Ever the same

I live on 603 Watts St., just a few blocks away from the site of the "incident," which everyone is talking about, and in some cases, not talking about.

Having graduated from Duke last May, and watching campus life from "across the street," I am greatly saddened and angered that nothing much has changed in the past year.

I was around when the Women's Initiative reared its ugly head, and I was around after all the talk died down, and nothing much was actually done to address the issues taken from the report. Sure, you can go online and view all the programs Duke has created to help women on campus post-Initiative, but how many of them are actually up and running right now? How many times do we have to watch one of our fellow students or community members are ravaged and destroyed by the very issues we at one time wanted to eradicate?

Last year, we watched as several women were brave enough to speak out about being raped, and we listened long enough to be angry, and then we let it go. I only hope that we will not make the same mistake again. Duke's campus culture has to undergo some major changes, concerning gender and racial issues.

If everyone is so outraged and hurt by this current "incident," then we should hold onto that hurt, live in that anger for a while, until we can figure out how to actually create change on campus, and in this community.

I personally do not want to live anywhere I feel unsafe, or where I feel that I am thought of as merely a vessel to be used and discarded by whosoever chooses. And I know I am not the only one who feels this way.

While others are keeping their silence, let us be loud. Let our actions speak louder than our words this time.

Elizabeth Clift

As uncouth as it may sound, we implicitly encourage racist behavior by even describing another person by his race. The boundaries that have been imposed between cultures serve as dividing lines rather than something positive around which a group can rally. So what am I proposing? Am I saying that we should just ignore race, ignore the extent to which the South remains segregated? Yes. It would be tough in the short term, but would solve problems in the long term. We should eliminate race as a form of identification, eliminate race as a basis for placement. The concept of race should be eliminated. Different groups of people will still be able to maintain their cultures; they just won't be defined by the members' skin color. Solidarity movements among a given race do nothing but isolate that group from others. The Ku Klux Klan thinks of themselves as a solidarity movement. Do we want ourselves to remain a society separated by the color of each others' skin?

Great strides have been made to curb racism and desegregate the nation. But we have arrived at a point where previous strategies no longer work and we need to do something new. We need to forget about race altogether. I actually believe that this is a situation where not talking about something can make it go away. If we don't tell our kids about the concept of races, how will they know about it? This is certainly not a popular view, but it seems that the only way to end interracial hatred and abolish segregation is to erase the concept itself. Or we can remain a society that, on the surface, gets along with each other but has hatred at its core. It's a horrible way to cause us to think about such issues, but it's something that we need to do.

And if the lacrosse players raped that woman, I hope they rot in jail for the rest of their lives.

Dan Wilson

Trinity '09