I want to say that I hate to admit this, but I’m not sure that I do hate to admit it. Let’s say I have mixed feelings about the outcome of the “Duke Lacrosse Rape Case:” the North Carolina attorney general dropped all charges and so the men involved are all innocent in the eyes of the law.

Without getting into the details of the case or the ethics around how the investigation/charges went, let’s just assume that they were innocent all along.

In light of this whole Don Imus thing (and his torrid past), I couldn’t help but think something along the lines of, I wish there was something like this that could happen to straight white men that might make them (and the country and others like them) realize that racism is an everyday thing for most non-white people in the U.S. and that their white privilege lets them either pretend racism isn’t as bad as people think or that the racists are only people like Strom Thurmond or other really old, bigoted white men, etc.

And then somehow the Duke thing came today.

What these men experienced is somewhat similar to racial profiling, but sort of in reverse. Black men all across the country are accused and charged with committing all sorts of crimes that they likely didn’t commit. We see this everywhere from Driving While Black/Brown to the amount of black (and sometimes innocent) men on death row.

The way I see it, these white Duke players got a taste of what it’s like not to be privileged and white.

The criminal justice system is setup to be biased in all sorts of ways, and this was a perfect example of how it can backfire against anyone.

I just hope that if this case ends up prompting improvements in the way justice is carried out in the U.S. that it doesn’t continue to privilege white men.

During Easter Mass, the Pope made some comments about Iraq such as

Nothing positive comes from Iraq, torn apart by continual slaughter as the civil population flees

Being that he is the Pope, I think it’s safe to assume he’s speaking the word of God or something like that, right? Isn’t the Pope basically God’s representation on Earth?

What confuses me is the fact that George Bush also talks to God, but God is telling the president something different. In the past Bush has basically said that God told him to go to war in Iraq to spread peace and find weapons of mass destruction and whatever other justifications he used for the war.

So what’s going on here? Is God telling one thing to the Pope and another thing to George W. Bush?

And also, why does the Pope hate America so much? Doesn’t he know not to say anything bad about the war? Remember when France was against the war? There was all sorts of anger and even an ongoing boycott. Where is Bill O’Reilly now? And where is all the anger at the Pope?

Note: of course I don’t really think “god” talks to either of these people… I just find it revealing that when “liberals” in the U.S. say something about the slaughter in Iraq, the conservatives label them as traitors and say they hate the troops and stuff like that, but when the most prominent point-person for Christianity on the planet says stuff against the war (and his Easter comments were not his first…), nobody seems to hate him or question what’s going on.