Michael Gaynor is worried to death about “the political correctness danger“.  His lengthy rant was inspired by Stuart Taylor’s recent book currently being marketed under the provocative subtitle: “”Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case.”

To make his point, Michael Gaynor provides a lengthly series of quotations from a recent PBS interview in which Jeffrey Brown interviewed the author of the Duke Lacrosse book.  According to Brown, the Duke Lacross team was almost railroaded by “Bias in favor of the idea that, well, the privileged white male athletes are accused of abusing the poor black woman, we love that. It’s in synch with all of our preconceptions and our ideology. Let’s pile on and make it a morality play. And an awful lot of people, including the New York Times, for example, were not a bit deterred by contrary evidence from making it a morality play of that kind.”

In the PBS interview, Jeffrey Brown, like any sane observer of the American scene, had no problem believing that the mainstream media was guilty of sensationalism; but he was surprised to hear Stuart Taylor applying an ideological explanation to this phenomenon. 

Michael Gaynor isn’t the least surprised.  “If you think the politically correct media reformed after the [Duke Lacrosse] Hoax was exposed and therefore the situation in Jena, Louisiana was accurately reported generally instead of politically correctly reported, read Craig Franklin’s “Media Myths About The Jena 6” in The Christian Science Monitor”.

Actually, Craig Franklin’s willingness to believe the worst about the Jena 6 (even if that requires a bizarre revision of the historical record) is reminiscent of the national media’s rush to judgment in North Carolina.  In both cases, biased and irresponsible prosecutors were determined to hold student athletes to account. 

That’s where the similarities end. 

One case deals with college athletes; the other is about high school kids. 

One case is exclusively about guilt, innocence and the reliability of a single witness; the other is about a prosecutor who produced and directed the tragic events he is now prosecuting. 

One case was a cause celebre from day one; the other would have passed unnoticed if Friends of Justice hadn’t intervened.

One set of defendants had the resources to hire top flight legal representation; the other set of defendants were initially dependent on court appointed attorneys like the unspeakably inept Blane Williams (the man who “defended” Mychal Bell in late June).

One case was about affluent white lacrosse players; the other was about poor black football players.

One case demonstrates that Americans love to see rich people laid low by the criminal justice system (primarily because it happens so rarely in real life).  If you don’t believe that Americans have it in for rich people, just watch re-runs legal dramas like CSI and Law and Order and see who gets busted 95% of the time–rich white guys with skeletons in the closet.  The Duke lacrosse case fit this pattern perfectly.

American television audiences have little interest in the plight of poor black defendants (primarily because, in real life, young black males are convicted so frequently, so silently, and so anonymously that their plight is just another unremarkable, and unremarked, fact of life).

The New York Times was all over the Duke Lacrosse case because it followed the familiar script of a Law and Order drama.  The Times ignored Jena, possibly because their coverage of the Duke case was almost as appalling as their coverage of the build up to the Iraq war. 

Besides, the Duke lacrosse story featured a crusading white prosecutor standing up for a black victim (another favorite media trope (think, “To Kill a Mockingbird”); Jena featured a white prosecutor nailing poor black guys accused of beating up a poor white guy.  The liberal media likes “sympathetic” black victims, and the Jena 6 didn’t qualify.

And yet “Jena” has become as prominent as the Duke Lacrosse case.  Why?

You can’t blame it on the mainstream media.  Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune gave the story early attention, but his coverage was sober, carefully researched, and straight forward.  Besides, apart from CNN, few media outlets followed Witt’s lead until the story blew up in August.

Jena became a national story because black America made it a national story.  But why? Why would anyone want to stand up for black kids accused of jumping a white kid?

Black America came to the aid of the Jena 6 because the Jena story is a blatant example of America’s two tier system of criminal justice.  The message goes something like this: so long as public officials in Jena refuse to admit that they are every bit as responsible for what happened to Justin Barker as the Jena 6, Jena justice has no credibility in our eyes.

Here are the facts that matter to black America (and to a few white folks who care enough to reflect on the matter): 1. A hate crime was dismissed as a childish prank; 2. students protesting this dismissive remark were threatened with felony prosecution; 3. the same man who issued this threat is prosecuting the Jena 6.

Hence the cry, “Free the Jena 6!” 

It isn’t that people want the defendants freed from taking responsibility for their actions; they simply refuse to let high school kids reap the whirlwind after public officials like DA Reed “Stroke of my pen” Walters and school superintende Roy “Childish Prank” Breithaupt sewed the wind.  Black America has determined that, in this case at least, the sins of the fathers will not be visited upon the children.

“It is necessary that temptations to sin come,” Jesus told his disciples, “but woe to the man by whom the temptation comes!”  By refusing to call a hate crime by its proper name, and by refusing to validate the legitimate protest of black parents and their children, Roy and Reed created an adversarial relationship between the noose hangers and their white friends, on one side, and the black student athletes who reacted to the noose provocation, on the other.  In the process, a spark of crude and clumsy racism that could have been used as a teaching opportunity was transformed into a torch that eventually engulfed an entire community.

Jesus refuses to serve as “a judge and divider” in human affairs.  But Jesus leaves little doubt how he feels about adults who lure children into sin: “It would be be better for him to have a great millstone fastend found his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea!”

This morning, a journalist asked me why these cases have taken so long to go to court.  “We’re dealing with a standoff,” I told her.  “Jena officials can’t admit their personal culpability, and they can’t drop the charges against the Jena 6 without risking a backlash from angry whites.  On the other hand, black America rejects the validity of any verdict handed down by an all-white jury in Jena, Louisiana, and that creates a problem for the system.

So, how do we bring resolution to this mess?

The first step, clearly, is to find a new venue (perhaps Alexandria, La.) in which a multi-racial jury is at least a possibility.  Another all-white jury in these cases is not an option. 

The second step is to demand that the prosecutor and the judge recuse themselves.  

Once we have an objective prosecutor working in front of a multi-racial jury, black America will be able to live with the outcome.  

The cry, “Free the Jena 6” was originally a demand that incarcerated defendants to be released on bond awaiting trial.  But the cry is now best interpreted as a demand that these young men be freed from a complicit prosecutor and Jena juries awash in prejudicial propaganda. 
 

http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/11965/1/397

Author: Tim Wheeler

People’s Weekly World Newspaper, 11/01/07 11:38

The NAACP has declared a “state of emergency” in the criminal justice system’s brutal mistreatment of Black youth across the nation. The declaration cites the zealous over-prosecution of the Jena Six teenagers in Louisiana, the killing by guards of Martin Lee Anderson, 14, at a Florida boot camp last year and the Oct. 4 beating and pepper-spraying of Shelwanda Riley, 15, for curfew violation in Fort Pierce, Fla.

“The NAACP denounces overly aggressive handling of Black youth by law enforcement entities, a blatant disregard toward investigating hate crimes and racially discriminatory utilization of prosecutorial discretion,” Dennis Courtland Hayes, the NAACP’s interim president and CEO, said in a statement Oct. 23. “Violence and intimidation of our young people is not acceptable; it’s against the law and must end now.”

Hayes declared the emergency on the eve of a Nov. 7 hearing for four of the Jena Six teenagers at the LaSalle Parish Courthouse in Jena, La. They are Theodore Shaw, Robert Bailey, Bryan Purvis and Mychal Bell. All were charged with “aggravated battery” for a fistfight that erupted after a Black youth sat under a so-called “white tree” on their high school lawn. The next day, three lynch nooses were hanging from the tree, widely considered a hate crime but dismissed by the school superintendent as a “prank.”

Judge J.P. Mauffray, who has presided over the Jena Six case from the beginning, revoked Bell’s $90,000 bail and threw him back in jail last month for a parole violation related to a previous conviction. An appeals court had overturned Bell’s more recent conviction, saying he was improperly tried as an adult. The prosecutor, Reed Walters, promised he would not retry Bell as a juvenile. The judge’s latest action was denounced by many as an act of revenge in response to the huge outpouring of support for the six youths.

Along with other groups, the Louisiana NAACP and NAACP chapters throughout the South filled hundreds of buses that brought an estimated 50,000 protesters to Jena Sept. 20 demanding “Justice for the Jena Six.”

Alan Bean, director of Dallas-based Friends of Justice, said he will be in the LaSalle Parish courtroom for the Nov. 7 hearing. “These youths are in jeopardy. They are facing a very hostile court,” Bean said. He decried the media focus on the back-and-forth between the white and African American students at the school. “We need to focus on the complicity of the adults, their completely inept handling of the noose-hanging incident,” he said. “Their treating it as a prank set up a very poisonous atmosphere. We need to take the emphasis off the kids and put the spotlight on Reed Walters and the other adults who have been driving this from the beginning.”

The National Lawyers Guild has called for disbarring Walters and Judge Mauffray for flagrant abuse of their offices and trampling on the constitutional rights of the Jena Six.

The NAACP declaration calls for “immediate action by local and state authorities as well as the U.S. Justice Department” to halt the mistreatment symbolized by the beating death of Anderson, the assault on Riley, the Jena Six “and countless other recent dehumanizing attacks” on African American youth by law enforcement officers.

The Florida NAACP staged a march in Tallahassee Oct. 23 demanding justice for young Anderson, who died while in custody at the Bay County Boot Camp last year. “To add insult to injury,” the statement says, “on Oct. 12, an all-white jury acquitted deputies and a nurse who participated in the videotaped violent abuse of Anderson that resulted in his death hours later.”

Other incidents cited by the NAACP include the following:

• In Inglewood, Calif., a July 2006 videotape showed police officers slamming Donovan Jackson-Chavis to the ground, tossing him in the air, bouncing him on the hood of a squad car and choking him for failing to drop a bag of potato chips.

• In Cincinnati, April 7, 2001, Timothy Thomas was fatally shot by a cop during a foot chase. He was unarmed and was holding up his pants as he ran. He was wanted on traffic violations. The officer was cleared in the shooting.

• In July 2003, Marcus Dixon, a straight-A student with a scholarship to Vanderbilt University, was charged with rape and held in prison for over a year for engaging in consensual sex with a white classmate. His 10-year conviction was overturned once jurors learned that the Georgia prosecutor withheld evidence from them.

A report titled “And Justice For Some,” using U.S. Justice Department data, reveals that while minority youth are one-third the adolescent population, they constitute two-thirds of the more than 100,000 young people confined in local and state detention facilities.

“When white youth and minority youth were charged with the same offenses, African American youth … were six times more likely to be incarcerated than white youth with the same background,” the NAACP declaration charges.

greenerpastures21212 @yahoo.com

This article in the Philadelphia Inquirer deals with a form of “anti-racism” training sponsored by the University of Delaware.  Conservative and libertarian blogs, to no ones surprise, have been having a field day with this issue.  Bloggers are particularly offended by the suggestion that white people are inevitably and incurably racist because, whether they know it or not, they benefit from white privilege. 

White supremacy, according to some anti-racist theorists, is a natural and unavoidable outgrowth of white privilege which is the only kind of racism that matters.  In other words, racism isn’t primarily a matter of believing that non-white people are inferior, nor is it about behaving as if white people are superior; racism is about white privilege, period.

Take me, for example.  I see white privilege as  an obvious and undeniable reality.  Being white confers all manner of advantages on me, whether I like it or not.  Thus, I am a participant in a racist system, and, if racism means benefiting from whiteness, I guess that makes me a racist.

If critical race theorists choose to define “racist” in this way they are free to do so.  As Frank Stagg, my old New Testament professor at Southern Seminary used to say, “words have usages, not meanings.”  The word “racist” can be used in all sorts of ways; like all words, it means different things to different people.

Does the anti-racist definition of “racist” comport with common usage?  Certainly not.  Is there much chance that more than, say, 10% of the American population will ever adopt the anti-racist analysis?  Probably not. 

Conservative Black intellectuals like John McWhorter and Shelby Steele have argued that blaming all of society’s ills on white racism forces young people of color into fatalism and victimhood.  I tend to agree; but that doesn’t mean the anti-racists are necessarily wrong. 

My concern is more practical than ideological.  The racial divide Jena has exposed tells us that Americans (particularly those of the African and European persuasion) need to talk.  Conversation is the key; indoctrination is both impractical and ineffective.  We need to start where people are and move from there.  Real conversation is open-ended.  That means we can’t know at the outset where the process will lead, or if it will lead anywhere.

Getting any kind of a conversation about race started in America represents a pretty high hurdle.  We aren’t trying to usher in the Kingdom of God here; we’re trying to grope and stumble our way to a rough and ready consensus.  We’re trying to get us a little justice.

The racial history of these United States needs to be part of the conversation–I’ll stipulate to that.  But defining white people as moral lepers will create the kind of backlash we are presently seeing at the University of Delaware. 

I am the kind of Christian who sees the human race (black, white and indifferent) as fallen, broken and in desperate need of redemption.   I am not the redeemer; and neither are you.  My ideas are full of holes; and so are yours.  Talking about race won’t fix anything in the absolute sense; but it might nudge our nation down a better road, and that’s all deck hands on a ship of fools have any right to expect.

_____________

Diversity program creates division

Delaware freshmen unsettled.

By Kathy Boccella

Inquirer Staff Writer

When University of Delaware freshmen showed up at their dorms this semester, their orientation included an exercise aimed at bridging cultural divides.But the program backfired after they were told to write down stereotypes of different ethnic and religious groups and publicly give their views on issues such as gay marriage and affirmative action.

“You have girls giving you hard looks because they’re Jewish, and you just wrote something offensive, like they’re cheap, even though you don’t believe it,” said Grace Banks, 18, of Smyrna. “It caused a lot of separations. . . . The whole situation was really uncomfortable.”

Delaware’s diversity training program is under scrutiny after students complained that they were pressed to adopt university-approved views on race and other sensitive topics, participate in squirm-inducing exercises, and rated on their responses to questions about their sexual and cultural beliefs.

Parents and professors also complained that the program is politically slanted, citing training material that claims all white people living in the United States are racist.

“It’s straight-out indoctrination,” said Linda Gottfredson, an education professor who looked into the program after her Honors Program students grumbled about it.

Another education professor, Jan Blits, president of the Delaware Association of Scholars, labeled the program “political propaganda and brain-washing.”

“I’d be out of a job in a day if I asked students questions about their sex lives or their experiences as oppressors. . . . It’s illegal,” he said.

In a letter to Delaware president Patrick T. Harker, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a Philadelphia-based free-speech group, called the program a “threat to freedom of conscience” and asked that it be dismantled immediately.

“The most terrifying thing is it’s teaching a generation of students that it’s OK to force people to believe what you believe, if you believe you’re right, and that’s not what a free society is supposed to be about,” said FIRE president Greg Lukianoff.

Michael Gilbert, the university’s vice president for student life, acknowledged “missteps” in the program, which is intended for the 7,000 students living in dormitories on the 970-acre Newark campus.

Among the problems Gilbert acknowledges: Resident advisers told students the sessions were mandatory when they were voluntary; the term “treatment” was used, which he said could be “easily misinterpreted” and “construed as inappropriate”; and students were rated “best and worst” by RAs after their one-on-one meetings.

Students “are not required to adopt any particular points of view but are presented with a range of ideas to challenge them and stimulate conversation and debate,” Gilbert said in a posting on the university’s Web site.

A few “overzealous” RAs told students they had to attend the meetings, he said. After students complained recently, they were informed last week that they did not have to attend.

As for the prying sex question, Gilbert said the exercise was intended to help students “reflect on a number of things” and to become “critical thinkers,” and would continue.

It a student declines to answer “our obligation is to accept that and respect that,” he said.

An RA who asked that he not be identified for fear of being fired said he was so uncomfortable asking students about sex and race in the one-one-ones that he never did it.

“It’s an insane thing to ask,” he said.

During the interviews, which are held twice a semester, staff evaluate students on their “level of change or acceptance,” he said.

Gilbert said the only ratings were of RA interview skills.

The senior, who is in his second year as an RA, said: “There’s very little dialogue. It’s very much a monologue.

“They call it diversity, but what it really is acceptance of a specific set of dogma,” the student said.

The 20,000-student brick-and-ivy school, which started as a private academy in 1743, is overwhelmingly white, 83 percent; African American, 5.3 percent; Hispanic 4.4 percent; and Asian, 3.8 percent.

There are few racial problems on campus, according to students and administrators. The diversity program was started, Gilbert said, to help students become “active and successful citizens” of the world.

Topics such as internalized and institutional racism, diversity, and environmental and social justice are taught at various dorms.

Materials from an August 2007 training session for Whole New World included articles that described a racist as “one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States . . . ”

Another article said “white culture is a melting pot of greed, guys, guns and god. It is a deadly brew.”

Gilbert said those were not the university’s views and should not have been posted on the school’s Web site without some “context.” The material is among “thousands” of documents used to teach the course, he said.

Other articles on the Web site included the confessions of a “recovering racist” and a list of the daily effects of “white privilege.”

Students said they felt pressured by RAs to agree with an ideology in which whites were oppressors and minorities were victims.

“It made me feel that because I was white and not at the lower economic spectrum of society, I was in some way racist, when in reality I do not think differently of anyone because of their race or gender or sexual identity,” said Brooke Aldrich, 18, who lives in Russell Hall dorm.

In one exercise, she said students had to go to different sides of the room if they agreed or disagreed with statements about gay marriage or affirmative action.

“You had to take a stance, yes or no. There were no gray areas. It was very uncomfortable,” Aldrich said.

In another session, students had to step forward or backward depending on their response to statements about race and sexual identity. Those who ended up at the front were supposed to be white males, which they were told were the least oppressed members of society, she said.

Kelsey Lanan, 19, a sophomore, said, “It seemed like they were trying to convince us we were racist and sexist and were horrible people.”

For many students, the worst was the one-on-one meetings in which they were given a sheet of questions such as, “When were you first made aware of your race?” and “When did you discover your sexual identity?

Matthew King, 19, said that when he asked his RA if he could skip the question on sexuality, she said, “I’m really going to need you to answer it.”

They sat in silence until he wrote something down.

One student identified in a write-up as an RA’s “worst” was a young woman who said she was tired of having “diversity shoved down her throat” and that the questions that were being asked were nobody’s business.

Another “worst” student who was angry about the program was said to be “very set in her ways – to the point of annoyance.”

A parent of a biracial boy said he found the program “very disturbing” and was hesitant about keeping his son at Delaware.

Peter Johnson’s 18-year-old son told him there was pressure to agree that “all white people are the committers of racial oppression and everybody else is a victim.”

He said he was stonewalled when he asked the school for program materials but when he insisted, he received them.

An RA who is Latina, Lorraine Makond, agreed that the program was a flop because students didn’t really want to be there.

“For the most part students put up a wall,” said the 19-year-old junior, who is president of the Latino student union. “When people hear diversity training, they put their politically correct sensors on for three hours, then go back to their regular behavior.”

---

One-on-One Sample Questions The University of Delaware’s student diversity training required freshmen to meet one on one with dorm resident advisers to answer these questions and others. The university says the program was voluntary, but students in some dorms were told it was mandatory.

1. When were you first made aware of your race?

2. When did you discover your sexual identity?

3. Who taught you a lesson in regard to some sort of diversity awareness? What was that lesson?

4. When was a time when you confronted someone regarding an issue of diversity? What was the confrontation about? If haven’t, why not?

5. When was a time you felt oppressed? Who was oppressing you? How did you feel?

6. Can you think of a time when someone was offended by what you said? How did that make you feel? How do you think it made them feel? How did his/her behavior change toward you?

This essay by Barbara Raye is based on the mainstream media’s version of the Jena story: white kids hang nooses; black kids beat up white kid.  The media tells the Jena story this way because Al Sharpton has been shaping the message since mid-August. and Sharpton’s primary argument seems to be that because the noose hangers aren’t doing prison time, the Jena 6 shouldn’t be prosecuted either.  I don’t think that’s what Sharpton really believes, but his soundbites clearly give this impression, and you can’t blame the casual reader for (a) thinking this is what Jena is about, and (b) being a bit bewildered.

But Ms. Raye isn’t that concerned about the precise details of the Jena story–she is asking how the principles of restorative justice could have forestalled a tragedy.  Please give her reflections your serious attention, and tell us what you think.

Missed Opportunity for Peace: Restorative Justice and Jena Louisiana

Last year black students asked for the “right” to sit under a tree on campus that had historically been reserved for white students. The tree, instead of becoming a symbol of harmony and progress, no longer lives on campus. But before it was cut down, nooses were strung from it by white students. Those students knew the symbolism of the act and they knew the threat and history it provoked. But, they might not have known the harm it caused. How could they? They probably didn’t intend to hang black students from the tree–they merely wanted to be “one-up” in the power dynamics of a situation that seemed to be threatening the separation of the races on school grounds and the superiority of white students. It was determined that a “crime” had not been committed and school suspensions were meted out to those involved.  Reports indicate that tensions and fights between black and white students have flared up over the several months since the first noose was found in the tree. School officials, students, parents, and community members considered them a normal part of high school life–schoolyard fights between boys, often between boys in groups of their friends, often based on racial identity. Each situation was probably handled by the rules and what seemed reasonable to school officials. However, they did not understand the ongoing harm that occurred in the school community. Fear, anger, suspicion, tension, and reminders of “place” and social divides that many had hoped would have been long irrelevant were affecting everyone. There were likely both white and black students who worried about violence on campus.  

Then the group of black students now called the Jena 6 was charged with attempted murder for the beating of a white student. We’ve seen the consequences. Thousands of people converging in Jena, national news and interviews of some involved, political comments and reminders of the civil rights movement, acknowledgment of systemic racial discrimination in our criminal justice system, and a “protecting of their own” by prosecutors and other officials within the system. Charges have subsequently been reduced and five of the students are out on bail while the prosecutor tries to make a distinction between them and the sixth (Bell) who has had previous arrests.

 These details are hard to surface in the turmoil and big picture experience of racial prejudice. There have also been more nooses tied to car/truck bumpers recalling the 1998 killing of James Byrd Jr. a black man dragged to his death from a noose tied to a truck in Jasper Texas.  

Here is an important example of the consequences of not understanding the harm that happens–even if the action doesn’t reach the level of being named a ‘crime”. It is an example of how actions–known to be symbolic–have enormous impact. It is also a searing example of the collective harm that occurs from systemic discrimination.

The thousands of demonstrators and rhetoric of the case being a new symbol of the 21^st Century civil rights movement reinforce the need to address overt racism in our criminal justice system. But, it also compromises all of us to suggest that a six-on-one beating should be endorsed as either an acceptable or necessary response to a harmful situation.

This is also a case where the reliance on the results of the beating rather than the harm it induced creates even more harm. When people note that the student was released from the hospital and attended a school function the same evening, they are in effect saying the crime was less severe than the charges indicate. I have no doubt that the student beaten by the Jena 6 feared for his life. I think both he and they are lucky that he did not die. Not because there was an intention to kill, but because permanent injury or death can be so easily a result from this type of physical violence. The societal attitude that violence (especially group violence) should be accepted also reinforces an approach to harm that young men (and growing numbers of young women) in this county model to their long-term detriment.  An alternative approach would have been to recognize harm and deal with it. Knowingly fostering racial discrimination by allowing race-designated places (informal or formal) is the responsibility of the school and addressing the harm that occurred to students is part of the obligation school leaders needs to assume. Those who hung the first nooses might have better understood the impact of their actions if there had been dialogue rather than quiet suspensions. Students who were impacted and found racial tensions and fights occurring in the school could have had a venue for letting out the experience, feelings, and story of what did and was happening on campus.

The Jena 6 could have had the opportunity to name their experience and understand the impact of their actions. The student, beaten by a group of six and surrounded by onlookers, and his family/friends could have had the opportunity to share their fears and concerns without being named racists. And, the community of the school could have learned more about the needs of its students and engaged them in creating a safer place for everyone.  I know that Jena doesn’t want this incident to define it in the national consciousness–and yet it does. The legal process and rules of school administrators and policy makers have their place. However, they have not served these students and this community well. A restorative model of dialogue and conflict resolution could define Jena as a place that strives to heal hurt, allows experience to be expressed in the context of time and symbolism, and engages those impacted by harm to seek and define resolution.

I wish for Jena, the Jena 6, and the students expelled, beaten, and suspended a place and a process of dialogue that offers an opportunity for understanding and the power to define their own resolution to the harm. Through their wisdom, sustainable and effective guidelines for their future school community could be developed. I offer our dialogue facilitators who understand the dynamics of race, violence, adolescence, and harm to help in any way we can.  Barbara Raye International Association for Restorative Justice and Dialogue Victim Offender Mediation Association 2233 University Avenue West #300 St. Paul, MN 55114 Email: voma@voma.org or braye@effective.orgWeb: http://www.voma.org or http://www.rjdialogue.org Tel: 612-874-0570 or 612-

This CNN article by Ashley Franz provides the most in-depth coverage of the recent rash of noose incidents yet published. 

The most penetrating quote comes from Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center:

“Tens of thousands of white people, if not more, feel that the events in Jena were grossly misportrayed by a politically correct media that twisted what was [to them], really, a six-on-one, black-on-white hate crime into an instance of the oppression of black people.  That accounts, in part, for a backlash.”

I think Mark has it right.  This demonstrates how successful the right wing myth making has been.  But white conservative rage is also driven by the false impression that Black America has embraced the Jena 6 as heroes.  Many African Americans have told me that they identify vicariously with these kids, not because their alleged actions were acceptable, but because they are normal kids responding to a toxic social environment. 

Jena is like a Rorschach test: people find in the story what they want to find; and that is largely a reflection of personal experience.  Blacks and whites tend to see this story differently because they do not share a common, or even similar, life experience.  Social learning can only emerge from conversation; unfortunately there are few natural settings in which black and white Americans can sit down and talk about race in a personal way. 

Which reminds me of a joke my father used to tell.  The preacher was waxing eloquent on the subject of hell.  There, he told his congregaion, “Men shall wail and gnash their teeth.” 

“What if you haven’t got any teeth?” a toothless gramma asked.

“I assure you madam,” the preacher replied, “they will be provided.”

What if we haven’t got a place where people can talk across America’s racial divide?  Places must be provided.

Noose incidents: Foolish pranks or pure hate?

 CNN) — The media spotlight might have shone most intensely on Jena, Louisiana, but a symbol of racial violence has been hung across America lately, spurring anger, resentment and a big question.

A symbol of racial violence and hate, the noose is the focus of several alleged hate crimes cases across the U.S.

Do all the incidents of hanging nooses — many with hateful notes to their intended black audience — reveal an ugly truth about race relations in the United States, or are they just stupid pranks by a few foolish, attention-starved people?

Since September, nooses have been found in a Coast Guard office, a suburban New York police station locker room, a North Carolina high school, a Home Depot in New Jersey and on the campus of the University of Maryland.

A Brooklyn, New York, high school principal, who is black, received one in the mail recently, along with a letter that read, “White Power Forever,” The New York Times reported. In mid-October, a noose was discovered outside a post office at New York City’s “Ground Zero,” just days after a noose was hung on the office door of a black Columbia University professor.

Earlier this week, the head of a black mannequin was found hanging from a noose outside a home in Valley Stream, New York, police said. Beneath the noose, on the mannequin’s neck, was a piece of paper with the “n-word” written on it, said Detective Jeff Schilling of the Nassau County Police Department.

And days before Halloween, a Stratford, Connecticut, woman reluctantly removed from her yard a dark-hued figure hanging from a noose. It was among numerous innocuous lawn decorations, such as ghosts and a plastic grave marker.

“It’s unfortunate that now, we’re goingto have to think twice about what we display because someone might be offended,” Jennifer Cervero told CNN.

Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate crimes, said that the apparent increase in noose incidents is, in part, reaction to the news coverage of the “Jena 6”.

Since September, the SPLC has recorded between 40 and 50 suspected hate crimes involving nooses, one involving two people traveling the road to Jena during the protests in a pickup truck with nooses affixed to the bumper.

Tens of thousands of white people, if not more, feel that the events in Jena were grossly misportrayed by a politically correct media that twisted what was [to them], really, a six-on-one, black-on-white hate crime into an instance of the oppression of black people,” Potok said. “That accounts, in part, for a backlash.”

CNN and other news organizations devoted much time and effort covering the September protests in Jena. Led by black civil rights leaders, thousands of people gathered in the small Louisiana town to protest what they said was the racist treatment of six black high school students who were being charged as adults in the beating of a white high school student.

Racial tensions were already at a boiling point in Jena in September 2006, when three white teens hung nooses from a tree near the local high school. The day before, black students had received permission from school administrators to sit under the tree — a place where white students normally congregated.

The white students were briefly suspended from classes for hanging the nooses, despite the principal’s recommendation they be expelled, according to Donald Washington, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Louisiana.

It wasn’t long before the focus on Jena was diverted to other racially charged incidents involving nooses in the country. “I would say undoubtedly some of that is 12-year-olds doing the most obnoxious thing they can think of,” Potok said.

In early October, a student who recorded a re-enactment of the “Jena 6” incident and posted it on the social networking Web site Facebook apologized, saying the video was not intended to make fun of the six black students, according to The News-Star newspaper of Monroe, Louisiana.

The video, recorded by University of Louisiana-Monroe student Kristy Smith, shows students in blackface apparently acting out the beating of the white Jena student.

One of the men in the tape runs onto a beach acting as if he is holding a noose, and three others — covered in river mud — pretend to knock him to the ground, punch and kick him. At least one racial epithet can be heard.

While the Department of Justice doesn’t keep track of noose-specific offenses, the government published a report in 2000 showing an increase of nooses in professional environments.

And The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says the race-baiting technique still creeps up in professional environments. There have been at least 20 lawsuits involving nooses in the workplace since 2001.

Of the 5,500 racial harassment charge filings in 2006, anecdotal information from EEOC field offices suggests that some involved nooses, but the agency is unable to quantify that data, according to EEOC spokesman David Grinberg.

On Wednesday, seven black workers employed by an Oklahoma-based drilling company won a $290,000 settlement in a discrimination lawsuit which claimed they felt threatened by the display of a noose on a Gulf of Mexico oil rig.

“It’s time for corporate America to be more proactive in preventing and eliminating racist behavior,” said EEOC Chairwoman Naomi C. Earp. “The EEOC intends to make clear that race and color discrimination in the workplace, whether verbal or behavioral, is unacceptable and will not be tolerated.”

In this exhaustive and detailed post, Eddie G. Griffin provides a thorough refutation of Craig Franklin’s column in the Christian Science monitor.  Eddie has combed through all the Jena-related articles published by the Alexandria TownTalk since the noose incident in September.  No one can read this material (much of it written by reporter Abbey Brown) without realizing that the black community was outraged by the noose incident and the way it was handled by public officials.  This impression is actually deepened by articles in the Jena Times that describe a locked-down campus bristling with tension.  Craig Franklin can replace history with fantasy if he wishes; but the facts speak for themselves.  Please give Mr. Griffin’s post a careful reading. 

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g_B895UEtV38cUvZWav9zg08hh3QD8SJQK600  

Judge Steps Out of Jena Six News Case

By MICHAEL KUNZELMAN – 15 hours ago

 NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A judge has disqualified himself from hearing a request from news media to open juvenile court proceedings for a black teenager charged with beating a white classmate in Jena, a case that has drawn thousands of protesters.

After the recusal of state District Judge J.P. Mauffray Jr., the Louisiana Supreme Court on Tuesday assigned colleague Thomas Yeager to decide whether the case against 17-year-old Mychal Bell should be open to the public.

Yeager, who sits in the central Louisiana city of Alexandria, said he set a tentative court date of Nov. 21 to hear the petition filed by The Associated Press and more than two dozen newspapers, television networks and network affiliates.

The news organizations are seeking permission to attend new hearings in Bell’s case, to review transcripts of previous hearings and other court records, and to lift a gag order against participants in the case.

Bell, 17, originally was charged with attempted murder for his suspected role in a December 2006 attack on Justin Barker at Jena High School. That charge was reduced before a jury convicted him in June of aggravated second-degree battery. Mauffray presided over the trial.

The charges against Bell and five others — the so-called “Jena Six” — sparked a huge civil-rights demonstration in Jena last month. Critics accused prosecutor Reed Walters of treating blacks more harshly than whites, because his office didn’t file charges against three white teens accused of hanging nooses in a tree at the high school shortly before the attack on Barker.

In September, a state appeals court vacated Bell’s conviction and ruled that he shouldn’t have been tried as an adult. Bell is due in juvenile court early next month — also before Mauffray — and has a tentative trial date of Dec. 6.

In a one-page ruling, Mauffray indicated he recused himself because he was named as a defendant in the news media’s litigation. Mauffray is the only judge assigned to the Lasalle Parish court where Bell’s case is being heard. Dan Zimmerman, an attorney for the news organizations, said the judge would have been in a “difficult position” if he had to review his own decision.

Criminal cases involving juveniles in Louisiana are usually sealed, but lawyers for the news organizations argue that aggravated second-degree battery is one of the violent offenses that allows a juvenile court case to be opened to the public.

Five other students were charged with the attack on Barker, who was knocked unconscious.

Charges against three other teens — Robert Bailey Jr., 18; Carwin Jones, 19; and Theo Shaw, 18 — also have been reduced from attempted murder to aggravated second-degree battery. Bryant Purvis, 18, has not yet been arraigned, and a sixth suspect was charged as a juvenile.

In addition to The Associated Press, news organizations seeking to open Bell’s case are The New York Times; USA Today; the Chicago Tribune; the Los Angeles Times; the Houston Chronicle; the San Antonio Express-News; The Beaumont Enterprise; The Dallas Morning News; CNN; ABC News; WDSU-TV and WWL-TV in New Orleans; WAPT-TV in Jackson, Miss.; WFAA-TV in Dallas; KHOU-TV in Houston; KVUE-TV in Austin, Texas; KENS-TV in San Antonio; The (Houma) Courier; The (Thibodaux) Daily Comet; The (Alexandria) Town Talk; The (Monroe) News-Star; The (Shreveport) Times; The (Lafayette) Daily Advertiser and The (Opelousas) Daily World.

The NAACP is now taking credit for exposing the injustice in Jena.  No surprise there; they also took credit for the Tulia debacle.  In both cases, the NAACP dithered and dawdled while Friends of Justice got the facts straight, worked the media and drafted more responsive allies into the fight.  In both cases, the NAACP rushed to the forefront at the eleventh hour.

I have been criticized for beating up on white people while giving black America a pass.  If I lose my patience with white folks because they call the shots, in America and in tiny towns like Jena, Louisiana.  This combination of unfettered power and blissful ignorance has stirred up a witches brew of trouble, but the people making public policy decisions live in blessed isolation from their own mischief.

Ultimately, white people must come to the table.  We cannot be ignored because, in the public policy poker game, we hold all the cards.  Notice, I said “we”.  I am part of white America and there ain’t a damn thing I can do about it.  The leopard, as the Good Book says, cannot change its spots.

The September 20th march on Jena was a virtually all-black affair.  Several hundred white people showed up, but in a crowd that immense you had to look really hard to find us.  If a white person was asked to speak even once it escaped my attention.  Peter, Paul and Mary set the stage for Martin’s “dream speech”, but in Jena we weren’t invited to the dance.

Ironically, white people brought the Jena story to the world.   Friends of Justice was on the ground for over a month before Tory Pegram, a gifted, and incurably white, activist with the Louisiana ACLU, answered our call for help.  Tory didn’t necessarily come with the blessing of her organization; she came because she cared. 

White people investigated and framed the Jena story.  A white reporter named Howard Witt broke the story in the mainstream media.  A white journalist named Jordan Flaherty introduced the story to the independent media and the blogosphere.  A white law professor named Bill Quigley gave the story credibility with veterans of the civil rights movement.  A white BBC correspondent named Tom Mangold broke the story in the international media before it caught fire in America.  Amy Goodman gave the story a big boost by featuring it on Democracy Now (Amy performed a similar service in the early days of the Tulia fight).  The reporters who brought the story to Goodman’s attention were also white.

I must also point out that high-profile black organizations didn’t flock to the banner of the Jena 6 until after the trial of Mychal Bell, that is, after the story clearly had legs. 

Don’t get me wrong, our organizational meetings in Jena were overwhelmingly black from the beginning.  It should also be noted that King Downing, a highly effective black organizer with the national ACLU, joined the fight early on at the request of Tory Pegram.  In addition, several NAACP representatives from the Jena region contributed to the organizing and Tony Brown, a black radio host in Alexandria, was the first journalist to give the Jena 6 sympathetic coverage.  Also, James Rucker, the black leader of Color of Change, multiplied the organizing capacity of the Jena 6 movement by bringing the story to the attention of his vast network. 

But if white people brought Jena to the attention of the nation, black Americans transformed the story into a phenomenon.  Once black bloggers and radio talk show hosts latched onto the Jena 6, momentum began to build behind the massive protest we saw on September 20th.

The tipping point came in late July in the wake of a rally in Jena that attracted 300 people, a third of them white, to the LaSalle Parish courthouse.  By that time, Color of Change had already collected over 100,000 petition signatures and donations were beginning to roll into the Jena 6 defense fund.  For the first time, representatives of the Nation of Islam and the New Black Panther Party were on hand.  They didn’t seem comfortable around white folks like me.  One woman ostentatiously refused to shake my hand because I was white.  I have felt a similar reserve from many black activists; although most have been too polite to make their feelings explicit.

The critical moment came late in the day as torrential rain was beating down on the enormous tent the Jena 6 families had rented for the Ward 10 ball park on the black side of Jena.  All the out of town guests had gone home and only the Jena 6 families and the primary protest organizers: Alan Bean, Tory Pegram, King Downing, and James Rucker, remained. 

A cell phone rang and somebody said,  “It’s Al Sharpton.  He wants to talk to the families.”

I wasn’t surprised.  Sharpton’s people had called Friends of Justice earlier in the week asking for contact information for the Jena 6 families.  That was the last time they would talk to us, or to any of the original organizers.

Days later, Jesse Jackson flew to Alexandria via private jet, picked up one of the parents of the Jena 6, then jetted back to Chicago for interviews, photo opportunities and fund raising.

Suddenly, mainstream media coverage of Jena was primarily coverage of Al Sharpton.  This wasn’t necessarily the reverend’s doing; it appears to be the way the media game is played in America.  A legitimate civil rights story is whatever story Sharpton has latched onto.  It’s a lot like professional wrestling: Sharpton mugs for the cameras, Jesse Jackson fumbles for the microphone, black folks clap and whistle, white folks hiss and throw rotten fruit, and the media people are happy because . . . hay, everybody’s paying attention!

This format was on display in the days leading up to September 20th.  The media scrum chased after Rev. Sharpton and his sizable entourage whenever his stretch limo pulled into sight.  Talk show host Michael Baisden stood at Sharpton’s side outside the courthouse (clearly a power-sharing arrangement of some kind had been worked out behind the scenes).  Baisden boasted that 50,000 of his listeners were descending on Jena even as he spoke.  The Rev. Al thanked the Bad Boy of Talk Radio for taking on the Jena 6 “at considerable commercial sacrifice”. 

The Nation of Islam was given a precious two minutes in front of the cameras; just long enough for an articulate young man with a scowling visage to announce, on behalf of the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, that Allah intended to punish the white racists in Jena with a natural disaster (details were not disclosed).

Then Al and Michael climbed into their limos and it was back to Alexandria for a book signing and the closest thing to a posh hotel Central Louisiana affords.

Then, at long last, the state NAACP swept into Jena in full force.  They were organized, articulate and effective.  We could have used this show of support back in March, but were happy to have it in September.  Jesse Jackson threw in his lot with the NAACP folks from Baton Rouge and New Orleans; Al Sharpton and Michael Baisden proceeded with a parallel rally.

In the end, everything worked out amazingly well.  The crowd was exuberant, energized and positive.  They were there for the kids and, blissfully ignorant of the power struggles going on behind the scenes, the ordinary people made the show.

Neither Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson nor Michael Baisden made the slightest effort to involve the original organizers (white or black) in the planning process.  In fact, Baisden told his listeners that they should send their Jena 6 contributions directly to him.  The implication was that the existing Jena 6 defense fund was tainted in some fashion.  Calls from the original organizers to Baisden’s people were not returned.

This didn’t mean that groups like Friends of Justice and Color of Change have been rendered impotent.  Color of Change has raised a sizable war chest for the legal teams representing the defendants, every penny of which will soon be placed in the hands of the families and their attorneys.  Original organizers, including Friends of Justice, have been working behind the scenes to draft civil rights groups, church organizations, and some of the best attorneys in America into the fight.  

As the media circus winds down, the legal fight is roaring into high gear.  The Jena 6 still face charges that could put them in prison for a decade.  The Rev. Sharpton et al don’t seem too concerned about the legal fate of the Jena 6–so long as the white kids get hammered just as hard. 

Meanwhile, the court of public opinion has fractured along racial lines.  Most black people think the Jena 6 are the victims of a corrupt criminal justice system; most white people can’t see what all the fuss is about.

I got into this struggle for two reasons: the defendants needed solid legal representation, and America needed to talk.  By bringing the plight of the Jena 6 to the attention of the nation, I hoped to spark a long-deferred conversation about race and the criminal justice system.  The more lively this conversation became, I believed, the better the chance that Mychal Bell, Robert Bailey, Theo Shaw, Bryant Purvis, Carwin Jones, and Jesse Ray Beard would some equal justice. 

It isn’t my job to dictate outcomes to the criminal justice system–I just want the system to operate according to its own rules.  That’s why Friends of Justice called for a change of venue (no one in LaSalle Parish can be considered objective after the dramatic and highly polarizing events of recent months).  And we have called for DA Reed Walters and Judge JP Mauffray to recuse themselves (I will leave it to the lawyers to explain why this is needs to happen). 

The Jena 6 will get the kind of  legal representation every American deserves, but this will not happen because Al Sharpton and Michael Baisden crashed the party; it will happen because a dedicated and gifted coalition of organizers, defendant families, and local supporters cared enough to bring a complicated collection of facts to the attention of the nation.

The folks currently at the helm of the Jena 6 media show have inadvertently sparked a vicious backlash in large segments of white America.  The white progressives who initially rallied to the Jena 6 banner are beginning to back away.  Racists are merrily hanging nooses and “hang the Jena 6” zealots are making their presence felt.

On a more positive note, the Jena 6 story has forced opinion leaders in the African American community to admit that the new civil rights movement needs to focus on young people like Mychal Bell.  The cruel machinations of the New Jim Crow are coming to public awareness, and not a moment too soon.

Why was it left to white folks to discover the Jena 6 story?  Why weren’t black journalists the first on the scene?  Why were traditional civil rights organizations like the NAACP and the Legal Defense Fund so slow to step up?  Because everybody is looking for the next Rosa Parks.  The civil rights movement can’t come to terms with the social dynamics of the New Jim Crow because it’s still operating out of an Old Jim Crow paradigm.  The victims of a flawed criminal justice system are routinely overlooked because . . . they have been accused of crimes.

A lot of liberal white people backed away from Mychal Bell as soon as it was revealed that he had “issues”; a lot of black people distanced themselves from Mychal because he didn’t look like Rosa. 

On November 7th, attorneys for four of the Jena 6 defendants will file into the LaSalle Parish courthouse.  Inevitably, media coverage will shift from the sins of the children to the transgressions of grown-ups like Reed Walters and School Superintendent Roy Breithaupt.  Attorneys who prefer to do their talking in the courtroom will finally get a chance to talk. 

My fervent prayer is that, as the focus changes, the painful perception gap between white and black America will begin to narrow.  The Jena 6 story has produced lots of heat; now maybe we’ll see some light. 

The grandstanding self promotion we have seen around this case might be an inevitable part of the process.  Maybe this is just the way we do things in America.  Perhaps the only realistic alternative to the Jena 6 media show is a deadly and deafening indifference.  If it takes a circus to get a little justice in America, then bring on the clowns.  I just hope the media can tell the difference between a celebrity with a pocketful of one-liners, and a defense attorney with a briefcase crammed with facts.

 http://www.diversityinc.com/public/2628print.cfm 

After Jena 6 Noose Case, More Blacks Feel Courts Are Unfair

Compiled by the DiversityInc staff

In the wake of the Jena 6 noose case, CNN polled black and white Americans and found they continue to have widely different views of race relations in this country. Blacks’ increased attention to perceived judicial inequities at least partly explains the furor in the black community over the Jena 6 case. See the DiversityInc Noose Watch for regular updates on noose-hanging incidents across the country and how local and federal officials are responding to them.   

The poll found that more blacks pay attention to news stories that imply the justice system is unfair to blacks. Here are a few key findings:

 

• Of the total respondents, 35 percent of whites compared with 10 percent of blacks said that they did not know enough about the Jena 6 case to respond to questions
• Seventy-nine percent of blacks compared with 33 percent of whites knew enough about the case to say that the six black teenagers in Jena, La., were treated unfairly by the town’s justice system
• Twenty-nine percent of whites and 10 percent of blacks thought that the black teenagers were treated fairly

The poll conducted for CNN by Opinion Research Corp. included 1,212 telephone interviews from Oct. 12 to Oct. 14 with adult Americans, including an over-sample of blacks, reported CNN. The question of whether race relations will improve in America nearly split black respondents, with slightly more saying they will not improve. Of black respondents, 49 percent said race relations will improve, while 51 percent said they will not. Meanwhile, most white respondents thought race relations will improve; 66 percent said they will and 33 percent said they will not.  When blacks were asked if they felt whites or blacks were treated more harshly by the justice system, an overwhelming majority of black respondents, 79 percent, said that blacks are treated more harshly than whites. Only 19 percent of black respondents said the justice system treats blacks the same as whites and only 1 percent said whites are treated more harshly.  Whites, however, are nearly split on the question of who is treated more harshly by the justice system. While 48 percent of white respondents feel the justice system treats blacks and whites the same, 47 percent feel the justice system treats blacks more harshly and 3 percent think whites are treated more harshly.

Stephanie Holmes of the British Broadcasting Corporation may be the first journalist to focus on the issue of birds-of-a-feather self-segregation.  According to Anita L. Allen, a University of Pennsylvania professor, “American society is much too full of what are metaphorically ‘white-only shade trees’ and ‘black-only shade trees.  We are much too content to let these pockets of segregation persist.”The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity recently published a paper called “The Dangers of Not Speaking About Race.”  According to the authors, America now practices a “racism without racists,” based on four primary assumptions (what Friends of Justice calls “the four pillars of the New Jim Crow”).  The first assumption is that race no longer matters in America.  The second assumption is that whatever vestigial traces of racial tension may exist are driven by the dysfunction within underclass minority communities.  Third (and most critical for our present purposes), is the assumption that voluntary self-segregation is natural, normal, and essentially healthy.  The final assumption flows from the first three: America is a meritocracy with a level playing field. The article below pays particular attention to pillar number three: self-segregation. We all know that America is a highly segregated society.  A drive through most affluent suburbs, most inner city neighborhoods, or a visit to most Protestant churches on Sunday morning would illustrate the point.  But is this such a bad thing? Anita Allen thinks it’s a bad thing; and I agree.  The response to Jena (people like Alan Bean and Mychal Massie notwithstanding) breaks down along racial lines.  White people often have a hard time seeing a noose hanging from a tree as a big deal.  Many African Americans refuse to see Justin Barker as a victim.  White people tend to identify with Jena’s white residents; black people commonly demonize them. Few observers on either side of the racial divide understand how bizarre missteps by a handfull of public officials created a toxic environment for all students, black and white. Black and white Americans need to talk a lot more than they do.  In particular, we need to talk about race.  We need to talk about Jena.  Segregated worlds have created segregated experience which produce segregated perceptions.  On the whole, as I have often suggested, African Americans have a more nuanced and informed grasp of racial issues than white Americans–but that doesn’t mean that learning can’t flow in both directions.  Unravelling race relations in the US

By Stephanie Holmes BBC News When three hangman’s nooses were suspended from a tree in a school playground in a small Louisiana town, it sparked a chain of events which has fuelled a furious debate over race, justice and symbolism in the US. The Jena noose incident spawned a series of copycat acts The coils of knotted rope which swung in the shade of the tree recalled the nooses used to hang black men in collective lynchings carried out by white mobs in the southern states as recently as the 1940s. The incident in the small town of Jena, which culminated in a group of black youths being charged with attempted second-degree murder for allegedly beating a white boy, has spawned a series of copycat acts. Nooses have been hung on doors, pinned up in workplaces and slipped into letters. New York’s government is now considering criminalising any representation of the noose as a hate crime. Some African-American analysts argue that the recurring use of the noose as an instrument of intimidation reveals deep and unresolved racial tensions in US society. Symbol “The noose, in the context of Louisiana, is a symbol of a technique of racial intimidation,” explains Professor Anita L Allen, of the University of Pennsylvania’s law school. Columbia University students denounced this noose on a teacher’s door “Up until the 1940s, African-Americans were ritualistically hung from nooses in trees, killed and tortured – and this memory persists.” Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Centre’s Intelligence Project, which monitors hate groups operating across the US, agrees. “The noose in US history is intimately associated with the Ku Klux Klan. It became the symbol of the worst the southern white supremacists could do,” he told the BBC News website from Alabama. At Columbia University, in New York, a black professor arrived at work earlier this month to find a noose hung from the door of her office. Nooses have also recently been reported to have been found in a coast guard cadet’s bag and outside a Manhattan post office. American society is much too full of what are metaphorically ‘white-only shade trees’ and ‘black-only shade trees’ Professor Anita L Allen, Pennsylvania University Mr Potok argues that the rise in the number of incidents involving nooses echoes an increase in the number of hate groups across the US, which has grown by 40% over the past six years. “There really has been an outbreak of incidents,” he says. “They reflect a much wider white backlash. This is not a handful of Klansmen and neo-Nazis but widespread anger.” Divided spaces In Jena, the nooses – reportedly in the three school colours – were hung from a tree where whites used to congregate, a day after a black pupil asked the headmaster if he could sit in its shade. Some public zones remain divided along race lines Months later, a white teenager was violently attacked and kicked at the school, allegedly by six of his black schoolmates. The response of the local justice department, which initially charged five of the six with attempted second degree murder and set prohibitively high bail costs for them, provoked anger. Some of charges were subsequently downgraded. According to Anita L Allen, although the history of lynching is widely known, it is not on the school curriculum and the “full horror and terror” of the noose’s significance may remain unclear to a 16-year-old who would see it as merely an “intimidating or cheeky” act. The underlying problem, she insists, is the fact that the use of public spaces – such as the tree for shade – continues to be defined by skin colour. “American society is much too full of what are metaphorically ‘white-only shade trees’ and ‘black-only shade trees’,” Ms Allen says. “We are much too content to let these pockets of segregation persist.” She sees the schoolyard as the place where broader race struggles are played out and erupt into conflict. “If you have playgrounds that are single-race or school proms – as often happens in the US south – that are for one race or the other, or students who dine separately from one another… then I think we are asking for trouble.” ‘Bifurcated world’ She points to a recent Supreme Court ruling which threw out voluntary affirmative action programmes operating in schools in Seattle and Louisville, Kentucky to encourage mixed-race schools. “Now we are back-pedalling on that approach and the legal context for desegregation is being destroyed and the social and political will to desegregate the society is disappearing with the result that we live in this bifurcated black/white world,” she says. But Mr Potok reckons that the US needs to look beyond its borders, rather than to its backyards, for the source of race tensions. “You can see it from the comments in reaction to this case on the internet. I would argue that racial nationalism is going up. It is a function of globalisation, of the weakening nation-state.” ‘Riot and mayhem’ For Mychal Massie, the head of Project 21, a group of conservative African-Americans linked to a Washington-based think-tank, the whole case has been blown out of proportion by the US media because of what he believes is an intrinsically liberal bias. “They made it an issue of race when it should not be about race. You had seven thugs, who were black, who beat a white young man, beat him unconscious,” he told the BBC News website. “That’s not race, that’s riot and mayhem! They should be held accountable for their actions.” He insists the noose cases are random, isolated incidents linked up by the media, and that Jena’s violent school brawl is not connected to the “teenage prank” of months earlier. “We cannot take these incidents and say that they are indicative of a pandemic of racism that is spreading across America, it is just not the case,” he said. In Jena, the shade tree – which had itself become a symbol of conflict in its own right – has been cut down, but the issues it exposed remain deeply rooted.