My thoughts on the Duke University scandal.

WARNING: DANGEROUS PARADIGMS

First and foremost, as an avid reader of Fark.com, Duke sucks.

Ah, glad we got that out of the way.

Now, we get to the read issue at hand, whether or not a young black girl was raped by a few young white men. The issue may seem simple when first glanced at, but the underlying social implications are far stretching for the city of Durham. Durham is a 43% black community, while the University tends to be a fairly white university, due to somewhat high tuition and the fact that minorities don't score as well as some hope they would. Because of these demographic differences, the issue of race can and has come up, but mostly because of the black community. From my viewing of the situation on television, there is no interest from the black community in waiting to see if these allegations are true or false, they want to see the boys arrested and probably beaten up. Now that the DNA results have come back negative, I have seen no shift in that attitude. I even heard a person accuse that courier of the DNA evidence of tampering with it to make the results negative, which is ridiculous; no lab accepts packages that are tampered with.

I do not believe these boys raped that girl, now of course I don't know for sure, nobody really does, except for those intimately involved in the situation, but from the way the evidence has been shown so far, what little evidence that has been shown, the accused were unjustly accused. Were they misguided in hiring 'escorts'? Yes, but they are kids and kids make stupid mistakes. Was the one wrong in sending out that 'tasteless' email? Yes, but that's hardly evidence, he could have and probably was joking around, acting cocky in front of his friends, or doing some stupid stunt.

So far there is only accusations, and weak ones at that.