already observed, Alcoff’s use of the phrase, “Duke Lacrosse Team Scandal,” is dishonest to the bone. But Alcoff’s entire exercise in pedantic propaganda is an attempt to rationalize her prejudices regarding the Duke Rape Hoax, and thus to save the possibility of re-enacting the hoax against other innocent white, heterosexual men. She does this through the time-tested propaganda methods of omission, distortion, and outright lying, and within a framework of what the political thinker Carl Schmitt called the “friend/enemy relationship” (das Freund-Feind-Verhältnis”), by demonizing members of groups she hates, and romanticizing members of groups she loves.

In case anyone is wondering whether I am being unfair toward Alcoff, by taking advantage of 20-20 hindsight, the three falsely charged white lacrosse players had already been proven innocent of the rape charges by DNA testing on April 10, 2006, less than one month after Mangum had made her false charges, and a good four months before Alcoff wrote her screed. On top of that, the National Journal’s Stuart Taylor and the Kansas City Star’s Jason Whitlock, respectively, had publicized the fraud in the first week of May, 2006.

At K.C. Johnson’s blog, Durham-in-Wonderland, commenter rrhamilton opined,

First on [Durham PD detective Benjamin] Himan: Who can blame him for acting like he was going along with the Hoax in the beginning? He saw that no one of importance in the DPD or the DA's office believed the responding officer who called CGM a liar. Given that the metanarrative demanded indictments of the lacrosse team, what good would it do anyone for one more police officer (Himan) to say (aloud) that he thought nothing happened?

The other day, KC used the term "eviscerate". He used it to describe Brad Bannon's one-liner retort to Nifong's lawyer's contention that no "significantly exculpatory evidence" had been withheld: "That's absolutely false and you know it."

Here's what I think of when I think of "eviscerate": Put Prof. Linda Alcoff on the witness stand and let her explain under oath her false blood-libel. When I think of "eviscerate" I think of how any good lawyer would take this liar apart paragraph-by-paragraph, sentence-by-sentence, and word-by-word. Within two hours she would be weeping on the stand, but the whole examination would, in my estimation, take about eight hours.

By the time a good lawyer was finished with Prof. Alcoff, observers of the examination would be checking her name, birthdate, and number of children -- to see whether she lied about those, too.

There are several other excellent comments on the D-i-W thread.

With the exception of Alcoff’s whopper, “the narrative of black male sexual aggression against white women was a false narrative,” and her phrase misrepresenting the rape hoax, I’m not going to go through her screed and highlight her omissions, distortions, and lies. However, those who want a refresher course about the hoax, or who never studied it in the first place, may want to read my January 13, 2007 VDARE exposé, which my legendary editor, Peter Brimelow entitled, “Nicholas Stix’ Absolutely Definitive Account of the Incredible Disappearing Duke Rape Hoax.”

My exposé, which uses simple English, opens thus:

Ten months into one of the most dramatic racial rape hoaxes in American history, the suspects still can’t get their lies straight.

By suspects, I do not mean defendants Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, or Dave Evans. They’re the crime victims. The suspects are Durham, NC DA Mike Nifong who finally backed off on Friday asked North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper to appoint a special prosecutor in the case; Durham Police Sgt. Mark Gottlieb; Duke University President Richard Brodhead, various Duke administrators; the almost 100 professors (including the “Duke 88”;) who sought to have the victims railroaded, and who incited hatred against them; the socialist MSM; hoaxer Crystal Gail Mangum; and assorted John and Jane Does.

But hey, what do I know? I’m just a simple, ink-stained kvetch who actually researched the case, as opposed to a tenured antiversity professor and director of women’s studies who is above facts, the law, and morality.
* * *
Linda Martín Alcoff: On Prejudging the Duke Lacrosse Team Scandal
11 08 2007 [N.S.: Date that UBUNTU posted this on the Internet.]
Linda Martín Alcoff
Director of Women’s Studies

The following was written for the inaugural event for the Institute for the Study of the Judiciary, Politics and the Media at Syracuse University, September 2006.

The Duke Lacrosse team scandal continues to raise heated debates, but hidden within much of the political and legal commentary are some important epistemological issues that need to be brought forward. I want to address those here.

First, we should separate out the two distinct realms of discourse that are operative in this scandal: the formal legal one, from the informal public one. Each realm has different standards of judgment, and plays a different role. The formal, legal realm is organized to determine the legal guilt of [sic] innocence of the individuals accused, while it should be clear that the public realm–that diffuse and loose amalgam of both formal and informal communications–cannot determine individual legal guilt or innocence. First, because it is not privy to all the facts (secrets can still be kept, even in these days of hyper-surveillance), and second, because the public realm of discourse is subject to the influence of various media which is in the business of selling stories. Almost everyone today understands that media reports of all sorts are edited, even when they are upholding the most scrupulous of journalistic standards.

We should take the public realm of discourse not as a court of law, then, but as a cultural site, and in analyzing it we should look not only at what is said but who is saying it, who is being given credibility, who is not, and what are the narratives on offer for making sense of the facts. Narratives are like theories, generally with some historical content, which are used to make sense of new events and to bring order to complicated facts. It is neither possible nor desirable for us to completely dispense with the use of narratives in judging new events: when synagogues are defaced, we interpret this understandably and rightly in the context of the history of anti-semitism, when a black man is dragged behind a truck until he is dead, this event is connected to a history of lynching and antiblack racism. When George Bush speaks before the U.N. on the topic of freedom, his speech is interpreted through the recent history of US military initiatives. Such historical narratives do not tell us everything we need to know about the new case or new claim, but they tell us some of what we need to know to understand the new event.

However, there are clearly better and worse narratives, even true and false narratives. For example, the narrative of black male sexual aggression against white women was a false narrative. That narrative played a role in the public’s willingness to condemn the Scottsboro Boys in 1930′s Alabama, a case that columnist Nicholas Kristof likens to the Duke scandal, but in the Scottboro case the narrative was actually historically inaccurate. It was simply a method used to maintain Jim Crow segregation and to terrorize African Americans from asserting their legal rights.

There are three main narratives being invoked in the Duke case, two false and one true, in my view. One of the false narratives is relatively old, and the other two narratives–one false and one true–are quite recent. Perhaps the most lasting significance of this case will be its effects on these narratives, and thus what I find most interesting about the public realm of discourse over Duke is to see how these narratives are being fought over, and by whom.

One narrative is that sex workers lie. Sex workers are generally not given epistemic credibility, by the courts, the police, or the public. They are seen as morally debased, or as strategic opportunists who have had to lie so much to make a living that they have forgotten how to be honest, or as human refuse too ignorant to have a conscience. Today, more people now know such claims to be distortions at best. More people now know–perhaps because of the exposes on human trafficking, perhaps because of sex worker organizations themselves that have articulated their political rights, perhaps because of feminism–that sex workers are a variegated group of people, sometimes quite well educated, and sometimes aware of their choices and risks. It is a fairly new event that a sex worker would be given credibility by feminists, by women’s fashion magazines, by mainstream African American media, even by some of the general public media. So the initial credibility given this woman complainant was interesting to me in this regard. Now I fear that the collapse of the legal case will be used to re-consolidate the older narrative that epistemically discredits all sex workers once again. But initially, the credibility that was being given an African American, working-class sex worker was evidence of a historic shifting away from previous practices in the public domain.

The second narrative under contestation concerns the history of privileged white men at elite universities who are involved in collective high status activities like sports and fraternities. This narrative–much newer, much less widely accepted–is that such groups sometimes abuse their status and power to break laws, both small ones and more serious ones. Is this narrative relevant here? The Duke Lacrosse team was organized very much like a fraternity, with most of the team living together and apart from the rest of the campus. The facts that are not in dispute here are that the team members hired sex workers for group entertainment, that they asked for racially specific types of sex workers (not black, as it turns out), that some of them referred during the evening to the sex workers as niggers and bitches, that one shouted out to a sex worker (as heard by a neighbor) “Hey bitch, thank your grandpa for your nice cotton shirt,” that one said to a sex worker that he was going to shove a broomstick up her, and that another one sent around a sick email professing his intention to rape, kill, and skin the sex workers. Those are the facts that are not in dispute. Also not in dispute is the fact that the Duke Lacrosse team has violated laws systematically over at least the past 5 years, becoming notorious among the administration for boorish behavior, such as public urination and hitting golf balls at buildings.

An almost uniform set of white columnists in the mainstream media have been arguing vociferously that the narrative about privileged white guys abusing their status is wrong, irrelevant, a “rush to judgment” (David Brooks), an unfair stereotype (Nicholas Kristof), a social prejudice. I would argue otherwise; it is both a true narrative and a relevant narrative to this case, even though it obviously does not establish the Lacrosse players guilt in regard to rape. Clearly, the list of actions given above coheres with the narrative of sports team members given license by their institutions to harass and abuse people, especially racially and sexually. We need more empirical studies of team sexual behavior in elite schools, but there is already a body of work that confirms that the tendency exists.

The third narrative involved here is the narrative about the so-called victim culture, in which people (especially white women and people of color) desire to be victims, to “wallow” in victimhood, and so on. Some have argued in this case that the commentators from the African American community who are condemning the Lacrosse players are driven by a strong self-identification as victims, or the desire to perpetuate their status in the public mind as victims. This narrative, I suggest, is quite false, and obviously self-serving to those who would rather not have their boat rocked by groups demanding social change. African Americans, in my experience, do not like being called “nigger-bitches.” Women do not want to be raped or threatened with rape by broomsticks. No one in their right mind really wants either to be a victim, or to be reminded of their victimization. In our highly individualistic, competitive society, to be a victim is actually to be vilified as weak, as not strong enough to have avoided the victimization, as not hardy enough to swallow one’s victimization in silence. Moreover, it is quite humiliating to be known publicly as having been victimized racially, or sexually. There are a lot of disincentives against reporting one’s victimization, as evidenced by the 80% (according to the FBI) of rape victims who never report.

(There are no doubt more narratives than those I am listing, but I have to keep this short.)

The point of this argument, then, is that narratives are not irrelevant to the process of trying to make sense of new events. No matter how this legal case turns out, those who have raised these and other narratives, contesting some and supporting others, have engaged in good epistemic practices.

However, there are two things that all of us who are engaged in the public realm of discourse need to do in order to improve the epistemic practices in regard to narratives: (1) understand more clearly the limits of narrative in determining, for example, the legal guilt of [sic] innocence of a particular defendant; and (2) instead of condemning all narratives wholesale we need to distinguish between better and worse, true and false narratives, criticizing those that still hold sway despite their inaccuracy. There’s knowledge, and then there’s myth, and in the public discussion over the Duke case, there has been plenty of both.

[A tip ‘o the do rag to UBUNTU.]