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02/23/2010: "The LieStoppers Listening Statement"

http://liestoppers.blogspot.com/

By Joan Foster

To the Gang of 88....

It is WE who are listening now.

We are listening to the fear in the voice of a nine year old child. We are listening to the rage of a 32 year old woman...who has in the past attempted to run down a police officer with a stolen vehicle, jail three innocent young men for 30-40 years with her lies, and has now set an apartment on fire and threatened a lover in the presence of her children. She has never been held accountable. We are listening to the ranting of an untreated custodial parent of three minor children. We are listening to the Durham community, to Duke, and to all who may be unfortunate enough to someday be the target of her rage and/or reckless accusations. Her volatility and the deliberate avoidance by those in power to impose ANY treatment and or accountability is a social disaster.

But we know it isn't just Ms. Mangum who created this situation.. It isn't just the disbarred "rogue prosecutor" Nifong. It is ALL of you enablers that allow her to endanger her children, our children and even yourselves.

YOU are the authors, implementers and high priests of this outrage. You created a pious cloud of historical racial "payment-due"... to enshroud from Magnum from her present day crimes and consequences. You shifted the responsibility for her lies to her victims because of their color and their class. You intentionally imbued Mangum with some mythical righteousness. You left the truth and true justice behind in your quest to further your own funding, importance and world view.

That is a true SOCIAL DISASTER.

You are too morally ignorant to acknowledge it...But it is a disaster nonetheless.

Many, many people all over the world are reading the news this week and once again, shouting and whispering about what happened to Collin , Reade, and Dave almost four years ago...and to Crystal's young children and the man she attacked IN THEIR PRESENCE this week. We hear her child on the 9-11 call begging for police intervention. We hear unmitigated insanity in the background. We read of fires set while her minor children are watching and at risk. We wonder what kind of daily Hell the political entities in Durham and North Carolina... under the influence of your over-reaching PC mindset.... have imposed upon these young children?

That fear in that little girl's voice is not from any unpleasant encounter on a college campus or at a fraternity party....the only incidents your listening ears or "sensitive" minds seem capable of absorbing. That fear is from being the forgotten victims in the most horrific example of your warped Universe of political correctness and unending racial hyperbole: the Duke Lacrosse Frame. You put yourselves out there, immediately...before you had any information or knowledge other than an accusation and the color of the accuser's skin. Immediately, you risked the reputations and even the very real legal jeopardy of your own students, to pimp a racial fairy tale. We listened to you, in many venues...over and over and over for months. You hectored our children in class. You harangued about white privilege in every medium. Yet Mangum stands as an undeniable example of political Black privilege. Her False accusations, her crimes have had no accountability. The false persona you created for her of the brilliant Magna Cum Laude student , shy, resilient, "new to dancing"...allows her to write books and perpetuate falsehoods...but also prevents her from getting the real mental and medical help ahe needs.

Her children bear the real burden of this.


The centerpiece of the fairy tale was that Crystal Mangum was not only the Lacrosse team's victim, but a victim of all the ills of society as well. Therefore, Mangum's lifestyle, her choices, her criminal record, her substance abuse, her mental illness...were not relevant or to be factored into the adjudication of the Hoax. Immediately and in your writings and statements afterward, you demanded legal and political entities likewise shroud Sister Survivor in your sympathetic bias. You silenced reality and therefore you attempted to hijack justice. You failed in regard to the Lacrosse team. But you tragically won..in regard to Mangum's minor children. They stay in what passes for her "care." They live in a state of daily perpetual risk because the self-enriching PC metanarrative of people like the 88 of YOU.. demands society create some special racial nobility for their Mother that negates her having any accountability or even self-respect.

What do we want? . . .We want the absence of terror for Crystal's children. AND we DO really know what that means . . . We can remember the terror of the Lacrosse families. That’s why we’re CANNOT be silent and allow your guilt to fade; we cannot ever allow to be forgotten the absurd metanarrative you Listeners spun about the Lacrosse case in your public statements, your op-eds, your letters to the Editor. YOUR mythology about Crystal Mangum is the lie that enables Crystal , the magna cum laude graduate of NCCU, to present to her children , day after day, her personal example of how to "get by" and know that "scholars" like you deem that past societal ills make Mangum forever entitled to be society's burden. For her children, left in her care, your mythology may well rob them of REALITY of her illness and understanding of her crimes and mistakes...and they need that understanding to protect themselves, respect themselves and for "the healing to begin. "1

You never "listened.

You SAW.

You saw her color.

You wrote: "We go to class with racist classmates, we go to gym with people who are racists....It’s part of the experience."

You might well have included ""We teach with fellow racists"...because by pre-judging (as in "prejudice"), by "not waiting", by insisting a troubled woman be made into a obscene Myth of Black virtue...you personified racism in a way that will reverberate wherever the story of the Duke Lacrosse Frame is told.

You wrote in despair of your students, not "finding a voice" One of your lot called these innocent young men "farm animals" in an email to one of their Mothers. His shame is shared equally by every one of you...who could not "find a voice" to condemn him or even mildly critique him. Your own fear of showing too much integrity in the presence of your peers rendered you mute before an amazed and disgusted world.

You wrote this:

"If it turns out that these students are guilty, I want them expelled. But their expulsion will only bring resolution to this case and not the bigger problem. This is much bigger than them and throwing them out will not solve the problem. I want the administration to acknowledge what is going on and how bad it is. "

"These students" were NOT guilty but none of you ever had the grace or moral fortitude to apologize. But now it's past time for all of you to admit "how bad it is." at Duke. Your stampede to judgment, your closed-mind-angry-studies, crying-in-your-imported-beer perpetuate-the-problem-for-job-security mindset....keeps all of us from the post-racial era we deserve. It almost cost three innocent kids their lifetime in jail. It is surely costing Mangum's innocent offspring any chance at normal, safe, un-chaotic childhoods. It's past time for the 88 of you to man up and demand that Durham revoke Mangum's racial free pass...her unending "get-out-of-jail-free card. It's time you demanded that Duke and Durham and all the rest of those young minds ... that YOU indoctrinated... understand it's time to move past the bitter cornerstone of your "profession."

Get over the past. Get over yourselves.

We left our white guilt at the courtroom door "LISTENING" to the Black Panthers screaming "Die Racist!" at Reade Seligman. It is our mindset, not yours, that is most aligned with President Obama's post-racial goals. Teach the accomplishments, the glory, every piece of history that gratifies your race...but stop perpetuating bitterness. Stop dividing us. Your Listening Ad was the penultimate example of your selective sensitivity, your bias, your concrete hard "identity-blinders" that see ONLY skin hue first.

YOU are the today's archetypical pot-bellied Sheriff of the Old South: Crystal's color was the only "evidence" you needed to give absolute credence to her lies.

That is the instantaneous racial bigotry that caused you to rush to print and thank others "for not waiting."

Now, it's time YOU "listened" to that 911 call and DEMANDED a safe living environment, not for your coddled tenured carcasses, but for the most vulnerable of all...Mangum's children.

You wrote, and published and advocated for "Sister Survivor." We saw and heard from you constantly, on NPR, Nancy Grace...any venue you could find, as you sought to hold the "Farm Animals" accountable.

It's time to hold Crystal Gayle Mangum accountable. If any one of you have a conscience, speak out, buy another ad with Duke funds. Send your lackey Brodhead out to apologize for your past mistakes and his own.

Ask yourselves...will Mangum's children survive in the political legal SOCIAL DISASTER you helped create.... and perpetuate in your classrooms every day?

We're listening.

Are you?