Wednesday, April 11, 2007

The Rape Case

Finally all the charges are dropped. There are several losers in this whole ordeal.

First, Duke University proves that political correctness has gone too far in that they actually punished innocent people for the perception that they needed to "do something about it."

Second, the overzealous prosecuter acted exactly how you might imagine an overzealous prosecutor would act and is rightfully embarassed.

But third, and most interesting to me, is how odd the African American community responded. I got clued into while listening to caller on the radio today, an obviously smart, well spoken black man who called in trying to point out how the accused men should have been put on trial for X, Y, and Z reasons. He was calm, rational, and totally wrong. What became clear to me in this moment is that many well educated, smart African American people, against all logic implicity side with a a liar simply because her story taps into a cultural nightmare of privileged white men getting away with crimes against African Americans. The woman clearly lied, regardless of what historical injustices her ancestors lived with, and regardless of her underprivileged background. It is not shocking to me that she lied, but it is shocking to me that people who know better are willing to believe silly conspiracy theories.

The parallel to this is of course, the OJ trial, where you have the African American community cheering when a murderer is found not-guilty. And we're not talking just about people in the ghetto used to getting treated like shit by the LAPD, we're talking about Black college students who in all likelihood were raised in middle class homes. I don't know how to explain this.

In some sense I guess it is similar to how I don't understand Muslim anger towards Israel. Why do kids in Pakistan care about Israel? The two countries have nothing to do with one another. It's absurd. Why don't the Pakistanis care about the Taiwanese or the North Koreans or the Kurds or the fricking Quebequios, or the Navajo?

Anyhow, the rape case should've been about the crime, instead people made it about race. It makes no sense to me...

3 comments:

robyn said...

Quebecois. As in "Kay-beck-qwa". As in, Canada's long-standing topic of cultural division that keeps us distracted from other forms of cultural/racial division. Le quebecois je t'aime.

Greg said...

i knew i spelled it wrong, but was too lazy to look it up on the internet.

deepstructure said...

hi greg, im a friend of ray haratian's from way back (we were in an acting group together and he was in a short film of mine). i've been trying to get back in contact with him. could you get him my email? i did a google search for him and an entry on your blog back in 05 popped up. appreciate any help you can give!