September 20, 2007
Jena Puts Race Back In The Headlines... For Now
CNN anchors Kyra Phillips and Tony Harris have been waxing poetic about the state of race relations today from Jena, La., where thousands, possibly tens of thousands, have gathered to protest criminal charges brought against seven black teens who jumped a white classmate last year.
This latest national Rodney King moment reminds us of the early days of the Duke lacrosse rape case, which inspired intense soul-searching about the state of race relations in this country that quickly came to a halt once it became clear the accusations were a whole lot of bunk. The New York Times, a primary driver of the race narrative in that story, never revisited the issue in its subsequent reporting (though the ombudsman did) after the charges were dropped and DA Mike Nifong was stripped of all credibility.
The Jena case may have its own dodgy prosecutor. The LaSalle Parish District Attorney, Reed Walters, initiated the national outcry over this case when he charged the seven high school students -- including three minors -- with attempted murder and conspiracy to commit second-degree murder. Given the facts, his effort to lock the teens up until they reach middle age seems both patently foolish and grossly punitive. Walters eventually scaled back the charges to aggravated battery, but the damage was done.
Enter Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.
Just as they did during the Duke rape case, the two civil rights activists are leading the charge to "free the Jena Six," as they are better known (the media learned of a seventh suspect only last week). But as we now know from the Duke lacrosse case, the media risk big karmic payback when facts inconvenient to the narrative of choice go ignored.
According to the Jena Times, which has a handy chronicle of the case, the Dec. 4 beating began when the victim, Justin Barker, was hit so hard on the back of his head by then 16-year-old Mychal Bell that he was knocked unconscious. The group then proceeded to kick and stomp Barker, who had allegedly provoked them with racial epithets.
Much of the protest swirls around Walters' decision to charge Bell as an adult. A state appeals court last week ruled that Bell should be tried as a juvenile for battery, and a district court said the same about the conspiracy charge. Bell is now in a juvenile detention facility while Walters decides whether to refile the charges against him in juvenile court. Walters, by the way, isn't showing any signs he's been chastened by two court rulings against him, and is soon expected to announce whether he will appeal the decisions to the Louisiana Supreme Court.
If you're not seeing a lot of eye-rolling among traditionally "color blind" conservatives, thank Walters, who at a school assembly before the beating told students, "I can be your best friend or worst enemy. I can take away your lives with a stroke of a pen." He denies being motivated by racism in this case, but the outsized attempted murder charges, which he's expressed no regret for, say otherwise.
That's too bad, because another DA would have had a prime opportunity to throw some cold water on the Jena Seven story before Messrs. Sharpton, Jackson, and celebrities including David Bowie, Mos Def and Salt n Pepa took up their cause. Bell can't be "freed" even if he makes his $90,000 bond, because with the beating, he violated parole for another offense. Before the beating, he was charged with battery twice and damage to property twice in separate incidents, according to the Jena Times. On the Saturday before the beating, three of his co-defendants, Robert Bailey, Ryan Simmons and Theodore Shaw, allegedly robbed and beat a man outside a convenience store, sending him to the hospital. The three were charged with second-degree robbery, theft of a firearm and conspiracy to commit second-degree robbery, and the incident was factored into their higher-than-usual bonds following the Jena High School beating.
They claim self-defense in that incident, and supporters point to a "prank" in which white nooses were hung from a tree at the school as inciting racial tensions at JHS that culminated in Barker's beating. The three white students who hung the nooses were suspended for the incident after the principal initially recommended they be expelled. Walters is under fire for not charging them with a crime, and the FBI and DOJ's Civil Rights Division determined the nooses did not qualify as a hate crime. It's still unclear why Walters did not pursue a vandalism charge, at least, considering the attempted murder charge he tried to lay on the seven black students.
As for the town's racial divide, we may never know the truth. In interviews, the town's mostly white residents say that everyone got along just fine before the national media picked up the story and sparked a frenzy. The JHS yearbook shows that black students frequently took honors for popularity awards (Most Likely to Succeed, etc.) "There is a lot of misinformation that's been published in the national media," says Craig Franklin, assistant editor of the Jena Times. "What we're seeing in the national media is we have a lot of people that have jumped on this bandwagon because of the misinformation, and instead of simply reporting what's taken place or has taken place, they've actually crossed the line in being biased and reporting their opinions on things."
Earlier today, CNN's Phillips declared of Jena, "There is a community here that has not, let's say, matured." Wide-eyed, she and Harris expressed amazement that townsfolk still referred to blacks as "colored people."
The Jena story feeds perceptions about the South as openly racist and "backwards," a word Phillips used several times on the air as well. She's hosting an hour-long special on the Jena Six at 8 p.m. EDT tonight, where the question of whether Jena, and America, still has a race problem will presumably be answered.
John McWhorter, of the conservative Manhattan Institute, is no fan of the Sharpton-Jackson circus, but agrees that a race problem persists. "When white officials act upon a sense that what merits a slap on the hand for whites merits decades of confinement for blacks, they contribute to the fact that almost half of America's prisoners are black," he writes in his New York Sun column today.
Indeed, there are reasons beyond prisoner demographics to believe that America's racial divide is serious. After Hurricane Katrina, it seemed that the national media was ready to engage in a serious dialogue about race and poverty in this country. That didn't last long.
It's too soon to say if all this media attention will ensure fair treatment of the Jena Seven. But it might be telling that it takes footage of people stranded on rooftops, a stripper's allegation of rape on an elite student campus, and now a schoolyard beating and some nooses to get them to pay attention to the racial divide in the first place.
