A Noose By Any Other Name: An Onyx Take on the Root Causes of Anger Surrounding Jena 6
10.15.07
NEWSFLASH -- The
Jena
6. There is a simple, but effective official website. There are multiple Facebook groups, blogs and You Tube videos devoted to this hot topic that has brought new attention to the cold war that is racism in the
United States
. On the eve of the September 20th marches, t-shirts of a sketched tree with nooses were on sale for 10, and eventually five dollars, on the same street corners that sold shirts boasting the phrases Can’t Touch This, I Survived the L.A. Riots, Free Mike Tyson! and Snoop: Not Guilty. The phrase of the Moment: Free the
Jena
6! I briefly wondered where all the proceeds were going, but thought I could figure out the answer.
The official NAACP position was made public. The unofficial leaders of black academia, politics and hip-hop weighed in. The protestors came en masse and the fundraising for legal fees began. As matters progressed and got uglier, the question of who would watch the defendants’ houses had to be settled. People got angry and more importantly, they took action. The results? A short-term read would say “effective.” A longer-term read would come back with “mixed, at best.” The national attention undoubtedly played a role in the legal proceedings – some wrongs being made right as it were. The lessening of charges against the defendants, the overturning of Mychal Bell’s guilty verdict and the reduction of his bail can be viewed as confirmation that the peaceful, yet powerful protests and media attention “worked.” Perhaps. These results also confirm that shame and embarrassment work in situations where equality and common sense are sacrificed.
Onyx Cranium will not delve into a complete outline of the case’s facts. That’s what all the websites, blogs, internet groups and Wikipedia write-ups are for. Despite all the details provided by various sources, there still seems to be some confusion about the basic reasons this case has become so galvanizing for so many. From our perspective, the
Jena
6 case “has it all.”
· There is the unveiling of a legal system that is anything but equitable or just.
· There is a “sympathetic” white victim. (“Sympathetic” meaning someone can identify with him – put themselves in his shoes so to speak.)
· Front and center is a black student athlete with one of those debatable track records of juvenile violence (football could hide him or save him depending on how you look at it).
· The case involves angry parents, ineffective school administrators and that most favorite of American obsessions – violence.
But more than anything else,
Jena
6 encapsulates history. And it begins with a noose.
So let’s get real here and save the politically correct niceties for another website. We basically have two camps in all this. The
Jena
6 as hoodlums and the
Jena
6 as martyrs. There is a rather large in-between camp that sees shades of both, but when it comes to social and political action, sides must be picked in order to affect change or maintain the status quo. The two camps are pissed at what they see as injustice. They view the same set of facts differently, but more importantly, they disagree on the relevance of the circumstances surrounding the alleged beat-down of Justin Barker. While there are plenty of well-voiced exceptions, the Martyr Camp tends to be comprised of blacks and the Hoodlum Camp composed of whites.
Camp 1 –
Jena
6 as Hoodlums
Official Stance: This case is as simple as it gets. Six black boys beat the crap out of a white boy. He is the victim. They are the assailants. Case closed. The events of the nooses and “what not” have nothing to do with the facts of the case. The young man said he was attacked and why shouldn’t he be believed? He was just standing up for himself and bravely attempting to defend himself. And even if he did provoke one or all of the boys, it was six against one. And that just ain’t fair! The poor boy had to go to the hospital. The six should go to jail as they could have killed him. Some of those boys couldn’t even keep themselves out of trouble and that was long before they happened upon the boy they beat senseless! They should get no mercy from the criminal justice system, as they showed none to him. It’s really about six v. one.
Unofficial Stance: Have these boys lost their fuckin’ minds? Who told them that they could get away with beating up a white kid? Yes, it’s 2007, but this is still
America
and they should know better. What kind of world are we living in where a bunch of black boys can harm a white boy and not pay for it with their lives? These kids grew up in
Louisiana
! What made them think they could break the rules? Who cares what the prosecutor or some official said to them? Who cares what happened at that school or over the course of several months or a year? Black boys don’t beat up white boys and they certainly don’t gang up on them. This is a perfect example of where all that civil rights/affirmative action shit got us – black people thinking they can carry out their violent tendencies on white folks. The world is upside down! They’re lucky the justice system is dealing with them instead of the KKK. (Oh, that's right, the supremacy groups did post the boys' addresses, but WHATEVER.) Yeah the jury was white and that’s because that’s who bothered to show up for jury duty. Besides, if it was six white boys beating a black kid, the minorities and progressives would want them to serve as much jail time as possible.
Camp 2:
Jena
6 as Martyrs
Official Stance: We can’t debate the six against one thing – there’s no way around admitting that. So yeah, we know some punishment must be exacted. But they want to add long jail sentences on top of expulsion? Please! Real talk – we can see right through this. The “victim” provoked them and he did it because he felt he could. He clearly believed his skin color would save him from any consequences for his crude words. Yeah, the young men could have walked away, but they stood up for themselves. These young men, along with other blacks, had been putting up with poor treatment, threats and various forms of racial intimidation for months. Boys will be boys. They got into a fight with someone who chided their manhood. And for this, you want to send them away to prison for decades? You want six lives ruined because of decisions they made in the heat of the moment and for a victim who attended a ring ceremony the same evening as the incident? It’s really about race and who gets to take a stand in this country.
Unofficial Stance: Here we fuckin’ go again! Are they really serious? How many times do we have to see this? Let’s see if all the “usual elements” are here: All White Jury – Check! Racist Prosecutor – Check!
Small
Town
Concept of Justice - Check! Trumped up Charges – Check! (Did they say a shoe was a weapon?) Preferential Treatment to the White Person Provoking the Incident – Check! They want to kill these kids with time in prison because they beat-up a peer? You really want to know what went down? That white boy thought he could talk to them black boys any way he wanted. Yeah, they got pissed. We’re not saying they didn’t kick his ass. But who the hell steps to a group of six people when they’re ridin’ solo (assault weapon or not)? Where I’m from, talkin’ shit has consequences and definitely includes a beat-down. Now we don’t want to speak ill of the victim, but he doesn’t seem that bright. They said he was teasing one of the young men who’d been assaulted by a white guy just a few days before.
Let’s ask a real unpopular question: What kind of fool practically demands an ass whoopin’ by egging on a group of people? I mean the white boy was CLEARLY outnumbered, but he was depending on them being docile and “knowing their place.” Well, he bet wrong on that one. Teenage boys fight. Teenage boys get jumped. And they live to tell about it. You really want us to get all bent out of shape because I shit-talker got his butt kicked by his peers when we can’t even get police punished for beating up and shooting black boys his age across the country? Please! He said that he was just minding his business and they started in on him? That scenario doesn’t even make sense. Think about it. Why him? Why then? He did and/or said something out of line and he paid the price. There was no attempt to kill him. The fact that he’s still alive is testament to that. This incident had been building for months. It began with those nooses and it just kept going. If the school officials had dealt with it properly, rather than just dismissing it as a prank, things would not be perfect in
Jena
. BUT opportunities for de-escalating tensions did present themselves and as usual they were ignored. And did you hear what the prosecutor said to them? Case closed. Can’t get real justice because it ain’t blind. It sees black and it sees white. These boys are the latest in a long line of examples of how the criminal justice system labels blacks as “criminals” while seeking justice for whites. If you can call hanging a noose a “school yard prank” then you can label this appropriately as a “school yard fight.”
--
While these “stances” are Onyx Cranium’s take on what we’ve heard and read, they get to the heart of the matter. For most black people, at least the ones we know, it started (and in some ways ended) with those nooses. Some say three were hung – to symbolize the Klan. Others say there were “just two.” Just two, you say? What the hell? Do these kids understand what a noose symbolizes, what it truly means? We would argue “yes” and “no.” If they genuinely knew, they would never have hung them in the first place, because they would have been too embarrassed to do so. On the surface, a noose is a sign of white power and privilege. While it was originally a sign of vigilante justice across all races, for good reason, it has come to symbolize the white threat to black life in
America
. So when those nooses were hung, that’s what was probably going through those ignorant kids’ minds: Know your place nigger or we’ll kill you. It is the equivalent of pointing a gun in someone’s face, but stopping short of pulling the trigger. It is a terrorist threat. Period.
But the hanging of a noose is also something more. As it pertains to blacks and the history of lynching in this country, it is a sign of white depravity. Lynchings were cultural events in this country. While many were done in the cover of dark, many were also performed in the broadest of daylight. They were not mere public executions. They were the equivalent of being invited to a front row seat in an Abu Gharib prison cell. White men, women and children, sometimes dressed in their Sunday best, watched the torture and mutilation of black bodies (for they had dehumanized them at this point). They sometimes took souvenirs and “strange fruit” comprised of burned blackness was featured on post cards. All that to say what? It’s a factor often overlooked by those with a vested interest in viewing lynching as a “black issue” when it was quite clearly a white one.
Pictures from lynching events reveal ordinary people participating in extraordinary cruelty. It is sickening. What kind of person enjoys this? What kind of people, en masse witness via sight, smell and touch, such evil acts? Many would like to say “people of the past.” But they keep coming back. They drown their own children for a lover and blame it on a black man. They offer a black man a ride, beat him and then drag him with his pants down until he is decapitated. They kidnap a mentally challenged woman and treat her like an experiment. But these are the more sensationalized cases. In between these headliners (that mainstream, corporate media ignores until compelled to do otherwise) there are the police shootings and beatings, the lopsided justice via more extensive sentencing in prisons and to add a little political flavor, the purging of black votes when it comes time to decide who WON’T be the president. Like any violent crime, the act says much more about the assailant than the victim. And what do the acts in
Jena
say of the assailants and the victims? Depending how much of a critical thinker you are and how important it is for you to connect dots, you’d find that the terms become interchangeable in the larger scheme of things. But that’s not all whites! No it’s not. But it never has been. Well, that’s not even the majority of whites. That statement is debatable.
The Scary Truth of the
Jena
6 Case and Similar Incidents
For all its gravity, many are mocking
Jena
6. Incidents are sprouting up throughout the country. Faux hangings using mannequins, blackface re-enactments of the
Jena
6 incident, and racial tensions flaring from students clashing over race. And nooses are popping up everywhere, more to rile people up than to threaten, but the two can't really be separated. What’s the truly disturbing part about a white student or anyone else hanging a noose in 2007? Real Talk.
Scary Truth 1: They don’t know what they’re doing! It’s just a joke to them. In this day and age, with technology and so much information on the black experience in
America
at anyone’s fingertips, how can these kids not know the gravity of their actions? How can they so carelessly hang a noose as if they were toilet-papering a house? We’ll never get anywhere if we can’t reach them! Their parents are so far removed that they don’t see it as a big deal. Could it be that they too don’t understand? How can something as vicious as slavery and as depraved as lynching be mocked and trivialized by civilized human beings? There’s no hope to change tolerance into acceptance with this kind of thinking.
OR
Scary Truth 2: They know exactly what they’re doing! It’s not a joke to them at all. In this day and age, with technology and so much information on the black experience in
America
at anyone’s fingertips, they know exactly what their actions mean. They were deliberate in hanging those nooses and wanted those kids to feel as if their lives were in danger. We’ve made no real moral progress and we can’t reach them because they refuse to be reached! And their parents…oh my God…they KNOW! They understand because they’ve purposely imparted this hateful rhetoric into their children’s heads. They know exactly how vicious slavery was and how depraved lynching is and they believe we deserve it – that it’s the right way to treat us. We’re worried about tolerance and what we’re seeing is that they want to retreat even from that. There’s no hope with this kind of thinking.
So which do you think it is? Oblivion and hatred are equally damaging in the hands of those in power. And the wicked combination of the two? Well, that’s American History 101 right there. It is chilling to know that for every white hand gripped around the stem of a protest banner there is another extended for the sign of “White Supremacy.” That old, healthy black paranoia creeps up when you understand that the American exchange rate for tears on a white face over the “injustice of it all” is another face’s silent smile denoting “and there’s more to come.”
At the end of the day, after each trial, each rape, each incident that isn’t successfully drowned out by coverage of O.J. Simpson’s dumb ass or some athlete’s antics, there is a quiet exhaustion. The weariness comes from those who know the scope of the fight and that it will continue in various forms and in a myriad of arenas until the sun has set, not on a new century, but on the human race as a whole. Some zone out and mummify themselves with television, partying and drinking. Others convince themselves that getting a degree, owning their own home and climbing the corporate ladder is enough activism for them and theirs. More decide that they’ll spare a weekend, a week or maybe a whole year to work “behind the scenes.” Others get married, raise their children and convince themselves that they’ll return to “the fight.” A shrinking amount risk tainting their permanent records with arrests at a protest or going to jail over making their point. A tiny portion, are willing to die, knowing that the sacrifice may spark some change or at least enough rage in others. Because while love and peace get so far, rage is a key element of any revolution or movement’s foundation.
Whatever category you may fall into right now or in the future, it’s safe to say that the saddest part about being fully aware and connecting dots is that shock comes often, but surprise at racism and injustice in all its various forms is rare. If you’ve read
America
’s real history books, you understand that you’re still in them.
Oh and for those wondering what “Camp” Onyx Cranium places itself in – we’re objective observers with eyes and ears for truth. That makes membership in Camp 2 somewhat precarious. But it clearly eliminates Camp 1 all together.
