Eugene Robinson: United By Hate

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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070920_united_by_hate/

United by Hate

Posted on Sep 20, 2007

By Eugene Robinson

WASHINGTON—How did thousands of African-Americans come to descend on the town of Jena, La., on Thursday for a march and rally that brought to mind the heady days of the civil rights movement? The answer says as much about what has changed over the past half-century as it says about what hasn’t.

Most people know the outlines of the story by now, but here’s a synopsis: Black students at the local high school sat under a tree that everyone knew was a place where white students usually congregated. White students reacted by hanging three nooses in the tree. Racial tensions escalated from there, including fights in which both black and white students got roughed up but no one was seriously injured. Local authorities, who are white, handled the white offenders with a “boys will be boys” attitude—a few brief school suspensions, basically. Black offenders were expelled from school, arrested and charged as adults with felony offenses, including attempted murder.

These events happened in 2006. For months, they utterly failed to penetrate the national consciousness. We still might not know about what was happening in Jena if the case hadn’t been noticed by Internet bloggers, who sounded the alarm. And I’m quite sure there would have been no busloads of protesters descending on Jena if the cause hadn’t been taken up by a radio personality best known for R-rated banter about sex and relationships.

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But Thursday’s protest needed more than the right medium, it needed the right message. When a local prosecutor in a small Southern town is confronted with a racial clash and he gives the whites a mild slap on the wrist while trying his best to send the blacks to prison, there aren’t many black Americans who feel they can enjoy the luxury of indifference.

We don’t see that many instances of overt, unapologetic, separate-and-unequal racial discrimination these days, thank goodness. Let’s hope we never see another. Because when something like Jena happens, we’re reminded, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his letter from the Birmingham jail, that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” And we’re reminded that however diverse we are, to some people we all look alike.


Eugene Robinson’s e-mail address is eugenerobinson(at)washpost.com.