[NYTr] The Whole (Jena 6) Story?

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Alternet - Sep 24, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/63420/


The Whole (Jena 6) Story?

By Sean Gonsalves

I spent my kindergarten and first-grade years at Glassbrook Elementary
School in Hayward, California -- where two playground incidents,
colored by racial taunts and retaliatory violence, left their mark on
my impressionable mind.

My class was all-white, except for this Vietnamese kid named Q. And me.
We were playing kickball in gym class and Q wasn't very good. About a
half-dozen of my classmates started taunting an extremely meek and
seriously scared Q with chants of "gook."

Now that I think about it, Q had probably immigrated to America with
his family after his people were "liberated" by soldiers like my
(step)father who had voluntarily served with a USMC tank battalion in
Vietnam several years before our little scapegoat game on the
playground.

I don't know if the biblical prophets I began learning about in church
had already started to influence me but like Jeremiah, I had a fire
shut up in my bones, burning in defense of Q. I told my classmates that
if they didn't stop calling Q a "gook," I was "gonna kick they ass."

They didn't stop and I delivered on my threat.

But I didn't get charged with attempted murder like the Jena 6. I
didn't even get in "trouble;" at least, not by-the-book "trouble."
Instead, karma came back to me -- hard. Not long after the Q incident,
we were playing softball. I was catching, standing too close to the
plate, and one of the kids I beat up in the name of Q caught me with
his backswing -- right in the jaw. (I can still see that green wooden
bat today).

I went to our gym teacher moaning about the nurse's office. "I told you
to back up. That's what you get. Now, go over there and sit down," he
said.

Too bad my gym teacher isn't the District Attorney in Jena, Louisiana.
He might not be the ideal man for the job but at least he allowed my
classmates to learn a real-world lesson in the wrath that white
supremacy evokes while sparing me certain school (and maybe legal)
discipline.

He also saw the poetic (and painful) justice of me getting cracked in
the jaw by a kid who had been a victim of my retaliatory violence.

The Jena 6 were initially charged, as adults, with attempted murder for
a playground butt-whoopin' after a series of racial incidents that
included the ugly American spectre of nooses. Predictably, the story
has quickly devolved into one that pits two polarized camps arguing
about "justice."

One side, many of whom I'd bet are purveyors of "color-blindness," can
only see black criminality in this case, while downplaying (or
ignoring) the existential threat nooses represent to black folk. The
other side -- rightfully calling attention to a clear-cut case of
white-skin privilege -- wrongly sees the Jena 6 as the beginning of
21st century civil rights movement.

Of course, both camps have a point. The Jena 6 haters, despite their
evident historical amnesia of the lynching terrorism African-Americans
endured for nearly a century (and that was tolerated by "Christian"
America until less than 50 years ago) are right: you can't claim the
moral high ground in the struggle for racial justice with a beat-up
white kid at the bottom of the pile.

The Jena 6 defenders are also right: sending any of those young
brothers involved in the fight to jail, without considering the
"mitigating circumstances," would be an injustice that should be easy
to see in a so-called Christian country. "A false balance is
abomination to the Lord: but a j8ust weight is his delight," declares
the book of Proverbs.

Certainly, the charges in the Jena 6 case are a "false balance."

It's not just my Glassbrook experience that makes me sympathetic to the
Jena 6, my sympathies are also based on the recognition, as Karl
Menninger observed his classic analysis of America's penal system The
Crime of Punishment, that "in practice, justice does not mean fairness
to all parties. To some people the law is an inexorable, inscrutable
Sinai -- the highest virtue is to submit unquestioningly. But to others
law and the principle of justice should ... 'embody the plasticity and
reasonableness that Aristotle praised in his famous description of
equity."

"He said: 'Equity bids us to be merciful to the weakness of human
nature; to think less about what he said than about what he meant; not
to consider the actions of the accused so much as his intentions, nor
this or that detail so much as the whole story..."

[Sean Gonsalves is a Cape Cod Times staff reporter and a syndicated
columnist.] 

© 2007 Independent Media Institute.