It’s official. “Nifong” is now a verb. The journey from mere person to Internet verb is hardly ever a proud one (see to Frisch, to Latham, to Dowdify, to Fisk), and Durham D.A. Mike Nifong’s trip has been a doozy.

But he’s not the only one who has something to answer for in the Duke lacrosse case. That’s the column I was writing this morning, for ABC News.

This spring, 88 Duke faculty members published an ad in the Duke campus paper, which made reference to “what happened to this young woman” without qualification, and thanked students and protestors for “not waiting” to make their voices heard. Not waiting, presumably, for something as silly as due process.

This week, one of the 88 wrote a column for the Raleigh News and Observer, in which she referred to the accuser as simply “a single mother who takes off her clothes for hire partly to pay for tuition at a distinguished historically black college.” She charged that the real “social disaster” is that “we do not have national health care or affordable childcare,” and “a group of white athletes at a prominent university can get drunk and call out for a stripper the way they would a pizza.”

Local columnist Ruth Sheehan wrote in March, before any charges had been filed, “We know you know. Whatever happened in the bathroom at the stripper party gone terribly, terribly bad, you know who was involved. Every one of you does.”

In a back-off column published this week, Sheehan wrote, “like others, I was outraged. And I wrote about it. I make no apology for that. It is not my job to wait for cases to be resolved and then walk through the aftermath and shoot the dead.”…

The Durham activists who banged pots and pans and hung wanted posters of the Duke lacrosse team have put up their own “wall of silence,” refusing to talk to press as Nifong’s case has fallen apart and their sympathetic victim has become a liar…

In Durham, it seems, it’s possible to learn exactly nothing in 10 months—that’s a trick a lot of people pick up in college towns, but it’s not encouraging in this case.

Read through the Duke 88’s “listening letter,” if you never have before. Then read through the recent column by Cathy Davidson of the Duke 88, to which I referred. It’s got some bonus blog-hatin’ in it:

On the other hand, most of my e-mail comes from right-wing “blog hooligans.” These hateful, ranting and sometimes even threatening folks don’t care about Duke or the lacrosse players. Their aim is to make academics and liberals look ridiculous and uncaring. They deliberately misrepresent the faculty and manipulate the feelings of those who care about the lacrosse players in order to foster their own demagogic political agenda. They contribute to the problem, not to the solution.

Right, because the fact that 46 men’s names were dragged through the mud and three families were put through hell in the P.C. rush to judgement is not reason to reexamine the P.C. assumptions that caused the rush, as we “hooligans” suggest. The only possible solution to the problem is to double down on the very identity politics that brought us here. What’s confidence in the judicial system when there are “larger truths about race and gender” at stake?

The revisionist historians are hard at work in Durham. The potbangers were just speaking out “against sexual violence.” The Duke 88 were just focusing on “larger campus and national concerns.”

The needs to “examine” and “heal” trump the presumption of innocence now, just as they did then, which is why no real examination or healing will happen.

The columnist writing opposite me, on the Left of this issue– Ben Mankiewicz of Air America– predictably jumps straight into the “larger truths” instead of dealing with the injustice of the Duke case. Racism still exists, and we’ll never know what happened in that house anyway, so let’s just talk about how racist white Southerners are.

Yeah, that’s the ticket. These are the “healers,” mind you. Funny, everyone seemed very certain of what happened in that house before the lacrosse players were exonerated by evidence.

Durham is a good town full of many good, liberal folks, but it has its problems. The rush to judgment in the Duke lacrosse case was one of its darkest moments, and things will only get brighter if the people who rushed realize that.

On a lighter note, please enjoy my Tour of Things That Did Not Happen in Durham– a three-minute video walking tour of my fair city.

Update: I just noticed that the definition of “Nifong” is not blockquoted in my ABC column, as it should be, since it is from the Urban Dictionary. I’ll see if I can get that corrected.

Update: Betsy Newmark takes on Mankiewicz:

See, there are still racial problems in this country so it really doesn’t matter that three young men have maligned and persecuted by an out-of-control prosecutor.

I’d like to remind Mr. Mankiewicz that the plural of anecdote is not data. Perhaps he is just hanging out with a more racist crowd than I am. But I’ve lived in Raleigh, NC for 23 1/2 years and I can only think of one racist making comments about race that I’ve heard in that time. Can we generalize about racism from that? I doubt it. But I sure know that the Duke case doesn’t explode some hidden truth that should enlighten us about white racism.

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