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The salient point in "Vetran"'s post, and in the article itself, is that these young men seem not to have any idea that what they're doing is wrong. And why should they? After all, they've been shown time and again that nothing they do carries any consequence -- not only by their parents and their school, but by the nightly news and the culture at large. It doesn't take exceptional insight to see that part of the appeal of belonging to the uppermost stratum of any society is the comparative freedom from accountability that membership therein affords. (Indeed, a guy like Ken Lay must right now be feeling, above all else, very surprised at his current situation.)
Which brings me to a related point. While I don't want to downplay the significance of race in this country's day-to-day troubles as well as its larger historical ones, it seems to me that this particular problem -- privileged idiots stomping around on those less privileged simply because they can -- probably has less to do with race, per se, and more to do with that other elephant in the American parlor: class. Whatever actually happened to that stripper -- racial epithets included -- would not have happened, had she not belonged to the relatively powerless and voiceless underclass. A century ago, that working class mother of two might have been Irish. The fact that she is black is probably, in an awful sort of way, fortunate, since that fact has gotten a lot of people involved in this affair who might not otherwise have heard about it, or cared.
So what to do? Well, it seems to me that this kind of problem on college campuses has less to do with a "boys will be boys" attitude than it does with the school administration's fear of losing the future benefits that its well-placed and well-heeled alumni might bestow. Whether or not it ever owns up to this fact (and it obviously won't), Duke and other schools like it have in various ways actively fostered the sort of image that appeals to wealthy sociopaths and their offspring because it knows that's where the money is. And this amounts to leading by example. Too bad the example being set is one of sycophantic cowardice.
