KC's World

Abstract

The Duke lacrosse incident in spring 2006 was touched off by a party held by the men's lacrosse team that featured exotic dancers. One of the dancers claimed that she was raped by three of the players, and charges were filed by the local district attorney. The national media rushed to condemn the players and told the story of the event and of campus culture more broadly as one about gender and race privilege (the players were White and the dancers Black) and about a fraught relationship between the town and the university (characterized as a site of elitism and drunken debauchery). A cottage industry of blogs developed in the aftermath of the event itself, commenting not only on the legal case and the party but also on Duke faculty who were signatories to an ad that drew attention to the racialized atmosphere on campus at the time—a time of backlash against African American students. Many of these bloggers accused faculty of enabling the district attorney's, the university's, and the nation's “rush to judgment” about the players. After the state's attorney general took over the case, he dropped all of the charges against the players, and the district attorney resigned and was disbarred. This essay focuses on one such blog, KC Johnson's Durham‐in‐Wonderland, examining the way in which he used the event to demonize faculty and further ideological agendas that are part of a broad‐scale rightwing attack on progressive faculty across the nation.