Think the Alleged Rapists at Duke Bought into the “Oversexed Black Woman” Image?

Thanks AREA25 for sending me this and the preceding article.

Commentary: Think the Alleged Rapists at Duke Bought
into the “Oversexed Black Woman” Image?
By: Gregory Kane, BlackAmericaWeb.com Date: Thursday,
March 30, 2006

Were these a bunch of white guys looking for a
real-life ‘make me feel good’ moment from a black
woman?

Consider this Part Two of last week’s column, in which
I suggested that it’s high time black folks pull
Hollywood filmmakers up for their persistence in
perpetuating the oversexed black woman stereotype. I
suspected when I wrote the piece that such
stereotyping might have some extremely bad real-life
consequences.

Now, courtesy of Duke University’s lacrosse team, we
all know how bad.

At least three members of Duke’s lacrosse team have
been accused of raping, beating and attempting to
strangle a black dancer at a party on March 13. The
woman is also a student at North Carolina Central
University.

According to several news stories, the players invited
two women to dance at the party, in which underage
drinking figured prominently (Booze isn’t called
“ignorant oil” for nothing.). The alleged victim and
another black woman went to dance at what they thought
was a bachelor party for five men. The two left after
they saw “dozens” of men and the party took a rowdy
turn, but one player apologized and convinced them to
return.

It was after the women returned that the victim
alleges three players dragged her into a bathroom and
raped and sodomized her. Forty-six of the 47 members
of Duke’s lacrosse team submitted DNA samples to
police. The 47th player is the lone black member of
the team, who didn’t fit the description of the
suspects.

Joe Alleva, the athletic director at Duke, said the
players deny all the charges. Even if that’s true,
this incident presents all sorts of disturbing
questions.

Why did a bunch of white guys feel it was necessary to
hire two black exotic dancers for their booze-a-thon?
I’m sure there are white exotic dancers in Durham,
N.C. Did these guys watch “Monster’s Ball” and
overdose on Halle Berry’s “make me feel good” moment
once too often?

Let’s assume they simply hired two female exotic
dancers and didn’t know the race of either until they
arrived at the party. How, then, do we account for
the women being subjected to racial slurs, as one told
the Raleigh News and Observer last week?

This was clearly a case in which, at best, a bunch of
white guys deliberately set out to degrade and demean
two black women. And black folks should be justifiably
outraged.

Now here’s the hardest question of all: Don’t some
black men degrade and demean black women just as much
as those Duke lacrosse players allegedly did?

You know the ones I’m talking about. Some rappers and
their endless stream of videos depicting black women
doing exactly what the exotic dancers at that party
near the campus of Duke University were doing: Shaking
it fast and dropping it like it was hot. And the irony
is we¹re usually seeing a bunch of rappers who look
like they got beat down with both ends of the ugly
stick surrounded by gorgeous women.

Perhaps the most notorious of those videos is Nelly’s
“Tip Drill.” When Nelly was invited to Spelman College
a while back, some sisters there felt compelled to
uninvite him. They didn’t appreciate that “Tip Drill”
video. Change the race of the guys in Nelly’s “Tip
Drill” video from black to white, and you’d probably
have a scene similar to what went on at that party,
given the best-case scenario in which no rape
occurred.

Nelly’s defense of “Tip Drill” is that the video was
entertainment. The sisters at Spelman would probably
tell him that’s not the point. What is the point is
that the nearly butt-naked, scandalous hoochies
depicted in “Tip Drill” aren’t who most black women
are.

Black women are the ones graduating from college more
frequently than black men. If those black women happen
to be enrolled at Vanderbilt University in Nashville,
Tenn., then they’re also the group on that campus with
the highest grade point average.

Black women are the ones earning, on average, more
than their white female counterparts with comparable
educations. In Baltimore, black women are the ones who
hold three of the city’s top four elective offices.

Black women are doctors, lawyers, engineers, judges,
entrepreneurs, journalists, editors, legislators and
administrators. It’s time Hollywood got that. It’s
time those horny booze hounds otherwise known as Duke
University’s lacrosse team got that.

And it’s time black men got that.