Previously published in the NJCU Gothic Times November 2007 issue
A Look into Jena 6
By: Lyle Hickman
Issue date: 11/1/07 Section: Opinion
|
This scuffle was instigated by several incidents, one in which nooses were hung from a tree that a group of African American students stood underneath. In another incident, two African American students were arrested at a nearby convenience store for the theft of a shotgun which they managed to obtain from a white man who had threatened them with it.
I am disgusted, but not surprised, by the hanging of nooses and unfair trials of the six young black men in contemporary, post-13th Amendment America. The promoted illusion that the United States has simply wiped out most of its ingrained racism, like a q-tip cleaning earwax out of an earlobe, is a fraudulent deception.
My angst because of the Jena 6 situation stems not only from the unfair charges against the six teens, but also from the nonchalant responses from some of the white citizens in Jena. The responses' commonality was their lack of sensitivity for the African American students who were terrorized in the same nefarious fashion as their elders and ancestors. They acted as if it were a prank such as a whoopee cushion or trick gum!
These were nooses intended to be interpreted as a response to the African American students who sat under that tree. The intentional hanging of a noose in school colors asserts the perpetrator's historic understanding of the noose in relation to African Americans. The choice of school colors showed a demented school spirit, but more importantly, it represented the perpetrator's belief that this sentiment was shared with the white student body or school population.
This was no different than the lynchings of the past, both in the North and South, where a white man would hang the American flag while simultaneously smiling with his wife and two-and-a-half kids under the strange fruit that Billie Holliday sung of which hung overhead from a poplar tree.
The Jena 6 incidents have also brought attention to two African Americans--Detective Gregory Anderson and Professor Madonna Constantine--who have also had similar experiences. Detective Anderson of Brooklyn, NY, found a noose hanging above his locker at an emergency service unit in 2001. Professor Constantine of Columbia University discovered a noose hanging from her office door on October 9, 2007.
The fact that noose hanging continues to happen in both the North and South conveys an evil ideology that might have gone into hiding, surreptitiously continuing its agenda, but that is now unleashed and undoubtedly in the public eye.
Megan Williams, a 20-year-old African American woman, was kidnapped, degraded, tortured, raped, and forced to eat animal feces for the span of a week before the police found her. Williams' kidnappers were three white males and three white females between the ages of 20 and 50. The kidnappers tortured and raped her violently while screaming racial epithets.
These occurrences display the vile barbarism of racism that persists to live in the minds of not only the poorly-educated, rural-living white supremacists, but also in the minds of those holding authoritative positions in the criminal injustice system that consistently indicts African Americans unjustly.
The parasite of racism cannot be ignored because it spreads and spreads hopping from host to host. The United States has tried to suppress this parasite which started as a wound and has developed into a tumor filled with blood. Many watch this tumor called racism flourish, and many refuse to take part in administering its remedy because they feel as if it is distant and doesn't concern them. Ask yourself, "Am I part of the solution or part of the problem?" because before you know it, a noose may be hanging from your front door.
Posts
