Accountability

My own experience as a white woman living often in mixed black and white neighborhoods in the Northeast has not been pretty. I have been teased, verbally threatened with rape and murder, had objects thrown at me, had my mother stopped in her car and then the car beaten on, etc. As a seven year old child I was surrounded by a group of black kids and beaten down in the playground on one little girl's trumped up racial insult.

When I have told black and Hispanic friends of some of these incidents, they have expressed near disbelief. They only believed me, because they knew me to be their friend and honest to a fault. But this had not been their reality or something they have seen or participated in. Their experiences have been of white hostility towards them at times.

For all these reasons of personal experience, my take on the Jena 6 is a bit different. There is so much racially motivated bad behavior, and this comes from all people of all races toward others. We in the United States are so used to seeing incidents of white racial profiling and worse of other races, that it's hard for the more insulated to imagine that the reverse is also happening.

While the Jena 6 may have had the book thrown at them, and while the charges may need to be modified, charged they should be. Being black gives you no blank check to act out your cross-racial hostilities. Al Sharpton's chiming in on this case, just makes it all the more a circus.

What about the redneck kids who hung up the fucking nooses? Make no mistake, their attitudes come directly from their parents. I grew up in Louisiana, and there were always two or three kids who were a bit strange, i.e. singing little racist ditties that I still recall:

Glory, glory, segregation!
Glory, glory, segregation!
Glory, glory, segregation!
The South shall rise again!

And then there was one to the tune of "Angel is a centerfold" that I don't quite remember, but it basically describes a lynching. It was clear that their parents taught them this shit, and the rest of us weren't quite sure how to react, besides calling them rednecks behind their backs. (Bear in mind, I'm talking about elementary school here.) There's no happy ending; as far as I know, they're all still creepy future Tim McVeigh types. There's a couple in every town, I guess, and the tradition's still going strong in Jena.

Shame that they don't have any accountability, though.

But I still believe
And I will rise up with fists!!

as this story from AlterNet confirms:
six white men and women in West Virginia who held a 20-year-old Black woman captive, and for a week, subjected her to gang rape, stabbings, torture and psychological abuse, will not be charged with hate crimes. Details at A Post Duke Lacrosse Justice Coma.

We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!-- Xan

Google up Tulia Texas.

I know about Tulia.
I know about Tom Coleman.
But I'm talking about things that are still going on, today.

We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!-- Xan

But it is hardly realistic to say that there is insufficient attention paid to black on white tension, violence, or crime. Nor is there any truth to the notion that black folks, especially black folks, more than any other minority, depending on region, of course, are not treated with greater severity by the Justice system, which is to say it isn't a truly a just system.

None of the white students involved in fights were arrested. The white student who was the so-called victim of the six black students attended an event the same night as the fight itself. And for that, six black students were arrested and charged with ATTEMPTED MURDER, as adults, and in the first trial, tried as an adult.

We have a federal justice system that defines a more severe punishment for the use of crack, which is cocaine, than for powder cocaine; it is still on the books, it was passed with the full knowledge that because of price and availability most users of crack are minorities.

There would be no Jena Six if the white establishment had not treated what was going on at the high school with a bias as blatant as anything I can remember from the sixties. This was an attempt to put blacks in their place, their inferior place; the white students understood a silent reality when they hung those nooses from a tree that marked a whites only place on campus.

I'm not condoning any of the conduct you describe, it pains me to hear about it, as it pained me to see some of that same victimizing behavior from African-Americans toward other African-Americans when I worked as a social worker in the South Bronx, for instance. There are a variety of ways this society could have changed the dynamics which convince so many black folks, in particular, and not without reason, that there is no future for them; "we" have chosen to take none of them. I sometimes wonder if we somehow need the notion of a predatory, scary black minority among us, and so we have done all we can to make sure there is one, including, BTW, stigmatizing black folks as such no matter the situation.

And before anyone brings up the issue of personal responsibility, please don't. It is in the nature of being human that one way or another we are forced to take responsibility for our actions. We all live inside our own skins; when a black kid victimizes those around whom, be assured that his life is not one that any of us would want for ourselves or our children, and be assured that without an enormous personal effort by the kid, or not a kid, and those around him in the community, with little support from the government or the rest of American society, that young life will be penalized severely, and more severely than most whites will be for similar behavior.

Leah,

I see your point(s) about the larger issues of the Jena 6 (the laws, the interpretation & application of laws, the casual neglect of poor, black folks to the point that black teens are acting out, etc.)

I don't understand your point, however that there is a lot of attention paid to black-on-white harrassment and violence. That type of story-line doesn't seem to get much play, at least in my experience. I think it's because such small stories like mine don't make sense, don't fit into a progressive narrative about racism.

Sure, we see lots of entertainment shows and news stories about black gangsters and the like menacing others, but I don't recall hearing little stories like my own. Am I missing something?

What do you think?

becauses there isn't a lot of play?

I could tell my own stories (not too significant in the great scheme of things) but if there's one thing the Republicans have taught us, it's that anecdotes, even personal ones, aren't a good guide to "policy."

UPDATE I read the post from Pam that Leah excerpted, and she's absolutely right on the rationalizations--my rationalizations--and on the tasing. Shit.

And Jena is--sorry, Louisiana readers--at the back end of beyond. Yet thouands marched. Wonder if more than in DC on the 15th? I'd bet so.

We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan

It ain't beautiful downtown Alexandria, of course, but Jena actually is a bigger town than some I saw.

Ft. Polk, England AFB, Barksdale WSA ... those places are the back end of beyond.

Checked out Google Maps tonight. Was pleased to see I recognize some of the bombers at Barksdale, still.

The Alert Pad looks a lot different now.

... marchers to a place that's not on the Interstate, not on the Eastern corridor, that's impressive. Newsworthy.

Orcinus Here.

We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan

The problem with throwing tons of support towards the Jena 6 is the fact that these six high school boys acted really badly. Surely, there must be a better case study to rally around for the cause of equality before the law.

1) Did their victim hang the nooses? Or was he simply guilty by racial association? So handy to pick on whoever is nearby, isn't it? Similar in thought process, if not in scale, to what mobs of whites did for a hundred+ years of lynching -- any black man would do, as his battered body was used to symbolize white supremacy's unassailability.

2) How are symbolic acts (hanging nooses), however hateful and fear-inducing, the equivalent of actual violent physical acts? Wait, I have to go back to read my Plato to check on this.

3) How is ganging up on somebody 6 to 1 the same as "fighting" one on one, however mismatched the fighters? I guess when "Justice" is on your side, it doesn't matter what the means you use are. See clip on World Wide Wrestling for this.

I am struck by how abstract the support for the Jena 6 is. Sure, there are larger issues involved. I see that, and CD, Leah, Lambert and the others have pointed those issues out, so I won't repeat them here.

But these six high school boys are neither heroes nor victims. They are not the civil rights crusaders of the 50s and 60s. They are not the underpaid garbage carriers of Tennessee that Martin Luther King went to support in their dispute with a city there. They are six boys who took matters into their own hands and perpetrated a further racial injustice, after getting frustrated that the authorities weren't taking black student complaints seriously. They didn't do anything worth emulating. Quite the opposite.

What I'm struck by is the ability of many, who I trust, to organize a massive demonstration with great success. We need to learn from this.

As far as the Jena 6 themselves: I'm not sure why more perfect individuals weren't chosen to defend. Did they not face the death penalty at some point? OTOH, one might argue that in today's environment, even perfection would be smeared, so no point worrying about it.

On rereading: Is the argument that only heroes and victims deserve justice? Surely not.

We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan

various others who have been at the center of important legal cases have been equally unheroic. the only point here is that justice must be served to all equally, dispassionately, and fairly. that didn't happen in this case, in large part because some of the people involved were black. black people have the same rights to be assholes as everyone else, or at least we should. being a pushy or bullying asshole should get you a night in jail at the most, not adult sentences for murder.

I just wondered if there were tactical concerns. From what I remember of the civil rights movement, they had plenty of Rosa Parks situations to choose from (duh), but only one Rosa Parks.

We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan

seriously. the NAACP had to be shamed into getting involved, they were too busy defending vick to notice the jena 6 much. same true for a lot of the rest of the folks getting on board this train so late. it was the black progressive blogosphere that kept this one alive, working with a handful of dedicated locals who didn't know when to shut up. but the "leadership?" not really rushing to the forefront on this one. not initially, anyway.

The last few comments from Lambert and CD have helped me think things through -- about justice and how people involved in criminal or civil cases are often not your best poster children. Nevertheless, they and we do deserve justice.

So, thanks, guys, for the exchange. This is why I read blogs -- to hear those points of view I haven't been able to conjure on my own, and so to modify my positions because of them.

A welcome break from beating on mercenary wannabes over on the Blackwater thread. That's hard work.

We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan