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Given her record, there’s probably a reason no one is talking about it.

MSNBC’s celebrated African-American guest, Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell (now, Harris-Perry), has made a career as an eye-roller about Americans who, in times of economic insecurity, fear “the Other”—immigrants, Muslims, and black presidents. This is the sum total of left-wing social science from the 1960s to the present. And it’s manifestly untrue: Some of the most comfortable, cosseted people in America will apparently believe anything.

Unemployed mine workers in West Virginia, clinging to their guns and religion, for example, have shown more skepticism about Obama’s alleged Kenyan birth than Melissa Harris-Lacewell showed toward innocent Duke lacrosse players falsely accused of gang-raping a stripper in March 2006.

By May 20, 2006, the liberal legal reporter at the National Journal, Stuart Taylor, had written that the available evidence about the case left him 85 percent sure that the rape charge was a lie.36 Among the evidence that was then publicly known was the fact that not one speck of the DNA taken from the stripper’s body, clothes, or fingernails belonged to any of the lacrosse players, who had allegedly raped her anally, orally, and vaginally in a small bathroom.

It was also known that one of the three defendants, Reade Seligman, had an airtight alibi for virtually every minute of the only time period when a rape could have occurred—midnight to 12:31 a.m. on March 13. Phone records proved that Seligman was on his cell phone from 12:05 to 12:14 and that his last call was to a cabdriver. The cabdriver, who happens to be black, said he picked Seligman up at 12:19, drove him to an ATM, where a receipt showed that Seligman used his card at 12:24 a.m., then took Seligman to a fast-food restaurant, and finally drove Seligman back to his dorm, where his key card was swiped at 12:46 a.m.

It was also known that the accuser had a criminal record and had repeatedly changed her story about the alleged rape.37

More than a month after all this information had been released to the public, Harris-Lacewell wrote about what she called the “Duke Rape Case” on her blog and accused Duke athletes of “pervasive misogyny” and “brewing hostility.”

Everything about this story resonates with my experience.… The pervasive misogyny that clung to the men’s athletics programs and the thinly veiled racism of the university culture were palpable. I distinctly remember a crushing sense of vulnerability and dread when I interacted with some white males on campus. Although many were the model of respectable, genial behavior on the surface, I often sensed a brewing hostility beneath the surface. When I first heard the allegations in this case I wept because it felt like someone had finally revealed that unspoken anxiety I so often felt.38

Apparently, she perceives Duke athletes as “the Other.”

Contradicting Harris-Lacewell’s broad generalizations about white men at Duke were actual facts adduced by a Duke faculty committee two months earlier. Led by liberal law professor James Coleman, who, again, happens to be black, the committee had reviewed the conduct of the entire Duke lacrosse team for the previous five years. The committee found a few alcohol infractions, but concluded that none of the misconduct by the lacrosse players—again, going back five years—had “involved fighting, sexual assault or harassment, or racist slurs.” The committee also reported that “current as well as former African-American members of the team have been extremely positive about the support the team provided them.”39

But Harris-Lacewell was too busy inventing a myth about innocent men accused of rape to bother with the facts. In an interview on the Duke lacrosse case, she told BlackAmericaWeb.com that the “sense of entitlement and privilege at Duke is nauseating.” She also accused the Duke women’s lacrosse team of supporting the accused players because “given the entire history of white men sexually assaulting black women, we always know