The latest edition of the Black Agenda Reportrefers to the recent march on Jena as a baby step in the direction of a new mass movement. Serious policy wonks need to read this document. In the build-up to Jena, the report asserts, Black opinion leaders were followers, not leaders. Furthermore, the Jena phenomenon was a protest against the “carceral state” sociologist Loïc Wacquant has eloquently described:
The prison and the criminal justice system… contribute to the ongoing reconstruction of the ‘imagined community’ of Americans around the polar opposition between praiseworthy ‘working families’—implicitly white, suburban, and deserving—and the despicable ‘underclass’ of criminals, loafers, and leeches… personified by the dissolute teenage ‘welfare mother’ on the female side and the dangerous street ‘gang banger’ on the male side—by definition dark-skinned, urban and undeserving. The former are exalted as the living incarnation of genuine American values, self-control, deferred gratification, subservience of life to labour; the latter is vituperated as the loathsome embodiment of their abject desecration, the ‘dark side’ of the ‘American dream’ of affluence and opportunity for all… And the line that divides them is increasingly being drawn, materially and symbolically, by the prison.
Sadly, many of the reptilian comments we have been receiving at Friends of Justice reflect this tragic bifurcation.
The Black Agenda Report argues that if there is to be another mass movement in America it must be organized around “the black consensus”.
While majorities of all Americans do believe in universal health care, the right to organize unions, high quality public education, a living wage, and that retirement security available to everyone ought to be government policy, and many even believe America is locking up too many people for too long, support for these propositions is virtually unanimous among African Americans.
So far, so good. Wacquant’s analysis proved helpful to me when I was trying to make sense of what was happening in Tulia, Texas, and it also illuminates the black-white split over Jena. Unfortunately, the “mass movement” concept fails to account for the profound shift from an Old Jim Crow regime (which applied to exemplars like Rosa Parks) and a New Jim Crow (which, as Wacquant suggests, is primarily aimed at folks like Mychal Bell).
The Old Jim Crow crumbled because most white Americans knew it was unacceptable and could be shamed into acting on this knowledge. The New Jim Crow is more intractable. Jena shows that Black America (at least the folks under 30) understand the problem. The backlash to the Jena rally suggests that white America still doesn’t get it.
Several readers have suggested that I have it in for white people. Not so. I am a white people. Moreover, until a whole lot of white people embrace “the Black consensus”, the carceral state Wacquant describes will continue to expand. We need to reach out to Middle America; and that means reaching out to white folks and moderate-to-conservative black professionals. That means interacting with the “personal responsibility” and “cult of victimization” arguments presented by people like Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, Bill Cosby and . . . yes, I’ll say it, Jason Whitlock.
The trick is to keep more than one contributing factor in view. The “cult of victimization” folks refuse to acknowlege the emergence of Wacquant’s sinister carceral state; criminal justice reformers typically refuse to acknowledge the relevance of personal responsibility. So long as everyone is screaming soundbites and bumper sticker slogans, we ain’t goin’ nowhere.
Friends of Justice 
You mention John McWhorter. Here is an anaylsis of his book, Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America, John McWhorter, Gotham Books, 434 pages
by Elizabeth Wright, a black woman with a different point of view and can be found at http://www.amconmag.com/2006/2006_02_27/review.html
From her website, and I quote,
“””By using as his model the black district of Indianapolis from the early years of the 20th century, he determines to debunk the theory that poor black communities came undone in the mid-1960s due to the loss of manufacturing jobs, the emigration of the black middle class to suburbia, and the impact of drugs. No, McWhorter claims, something much more powerful than deindustrialization and middle-class flight turned the black poor against themselves. That something was born in the 1960s, “when black America met the New Left.”
White liberals succeeded in getting government agencies and academic progressives to turn their attention to the plight of the black poor. The social and economic policies that resulted from this new benevolence irrevocably changed the culture of black neighborhoods. The creation of an “open-ended” form of government welfare that had never been known before proved disastrous. “””
“”” In Indianapolis and across the U.S., welfare was not only free and easy to get but was vigorously encouraged by whites who viewed these gifts from the Treasury as a form of justice. The expansion of this new kind of welfare was specifically directed to blacks, says McWhorter, and it soon took its toll.
Another result of this encounter with the country’s radical liberals was the adoption of the counterculture disseminated by them. Blacks across class lines began to reject mainstream norms. In earlier times, writes McWhorter, alienation felt by blacks was often a spur to action, an incentive to roll up their sleeves. But now their alienation became a form of self-medication—a “therapeutic alienation,” something to be indulged, not overcome.
Multitudes of blacks began to fetishize the “evils of the White Man,” a preoccupation that became a crutch for what McWhorter calls a “spiritual deficit.” Liberal whites, in their desire to have allies in the crusade to undermine The System, fed this growing discontent. As blacks idled on the dole, claims McWhorter, the activists were unperturbed because “their actions were really about them, not justice or compassion.” “””
Go to the site shown near top for the complete article.
“The Old Jim Crow crumbled because most white Americans knew it was unacceptable and could be shamed into acting on this knowledge. The New Jim Crow is more intractable. Jena shows that Black America (at least the folks under 30) understand the problem. The backlash to the Jena rally suggests that white America still doesn’t get it.”
What’s surprising to me is that it’s not just white America who doesn’t get it. I’ve read several Black journalists in the past few days who express the view that the Jena rally was “misguided” and not a worthwhile effort.
The rally was organized very quickly. As a result, the focus was on logistics rather than message. There were two major problems: how to get all the celbrities on stage and how to get thousands of people in and out of town. The celebrities did a good job of sorting out their conflicting agendas, and the logistical issues were handled with remarkable efficiency, given the time constraints. No one had the time to ask why folks were coming to Jena in the first place. The people I talked to were in Jena to protest the negative impact the carceral society is having on black America. Whether that message was coming through the microphones I’m not sure–I never got close enough to the stage to hear what was going on. The Jena event was beautiful because so many lovely people got on the buses. Almost everyone I talked to was a church member, a college student, or both. No one said, “I’m here because Michael Baisden (or Al Sharpton, or Jesse Jackson, or Steve Harvey) told me to get on a bus and ride for two days.”
The New Civil Rights Movement will not be hijacked, by any who are not totally for what we as a people need. From the day that Blane Williams was laid open by you, and you Alan Bean, didn’t say a word about the conspiracy to cause Mychal Bell to be convicted by a plea bargain! However, we know that you were not for Reed Walters, intimidatory tactics or for Judge Mauffray allowing the tactics to ensue.
We will address our ills as a nation within a nation, and we will expose all the culprits who planted deceit and distrust in the minds of the parents. Those who took and NAACP meeting and turned it into an ACLU, those who offered the parents a pay-off after raising 6 figures, from there website.
The plantation paternalistic controls will cease to exist from here. You don’t know it, but we do have a mass movement, and it will not be derailed by the “Jack Ruby” types, or the “James Earl Ray’s”. We see you and we know you! You may be a baptist minister, but throwing back long necks in the public is ugly. “I pray this prayer, every person that had any input in the dysfunctional methods of the 6’s parents will receive their just rewards
You know, Alan, it is not fair nor right, to ignore other viewpoints and only focus on agreeable ones. This is the easy way out. The yankee way out.
I agree with Mr. Shirley…
Its totally unfair that all the great ‘Americans’ are murdered…
Lincoln
Malcom X
MLK
Kennedy
i’m talking about those who try to see things from somebody else’s birth-viewpoinp…