More like UNcivil WRONGS: Socially Quarantine the Jena 4006

I've read a lot about this. Of all people, a black sports columnist comes close to summing up the other thing wrong w/ all this. An excerpt:

Including the fact that not one witness — black or white, and there were 40 statements taken — connected the jumping/beatdown of the white student (Dec. 4) to the noose incident (Sept. 1).

No one mentions that a black U.S. Attorney, Donald Washington, investigated the "Jena Six" case and held a town-hall meeting explaining that there was no evidence connecting the jumping/beatdown to the noose incident.

Only after the prosecutor overreacted (or tired of letting Bell and others skate once the successful football season was over; Bell wasn't the only football star charged) did the "Jena Six" blame the attack on the nooses and the white shade tree.

And Michelle Malkin, a commentator who I'm pretty sure doesn't actually reason, but rather has been programmed at some point with an ideology that hits more than misses, summed up the question whose beggings to be asked have fallen on deaf ears:

I’m not going to join the knee-jerk race-hustlers in celebrating the “civil right” to beat white people unconscious to rectify institutional racism. Is this the legacy Martin Luther King, Jr., would have sanctioned?

Which is the problem all the contrarians like me have w/ this. The implicit narrative behind all the "Free the Jena Six" talk is this: "Whites in this town hate blacks and punished them too harshly, and any wrongdoing blacks might have done can be blamed on white racism." It's not too big a mental leap to remove the words "this town" from that notion-- especially if you don't think about the actual words that make up that thought, which no one is.

White doucebaggery-- and nothing I've read doesn't suggest every white person in that backswamp nightmare town is the worst kind of anachronistic scummy backwash, the sort of hyper racist Bad Sheriff caricature that most of us will only ever encounter in movies-- doesn't excuse black doucebaggery. Not even when it outweighs the black doucebaggery, as it does in this case. Every race represented in this whole affair needs to disown the participants.

Still not convinced the attack wasn't at least kind of justified? Consider the logistics of a six-on-one attack. Mychal Bell was a promising football star. He needs five other kids to beat some white boy's ass? How does that number break down? Four to hold each limb, one to hold the head, and the sixth to work the body? Or maybe four for the limbs and one for each nut? Or was there room for only six?

Plus, Bell had three assault convictions prior to this. If it's racist of me to just blindly assume, without looking into it at all, that none of those three beatings were administered in the pursuit of social justice, my bitterly, drippingly sarcastic apologies.

And among the many lies by omission told about the Jena Six now-fiasco, the downplaying of Justin Barker's medical condition makes me puke the hardest. The lightness of his wounds isn't further evidence of the harshness of the charges against the Six; it's lucky defiance of the already evident severity of his beating. He was punched and kicked unconscious. Have you ever hit your head hard on a cabinet or door? Imagine someone hitting you that hard on purpose until you can't stay awake. Because we see cats getting knocked out all the time in entertainment, and have never been beat so hard we can't remember getting beat ourselves, it's easy to laugh it off. But think about what goes into a fight that escalates that high. And think of Robin Williams in Insomnia defending his accidental murder of his girlfriend in what sounds like perfectly reasonable, though tragic terms, until pursuing cop Al Pachino drops some context on the audience by screaming that choking a girl out for five uninterrupted minutes does not constitute a heat-of-the-moment outburst.

Again, none of this is to defend, excuse, or rationalize the racist institutional abuse perpetrated by the whites. And even I think hanging nooses from a whites-only tree doesn't qualifiy as aggressively provocative social satire (although making the nooses the school colors almost brings it back). Really, this whole town is a petrie dish of human bacteria that needs to be sterilized and thrown out. I don't know if segregation was wrong by itself so much as it was wrong in service of racism, if you get my meaning. Why not keep this whole townful of idiot apes away from the rest of the world?

I know, when you average it out, that black people are nowhere near the sort of thug, ass-with-impunity BET likes to spotlight non-stop. I know most of the people in any group aren't represented by the terrible examples that get all the attention, and are decent and just want happy lives for they and theirs, and don't like being a shit to anyone, really. But speak the fuck up already, folks. And don't chose solidarity with those you should shun just because you think the other guys are worse. I can tell you whitey busts his ass letting everyone know his disgraceful cousins don't speak for him. Your turn.

I think that covers it. I skipped the Cavemen premiere to write this. You owe me so big.