'Whatever happens, ... what people are asking is that something change.'

An anger is surfacing against aspects of everyday life at Duke, an anger that is playing out in the aftermath of the accusations against the lacrosse team and responses to those accusations. The changes at Duke that critics want to see are coming more sharply into view as a result of struggle in this moment of spectacle.

It is the ordinariness of life here for those who are marginalized by structural and generally invisible racism, sexism and class divisions that fuels this anger. In everyday life, people are unable to easily see structural racism, sexism and class divisions. The differences have been cemented into our social order for centuries and persist without drawing our attention.

At the same time, academic institutions such as Duke are assumed to be perfectly fair havens for the exchange of ideas, for teaching and for learning. A university is a place where many imagine a better world, with better relations among people, is possible. Students in this world are expected to know magically how to interact with one another without targeted teaching. Somehow this better world is supposed to come about without regard to everything that students might have been taught or taken for granted before they got to Duke, without regard to the structures of racism and the not-so-hidden injuries of class entitlement in place at Duke and everywhere in this country, and without regard to banal and ordinary sexual harassment.

I want us to look at what is more difficult to see, the less visible harms of racism, sexism and class divisions that are part of what underlies this moment. To do this, we need to think about what has been demanded by those critical of the alleged victim and those critical of the alleged offenders.

First, if a crime occurred, the victim need not be constructed as a perfect victim whose social respectability and history are without blemish, the offenders need not be constructed as perfect offenders whose class and race entitlement are homogenous and absolute, and the crime need not have the contours of the worst possible brutal actions for harm to have been done to this young woman. Gendered violence is much more often banal and routine than it is horrific, and victims and offenders are always complicated.

Second, Duke need not be proved to be the worst or the only institutional sinner ever to have inhabited the earth, nor does every single person of color and/or woman on this campus need to have been harmed moment by moment by racism and/or sexism, and Durham itself does not have to prove that it never benefited from Duke's presence in order for change in the institution to be undertaken. And proving all acts of individual racism, gendered violence and class harm is not necessary before structural racism, sexism and class entitlements are addressed.

To undertake change, in other words, we don't have to wait for working class or poorer students to be targeted by fraternity "theme" parties or cross burnings on the quad or in dorm halls, or for sexual assaults to be attested by perfectly placed witnesses and indisputable evidence.

Regardless of the "truth" about the incident at the house on North Buchanan Boulevard, the engine of outcry in this moment has been fueled by the difficult and mundane reality that existed before and continues to occur in everyday life in this place. Whatever happens with the court case, what people are asking is that something change.