Jena Six the Hard Way

Stephanie Greenlea

Playing the Game

Silences on racial inequality in America have a solid history.  For decades during the civil rights movement, black activists and their allies pulled off innovative collective action and made sure that the media was there to see it.  In print and on screen, inequality by race (and white investment in it) became visible. Ultimately protest faded and coverage turned away, but not without leaving a peculiar legacy. Today most folks agree that racism is bad, that racists are “the bad guys” and that no one is inherently better than anyone else.  Having thus declared a change of mind, mainstream America became anxious to put the race saga to rest.

These silences serve a purpose, too, by ensuring a certain stability for the way that things are.  Inequality by race carries on, and in few places is this injustice more acutely felt than in the American criminal justice system. Unwillingness to talk about race as a foundational problem leaves everything intact. The business of mass imprisonment may proceed as usual, with high stakes for poor, young people of color.

From these thick silences, Americans across the country eke out a tenuous peace in order to go about daily life. In the absence of a sustained public discourse, the daily relevance of race finds most articulation in the marginalized spaces of black barbershops, living rooms, and through shared experience of friends. It is a remarkable game of co-existing, functional and occasionally comfortable, even when it doesn’t seem quite fair. 

And so, when Mychal Bell and five others were charged with severe crimes, Jena residents did the American thing to do.  In August, the town held a vigil at which underlying race issues were silenced for the town’s need for peace.  The way that Jena initially played it, silence was more valuable than race-talk.  It was a shortcut to unity and an easier way.

 Jena Six The Hard Way

Early research by Friends of Justice supported a race-centered reading of the events in Jena.  Alan Bean’s final narratives resonated with the buried conversations of black Americans.  This discourse was exhumed and aggregated through strategic organizing on the ground and innovative use of social media. With tens of thousands of supporters at marches and in the blogosphere these perspectives came forth in a remarkably public way. As with civil rights movements of the past, the September 20th protest elevated race talk from submerged, scattered conversation to a focused, highly-visible counter-narrative.  Collective action had changed the game. Rather than silence over-determining public interpretation, race-talk offered a competing narrative of increasingly equal weight.

Though it unsettled many observers, shouting about race in a culture prone to shushing presented an opportunity for a better way forward.  Rather than taking the easy route through silence, the protests demanded a more difficult engagement with racial justice.  Jena Six supporters imagined a future where interracial peace was not predicated upon ignored inequalities, but resulted instead from deep and meaningful equality of opportunity. They wanted to play it the hard way.

Obama Rolls the Dice

Remarkably, the counter-narrative on Jena became an important part of the 2008 presidential election, and by extension, an influence on subsequent national discussions on race.  The scale of the September protests made Jena a litmus test of candidates’ responsiveness to the expressed concerns of the people.  When Jesse Jackson critiqued Obama’s silence, it was clear that Obama had a heavy decision to make.  Mass support for Jena and related racial justice issues made continued silence untenable.  So, eventually the Illinois senator spoke.  When he did, he risked white backlash and black disappointment. 

Ever the good politician, Obama couched his remarks in language about shared commitments to American values (peace, equality, freedom) across race.  These rhetorical strategies allowed him to address both white fear of racial discord and black desire to have their experience taken seriously.  Clearly, Obama entered the election ready to play.  But his comments also suggest that he was willing (at least rhetorically) to play it the hard way.  His remarks on Jena would be some of his earliest articulations of a concern for racial justice in the campaign.  Breaking silences at the highest levels of government, his actions prompted candidates Clinton and Edwards to do the same. As a result of their collective action, supporters of the Jena Six had shifted national discourse on race from silence to engagement with racial justice questions.

Importantly, Obama’s support for the Jena Six made him legitimate to scores of black Americans, many of them the young people who also supported the defendants. His accountability to their experiences was rewarded richly by votes and growing loyalty.  His message of hope and unity no doubt seemed more trustworthy to black Americans after articulating that he was interested in achieving those ideals by addressing to racial inequality rather than skipping over it. By the South Carolina primary in January 2008, Obama had apparently gained enough traction with voters to enjoy their help in making him a candidate that could win.

Subsequent events would cause Obama to be more and more explicit about the relevance of race in American inequality.  Though Jena Six supporters probably did not imagine it at the time, his full-length, globally televised speech on the subject was prefigured in part by their small-town organizing.  By presenting an alternative reading of the Jena Six, Friends of Justice and their allies responded to the high stakes of the criminal justice system for black Americans, and helped to change the game for things to come. In pursuit of victory that is meaningful to all, playing the hard way is the only way to go.

Stephanie Greenlea, a doctoral student at Yale University, is currently writing her dissertation on the Jena 6 phenomenon.