aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Thursday, January 10, 2008
The truth about Jena?
The headline over Amy Waldman’s Atlantic piece promises to explain “why America’s black-and-white narratives about race don’t reflect reality.”
I agree they don’t. But I didn’t see any real analysis or insights that even begin to explain why:
In the fall of 2006, Mychal Bell was a football hero, and his hometown, Jena, Louisiana, loved him for it. As his high-school team posted its best season in six years, Bell scored 21 touchdowns, rushed for 1,006 yards, and was named player of the week three times by The Jena Times. The paper celebrated his triumphs in articles and photographs, including a dramatic one in which Bell, who’s black, stiff-arms a white defender by clutching his face guard. But within weeks after the season’s end, Bell was transformed into a villain, accused of knocking out a white student, Justin Barker, who was then beaten by a group of black students. The parish’s white district attorney charged Bell and five others with attempted second-degree murder. Six months later-after the DA had reduced the charges against Bell—a white jury convicted him, as an adult, of aggravated second-degree battery, a crime that carried a possible 22-year prison sentence. By then, he, along with his co-defendants, had been transformed yet again: together, they’d been dubbed the Jena Six and had become icons of a 21st-century civil-rights movement.
When Bell began to get into trouble, his football hero status apparently helped folks look the other way:
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.”
Everything I read about the DA, J. Reed Walters, suggested he was a big problem. That’s affirmed here:
Walters remained convinced that everything he did in the case of the Jena Six was “absolutely 100 percent correct-without question.” Never mind that even some of Walters’s white friends say he charged too severely, not least because the victim was able to attend a school function that night. Walters believed his decision to charge Bell as an adult with attempted murder reflects both the facts of the case, including Bell’s history, and the values that his community holds dear—"conservative," “help-oriented,” and “Christian.” (I spotted a photocopy of the Ten Commandments hanging on the courthouse bulletin board, next to the bail-bondsman and paternity-testing ads.)
Walters says he does not look at race in his prosecutions. But that does not mean the racial boundaries of his community do not influence him. Whites outnumber blacks by 7-to-1 in the parish; beyond one black member apiece on the 10-member school board and on the 10-member police jury—both from a racially gerrymandered ward-no black has a position of power. There are four black teachers on a parish staff of 196. Black-owned businesses? Sammy Franklin could think of two: a car-detailer and a funeral home.
As for Walters himself, his world-like that of many white Americans—is white, as is most of his neighborhood. The restaurants he frequents rarely have black employees or black patrons. The worshippers at his church are white, as are the small-town-elite circles in which he moves. In 17 years, he says, he has never had a black employee, beyond some who helped him “privately.” He offered as evidence of Jena’s “perfect” race relations that the high school’s white quarterback throws to both black and white players. The white kids who hung the nooses were of Walters’s world—indeed, one of their families attends his church. Mychal Bell was, in essence, a stranger.
Read the entire piece. It’s interesting in that it both confirms and refutes the press narrative prevalent at the time. What it doesn’t do, what I’m looking for, is someone to change the frame.
Yes, it’s clear that we need a new language, a new paradigm, to depict the challenges of contemporary race relations. Yes, white and black and press and activists all place these stories in the old template.
Who’s going to build a new one? Two people I have found so far who might help:
Melissa Harris Lacewell. She calls the traditional civil rights movement a hammer but says, “Contemporary racial inequality is a screw, and if you take a hammer and start pounding on a screw, you just end up with a mess.” We need to build a screwdriver.
Richard Thomspn Ford. He says, “the racial problems facing this town-and many others-are more complex than simple prejudice, and finding solutions will necessarily require more nuance than a mass protest can offer...” I’m wondering if his forthcoming book, The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse, will offer something new.
