Jena

[sandnsea]

I am embarrassed that people are more upset about a stupid ad than those kids in Jena. I just wanted to say that.

[Catherine Vincent]

1. And I was actually disappointed that I didn't see more white faces

among the protestors in Jena. There were some that attended but there clearly should have been more.

[NOLALady]

2. There were a lot

more than I expected. BTW, it was awesome!

[Chovexani]

3. A white supremacist published their names and addresses on the Net

So the good folk of LA can administer some good ol' boy "justice"

http://www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=3058

I posted a thread about in GD that is currently sinking like a rock. Why am I not surprised?

[Brewman_Jax]

4. Black columnists and the Jena 6 case

It's not so much that the blogosphere is going insane, as it usually does when black people don't "remember their place", esp. if they stand up to the majority and knock them down. But even the black syndicated columnists (the black-themed sites are not included because they helped to get the news out) are falling all over themselves to say how bad the "6 on 1" incident is, but they don't talk about the "3 on 1" when the black kid was beaten up at a party. Nor the shotgun incident, when an armed white man waved a shotgun at a group of black kids outside of a convenience store. The white people that committed those crimes weren't charged. To add insult to injury, the post-incident identification of the "Jena 6" after the beating incident was less than conclusive.

The only black columnist that has stood his ground and not waffled has been Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald. The list of fence sitters and tap dancers is too long to list. Even some of the ones I expected more from, like Sean Gonsalves of the Cape Cod Times, have folded. Let's remember that you can't be TOO truthful if your job and position are constantly in question. I don't count truth-telling Gary Younge of the Guardian UK because his job is probably not in danger as his US counterparts. I don't mention white columnists because they are in a position not to have to comment. The right wing neo-cons and reactionaries can't wait put the accused on death row and the left wing progressives and liberals responses are few and muted.

Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who is far too often a lawn jockey for her corporate masters, said in her latest column that black crime victims deserve outrage, too--which they do. She notes an e-mail from Fulton Co. (GA) District Attorney Paul Howard: "Everyday my office ... handles horrible cases involving the sexual assault and/or death of black children, black women and black senior citizens. It is difficult for me to recall an occasion wherein my office has received a note, card, letter or phone call from any black advocacy group or political leader in support of these victims. We receive many communications in support of black defendants in some of those same cases," he wrote. Another case of intellectual dishonesty by Tucker and D.A. Howard. Out of the hundreds, if not thousands, of cases that any major municipality has to process, how many make the evening news? (Hint: if it bleeds, it leads.) Of those, how many receive the appropriate level of outrage? As she noted in her column, black crime victims are as quickly shoved aside as black defendants are as quickly shoved behind bars. Multiple studies and reports (latest being a multi-part series in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution) have shown that black defendants are more likely to be prosecuted than white defendants, white crime victims garner more sympathy than black crime victims, harsher punishments are given for white crime victims than black crime victims, esp. death penalty cases.

As the legally untrained aren't aware, the crime is against the STATE, not the victim, and the legal procedures are in place so that the state cannot simply roll over the rights of the accused in response to public outcry. (The main reason the judiciary is supposed to be insulated from politics, but…) Those advocacy groups that D.A. Howard says are so silent, have limited resources and personnel, just like any municipality. The D.A. no more takes every case to trial than the advocacy groups respond to every case. I know, I had my day of jury duty sitting in the waiting room as the plea bargains are agreed upon, so Mr. Howard is again being disingenuous. As any lawyer will tell you, a trial is the option of last resort and you don't want to go to trial unless there's a better than average chance of winning.

The point is to show the uneven media and opinion coverage esp. from those who should know better. When Faux News still trots out the dark-skinned lawn jockeys to agree with them, we aren't that far along. If you can't help the cause, at least stay quiet and don't hurt it.

[Brewman_Jax]

5. Tim Wise on Jena

Complicity has its cost: An open letter to Mayor Murphy McMillin of Jena, LA

From the letter:
Of course, I do find it interesting that neither you nor any white elected official in Jena have seen fit to label the noose-hanging a racist act and its perpetrators racists. It's as if you can't come to say the words, no matter how obviously they fit. Oh sure, you said the act was "hurtful," but nothing more. And you wonder, dear sir, why 20,000 people descended on your town to let you know what they think of you?

Does it not give you pause that two-thirds of Jena's white folks voted for neo-Nazi, David Duke in 1990 and 1991, when he ran for U.S. Senate and Governor?

Or perhaps you were among those two-thirds? After all, you did recently tell white supremacist leader Richard Barrett that you were grateful for the counterdemonstrations he's been seeking to foment in Jena, in answer to the mostly black protests of last month.

Maybe you too supported Duke: a man who not only led the nation's largest Ku Klux Klan group in the 1970s, but who, as head of the National Association for the Advancement of White People (with which he remained affiliated until the early 90s), called for dividing the U.S. into racial sub-nations and breeding a master race of high-IQ whites. From the back of Duke's newsletter, he even sold books praising Nazi Germany and denying the Holocaust, but perhaps that wasn't a big concern of yours.

Perhaps you voted for Duke, as most of your white brethren in Jena did, even though you must have heard the radio ad that was airing right up until the Gubernatorial election in 1991: the one featuring a tape recording from just five years earlier, in which Duke responded to a fellow Nazi's boast that "Hitler started with just seven men," by noting, "We can do it here too if we just put the right package together."

Yes indeed, how dare John Mellencamp besmirch the good name of a town like yours, filled with such stellar exemplars of racial amity as could vote for someone like that. How dare he, and how dare we--those of us who have spoken out against the perverted system of justice you dispense in your hamlet--offer our opinions about people and places we don't know.

But here's the thing Mr. Mayor: we do know you.

Oh sure, Jena is not any worse than a lot of other places. And yes, it's always easy to beat up on some little southern town, making it the presumed seedbed of everything racist, rather than seeing the racism therein as symptomatic of a larger national problem. I'll give you that much. As a proud southerner that burns me up too.

But we know you just the same.

The one thing we know for sure, that I know as certainly as I know my own name, is that your town is filled with good Germans. The kind who, irrespective of their own racism, almost uniformly refuse to condemn the racism of their fellow citizens, fellow churchgoers, neighbors or family.

Your town is filled with people who never expressed any concern about this case until it brought them, and you, bad publicity. Some white folks now are saying that those attempted murder charges were extreme, but where were they a year ago? Nowhere to be seen or heard from, Mr. Mayor, that's where. Mychal Bell and the other five could have rotted in jail for the rest of their lives for all you could have cared, and so long as the media never made mention of it, everything would have been fine.

Thus the lesson for today, Mayor McMillin, and please make note of it: complicity has a cost.

And here's the sad irony embedded within that lesson--one which you and your compatriots utterly fail to recognize, and which whites have failed to understand going back to the days of slavery, when most whites didn't own slaves, but also never spoke out against or challenged those who did: namely, that all of this could have been avoided. You and yours could have prevented it. You could have made it all go away: the angry denunciations, the demonstrators, the Reverends Sharpton and Jackson, the T-Shirts reading, "Free the Jena Six," Mellencamp--all of it.

http://www.timwise.org

Writer's Note: Tim Wise makes the killing point--none of those white people, neither residents nor official, stood up and called them on their actions. Now every one knows the truth--and does the truth ever hurt!