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TechnoratiRacially Biased Justice Still Infects American Courtrooms
They cut down the "white tree" at Jena High School last month -- about a year too late. On Thursday, a mass civil rights march will take place in Jena, La., demanding justice for the Jena Six -- the six young men unjustly charged with felonies, jailed on prohibitive bonds and facing years in prison. As we march for the Jena Six, we will protest a racially biased U.S. criminal justice system that is creating explosive conditions across this country.
Jena, La., was Klan country, and racial divides still run deep. At Jena High School, there was a "white tree" where it was known only white kids could sit. Blacks and whites sat separately in the auditorium. Last year, at the beginning of school, a freshman asked the principal if blacks could sit under the "white tree." The principal said they could sit anywhere they wanted. The next day, three nooses -- in school colors -- were hung from the ''white tree." In the South, a noose is not a laughing matter. This is a hate crime: a direct racial threat in a region with a terrible history of hanging.
The principal took it seriously and expelled the white students responsible. The school board and superintendent overruled him, dismissing it as a "prank," reducing the expulsions to three-day, in-school "suspensions." Racial tensions rose. A sit-in took place, followed by a series of fights. Then a white youth, apparently taunting an African American who had been beaten, was thrown to the ground and kicked. He went to the hospital, but was released that night and attended the school's "ring ceremony."
The prosecutor had six black teenagers arrested and charged with attempted murder. The first, Mychal Bell, a 16-year-old sophomore star on the school football team, was tried as an adult for aggravated assault and conspiracy, both felonies. He was tried before a white judge with an all-white jury. He had only a court-appointed counsel who called no witnesses. The prosecutor argued that the gym shoes on his feet constituted a "deadly weapon." He was convicted, jailed with prohibitive bond and faced 20 years in prison.
This month, the appellate court ruled that he should not have been tried as an adult. The prosecutor has appealed that ruling. And astonishingly, Bell remains in jail, a fact that intensifies the struggle around the nation to free the Jena 6 and will no doubt swell the crowds at Thursday's demonstration.
Across this country, there are two justice systems -- one for blacks and one for whites. Black (and Latino) young men are not more likely to commit crimes than whites. But they are more likely to be stopped by police, more likely to be arrested if stopped, more likely to be charged if arrested, more likely to be jailed if convicted, more likely to be charged with felonies, and more likely to be tried and imprisoned as adults.
One of every eight young black men in his 20s is in jail or prison on any given day. This isn't just a Southern problem. A study of five states in the Northwest and Midwest showed that blacks are incarcerated at 10 times the rate of whites.
Mass incarceration of African Americans, mostly for nonviolent crimes, is poisonous and destructive. Today, according to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, bans on ex-felons voting is the "biggest impediment to voting since the poll tax," with more than 5 million people of color losing their right to vote. Thursday in Jena, the protest will begin. But it won't end there. This situation is explosive -- not only in Jena but across the country.
Jesse Jackson can reached at jjackson@rainbowpush.org
© 2007 The Chicago Sun Times
17 Comments so far
Show Allthe social construction of race has been the primary mode by which "the elite" have maintained hegemony in this country since its inception in order to maintain both their wealth and power. it is and has always been the primary motivation for the use of race/racism. the 1% divide the populace by fostering and feeding a system that primarily discriminates based on race. race has so permeated our culture that even on a progressive website white guilt leads to woolen eyes. generations of white kids and their families have bought the fiction that their friends are the 1% and that others with more in common with them are their enemies - though the same debtor culture has followed them from Europe, and poor whites get screwed consistently. blacks see everyday that whites have privilege. hegemony confirmed.
it is plain that this is an awful story of racism and injustice. anyone who thinks otherwise, redirects the attention to jackson, or cries afoul to anything he wrote is kidding themselves or meaningfully doing so because they have an agenda. class is the 1%'s motivation - race is their tool. black and white go at each other in small town america and they cheer. whites on a progressive website make excuses and distract from the truth because they fear the implications for themselves or hate that they feel guilty for a system that they did not put in place, but other whites buy, that gives them privilege that they didn't ask for. meanwhile, 6 KIDS are in jail for no reason.
What's really disgusting is that they cut down this "white tree", an oak that was probably centuries old, for the foolish actions of smallminded humans. And a "great leader" approves of this. The oak did nothing, but it got the death penalty, and the future generations have been deprived of the tree, and they did nothing either to deserve this penalty.
Cutting down this majestic tree was the greatest crime of all, and will echo down through the next centuries, long after this foolishness has blown over.
What horrible, shortsighted travesty.
BillB
I worked as a reporter for big papers for years and went through this whole crime statistic thing every year.
Any statistics regarding blacks committing more crimes than whites are most likely derived from a totally outlandish formula.
Crime statistics are based on police records of who gets arrested. Then this record is used as the indicator of what people commit, or are likely to commit, more crimes.
But what the statistic truthfully says is that since blacks get arrested more relative to their total population, they commit more crimes. That is absurd. And it is totally skewed by police profiling of blacks.
Police profile blacks, and then states use police statisitcs to state that blacks are more likely to be criminals.
Even with that said there are crimes in New Jersey where whites have come out ahead of blacks on a regular basis, and that is with the profiling of blacks intact.
Jackson has no coherent arguments. He's just a sleazy race-hustling bigot. But he's a liberal Democrat.
If you're a good Democrat, you can be more racist than David Duke and get away with it. Just ask Robert Byrd--the "conscience of the Senate", as they often call him.
It never ceases to amaze me that whenever blacks are unjustly charged with a crime there are always those who whip out the OJ delusion (you know who you are so I won't call you out). That comprises of there being no racially based injustices until OJ got off and also that blacks in a jury will naturally let a black defendant off the hook despite evidence. For some unknown reason they believe that no racial discrimination has ever occurred in this country (slavery doesn't count for them) and that any that did occurred was wiped out in 1968. Of course to back up their beliefs there was also no crimes until blacks started crowding into ghettos and that blacks are lazy and stupid. What a nice bubble that must be. Also I love it when people attack the messenger because they can't attack the message.
To get back to Rev. Jackson's point. Although I wish I could be there to march, I would suggest everyone wear gym shoes. It would be interesting to see if the crowd is arrested for sporting unregistered deadly weapons.
Let me get this correct, if you vote the wrong way your vote is taken away? and this kind of stuff happens every day. let me hear it for the yeah's and na's and any thing else you've got to say. and may our voice for justice never go away.
"It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination against other religious, racial or economic groups."
Henry A. Wallace
wishfullthinker, a very large majority of those in prison, black or white, are there for drug violations. The war on drugs has been very profitable for the Prison Industrial Complex.
Mr.BillB
Mr. Jackson was making the point that black people who come into contact with the justice system are penalized by the police and judges every step of the way.
He was not making a judgement on who commits more crimes.
When you consider the harsh racially biased sentencing and policing coupled with an historically underfunded educational system, a biased banking system and voter suppression it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure your going to have someone go wrong somewhere.
How dare you expect any race of people to be put through such treatment and come out the other side angelic.
The operative word is injustice.
We should be against ideas that say we can allow one human family member to be treated worse than another.
I think it makes more since to put $18,000 more per underfunded school on the front end regardless of race than
to put $100,000 on the back end because of race.
Know your history. Prior to the civil war the u.s government granted I believe it was 165 acres of land to any citizen who would make it productive. That meant you could grow crops, start a business or simply build a house on it and it was yours.
This had to do with the western frontier. Black people were not granted this inheirtance of national uplift and prosperity. The repercussions of these injustices is the plight that we find many of our brethern in.
Martin Luther King said " Injustice anywhere is Injustice everywhere."
Please tell me that the District Attorney will be investigated by the Bar Association. This is a misuse of power. He threatened the Black students when he said that he could destroy their lives with the stroke of his pen. That is what he set out to do when he brought these ridiculous charges against the Jena 6 for a high school fight. The victim was not injured enough to spend one day in the hospital. He was released and attended a ring ceremony the same evening. And the D. A. thought that sounded like attempted murder?! Either the district attorney is an idiot who doesn't know how to do his job or he was following through with his threat to destroy their lives with a stroke of his pen.
Mr. Jackson,
I have long supported you. I am white and grew up poor but still know that "white" has privilege before non white. However, money makes a difference. Rich blacks have a better chance in court than I do. Poor white against rich black even in Jena, the black stands a better chance. I wish you had developed the point that poor against poor there are only losers. Also for you to try to make the point that blacks and other non whites are not likely to commit more crimes than whites. That is true about being likely, however, given the real numbers in percentages more black males do commit more crimes than whites. This is a shame you are trying to use opinion in place of facts.
I reread this three times and truth is this does not sound totally like you. Did somebody else write the last part ?
BillB
OJ proves that class and not race is the great divide in the US. But of course, a member of the Black elite like Reverend Jackson can't admit that.
You conveniently forgot to mention the O.J. Simpson murder trial, Mister Jackson - a trial which was racially biased, as well as sexist. Were you worried that mentioning his trial would detract from your argument?
The last paragraph doesn't make much sense. Obviously, a ban on someone voting would HAVE to be an "impediment" to voting. But the solution isn't changing the law that bans felons from voting, it's revising the OTHER laws that make them felons in the first place.
I have a hard time taking Jackson's side in most things (even though here, I believe, he is clearly in the right). He's a camera-loving opportunist who believes SAYING something profound is the same thing as doing good works.....
The Invisible Empire mostly dispensed with the sheets & the oaths & cross burnings after the 1960s, but its spiritual children remain wholly committed to the same cause of keeping blacks out of power, or, if in power, then allied with them.
So you have Clarence Thomas and Condileezza Rice helping maintain disfranchisement, incarceration, economic dispossession, and even the rollback of Brown vs. the Board of Education. They get to be much bigger fish in the pond by providing our Grand Wizards with proof that we've become 'colorblind' as a society, with the popularity of Jordin Sparks demonstrating "See? There's no prejudice!"
Twenty five years ago I took a graduate level law class at a California University.
The instructor was an attorney and he ended every class with the following admonition:
"Irrespective of what you learned in class today, always remember to ask the question: HOW MUCH JUSTICE CAN YOU AFFORD?."
Some of the comments critical of Jesse Jackson here are as Adlai Stevenson would say, "more appalling than appealing." The fact that Reverend Jackson didn't stress class enough is fine to say, but I'm sure Reverend Jackson realizes and recognizes we have a racist and classist criminal justice system in this country. But his remark about the problem with racism in the criminal justice system is something Gary Younge, a solid black British journalist documented in another article in Common Dreams. It's not just a problem in the South, ya'll. However, the person citing Texas in his entry certainly sounds like he has a lot of W's racism in him.