The Jena Six fraud

Speaking of a culture tolerating violence the strong impose on the weak...

The Atlantic Monthly sends a reporter to Jena, Louisiana, to find out what really happened in the Jena Six case, and she pretty much determines that the so-called "Jena Six" were really popular athletes in a football-obsessed small town, and that the town had turned a blind eye to their thuggery until they could no longer look away. But that turning point too might have had something to do with race, says a woman whose daughter had been beaten up by Mychal Bell, the main malefactor in the case:

Bell’s legal troubles never cost him a game. Nor did the problems he began to have in school during the fall of 2006, when his grade-point average, which had been above 3.0, slipped substantially. According to Fowler, Bell and another member of the Jena Six were written up so often that school officials asked the school board whether there was a policy on excessive infractions. There wasn’t. The coach said that if necessary, Bell should be sent to an alternative school. He wasn’t. The assistant principal was “sports-minded, you know, so he didn’t want to disrupt,” Fowler says. “And we finished 7 and 3 and barely missed the playoffs. But you look back and wonder—well. But [Bell] was never nothing but ‘Yes sir, no sir’ around us.” Still, Fowler knew enough to warn Bell that if he didn’t watch out, the streets would “whup” him and he would end up with nothing.

That Bell failed to heed that warning is perhaps understandable. As a football star, he seemed to have found the loophole in his father’s lesson that a black man can’t get a break. No wonder he didn’t see that punching a white boy at school could change the rules. “This is Jena,” Anlynne Hart says. “You had the judge and DA at those ball games Friday night, clapping them on—you see what I’m saying? And all this is going through the courts while they’re clapping him on, running up and down the football field, and then the minute this happened to the white boy—it’s like, uh-oh—click-click—he going to jail.”

Amy Waldman has written a fascinating account. The thing is, it becomes obvious that racism really does play a defining role in the town's social structure. I was struck by the way Waldman frames it, because it sounds very true to me, coming from a small Louisiana town not that different from Jena. Back in 1994, I was living there for a short period, and got involved reporting on a freelance basis a story about a rich white man from Dallas who bought a famed local plantation, and who was trying to force a black Baptist congregation that had been on the land since its slaves were first evangelized in 1814, to abandon its church (which, in a quirk of history, the plantation owner held deed to). Local whites were as outraged as blacks, though an older black man I interviewed told me that he couldn't help wondering whether whites would have risen up in their defense had the landowner been a local man instead of an outsider. He said that back in the civil rights era, white landowners shut down black churches on their land to prevent them from being used for organizing.

Anyway, I'll never forget what one very well-meaning older white woman, a lady who was helping lead the public fight to save the black church, said to me in trying to explain how peaceful race relations in the parish were: "Rod, you know we've always been good to our nigras."

What do you do with that? The self-congratulatory paternalism, the sense of ownership ("our nigras"), the jaw-dropping denial of history, even recent history ...? And yet, I saw in front of me a white woman who had gone out of her way to help save a black church, because she saw it as a morally urgent task. Go figure. And yet -- and yet! -- I can tell you that despite it all, blacks and whites there get along better than they do in the northern cities in which I've lived. Anybody who tells you they have race in the South figured out is lying, either to you or to themselves, or most likely both. The New York Times, which came to my hometown to do a story on the threatened plantation church after I faxed their Atlanta bureau my articles, did a pretty good job of capturing the cultural nuances of the story.

Anyway, Jena's got a race problem, and whites there come off in this piece as living in denial. But blacks are no passive victims of white indifference or malevolence; they bear some burden of the blame for their woebegone fate. Waldman points out that race pimps Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton also had no intention of seeing Jena in its true, confounding complexity:

Less surprising is that the [civil rights] movement [started around the Jena Six] avoided the other side of Mychal Bell’s story: his own choices, for starters, or the link between the generational disintegration of black families and black incarceration. The lip service about not excusing Bell’s past or the boys’ attack on Barker didn’t diminish the hagiography, which climaxed in a standing ovation for two of the Jena Six when they appeared as presenters at the Black Entertainment Television awards (dressed in hip-hop gear, which coach Fowler says they never wore in Jena).

Anlynne Hart, the mother of Bell’s earlier victim, says his parents should have acknowledged his history up front and declared that he deserved help in spite of it. But would such a movement have grown around an icon with a tragic flaw? There is a reason we tell these stories as we do. On Melissa Bell’s wall hung a commendatory plaque from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization Martin Luther King Jr. co-founded and led. Simply by mothering Mychal and standing by him, she became a heroine of this civil-rights movement, an elevation that perhaps spoke more to its character than to hers.

Read the piece. Despite what you might think from previous media reports, there are no heroes here, white or black, nor any pure, uncut villains either. Just flawed human beings. You didn't get that from news media reports, because when it comes to reporting on race in America, more often than not we media Manicheans in the press are only interested in seeing things in terms of black and white.