On the morning of September 1, 2006, three nooses dangled from a tree in the High School square in Jena, Louisiana. The day before, at a school assembly, black students had asked the vice principal if they could sit under that tree.
Characterizing the noose incident as an innocent prank, a discipline committee meted out a few days of in-school suspension and declared the matter settled.
As you might imagine, it all went downhill from there. The picture above is what remains of parts of that high school.
What we have here is a problem and the problem has everything to do with a black middle class that is able to see, but not do. We are able to express concern but we are unable to make change. What you need for making change is insight, wisdom, discipline & power. Having read some of the ugly details from this episode out in Sherwood Forest, I can see that it's not something I want to burn a lot of cycles on. By definition, this is the kind of crap that happens in the boonies. But I think the concern of the folks in AfroSpear is appropriate, I wonder if they are able to roundup the resources. They've got the insight, and probably the wisdom, but the last two requirements are probably missing.
See the merits of kind of stuff is not an issue - that is to say there's nothing here that the appropriate folks cannot adjudicate. The problem is that we give license to inappropriate folks, and expect the proper results when using alternative means. What's going to happen is a lot of well-intentioned folks are going to get exercised over a moral situation over which they have no legal jurisdiction in it's going to end up being a political embarrassment. It's this kind of cycle of frustration that begets and sustains Al Sharpton, who functions as a traveling media courtroom. You would think someone would find an attorney.
Retaining an attorney is a middle class effort, and you know that whenever 3 or more black partisan activists are gathered, at least one of them is extremely uncomfortable with Middle America. This in time will pass, but certainly more slowly for those who see the face of black America in places like Jena.
For the moment, without passing judgement, I have to shake my head at this particular detail:
· The response of school administrators to a flagrant hate crime was radically insufficient. According to The Jena Times, the noose incident was officially characterized as a harmless prank in which white students were merely imitating the actions of cowboy vigilantes in the television mini-series, 'Lonesome Dove' with no intent to intimidate the black students who had expressed a desire to sit under the tree. This construal of the noose incident is so unconvincing that the objectivity of anyone who accepts it must be questioned by any reasonable observer.
As long as it is that easy to spark blackfolks to irrational behavior, this kind of childish back and forth is inevitable. This reasonable observer says that insults should not rise to the level of provoking criminal reprisal. If there is black rage buried beneath a patina of civility, whose fault is it and what is to be done?
Here's a town with a white tree. Here are blacks who want to sit there. Here are whites who don't want them to and make threats. The results are inevitable because nobody is stepping out of the racial roles that are 200 years old. I think that's because there's nothing else to do in Jena.
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