Take a note from Durham

The good news: The American college community has finally found a scandal to replace the high-rise photo debacle, and it's all the way down in Durham, N.C. The bad news: This scandal is much worse.

An exotic dancer hired to dance at a March 13 party held by the Duke University men's lacrosse team, claims she was pulled into a bathroom, sexually assaulted, sodomized, beaten, kicked and strangled by three men. While no charges are expected to be filed until next week, 46 team members have already been subject to DNA testing, the remainder of the lacrosse season has been cancelled, and lacrosse coach Mike Pressler has resigned.

And as if the incident needs to be any more complicated, the dancer was a black student from North Carolina Central University -- also located in Durham -- while her three attackers were reportedly white. Witnesses say the dancer was also teased with racial slurs, including, "Thank your grandpa for my nice cotton shirt!"

Not surprisingly, the incident has brought to a head pre-existing racial tensions between Duke and the surrounding city. Hmm ... racial tension between a predominantly white, affluent student body and a mostly black, working-class neighborhood. Sound familiar?

True, we don't have the same regional history of tension between blacks and whites that Durham has simply from being in the South, but enough parallels exist between the two schools that we can learn some valuable lessons from the tensions revealed from the incident.

Students do live in West Philadelphia, but few undergraduates claim to be of the neighborhood; sharp divides remain between Penn students and other residents of the area. We love Nara and Copabanana but wouldn't go into the arcade next door. Very few of us have even had meaningful conversations with residents of the area. We coexist but seldom interact.

It's a little harsh to call Penn students "racist," and I don't believe that our problems with West Philadelphia stem from inherent biases. According to Duke junior Daniel Bowes, many students "haven't really dealt with people of diverse backgrounds before," which makes for awkward interaction. The same is true at Penn.

Racial tension, while awkward, may seem harmless at first. However, Durham students are suddenly finding themselves in very real danger. If the alleged attack was truly racially motivated, NCCU students will fear interaction with Duke students. On March 31, all Duke students received a warning about a threatened drive-by shooting near the house where the party was held. That night, two Duke seniors were physically and verbally assaulted at a local restaurant by a group of men saying, "This is [North Carolina] Central territory."

"They're increasing a lot of police presence around here," Bowes said. "That's got everybody on edge."

To their credit, both Penn and Duke have both committed tremendous resources and made efforts to reach out to their respective communities. Engagement in West Philadelphia is part of the Penn Compact, and many Penn students participate in community service, from building houses with Habitat for Humanity to tutoring local students. Duke, for its part, has established the Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership, which organizes community-service opportunities in Durham for Duke students and has special days designated for community service.

These efforts are admirable, but treating our cities as giant charity cases will hardly help integrate us. Committing resources is not enough; we need to truly be a part of our community instead of feeling isolated from the people we're trying to help.

We shouldn't be thinking about charity, Bowes said, but we should instead care about "what can I give? How can I stand in solidarity with the community? If you can show that you're genuinely concerned about people's lives, then they're going to respond."

The problems currently facing Duke, while unfortunate, can serve as a valuable lesson to Penn. We can't afford to treat West Philadelphia as one big community service project. It's our home, and we need to be a part of it, instead of remaining isolated by confining ourselves to Locust Walk. It simply means a change in mindset.

Liz Hoffman is a sophomore political science major from New York, N.Y. New York Minute appears on Mondays.

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