Black power means more than a t-shirt: Jena 6
Posted Sep 27 2007
Due to the phrase "Free the Jena 6," many don't realize that five of the accused are out on bail. I realize that "free" means them getting fair treatment, or altogether pardoned, but some speak as if they're literally still locked up. Some don't know about Mychal Bell's priors. I've heard/read people saying that the six were charged with murder, not being aware that those charges have been reduced to battery. I keep hearing that the noose hangers were suspended for three days, yet other reports say that they were sent to an alternative school for a month then had two weeks of in school suspension. Yes, investigate the D.A. and superindendent, call for their ouster if need be, but sound competent when you do it!
I'm not arguing that there haven't been some serious problems with this case. Rather, I'm saying that it needs to be addressed on facts. As with racism in general, there's no need to make up stuff. The truth is powerful enough. For every Duke rape case, there are plenty of real cases. It's one thing to call the D.A. racist, but does his track record back it up, alongside his comments? It's easy to say that Jena is filled with racists, but if it's true that when former Klansman David Duke ran for governor the majority of Jena's Whites voted for him, this assertion takes on more weight.
Obviously there are way deeper issues that affect people's feelings on "The Jena 6." I was told by adults that if the White kid was taunting the Black kids, he deserved to get beat in front of others. While I understand the feeling (and I have a pretty short temper), can we just let everyone at school fight because of what's said? What if someone says that my sister is a whore? Am I not within my rights to whup on somebody in the school yard and not expect consequences? Why don't we just all take the law into our own hands? If the government/administration doesn't do its job people have a right to defend themselves? Mind you, I've taught Robert Williams' book Negroes With Guns to my students so I'm not a complete flunkie of the government. Yet everyone can't just go around knocking fools out because we don't like what they say.
On that note, what was the responsibility of the adults who let this situation fester? How did teachers and the administration address this situation beyond calling an assembly that had the D.A. threatening the students? How is the city, and the country for that matter, addressing racial tensions? I'm a huge advocate of personal responsibility, but when adults neglect their duties, such as proactively confronting racism, is it any surprise that children and teens act the way that they do sometimes? They bear the burden of our mistakes.
People have to ask themselves what they're willing to do in the long run to better our society to help prevent these situations, or at least make us better equipped to address them. I'm glad that people are doing something, but fighting oppression is a way of life, not just a series of marches, buying a T-shirt, or blindly following our "leaders." On a regular basis, what are most of us doing to combat racism?
Racism is way more sophisticated in the past so we have to constantly develop strategies to confront it. The hardest part is addressing the institutional inequalities. Everyone can get mad when they hear someone use a racial slur, but that's rarely the most damaging thing. In the larger scheme of things, do I really give a damn about some comedian from Seinfield acting a fool? I'm more concerned about this country's racist policies, of which the Jena 6 rehighlights.
As another example, segregation may be illegal, but there are enough schools that might make one question that. I worked at a school in Illinois that was filled with African American and Latino kids in special education, even though it was obvious that many shouldn't have been there. During a recent visit to my old high school in Alabama, which has 1,300 students, we were there for more than four hours and saw ONE White student. The rest were African American. Even in "liberal" California, I've been teaching at a school in the Bay Area for four years and there have been two straight up White students the entire time, none in the past two years. One of those students was a Bosnian immigrant so the kids didn't consider him "White" in the American sense of the word. I'd say that these cases count as segregation. Most of our students are going off to predominately White schools for college. It's safe to say that there will be some cultural adjustments that need to be made.
Going back to the Jena 6, if I'm correct, four of them were seventeen at the time of the incident, which means that under Louisiana law they would've been tried as adults. There's no need to argue that young Black males face discrimination and oppression, yet there's a larger issue of how we treat our young people in general. Like we've discussed in my class, we trust them enough to fly planes and shoot people in other countries and consider them wise enough to be held responsible as adults for their crimes yet we don't trust them to legally drink a glass of beer. Where is our consistency as adults?
To wrap things up, it's clear that the sentencing and treatment of these six young men is unfair and that there's unfair application of the law based on race. I merely raise the above points to express my belief that we all need to have critical and self-reflective thought about these serious issues and not just respond to our emotions and hearsay until the next march. As usual, my "students" have given me a lot to think about
Note: After typing this up, I came across this article, which basically addresses everything I said above. It was definitely more balanced than most of what I've read up to this point. If I would've used it in class we would've had an entirely different discussion and I probably wouldn't have spent hours of my life on this rant!
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