http://www.katc.com/Global/story.asp?S=7236750

ALEXANDRIA, La. — Two of the “Jena Six” defendants helped present the Video of the Year award on Black Entertainment Television’s Hip Hop Awards.

Katt Williams, a comedian and host of the show broadcast Thurdsay night, introduced Carwin Jones and Bryant Purvis as two of the students involved in a case of “systematic racism.”

“By no means are we condoning a six-on-one beat-down,” Williams said during his introduction of the teens, accused of knocking a white student unconscious and then kicking and stamping on him. “… But the injustice perpetrated on these young men is straight criminal.”

Attempted murder charges against each defendant charged as an adult have been reduced to aggravated second-degree battery at arraignment; Purvis is the only one yet to be arraigned.

Jones and Purvis got a standing ovation as they walked onto the stage at the Atlanta Civic Center, where the awards show was filmed on Saturday. “They don’t look so tough, do they?” Williams joked.

Both Jones and Purvis thanked a number of people, including family, friends, the “Hip-Hop Nation” and the thousands who participated in a march and rally in their small hometown.

Purvis said the Sept. 20 rally proved “our generation can unite and rally around a cause.”

Purvis handed Kanye West the award for his video for “Stronger.” West shook hands with both teens.

Some people commenting on BET’s Web site have criticized the appearance, saying the teens _ accused of knocking Justin Barker unconscious and then stamping on and kicking him until another student intervened _ shouldn’t be made celebrities. “If anything, they should be humbled and go home and not be trying to get celebrity status off a tragedy,” one person wrote.

Another wrote, “this is what I was protesting for! So that later you could show up at the BET awards and style and profile?”

Tina Jones, Purvis’ mother, said BET contacted the Jena Six families to come to the awards show “to get away for a relaxing weekend.”

Also attending were Mychal Bell’s father, Marcus Jones; Carwin Jones’ parents, John Jenkins and Dwanda Jones; and Theo McCoy, the father of Theo Shaw, another defendant.

“You can’t get caught up in what people say,” Tina Jones said. “They are going to say something no matter what you do.”

She said her son was most excited about meeting rappers Birdman and Lil Wayne.

Bill Furlow, a spokesman for LaSalle Parish District Attorney Reed Walters, said the boys had a judge’s permission to attend the ceremony.

Purvis’ attorney, Darrell Hickman, declined to comment about his client’s appearance and said he doesn’t know of any others scheduled in the future. Neither Carwin Jones’ attorney, Mike Nunnery, nor Barker’s family returned calls Thursday.

Mychal Bell, who was 16 at the time of the Dec. 4 attack, is the only defendant tried so far. He was tried as an adult, but a state appeal court ruled that aggravated battery is not a charge on which a juvenile can be tried as adult and returned his case to juvenile court.

Purvis, Carwin Jones, Robert Bailey and Theo Shaw all were 17 at the time of the attack, and legally adult in Louisiana. The sixth defendant’s case has been in juvenile court all along.

Bell is currently at the Renaissance Home for Youth in Alexandria, the Rev. B.L. Moran of Jena said.

Bell had spent almost 10 months in a LaSalle Parish adult jail before he was released on bail last month. Two weeks later, he was sent back to juvenile custody for 18 months because a judge found he had violated terms of his probation for a previous juvenile conviction.

This is not the first time John McWhorter, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who is usually introduced as a black conservative, has weighed in on the Jena story.  In a September 20th column in the New York Sun, he characterized the noose hanging as a prank–malicious but not deadly.  On the other hand, he hung the racist epithet around the neck of DA Reed Walters because the prosecutor responded to student protests with a bizarre threat.  McWhorter’s facts are a bit off in places, but, after watching the clownish Jason Whitlock swallow every morsel of misinformation the white folks in Jena served up for him, it is gratifying to see a black conservative who is capable of independent thought. 

A month after the big march, John McWhorter returns to the subject of Jena with these reflections on symbols of hate.  I pasted McWhorter’s piece right after Pat McCollough’s personal story for a reason.  When you work for the Manhattan Institute you have little to fear from people who hang nooses and spray paint swastikas; others are not so fortunate.

Walking Away From Hate

BY JOHN McWHORTER
October 18, 2007

A modest proposal. The next time somebody plants a noose, let’s just ignore it.

Really. No press conferences, no news stories. Nothing.

I suggest this not because I don’t understand the importance of fighting racism. I’m right with everybody else in considering Reed Walters, the district attorney in Jena, to deserve resistance and condemnation.

I also am quite aware of what nooses symbolize.

I suggest this for a simple reason. Walking on by might be the way to tamp down this expression of racism, rather than going nuts every time someone pulls it.

After all, you can reverse the decisions of a Reed Walters and hopefully fire him. But these nooses lately are different.

Right now we’re in the aftermath of the one hung on the door of Madonna Constantine, a professor at Columbia’s Teacher’s College. The nooses hung from a tree in Jena were just last year. Some may recall the noose hung at a cable company’s headquarters in Nassau County last December. This summer two people in the Coast Guard found nooses planted among their possessions. Just this past weekend someone scrawled the N-word on a bench at a Staten Island high school, which is really the same kind of thing.

There is no evidence that a sententious brouhaha after each of these events has any preventative effect. Rather, they just keep coming. Obviously, the kinds of people who do things like this aren’t reached by sonorous statements about civility. They’re like spam.

Mind you, there are times when a brouhaha makes a certain sense. Don Imus’ temporary banishment did, because it could actually be construed as an effective battle against expressions of racism. Talk show hosts will now be more careful about what they say, out of a desire not to lose their jobs. Mr. Imus is only being rehired because his superstar status brings in so much ad revenue; smaller fish could be beached forever.

But even there, they only could be, and if even Mr. Imus had been allowed to just stay put, all the dutiful condemnation would have been enough to warn others in his line.

And the fact remains that meanwhile, noose-hanging pranksters in the night, however revolting, cannot be stopped by mere words. The words, in fact, only encourage them.

Some bored little piece of trash hangs a noose one morning, and spends the rest of the week watching his deed make national news on the internet and get discussed on the top talk shows. He and his friend do a high-five, while some similarly-minded web-surfing scum across the country decides he wants to do something like that too.

And as to the white kids in Jena who hung the nooses, even if they had been expelled, it wouldn’t have stopped whoever hung the noose at Teacher’s College, who apparently left no traces, as is the usual situation in such cases.

Imagine if after the Jena incident, black kids had just taken the nooses down and kept on hanging out under that tree. Why is that such an unthinkable alternative to shouting it to the rooftops only to watch similar things keep happening nationwide anyway?

Thus my suggestion that we just walk on by. I admire Professor Constantine’s assertion that she will not be cowed. However, might we take a deep breath and take a new tack that might actually have an effect?

Let’s say next month there is a noose hung from the mast of a black man’s yacht in Key West. Say nothing. In February some sniggering jackanapes writes the N-word in the dirt in front of a black schoolteacher’s apartment in Tuscon after she gives him a bad grade. Nothing.

And nothing after a black guy finds a little noose hanging from his rear-view mirror for no reason he can think of in Savannah next summer.

If these dregs of society couldn’t get such a rise out of us and the media, they very well might eventually knock it off. Not immediately. But if anyone thinks that if it never made news there would have no effect at all, it’s they who have some explaining to do.

And I take it that in the meantime, individual black people will not pretend that some rope or word harms them psychologically. I presume black pride means something — i.e. that we have it. My proposal is designed to stop the pranksters, not to medicate us — because I presume we need no medication.

If anyone hung a noose from my door, I’d mention it to some friends and family, but that’s it. I wouldn’t mention it in this column, because soon the media would be doing stories about it and the perpetrators would be doing their high-five. I have a job, a piano, a kitchen, families, a life. “Symbols”?

With sincere respect to Professor Constantine, I would feel uncomfortable implying that there was even any question as to whether someone imposing some “symbol” on me could actually make me feel bad.

The jerks press the button and watch black people go “Ack!” time and again, while the media exploit it for viewership. You get two for one: weakness plus only encouraging more nooses. Great!

Hence my modest proposal. The next time — and there will be one, and another, and another — let it go. Not because it’s okay, but because that is the way to discourage it from happening.

Isn’t that what we were going for?

Mr. McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Pat McCollough’s personal story originally appeared as a comment.  I asked Pat if I could post it because it provides a poignant answer to those who dismiss the significance of hate crimes.  How should we respond to a noose or a swastika?  Or is this about “should”?  We respond how we respond.  Some shug and move on; others are devastated, and the fine details of our personal histories usually determine the emotional impact.  You can find a picture of the graffiti Pat references here.

_________

I am Pat McCollough, a retired United States Marine Sergeant Major, also known around campus as, “Coach Pat.” I returned to the education industry at my alma mater, Hawthorne Middle/High School; this was a dream come true. My dream turned into a nightmare when I became the victim of a hate crime.

On 1 Jun 2007, the last day of school, I fell prey to racial discrimination and a victim of hate. This happened on campus during the school day. My classroom was the only one spray painted with hate graffiti, K.K.K. and a Swastika symbol. My vehicle was also spray painted with similar graffiti.

One student has been identified as the suspect. It has never been explained or investigated why this student was out of class and allowed to just roam around campus without a pass or any supervision. This was final exam day.

The administration was very passive about the entire situation. They gave the impression that even though the incident was identified by the local police as a “criminal act” or maybe “just a prank,” they had not taken into consideration how the entire event must have traumatized me as a human being. They stated that they must have misread me because I was a pillar of strength and so well composed though out the entire situation. Well, isn’t that how Christian professionals are suppose to respond.

If this type of racial behavior continues and is condoned with little or no consequences for the real criminals, someone is going to get seriously hurt…remember Jena 6? I wonder if those three nooses hanging on the tree traumatized any of the students or were they provided with any type of professional psychological counseling after having been subjected to such hate. I requested professional psychological counseling and was denied at two different levels. I had to eventually seek professional counseling through other resources outside of the school district. The local community also turned a deaf hear to my cry; even the NAACP.

It is a known fact there is a current issue with safety and security within the Alachua County School District, Gainesville, Florida. From my research, there are many other schools throughout the Nation facing similar incidents.

I did not return to teaching this year.

Still Hurting,Pat McCollough

Clarence Page offers some helpful suggestions regarding the recent spate of noose hangings in America.  He may be a tad cavalier about the emotional damage a hanging noose can do, but his words of caution are helpful. 

Al Sharpton suggested, in the course of the House Judiciary Committee Jena hearings, that the impact of Jim Crow racism hasn’t changed in America.  James Crow Jr., he remarked, is simply a slicker version of the older version, but the effect is the same.

I disagree.  The effect of the New Jim Crow is not the same as the old variety.  For one thing, the New Jim Crow impacts poor people in a disproportionate way–the Old Jim Crow applied to all black people equally.  While the fortunes of most black people in America are undoubtedly brighter than they were in the fifties (a point Mr. Page makes in this column), the lot of poor black males is much worse than it once was. 

Clarence Page references the Cosby-Sharpton rift I mentioned in a recent post, and comes to the same conclusion I arrived at: both men represent half the truth.  I would like to see the Chicago Tribune columnist expand on these ideas in future columns.

In the end, what was accomplished?  Most committee members aimed their questions at US Attorney Donald Washington, the man who has been consistently unplaying the seriousness of the noose incident since mid-June.  Washington initially felt pressured to side with Jena officials in this matter; now, with some pressure coming from opponents of the status quo, the political appointee has adapted his testimony . . . slightly.  It is no longer possible for noose apologists to site Mr. Washington as an ally.  So far, so good.

Tragically, most of the people interrogating Mr. Washington and his associate, Lisa Krigsten, seem to feel that the noose hangers should have been tried as adults under federal hate crimes law, even if this meant locking them up for ten years without parole (remember, parole has been eliminated from the federal judicial system).

There are two problems: (1) the limp response of Jena officials to the noose incident; and (2) an inept reaction on the part of the Department of Justice that, in the minds of most observers, appeared to validate the inaction of folks like Roy Breithaupt and Reed Walters. 

The hearings represent a giant step forward.  They would have been more effective, however, if more attention had been paid to the egregious behavior of Reed and Roy.  When Mr. Sharpton focuses on the noose boys he lets Jena officials slip into the shadows.

But this is just a matter of emphasis.  The significant fact is that hardly anyone, Democrat or Republican, made the slightest attempt to defend the indefensible.  The very fact that most Republicans chose to be elsewhere suggests they have no appetite for this fight. 

Unfortunately, proponents of a knee-jerk law-and-order, lock-em-up philosophy don’t have to fight–they currently control the public policy agenda.  Nonetheless, we congratulate Mr. Conyers for convening an illuminating hearing on a timely topic.

Howard Witt just filed this report on today’s House Judiciary Committee hearings into the Jena fiasco.  I didn’t catch the initial remarks by the half dozen witnesses, but the real drama didn’t unfold until the questions began to flow. 

As I hoped, US Attorney Donald Washington was deluged with tough questions from unless somebody does some serious prison timeenraged politicians like Sheila Jackson-Lee and Maxine Waters.  The heat generated by these blunt exchanges was not manufactured for the cameras; it was personal and it was emotional.  Mr. Washington has clearly shocked black politicians with his tacit endorsement of LaSalle Parish District Attorney, Reed Walters.

As Howard Witt’s report suggests, Washington did his best to restate his opinions without appearing to contradict himself.  The nooses hung at Jena High School in late August of 2006 constituted a hate crime, the US Attorney admitted; but the students responsible for the incident were too young to try under federal law.

This rhetoric is much stronger than anything we have heard from Mr. Washington up to this point.  Frankly, I agree with his assessment–so far as it goes.

The real issues didn’t emerge until late in the hearing.  Don Washington agreed that if Reed Walters had told protesting black students that he could make their lives disappear with a stroke of his pen he should be disciplined.  But, Washington argued, the DA had said nothing of the kind.

Asked to defend this surprising claim, Washington admitted that Walters had said “those words,” but that the prosecutor hadn’t meant by them what the congressman claimed he meant.  Since the wording of the allegations against Walters was taken straight out of my original Jena narrative, my ears perked up at that comment. 

The US Attorney hinted that Mr. Walters had not been “flanked by police officers” as I originally suggested.  In a literal sense, this may or may not be true.  But there can be no doubt that several officers, in full uniform, (probably the entire force) was present in the high school auditorium when Walters uttered his ominous threat.  As I have argued elsewhere, the “I can make your life disappear with a stroke of my pen” remark only makes sense when applied to the black students who, moments earlier, had created unrest on the campus by occupying the tree at the white end of the school yard.  White students may have been protesting the protesters–but then, so was Mr. Walters.

But I have worked that argument to death–the important point is that Mr. Washington is now on record as saying that, if Reed Walters meant what I say he meant, he should be disciplined.  That is a mighty step forward.

A second issue also passed unremarked by reporters: the sharp disagreement between Al Sharpton and Richard Cohen, CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center, as to the source of the problem in Jena.  Sharpton thinks the noose hangers should have been tried in federal court as adults even if this carried the potential of ten years in prison without parole. 

Cohen disagrees.  He believes that all the tragic developments in Jena flowed from the tragic mishandling of the noose incident.

I am with Cohen on this one.  Rev. Sharpton, clearly angered by Cohen’s inconvenient perspective, proclaimed stridently that, unless somebody does some serious time behind bars, people will go around thinking that hate crimes are okay .  This is an extension of the flawed “lock-em-up; it’ll-teach-em-a-lesson” logic driving the current policy of mass incarceration.  

You can’t teach a kid to stop hating by sticking him in prison.  The child behind the hate crime must be taught why his behavior is hurtful and unacceptable.  Locking up the noose boys (even if such a thing were conceivable in a place like Jena) would simply have created martyrs for the South-gonna-rise-again cause.

A strong disciplinary response was clearly called for in September of 2006; but the criminal justice system provides remedies for very few problems–and this isn’t one of them.  Black parents weren’t angered because of the lax discipline; they were angered because school officials (and DA Walters) gave their tacit endorsement to the noose symbol by refusing to call hate by its proper name.  The lax disciplinary response was galling principally because it reinforced this message.

Republican lawmakers, for the most part, showed their support for Jena officials by boycotting the Jena hearings.  Reed Walters was asked to testify but politely declined the invitation.

Somewhere between Salim Muwakkil’s In These Times article, “Jena and the Post-Civil Rights Fallacy” and Bob Herbert’s positive review  (pasted below) of Bill Cosby and Dr. Alvin Poussaint’s new book, “Come on, People: On the Path From Victims to Victors,” lies the truth.  Cosby and Poussaint’s book was featured for a full hour on “Meet the Press” this past Sunday. 

Mr. Muwakkil suggests that America’s “school to prison pipeline” belies the argument that America has moved into a post-racial era in which black candidates can run for office without their race being a major factor.

Bill Cosby says black people need to stop blaming white people for their problems.

Mr. Cosby is resented by many black intellectuals, but not because they necessarily disagree with his sentiments.  Critics say the comedian’s one-sided, no-nuance approach lends aid and comfort to folks like Jena’s Reed Walters and Roy Breithaupt who deny that racism has anything to do with anything.

At first glance, Bob Herbert appears to fill the middle ground between the “blaming white folks makes it worse” school and the “institutionalized white racism” camp.  The New York Times columnist wrote ten influential columns on the Tulia drug sting (the case that created Friends of Justice), and he is famous for his graphic depictions of white bigotry and eloquent diatribes against the mass incarceration of minority males.

But Herbert has also written a string of columns in recent years critical of Hip Hop Culture and the pathologies commonly associated with the black underclass. 

Unfortunately, Herbert rarely discusses both issues on the same day and under the same heading.

Mr. Muwakkil, orthodox leftist that he is, laments the persistant reality of entrenched white racism and “the school to prison pipeline”; but he has little to say about the alarming social disintegration within poor neighborhoods.

Here’s the problem: Mass incarceration multiplies the social chaos it is intended to address.  The theory behind America’s love affair with prisons and jails works like this: if we send offenders away for very, very long sentences, people will stop doing illegal things.  Because people act in their own best interest, the threat of incarceration encourages people to live within the law. 

Sadly, things haven’t worked according to plan.  Anyone who has worked with at-risk kids (as I have) knows they rarely do what is in their best interst.  In fact, they don’t know what their best interest looks like.  Under the best circumstances, adolescent males have an alarming tendency to act on impulse.  Under the worst circumstances, impulse is everything.

The Children’s Defense Fund invited personal responsibility gurus like Bill Cosby and Juan Williams to their recent conference on Dismantling the Cradle to Prison Pipeline.  As I mentioned at the time, the Howard University audience embraced their message with enthusiasm. 

The next night I was on the same stage with several Jena 6 family members.  Same rapturous response.

But you rarely find Bill Cosby on the same panel with Ted Shaw of the Legal Defense Fund, or Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree.  Placed on the same stage, these folks would have to address each other’s issues–something they are more than capable of doing.  But they never seem to get the chance.

In my experience, you can’t get anywhere with a mainstream black audience unless you address the personal responsibility issue and the debilitating impact of institutional racism.  The folks who streamed to Jena would generally agree with Cosby and Pouissaint.  Blaming whitey for your problems is a one-way ticket to personal oblivion; but that doesn’t mean whitey ain’t a big part of the problem–he is . . . I am.

When we admit that the prison problem begins with the cradle we understand that fatherless families place little boys and girls (especially boys) at enormous risk.  But we also acknowledge the debilitating impact of racially toxic, white-controlled, environments like Jena High School.  Inner city schools in high-poverty neighborhoods, even if they enjoy a high percentage of minority teachers and administrators, are generally overwhlemed by low teacher morale, substandard facilities, little parental support, and the myriad social problems kids drag to school behind them. 

On balance, American society has chosen to ignore poor families and dysfunctional schools.  We believe that if we lock up enough young males folks will straighten up sooner or later.  We keep waiting and nobody seems to be straightening up.

Against this depressing backdrop, Cosby’s rant against black poor people rings hollow.  He fails to address the full complexity of the problem out of fear that too much nuance will encourage a counterproductive “blame whitey” cult of victimization.

Most people, it is assumed, can only live with one big idea.

But this is not an either-or proposition.  It is not a zero-sum game in which paying attention to one side of the problem deflates the legitimacy of the other side. 

I retract the last paragraph.  In practice, it is as zero-sum game–but it shouldn’t be.

If we segregate the issues we cannot address the problem.  The cradle to prison pipeline must be considered in the context of personal and family responsibility–and vice versa.  Tackle just one aspect of the problem and we will fail, miserably, repeatedly, and utterly. 

October 16, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

Tough, Sad and Smart

By BOB HERBERT

They are a longtime odd couple, Bill Cosby and Harvard’s Dr. Alvin Poussaint, and their latest campaign is nothing less than an effort to save the soul of black America.

Mr. Cosby, of course, is the boisterous veteran comedian who has spent the last few years hammering home some brutal truths about self-destructive behavior within the African-American community.

“A word to the wise ain’t necessary,” Mr. Cosby likes to say. “It’s the stupid ones who need the advice.”

Dr. Poussaint is a quiet, elegant professor of psychiatry who, in public at least, is in no way funny. He teaches at the Harvard Medical School and is a staff member at the Judge Baker Children’s Center in Boston, where he sees kids struggling in some of the toughest circumstances imaginable.

I always wonder, whenever I talk to Dr. Poussaint, why he isn’t better known. He’s one of the smartest individuals in the country on issues of race, class and justice.

For three years, Mr. Cosby and Dr. Poussaint have been traveling the country, meeting with as many people as possible to explore the problems facing the black community.

There is a sense of deep sadness and loss — grief — evident in both men over the tragedy that has befallen so many blacks in America. They were on “Meet the Press” for the entire hour Sunday, talking about their new book, a cri de coeur against the forces of self-sabotage titled, “Come On, People: On the Path From Victims to Victors.”

There weren’t many laughs over the course of the hour. Speaking about the epidemic of fatherlessness in black families, Mr. Cosby imagined a young fatherless child thinking: “Somewhere in my life a person called my father has not shown up, and I feel very sad about this because I don’t know if I’m ugly — I don’t know what the reason is.”

Dr. Poussaint, referring to boys who get into trouble, added: “I think a lot of these males kind of have a father hunger and actually grieve that they don’t have a father. And I think later a lot of that turns into anger. ‘Why aren’t you with me? Why don’t you care about me?’ ”

The absence of fathers, and the resultant feelings of abandonment felt by boys and girls, inevitably affect the children’s sense of self-worth, he said.

The book lays out the difficult route black people will have to take to free the many who are still trapped in prisons of extreme violence, poverty, degradation and depression.

It’s a work with a palpable undercurrent of love throughout. And yet it pulls no punches. In a chapter titled “What’s Going on With Black Men?,” the authors (in a voice that sounds remarkably like Mr. Cosby’s) note:

“You can’t land a plane in Rome saying, ‘Whassup?’ to the control tower. You can’t be a doctor telling your nurse, ‘Dat tumor be nasty.’ ”

Racism is still a plague and neither Mr. Cosby nor Dr. Poussaint give it short shrift. But they also note that in past years blacks were able to progress despite the most malignant forms of racism and that many are succeeding today.

“Blaming white people,” they write, “can be a way for some black people to feel better about themselves, but it doesn’t pay the electric bills. There are more doors of opportunity open for black people today than ever before in the history of America.”

I couldn’t agree more. Racism disgusts me, and I think it should be fought with much greater ferocity than we see today. But that’s no reason to drop out of school, or take drugs, or refuse to care for one’s children, or shoot somebody.

The most important step toward ending the tragic cycles of violence and poverty among African-Americans also happens to be the heaviest lift — reconnecting black fathers to their children.

In an interview yesterday, Dr. Poussaint said: “You go into whole neighborhoods and there are no fathers there. What you find is apathy in a lot of the males who don’t even know that they are supposed to be a father.”

The book covers a great deal that has been talked about incessantly — the importance of family and education and hard work and mentoring and civic participation. But hand in hand with its practical advice and the undercurrent of deep love for one’s community is a stress on the absolute importance of maintaining one’s personal dignity and self-respect.

It’s a tough book. Victimhood is cast as the enemy. Defeat, failure and hopelessness are not to be tolerated.

Hard times and rough circumstances are not excuses for degrading others or allowing oneself to be degraded. In fact, they’re not excuses for anything, except to try harder.

http://axcessnews.com/index.php/articles/show/id/12740

House committee to examine hate crimes, Jena Six incident

By Kris Turner

(AXcess News) Washington – The House Judiciary Committee will be schooled about the Jena Six incident and youth hate crimes Tuesday.

Legal and civil rights experts will testify about the types of youth hate crimes being committed throughout the country, using the Jena Six as an example.

“A very high percentage of hate crimes in our country are committed by youth,” said Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “Schools are a common venue for hate crimes.”

In December, six black teenagers were charged with attempted murder after being arrested for beating a white classmate in Jena, La. The arrests followed a series of racial incidents at Jena High School that included the hanging of nooses from a tree.

Schools are the third most common place hate crimes are committed, the FBI reported in its 2005 Uniform Crime Report. From 2004 to 2005, hate crimes at schools and colleges increased by 8 percent, the report stated.

“There are a lot of hormones that are raging,” said Cohen, who will testify before the committee. “Our schools are flash points for this activity. People are stating their claim and marking their territory.”

School administrators can help eliminate hate crimes, but sometimes exacerbate situations by dolling out unequal punishments to students, Cohen said.

The Jena Six incident highlights the failure of public schools and the criminal justice system, said Charles Ogletree, director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School. Congress must examine whether Jena High School treated its black and white students the same when handing out punishments. Several white students were suspended for hanging the nooses.

“The Jena case is simply the reflection of a broader set of problems and racial hostility in the United States,” said Ogletree, who also will testify before the committee. “While we were shocked and dismayed to learn about nooses being hung on a tree that was usually reserved for white students to sit in the shade, we have seen repeated incidents at Columbia University and the University of Maryland. This sort of behavior is coming back in the 21st century.”

The commonplace nature of hate crimes in schools is disturbing, said Joselle Shea, manager of children and youth initiates for the National Crime Prevention Council. Schools are working to prevent hate crimes, and focusing on bullying is one way to stop the spread of hate, she added.

The council has visited more than 30 states and established programs that teach tolerance, Shea said. The programs consist of skits or demonstrations that illustrate the effects of harassment.

“The Jena Six incident is a call for all of us and our communities to take a good look and see how we are showing respect for all the people in our community,” she said.

Also scheduled to testify Tuesday are the Rev. Al Sharpton; Donald Washington, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Louisiana; Lisa Krigsten, of the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division; and the Rev. Brian Moran, pastor of the Jena Antioch Baptist Church and president of Jena’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Source: Scripps Howard Foundation Wire

 This editorial from the Chicago Sun-Times shows that some folks are beginning to “get” Jena.  “If the Jena 6 case teaches us anything,” we read, “it’s the ability to question injustice served on people who aren’t altogether perfect.” 

I am not suggesting that all of the Jena 6 defendants are guilty as charged.  But somebody beat up Justin Barker, and those convicted of participation in the assault, in a fair trial (i.e. the kind no longer possible within the confines of LaSalle Parish) need to answer for their actions. 

But what sort of punishment is appropriate for these students, or for the adults responsible for creating a toxic social environment at Jena High School?  How do we go about fixing what is broken?  That’s the question.

Suspensions fail test of fairness

October 15, 2007

The Jena 6 case drew the nation’s attention to unequal justice at a small-town Louisiana school. Yet, discipline statistics from the Chicago Public Schools, analyzed by the Sun-Times’ editorial page, suggest we don’t have to look beyond our backyard to raise the same questions of inequality. Of the 500 students suspended every day in Chicago public schools, black students are three times more likely than whites or Hispanics to be suspended.

Black students make up 48 percent of the Chicago Public Schools population but account for 73 percent of suspensions. The suspension rate is about equal for Hispanic and white students: Hispanics total 38 percent of the student population and 20 percent of suspensions; white students make up 8 percent of the population but just 4 percent of suspensions.

Those numbers are from 2006, but the disparity has lingered for many years. Foundations and think tanks have studied it and written about it. A 2005 report, “The Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track,” said, “Chicago’s zero tolerance policies and practices fall more harshly on black students.” An internal study by CPS in 2004 showed that black students were more likely to be suspended — and serve longer suspensions — in schools where they are in the minority.

The Board of Education cracked down on the sheer number of suspensions in recent years. Still, last school year, 45,288 students were suspended, some of them more than once. In August, during mandatory sessions on the Student Code of Discipline, administrators were briefed on options to suspension.

Still overdue, however, are answers for the reasons behind the divide. Because even when the number of suspensions declined, the rates remained the same: African-American students were still suspended 3-1 over whites and Hispanics.

“There is something out there that we’re missing,” admits James Bebley, first deputy general counsel for the Board of Education.

Barbara Radner of DePaul’s Center for Urban Education said teacher preparation could be at the core. With inexperienced teachers typically assigned to tough schools, “maybe they are not prepared to manage classes effectively.”

A cultural divide is often at the heart of such disparity. Yet while the majority of CPS teachers are white (47 percent), the majority of principals are African-American (54 percent.)

“I think the ‘why’ that affects race and culture and how people act — this is a conversation of the United States of America of every level,” said Cook County Judge Sophia Hall, a juvenile justice expert who advocates “a menu of options” for kids who do wrong.

Suspensions are a short-term fix to a long-term problem. They leave struggling kids disengaged and further behind. And they reward kids who hardly need a disincentive to skip school. Teachers need alternatives — in-school suspensions and detentions, peer mediation and conflict resolution, for example.

If the Jena 6 case teaches us anything, it’s the ability to question injustice served on people who aren’t altogether perfect.

The best commentary on Jena rarely appears in the mainstream media.  This essay in The Black Chronicle gets a few minor facts wrong, but the analysis is spot on: Jena is about public officials sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind.  If you are inclined to believe that the Jena 6 case is being “blown out of proportion,” please read on.

A Missed Opportunity

Jena 6 Racial Uproar Preventable Five decades ago, civil rights struggles could be seen in stark, good versus evil terms. Virtuous pioneers such as the Little Rock Nine, James Meredith and Rosa Parks confronted raw racism and triumphed over it. Today, racial injustice persists, still corrosive, but less overt, and so it is in tiny Jena, La, where dangling nooses, an overzealous prosecutor and an insensitive establishment have drawn international attention and generated talk of a new civil rights movement. Some of the evidence in Jena is murky or in dispute, and the “Jena Six” — the Black teens at the heart of the story — don’t quite conjure images of civil rights heroes of the past. While the Little Rock Nine heroically challenged a bigoted governor who attempted to keep them out of a segregated high school by armed force, the Jena Six are accused of beating a white classmate in front of dozens of witnesses. The question is whether they, like so many other Blacks, were wronged because of their race. They were charged with attempted murder even though the beating victim was well enough to go to a school function that night. The cases are still being adjudicated. However, a careful review of the known events that led up to the beating suggests that the way white authorities handled racial tensions in their overwhelmingly white town may well have turned a manageable, teachable situation into a racial maelstrom. School officials appear to have minimized or patronized Black concerns, while the district attorney filed inappropriately severe charges against the Black teens — a double standard that rightly resonated with Blacks across the nation. The story revolves around two primary, but not directly related, episodes: The Nooses. Thirteen months ago, when a Black student asked at a Jena High School assembly whether he could sit under a tree known as a gathering place for white students, an assistant principal told him he could sit anywhere he wanted. The next day, though, two nooses were found dangling from the tree. Hanging nooses is not a crime under Louisiana law, but, in a state where 335 Blacks were lynched from 1882 to 1968 (a total exceeded only in Mississippi, Georgia and Texas), it is a repugnant, overtly racist act. Three white students were quickly identified as the perpetrators. The principal recommended their expulsion. But a school board committee overruled him. The students were suspended — but the length and terms were not disclosed. “Some alternative suspension, along with other criteria,” LaSalle Parish School Supt. Roy Breithaupt told the Town Talk in nearby Alexandria, La., shortly afterward. The vague language proved maddening. Stories circulated that the suspension was for three days; this echoed in multiple media reports and became an article of faith. Just in the past few days, Supt. Breithaupt has begun saying that the students were suspended at an alternative school for nine days, served “in-school” suspension for two weeks and faced detentions and other penalties — a far more fitting response. In the absence of any clarity, though, Black parents and other Blacks in the community, incensed over the nooses, grew more angry at this perceived leniency. Some tried to talk to the school board and were turned away, according to the Alexandria newspaper. At the next meeting, one parent got five minutes to speak. When she was done, only the lone Black on the 10-member board thanked her. The meeting went right on. “They act like she didn’t even come,” one parent told a reporter. The school’s response to the nooses was almost as clumsy. Officials called an assembly to calm students and invited District Attorney Reed Walters. “I can be your best friend or your worst enemy. With the stroke of a pen I can make your life miserable,” District Attorney Walters recalled warning the students. That blunt statement ignited deeper resentment. Three months after the nooses appeared, in early December, two scuffles over a single weekend revived racial tensions. When school opened on Monday, Dec. 4, they exploded. A Black student — identified by some witnesses as 16-year-old Mychal Bell — hit Justin Barker, a white student, as he walked into the schoolyard after lunch. As Justin Barker lay motionless on the ground, Black students allegedly kicked him in the head. He was treated for cuts, bruises and a swollen eye and released from the hospital later that day. He attended a school ceremony that night. J ustin Barker was not involved in the noose incident, authorities said, and they found no hard evidence to connect that incident to the assault. Six students, ages 14 to 18, were arrested. Mr. Walters, the district attorney, charged five with attempted second degree murder and conspiracy, driving home his point that he could make lives miserable. Together, the two charges carry prison sentences of up to 75 years. All six students, including one charged as a juvenile, were expelled. A judge set high bonds — $70,000 to $138,000. Mychal Bell spent nearly 10 months in jail. Another teen spent more than six. As the case started drawing national attention, District Attorney Walters began reducing the charges. Mychal Bell was tried first. He was convicted of aggravated battery and conspiracy by an all-white jury in June. (Only whites showed up for jury duty that day, according to the Alexandria paper, not necessarily surprising in a parish that is 86 percent white and 12 percent Black.) Since then, an appeals court has overturned Mychal Bell’s conviction, ruling he should not have been tried as an adult on those particular charges. District Attorney Walters said he will prosecute Mychal Bell again, this time as a juvenile. Four others, ages 17 and 18 when the fight occurred, still face charges as adults. By this summer, the perceived under-reaction to the nooses, contrasted with the harsh treatment of the six teens, had caught fire on Black radio and reverberated across the Internet. The national media descended on Jena, and on Sept. 20, civil rights activists, including Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, led a rally that drew thousands to the town, many waving signs proclaiming, “Free the Jena 6.” What works on a placard, however, will not resolve a criminal case. If the six Jena teens were involved in beating Justin Barker, they are no choir boys. Mychal Bell, for example, has been found responsible for several juvenile crimes, including two batteries and was on probation at the time of the beating, according to the Town Talk. (For that matter, the victim, Justin Barker, was arrested last May at Jena High after a gun was found in his truck.) The six accused teens deserve to be dealt with by the criminal justice system — but fairly and judiciously. Instead, District Attorney Walters brought the most severe charge imaginable. He cited the sneakers the teens wore as lethal weapons. He failed to take into account their youth. The community was left to wonder: Would District Attorney Walters have done the same if the “Jena Six” were white teens and their alleged victim were Black? That point resonates with Black Americans, not because this case is an aberration in 2007, but because it seems so commonplace. Just ask any Black man who has been stopped for “driving while Black” — and most will tell you they have, or look at the findings of a 1999 study of the city of New York’s “stop and frisk“ program, which concluded that Blacks were detained at higher rates than whites. While Blacks made up about a quarter of the city’s population, about 51 percent of all persons stopped were Black, the New York attorney general found. Other research, published by Stanford University, suggests prosecutors consider white victims, especially of non-white offenders, to be more credible than non-white victims. Is it any wonder so many Blacks are distrustful of the criminal justice system? Throughout the episodes in Jena, authorities seem to have lost sight of the obvious goal when a teenager goes off track. It is to salvage his life — usually by some mix of punishment and instruction — not to destroy it. That applies to noose hangers and muggers, though perhaps not in equal proportions. More broadly, authorities in Jena appear to have had ample opportunities to use those hateful nooses to open talks about race relations with students and parents, Black and white — the most productive outlet for racial tensions. District Attorney Walters had a chance to use his discretion more wisely. If there is a lesson here for the rest of the nation, it is to recognize that color-blind justice is far too rare and that, when racial tensions simmer, they need a peaceful outlet, not hot flames that will bring them to a boil.