Controversy of the week

From the magazine

It may be a new millennium, said Paul Krugman in The New York Times, but the South is still the South. Last year, a black high school student in Jena, La., asked his principal for permission to sit beneath a “white tree” on campus. Permission was granted, so he and some friends sat there—prompting several white students to hang nooses from the tree. Thus began a painful new chapter in the long, ugly saga of American racism. The students who hung the nooses were given three-day suspensions and, after a year of escalating racial incidents, six black students who beat up a white student were charged with attempted murder by a white district attorney. One has been convicted and sent to jail. Considering the slap on the wrist given to the white provocateurs, said Amina Luqman in The Washington Post, the absurdly harsh treatment of the black students reeks of racism. That’s why more than 10,000 protesters descended on Jena last week, after black radio stations, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and the Rev. Al Sharpton turned the “Jena Six” into a national cause célèbre. Forty years after the civil-rights movement, we African-Americans have been reminded, the Jim Crow era is not dead and “a school fight can cost our children their lives.”

The protest in Jena was certainly designed to evoke the 1960s, said Richard Thompson Ford in Slate.com, as were the chants of “No justice, no peace!” But comparing the Jena Six to the heroes of the civil-rights movement is a mistake. These six young men were not prosecuted for whistling at a white woman or using a “Whites Only” drinking fountain; they were charged with “beating and kicking a white classmate until he lost consciousness.” You can’t justify that act by saying that different white kids hung nooses from a tree. “At most, the nooses threatened violence that was never carried out.”

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Never carried out? said Jarvis DeBerry in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. To black Americans, a noose is neither a joke nor an idle threat. It’s a uniquely American form of racial terrorism, a reminder of a time when a “black person didn’t even have to break the law to meet the rope.” The white students who hung the nooses were quickly absolved, and so were other whites who menaced black students with a broken bottle and a sawed-off shotgun, while using the “N-word.” “One wishes the black students had not responded violently,” but with white authorities clearly unwilling to defend them, is it any wonder they wound up taking the law into their own hands?

So now that these young black men are symbols of white racism, said Jason Whitlock in The Kansas City Star, the black community suddenly cares about them. But where were all the concerned parents and ministers when Mychal Bell, the young man who is now sitting in jail for attempted murder, got arrested for assault on two previous occasions? Where were they when Bell was throwing away his Division I football scholarship, and his life? His father, who abandoned him years earlier, has returned now that his son is nationally famous, and is promising to help local ministers supervise Mychal if he’s released from prison. “Where were the promises and supervision before any of this?” Racism is, of course, real, but it’s time we stopped blaming whites for the fate of our wayward children. The case of the Jena Six proves that black Americans “remain deeply locked in denial about the path we need to travel for true liberation, equality, and power.”