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Nope, no racism here…

Ren

Gee, white folks in Jena, LA don’t want you to think they are racist. They don’t like the stigma or the ghosts of the Old South floating around their nice little town…

Well, then maybe they need to consider shit like this, eh? Notice, oh, ANY racism or double standards or other assorted bullshit there?

White kid pulls a shotgun on someone, nothing…white kids beat up a black kid…charged with simple battery. Black kids beat up a white kid? Attempted second degree murder? Oh yeah, and hanging nooses in a tree on school property is just a “prank”…harmless teen fun and all?

Nope, no racism there, none at all….

12 thoughts on Nope, no racism here…

  1. It’s such a fucked up situation. I wish I could believe this is a one time thing, one bad place with a few bad people. Sadly there is still a lot of racism going on in the South. I grew up in a town where no one of color dared stay in after dark. It was a small town with no local cops, and enough “good ol’ boys” that you toed the line or else. Fucking disgusting. I’ve got a video up about it on my blog, here.

  2. Yuck. A situation the authorities let spin out of control. Read this article for a complete timeline.

    What decade is it, anyway? This sounds more like it happened in 57 than 07. Black hs students sitting under the “whites-only” tree, followed by whites hanging nooses in the tree, followed by someone burning the high school down. You’d think at that point, some one would have tried to control the situation. But instead, the local DA told the black students to shut up and quit complaining.

  3. the local DA told the black students to shut up and quit complaining.

    Worse. He’s prosecuting black youths on trumped up charges after telling them publicly that with a stroke of his pen he could make them disappear. And the worst part of it is, he’s right.

  4. God forbid I should criticize, but maybe it would be a slightly better idea to link to any of the Jena Six supporters or any other more current update than to a three-month old article that made the rounds of all the blogs, including, I dearly hope, this one, back in May. Had you somehow not known about this before? Because to present this as some kind of done deal that we can only belatedly sigh and shake our heads at and not, you know, affect in anyway way, seems pretty fucking irresponsible. Here is a place to watch for updates.

  6. That lynch “prank” is in the same vein as rape “jokes,” or to be more equal, rape and murder “humor.” However, there are some exceptions: while the lynching of blacks is quite rare today, the raping and murdering of women and girls occurs regularly; oh, and when most Americans hear lynching being trivialized they cringe, but the ol’ rape-and-murder punchline amuses them to no end (see: Eminem or radio shock jock “banter”).

    Notice how the town folk employ the same “Get a sense of humor” defense. “Adolescents play pranks,” said superintendent Roy Breithaupt. “I don’t think it was a threat against anybody.”

  7. A friend of mine who has lived in considerably more places than I once told me that, in her estimation, racism wasn’t any less prevalent in the North than it is in the South. After having lived in the South for ten years, I have to admit that I agree with her, but there is an important difference in the way that racism is displayed.

    In the South, racism is an open festering wound (her words for it, but I have to agree, assuming my experiences in Oklahoma and Virginia were typical). In the North, it’s covert. It’s still there, just as potent and just as nasty, just hidden under enough of a veneer of civility to enable people to claim it does not exist or it really isn’t all that bad.

    Frankly, I’m not sure which is worse.

  9. What is the best example, to me, that those in charge in Jena don’t want the appearance of racism shown to the world but don’t care about the fact of its existence?

    They cut down the beautiful 20-year-old oak tree on campus.

    Bastards. What can the black community think but “Proves that if there’s something nice out there, they’ll get rid of it before they’ll share it with us” and what can the racists think but “Can’t have anything nice without them ruining it for us”?

  11. I live in the Northeast, in a town of 60,000 people, where the whole city council and every member of every city commission is white and 30% of the city’s population is not.

    However, if you try to raise that issue, the (paraphrased) response is: racism? What, here? How dare you accuse us of being racist? It’s all the fault of those lazy nonwhite people who don’t involve themselves in civic life! Besides, we are diverse – we have two women on the city council! Out of 15!

    Seems like white Americans (I’m white, but not American) are often very willing to strenuously declare that everything that appears racist is not racist; but they get sore at you if you ask them, for example, to define for you what is racist.

  12. A friend of mine who has lived in considerably more places than I once told me that, in her estimation, racism wasn’t any less prevalent in the North than it is in the South. After having lived in the South for ten years, I have to admit that I agree with her, but there is an important difference in the way that racism is displayed.

    I tend to agree with this; even though I’ve never lived in the South, I have several acquaintances who are from there, and from hearing their experiences, it seems to me that it’s an issue of how racism is manifested (and sometimes it isn’t manifested all that differently) than which region of the country is worse.

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