'Can they really do this to me?'

By Sue Hyde, Director of Creating Change, September 26, 11:06 am

Because all of the actors in the Jena 6 drama are high school students, we must ask what the adults at the school and in the town had done to address and calm the burgeoning racial tensions at the high school.

They didn’t expel the white students who hung the nooses. Instead, they cosmetically cut down the now infamous “white tree.” In fact, they effectively congratulated them by calling a blatant racist threat and provocation a “prank” and never reported the incident to the police, which might have triggered a hate-crime investigation.

The district attorney, who was called to the school to speak to students, told them he could “end their life with a stroke of the pen,” reportedly looking directly at black students as he spoke.

There are reports that black students were assaulted at an off-campus party and that someone tried to burn down the school. So while the young people of Jena — both black and white — acted out the social pathologies of race-based violence, the “adults” were throwing gas on the fire by failing to set a zero-tolerance policy for racial intimidation at school and in the town. With leadership like this, it is no damn wonder that the young people of Jena struck out against each other.

While the school leaders fiddled as Jena burned with race-based rage, the district attorney threw the book at the black students accused in the attack on a lone white student and charged five of the six as adults, no doubt affirming in the minds of all concerned that the black students’ behavior was intolerable, but the white students’ provocation of their black classmates was not to be taken seriously.

The Jena 6 miscarriage of justice stands as the most recent example of a long-running pattern of prosecutorial overreach in cases involving black people and especially black youth. According to a study conducted by the Campaign for Youth Justice, black youths represent 28 percent of juvenile arrests and comprise 58 percent of youths sent to adult prisons between 2002 and 2004. The NAACP has named this scourge the “School to Prison Pipeline” that tracks black young people into jail rather than college.

District Attorney Reed Walters prosecuted the case by bringing adult charges of attempted murder, the strongest possible charges against the black teenagers who attacked a white classmate in the midst of a boiling racial conflict.

According to an Aug. 4 Washington Post story, Mychal Bell, the only one of the Jena 6 to be convicted (later overturned), sat in his jail cell reportedly looking frightened and numb and asked: “Can they really do this to me?”

In Jena — and all too often in many other communities nationwide — white teens are just youthful pranksters who get a second chance, but black teens are adult potential murderers who get jail time.

The Jena 6 prosecutor’s zeal gives full life to our culture's current hallucination of black men of any age: suspected of living while black, they are dangerous criminals who must be punished for whatever they might do in the future.

Back in the day, white people fueled their hatred and suspicion of black people by telling stories about the predatory and threatening sexuality of black men, stoking themselves up to lynch any black man who stepped too far out of line by noticing white women. The message was clear: stay in your place or your place will be at the end of a rope hanging from a tree.

The chilling images of lynchings of black people at hands of cheering, jeering and leering whites need only to be recalled by a rope hanging from a tree to underscore a fundamental message: Black people must live always on notice that this town, this school, this tree, this nation is not really theirs. It all belongs to white people, and black people are conditionally allowed entrance only by the generosity and good graces of white people.

So, the white kids at the high school, hearing that some black kids might violate the unwritten rule forbidding them to be seen under the “white tree,” relied on an old and sturdy message delivery system: nooses hanging from the tree. It’s hard to miss that, but school and town officials chose to ignore the meaning of the nooses, allowing plenty of social space for their teenagers to engage each other in what seemed to be escalating physical confrontations.

The adults in charge appear to have been oblivious to the dangerous tinderbox they helped to build in their community. If there are accusations to be made in this mess, they should be against the superintendent of schools and the school board for abdicating their responsibilities to provide students with a safe learning environment at school and against a district attorney who was all too willing to throw away the lives and futures of six young people.

The behavior of the adults toward these young people amounts to willful neglect of children. How many academic lessons were being learned while the racial rage burned? How many kids graduated with not much to show for it because they and everyone else were distracted and disturbed by the ever-fraying relationships in the classrooms, the hallways, the locker rooms?

The school district leaders’ first responsibility is to watch out for the futures of their students, making sure that all can have access to the best education available to them. Instead, this school district allowed racial turmoil to overtake the business of education: sending young people into the world with solid skills for the workplace and/or higher education and an eagerness to participate in our democracy.

Six young people, and doubtless many more, have been grievously wounded by the failure of leadership in Jena and by a scandalous national two-tiered, race-based system of justice. The Jena 6 should be cleared of these charges, yes, but also given another chance to recover their lives and their confidence in themselves and in this country’s promises of equal justice and equal opportunity. We owe them that.

The NAACP invites all of us to send a letter to Gov. Kathleen Blanco of Louisiana and to the state’s attorney general. Help right a terrible wrong today by visiting the NAACP site and join the thousands who have protested education and justice Jena-style. Please click here: http://naacp.org/pdfs/SampleJena6SupportLetter.pdf.

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