Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

There’s been a lot of self flaggelation in the liberal blogosphere over whether we provided the appropriate amount of coverage for the Jena 6 debacle.  Like Ezra, the reason I didn’t blog about it was that the story seemed so obvious, so awful, that I really didn’t have anything to add to it. Moreover, I have been up on the story for at least the last 2-3 weeks due to black students at my school who were publicizing it.  But now that the discussion has gone meta, I do have something to say.

The narrative coming out of Jena is that it is a microcosm for larger race-based injustice in the United States.  As Jesse Jackson put it, “Jena is just a DNA sample of what’s happening around the country.”  Courtney Martin’s TAP article puts it in similarly dramatic, broad terms:

Indeed, the Jena 6 case, like the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, is a violent reminder that our country is actually many nations. Despite all of the progress that has been made, racism is still a part of too many American kids’ ideological diets. A noose, even in 2007, struck these good ol’ Southern boys as an apt symbol for the fear of “the other” that had been bred in them from birth. And their elders — the school administrators, city officials, and parents — called their inexcusable hatred by cutesy names: pranks, child’s play, boys will be boys. It is a wake-up call to us all: The work of ending racism is far from over.

Well, I must disagree slightly.  While Jena is clearly a result of what happens when a black populatoin has become so alienated from the white power structure that they can no longer trust it to pursue justice equally, it’s almost impossible to say that Jena really is a microcosm.  I imagine that cases of such blatant racism, of such blatant inattention to black citizens basic concerns about safety and equity are rather rare.  The District Attorney in Jena, Reed Walters, is a character of almost Grinchian malovelence, seemingly more concerned with keeping the black students under watch and “in control” than trying to alleviate racial tensions and violence.  Instead of speaking to the white students who were constantly intimidating and denigrating black students with such “harmless pranks” as putting nooses on a tree black students dared sit under, he warned them that, “I can make your lives disappear with a stroke of my pen.”  But I have to think that Reed Walters behavior is probably rather rare.  Jena isn’t a microcosm, but a ridiculous extreme.

Do Jesse Jackson and other black activists really want us to think that everywhere is Jena, when our own experience doesn’t tell us that’s true?  By pointing to such an obviously, blatantly, openly racist situation and saying “this isn’t Jena, this is America,” the activists involved are shooting themselves in the foot.  When people look at Jena, they say “that’s awful…that’s awfully abnormal” and so they can move on, assuring themselves — oftentimes correctly — that such racism just isn’t present where they live.  It’s easy to remedy or protest individual cases of such obvious injustice, especially when people can contrast it with their own experience in such obvious ways.

Ezra Klein points out that there really is, however, massively unjust, racially tinged crime policies that are being implemented everyday, and not just in Jena, but everywhere.  That would, of course, be the ongoing operation of the War on Drugs.  Will the attention brought Jena 6 focus on the millions of black men in jail today for essentially victimless crimes?  Will it focus on the draconian sentences they so often receive?  I sure hope so, but I’m skeptical.  By activists and journalists trying to pass of Jena as a small-scale America, they are saying that blatant racism on the part of government officials in charge of enforcing the law is the problem.  But it isn’t.  The problem is that we have drug laws that treat the most vulnerable members of society in the harshest way.  We can’t point to the obvious perfidy of someone like DA Walters to say that the War on Drugs and the sickening numbers of Black men in prison is wrong.  We have to look deeper, we have to ask why we demanded such a punitive system, and why we continue to put up with it.  And the answer to those questions doesn’t lie in Jena, but in all of us.