Motives and victims

Michael Barone:

"We believe these three individuals are innocent."

The words, soberly spoken by North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper, bring to an end the unjust prosecution of the three former Duke lacrosse players.

"We have no credible evidence that an attack occurred."

The motives of the "overreaching" prosecutor, as Cooper called him, are obvious: Prosecuting three white men on charges brought by a black accuser helped him win black votes he needed in an election. The motives of those who rushed to believe the charges -- and continued to believe them 366 days after DNA testing implicated none of the players -- are something else.

The "Group of 88" Duke professors, journalists for The New York Times and the Durham Herald-Sun, and heads of black and feminist organizations all seemed to have a powerful emotional need to believe. A need to believe that those they classify as victims must be virtuous and those they classify as oppressors must be villains. A need to believe that this is the way the world usually works.

Except it doesn't. Cases that fit this template don't come along very often. In this country, black-on-white crime is far more common than white-on-black crime (black-on-black crime is far more common still). You won't see the characters exercised by the Duke case looking at the recent case of three University of Minnesota players accused (whether justly or not) of rape -- they happen to be black.

This need to believe that the victim class is always virtuous and the oppressor class is guilty is widespread, and perhaps growing, in this country and abroad. It is particularly strong among those lucky enough to get paid to observe the way most people work and live -- academics, journalists, apparatchiks of advocacy organizations.

We can see the impulse in the rejection by the Public Broadcasting System of a film about moderate Muslims confronting Islamists. PBS says the film isn't ready yet and was tainted by the presence of two conservatives -- imagine! -- on its board of advisers. But lurking behind PBS's decision, I suspect, is a distaste for Muslims who embrace the values of Western oppressors along with sympathy, or something like it, for the Islamist victims.

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This urge to see the victim class as virtuous and the oppressor class as villainous leads people in countries like the United States and Britain to sympathize more with our enemies than our defenders. This is not new.

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Barone sees this as the motivation behind some of the "anti war" movement. What is interesting is how our enemies exploit this "feeling." During the recent war with Israel Hezballah engaged in what I called victim offensives using civilians as props in an attempt to slow Israel's attacks on their forces that camouflaged themselves as civilians. Certainly the Duke faculty was willing to believe the worst of the players because they sympathized with a black stripper who clearly had victim status with that crowd before she even made her false allegations about the players. Her incredible story became a "victim" offensive on its own in response to some perceived insults.

See also this LaShawn Barber column on the egregious acts of the lynch mob.