The Jena Six and US History
By Paul Ortiz t r u t h o u t | Perspective Thursday 27 September 2007
I was in the middle of an extended research trip in the South when news of the march and rally to free the Jena Six began flowing through the blogosphere. What has transpired in Jena in support of six young black men is an important new chapter in the black freedom struggle.
The Jena Six are six black teens from Jena, Louisiana, who were accused of fighting and beating up a fellow high school student last December. The student who was beaten up was white. While the victim in question suffered no severe injuries, the six black youths were initially charged by the local district attorney with attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder. The murder weapons, according to the DA, were the perpetrators’ tennis shoes. This is how much progress we’ve made in the United States: what used to be seen as a schoolyard brawl punishable by suspension or community service has become a crime punishable by life in prison. After a wave of publicity, the charges were reduced in most of the cases to battery and conspiracy which may still result in over two decades of prison time for these kids. One of the defendants remains in jail after being unable to post $90,000 bail.
According to the local authorities in Jena, we are supposed to believe that race has nothing to do with the charges levied against the high school students.
Earlier incidents of violence and intimidation directed against black students at Jena were ignored by local law enforcement officials. In one incident, a white man pulled a shotgun on a black teen, and on another occasion white youths smashed a black youth over the head with a beer bottle. Black residents also reported that whites were spewing racist epithets at them in public. All of these incidents were reported to authorities, and the police did absolutely nothing in the months leading up to the beating.
Local authorities also claim that three nooses hung on a tree at the high school three months before the fight had nothing to do with race. African-Americans in Jena report that the nooses were hung up after black students sat under a tree that some white students felt was reserved for them. While this version of the story has been disputed by school officials, according to the district attorney, it doesn’t matter anyway. The DA claims that young people are so ignorant about their histories that they wouldn’t know what the nooses were supposed to represent! The US attorney for western Louisiana concluded that there couldn’t be any possible linkage between the nooses and the subsequent school fight. It was reported that one of the witnesses for the youth who was beaten was also one of the students connected to the noose hanging.
In Jena, as throughout the rest of the US, we are supposed to believe that “race is no longer an issue” and that justice is colorblind. California fits the pattern perfectly. Out here, Martin Luther King Jr. commemorations have become exercises in remembering how bad racism used to be [in the South] but thank God almighty we are free at last! I am really, really glad that tens of thousands of demonstrators who descended on Jena on behalf of the six young black men ignored what has embarrassingly become the “common sense” position on race relations in this nation.
Many progressives today would like to de-emphasize or even separate the struggle against racism from efforts to end war and bring economic justice to the Americas. Their rationale is that white folks get upset when you talk too much about racial inequality and that the only way to draw the white working class to the movement is to keep quiet about race. This viewpoint is insulting to white people and it ignores the history of social change in this country. The nonracial proletarian revolution has never occurred in this country, and it never will. White people could not make the revolution by themselves in 1776, and they certainly cannot do it now. Furthermore, you cannot erase five hundred years of slavery, segregation, the Mexican-American War, the Sand Creek Massacre, Bracero programs, etc., etc. Tell the parents of the Jena Six or the survivors of Hurricane Katrina that we are all equally oppressed by capitalism. Race and class are forever linked in this nation.
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