The Whole (Jena 6) Story?
I spent my kindergarten and first-grade years at Glassbrook Elementary School in Hayward, Californ8ia - where two playground incidents, colored by racial taunts and retaliatory violence, left their mark on my impressionable mind.
My class was all-white, except for this Vietnamese kid named Q. And me. We were playing kickball in gym class and Q wasn’t very good. About a half-dozen of my classmates started taunting an extremely meek and seriously scared Q with chants of “gook.” Now that I think about it, Q had probably immigrated to America with his family after his people were “liberated” by soldiers like my (step)father who had voluntarily served with a USMC tank battalion in Vietnam several years before our little scapegoat game on the playground.
I don’t know if the biblical prophets I began learning about in church had already started to influence me but like Jeremiah, I had a fire shut up in my bones, burning in defense of Q. I told my classmates that if they didn’t stop calling Q a “gook,” I was “gonna kick they ass.”They didn’t stop and I delivered on my threat.
But I didn’t get charged with attempted murder like the Jena 6. I didn’t even get in “trouble;” at least, not by-the-book “trouble.” Instead, karma came back to me - hard. Not long after the Q incident, we were playing softball. I was catching, standing too close to the plate, and one of the kids I beat up in the name of Q caught me with his backswing - right in the jaw. (I can still see that green wooden bat today).
I went to our gym teacher moaning about the nurse’s office. “I told you to back up. That’s what you get. Now, go over there and sit down,” he said.
Too bad my gym teacher isn’t the District Attorney in Jena, Louisiana. He might not be the ideal man for the job but at least he allowed my classmates to learn a real-world lesson in the wrath that white supremacy evokes while sparing me certain school (and maybe legal) discipline. He also saw the poetic (and painful) justice of me getting cracked in the jaw by a kid who had been a victim of my retaliatory violence.
The Jena 6 were initially charged, as adults, with attempted murder for a playground butt-whoopin’ after a series of racial incidents that included the ugly American spectre of nooses. Predictably, the story has quickly devolved into one that pits two polarized camps arguing about “justice.”
One side, many of whom I’d bet are purveyors of “color-blindness,” can only see black criminality in this case, while downplaying (or ignoring) the existential threat nooses represent to black folk. The other side - rightfully calling attention to a clear-cut case of white-skin privilege - wrongly sees the Jena 6 as the beginning of 21st century civil rights movement.
Of course, both camps have a point. The Jena 6 haters, despite their evident historical amnesia of the lynching terrorism African-Americans endured for nearly a century (and that was tolerated by “Christian” America until less than 50 years ago) are right: you can’t claim the moral high ground in the struggle for racial justice with a beat-up white kid at the bottom of the pile.
The Jena 6 defenders are also right: sending any of those young brothers involved in the fight to jail, without considering the “mitigating circumstances,” would be an injustice that should be easy to see in a so-called Christian country. “A false balance is abomination to the Lord: but a j8ust weight is his delight,” declares the book of Proverbs. Certainly, the charges in the Jena 6 case are a “false balance.”
It’s not just my Glassbrook experience that makes me sympathetic to the Jena 6, my sympathies are also based on the recognition, as Karl Menninger observed his classic analysis of America‘s penal system The Crime of Punishment, that “in practice, justice does not mean fairness to all parties. To some people the law is an inexorable, inscrutable Sinai - the highest virtue is to submit unquestioningly. But to others law and the principle of justice should…‘embody the plasticity and reasonableness that Aristotle praised in his famous description of equity.”
“He said: ‘Equity bids us to be merciful to the weakness of human nature; to think less about what he said than about what he meant; not to consider the actions of the accused so much as his intentions, nor this or that detail so much as the whole story…”
Sean Gonsalves is a Cape Cod Times staff writer and a syndicated columnist. E-mail him at sgonsalves@capecodonline.com.
Thanks for the anecdote as extraneous as it was.
Last I checked students get suspended for schoolyard fights…not expelled let alone charged with second-degree attempted murder…
Six people beating up one, regardless of ethnicity or actual result, SHOULD be charged with attempted murder. Have you ever seen a group beat on one person? It’s never less than brutal.
This is a COMPLETELY separate issue from the lack of punishment for the moronic white boys who started this whole thing. YES, their “punishment” was unfair and wrong, but that excuses NOTHING. The “Jena 6″ are victims AND perpetrators here. BOTH.
We have been exhorting youth to stop with the guns to do battle with each other; when telling this Jena Six story, one almost never hears that not only did the White kid hang a noose on a tree, but also pulled a rifle on one of the Jena Six. Then the “whuppen” started. The age of these youth must be taken into account. The communities of color, be they brown or black or red or yellow are tired of D.A.s and judges throwing the book at them. There was repeated racial hatred perpetrated on those boys, and no one in that tidy little town lifted a finger, and now they say,”Go away, so we can handle our own problems.”
Of course you can. Not!
Thanks Mr. Gonsalves.
What else could one expect from Americans, and their nation of hypocrisy, double standards, systemic and glorified racism, genocide, slavery, etc…?
Land of the free, home of the brave? A myth, propaganda, a blatant lie? sigh
Actually AUberon, I must disagree with you completely.
The “noose” incident, if we are to correctly discribe it as a hate crime, then it must be because the act is simultaneously one inciting violence, and at worst, a threat of violence/death against any Black student who dared to seek shade under the “white tree.”
If, then, we discribe the noose incident as a threat to the lives of the youths, the subsequent event (the aiming of a shotgun at a convenience store) gives credence to the first point that the nooses were indeed a threat to the lives of the youth. Not to mention, the pointing a shotgun at another person can be considered at least a threat, if not an attempt (I’m not sure with the particulars of that incident, but I assume that part of the reason no shots were fired was because the Black youths ran!). So the shotgun incident is also an attempt on the lives of the youths.
Should they have sought out the authorities? Tried and failed.
If one is threatened a first time (through a powerful symbolic gesture that ANY American should be able to understand), then a second time with a shotgun (which ANY human can understand), and the legal system dismisses these attempts on your life as pranks, what would you do on the next occassion? Wouldn’t you defend yourself?
Lost in the rhetoric of views such as AUberon’s is that these youths had sought out the authorities prior to the escalation of violence on their part…. If the Law is not there to SERVE & PROTECT you, by all means, PROTECT YOURSELF!!!
What would we be saying about this story if at that convenience store, one of the Black youths had a gun, and when the White youth brandished his shotgun was shot at, hit and mortally wounded? Wouldn’t that be self-defence?
Perhaps we can even compare the plight of these youths to battered women. Both are terrorized. Both often have difficulty trying to get justice from our legal system. Should a perpetual victim wait to be victimized (again)BEFORE they defend themselves?
Race relations in the US will never imrpove, I fear.
Just look how many (few) posts there are on this topic. If progressives aren’t up in arms about this, how long before the mainstream media turns a blind eye? (REMEMBER: This is an OLD STORY!!!! This happened nearly a year ago).
It was progressives who put it on the mainstream radar and drew attention to the New Face of Jim Crow: The Legal System and the Prison-Industrial COmplex.
Don’t let the issue fade before REAL discussion occurs on the Justice System!!!!
Paulitics, there are several other threads on Jena if you scroll down the main page. This article wasn’t that in depth or inciteful so it didn’t get much interest.
Growing up in Phila, we brawled almost daily. White v white; white v black; black v black; hell, sometimes we beat the crap out of each other. And aside from the errant knife wielder, no charges were ever filed against anybody.
One time, our HS gym teacher wouldn’t stop picking on an overweight kid, so I decked him. Instead of even suspending me, he made me try it again the next day, then knocked me silly. No hard feelings.
Free the Jena 6; arrest the racist prosecutor and let him share a jail cell with that lying Duke Lacrosse case prosecutor. And any racist who hangs a noose off of anything - kicking his pussy ass is the least we can do to help him see the light.
there was an incident in Jacksonville FL about a year and a half ago where nooses were brandished and the involved white students were expelled.
at least the school board didn’t interfere here as they did in Jena
THanks Kristina…read those at work and wanted to post (but I work for the govt…God knows who’s recording every keystroke:)
“Race relations in the US will never imrpove, I fear.”
It’s hard for race relations to improve when so many people on every side seem to like things the way they are and want that fire to keep burning. Too many people want very much for us to hate, resent, and fear one another.
The Jena 6 (it’s starting to sound like a singing group now) shouldn’t have beaten up that white kid. However, I don’t feel bad for that white kid either. I think that white kid wanted the six black kids to beat him up to get them in trouble, like a lot of people of any race who talk smack, relying on machismo (and I’ve fallen for it too) to take over the people they are taunting.
On the other hand, people need to realize what preceded that beating, which wasn’t that severe. In fact, I think the six black kids showed a lot of restraint as did the other group of black kids who wrested a gun away from a white guy who was waving it at them in an earlier incident.
One thing that’s really sad about all of this is that it could have nipped in the bud.
You’ve got a “white tree” in an integrated school. And white kids are hanging nooses from it. Instead, they suspend the noose-hangers when they should have been expelled.
Then they just cut down the tree?
What happened to the whtie kids who beat up the black kid at the party? Or the one that waved a gun at the group of black kids?
Some people have disagreed with me on this, but I think some people high on the totem pole are benefitting from the racial tension in Jena. I think certain white adults with some money and power are using this to stir up a fire by merely looking the other way and coming down hard on some and being lenient with others. Perhaps even egging some of these white kids on? This is an area where the per capita income is under $14,000.
I’ve had some people tell me that they just think this is a case of Southern racism, but I think there’s more to it than that. I think the Jena 6 case is even dirtier than it already appears on the surface.
Btw, I wasn’t aware of Mr. Gonsalves’s childhood experiences. Racism surely wounds people.
I dunno. Should I not be looking at the big picture here?
“Free the Jena 6; arrest the racist prosecutor and let him share a jail cell with that lying Duke Lacrosse case prosecutor.”
frank1569-I agree with most of what you say. However, I think something DID happen at Duke and that the stripper just didn’t want to go through a trial. Both parties imo were guilty of something, but that’s speculation on my part and Lord knows I’m not a lawyer, judge, or detective.
Auberon–Attempted murder? Get real. If they had intended to kill him, they would have.
I don’t understand this article. Did the kid hit the author with a bat on purpose or not? The facts and the relationships between the facts in the Jena case remain unknown. The kids deserve to go to jail for beating the white kid unconsious, and the noose hangers should be charged with some kind of hate crime.