Alleged Hate Crime at UVa (Continuing…)

Alleged Hate Crime at UVa (Continuing…)

Although UVa students are out on spring break this week, Charlottesville and UVa are still reeling from the alleged racist attack on undergratuate candidate for Student Council president Daisy Lundy last week.

In addition to the Daily Progress and the Cavalier Daily, Charlottesville sports two free weekly newspapers, and both of them have just come out with long articles on the incident. C-Ville, the more established of the two (but with by far the more rudimentary web site), actually has two stories, both of them expressing the consensus view of shock and outrage. In “Read This First,” which does not appear to be online, Cathryn Harding observes impatiently that “email is not action. And meetings are good for hashing out strategy, but they don’t substitute for protest.”

Whatever happened to outrage and activism? One thousand people can take to the Mall to shout out about military action. But where are they when the hate crimes hit home?

“We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” was the angry call of the post-Stonewall generation of gays and lesbians fed up with the bashing that been their late-night dessert for too many years. Their take-to-the-streets confrontations busted open the door of implicitly sanctioned discrimination and violence.

How about “One, two, three, four. We don’t want your stinking war”? That one was effective, too.

Ms. Harding sounds like a refugee from the 60s, of whom there are a number around here. (I write from about 15 minutes west of Charlottesville.)

The article in C-Ville, “Student Council Race Gets Racial,” which is online here, affects pretty much the same tone. “Attack on candidate not surprising to campus blacks,” says the article’s sub-head. “Still think racism doesn’t exist at UVa?” one undergraduate asked.

[She] says the racism on campus is shrewd — not usually so overt as Lundy’s attack. “The subtle way that people are generally unfriendly to me —” she says, “I really get this feeling that I’m not exactly welcome here.”

In her courses, for instance, [she] says, the soft racism is at its prime.

“In my French class last semester, I was so uncomfortable,” she says, “that I was afraid to speak up, afraid to make a mistake. It killed my performance. When we would divide into groups, not one person would walk up to me to be my partner.”

By contrast, The Hook, Charlottesville’s new-kid-on-the-block weekly paper, has a much more complete and compelling web presence, and its article, while both expressing and quoting the shame shock and outrage, was not quite so whiningly monochromatic. First, and I think quite revealingly, it was entitled “Race Attack: Alleged Assault Shakes UVa.”

This is the first time I’ve seen the word “alleged” appear in connection with this incident, except on campus chatboards. Speaking of which, The Hook‘s online front page links to a chatboard discussion where some doubts are being expressed by a few more students. Although still a minority view, the following comment on the chatboard is typical of some doubts that are being expressed by a few students:

The exact same thing happened at Mary Baldwin in Staunton last year. An alleged hate crime attack (homophobic instead of racist), the victim went to the police who believed her, an outraged community mobilized, the frightened college beefed up security. . .

It turned out after two weeks of anger and fear, the young lady admitted making it up. She wanted attention for some sort of political agenda, and did not realize what a stir her story would cause.

Accordingly one should not leap to conclusions one way or another.

In this case there is a minor factual conundrum. The Cavil Daily reports: “Lundy was leaning into her car when the assailant grabbed her by the hair and slammed her head against the steering wheel. She subsequently fell to the ground, injuring her ankle.”

Then, “[l]awn residents were alerted to the scene when Lundy repeatedly honked her car horn. [A rescuer] Lovelace heard the honking and ‘decided to make sure things were okay,’ said McCarthy, who lives two rooms down from Lovelace and has been actively involved in Lundy’s campaign. When Lovelace arrived on the scene, Lundy was laying on the ground and he began screaming.”

Now this says Lundy is knocked against the steering wheel, she falls to the ground–then she gets up again, honks her horn for a while to get attention, and then falls back down on the ground and stays there waiting for somebody to arrive ?

One would like perhaps to learn a little more about the sequence of events. Always giving an alleged victim the benefit of the doubt of course.

Another student added:

While one should not rush to judgement, we really do need to know more detail.

For one thing an attacker saying “Nobody wants a N—-R to be Student Council President,” simply does not ring true.

Nobody outside the university knew there was an election. Only students knew or cared. Of those, in the even smaller, tiny circle of politically active students to whom it deeply matters who wins the Student Council Presidency —I just don’t see a racist violent and dumb enough to attack, and thus guarantee electing, the candidate he hates….

Then there is this: she had driven there in her car. That means an assailant/ stalker who has been making harassing phone calls, must also have been watching her dorm/apartment–or wherever she was beforehand– in the wee hours of the morning. Ms. Lundy gets in her car at, what time maybe 1:00am? The assailant follows her, presumably driving a car of his own? She parks in Poe Alley, goes in to talk to Lovelace.

How long did the stalker lie in wait, concealed, out in the cold at 2:00am, watching her car, waiting for whenever she might return?

All this just to bang her head on the steering wheel and insult her, run to his own car at the risk of having the license spotted, and drive away?

It is possible of course, but that seems an awful lot of time-consuming high-risk stalking by a very foolish and unbalanced person, for very little result. Is there anybody who cares THAT much who is Student Council President?

Other than the candidate herself, that is.

There is quite a lot of discussion on that board if anyone wants to track it. Meanwhile, anyone interested should, as always, monitor Erin O’Connor’s site, Critical Mass. The comments added to her post on UVa reflect the comments one is hearing now from some UVa students.

UPDATE – By now I shouldn’t have to keep suggesting that you monitor Erin O’Connor’s Critical Mass, but just in case: see her latest discussion of campus hate crime. Among other points she makes is the following:

Hate crimes on campus–whether real or faked–are wonderful boons. They facilitate an agenda. They prove that racism, sexism, and homophobia really are the defining issues of our moment. They justify throwing money at campus advocacy groups, hiring minority faculty, establishing ethnic studies departments and creating diversity course requirements.

That’s certainly how the UVa incident is playing out so far. The C-Ville article linked above displays a prominent picture (its only one), not of Daisy Lundy, but of Prof. Corey D.B. Walker, Assoc. Prof. of African-American Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Local Knowledge. He comments that “yes, of course racism still exists at UVa.”

“I am not surprised that it has generated to this,” he says. “I am surprised at the severity of it.”

[….]

Walker believes change won’t come until UVa is more racially diverse. “Less than 2 percent of this faculty is African American,” he says. “What is that alone teaching?”

Presumably that UVa’s teeming racists have license to roam about Grounds at will, attacking students of color. Now, if UVa only had more professors who look like Corey D.B. Walker….