Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Duke's Tyson: shameless then and now

A letter today in the Durham Herald Sun includes this about Duke University Professor Tim Tyson:

Tyson's atrocious and inciteful behavior -- in word and deed -- during the lacrosse hoax is what many remember too well. He assisted Mike Nifong in stirring up the community with lies and tall tales, and it was clear that he loved it.
The letter writer has Tyson's number.

Tyson was one the first and loudest of the Duke faculty to condemn the lacrosse players, stir racial animosities, and support the now disbarred Mike Nifong and certain Durham Police officers as they worked to frame three Duke students.

Tyson's never expressed any regret for what he did. In fact, he continues to speak falsely now as he did in 2006. That's made clear in this excerpt from a Jan. 14, 2008 post - Duke's Tyson Is Still Race Hustling - :

Duke Professor Tim Tyson continues to race hustle.

From today’s Durham Herald Sun:
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. should be remembered as "a black revolutionary" dedicated to a democracy for future generations, not as "a black Santa Claus who wanted to be nice to everybody," an author and historian said at a Sunday service at a historically black Oxford church.

"He gave his life so that the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution would not be just worthless scraps of a paper, which is all they were until the black South redeemed them and allowed them to speak to the nations for all time," Tim Tyson said. (emphasis added)

Tyson teaches at both Duke University and UNC.[…]
The rest of the H-S story is here.

Professor Tyson was among the first of Duke’s faculty to enthusiastically endorse and enable Crystal Mangum’s and Mike Nifong’s lies. Few faculty members were more reckless and wrong in their public statements.

Here, for example, are excerpts from Tyson’s Apr. 2, 2006 Raleigh News & Observer op-ed:
[...]Rape is one of the deepest and most vicious ways that human beings deny their common humanity. Racism is another.

These crimes are intertwined deeply in our history, and that history came off its leash once more on Buchanan Boulevard on March 13, as a few Duke students did great harm to our community. …

Young white men of privilege deployed their unearned affluence to hire black women to provide live pornography. This is only partly a free market, where people choose to buy and sell themselves. It is also a slave market, where an enduring racial caste system placed those women in a vulnerable position. …

The spirit of the lynch mob lived in that house on Buchanan Boulevard, regardless of the truth of the most serious charges. The ghastly spectacle takes its place in a history where African- American men were burned at the stake for "reckless eyeballing" -- that is, looking at a white woman -- and white men kept black concubines and mistresses and raped black women at will.[...]
The spirit of the lynch mob didn’t live in that house on Buchanan Boulevard.

In Spring 2006 the spirit of the lynch mob lived in the minds and words of Professor Tyson and people like him. Unfortunately, we have no reason to doubt it's still with them today.

END OF EXCERPT

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Tyson was shameless in 2006; he's shameless now.

Hat tip: Anon commenter for alert on H-S letter

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

John -

The part of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s speech that resonated with me and continues to resonate with me is the part that goes (and I paraphrase): What matters is not the color of your skin but the content of your character. Regretfully, too many black leaders have forgotten that. They have become most like the people they despised the most, the white racists of the old South. Now, most black leaders are black racists.

Jack in Silver Spring

Anonymous said...

Thanks John

Don't let Tyson forget.

kbp