@Silverchild79,
Interesting opinion/article on Nifong. It reminds me of a close friend of mine who taught me about being Black in our world. She and I discovered one day we had become friends because we no longer 'thought of each other in terms of black and white'...or as neighbors thrown together by proximity and serendipity...but as two women involved in gossip and sharing ! It was a great moment for both of us - fifteen years and counting...
News-Sentinel | 06/19/2007 | Nifong’s fiasco
Posted on Tue, Jun. 19, 2007
Nifong’s fiasco
As long as we view each other as groups, we will be manipulated by scoundrels.
Edit: Add 'and politicians'
By The Associated Press
Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong listens as rules violations are being announced during his North Carolina State Bar trial in Raleigh, N.C., Saturday. Nifong will be disbarred for his disastrous prosecution of three Duke University lacrosse players falsely accused of rape, a disciplinary committee decided.
Most of us would like to think America is on the path to being a colorblind society in which race does not matter. Mike Nifong, the disgraced and disbarred former Durham County, N.C., prosecutor, has served at least one valuable public service by showing us just how far we have to go on that journey. Nifong cynically played the race card to keep his job for one reason only: He knew he could. Though he will now pay the price for his inexcusable behavior, don’t ever forget that his ploy worked.
The disciplinary committee of the North Carolina Bar Association minced no words in ruling against Nifong. He was guilty, it said, of a “politically motivated fiasco” in seeking to prosecute three members of the Duke lacrosse team, though there was no evidence a crime was even committed. The state attorney general, in taking over the case and declaring the three innocent, had earlier called Nifong a “rogue prosecutor.”
The case began on March 13, 2006, when the lacrosse team hired two strippers to perform at a party. One of them alleged that players Dave Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann raped her. It was just the case Nifong needed. He was in a tough election bid in a three-way Democratic primary race and trailing both of them in the polls. After a lifetime in the prosecutor’s office, he had been appointed to fill an unexpired term. If he won the office on his own for four more years, it would make a big difference in his pension.
But in the three-way race, Nifong was doing the worst in the black community, which had the majority of voters. Why not impress them as a defender of the poor and downtrodden? Here was a case in which three white, privileged college kids were accused of abusing a poor, black woman who had to do terrible things just to feed her kids.
It worked. He didn’t get a majority of the black votes, but he got enough to squeak by with a 45 percent victory, enough in North Carolina to avoid a runoff election. County Commissioner Philip Cousin, a local minister and member of the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People, stated after the primary, “The Duke lacrosse case was the overwhelming issue . . . When Nifong came through with the indictments, that indicated to the black community he would be fair.”
Of course, we now know there was really no case at all. The alleged “victim” had serious reliability issues and kept changing her story. There were eyewitness accounts putting at least one of the alleged attackers somewhere else. But Nifong kept plowing ahead, making inflammatory remarks about the three defendants and not disclosing to the defense DNA evidence that would clear them – and lying about having the evidence, both to the defense and to the judge.
It is seldom that real life so eerily imitates art. Nifong could have taken his whole scenario from Tom Wolfe’s bitingly comic novel “Bonfire of the Vanities,” in which a Bronx district attorney is facing a tough re-election fight and needs a rich, white defendant to prosecute so as to win the black vote. The racial imbroglio that follows is fueled by a ravenous press, just as in real life, and egged on by a cynical, manipulative Reverend Bacon, said to be based on Al Sharpton. Guess who showed up in Durham to denounce the lacrosse players?
In Wolfe’s novel, though, the prosecutor keeps his job, and the white defendant (who was not even driving the car accused of killing a black pedestrian) is destroyed, as these three athletes could have been. And how many people – black and white and everyone else – are there whose lives have been ruined for political reasons that we will never hear about?
When we face each other as groups, we think in group terms, often letting a misstep by one member of a group make us see the worst in the whole group. So blacks distrust whites, and Hispanics distrust Asians, and race warriors and charlatans of all stripes can use our own worst instincts to further their own ends.
It’s no secret that harmony will come only when we learn to view each other as individuals, each with our own potentials and weaknesses. It is also no secret that we are a long way from reaching that harmony. The slower we go, the more scoundrels such as Nifong will prey on us.
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