Innocent Until Proven Innocent

Abstract

As the national media descended on Durham, North Carolina, in wake of public accusations of rape against three Duke Lacrosse student athletes, much of the discourse remained mired in its own shock and awe. Ignoring, if not erasing, histories of sexual violence involving White men and Black women while focusing on the problems plaguing college athletics, the media, and the numerous online defenders of the players used this instance to rearticulate tropes of White power, imagining the case as yet another assault on White masculinity. Beyond examining these deployed fictions and the denials of the possibility of guilt, given the player’s Whiteness, sport of choice, educational institution, and class status, this article explores the ways in which their student athlete identities were seen as either meaningless or evidence of innocence, especially in juxtaposition to the discursive articulation of the criminalized Black male student athlete.