The New Baptist Covenant in Atlanta was Jimmy Carter’s baby.  Among Baptists, only the beloved ex-President has the name recognition and the hard-won credability to pull off an event of this magnitude.  For the first time in living memory, Baptists from North and South, and Baptists from Black and White denominations came together in Atlanta.

True, by the time Carter and Bill Clinton spoke on Friday night most of the people in attendance were white refugees from the Southern Baptist Convention.  More than anything else, Carter’s New Baptist Covenant framed with these folks in mind.

On Friday night, Jimmy Carter paid the ultimate tribute to the SBC of his youth.  He told us how Southern Baptist mission trips pulled him out of a crisis of faith he in the mid-1960s as he watched unlettered men share their simple faith with strangers.  These stories ended with a period; there was no semi-colon followed by a diatribe against the current leaders of the SBC.

The best reporting from the New Baptist Covenant appeared in a Los Angeles Times article by Richard Fausset.  The focus is on Carter the man, the meeting he inspired in Atlanta remains in the background, but Fausset addresses all the important issues.

On the opening night, former Southern Baptist President Jimmy Allen asked if the Atlanta gathering would be a movement or simply a moment.  One thing is clear, a movement sparked by an octogenarian can’t remain a cult of the personality.  Carter’s active years are numbered; he knows it, and so do the folks who flocked to Atlanta.  This poignant fact added a sense of urgency to the meeting.

Richard Fausset plucked a telling quote from Bill Leonard, currently dean of the divinity school at Wake Forest.  “The curse and the genius of the Southern Baptist Convention for Carter’s generation is that it inculcated a sense of Baptist identity that is so deep in people that it was hard to give up.  It shaped your spirituality — but also your own sense of who you were.”

Leonard was a newly minted church history professor when I enrolled at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1975.  He was still there when I returned for doctoral work in 1989.  I served briefly as Leonard’s grader before he yielded to the inevitable and left Southern for a more hospitable academic climate.  Southern boasted one of the best church history faculties in America in 1990; three years later, all four professors had left the fold.

Bill Leonard grew up in Texas, attending Southwestern Theological Seminary in Fort Worth (20 miles west of where I currently live).   For men like Leonard and Carter, the rift in the Southern Baptist Convention meant exile.  It was like being disowned by your own mother.

As a Canadian Baptist ordained by the American (Northern) Baptist Churches, I had a hard time relating to all of this.  I suspect many of the Black and northern white Baptists who attended the Atlanta gathering wearied of all the nostalgic references to what had been. 

From the beginning, Southern Baptist leaders have regarded Mr. Carter’s religious experiment with suspicion.  Paige Patterson, currently President of Southwestern Seminary, said the rift in the ranks boiled down to epistemology: how you know what you know.  “We believe that we know what we know because God has flawlessly revealed to us in the Bible what his will and thought and purpose is; they do not believe that.”

Here we come to “the curse” of Southern Baptist life professor Leonard mentions.   Growing up Baptist in the South created such a strong connection between person, place and piety that most believers would sacrifice anything to hold onto it.  The myth of the perfect Bible proved to be a wonderful debating ploy against “liberal” opponents–no Baptist wants to be defined as anti-Bible.

But there has been a profound and tragic downside.  Almost by definition, a flawless Bible is a “flat Bible” free of internal contradiction.  If a teaching (stone the adulter) appears in any part of Scripture it is God’s own truth.  In fact, since Jesus is the Son of God, all Scripture can be read as the very word of the Savior. 

Unfortunately, Jesus self-consciously set himself against many of the legalistic traditions in the Hebrew Scriptures; other prophetic teachings were radicalized and expanded.  In the fifth chapter of Mathew, Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said to the men of old, ‘You shall not kill; and whoever kills shall be liable to judgment; But I say to you that every one who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment . . . You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’  But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil.  But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”

Jesus’ moral teaching flies in the face of conservative American ideology.  In a desperate attempt to preserve a culture, Baptist leaders in the South allied themselves with cold warriors and free market capitalists (hardly natural allies for followers of Jesus; but you gotta do what you gotta do).

Which brings us to the ultimate irony: Southern Baptists leaders accusing a pious Baptist deacon of embracing “the religion of secular humanism” while they embrace a politician who rarely attended church and his horoscope-consulting wife.  It was neither pretty nor logical, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

The Atlanta event was organized around the incendiary words of Isaiah, amplified by the teaching of Jesus in the fourth chapter of Luke: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”

I was drawn to Atlanta because (a) the American Baptists invited me to participate and (b) all this talk about “good news to the poor” squared perfectly with my criminal justice reform work with Friends of Justice.

Southern Baptist leaders have charged that the New Baptist Covenant is a not-so-subtle smokescreen for liberal politics.  The involvement of Bill Clinton and Al Gore did little to counter this impression.

I didn’t attend Gore’s Climate Change luncheon (the $35 fee stuck in my craw), but I did hear Mr. Clinton on Friday evening.  I have been critical of some of Clinton’s racially polarizing remarks during the current election campaign, but I was pleased with the tone of his comments in Atlanta.  He talked about his attempts to find common ground with Southern Baptist leaders.  He urged the audience to be gentle with their co-religionists because, after all, we might all be wrong.

Throughout his address (delivered without notes) Mr. Clinton demonstrated an impressive familiarity with the Scriptures.  He gave particular attention to a phrase from the King James rendering of 1 Corinthians 13: “For now we see as through a glass darkly, but then, face to face.”

Unlike Paige Patterson, who, thanks to his flawless Bible, already sees face-to-face, we must be humble and respectful of diversity because we are all stumbling about it a dimly lit room.

Good thoughts; but can you build a movement on shadows?

In his interview with Richard Fausset, Jimmy Carter worked hard to temper his criticism of the estranged members of his religious family.  “The Southern Baptist Convention has become increasingly narrow in its definition of who is welcome,” Carter began.  “They now have decided that women can’t teach men, and that women can’t be deacons, and women can’t be pastors, and women can’t be missionaries and so forth.”

The ex-president paused.  “Which–I’m not criticizing them.  That’s their prerogative.” 

Richard Fausset was irritated by Carter’s reserve.  “It is the kind of staement that doesn’t help matters,” he observed.

Fausset is right.  The glorious thing about the New Baptist Covenant was the opporunity to bridge the North-South and Black-White divides that have haunted Baptist life for generations.  For ex-Southern Baptists, the grieving process will never end.  We understand that.  We sympathize. 

But a new world of opportunity awaits.  We are now free to take Jesus’ radical teaching at face value without ignoring or explaining away the clear import of his teaching.  To follow the Jesus of the Gospels is to work for the poor.  That means undermining a criminal justice system that preaches bad news to the poor.  It means seeing the defendant and the prisoner not just as American citizens but as the very face of Jesus–Christ in his distressing disguise (to borrow a phrase from Mother Theresa).

The time has come for Mr. Carter, Mr. Clinton and their spiritual kinfolks to let go of the Southern Bapist Convention so their hands can be free to enthusiastically embrace their American Baptist and Black Baptist brothers and sisters.  It’s tough, I know; but we all gotta do what we gotta do.

Alan Bean

Executive Director

Friends of Justice

A young man has been charged under hate crime statutes for displaying a noose on the back bumper of his pickup truck.  The incident took place in Alexandria, a few miles down the road from Jena, in the immediate wake of the September 20th march on Jena.  I learned about the incident from a breathless CNN producer who was in town to cover the march.  He wanted my reaction. 

I told him I’d have to think about it.  Four months have passed and I’m still thinking.

Yesterday, while my wife and I walked the dog, I said, “What do you think of charging the guy with the noose on his truck as a hate criminal?”

US Attorney Donald Washington announced the prosecution hours after dozens of lost souls wandered the streets of Jena with nooses dangling from their belts–one protester used a noose as a leash for his dog.  No charges were filed.

Nancy was silent for a moment.  When she started talking, I realized she had more to say on the subject than I did, and that she’d say it a lot better than I could.

Nancy Bean has been the heart and soul of Friends of Justice since our inception in 2000.  She opened our home to the defendants and their families every Sunday night.  She recruited and organized a bus trip of 50 people, mostly children, to march on Austin in the fall of 2000.  She was a teacher at Tulia High School at the height of the drug sting controversy where she was aggressively shunned by other teachers.  She organized a series of camps and college visits for poor students of Tulia who had never dreamed of going to school. “Hello Ms. Bean,” kids of all ages would say as we walked our dog through the poor neighborhoods of Tulia.  Regularly we’d open our door to a band of children inquiring about the next outing. After they graduated, Nancy’s students continued to drop in to her classroom or to our home for help filling out a job application or to play a game of pool. 

After we took in three young children who had been orphaned by Tulia’s drug sting, Nancy received furtive requests from high school students wanting to come home with her.  When her latest orphan graduated high school and left for college after two years with us, Nancy told her parents and God: “I’m not taking anyone else in. Well, not unless they arrive on the doorstep and tell me that God sent them.”

Nancy is now a Special Education Counselor in two Arlington schools.

So, what does Nancy think about charging a white kid in Louisiana with a hate crime?  Read on . . .

Hate sucks. And directed against God’s creatures, hate is shameful and anathema to the law of God which is love.  But making hate a crime is a dangerous thing in a free society. When we give the power of punishing motives to the government, whether in the name of a terrifying war on terror or in the name of protecting the civil rights of minorities, we open up a floodgate assault against free speech and dissent.

I hear and agree with the well-intentioned arguments for hate crime enhancement as disincentive for intimidation of ethnic minorities. But since when can we entrust government with powers over our intentions? Since when can we entrust government with powers over our free speech? Since Salem? Since the Sedition Acts? Since McCarthyism? Since Homeland Security?

A noose is an unmitigated symbol of hatefulness and a reminder of our societal shame. So is a swastica. Such symbols are not allowed in public schools. Items of clothing or drawings boasting such are confiscated and kids in possession are given detention or suspension.  That’s because students are required to be in school and the school is acting in loco parentis. Sorry, but you can’t show your boobs or your butt in school, either. It’s not about freedom of speech; it’s about the training and supervision of our children.

School administrators are known to go overboard in their parental role and do nasty things such as suspicionless drug testing under parental protest. Our family knows that first hand. But no one is going to prison because confederate flag t-shirts are not allowed on campus. And the administrators at Jena High School could have saved everyone a whole load of trouble if they had responded to nooses hanging on school grounds with firm in-school discipline for the perpetrators and in-class education and counseling sessions for students and staff.  

A kid stupid enough to drive through town with a noose on display should be charged with a stupid crime that he is no doubt committing. Like driving dangerously or under the influence. Or somebody should call his mother. Or if she is already in prison, somebody should call his grandmother. We have more than enough laws to prosecute and to send two million people to prison.

We don’t need to make more criminals; we need to make more citizens. We need to teach real history to our kids: the real ugly and courageous stories that make us who we are. We need to teach dissent to our children: how to live respectful, empowered, dissenting lives.

The New Black Panthers joined the September 20th throng in Jena. Dressed in military fatigues and black barets as symbols of racial warfare, they employed physical intimidation to get their message to the crowds. They barred organizers like my husband, Alan, from some proceedings. Should they be charged with hate crimes? As distasteful as I find the symbols of war, I don’t think so.

People go to prison or disappear to torture camps in Syria when the government is given the right to censure our speech and to interpret our motives. I want to live with my freedom of speech and dissent. And that means people I disagree with and people full of hate get to keep theirs, too.

Nancy Bean

John Grisham is a writer, not a public speaker.  But when the voice on the phone belongs to Jimmy Carter, you make exceptions.   Bill Moyers had to back out of this week’s New Baptist Covenant celebration in Atlanta and Carter wanted a speaker of equal stature as a replacement.  Friday evening, Grisham was a guest on Bill Moyer’s Journal.

Grisham talked about writing.  He talked about being Baptist in the South.  He talked about the Iraq War.  But the conversation kept coming back to the writer’s fixation with the criminal justice system.  In particular, Grisham wanted to talk about wrongful convictions and small town justice.

Here’s my favorite segment:

JOHN GRISHAM: Wrongful convictions happen every week in every state in this country. And they happen for all the same reasons. Sloppy police work. Eyewitness identification is the most– is the worst type almost. Because it’s wrong about half the time. Think about that.

BILL MOYERS: Eyewitnesses?

JOHN GRISHAM: Eyewitness identification. They get it wrong about half the time. And that’s sent more men to prison than probably anything else. Sloppy police work. Sloppy prosecutions. Junk science. Snitch testimony. What– it happens all the time. You get some snitch in a jail who wants out, and he comes in and says, “Oh, I heard your defendant confess.” And they’ll say, “Well, okay, we’ll reduce your time and we’ll let you out if you’ll testify at trial.”

So there should be rules governing snitch testimony. But there are a lot of reasons.There are five or six primary reasons you have wrongful convictions. All could be addressed. All could be fixed with the right statutes.

Amen, and amen!  Everybody familiar with the criminal justice system knows Grisham is right; but when was the last time you heard someone talk like that in the mainstream media?

There are a lot of Baptists like Grisham in the South; quietly passionate, earnestly honest, haunted by ghosts past and present.  Many of them will be speaking at President Carter’s New Baptist Covenant gathering.  Actually, hundreds of people have labored long to make this dream a reality; but the dream was Carter’s.

The New Baptist Covenant celebration is a modern miracle–the sort of thing that doesn’t happen in the natural world.  Twenty thousand Baptist preachers, lay people and bureaucrats will spend half a week considering the implications of the good news that once danced on the lips of Jesus.  Everything will come back to the passage in the fourth chapter of Luke where Jesus built his work on a foundation laid by the prophet Isaiah:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.  He has sent me proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind; to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.

Follow those words to their natural conclusion and you don’t end up with the Southern Baptist Convention, or any other Christian denomination.  That’s why I call a massive gathering of Baptist leaders organized around such an incendiary text a miracle.  

What does it mean to preach good news to the poor?  Ask that question and the criminal justice system will soon enter the conversation.

I will be part of a special interest session on racism this coming Friday.  On Saturday morning I will say a few words at the American Baptist breakfast.  My wife, Nancy, and I will be leaving Wednesday and returning to Arlington next Sunday evening.  We changed our flights so we could hear Grisham and President Carter speak this Wednesday evening.  I’ll give you the highlights when I return.

Since a disciplined army of fundamentalists took control of the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1980s, moderate Baptist preachers have been wandering in a wilderness of regret, revisiting the ashes of painful memory, regrouping, establishing new seminaries and places of worship.  Twenty years have now passed and the time for grieving is over.  This week, the focus will not be on the sins of the Southern Baptists.  The New Baptist Covenant is a celebration of future hope not a lamentation over spilled milk.

Bill Moyers talks with John Grisham

BILL MOYERS: My next guest has written twenty one books in all — with titles you’ll recognize. A TIME TO KILL, THE FIRM, THE PELICAN BRIEF, THE CLIENT, THE RAINMAKER, THE TESTAMENT, THE INNOCENT MAN, A PAINTED HOUSE. Believe it or not they have sold nearly a quarter of a billion copies in 29 languages.  Some were made into blockbuster movies  

THE RAIN MAKER: I’m asking you, the jury, just do what you think is right in your hearts.

BILL MOYERS: The writer, of course, is John Grisham, the small town lawyer who never wrote a book until he was 30 years old.  For all his wild success, John Grisham is not a very public man.  He keeps a low profile and makes few speeches.  So I was surprised to read that he is going to make a keynote address next week in Atlanta, Georgia before the first meeting of the “New Baptist Covenant”. It’s a group formed by former President Jimmy Carter to unite Baptists “around an agenda of Christ-centered social ministry.”

JIMMY CARTER: Strengthening God’s kingdom on earth in the name of Jesus Christ our savior.

BILL MOYERS: Former President Bill Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore will speak so will Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and Charles Grassley. John Grisham is a devout Baptist laymen .a member of University Baptist Church in Charlottesville, VA. And a veteran Sunday school teacher, like Jimmy Carter himself. He has some strong feelings about social justice and the state of democracy.  I invited him to the studio for a conversation.  Welcome to the Journal.

BILL MOYERS: You so rarely give speeches that I’m curious as to why you chose this gathering in Atlanta for a forum?

JOHN GRISHAM: I didn’t have much of a choice. The phone rang a couple weeks ago, on Saturday morning, and it was Jimmy Carter. And I’d never talked to him before. And he invited me to come down. And I told him I probably couldn’t do it because my next book comes out that week, January the 29th. And he said, “Well, can I be pushy?” You know, I don’t know how you tell a former president they can’t be pushy. And I said, “Sure.” And he said, “I really want you to come.” I said, “Okay. I’ll be happy to do it.” So I’m looking forward to it.

BILL MOYERS: What is the new one?

JOHN GRISHAM: It’s called THE APPEAL. You’ll love it. It’s got more politics than anything I’ve written. It’s tons of politics, tons of legal intrigue. It’s about — all my books are based, in some degree on something that really happened. There’s an element in truth in all these books. This is about the election of a Supreme Court justice in the state of Mississippi.

Thirty some odd states elect their judges, which is a bad system. Because– if they allow private money. Just like a campaign. Just like the campaign we’re watching now for president. You got corporate people throwing money in. You got big individuals. You got, you know, cash coming in to elect a judge who may hear your case. Think about that. You’ve got a case pending before the court and you want to reshape the structure of the court, well, just to get your guy elected. And that’s happened in several states. Big money comes in, take out a bad judge, or an unsympathetic judge. Replace him with someone who may be more friendly to you. And he gets to rule in your case without a conflict.

BILL MOYERS: Is this the story of the corporation that dumps the toxic poisons into the stream. Ruins the community’s drinking water?

JOHN GRISHAM: It starts off with a verdict. Chapter one is a verdict where this big chemical company has polluted this small town to the point where you can’t even drink the water. It’s become a cancer cluster. A lot of people have died. And so there’s a big lawsuit. And that’s the opening of the book. And then it’s all the intrigue about what that company does. Because the guy who owns that company doesn’t like the composition of the Supreme Court. And he realizes he can change it. And so–

BILL MOYERS: By buying an election. He can buy the judge.

JOHN GRISHAM: Buy your judge. It’s bad at the Supreme Court level, but even at a local level, you know–

BILL MOYERS: You mean at the state Supreme Court level.

JOHN GRISHAM: State Supreme– oh yeah, state Supreme Court. All these are state Supreme Court–

BILL MOYERS: What practical consequences issue from the fact that judges in Mississippi are often determined by the most money that goes into the campaign? What’s the practical consequences for citizens?

JOHN GRISHAM: In a state like Mississippi, where the court has now been realigned in such a way where you have a hard right majority. Six or seven. Two or three dissents. When you’ve got a majority you only need five. Virtually every plaintiff’s verdict is reversed.

BILL MOYERS: Virtually every one?

JOHN GRISHAM: Virtually every one. So if you have a– if your neighbor’s son gets killed in a car wreck, and there’s a big lawsuit, and there’s a big verdict against the, you know, the guilt of the negligent party– or if your friend is injured by a negligent doctor, or a hospital, whatever, you’re pretty much out of luck.

BILL MOYERS: So the court is now decidedly biased, in your judgment, in favor of the powerful.

JOHN GRISHAM: Oh, it’s not in my judgment. It’s a proven fact. You can read the Supreme Court decisions in Mississippi, and Alabama, to those two states are next door to each other. And both states have a hard right majority. And so people with legitimate claims are, not always, but generally out of luck. (more…)

Over the course of the past few months I have been repeatedly stunned by white discomfort with Jena.  The inability to understand why African Americans are outraged by the hanging of nooses; the lack of sensitivity to context; the lack of feel for proportion; the fact that so many white people were intimidated, or even disgusted, by the appearance of 20,000 black people on the streets of Jena–taken together, these factors sketch the contours of a new kind of Jim Crow regime

And then we stumble across Raquel Christie’s rambling and unfocused essay in the American Journalism Review.  Why did Christie give so much credence to bumbling blowhards like Craig Franklin and Jason Whitlock while heaping scorn on established professionals like Howard Witt and Darryl Fears?  Why was she so desperate to believe that “Jena” wasn’t worth the oceans of ink and miles of celuloid that have been devoted to it?

White America wants to believe that, apart from a few weirdos like Richard Barnett, racism is dead.  And if bigotry is dead and buried, why are all these black people (and a few self-loathing African American-lovers like Alan Bean) intent on digging up the corpse? 

Barack Obama has been running away from the race issue from the moment he announced his candidacy.  Obama knows that if he is seen as the champion of black America he is doomed.  So, whenever the race card appears on the table, Mr. Obama quietly slips it back in the deck.  He doesn’t want to share a sentence with Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson–given the current state of the white electorate, that would be a death sentence.

Remember Dick Morris, the cynical Clinton spinmeister of yesteryear? 

He’s back!  And if he’s right about the dynamics of the Democratic primary my caustic evaluation of white America is seriously understated.

Morris asserts that Hillary and Bill Clinton want to lose in South Carolina.  Why? Because half the voters in tomorrow’s primary will be African American.  If Obama wins in South Carolina due the overwhelming support of the black electorate, he becomes a youthful incarnation of Jesse Jackson.

Is that a bad thing?  Well, if you need the support of white America (even the progressive side of white spectrum), yes, being construed as a black chamption is a very bad thing.  It isn’t that white progressives are uncomfortable with black professionals like Barack Obama.  As an isolated individual, Obama’s blackness isn’t problematic–it might even work to his advantage. 

But when Obama is seen as a black champion he hooks white anxiety.  At least, that’s what Morris suggests

Generally, the New Jim Crow is invisible.  Three things bring it to the surface: religion (our churches are as segregated as they were in 1962), the criminal justice system (black males are incarcerated at seven times the rate of white males), and electoral politics (even white progressives are intimidated by the assertion of unified black purpose

Are Bill and Hillary Clinton responsible for this lamentable state of affairs?  Not really.  Like her major opponent, Hillary Clinton wants to win.  It is in Mr. Obama’s best interest to de-emphasize his blackness and to Ms. Clinton’s advantage to characterize her opponent as a classy incarnation of Al Sharpton

Like Mayor Daley said, politics ain’t beanbag.

How Clinton Will Win The Nomination by Losing South Carolina

Hillary Clinton will undoubtedly lose the South Carolina primary as African-Americans line up to vote for Barack Obama. And that defeat will power her drive to the nomination.

The Clintons are encouraging the national media to disregard the whites who vote in South Carolina’s Democratic primary and focus on the black turnout, which is expected to be quite large. They have transformed South Carolina into Washington, D.C. — an all-black primary that tells us how the African-American vote is going to go.

By saying he will go door to door in black neighborhoods in South Carolina matching his civil rights record against Obama’s, Bill Clinton emphasizes the pivotal role the black vote will play in the contest. And by openly matching his record on race with that of the black candidate, he invites more and more scrutiny focused on the race issue.

Of course, Clinton is going to lose that battle. Blacks in Nevada overwhelmingly backed Obama and will obviously do so again in South Carolina, no matter how loudly former President Clinton protests. So why is he making such a fuss over a contest he knows he’s going to lose?

Precisely because he is going to lose it. If Hillary loses South Carolina and the defeat serves to demonstrate Obama’s ability to attract a bloc vote among black Democrats, the message will go out loud and clear to white voters that this is a racial fight. It’s one thing for polls to show, as they now do, that Obama beats Hillary among African-Americans by better than 4-to-1 and Hillary carries whites by almost 2-to-1. But most people don’t read the fine print on the polls. But if blacks deliver South Carolina to Obama, everybody will know that they are bloc-voting. That will trigger a massive white backlash against Obama and will drive white voters to Hillary Clinton.

Obama has done everything he possibly could to keep race out of this election. And the Clintons attracted national scorn when they tried to bring it back in by attempting to minimize the role Martin Luther King Jr. played in the civil rights movement. But here they have a way of appearing to seek the black vote, losing it, and getting their white backlash, all without any fingerprints showing. The more President Clinton begs black voters to back his wife, and the more they spurn her, the more the election becomes about race — and Obama ultimately loses.

Because they have such plans for South Carolina, the Clintons were desperate to win in Nevada. They dared not lose two primaries in a row leading up to Florida. But now they can lose South Carolina with impunity, having won in Nevada.

But don’t look for them to walk away from South Carolina. Their love needs to appear to have been unrequited by the black community for their rejection to seem so unfair that it triggers a white backlash. In this kind of ricochet politics, you have to lose openly and publicly in order to win the next round. And since the next round consists of all the important and big states, polarizing the contest into whites versus blacks will work just fine for Hillary.

Of course, this begs the question of how she will be able to attract blacks after beating Obama. Here the South Carolina strategy also serves its purpose. If she loses blacks and wins whites by attacking Obama, it will look dirty and underhanded to blacks. She’ll develop a real problem in the minority community. But if she is seen as being rejected by minority voters in favor of Obama after going hat in hand to them and trying to out-civil rights Obama, blacks will even likely feel guilty about rejecting Hillary and will be more than willing to support her in the general election.

This convoluted article appeared today in the American Journalism Review.  Prepare to be confused.  From Raquel Christie’s perspective there is only one thing you need to know about Alan Bean–he is not a journalist; therefore he should be ignored by objective reporters.  It is also suggested that reporters shouldn’t interview the parents of criminal defendants because, unlike prosecutors, local newspaper editors and school superintendents, family members of the accused are hopelessly biased.

Ms. Christie can’t decide if Jena was a non-story that didn’t deserve the attention it received, or a shocking “race beat” story that was too long ignored.  Since I figure prominently in this slash-and-burn critique of journalists run amok, I must respond. 

If I hadn’t alerted the media to this story, would anyone in America know about the Jena 6, Justin Barker, and the now-infamous nooses?  Would that have been a good thing or a bad thing? 

Christie raises all of the old bugaboos: why did early reports mention three nooses instead of two?  Why was it suggested that the tree was a “white tree” when black students occasionally sat under it?  Why did reporters insist that the noose boys received a three days of in-school suspension when they were actually suspended for a longer period and sent to counseling? Why did journalists report that Mychal Bell was convicted by an all-white jury without mentioning that a few black residents failed to show up for jury duty?  Why did the media fail to report that Mychal Bell had a criminal record?

Christie then allows Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune and Darryl Fears of the Washington Post to present the convincing answers they have been repeating for months now. 

They mentioned three nooses because their sources mentioned three nooses (and why does it matter anyway?).  

They mentioned that the noose tree was located on the white side of the school courtyard because that’s what every black person they interviewed reported.  Black residents admit that black students were free to wander across the sidewalk that separated white students from black students–so long as they didn’t linger too long.  No one doubts that a black student asked for permission to sit under the tree or that white students responded by hanging nooses–neither action nor reaction makes sense if the school yard was fully integrated. 

Witt and Fears reported the three-day suspension story because that’s what Superintendent Roy Breithaupt told them (why would the super lie?).

They mentioned the all-white jury because . . . the jury was all white.  It should be noted that Blaine Williams, Mychal Bell’s pro-prosecution attorney (yes, that’s the guy who didn’t call a single witness) is the source of the story that all kinds of black people didn’t show up for jury duty.  This didn’t raise suspicions in Ms. Christie’s mind because she didn’t attend the trial and doesn’t realize that Williams is a walking embarrassment.

Reporters failed to mention Mychal Bell’s criminal record because public officials never brought it to their attention.  Mychal’s file in the courthouse didn’t reference his juvenile history because adult files (as public documents) never reflect juvenile records.

Raquel Christie has dutifully printed these explanations but she appears unconvinced–why, I’m not sure.  Instead, she ends the piece by quoting a white guy who thinks Jena was a non-story and that the 20,000 people who road the buses in September were suffering from mass-paranoia.

 Christie didn’t call me (or anyone else) and ask me for a different take?  Does she think Barack Obama is part of the mass-delusion?

Ms. Christie is obviously confused.  She wanted to write a story about the media dropping the ball in Jena but the facts kept getting in her way.  So we are left with a mish-mash of unadjudicated disagreement ending with a racist allegation about black America which Ms. Christie appears to endorse.

According to many black bloggers, white reporting on Jena shows how little most white Americans know about the dynamics of modern racism or the criminal justice system.  Raquel Christie’s confused expose stands as Exhibit A.

How would Howard Witt respond to Christie’s confused meanderings?  This interview with the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education addresses many of the issues raised in the AJR piece.  Witt doesn’t suffer fools gladly.

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