The day ended with an aging hate-monger named Richard Barrett screaming into a megaphone to an audience of five.  At its inglorious height, the “Nationalist Movement” rally drew thirty lost souls to Jena.

Unfortunately, a crowd of 200 counter-protesters breathed a spark of life into the tawdry charade.  White Nationalists and New Black Panthers–equally opposed to the non-violent vision of Martin Luther King–trudged the streets of Jena exchanging insults. 

The most detailed coverage of the non-event comes from Abbey Brown of the the Alexandria Towntalk.  Read and weep.

Jena’s black community joyfully embraced the immense throng who visited Jena back in September.  Wisely, Jena’s white folks gave the Barrett fiasco a pass. 

If the remaining five defendants (Robert Bailey Jr., Theo Shaw, Carwin Jones, Bryant Purvis and Jesse Ray Beard) are offered reasonable plea agreements, the Jena 6 saga will end quietly. 

Richard Barrett wants to drag America back to 1955.  The Panthers are mired in the sturm und drang of 1968.  In contrast, the 20,000 people who rode the buses to Jena back in September were firmly rooted in the present.  They understood that most African Americans have benefited tremendously from the civil rights movement.  They also know that the issues that occupied Dr. King during his last year of life, war and poverty, continue to give the American dream a nightmarish quality.

Brandishing dangerous fire arms, strutting around in military fatigues, exchanging insults and epithets with mirror-image opponents–nothing good can come from this.  There was a cartoonish quality to yesterday’s demonstration that degrades and devalues genuine non-violent protest.

I have paid very little attention to the Barrett hate-fest; attention is precisely what the lunatic fringe craves.   In retrospect, I have two good words to say about yesterday’s protest . . . It’s over!

Liberal Democrats are outraged!  Why would Barack Obama have anything good to say about a conservative icon like Ronald Reagan?  Good God, what was the man thinking?

What did Obama actually say?  Here’s a good summary:

“I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America, in a way that Richard Nixon did not, and in a way that Bill Clinton did not,” the Senator told the Reno Gazette-Journal. “He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. . . . He just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was, ‘We want clarity, we want optimism.'”

Obama is saying that Ronald Reagan altered the American narrative so profoundly that he changed the ideological trajectory of the nation.  Policy, in Obama’s view, is rooted in narrative–a simple story about who we are.

Paul Krugman begs to differ.  Reagan’s narrative, he says, was fundamentally flawed because Reaganonomics didn’t work.  The New York Times columnist prefer’s Bill Clinton’s narrative:

The Reagan-Bush years have exalted private gain over public obligation, special interests over the common good, wealth and fame over work and family. The 1980s ushered in a Gilded Age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess, and of neglect.

All true, and I’m sure Barack Obama would agree.  But debunking Reagan’s narrative is easy; formulating a viable alternative is the hard part. 

Bill Clinton managed to get elected, and re-elected, by meeting the Reaganites halfway–stealing the Republicans best ideas and making them palatable (just barely) to Democrats.  Hillary Clinton has embraced the same policy of “triangulation”–hence her tepid support for the invasion of Iraq.

Barack Obama gives the Gipper his due because he is trying to change the narrative.  To do this, he must tap into the generous, compassionate, inclusive impulses that exist in America, fanning the flames through storytelling.  That’s what Martin Luther King, Jr. accomplished–and he may have been the last progressive American to turn the trick.

Ronald Reagan couldn’t simply jettison Dr. King’s narrative, he had to adapt it to his own.  Reagan sucked the wind out of King’s dream by shifting the emphasis.  Reagan loved black people, so long as they possessed the entrepreneurial spirit he so adored.  Upwardly mobile black folks who wanted a hand up, not a hand out, were A-OK with the Great Communicator.  Poor people who couldn’t compete were out of luck.

Bill Clinton’s mid-90s welfare reform package represented a tacit admission that Reagan’s narrative was driving the national trajectory. 

Friends of Justice is a criminal justice reform organization.  So why have I taken a sudden interest in politics?  The American criminal justice system is a creature of the zeitgeist, a reflection of the dominant narrative.  The system will change only as the national story changes.

Speaking yesterday at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Barack Obama seemed to have been reading my mail when he decried the gap between, “Scooter Libby justice and Jena Six justice.”  But that distinction, by itself, won’t move Middle America unless the narrative changes.  Obama doesn’t talk about deserving and undeserving poor people (ala Reagan); he talks about hopeful poor people and hopeless poor people.  Currently, we are sending the hopeful poor to college and the hopeless poor to prison.   Obama wants to change that.

“I wasn’t born into money or great wealth, but I had hope!” Obama told the worshippers at Ebenezer. “I needed some hope to get here. My daddy left me when I was little, but I had hope! I was raised by a single mother, but I had hope! I was given love, an education, and some hope!”

Most progressives are too wonky to understand the power of narrative.  We know how the system works, and we understand the importance of heavy political lifting.  But we don’t know how to inspire people.  Worse still, we don’t think we have to inspire people.

Amy Waldman, the journalist who penned an Atlantic Monthly essay called “The Truth about Jena,” recently appeared on a public radio program to talk about her Jena piece.  Waldman was asked the right question: “When you compare this to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, do we lack the right symbols, the right characters, the right stark imagery to effect positive social change, or are the issues so murky that we can’t have that simplicity this time around?”

She responded like a true Clintonesque policy wonk–great critique; no meaningful solution:

In Jena, I felt like there are specific issues that do need to be addressed when it comes to race. The quality of indigent defense, which affects blacks and whites, but I would argue disproportionately affects blacks. The fact that there are still some schools that in fact have never actually desegregated. So you have parents who are sending their children outside of town to public, all-white schools so they can avoid integration. The town lines, so the black areas are mostly excluded from the town. These are difficult issues that take time to resolve, that will take tenacious, dogged, not-very-exciting work, often bureaucratic work. I think it’s easier to go for the character-driven story, rather than taking on these drier issues.

Why then, did Waldman’s Atlantic Monthly piece focus so tenaciously on Mychal Bell and DA Reed Walters?  Because it’s the human story, not the “bureaucratic work” and the “drier issues” that capture reader interest.  True, behind-the-scenes slogging is necessary to effect change; but it is never sufficient. 

Friends of Justice works hard to publicize human dramas like Jena and Tulia because the intense conversation these stories inspire shifts the dominant narrative–however slightly.  

I was a $700/month psychiatric social worker in Louisville, Kentucky when Ronald Reagan made his successful run for the presidency in 1979.  You could almost feel the shift in public policy.  A few months after the election, a young Roman Catholic nun sobbed uncontrollably as she poured out her heart to me.  “We’re taking people with mental illness and forcing them out onto the streets.  They’ll all end up in prison–where else could they go?”

She was right.  And nothing much has changed over the last 28 years.  That’s what Obama means by a national trajectory rooted in a simple narrative.  Reagan didn’t deal in dry issues and bureacratic detail–he told evocative stories and the issues and bureacracy fell into place.

I don’t like Reagan’s story.  It has emptied the mental hospitals and filled up the prisons.  It has created a huge and hopeless surplus population.  Reagan didn’t tell the right story; but he told it well.  If progressives don’t learn from Reagan they will continue to live with his legacy.

The reporter from Diversity Inc. called me for an African American perspective on the Tiger Woods incident.   In a badly mangled attempt at a compliment, golf commentator Kelly Tilghman opined that if the golfing fraternity wanted to catch Tiger they would have to lynch him in a back alley.  Did I think that, in the wake of Jena, Tiger Woods should have taken offense?

“As a white guy, it’s hard for me to speak from the African American perspective,” I replied.  “Do you still want to hear what I have to say?” 

The reporter assured me that he was all ears.

Tiger was right to accept Ms. Tighman’s apology and move on, I said.  In fact, had it not been for Jena, I doubt anyone would have noticed the insensitive remark. 

The nooses in Jena were dangerous because they were aimed at low-status black athletes.  The threat of a literal lynching was miniscule; Mychal Bell and company had little to fear from the noose hangers.  But the white perpetrators knew that, as subsequent events made clear, the full weight of local authority was on their side.  The very real threat of a legal lynching gave the Jena nooses a sinister aspect that few white Americans fully appreciate. 

The “hang the Jena 6 crowd” (and their name is legion) don’t realize that our criminal justice system is skewed in favor of the prosperous and the powerful; Jena 6 supporters understand this all too well.

The “lynch Tiger” comment was tacky and insensitive, especially in a post-Jena context.  An apology was appropriate.

But Mr. Wood’s gracious acceptance of the apology was also fitting.  The offensive remark came from an old friend who genuinely admires Tiger’s prowess.

References to lynching, verbal or physical, might offend a man like Tiger Woods, but he has no reason to find them personally threatening.  Charged with a serious crime, Woods would enjoy public sympathy and the charges would be dropped unless the state had all its ducks in a row.

You don’t believe me?  Consider the case of David Medina, a Texas Supreme Court Judge indicted this week by a grand jury.  The Medina’s $500,000 home was destroyed by fire in June of last year.  The conflagration spread to neighboring houses, causing a total of $900.000 damage.  The Fire Marshall called it arson after evidence of an accelerant was discovered at the scene.  Moreover, the Medina’s were deeply in dept and the mortgage company was threatening to foreclose after several payments were missed.

It’s hardly surprising that a grand jury decided to indict.  Neither is it surprising that Houston District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal immediately dropped the charges.  David Medina was a Supremem Court Judge, an appointee of Texas Governor Rick Perry. 

It is often said that America has a two-tier legal system: one tier for low-status folks like the Jena 6 (95% of American inmates fall into this category); and a second tier for high-status people like the Duke Lacrosse boys, children of privilige who run afoul of the law only in extraordinary circumstances no matter how egregious their behavior. 

I would suggest a third tier reserved for Enron executives, celebrities like Tiger Woods, and the circle surrounding prominent politicians like Rick Perry.  Members of this Brahmin caste can be convicted, but the state must move heaven and earth to do it.  Generally, as in Mr. Medina’s case, it’s just not worth it.

Our goal in Jena was to give the Jena 6 equal justice under law–nothing more; nothing less.   Folks like Tiger Woods and David Medina have little to fear from the criminal justice system; kids like Robert Bailey and Mychal Bell aren’t so fortunate.

Most criminal cases are unambiguous.  Evidence of guilt is strong, the defendant knows he can’t win at trial, a plea agreement is negotiated, and that’s that.  Between 95 and 97% of criminal cases end this way.  When a case proceeds to a jury trial it is either because a guilty defendant decides to roll the dice with the jury or because the authorities got the wrong guy.

But how is a jury supposed to know which of these scenarios is playing out in the courtroom?

A recent string of DNA exonerations suggests that innocent defendants are convicted far more often than most people imagine.  Low-status black defendants are particularly susceptible.

Juries like to convict; especially when the defendant is black and looks dangerous.  And if you are poor and black you will look dangerous to most white jurors, and there ain’t a damn thing you (or the jurors) can do about it. 

In the face of ambiguous evidence, jurors are faced with an agonizing dilemma: convict, and an innocent man might be going to prison for decades; acquit, and a dangerous man may be unleashed on society.  When due process goes one-on-one with public safety, public safey wins every time.  This is especially true when the defendant, by virtue of being poor and black, looks dangerous.

This is why I argue that at least a third of the jurors selected in every trial should be of the same ethnic group as the defendant. 

Consider the case of Christopher McCowen.  McCowen’s DNA was found on the body of a female murder victim.  McCowen claims he had consensual sex with the victim but didn’t kill her.  That’s the kind of case that ends up in the courtroom.  The story below has appeared in newspapers across the country, and the case was featured on NPR’s Morning Edition this morning.

Mr. McCowen is a black garbageman.  He is physically imposing.  Several jurors felt intimidated by the defendant and said so.  A black juror accused her white counterparts of racism.  At one point the tension in the jury room became was so palpable the foreman called a break to give jurors time to cool off.

This sort of tension is common when racially mixed juries hold the fate of a black defendant in their hands, but the issues rarely spill out into the open because jurors generally keep their feelings to themselves.  If Mr. McCowen gets a new trial he will almost certainly be convicted, his protestations of innocence notwithstanding.  When you are big, black and poor you must prove your innocence beyond a reasonable doubt or you will be convicted. 

Call it racism or call it a simple concern for public safety?  In America, the two issues can hardly be separated.

Jury in Cape Cod Murder Queried on Race

By DENISE LAVOIE

BARNSTABLE, Mass. (AP) — Some jurors who convicted a black garbage man in the murder of a white fashion writer traded allegations of racism Thursday in an unusual hearing called by the judge to determine whether their verdict was tainted by racial bias.

Lawyers for Christopher McCowen sought the hearing after three jurors accused three others of making racially derogatory remarks while deliberating whether McCowen raped and fatally stabbed Christa Worthington in her home in January 2002.

Judge Gary Nickerson could order a new trial if he finds racial bias affected the verdict in November 2006.

The judge questioned the jurors individually in open court, but out of earshot of the other panelists. Each of the first four questioned by midday described racially charged deliberations.

Roshena Bohanna, who is black, told the judge that two women on the panel referred to the defendant as a “big black guy” and said they were afraid of him.

Bohanna said Marlo George, who is white, tried to convince fellow jurors that McCowen had caused the bruises on Worthington’s body and said: “If a big black man hits a woman, then she gets those bruises.”

Bohanna said she and George became confrontational when she asked what McCowen’s race had to do with the bruises and accused her of racism. The jury foreman had to call for a break.

George denied referring to McCowen’s race during that discussion but acknowledged describing McCowen as a “200-pound black man” while arguing that McCowen went to Worthington’s house looking for sex the night she was killed. She said she referred to his race “merely as a descriptive element.”

After Bohanna took offense, she told her she didn’t mean anything derogatory by it.

Bohanna also told the judge she overheard juror Eric Gomes, a dark-skinned man of Cape Verdean descent, tell a white female juror that he does not consider himself black. When Bohanna later had the confrontation with the white juror, she said she heard Gomes say: “That’s the reason why I don’t like black people. Look at the way they act.”

On Thursday, Gomes denied ever saying he did not like black people. “Absolutely not,” he said.

Carol Cahill, who is white, said Bohanna accused all the jurors of being racist during deliberations and herself used a slur toward a white female juror.

“She said, ‘You’re just a ‘cracker from the South,’ or ‘a southern cracker,'” Cahill said.

When the judge asked Cahill if she ever said she was afraid of “a big black guy,” she said: “I did say that I felt ‘intimidated’ … the fact that I was making a decision for his life,” Cahill said. She denied ever referring to his race.

McCowen claimed he had consensual sex with Worthington but that his friend killed her. His defense maintains authorities wrongly focused on him as a suspect because they did not believe Worthington, a 46-year-old writer who had covered fashion in New York and Paris before moving to the small town of Truro, would have a consensual relationship with a black garbage man.

The judge interviewed seven jurors Thursday and ordered all 14 back to court Friday. He told them not to talk about the case with anyone.

McCowen’s attorney, Bob George, said the hearing so far proved McCowen did not get a fair trial.

“There is no doubt in my mind that the jury deliberations in this case have been tainted by racial bias,” he said.

District Attorney Michael O’Keefe left court without commenting.

Does blackness doom Barack Obama?  This insightful opinion piece by Timothy Egan in today’s New York Times parses the question nicely.  We are listening to the voice of experience.

Obama has been criticized for not emphasizing his blackness, for refusing to talk about abiding racism, for sidestepping Jena.  As Egan points out, a black candidate can’t afford to touch these issues unless he or she is appealing to a predominantly black electorate. 

Simply by reminding voters that Obama is black, Hillary Clinton encourages white voters to back her candidacy and black voters to shift their support to Obama.  Since there are far more white voters than black voters in America this process of racial polarization inevitably helps Hillary.

The effect is intensified by the traditional tension between black and Latino voters.

 Since everyone knows that Obama is black, why should the mere mention of the fact encourage white supporters to drift to a white candidate?

Most white voters have moved beyond crude, Mississippi burning racism.  There are plenty of exceptions, of course, especially in the South, but white racial attitudes have changed dramatically in the last generation.  Many liberal whites are actually inspired by the prospect of a black president.

Residual white guilt helps Obama, so far as it goes.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t go very far.  White folks are get warm and fuzzy feelings from black folks like Bill Cosby who (a) rarely reference the bad old days of slavery and Jim Crow, and who (b) consistently disparage the black underclass.  In other words, white voters tend to respond positively to Bill Cosby-style black people and very negatively to the sort of black people Cosby laments.

White attitudes to low-status black people are just as negative as white attitudes were toward black people in general, circa 1950.  As a result, anyone who defends the rights of low-status black people will inevitably create a bad case of cognitive dissonance in the white electorate.  This is why it is so devilishly difficult to mend our badly broken criminal justice system.

Barack Obama is precisely the kind of black person most white America loves to love.  He’s urbane, witty, up beat . . . and he doesn’t rub slavery and Jim Crow in the face of white America. 

Unfortunately for Obama, white Americans can’t look at a black face without being reminded of our nation’s tragic racial history.  That makes us uneasy.  Without losing our enthusiasm for Obama as a candidate, we become slightly more inclined to support Ms. Clinton or Mr. Edwards. 

The effect is subtle, and by no means universal.  But if even 10% of the white electorate is impacted in this way the dynamics of the race change radically. 

Barack Obama isn’t a “race-man”.  He doesn’t talk about the plight of black Americans a whole lot.  And yet white voters have little doubt what Obama would say on the subject of race if he spoke his mind.  Most white democrats would probably agree with Obama’s sentiments, but they would also feel conflicted and defensive. 

This reaction is driven by the cognitive dissonance described earlier intensified by the fear that Obama will hook the racial ambivalence of white independents come the general election.

All of this helps Hillary Clinton, but it doesn’t insure that she will prevail.  Obama is like Jena, a complex reality that drags long-ignored emotions and attitudes out of the shadows.  Is America ready for a black president?

We’ll see.

Timothy Egan  

Race Bait

Mike Huckabee is a study in contradiction.  He’s a bible-believing Southern Baptist who plays base guitar and jokes about asking the Rolling Stones to play at his inaugural.  His conservative credentials on hot-button issues like abortion and gay rights are impeccable; yet he seems genuinely concerned about the environment and social justice issues.

In Baptist circles, “social justice” used to be code for “liberal”.  Real conservatives were too concerned about personal responsibility to care about poor people.  To give “those people” a hand up was to deprive them of a precious opportunity to “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps”.

Like me, Mike Huckabee is a former Baptist minister.  We both attended Southern Baptist seminaries in the 1970s.  Baptists are a tiny minority in my native Western Canada; in 1975 there were probably more Baptists in Louisville, Kentucky than in the entire Dominion of Canada.  In the dark days following the Civil War, southerners rallied around the Southern Baptist Convention, making it the nation’s dominant evangelical denomination.

When I arrived in Louisville in the summer of 1975, the SBC was a good-old-boy network that maintained the appearance of unity by trampling on “extremists”, be they liberal or fundamentalist.  The controlling personalities in the Convention at that time were conservative, traditional, and politically and sociologically savvy.  Their primary goal was to hold a massive denomination together, and that meant focusing on the basics: preaching, missions, evangelism and church growth.

Then it all fell apart.  By the late 1970s, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (known affectionally to fundamentalists as “the whore on the hill”) was under seige.  When Roy Lee Honeycutt became seminary president, he tried to placate the fundamentalist wing by inviting some of their firebrand preachers to address Wednesday morning chapel.

So it was that a tall, dark and handsome Texas evangelist named James Robison came to “Southern”.  Robison was loud, rambunctious and eloquent.  He was also half-crazy.  In one sermon he described a blood-drenched vision of his  wife and young children nailed to the wall of his study accompanied by a personal message from God written in blood.

Robison now admits that during these years he had “a claw” in his brain.  He also had a talented young press agent named Mike Huckabee.  It wasn’t long before Robison suffered a complete physical and emotional collapse, re-emerging as a soft-spoken “Bapti-costal” television personality more concerned with feeding children in Africa than with scaring folks into heaven.

Has Mike Huckabee undergone a similar transformation?

Perhaps.  It was hard to be a Baptist in the 1980s–and it didn’t matter if you were a conservative or a moderate (the handful of genuine Southern Baptist liberals had long since headed for the exits).  The Bible was a problem for everybody.  The Good Book didn’t say much about abortion, one way or the other.  You could find passages that appeared to condemn gay sex; but there were far more texts focused on God’s love for the poor.  No matter where you stood theologically, there were large chunks of the Bible that were best ignored.

The situation was aggravated by the dirty little secret of the fundamentalist resurgence.  Conservative Southern Baptists could rise to national prominence, but only as part of a loose coalition controlled by pro-business republicans.  The result: a marriage of convenience between soul-winning preachers and supply-side economics.  “Values voters” concentrated on homosexuality and abortion to the virtual exclusion of all other issues.  It was the only way to maintain an tentative consensus between conservative Roman Catholics and old style evangelicals.  A movement that eschewed evolutionary science found itself in the dark embrace of social Darwinism. 

Pro-business orthodoxy, with its stress on entrepreneurial passion and personal responsibility, provided the perfect answer to the civil rights movement.  Rejecting the carrot of affirmative action (popularly associated with moral drift and welfare dependency), southerners reached for the stick of mass incarceration. 

Here we see the roots of what the New Jim Crow.  Poor African Americans no longer had to eat in the kitchen or ride at the back of the bus; but the slightest departure from the straight-and-narrow earned a one-way ticket to hell.  While LBJ’s war on poverty receded into the shadows, the prisons filled up with poor black males whose primary sin was an inability to adapt to the rigors of high-tech capitalism.  Texas had 40,000 state prisoners in 1980; we now have 160,000.

Through the ministrations of a smiling and beneficent Ronald Reagan, this marriage between southern evangelicals and corporate Republicans becaming the regnant orthodoxy of America.

The Southern Baptist Convention tied itself to corporate Republicans by driving its moderate minority into exile.  When I returned to Southern Seminary to work on a doctorate in Church History, hard-featured young zealots were forcing the professors I remembered from a decade earlier to walk the plank.   

During my five-year stint as a Ph.D student, the halls of Southern seminary ran with blood.  Those days are now long over.  Under the guidance of the politically flexible Albert Mohler, Southern Seminary has emerged as a bastion of Republican evangelicalism.

It was during this period that Mike Huckabee became president of the Arkansas Baptist Convention.  Leaning on his wit and charm, the Baptist preacher generally avoided the theological rancor of the period.  But it wasn’t long before he left off being a preacher and went into politics.  Like me, he sees his new vocation as Christian ministry by other means.

By all outward signs, Huckabee remains an orthodox evangelical and a socially conservative Republican.  But there are signs that he is no longer driven by the crude compromise underlying the old marriage of convenience.  

Huckabee recently won almost 50% of the African American vote in Arkansas.  As a Baptist pastor he took a stand against the de facto segregation of Southern religious life; a fact black voters appreciated.  But there was more.  Huckabee frequently used his gubernatorial powers to commute the harsh sentences routinely dealt to Arkansas inmates.  The slightest sign of a jailhouse conversion and the Governor was waiting with his pen. 

Huckabee remains a fiscally conservative, small government Republican.  He recently turned down an invitation to appear at the New Baptist Covenant gathering in Atlanta, perhaps fearing that the event was too closely associated with Democrats like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.  Still, as the son of dirt-poor southerners, the presidential candidate consistently identifies with common folk.  People would rather vote for the candidate who looks like the guy they work next to, he likes to say on the stump, rather than the candidate who looks like the guy who laid them off.   Can you imagine Ronald Reagan saying that?

David Kirkpartick of the New York Times has recently noted that Huckabee’s candidacy has received a lukewarm reception from prominent evangelical opinion leaders like James Dobson and Pat Robertson.  Last night, Kirkpatrick expressed similar views on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross. 

The unenthusiastic reviews Mike Huckabee is drawing from the champions of evangelical orthodoxy is similar to the cool reception Barack Obama is receiving from the guardians of the civil rights movement.  Evangelical republicans don’t disagree with Huckabee on theological grounds; their concern is practical.  Huckabee, to their way of thinking, threatens to break asunder the marriage between evangelicals and big business Republicans.  The Arkansas governor generally agrees with fiscal conservatives, but he doesn’t bow and scrape in their presence.  Worse than that, he tilts dangerously toward the environmentalist camp and his “tough on crime” credentials are suspect.

Barack Obama fails to spark enthusiasm among civil rights leaders from Al Sharpton to John Lewis because he refuses to define himself as the champion of black America.  Obama is questionable, in this view, because he transcends the red state-blue state culture war that defined the issues for a generation of politicians and activists.

Barack Obama can preach the civil rights gospel as well as any black leader in America; but civil rights is only part of his vision.  Mike Huckabee can reach out to “values voters” as effectively as any right wing culture warrior; but his heart isn’t in the culture war. 

Obama and Huckabee disagree on the issues, make no mistake, but they are united by a willingness to cross ideological lines in search for votes and a sense of purpose.  Unlike their opponents, these two candidates don’t fit the old culture war categories.

Friends of Justice is a criminal justice reform organization.  When we bring instances of unequal justice to national attention we aren’t just trying to win justice for a few isolated individuals; we are creating transformative narratives with the power to change the bedrock assumptions that drive public policy. 

The corruption of the criminal justice system has been a bi-partisan effort.  Democrats and Republicans have been equally afraid of being labeled “soft on crime”.  But the winds are beginning to shift.  We are seeing the advent of a new kind of politician.  It is possible, perhaps likely, that neither Obama nor Huckabee will be the next president of these United States.  But they represent the wave of the future.

Young evangelicals might agree (sort of) with their parents about gay rights and abortion, but they are growing concerned about the environmental crisis and talking about social justice.  For the first time in my life experience, Christians are reading the whole Bible.  This fact might draw a shrug of indifference from secular America; but for battle-scarred Baptists like me it’s an exciting development.

Mainstream white America rewards any black opinion leader willing to tell us what we desperately want to hear.  “Tell us that race isn’t a big deal,” we moan.  “Tell us that centuries of slavery have had no lasting impact.  Tell us that generations of Jim Crow segregation have left no footprint in the America soil.  Tell us we are color blind, innocent and evolving.  Tell us . . . please! please! . . . that we don’t have to feel guilty.”

Larry Elder has fashioned a career out of telling white folks what we want to believe. 

Just as importantly, Elder tells upwardly mobile black folks what they want to hear–that they have no obligations to their less fortunate brothers and sisters.  

Elder is the anti-Sharpton . . . or, at least that’s how he’s trying to brand himself.  “This guy says black folks are responsible for their own problems,” white readers exclaim, “and he’s black.” 

Bill Cosby, unwittingly, plays much the same role in America’s racial melodrama.

The Beans recently broke down and subscribed to cable.  Last week I was introduced to Southpark, the Comedy Central show my sons have been telling me about for years. 

The father of one of the program’s rolly-polly anti-heroes is solving the final puzzle on Wheel of Fortune.  The category: “people you find annonying”.  All the letters but one have been provided: “n-_-g-g-e-r-s”.

“I think I can solve the puzzle,” the sweating contestant blurts out, “but I’m not sure I should.”

“Two seconds,” Pat replies, eyebrows arched in expectation.

“Niggers!” the contestant roars.

The audience falls silent. 

The “sorry-not-this-time” buzzer buzzes. 

An “a” falls into place. 

“The correct answer was “naggers,” Pat says.

On the way home, the father assures his family that he never would have uttered the n-word on national television if $30,000 wasn’t on the line.

The next day, the ‘nigger guy’ has is a national pariah.  Stand-up comics crack wise at his expense, store clerks refuse to service him, he is heckled on the street.  Finally, in a classic act of white American contrition, he appears with Jesse Jackson. 

He assures Jackson that he is no racist.  He says he’s mortified to think he may have caused the African American public any pain.

Jesse is satisfied . . . almost.

Jackson pulls down his pants, drops his briefs and says, “Kiss it!”  When the humiliated “nigger guy” hesitates, the civil rights legend wiggles his cheeks provocatively and repeats his demand: “Kiss it!”

The white man complies.

White people see race as a mine field.  The slightest departure from political correctness and everything blows up in your face.  We’re tired of apologizing.  We’re tired of feeling guilty.  We have decided that we’re not going to feel guilty and that’s that.  We’ve moved into a post-racial, color blind society.  The past is irrelevant. 

Must we choose between an Al Sharpton manipulating white guilt and a Larry Elder blathering on about a color blind America? 

No.  White America should be feel free to speak its mind.  Black America should be free to disagree.  We need honest conversation, give-and-take, dialogue.  

But our civil life is highly segregated.  The walls go higher every day. 

Most of us don’t talk about race that much because we don’t have to.  The racial no mans land separating white and black America can be crossed, but only by those willing to keep their mouths shut.  Race is one of those things (like sex, religion, death and politics) we’re not supposed to talk about in mixed company.

Al Sharpton and Larry Elder trading insults in the media is no substitute for a national conversation.  Al cranks up the guilt; Larry cranks it down.  Nothing is accomplished. 

Blacks like Barack Obama because he is black . . . at least he’s blacker than his opponents.  Whites like Obama because his success proves that race doesn’t matter. 

The fact that a black candidate has a serious shot at the presidency shows you how far we’ve come; the fact that Mr. Obama is forced to sidestep the race issue demonstrates how far we have to go.

Obama Surge Creates Problems for Jesse and Al

Amy Waldman spent a month in Jena but only talked to one of the Jena 6 families.  Or, if she ever met the rest of the defendants she doesn’t let on.  Essentially, this is a story about Mychal Bell and Reed Walters.  Both men are presented as human beings–there are no heroes and villains in this piece; and that’s as it should be.

As a journalist, Ms. Waldman enjoys considerably more access to folks like Reed Walters than partisan activists like me possess, and she has made the most of it.  Her portrayal of Reed Walter’s theology is absolutely priceless . . . and utterly frightening.  Walters is a practitioner of what I call “Sunday school theology,” the belief that Jesus came into the world to lay down the law and to damn all those who fail at perfection to eternal hellfire.

I call this “Sunday school” theology because it is the perfect antithesis of the amazing grace we encounter in the Christian Gospels, the letters of the Apostle Paul, and much of the Hebrew Scriptures.   This kind of harsh legalism thrives in small towns because it comports perfectly with common prejudice.  

Since perfection is the standard, Reed Walters cannot admit to any personal failing whatsoever.  Asked if he has ever made a mistake, the man scratches his head and shrugs his shoulders.  This reminds me of one of my wife’s Methodist relatives who often prayed, “Dear Lord, forgive us of our sins . . . if we have any.”

This is also a story about the movement inspired by the Jena 6, personified by Mychal Bell, the only defendant to stand trial thus far.  “Free Mychal Bell!” the crowd chanted on September 20th.  I was never comfortable with that message.  I too wanted to see Mychal back in the free world (he had already spent almost a year behind bars), but the ultimate goal was to free the Jena 6 from a legal regime that threatened to destroy their lives.  I didn’t want to get them off; I wanted to get them some justice.

But the message got muddled.  Amy Waldman wants to know why “the movement” didn’t rail against the woeful state of indigent defense in places like Jena; why there was no call to reform of the criminal justice system as a whole.

Good questions, all.  But I don’t blame the folks who rode the buses for the message problem.  These folks were profoundly and painfully aware of the systemic legal issues–that’s why they came to Jena.  Everyone had a loved one who had run afoul of the system.

The real “movement” problem was that high-profile leaders didn’t stop to check the facts before they shaped the message.  Turning troubled young men like Mychal Bell into heroes is a very bad idea.  What happened to Mychal during his brief trial was abhorrent, but so was what happened to Justin Barker.  In the end we were dealing with a melodramatic script–a clash between good and evil.  Ms. Waldman gives us shades of gray.

If you want to know Jena, this piece in the Atlantic Monthly is a great place to start.  Amy Waldman didn’t mention the remaining Jena 5 much–I suppose it would have dulled the cutting edge of her story; but she comes out at about the same place I came in.  Her Jena, for better or for worse, is the real Jena.

In the end, we accomplished what we set out to accomplish; the justice system is now working the way it is designed to work–for Mychal Bell, and the remaining five defendants. 

I like Barrack Obama’s take on Jena because it is informed and nuanced.  The presidential contender doesn’t believe in fairy tales.  And if Obama gets it, I think most thinking Americans who care about justice get it too.  The simplistic, good-vs.-evil storyline was destined to crumble–it simply couldn’t bear the weight of scrutiny.  But time and trial haven’t changed a line of the story I told almost a year ago.  Jena is a story about real people, black and white, poor and powerful, doing dreadful things.  Until this fact is fully grasped, Jena fails as an American metaphor.

 Why America’s black-and-white narratives about race don’t reflect reality

The Truth About Jena

By Amy Waldman

In the fall of 2006, Mychal Bell was a football hero, and his hometown, Jena, Louisiana, loved him for it. As his high-school team posted its best season in six years, Bell scored 21 touchdowns, rushed for 1,006 yards, and was named player of the week three times by The Jena Times. The paper celebrated his triumphs in articles and photographs, including a dramatic one in which Bell, who’s black, stiff-arms a white defender by clutching his face guard. But within weeks after the season’s end, Bell was transformed into a villain, accused of knocking out a white student, Justin Barker, who was then beaten by a group of black students. The parish’s white district attorney charged Bell and five others with attempted second-degree murder. Six months later—after the DA had reduced the charges against Bell—a white jury convicted him, as an adult, of aggravated second-degree battery, a crime that carried a possible 22-year prison sentence. By then, he, along with his co-defendants, had been transformed yet again: together, they’d been dubbed the Jena Six and had become icons of a 21st-century civil-rights movement.

That movement swelled through an electronic underground of blogs and black radio and Web sites, then burst into the national spotlight. On September 20, 2007, it culminated in a protest march that drew some 20,000 people to Jena, a town of roughly 3,000. The movement’s grievance wasn’t just the severe treatment of the Jena Six, but the light treatment of white youths who’d been in fights or hung nooses on a school tree—the “white tree”—after a black student asked if he could sit under it. Together, the galvanizing facts tapped into a larger ache: the record incarceration of African American males—the shift “from plantations to penitentiaries,” as the Reverend Al Sharpton put it at the protest. All of the frustration at the disproportionate imprisonment of black men seemed to find its way to Jena, as if here, at last, in a small town’s idea of justice, was an explanation. At home and around the world, the media found answers in the black-and-white clarity of Race Hate in America, as the British Broadcasting Corporation called an early documentary.

But soon the simple narrative began to fray. For every fact, a countervailing one emerged. Blacks had sometimes sat under the “white tree.” Justin Barker had not been involved in the noose-hanging or in the interracial fights that had occurred over the weekend before he was attacked. Mychal Bell, described in news reports as an “honor student,” turned out to have racked up, along with good grades, at least four previous juvenile offenses. He was said to be living with a white friend, suggesting that black-white relations in Jena were more complex than people assumed, and so on. Skeptics seized on each such revelation to argue that the case was more about black criminality than white racism—a manufactured racial drama à la Tawana Brawley (with Sharpton once again playing a role) or the Duke rape case. (more…)

Barack Obama chooses his words carefully, especially when he is talking about the criminal justice system.  Appearing soft on crime is a death sentence for any American politician seeking higher office. 

But make no mistake, Mr. Obama understands the desperate need to reform our system of criminal justice.  Moreover, he gets Jena.  As exhibit 1 I present this convocation address, delivered at Howard University in September, a couple of days after I appeared on the same stage with several Jena 6 parents.   

This excerpt deals explicitly with Jena:

There are some who will make Jena about the fight itself. And it’s true that we have to do more as parents to instill our children with the idea that violence is always wrong: It’s wrong when it happens on the streets of Chicago; it’s wrong when it happens in a schoolyard in Louisiana. Violence is not the answer. And all of us know that more violence is perpetrated between blacks than between blacks and whites. Our community has suffered more than anything from the slow, chronic tolerance of violence. Nonviolence was the soul of the civil rights movement. We have to do a better job of teaching our children that virtue.

But we also know that to truly understand Jena you have to look at what happened both before and after that fight. You have to listen to the hateful slurs that flew through the hallways of that school. You have to know the full measure of the damage done by that arson; you have to look at those nooses hanging on that schoolyard tree, and you have to understand how badly our system of justice failed those six boys in the days after that fight. The outrageous charges, the unreasonable and excessive sentences, the public defender who did not call a single witness.

When a politician with a serious shot at the presidency can speak this way I find the courage to believe that meaningful reform is as possible as it is necessary.  The entire text of Obama’s late September address to the students and faculty of Howard University is printed below.  Thanks to “The Daily Dish” for making the text available in a recent post.

Barack Obama’s Address at Howard University

“To all of the honored and distinguished guests faculty staff and students, it is a privilege to be a part of today’s convocation, and an honor to receive this degree from Howard. 

Now there are few other universities that have played so central a role in breaking down yesterday’s barriers, and inching this country closer to the ideals we see inscribed on the monuments throughout the city.

 It is because of those victories that a black man named Barack Hussein Obama can stand before you today as candidate for President of the United States. I am not just running to make history. I am running because I believe that together we can change history’s course. It’s not enough just to look back and wonder how far we’ve come; I want us to look ahead with fierce urgency at how far we have to go. I believe its time for this generation to make its own mark, to write our own chapter in the American story. Those who came before us did not strike a blow against injustice only so that we would let injustice fester in our time. Thurgood Marshall did not argue Brown so that we could accept a country where too many African American men end up in prison because we’d rather spend more to jail a 25-year-old than to educate a 5-year-old. Dr. King did not take us to the mountaintop so that we would allow a terrible storm to ravage those who were stranded in the valley. He did not expect that it would take a breach in the levees to reveal a breach in our compassion; that it would take a hurricane to reveal the hungry God asked us to feed, the sick he asks us to care for, the least of these he asks us to treat as our own. I am certain that nine children did not walk through the doors of a school in Little Rock so that our children would have to see nooses hanging at a school in Louisiana. It’s a fitting reminder that the 50th anniversary of Little Rock fell on this week. Because when the doors of that school finally opened, a nation responded. The President sent the United States Army to stand on the side of justice. The Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957. The Department of Justice created a civil rights division and millions of Americans took to the streets in the following months and years so that more children could walk through more doors. 

These weren’t easy choices to make at the time. President Eisenhower was warned by some that sending the army down to Little Rock would be political suicide. Resistance to civil rights reform was fierce. We know that those who marched for freedom did so at great risk, for themselves and their families–but they did it because they understood that there are some times in our history, there are moments when what’s truly risky is not to act. What’s truly risky is to let the same injustice remain year after year after year. What’s truly risky is to walk away and pretend it never happened. What’s truly risky is to accept things as they are, instead of working for what they could be. In a media driven culture that’s more obsessed with who’s beating who in Washington, or how long Paris Hilton is going to be in jail, these moments are harder to spot. But every so often they do appear.

Sometimes it takes a hurricane, sometimes it takes a travesty of justice like the one we’ve seen in Jena, Louisiana. There are some who will make Jena about the fight itself. And it’s true that we have to do more as parents to instill our children with the idea that violence is always wrong: It’s wrong when it happens on the streets of Chicago; it’s wrong when it happens in a schoolyard in Louisiana.

Violence is not the answer. And all of us know that more violence is perpetrated between blacks than between blacks and whites. Our community has suffered more than anything from the slow, chronic tolerance of violence. Nonviolence was the soul of the civil rights movement. We have to do a better job of teaching our children that virtue. But we also know that to truly understand Jena you have to look at what happened both before and after that fight. You have to listen to the hateful slurs that flew through the hallways of that school. You have to know the full measure of the damage done by that arson; you have to look at those nooses hanging on that schoolyard tree, and you have to understand how badly our system of justice failed those six boys in the days after that fight. The outrageous charges, the unreasonable and excessive sentences, the public defender who did not call a single witness. 

Like Katrina did with poverty, Jena exposed glaring inequalities in our justice system that were around long before that schoolyard fight broke out. It reminds us of the fact that we have a system that locks away too many young first time nonviolent offenders for the better part of their lives; a decision that’s not made by a judge in a courtroom but all too often by politicians in Washington and state capitals across the country. It reminds us that we have certain sentences that are based less than on the kind of crime you commit than where you come from, or what you look like. It reminds us that we have a Justice Department whose idea of prosecuting civil rights violations is to roll back affirmative action programs at our colleges and universities; a Justice Department whose idea of prosecuting voter fraud is to look for voting fraud in black and Latino communities where voting fraud does not exist. (more…)

Last Thursday, Charles Chatman became the 15th Dallas County inmate to be exonerated after DNA tests proved conclusively that they could not have committed the rape or murder of which they been accused.  Chatman was twenty when the rape occurred; now he’s forty-seven.

Chatman’s case came up for parole review three times.  Each time he was asked to confess and take personal responsibility for his actions.  Each time he refused.  You have to admire the guy.  When freedom demands that you own up to a crime you didn’t commit, most people would confess.  Chatman refused.

This case has received considerable coverage in the media; the best stories are in the Houston Chronicle , the Dallas Morning News, and the New York Times.  Like many victims of wrongful accusation, Chatman was identified by the rape victim.  I’m sure the unfortunate woman was convinced she had the right guy.  Chatman’s sister testified that the defendant was doing janitorial work for her in Arlington, Texas at the time of the crime.  Moreover, Chatman has two prominent teeth missing–the rapist did not.

So why was Chatman convicted? 

Race figures into the equation–there was only one black person on his jury.  It didn’t help that Chatman was on probation at the time.  Defendants who are already in the system are usually presumed guilty, especially if they are black and the victim is white.

But there are other factors.  Victims of violent crime naturally want to see their assailants punished, and that passionate desire often adds a false concreteness to an ambiguous set of facts.  Eyewitnesses are far more fallible than is commonly believed, even when they are trying to get it right.  And then there is the fact that police officers, eager to close a case, frequently push eyewitnesses toward a suspect.

Tragically, if the accused is poor, black and in the system, they will be convicted unless they can prove innocence beyond a reasonable doubt.

The rash of exonerations in DNA cases raises questions about the credibility of the criminal justice system in cases not involving DNA evidence.  How often are drug defendants, for instance, sent to prison on the uncorroborated word of a police officer or, even worse, a convicted criminal receiving a generous time cut in payment for testimony?

Far more than you imagine.

Finally, I would like to note that Jeff Blackburn, Mr. Chatman’s lead attorney, was also heavily involved in the Tulia case.