Justice was not served, and no lessons have been learned. Dharun Ravi was declared guilty of invasion of privacy and bias intimidation in the Tyler Clementi case, and was made to surrender his passport, even though he is a legal resident of the United States.
It is assumed that Tyler Clementi commit suicide because Ravi, his room-mate at the time at Rutgers University, had secretly videotaped him engaged in intimate relations with another young man, posted that video on the Internet, and obsessively Twittered about Clementi's sexual activity to friends.
There are a lot of missing pieces to this story, because Tyler could not speak for himself during the trial. Other people spoke for him. Things would have been easier, perhaps, if Tyler had not faced such sharp rejection from his mother when he came out to her. Things would have been easier, perhaps, if Dharun Ravi--and other incoming students at Rutgers University--received some kind of harassment training during their orientation.
While Dharun Ravi did not do right, he had no reason to know that he did wrong. American culture, to this day, glorifies the humiliation of awkward, weaker males who could be perceived as gay. Dharun Ravi was behaving like an all-American guy, and may be sent back to India for it. This is because, in American culture, people of color receive harsher sentences for their actions than whites do. If a white frat boy on the college football team spied on Clementi and outed him to the world, the university administration might suspend or expel him, but jail time? How many true human rights abuses have been committed with impunity by white upper middle class athletes, and even celebrated? They have yet to serve their sentences. A poor Indian immigrant, instead, is made a scapegoat, and people call this a victory in the war against bullying.
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