Make It Stop.

Amazingly, the appalling Scottsboro Boys/Duke analogy has reared its ugly head again in the pages of the nation’s most prestigious clearinghouse for irrational wingnuttery, with (natch) a hearty heh-indeed from the blogosphere’s ditto. Let us summarize some of the key reasons why this analogy is grossly inappropriate:

• The unjustly accused young men in the Scottsboro case were effectively denied legal counsel, provided at the last minute with a single lawyer unfamiliar with Alabama criminal procedure and who had every incentive not to put on more than a token defense. The unjustly accused young men in the Duke case were able to afford good lawyers.
• Most of the first group were sentenced to death after what was essentially a formalized lynching. The second group were released before trial.
  
• Even after their first convictions were overturned, most of the Scottsboro boys were given more show trials, and served between 5-20 years in prison. I think you can see the difference here.

There is, in short, absolutely no basis for comparison here. The injustices involved in these two cases are different not merely in degree but in kind. Some members of the Duke faculty behaved irresponsibly (in the kind of way that in America doesn’t necessarily stop you from getting your own cable news show), but not only does Gordon have no substantiation for his claim that the rush to judgment was “racist,” but rather more importantly they don’t have the power to sentence people to death. And as Blue Texan notes, what’s especially odious is the implication that privileged white men at Duke are in a situation in any way analogous to blacks in the apartheid south, an exceptionally offensive implication even by the standards of the Politics of Resentment.