Much has been said about the mainstream media’s slow reaction to the case of the Jena 6.  Actually, I was very pleased with the media’s response time: a slow response is better than no response (which is what I usually get when I try to interest journalists in a criminal justice horror story).  The mainstream folks have atoned for their supposed sins by generating an avalanche of Jena 6 and noose stories.  The real anomaly is the silence of the progressive media, in general, and the liberal blogosphere, in particular.

D. Yobachi Boswell’s BlackPerspective.net features a probing assessment of the virtual whiteout on the Jena story within the progressive white blogoshpere.  It has been suggested by some white lefty types that the a-list blogs restrict their attention to beltway politics and legal issues.  Well, Mr. Boswell says, doesn’t the recent Jena hearing in DC qualify on both counts?  Yet, once again, white liberal bloggers are MIA.  

A number of posts from black bloggers raised similar questions after the massive march on September 20th.

Conservative bloggers love the Jena story because it provides a coveted opportunity to trash Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.  This is especially true after the Jena Geek Squad started flooding the web with self-serving misinformation–the kind of nonsense that inevitably follows any published story on Jena with a comment section (including every post I write). 

But what about the white progressives?  Don’t they care about racial inequality, social justice, hate crimes and all that good liberal stuff?

Not really.  Why should they?  These people have never seen a family member or a close friend mangled beyond recognition by the criminal justice system.  White drug dealers (and every American college campus is crawling with them) have little to fear from the criminal justice system.  The Duke Lacrosse team brushed up against a vindictive prosecutor, but they had the legal firepower to turn the tables.  White people desperately want to believe that America is a level-playing-field meritocracy: a comforting notion for those on top.

White liberals (or progressives, if you prefer) love the moral clarity of the civil rights movement, a time when the issues were simple and straightforward.  Or were they?  If the typical white progressive was suddenly transported back to 1962, he would join the sensible center in condemning Martin Luther King as a race baiter, a shit-stirrer, a polarizing radical. 

Some would suggest that white liberals are silent on the Jena 6 issue because they don’t want to be associated with Mychal Bell’s oft-lamented criminal history.  But they were ignoring this story long before Mychal’s juvenile record became accessible to the public. 

Here’s the simple truth, white liberals don’t like the kind of people who are routinely chewed up and spit out by the American criminal justice system.  They love poor people in the abstract, but they generally don’t know any and, more to the point, they arrange their lives so as to insure that they never do.  Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but it gets in the way of moral clarity.

Mr. Boswell loves the people who are routinely chewed up and spit out by the American criminal justice sytsem because some of them are his friends and family members.  How do I know that?  Call it an educated guess.  Boswell is African American, and intimate association with the system is, with very few exceptions, an inescapable aspect of the black experience in our country.

The upside is that even the silence of progressive white bloggers on the Jena affair is contributing to the long-postponed conversation this story has unleashed.  Our silence defines who we are every bit as much as our rhetoric.  A lot of what we are learning about ourselves ain’t pretty, but we need to know.

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Coverage of the Jena 6 Hearings by White Progressive Bloggosphere

Back on the day of the Jena 6 March, Pam at Pam’s House Blend lamented the White Bloggosphere being MIA on Jena 6.

Well, we were enlightened that one reason for this was that the top tier so-called “progressive” bloggers that Pam specifically mentioned are “in the beltway” bloggers who blog on beltway issues.

Oh that’s it? Well, shame on me for my darn tong lashing.

Well certainly congress is in the beltway, so I know these blogs covered the October 16th hearing on the Jena 6 and hate crimes that took place with the House Judiciary Committee this week; because what’s more beltway than congress?

Well let’s run down that same list and see what good coverage we find this time:

Daily Kos, again nothing on the front page from the contributing writers, including Kos himself, though he had time to writer approximately 8 different post on the 16th alone.

Talkingpointsmemo.com, umm well, no commentary from them either; but at least their news headlines feed picked up an article by the associated press that ended up on their page by accident. They might want to look into that feed so that they won’t have that mistake again. I don’t think they intended to have that information on their.

As a matter of fact, a search of the site’s search engine only brings up one article ever on Talkingpoinsmemo, from September 22, lambasting Presidential Candidate Fred Thompson for not knowing anything about the Jena 6. The hysterically ironic part about a Talkingpointsmemo writer taking Thompson to task about that on the Talkingpointsmemo site, is that; even if Thompson read Talkingpointsmemo.com every single day, he still would not know a thing about the Jena 6.

atrios.blogspot.com/ – not a word!

How bout TalkLeft, which Pam previously described as having had “positioned itself as the leading progressive blog about criminal justice issues “

*Ding* *Ding* *Ding* *Ding* *Ding* TalkLeft actually dropped it’s readers a little note on the hearings and even minimally recognized what the real issue is.

So far we have all of a strapping 5 sentences from leading liberal white blog sites.

So let’s go on to firedoglake.com/to see if he can up the batting average…No! But I will give them credit, that their archive’s do at least contain 6 or 7 post on Jena since coming late to the party on the September 20th. Maybe I just needed to give them a couple more days to catch up again before doing this survey of “progressive” bloggers.

Well ya know the HuffingtonPostgot our back right – wrong. Not even the token black guy on the site could muster up one for the home team like last time. And this is with over 40 articles posted on Tuesday alone. I guess Kassey Kasem would tell us that this is not a Top 40 issue to white liberal America (get it? Kassey Kasem, top 40?).

Though, white writer Heather Wood has a decent piece on 10 Mistakes White People Make When Talking About Race After reading the comments on the White Bloggosphere being MIA on Jena 6, I’m thinking a lot of y’all could really stand to read this.

Pam noted in the MIA post that ThinProgresscould only muster two sentences last time. Well not to be outdone by their blanketing September 20th coverage, they come back with two more sentences buried in their “ThinkFast” daily roundup type post.

So even after the historic march, and even when the issue is in congress, so-called “progressive” netroots “reporters” don’t find the issue very news worthy. Maybe they’re taking the lead from progressive television favorite Keith Olberman who had no real time for the story either. I guess with doing two segments on Ellen DeGeneres’ dog on back-to-back days, and devoting his number 1 story the day of the hearing to Britney gossip, news that matters to a major part of his viewing constituency just didn’t matter to him.

But then again, when white women cry and when precious blond girls are having a tough time being rich, who in the news business has time for things like, oh I don’t know, say…the news?

Bottom line is white “Progressives” continue to ignore something that’s of great importance to a major part of their constituency. What’s more striking though than them not responding to what we care about is that fact that they don’t care about it in and of themselves.

Maybe we need to look more deeply at this liberal exploitation; where we’re used for our votes because they couldn’t win the house, the senate, or the presidency without us, but when we want something, it’s like, get loss.

I guess racial injustice; equal protection under the law; and fairness and equality in prosecution, enforcement of the law, and sentencing; aren’t things a “progressive” movement should be concerned about.

Maybe if we had more sympathetic defendants then there’d be a little interest from the white progressive world.

Maybe if it was this Louisianan under the gun, then they’d take notice: