It takes a lot to get me to dive back into the Michelle Malkin fever swamp. I decided the Jena 6 might just be a good enough reason.
And no, nothing Malkin said surprised me, nor was it worse than anything anyone else has said. Her commenters are their usual racist selves, of course.
A little more information… In today’s State paper, I read that the ropes were used as hoops by all students (that would be negroes and caucasian students) they were diving throught them? Did anyone else read this or have a comment?
Yeah, I have a comment: You’re an idiot. I know that it was a black teacher who made the “hoops” claim, but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t suggesting that this made them harmless. And I’m pretty sure he didn’t use the word “negroes.”
But while perusing the comments I realized what the true terror of the “Free the Jena 6″ movement is for right-wingers: It’s the terror of seeing the policies they have enacted and pursued staring them in the face. Another commenter says:
I seriously doubt that any regular ‘Malkinite’ poster here approves of any nooses being hung from trees. That was a disgusting display and should be handled appropriately.
However - this victim ( remember him? ) had nothing to do with that incident.
The victim was a victim of both assault and racial profiling. Remember that? Remember who was all the fuck in favor of racial profiling, writ large?
(And writ small: [About the children killed at Haditha] “It’s more of her racial profiling logic, really. She just can’t live without the fallacious thinking that has defined her wingnut pundit career. In a flawed mind like Malkin’s it makes perfect sense that IF some children were insurgents, THEN these children could have been insurgents too. And stating that they could have been is good enough to justify their killing.”)
If hanging nooses isn’t terrorism, as more than one Malkin commenter claims, it’s certainly much worse than flying while Syrian, just to take an obvious example. And at best it’s an adjunct to terrorism, perpetrated by members of the same race as those who have been committing terrorism in areas like Jena, Louisiana for too many years to count.
A Malkin commenter:
What is the statute of limitations on crimes from the past? How long does a community pay for what was done [the last lynching in Jena] over 35 years ago? Especially, if there has been change. Do the past crimes hang over their heads forever?
Leaving aside the obvious fuckwittery of calling something which last occurred in 1968 “hang[ing] over their heads forever” - it’s possible, and maybe probably even likely, that a participant in the last Jena lynching is still LIVING there - it’s not even close to that simple.
[TRIGGER WARNING]
Carmen Williams doesn’t understand why her 20-year-old daughter was tortured, raped and tied up in a shed.
Police tell her that what happened was probably a hate crime, that it happened because Megan Williams is black.
“Every time they stabbed her, they called her ‘nigger,’” her mother said…
A woman allegedly cut Megan Williams’ ankle and said, “That’s what we do to niggers around here.”
Six people have been arrested. None have been charged with a hate crime. And almost no one is talking about it. I guess that answers the commenters who have claimed that an analagous attack by six white people against one black person would ignite a giant firestorm.
I’m not suggesting that this example is any kind of norm, at least not in this decade. But it’s also entirely believable, because no matter how we delude ourselves, “that” - terrorism, dehumanizing - is what some people do around here. Not just in the South, but everywhere. Racism is not gone from any corner of the United States, so to suggest it’s gone from small-town Louisiana is just fucking insulting.
Am I suggesting that, contra Malkin’s commenters, violence was a valid solution to the Jena 6’s grievances? No, says the middle-class white man from the Pacific Northwest, violence is never a solution. But despite my privilege, I’m smart enough to recognize that sometimes, people aren’t looking for solutions, not in the heat of the moment. Did the Jena 6 put their heads together upon (allegedly) receiving yet another racial taunt, and say “Hey, you know what will make up for years of racism? Beating this guy”? No, of course not. (Never mind that Robert Bailey had allegedly been beaten up by a white man a few days earlier, which, by the theory of racial profiling, would just about justify viewing any taunt as a threat - even if, under racism, taunts weren’t already threats.)
I’ve lived with tension - money worries, relationship issues, wondering if my dog is going to pee on the carpet again - and it’s just about made me snap more than once. That’s the tensions of a reasonably well-off white person, mind you. Given that, how hard is it to imagine what it must be like to live under racism? Or, to put it another way, how hard is it to realize how the privileged can’t possibly imagine what it’s like to live under racism?
The sad* thing for the wingnuts is that their reaction to this incident is a Catch-22. Either the reactions of the black people of Jena are a product of their oppression by the systemic racism that still plagues much of America, or they’re not. And if they’re not, then the claimant is left with arguing that black people are crazy. (Which many Malkin commeters do, by the way.) But either way, it’s racism.
“See?” the wingnut says. “It’s all just one big trap for white people!” No. If racism weren’t such a fact, then the choice wouldn’t be so binary. The very existence of the catch-22 is an indictment of the system that white people erected. Unintended consequences; similar to the argument for racial profiling. If it’s only logical to target members of the same race or religion when the threat is felt from simply that race and religion, then it’s logical for blacks, faced with nooses and shotguns in an atmosphere of oppression, to target any white person in pre-emptive self-defense.
Terrorism and violence are not acceptable. Therefore free the Jena 6.
* Not sad.
27 Responses to “Malkin, Racial Profiling, and the Jena 6”
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The whole thing about Jena not being racist really defies belief for anyone who’s spent more than 10 minutes in the deep South. My sister lived in East Texas on the border of Louisiana and swore up and down she met white people all the time who defended the guys who killed that man in Jasper. Please tell me that a society where people feel free in polite company to walk around just defending modern day lynching is not one that tolerates racism. I heard one vile racist from Jena admit—barely—on the radio that maybe the nooses incident should have been condemned by the community. But he sounded like he was about to choke on the words, he didn’t believe a word of it.
Of course not all residents of the community are racist. Especially since, last I checked, black citizens are citizens. But I’m sure there are white people who support justice in the community. But the fact of the matter is the social support systems for lynching didn’t evaporate overnight—they may have had to quiet down some, but people don’t let go of deep hatreds that easily.
Six people have been arrested. None have been charged with a hate crime. And almost no one is talking about it. I guess that answers the commenters who have claimed that an analagous attack by six white people against one black person would ignite a giant firestorm.
There is another potential reason why that case hasn’t gotten as much attention — the woman who was kidnapped and tortured was, by some accounts, Bobby Brewster’s ex-girlfriend, or at least someone he had briefly dated. So then it becomes a creepy stalking revenge-for-rejection story and a domestic violence story, and nobody cares about domestic violence.
Yea, back in the day i was the token white in a communal house set-up with a 3 black fellas… two were going to college, one was ROTC, .. and I’ll always remember Scott telling me the thing he feared most was getting pulled over and having a cop throw some drugs into his car to set him up. And this was NJ. It was so believable to me because I knew of the story of the brother of a another black man who I’d played football with in HS. He was a FBI agent and while coming back from NYC with friends (all white collar workers) was pulled over in Clark, NJ which was noted for its lack of African-American residents. They were abused and insulted until B. pulled out his FBI badge and demanded that their supervisor show up immediately. It never made the papers but there were some suspensions.
P.S.1 I call my friends black ‘cause my best friend’s mother says she has been called “colored”, “negro”, “black”, and now “Afro-American” and “I’m tired and I’m not changing”
P.S2 and the ultimate irony is that Malkin admits to being an anchor baby,… her likely fate in life was to be lying back on a bar table with her legs up in the air improving the moral of the USN.
ping
Poor black woman assaulted/raped/tortured by whites is much less important than privileged white male being hit with a tennis shoe.
Obviously!
There is a serious situation at Pottersville. Please go over there now and talk some sense into JP. Give him some support.
Yeah, Mnemosyne’s right. It hit all the national news outlets (including the NYTimes) and was on the front page of CNN.com for a few days, but then I think the interest died out when the fact that she knew the people beforehand came out. Just another domestic violence story. (The actual story’s not that simple, and it’s defnitely not just another story in WV. It’s staying on the front pages here.) As for hate crime aspect, I think the prosecutor should add hate crime charges, but at least there’s comfort in knowing that they all face potential life sentences based on the crimes they’re already charged with.
Oh my god, did she seriously say “negroes?” I mean, no one edited that? It sounds like a wild allegation, but somehow it makes a lot more sense to me than someone publishing the word “negroes” in 2007, without a single ounce of irony and while claiming to not be racist.
I think that I need to lay down.
I thought the reason why the six white people were not charged with hate crimes is because the kidnapping charges carried higher sentences than the upcharged assault+battery+hatecrime combo. Not sure why they wouldn’t do both just as a belt+suspenders measure. Maybe they don’t want to waste time on counts that are harder to prove and would inflame the jury (i.e., the hate crime charge) when they can quickly and affirmatively establish the kidnapping charge that gets the harshest sentence.
Racially discriminatory behavior by law enforcement is everywhere in our culture. When I was in college in Dallas in the early 90s, an African American choreographer of note in the dance world came to campus to receive an award. He was pulled over because he was driving a luxury car and having a briefcase in the front seat (which, um, yeah, they could totally see before they pulled him over, and, um, they thought it could be a bomb because it was one of those metal briefcases, yasee), because heaven knows that black men don’t carry briefcases or drive luxury cars.
That was 15 years ago, not 35 — does that reset the clock in the mind of an asshatty white dude? What about so many other countless acts of bigotry and discrimination that happen every year, including this year, against African Americans? How many years of anger do blacks get for Katrina alone? I just don’t get this idea that we white people get to just set some sort of clock (the reasonable length of elapsed time being something that whites determine, natch) set to how long black people can be pissed off and distrustful of white people. What a fucking preposterous, privilege-ridden concept! Plus, why would white people think that such a clock has even begun to run, when so many assholes among us, particularly those in positions of authority, continue to reset it with events like the Jena 6 bullshit or the woman in WVa?
I just hear that “How long do we have to pay?” stuff so. fucking. much. among whiny asshole white people. It’s a joke to say white people “pay” for racism in any meaningful way compared to the way black people “pay” for racism, but even to the extent it strains friendships or makes social situations more awkward for white people, so what? White people should pay for racism as long as white people continue to benefit from it. I may feel my white liberal guilt and wish that I didn’t have to, but to act like it’s some kind of cross to bear is an insult to what African American people are made to go through because of both institutionalized and informal racism.
Egregiously misogynist, offensive, and appallingly gratuitous. I don’t care WHO she is, no woman deserves to have this kind of comment attached to her.
Go to hell.
What i find ironic is that non-racist Michele, whose parents are Filipino, would probably not be treated as “white” in non-racist Jena.
Cara, the person who said “negroes” was a commenter, not MM herself.
Not sure why they wouldn’t do both just as a belt+suspenders measure. Maybe they don’t want to waste time on counts that are harder to prove and would inflame the jury (i.e., the hate crime charge) when they can quickly and affirmatively establish the kidnapping charge that gets the harshest sentence.
I’d need a West Virginian to tell us, but I don’t think they have the kind of hate-crimes statute that we have in California where it can be used to tack a few extra years onto your sentence. So their option was state kidnapping charges or federal hate crime charges. I suspect the hate crime charges are being kept in their back pocket in case they need to be used.
And before anyone from the South can come in and complain, yes, the police harassment described above happens everywhere else, too. We had a case here in Los Angeles of a black surgeon being handcuffed so tightly that he suffered permanent nerve damage in his hands.
His crime? Driving a rental car that Budget Rent-A-Car had erroneously reported stolen.
“What i find ironic is that non-racist Michele, whose parents are Filipino, would probably not be treated as “white” in non-racist Jena.”
If Malkin was to just show up, without her husband, was unrecognized and tried to do random human activities, I suspect she’d find out about the way “Other People” are treated in Jena, etc.
The problem is she’d probably make the whole thing into a publicized “field trip”, like when she went to Iraq. As an “Honorary White Person” - for shilling for the bigoted Reichwing - she would easily get a pass.
People are always on their best behavior when they’ve been warned ahead of time…
What these twits don’t seem to get is that this suspicious attitude is RATIONAL for people of color. When you get years of that kind of behavior and years of thoughtless dismissal, you would be, rationally, quite stupid, not to assume the worst.
For me, the scary thing about the Brewster case is that this seems to be the way the perpetrators act when they’re not actively committing a hate crime. The racism is so embedded in their way of being that using it as part of their torture goes without saying.
You realize, of course, that you just captured in two sentences what I spent an entire blog post trying, not nearly as successfully, to get across.
I probably shouldn’t admit that, or I’ll get run off the blog.
If it’s only logical to target members of the same race or religion when the threat is felt from simply that race and religion, then it’s logical for blacks, faced with nooses and shotguns in an atmosphere of oppression, to target any white person in pre-emptive self-defense.
This may explain why they feel threatened.
Mnemosyne, the WV hate crimes statute can be used two ways — as a separate charge that carries a maximum 10 year sentence or as an aggravating circumstance at sentencing for other crimes. So, even though the prosecutor hasn’t charged them with hate crimes, the question of whether the crime was motivated by racial bias will most likely come up at sentencing and could increase their sentences. Of course, if they’re convicted of kidnapping, they could get life sentences anyway.
And the prosecutor has not said that he’s ruled out filing hate crime charges, so as you say, it is possible that he’s keeping them in his back pocket, though as cynical as I can be about the justice system, I don’t really have any doubt that these people are going to get what they deserve.
Re: The Jena 6
I keep remembering a rather long thread we had about a year ago, about bullies, our school days, and how we responded.
Time after time, story after story, the only thing that ever made a difference, in most cases, was for the perps to have fear put in them. Mostly, the bullying victim snapped, and attacked, at least momentarily, enough for the bullies never to want to see that happen again. One other person had seen the bullies find fear when they’d knocked their victim downstairs, only to see a group of teachers at the bottom of the stairs glaring up at them.
Which leads me to think there was only 2 ways the violence against the blacks would stop escalating. Like the kids who found the teachers spotting them nearly red-handed, the racists would have sat on their hate if they had been stopped by authority when the trouble started. Since no one in authority would help the black kids, though, showing they would fight back was about the only option left.
And other one. This time they were charged with a hate crime.
Tinfoil Hattie,
I love you.
Even if you are right, and the beating was incited by racism (I’m not arguing that it wasn’t a large part of it), why does that absolve the “Jena 6″ of the criminal responsibilities for the act?
Why should the beating of anyone be tolerated, regardless of reason?
It seems to me that the running commentary from many on the left is that because the Jena 6 were black, and because the victim of their assault was white, and because whites in Jena are evil racists, therefore, the beating wasn’t their fault.
Am I missing something here?
I also agree with tinfoil hattie, and would just like to point out that the comment was egregiously misogynist in a very specifically racist way, as well.
It does us no good to descend to level of our opponents. It just portrays us as hypocrits.
I just want to say something about that concept that lynchings happened “along time ago” so they shouldn’t have any impact anymore. I was living in Durham NC when the book “Blood Done Sign my Name” came out about a lynching and subsequent race riot in the 70s in Oxford NC. Well, I was teaching in Oxford when I heard the review of the book on NPR and I was surprised that there was a book getting national attention about this itty bitty town. So I asked people about it. The people who did the killings are all still there. Everyone knows them. Their son went to the school I taught at (and was known for making trouble with the Mexican students). The grandson of the man who had led the riots was in my class. 35 years is by no means the distant past, especially in a small town where everyone knows everyone. Everyone knows that a black man was killed and no one served a day in jail for it even though everyone in the town had no doubt who killed him. I can’t even imagine how my students would have reacted if someone hung nooses in the school. Lynchings may seem like ancient history to those of us who aren’t from the South, just something you read about in a history book, but they are still a pretty fresh memory to those who lived through them.
Sean: The issue isn’t that what they did was illegal, but that the charges are so out of proportion for the actual incident.
Assault and Battery, even Aggravated Assault sure.
There are mitigating circumstances; which could affect sentencing, but the actual charges are attempted murder.
It’s disproportionate, esp. as previous events (like the incident with a gun) were ignored/papered over.
So it’s disporportionate, twice.
(p.s. By the time I get to the bottom of an entry and comments, I’ve timed out the catchpa, which is frustrating).
Sean,
You’ve totally got your head buried in the sand, or up your behind. First off, this was an in-school brawl. Most in-school brawls end in, at most, disciplinary actions by the school. This in-school brawl, a fight where the deadly weapon of Air Jordans (not a gun, baseball bat, razor blade, or even a lunch tray) were used to visit a full 2 hour headache on another student, ended in attempted murder charges. You are free to keep your head up your ass and say these results are justified in light of the circumstances. Do you honestly believe that the students in questions were either trying or could have been trying to kill their classmate? Intent is an element of that crime. Or do you think they just wanted him to STFU? I would guess the latter. You can pretend like every single in-school brawl ends at the police station and results in jail sentences, but that is not the reality of how these situations are dealt with.
The fact that the student who got his ass whooped was looking for an ass-whooping goes without saying. But justice being done does not mean, and has never meant locking up a kid for 100 years for making a mistake! Then wonder why so many of our tax dollars are being sunk into the Prison Industrial Complex hell on earth we are so quick to ship little 16 year olds who kicked a kid once in a fight. I’m not even sure I would want any tax dollars to go to getting this “victim” justice at all. It should have been resolved within the school, with some suspensions or perhaps, if these kids records were riddled with offenses, removing the kids to an alternative school.