Number 8: The murders of Abhijit Mahato and Eve Carson

28 Dec 2009, Posted by Lindsey Rupp in Decade in Review, News, 1 Comments

Murder hit close to home in 2008—1.6 miles from West Campus, to be exact. Engineering graduate student Abhijit Mahato, 29, was found shot dead in his

Abhijit Mahato

Anderson Street apartment Jan. 18 that year. Several miles down the road, Eve Carson, 22 years old and student body president of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was found dead with multiple gunshot wounds March 5, 2008.  Police have charged Durham residents Stephen Oates and Laurence Lovette with the murder of Mahato. Lovette, along with   Durham resident Demario Atwater, was charged in Carson’s death. All three suspects had previous criminal records.

Carson’s death received national media attention, while Mahato’s death was only covered locally before its possible connection with Carson’s murder was reported. Community response was also markedly greater in reaction to Carson’s death than Mahato’s. Local media, Duke students and faculty discussed the disparity, many suspecting it to be in part a result of the victims’ race and sex. But more than discussion, the murders prompted statewide probation reform. Gov. Bev Perdue signed the reform into law July 30, 2009, allowing probation officers access to offenders’ juvenile records and

Eve Carson

providing for warrantless searches of probationers.

Atwater, Lovette and Oates are awaiting trial. If found guilty, Atwater, who recently requested his trial be moved out of North Carolina, could face the death penalty. Lovette could face life in prison if convicted.

The 2009 Clery Report shows some crimes, like burglaries and robberies, decreased on campus in 2008. But since July 2009, 10 students have been robbed at gunpoint. The robberies occurred on East Campus, near East on Watts Street and Markham Avenue, on Campus Drive and at a local restaurant. Another student reported being robbed and sexually assaulted on West.

The murders of Abhijit Mahato and Eve Carson were number 8 on our stories of the decade list. These are the issues and events that made headlines for weeks at a time over the last ten years, those that sparked the most debate on campus and beyond, and the ones that we believe will continue to shape our coverage in the years to come.

Arrest controversy highlights Gates’ Duke year

27 Jul 2009, Posted by Zachary Tracer in Faculty and Staff, News, media, 1 Comments

The controversy surrounding the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a black Harvard professor, has brought issues of race and prejudice back into the media spotlight.

Most of the attention has been focused on how black men and the police view each other. But some light has also spilled onto the year Gates spent in Duke’s English department, a period Gates described as, “The most racist experience I ever had in my professional life,” according to a 1993 New York Times article.

In the 1993 article, which focuses on Duke’s struggle to attract black professors, Gates’ contributions paint an unfavorable picture of the University.

“No matter what kind of car I drove or house I had, it was assumed it was a gift from the university,” Gates told the New York Times. “It was all a ‘Where did that nigger get that Cadillac?’ kind of thing.”

This characterization of Duke (though not Gates’ 1993 comments) was raised again Friday on the front page of the New York Times Web site by Stanley Fish, a regular blogger for the paper.

In a blog post titled, “Henry Louis Gates: Déjà Vu All Over Again,” Fish, who was chair of Duke’s English Department when Gates was hired, describes how Duke professors questioned Gates’ academic credentials, speculated on his salary, and spread rumors about him when he left the university. He also says workers and delivery people at Gates’ house routinely mistook the professor for a servant, a mistake whose message was, Fish writes, “What was a black man doing living in a place like this?”

By the time Gates left Duke, he had taken to calling the University “the plantation,” Fish says.

But according to an ABC-11 story, also published Friday (which brought up Gates’ 1993 description of his time at Duke) both students and administrators say the situation for blacks at Duke has improved since the early 1990’s.

And a 2002 report from The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education ranked Duke first on a list of prominent universities, based on its success at hiring black professors and attracting black students. Still, the journal’s description of Duke notes racial segregation among students and high turnover among black faculty as continuing problems at the University.

Nevertheless, it concludes, “A decade ago, Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates Jr. called his one year experience at Duke the most racist experience of his academic life. But clearly the climate at Duke for both black students and black faculty has improved immeasurably since that time.”

Duke saw the fruits of this improved climate last year, when it hired J. Lorand Matory who had been co-chair of Harvard’s Association of Black Faculty, Administrators and Fellows and a professor of anthropology and African and African American Studies, to chair the University’s African and African American Studies Department beginning this month.

The hiring represented a reversal, of sorts, of Gates’ decision to leave Duke for Harvard, The Chronicle noted at the time.

As he discussed leaving Harvard with the Boston Globe, Matory said Harvard’s professors were not diverse enough. “Harvard clearly has an insufficient number of African-American professors, and it’s being abandoned by one more,” he told the Boston Globe last September.

Pop Psychology Honors Michael: "Black Or White"

01 Jul 2009, Posted by Jordan Axt in Music, Playground, Pop Psychology, 2 Comments

Courtesy musicstack.com

In this third installment, Pop Psychology takes a look at Michael’s 1991 hit, “Black or White.”  Part 1 featured “Man in the Mirror,” and Part 2 highlighted “Don’t Stop ’till You Get Enough.”

“Black or White,” is the debut single off the Dangerous album. Not surprisingly, it topped the singles charts for 20 countries.  Although it’s still a very catchy song, it has not aged nearly as well as many of Jackson’s other hits.  Everything about it is just so early 90s, with Bill Bottrell’s rhyming being perhaps the worst offender.  I don’t really know Bill Bottrell; I just know that his verse on “Black or White” makes Will Smith look like Easy E.  What’s more ridiculous is that Epic Records hailed “Black or White” as “a  rock ‘n’ roll dance song about racial harmony.”

(more…)

Freshmen: Shape up

16 Nov 2008, Posted by Megan Neureither in Backpages, Backtalk, 0 Comments

I have absolutely no problem with people who support a given candidate or cause, as long as they know why they are supporting it, and it is with a reasonable justification that doesn’t violate any other person’s rights to existence. Part of what makes America great is that we have different opinions represented in our society. What I have a problem with is when people are completely disrespectful of others or other opinions.

I will be frank with you in saying that I am not the biggest Obama fan. I have issues with his fiscal policies that scream of big government. This is my opinion, and you are entitled to agree or disagree with me. However, I was absolutely disgusted to hear of the recent racially charged events going down on East Campus, which many have attributed to the outcome of the recent election. I read The Chronicle’s article of derogatory symbols being placed on benches and doors, and this past week I heard from a professor that her student on East Campus had reported being verbally attacked for her race while walking outside by other students. (more…)