The crime of their dreams: reading the Duke-lacrosse story.

AT Duke University, three white lacrosse players stand accused of raping a poor black woman. They have been indicted in court and portrayed in the national media as a trio of racist brutes. On their own campus and in publications nationwide, their story has been presented as a "teachable moment": a lesson in social exploitation, highlighting the depravity that lurks just beneath the polished surface of America's privileged elites.

In the meantime, however, the actual case against the three defendants has been unraveling. It now appears overwhelmingly likely that the "Duke lacrosse rapists" are innocent of the charges against them. If there is a lesson to be taken from their case, it will come from understanding why so many pundits, reporters, and academics have been so eager to accept, and even embrace, the accusations, without any sound reason. The spectacle has been Harper Lee in reverse: Driven by an obsession with identity politics and "oppression," wide swaths of society have rushed to condemn three young white men as rapists--largely because of their race and social status.

When news of the Duke rape allegations broke, it quickly morphed into a social narrative. An article in USA Today linked the case to "the national flash points of race, class, gender, violence, money and privilege." The Boston Globe described how students and residents in the area had at last begun worrying about "the silent fault lines of race, class, and gender" that might finally "tear them apart." A story in the New York Times quoted a female Duke student who wondered, "Is this going to be a team of rich white men who get away with assaulting a black woman?"

The same tone was adopted by Duke president Richard Brodhead. He wrote an open letter to the community, in which he instructed: "We must be concerned about issues of campus culture this episode has raised quite apart from the lacrosse team.... The episode has brought to glaring visibility underlying issues that have been of concern on this campus and in this town for some time.... They include concerns about the survival of the legacy of racism, the most hateful feature American history has produced." Brodhead then went on to explain how the rape allegations have called attention to "the deep structures of inequality in our society--inequalities of wealth, privilege, and opportunity (including educational opportunity), and the attitudes of superiority those inequalities breed."

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Brodhead's letter is shaped to drive home the point that the scandal at Duke involves much more than just a few individuals. He is explicit that there are bigger matters at stake here--there are "underlying issues" to deal with. To support his thesis, he goes to great lengths to upgrade the significance of the alleged rape from the level of the individual to the social. He writes:

  Rape is ... the crudest assertion of inequality, a way to show that
  the strong are superior to the weak and can rightfully use them as the
  objects of their pleasure. When reports of racial abuse are added to
  the mix, the evil is compounded, reviving memories of the systematic
  racial oppression we had hoped to have left behind us.... Whether they
  intend to or not, universities like Duke participate in this
  inequality and supply a home for a culture of privilege.

Brodhead has been joined on this point by former Princeton University president William Bowen and civil-rights lawyer Julius Chambers, who have decried Duke's "white, elitist, arrogant sub-culture that was both indulged and self-indulgent."

Through all of this commentary about the Duke rape case, however, there has always been the problem of the facts. DNA samples taken from the entire lacrosse team (including the three defendants) failed to link any of them to the alleged crime. A medical exam of the accuser on the night of the alleged attack showed no signs of violence consistent with her claims of being choked, kicked, beaten, and raped. One of the defendants provided a convincing alibi to the public: He produced time-stamped photographs, ATM and cellphone records, and testimony from a taxi driver, demonstrating that he could not have been assaulting the alleged victim during much of the time that she claimed. And, perhaps most damning of all, it was revealed that the alleged victim made an almost identical allegation ten years ago--when she said that she had been gang-raped by three other men. No formal charges were ever filed.

Far from dealing with these factual problems, many commentators have given the impression that the facts are beside the point. This attitude results from equal parts of ideology, guilt, and political expediency.

In the academy and much of the media, the prevailing view of society is straightforwardly radical: Owing to a legacy of slavery and racism, America is saddled with a system of persistent structural inequality, which continues to confer significant advantages on dominant social groups. White men, especially, are collectively stained with the blot of original sin: Even if they are not themselves racist, they benefit from a society that has been oppressing minorities for ages.

On this way of thinking, the facts of the rape allegations at Duke can be seen as ancillary to a larger question of "social justice." Whether the specific charges against the defendants are true or not, the imagery of the Duke rape scandal serves as powerful symbolic confirmation of what the Left already knows about America: There is little need to worry about the guilt of a few individuals when decades of scholarly inquiry have already convicted the whole society of rank oppression and exploitation.

This moral condemnation leads directly to feelings of guilt. The stars of today's academy are mostly wealthy, white, and "privileged." They are the gatekeepers of exclusive institutions with billion-dollar endowments. Socially and materially, they are entrenched near the pinnacle of Western society--the very society that they declare to be an oppressive hierarchy of exploitation, propped up by economic and racial injustice. From the comfortable heights of such a position, they perceive the need to seek redemption--to make up for the unfair advantages they have enjoyed. They accomplish this through a type of penance, performed by adopting pieties that display an appropriately critical attitude toward the established order.

This method of penance makes white liberal guilt quite distinct from self-loathing. In fact, the entire posture is infused from top to bottom with self-righteousness: Its very purpose is to establish moral superiority. By acknowledging one's "privilege" and then striving to combat it through the conspicuous endorsement of radical political change, it becomes possible to dissociate oneself from the reactionary mainstream. Railing against the status quo thus facilitates the reconciliation of radical beliefs and bourgeois lifestyles.

Practical politics plays an important part in this process. If the Duke scandal can be diagnosed as a mere symptom of a more widespread social disease, then it can be construed to support certain remedial prescriptions for political reform: more diversity-training workshops, more redistribution of wealth, and more affirmative-action policies to combat our country's rampant inequality. Most advocates of these programs truly believe that they will be effective. (In fact, of course, they are often counterproductive.) But what's equally important is that support for these measures is motivated by the proper political disposition, whose essential characteristic is the willingness to stand up against the supposedly unjust establishment.

And so this is why so many people--particularly in the academy and in the media--have been so eager to believe in the guilt of the "Duke lacrosse rapists," despite the dearth of evidence. The story provides fodder for the modern liberal political agenda. It is an irresistible illustration of one of the Left's favorite narratives: a dramatic tale of how affluent white men exploit poor people, women, and minorities. Lacrosse is the perfect game--the after-school activity of the prep-school set. Rape is the perfect metaphor--"the crudest assertion of inequality." The South is the perfect region--the locus classicus of American oppression. And Duke is the perfect setting--the microcosmic home of a "white, elitist, arrogant sub-culture that was both indulged and self-indulgent."