During the many online discussions concerning Jena, La., there was a recurring theme among many bloggers concerning the demonstration held there. The theme revolved around two issues; the first being that because Mr. Bell was not pristine as a defendant then the cause of the protests were somehow tainted and didn’t live up to the marches of the 60’s. The second issue was that there were bigger issues that should have also brought out protests in the black community that are happening without a whimper. I think to dismiss these issues out of hand would be a mistake and would damage the credibility of not only the case in Jena, but any future cases as well.
To respond to the first issue, Mr. Bell’s status as a victim with a record and the heinousness of the crime has been held up by many conservatives and some “so-called” progressives as somehow making it hard to rally behind the efforts of Jena 6. It has been cited that the protests held in Jena on their behalf were somehow tainted by these facts. They say that these facts made it difficult for them to join in the protests held to request their freedom. That this case somehow reduces the civil rights movements of the 60’s, because those involved innocent women and children. To state this as a reason not to rally behind these youngmen is based on a false pretext, many of the black men killed during the civil rights movement were considered criminals by the authorities because they were agitators and trying to upset the status quo of “white privilege”. Dr. King himself had been arrested a number of times.
I have to admit that I am not comfortable with the behavior of the victims in this case or their prior history, but to use that as an excuse not to seek their release is to not understand what the rally was about. The protest was not about these flawed youngmen, it was about a community and a standard of justice that was blatantly bias and unfair. For me to say that I can’t support a rape victim because she was a “loose” woman is for me to give rapists a free pass if they rape the right woman. Rape is rape and injustice and racism is racism regardless of the victim’s history. If they had done what they had done because Mr. Bell was a criminal is one thing, but what about the others? The protest had to occur because these youngmen symbolized a system that sought to reinforce the unspoken racism of not only Jena, but America.
What most “progressives” have to understand is that there is a large segment of black males who have been arrested and prosecuted in this country, so having a criminal record in our community does not necessarily disqualify you from justice. What we understood and what you could not was that this could have been any of our sons or daughters regardless of their past. There has to be a point of no return, we will not be taken back to the Jim Crow past no matter where it is or who is perpetrating it. Jena represented that line for many. Would it have made a better storyline if these were Valedictorians headed to Ivy League schools or docile young black men who were viciously attacked by a lynching party? But, the problem with circumstance is that you take it as it comes, remember we didn’t pick the victims, they did.
The second issue is one that has been a thorn in my flesh for many years. I have seen cartoons depicting marchers ignoring the issues in the Black community of violent crime, drugs, and fatherless homes. Are these issues just as important and deadly to our communities? Shouldn’t we be holding marches and protests to highlight and bring an end to these issues which to be honest on a day to day basis effects our children more so than Jena. Why are we not having icons and campaigns to stop the violence to the levels that the Jena protests rose to? Why are so many of our leaders so deafly silent against these issues that are crippling and killing our communities. Where is the national outcry against these self-inflicted wounds? Are we only willing to stand against outsiders while our communities are being destroyed from within?
I would love to see a grassroots campaign to end the violence and murder in our communities, to highlight the growing lack of family structure in our communities, and the seeming lack of male responsibility. Where are the two Reverends on these issues? These issues are not media driven and therefore won’t get you in the paper or on Bill O’Reilly, no these issues are difficult and require work. If we do not begin to address the internal issues that we confront daily, how can we expect to build stronger and more cohesive communities to combat the issues that were highlighted in Jena? This is similar to the situation with Don Imus; we want to condemn others from the outside while we continue to sit silently by while our communities are being destroyed from within.
It is time we stand up and say that not only are we against racism and injustice, but we are also against the violence, the fatherless homes, and the drugs that permeate our communities. To decry one without the other is an invitation to disaster. I say this not to impress those who would excuse their behavior based on someone else’s, but because our communities will not survive at the rate we are going. Between the penitentiaries and the murders we won’t have any youngmen left.
Our children are our future; let’s protect them from the racists and the bigots, but also from the thugs and the gangs. Let’s begin a campaign to raise up the many black men who have fallen and bring them back to a position of responsibility in the community. My biggest fear for my son is not the DA in Jena; it is the kid down the block from him or the one in his school with a gun. I’m sorry folks but we have some major issues that need to be addressed and they can only be addressed by us.
With that being said I have added a stop the violence ribbon to my website. It reflects the colors of the African American and I ask that all those who want to highlight and begin to address the issues destroying our community to also add it to your website and send it to your family and friends. Let’s once again use the power of the internet to bring attention to some long overdue issues and maybe we can begin to have rallies all over this nation in support of our communities. We have to be more than against something, we have to be for something as well.
I don’t never have any trouble in regulating my own conduct, but to keep other folks’ straight is what bothers me.
– Josh Billings
“Personal responsibility” has been the shibboleth of the right wing for some time in this country, who ask us to disregard our own responsibility when it comes to the causality of Black crime and poverty. Racism is obviously a continuing motivator of Black unemployment, poverty, and isolation in this country.
But when you have the major presidential candidates of the Republican party avoiding debates at Black universities, it is just an indication that the Reaganism of the 80s, the appeal to southern and northern (Reagan Democrats) bigotry, will continue to influence attitudes toward race and poverty.
Gang and drug related violence is something that must be dealt with in the short term. In the long term, however, we are still facing the effects of the racism which feeds gang and drug violence in Black and other communities.
Putting the cart before the horse, or in the case of this essay, equating them, is not exactly getting us to root of the problem.
You can’t legislate people’s attitudes they will always remain, but you can alter behavior. We need to change what we can change (ourselves) and stop trying to change what we can’t (others). Even if racism were to disappear tomorrow there would still be thousands of young blackmen dead in our streets…
At the rate we are going there will be no long run for many of our youngmen. Racism has been around for a long time this level of violence has not…
“You can’t legislate people’s attitudes they will always remain, but you can alter behavior.”
Disgree vehemently. You can change people’s attitudes and the behaviors associated with it as seen by the breakdown of Jim Crow segregation in the south and de facto segregation in the north over the past fifty years, all achieved through legislation. These changes, however, have been relative.
Efforts at desegregation have not gone far enough. We are just not educating our youth about the evils of prejudice and bigotry in our school systems. That would go a long way to help changing attitudes.
So you are saying that the legislation of the civil rights movement changed attitudes. I think you are very much misguided, all it did was take it underground those that disagreed are now solid republicans as evidenced by the frontrunners refusal to debate with tavis smiley on minority issues and the stories we are confronted with that detail the continued racial animosity. Just because I can sit at the counter for lunch doesn’t mean that people’s attitudes about me have changed, they just can’t express them publicly or deny me access. This is far cry from what you are stating…
I said, “These changes, however, have been relative. Efforts at desegregation have not gone far enough.” No one is arguing that racism no longer exists. I can’t quote the study verbatim, but one study of changing racial attitudes did find that racial tolerance increased among young southerners compared to old southerners since the Civil Rights Act. That is not also to say that Reagan did not succeed in using racism to his advantage in the 1980 presidential election, or that the Republican Congress of the 1990s did not gain strength through pandering to racism, or that the Republican party as a whole does not depend upon it. But that dependence in my opinion is weakening.
Don’t you think that a state law requiring that all public school children receive at least two years of classes in racial, religious, and ethnic tolerance would help to diminish prejudice and bigotry? We are just not doing enough in our school systems to teach children about this social problem and ways to avoid it.
I agree that children are the key, but without a willingness of the parent to expose the child their can be no change…how do propose to do that?
It is perhaps that case that I am overly optimistic about the prospect of removing bigotry from our society. For reasons that may simply have to do with the way people perceive each other, differences are more salient than similarities.
I think that education is the key, meaning, as you say, children are the key. Jena would not have cropped up had those boys been through an educational system that taught tolerance, especially in a society that just emerged from de jure segregation. In fact, had the school sat those boys down and began talking the problem through beforehand, the incident might never happened.
We know that people can learn tolerance and acceptance of differences, or in the best case, taught to evaluate people on the basis of shared similarities. In a society that is multiethnic and consists of people from over 190 countries, it would seem to be an essential part of our education that the system teach children to live in a world of different kinds of people. That they are not doing. Parents should have no say in what the public education system teaches were it to take on onus of preparing children to live in a multiethnic society.
Our educational system is failing in this regard. This important adaptive issue should not be left to parents, just as other curriculum is determined by the educators and not left to parents.