Stephanie Holmes of the British Broadcasting Corporation may be the first journalist to focus on the issue of birds-of-a-feather self-segregation. According to Anita L. Allen, a University of Pennsylvania professor, “American society is much too full of what are metaphorically ‘white-only shade trees’ and ‘black-only shade trees. We are much too content to let these pockets of segregation persist.”The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity recently published a paper called “The Dangers of Not Speaking About Race.” According to the authors, America now practices a “racism without racists,” based on four primary assumptions (what Friends of Justice calls “the four pillars of the New Jim Crow”).
The first assumption is that race no longer matters in America.
The second assumption is that whatever vestigial traces of racial tension may exist are driven by the dysfunction within underclass minority communities.
Third (and most critical for our present purposes), is the assumption that voluntary self-segregation is natural, normal, and essentially healthy.
The final assumption flows from the first three: America is a meritocracy with a level playing field.
The article below pays particular attention to pillar number three: self-segregation.
We all know that America is a highly segregated society. A drive through most affluent suburbs, most inner city neighborhoods, or a visit to most Protestant churches on Sunday morning would illustrate the point. But is this such a bad thing?
Anita Allen thinks it’s a bad thing; and I agree.
The response to Jena (people like Alan Bean and Mychal Massie notwithstanding) breaks down along racial lines. White people often have a hard time seeing a noose hanging from a tree as a big deal. Many African Americans refuse to see Justin Barker as a victim. White people tend to identify with Jena’s white residents; black people commonly demonize them.
Few observers on either side of the racial divide understand how bizarre missteps by a handfull of public officials created a toxic environment for all students, black and white.
Black and white Americans need to talk a lot more than they do. In particular, we need to talk about race. We need to talk about Jena.
Segregated worlds have created segregated experience which produce segregated perceptions. On the whole, as I have often suggested, African Americans have a more nuanced and informed grasp of racial issues than white Americans–but that doesn’t mean that learning can’t flow in both directions.
Unravelling race relations in the US
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By Stephanie Holmes
BBC News
When three hangman’s nooses were suspended from a tree in a school playground in a small Louisiana town, it sparked a chain of events which has fuelled a furious debate over race, justice and symbolism in the US.
The Jena noose incident spawned a series of copycat acts
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The coils of knotted rope which swung in the shade of the tree recalled the nooses used to hang black men in collective lynchings carried out by white mobs in the southern states as recently as the 1940s.
The incident in the small town of Jena, which culminated in a group of black youths being charged with attempted second-degree murder for allegedly beating a white boy, has spawned a series of copycat acts.
Nooses have been hung on doors, pinned up in workplaces and slipped into letters.
New York’s government is now considering criminalising any representation of the noose as a hate crime.
Some African-American analysts argue that the recurring use of the noose as an instrument of intimidation reveals deep and unresolved racial tensions in US society.
Symbol
“The noose, in the context of Louisiana, is a symbol of a technique of racial intimidation,” explains Professor Anita L Allen, of the University of Pennsylvania’s law school.
Columbia University students denounced this noose on a teacher’s door
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“Up until the 1940s, African-Americans were ritualistically hung from nooses in trees, killed and tortured – and this memory persists.”
Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Centre’s Intelligence Project, which monitors hate groups operating across the US, agrees.
“The noose in US history is intimately associated with the Ku Klux Klan. It became the symbol of the worst the southern white supremacists could do,” he told the BBC News website from Alabama.
At Columbia University, in New York, a black professor arrived at work earlier this month to find a noose hung from the door of her office.
Nooses have also recently been reported to have been found in a coast guard cadet’s bag and outside a Manhattan post office.
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 American society is much too full of what are metaphorically ‘white-only shade trees’ and ‘black-only shade trees’ 
Professor Anita L Allen, Pennsylvania University
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Mr Potok argues that the rise in the number of incidents involving nooses echoes an increase in the number of hate groups across the US, which has grown by 40% over the past six years.
“There really has been an outbreak of incidents,” he says. “They reflect a much wider white backlash. This is not a handful of Klansmen and neo-Nazis but widespread anger.”
Divided spaces
In Jena, the nooses – reportedly in the three school colours – were hung from a tree where whites used to congregate, a day after a black pupil asked the headmaster if he could sit in its shade.
Some public zones remain divided along race lines
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Months later, a white teenager was violently attacked and kicked at the school, allegedly by six of his black schoolmates.
The response of the local justice department, which initially charged five of the six with attempted second degree murder and set prohibitively high bail costs for them, provoked anger.
Some of charges were subsequently downgraded.
According to Anita L Allen, although the history of lynching is widely known, it is not on the school curriculum and the “full horror and terror” of the noose’s significance may remain unclear to a 16-year-old who would see it as merely an “intimidating or cheeky” act.
The underlying problem, she insists, is the fact that the use of public spaces – such as the tree for shade – continues to be defined by skin colour.
“American society is much too full of what are metaphorically ‘white-only shade trees’ and ‘black-only shade trees’,” Ms Allen says. “We are much too content to let these pockets of segregation persist.”
She sees the schoolyard as the place where broader race struggles are played out and erupt into conflict.
“If you have playgrounds that are single-race or school proms – as often happens in the US south – that are for one race or the other, or students who dine separately from one another… then I think we are asking for trouble.”
‘Bifurcated world’
She points to a recent Supreme Court ruling which threw out voluntary affirmative action programmes operating in schools in Seattle and Louisville, Kentucky to encourage mixed-race schools.
“Now we are back-pedalling on that approach and the legal context for desegregation is being destroyed and the social and political will to desegregate the society is disappearing with the result that we live in this bifurcated black/white world,” she says.
But Mr Potok reckons that the US needs to look beyond its borders, rather than to its backyards, for the source of race tensions.
“You can see it from the comments in reaction to this case on the internet. I would argue that racial nationalism is going up. It is a function of globalisation, of the weakening nation-state.”
‘Riot and mayhem’
For Mychal Massie, the head of Project 21, a group of conservative African-Americans linked to a Washington-based think-tank, the whole case has been blown out of proportion by the US media because of what he believes is an intrinsically liberal bias.
“They made it an issue of race when it should not be about race. You had seven thugs, who were black, who beat a white young man, beat him unconscious,” he told the BBC News website.
“That’s not race, that’s riot and mayhem! They should be held accountable for their actions.”
He insists the noose cases are random, isolated incidents linked up by the media, and that Jena’s violent school brawl is not connected to the “teenage prank” of months earlier.
“We cannot take these incidents and say that they are indicative of a pandemic of racism that is spreading across America, it is just not the case,” he said.
In Jena, the shade tree – which had itself become a symbol of conflict in its own right – has been cut down, but the issues it exposed remain deeply rooted.
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Friends of Justice 
There is also the problem of not reporting all the facts, or purposely or not misreporting them.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1024/p09s01-coop.html
This is a piece of British journalist momentous-sounding ‘analysis’ written by a woman with essentially no knowledge of and no interest in the caveats and complexities we’ve been discussing. She agrees with you, naturally.
As for self-segregation being a good or fine thing, I’ve never said it. I wish it didn’t exist to the extent it does. How, though? Do we force black people to congregate with whites, even if they kind of don’t want to? Do we prohibit groups of white people? That would be a start, let freedom ring and all.
One thing’s pretty likely, any natural flow toward less informal segregation at Jena High – a flow which does sound like it was taking place, what with the multi-racial parties and support from white students for the demonstration under the tree and so on – probably has taken quite a blow.
For one moment, let us allow ourselves the luxury of looking at the Jena 6 situation using the type of logic train that their supporters use.
Mychal Bell was adjudicated for a battery charge and placed on probation. Normal if this was his first offense.
Bell was later adjudicated for a property destruction charge. DA Reed Walters agreed with extending his current probation with another. Everyone deserves a second chance, right?
Then Bell was adjudicated with a second battery charge, his third felony. Well, ok, he’s a star on our high school football team. We’ll give him a third chance and extend his probation once again.
Whoops, a second destruction of property charge and his fourth felony adjudication? Perhaps if we give him another probation, he will graduate high school, move on to play college ball, and get out of our hair. “Mychal, fly right and you can escape this one-horse town.”
A third assault charge? “Mychal, if we charge you with a fifth juvenile felony, we have to send you to jail. So, here’s the deal. We’re going to charge you as an adult. Cop the plea and we will put you in the first-offender adult program like we did for Justin Sloan, and get you probation again so you can go play college ball. Then when your probation is over, we will clear your record and none of this ever happened.”
Are these the actions of racist, sentence-hungry judges and prosecutors? Or, a compassionate system that seeks, rather than imprisonment, some other judicial means? The latter, obviously. (Remember, we are using the same train of logic now as Bell’s supporters.)
How about another example?
Let’s see, two battery adjudications and now a third assault-charge. Hmm, looks like this young man follows trends.
Next, two destruction of property adjudications and now we have a burned school. Following the logic of Bell’s supporters concerning established trends, obviously Bell was the arsonist responsible.
So, there we have it. In the very scenario painted by the Jena 6 supporters and using their logic, we have here a prosecutor and a judge whose lack of getting tough on crime (damned liberals anyway) released a serial criminal to assault yet another person and burn down the school.
Say, Alan, has Bell’s old girlfriend healed from her eye injury yet? How about posting a picture of how she looks today? Oh, and did you get a copy of the car receipt yet?
Twana Brawley, Duke LaCrosse, Claremont McKenna . . . all were racial hoaxes designed to rile up black people. There is basically no racism in this country, though there is a modest backlash by adolescents against the constant torrant of anti-racism which rings like a parade of falsehoods. Take the Tupac “noose” incident. Tupac sang endlessly of shooting black and white people, cops, and everyone else. What is more damaging to black people, this sort of garbage or the phantom racism the media likes to trumpet and its hustlers, like the useless Al Sharpton.
I’m almost 100% certain the Columbia incident is a hoax, probably perpetrated by the esteemed professor herself. No one is racist anymore; it looks like you’ll have to find some other excuse for black failure.