Nobody Here But Us Racists

The Jena backlash continues:

From the Kansas City Star via Negrophile:

All of this is to say that blaming “outsiders” for protests of local grievances is a well-established tradition in the history of American social protest. Thus, it is not surprising that officials in Jena, La., want to blame an outsider, Tom Bean[I think this is a mistake? I think the name is Alan Bean], founder of the Friends of Justice, for stirring up trouble regarding the six black youths charged in a schoolyard assault on a white student.

From the Independent Weekly in Lafayette, LA:

The article also introduces Jena residents who say the situation is being blown out of proportion by the “international and national media, national civil rights activists and Internet bloggers.” Most believe Jena’s “a safe, nice place to raise a family.”

(A nice, safe place to raise a white family, you mean.)

This isn't new. It had commenced a-brewin' in Jena before the big rally, because Jena was already getting a little too much attention for its segregating ways (article by Etan Thomas and Dave Zirin, posted by Davey D. at Davey D.'s Hip Hop Corner:

Outsiders are always what people in the South have called those who challenge racism. But the story of Jena is not an outsider/insider story. It's a story
about the worst tradition of what is known as Southern Justice.

At Democracy Now, there is an interview with Caseptla Bailey and Tina Jones, the mothers of Robert Bailey and Bryant Purvis. The interview took place the day after the rally. The question about the accusation that outsiders were causing all the commotion came up:

AMY GOODMAN: And, Caseptla, what do you say to those who say this is a bunch of outsiders coming in, everything was fine in Jena before they started marching on our town?

CASEPTLA BAILEY: Well, I’d like to say that everything wasn’t fine in Jena. That’s why the outsiders are here, and that’s why everything has gone so tremendously within the last few months. So I’d like to applaud those people that have come here from the outside, to come in and to support us and to help us and assist us in this matter. So I’d like to say hats off to those persons.

These Things Happened Not Long Ago

This was noted at FOJ. It is a slideshow of photographs of lynchings, with a narrative. Everyone should watch this. This is the history that explains why the hanging of nooses can never be interpreted as a "prank."

File Under: I Shake My Head

Those college kids today. Crazy. All them pranks they be pulling:

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A north Louisiana university is investigating two of its students after a video surfaced on a student's personal Web page depicting several white youths pretending to re-enact a racial beating.

The brief, grainy video, posted Tuesday on YouTube.com, was related to the racially charged atmosphere in Jena, a central Louisiana town where a group of black youths were initially charged with attempted murder in the beating of a white student.

On the video, one of the students can be heard shouting racial epithets.

(Courtesy of FOJ.)

Educate, Don't Incarcerate

. . . as one of the Jena signs so eloquently put it.

More than three times as many black people live in prison cells as in college dorms, the government said in a report to be released Thursday. . .

Black students are more likely to attend segregated schools with high concentrations of poverty, less qualified teachers, lower expectations and a less demanding curriculum [says Amy Stuart Wells, a professor of sociology and education at Columbia University's Teachers College]. "And they are perceived by society as terrible schools, so it is hard to get accepted into college," Wells said. "Even if you are a high-achieving kid who beats the odds, you are less likely to have access to the kinds of courses that colleges are looking for." Students who don't graduate high school are much more likely to go to prison, said Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. Nearly 40 percent of inmates lack a high school diploma or the equivalent, according to the census data. "The criminal economy is one of the only alternatives in some of these places," Orfield said. "You basically have the criminalization of a whole community, particularly in some inner cities." Blacks made up 41 percent of the nation's 2 million prison and jail inmates in 2006. Non-Hispanic whites made up 37 percent and Hispanics made up 19 percent.

P.S. Some good writing on Jena at The Education of a Bookshop Clerk.

You Got a Right to Say It

. . . and I got a right to be disgusted by it:

Let's get this out of the way: what happened to the Jena 6 was heinous, non-blacks should be reexamining their hearts, and heads should be rolling Nifong-style. I'm as happy as the next Negro to stick it to the man (I'm on record as saying I'd have thrown a rock, just one and into a bush—more of a tossing if you will—after the Rodney King verdict had I been an Angeleno), but this wasn't exactly Selma and these brothers weren't exactly the Scottsboro Boys. Folks should go to jail for stomping a random (and lone) person into the ER, white or not, nooses or not. Not for attempted murder, of course not, but aggravated battery sounds about right, especially when you factor in that the stompee was not, as far as we know, one of the noose hangers. And when we have it on good authority that Jena High also boasts "black bleachers" where honkies fear not tread. Racism, and its effects on the ground, is rarely simple.

No one is saying it is simple. But people are saying, "Enough is enough." That, at least, is a simple message. And what this writer fails to address is the context.

The most objectionable portion of this piece, however, is the self-righteous sputtering:

I made no effort to get to Jena. Instead, I spent that time reading worthy analyses of the proveable, addressable, effects of racism in the criminal justice system. These bespectacled economists and sociologists are downright radical. They already knew that racism filled our prisons; now they're proving how it affects America at large. They're doing more good on Capitol Hill making these "tough on crime" politicians change gears than all the buses in Jena.

To each is given his calling. To each is given his gifts. Some are called to lift their voices in protest at injustice; others are called to research. Others are called simply to labor, or to do what is in front of them at any given time. We none of us got to pick, but when we hear the voice, we go and do its bidding, or we suffer the fate of Jonah.

Who among us has the wisdom to say which gift is most valuable? Not me, not you, and certainly not Debra Dickerson.

Call It What It Is

K. sent me this, from Mithras at Fables of the Reconstruction:

Picture the scene: 16-year-old girl attending her friend's birthday party in the school cafeteria. Someone bumps her and she drops her cake. Security guard orders her to clean it up, but when she does, he is not satisfied. When she refuses to do any more, he twists her arm behind her back, breaking her wrist, and slams her head onto a table while saying, "Hold still nappy head."

You know without my telling you the race of the victim and the race of the security guard. Will that white security guard be charged with attempted murder, I wonder?

Sounds Like Blame

Here, from the NYT via Negrophile, is what seems to be an example of using a series of unrelated events to come to some kind of conclusion with lots of opinions thrown in:

In New York City, the tabloids published sensational details of the bias suit brought by a black former executive for the Knicks, Anucha Browne Sanders, who claims that she was frequently called a “bitch” and a “ho” by the Knicks coach and president, Isiah Thomas. In a video deposition, Thomas said that while it is always wrong for a white man to verbally abuse a black woman in such terms, it was “not as much ... I’m sorry to say” for a black man to do so.

•

Across the nation, religious African-Americans were shocked that the evangelical minister Juanita Bynum, an enormously popular source of inspiration for churchgoing black women, said she was brutally beaten in a parking lot by her estranged husband, Bishop Thomas Weeks.

•

O. J. Simpson, the malevolent central player in an iconic moment in the nation’s recent black-white (as well as male-female) relations, reappeared on the scene, charged with attempted burglary, kidnapping and felonious assault in Las Vegas, in what he claimed was merely an attempt to recover stolen memorabilia.

These events all point to something that has been swept under the rug for too long in black America: the crisis in relations between men and women of all classes and, as a result, the catastrophic state of black family life, especially among the poor.

Go looking for evidence of troubled relationships among whites, or Asians, or Latinos. You'll find them. (And by the way? O.J. and Isiah Thomas are anything but poor.) So the writer uses these big Easy Reader Series news stories as the foundation for conclusions that should require some very specific supporting data.

I doubt if many supporters of the Jena 6 "view events there, and the racial horror of our prisons, as solely the result of white racism." Nothing is ever one thing. But how can anyone deny the white racism is the framework underneath it all? It almost sounds as if the writer is saying that Black men and women are incapable of having sound relationships, and unwilling and unable to raise children with care and thoughtfulness--and I know that is not true. In fact, it almost sounds as if the writer has subscribed to the hoax of race, and saying that Black people are fundamentally different (not in a good way), and that cannot be true. (For most of all time, there was really no such thing as race, until it served people who wanted to take from others to name the others as being of a distinct and different race and therefore undeserving of being treated as human. But that is another, much bigger topic, and I do digress.)

He goes on to propose that "even after removing racial bias in our judicial and prison system — as we should and must do — disproportionate numbers of young black men will continue to be incarcerated." I wonder.

Because even though the writer complains that the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are taking a simple, one-dimensional view of the matter by protesting racism, it seems to me that most of the factors the writer blames for the mess are the results of systemic racism and if not racism, America's War on Poor People:

The circumstances that far too many African-Americans face — the lack of paternal support and discipline; the requirement that single mothers work regardless of the effect on their children’s care; the hypocritical refusal of conservative politicians to put their money where their mouths are on family values; the recourse by male youths to gangs as parental substitutes; the ghetto-fabulous culture of the streets; the lack of skills among black men for the jobs and pay they want; the hypersegregation of blacks into impoverished inner-city neighborhoods — all interact perversely with the prison system that simply makes hardened criminals of nonviolent drug offenders and spits out angry men who are unemployable, unreformable and unmarriageable, closing the vicious circle.

The problem with this article is that instead of offering the facts to support conclusions or a real analysis of any of the hot-button issues it brings up and then dismisses (Black on Black violence; domestic abuse; poverty among Blacks; gangs as a family substitution; school segregation; the failure of school to prepare Black students for the workplace, etc.), it lapses into offering these unfounded conclusions, conclusions that provide justification for a certain amount of self-righteous denial about what is really happening in our country. Always so much more comfortable to blame the people in trouble than it is to help.