I’ve read few things more depressing than this GQ piece about the gang rape of an 11-year-old girl in Cleveland, Texas earlier this year. On March 8 The New York Times had reported on “a roundup over the last month of 18 young men and teenage boys on charges of participating in the gang rape of an 11-year-old girl.…The suspects range in age from middle schoolers to a 27-year-old.” This was in Cleveland, Texas, a down-at-heel townlet (pop. 7,920) forty-five miles north of Houston.

The Times story itself became a story, with attacks from all over. Mother Jones expressed the left’s general outrage, taking umbrage at the Times‘s use of the passive voice in asserting that local residents were troubled by questions such as: “How could their young men have been drawn into such an act?” This quote from someone who knew some of the defendants likewise vexed them: “These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives.

In addition to excusing the perps, the Times writer was thought to be blaming the victim. “Residents in the neighborhood…said the victim had been visiting various friends there for months. They said she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. She would hang out with teenage boys at a playground, some said.” Not just Mother Jones but feminists nationwide were furious at that. An online petition protested what Mother Jones called the Times‘s “rape-friendly” coverage.”

Out on the race-realist right some were wondering about missing details. Cleveland, Texas is pretty much half-white and a quarter each black and Mexican. So what race were the perps and the victim? The London Daily Mail had already reported that all the defendants were black and the victim was “Hispanic,” i.e., Mexican. As Steve Sailer has noted, you have to go to foreign media sources to find out facts like those.

Meanwhile the Times did a follow-up, trying to set itself right with its feminist critics. The follow-up only made things worse—as they say out in lefty-land, it “raises additional concerns,” revealing as it did the victim’s race but not that of the perps.

My, what knots the left ties itself in when two of its treasured conceits collide. The treasured conceits in this case were:

Treasured Conceit #1. Rape is an expression—the most heinously evil expression—of men’s desire to control women. An act of rape instantiates the patriarchal oppression that underlies our rotten, corrupt, Western so-called “civilization.” It must always and everywhere be protested and shamed. The woman raped is never anything but a helpless victim of power-crazed brutes.

Treasured Conceit #2. Black Americans’ minds are so deformed by centuries of enslavement and racism that they no longer have any power of individual will. They are the helpless pawns of malign social forces. If they commit acts which would, when committed by responsible agents, be regarded as wicked, it is because they have been, as the initial Times report expressed it, “drawn into” those acts by the aforementioned forces.