Everyone wants to talk about the series of copycat noose hangings across the country. Notice, the noose hangers are almost never apprehended. The three boys responsible for hanging the nooses in Jena stepped forward and acknowledged their culpability. Why? One can only speculate. But I suspect it was because they were assured that people in high places would pass the incident off as an innocent prank.
That’s what angered Jena’s black community. Black people and white people looked at the same nooses hanging from the same tree and reacted in two distinct ways. Black parents were horrified; white parents shrugged and moved on.
Like I say, everyone wants to talk about nooses. Darryl Fears of the Washington Post (the first flagship newspaper in America to cover Jena) returns with a he-said-she-said story about how folks across the country are responding to the noose issue.
Even the sophisticates have an opinion. Robin Givhan uses the disturbing silhouette art of Kara Walker (currently on display at New York’s Whitney museum) as a backdrop for her comments. According to Givhan, Walker’s disturbing, often obscene evocations of America’s slave days, suggest that “Everyone — black and white — has suffered because of slavery’s legacy. Everyone has baggage — huge steamer trunks filled with issues of self-esteem, entitlement and disenfranchisement. But while making allowances for that, she also argues that the fallout from slavery is a tangled web of grotesquerie, violence and absurdity. And everyone — white and black — has some culpability.”
An impressive introduction, you must admit. Unfortunately, Givhan’s essay will be seen by most readers as yet another endorsement of Bill Cosby’s “blame the poor” rant.
I think there is a deeper message. A lot of grotesque behavior and over-the-top rhetoric has been generated by the Jena story. My wife, Nancy, sees the media’s fixation with Jena as an illustration of the opening words of John’s Gospel: “the light shineth in the darkness.” Unfortunately, the divine illumination has become stage lighting for an odd assortment of self aggrandizing minstrels, jugglers and high wire artists. If that’s Givhan’s point–fair enough.
Douglas Lyons of the Florida Sun-Sentinel checks in today with a piece about nooses and all white juries. “In an era of Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Tiger Woods,” Lyons writes, “two throwbacks from a dark period of America’s past continue to show surprising resilience. Makes you wonder how far we’ve come.”
It is frequently pointed out that, given the demographics of LaSalle Parish, an all-white jury was virtually inevitable. But the concept of a “jury of ones peers” suggests that at least one-quarter of the composition of any jury should be of the same race as the defendant whenever possible. White people don’t feel this problem because it isn’t something we need to worry about.
The light shines in the darkness, in Jena and across America, and a great profusion of strange, exotic, and deeply disturbing facts, fancies and fanatics are being revealed. In the midst of all the hype, the prevarication, the jeremiads, the cavalier dismissals and the honest inquiry we are growing and maturing as a people. The conversation ain’t always pretty–but is necessary and long overdue.
Friends of Justice 
A few years ago, a revival of interest in the music of Billie Holiday and her song, “Strange Fruit,” generated articles that drew attention to the “lynch law” era that predated the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s, but these articles appeared mostly in scholarly journals, which most American don’t read. Copycat noose-hangings are now occurring across the country because few Americans associated nooses with racist sentiments until the Jena High School incident created national headlines.
Nooses can be racist or not, depending on the context. The hangman noose has been a symbol of dread and foreboding since the middle ages. It’s the card you don’t want to draw from a pack of Tarot cards. Hangman nooses have been incorporated into Halloween displays for decades. (Halloween Magazine even post instructions for tying nooses on its website at http://www.halloweenmagazine.com) A few years ago, a woman committed suicide by hanging herself from a tree in her front yard. Unfortunately, she chose Halloween eve to end her life. Her body dangled for days in full view of passerbys who thought it was part of the Halloween decorations. Today, she would be cut down and charged with a hate crime.
Are we to ban such classic western movies as Lonesome Dove, The Hanging Tree, and The Oxbow Incident simply because nooses play an important role in them. The hunt for nooses is turning into a witch hunt with often ludicrous results. The U.S. Army announced yesterday that it had ended its investigation into a noose-hanging incident at Anniston Army Depot. The “noose” turned out to have been a tie-day that had fallen from a truck delivering supplies to the depot.
The three Jena High School students who hung the nooses claim they did not realize that nooses have racist connotations. They claim they were merely replicating the famous lynching scene from Lonesome Dove, in which Texas Rangers string up with outlaws. This claim has been ridiculed by just about everyone, except those who actually investigated the incident. According to the Jena Times, state Welfare Supervisor Melinda Edwards said it might surprise everyone to learn that the three students did not have knowledge of black history in relation to that hanging of black citizens in the south during the civil rights movement.
“We discussed this in great detail with those students,” Edwards said. “They honestly had no knowledge of the history concerning nooses and black citizens. This may seem hard to believe for some people, but this is exactly what everyone on the committee determined.”
She also said that once the historical significance of the nooses was revealed to the students and how it was considered a tremendous insult to those of the black race, they showed great remorse. “When they were told about the historical relevance of the nooses and how others would interpret their actions, they really were very remorseful,” she said. “I can honestly say that these boys regretted tremendously ever hanging those nooses.”
Blair, I hope Melinda Edwards is providing a fair characterization of her conversation with the noose hangers. I am inclined to think that, like most young people caught in the act, the boys were placing the best possible face on the situation. I am also inclined to believe that the committee did a less than thorough job of pointing out the historical significance of a noose hanging in a tree. I say that because, in the wake of the incident, neither the Jena Times, nor Superintendent Breithaupt, said anything about the noose being a hateful symbol. In fact, everyone in the white community, with the partial exception of Billy Fowler, has assured me that the nooses were incidental, unimportant, a silly prank, etc.
Therefore, anyone protesting the nooses was, by definition, over-reacting–in the view of white leaders, there was nothing legitimate against which one could react.
If public officials had come out with the kind of stirring denunciation of the noose symbol Ms. Edwards comments suggest, black families would have been satisfied. But when several black parents took their concerns to the school board, no one would listen to them, ostensibly because they weren’t on the agenda. This suggests that no one on the board at that time (the composition of the school board has changed markedly since that time) took the concerns of the parents seriously. There was no sense of urgency whatsoever.
In the high brow article I mentioned in the “All Nooses, All the Time” post, Robin Givhan suggests that the black students should simply have ignored the nooses. Other commentators have made similar suggestions.
The students, and their parents, would have moved on from the noose incident if public officials had validated their outrage by making the kind of comments Ms. Edwards is making now. But Jena officials did precisely the opposite. Not only did they pass the symbol off as an innocent prank, they never so much as hinted that a noose hanging from a tree on the white side of the school yard could be anything but a harmless prank.
Failure to protest, under these circumstances, would have been tantamount to submission to white supremacy. I don’t toss terms like “white supremacy” around lightly. The phrase is over-used. But it fits the Jena situation perfectly and folks in Jena need to deal with that fact.
I’ll say it again–Jena is America. Smug comentators who advise black people to smile and walk away from nooses and other symbols of hate obviously do not feel the noose symbol as an intimidating, humiliating assertion of white privilege and white superiority. I say “feel” rather than “think” because I am not referring to considered reflection, I am talking about an initial, visceral gut reaction. Those who do not feel this way should not pass judgment on those who do. Our emotional response to a wide range of symbols is driven by personal experience and social position.
If the white folks in Jena are beginning to understand how their black neighbors think and feel, I am pleased. Ms. Edwards comments are a step in the right direction, whatever their motivation.
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Easy to lay it all on the backs of the white man, but what do you propose we should do about the situation?
Small towns are different than big cities, names drawn by computer randomization in big cities often have nothing invested in high profile cases, not so with small towns where there is only a few degrees of separation no matter what color one may be. It’s easy to print sensational eye grabbing mantras like “All whitey jury” or “All devil jury” and then completely leave out the machinations of small town life, such as what threats may have been going around, or is worth it in the long run to show up for jury duty in this case, is the risk worth the reward, etc. So then what do you propose? Should we be sending in SWAT teams to enforce citizens, who for their own reasons would rather shirk their civic duty, to show up for jury duty? Sounds like a PR nightmare to me.
at least one-quarter of the composition of any jury should be of the same race as the defendant whenever possible. White people don’t feel this problem because it isn’t something we need to worry about.
For clarification, the above statement is what I was replying to.