Racism: an age long battle

"We’ve got our rules here and you must fit in,’ a line from John Mellencamp’s powerful, new song “Jena.” The song is dedicated to the Jena 6, a group of six AfricanAmerican boys, whose age ranged from 1517 years old. The boys were charged with 2nd degree murder attempts and conspiracy. In this day and age, that, sadly, doesn’t seem out of the ordinary. Jena, Louisiana is at the heart of one of America’s greatest singers and songwriter with less than 4,000 people in the small town. September 2006 is the earliest they can trace this story’s origins back. It all started when one AfricanAmerican boy merely requested permission to sit under what was known around the high school campus as the ‘white’ tree. After receiving a unanimous ‘no’, the boy rejoined his friends, only to come to school to find nooses hanging off the tree. Outraged and offended, the students attempted to take the discriminating ropes down, only to enrage the school’s white population. The white students told administration that it was a ‘prank inspired by a television show,’ and received inschool suspension. They claimed they directed the nooses towards their fellow white friends, who rode on the school rodeo team. The idea came from the show Lonesome Dove. The removal of the nooses set off a chain of reactions involving violence between the two races. The major result was a fight in December, where the infamous Jena 6 left multiple bruises, and nearly caused one concussion, on the white boys. That’s how these six black teenagers, a minority in Jena who has a population of 85% whites, landed in court with an allwhite jury, and a side to the story no one would account for. All six boys were found guilty of the charges they faced, while the other people involved were free to go back to their school, and their tree, after they served a minor suspension. They were tried as adults and put in prison, not in a detention facility, until recently when they were released for trial. Sadly, the issue hasn’t died down. Mychal Bell, a seventeenyearold black boy, has just finished his trial. An allwhite jury took two days to find him guilty of conspiracy and aggravated battery. This young teen faces 22 years in prison. The white students involved received suspension from school. The media has played up the violence as a random, solitary act of racism. With the media taking this angle on the matter, it seems like racism doesn’t affect the world this drastically. It does, it just doesn’t make the 11 o’clock news. Racism hasn’t died down in America, as much as we hope to think differently. When slavery ended in the 1860’s, many people would hope that the narrowmindedness of racism would end as well. Obviously, this is not so. Jena has shown that racism still exists, even if we ignore it, and that extreme measures are still taken to ostracize certain people. They say the nooses weren’t racist towards the black but look at it this way: if it was a swastika hanging from the tree, everyone would understand if a Jewish person got offended and angry. This is the same principle. As children we all loved each other, we all played together in the sandbox at the local playground. So what went wrong? Siara Kahn, a reporter for The Retriever Weekly, believes the answer is simple and complex all at once. Hate exists in this world not because of our DNA or where we’re raised. Hate such as this exists because it’s taught to us. That is the ultimate tragedy here, that people support this behavior. Thankfully, although racism isn’t completely gone, it has faded slightly throughout the years. Honor and pride still exist in our world. The concept of good vs. evil, yin and yang. It’s sad that the world has been defaced by all the bad things in it, but there is still love and laughter. The Ford Foundation, a foundation that helps reduce poverty and discrimination while strengthening democratic views, also helps fight racism. Even if there are ugly things like this in the world, all they do is make good things seem more beautiful. So when you think, ‘Well, why should I care, Jena is thousand miles away from her,’ remember the pain of everyone involved. Jena may be far away, but it is a small town. The Jena 6. Six young boys standing up for what they believed in, standing up for their culture. Prosecuted because they’re black, and they displayed what the jury deemed as inappropriate behavior towards the white youth of Louisiana. Is it fair Mychal Bell might not see the outside world until he is 32 years old? How about the white boy who is in school, completely unaffected by the events that occurred a year ago? The court passed justice onto these boys, but was it worth it? These are the questions passing through a million people’s minds. The answers have proven difficult to find, and hard to understand. The Jena 6 has been discussed, analyzed, and looked at from every view point the media could possibly find. A delicate subject of controversy, this issue will not soon be forgotten in the minds and hearts of many Americans.