Parade of Fools
MichaelW on Jan 21 2008 at 4:36 pm | Filed under: Culture, Media, MichaelW's Page, Race, Society
Behold the band of idiots.
JENA, La. (Jan. 21) - The residents of this central Louisiana town, who watched their community turn into a battleground over the “Jena Six,” will watch out-of-towners doing most of the marching on the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr.
The Nationalist Movement, a white supremacist group headquartered in Learned, Miss., planned what it called “Jena Justice Day” on Monday.
Organization spokesman Richard Barrett said the group wants to voice its opposition to the King holiday and to the Jena Six, a group of black teenagers accused of beating a white schoolmate shortly after a noose was hung on the campus of Jena High School.
“We want to see the holiday returned to Washington’s birthday, something that celebrates the people that made this country great,” Barrett said Sunday.
Barrett’s group planned a noon march from the LaSalle Parish Courthouse to the high school and back, and an afternoon of speeches. He did not say how many protesters were expected.
“We’ll have speakers and an open mike,” Barrett said. “The people of this town have still not had their say in all of this.”
Barrett is upset over the rally for the black teens held in September that drew over 20,000. That group was protesting charges of attempted second-degree murder against the six. Those charges have since been reduced to second-degree battery.
One might ask, quite reasonably, why are these idiots getting so much attention? If the white supremacist groups held a march and nobody came, wouldn’t that be the best of both worlds: free speech being accompanied by the consequences of speaking hate filled nonsense?
Yes. Yes it would. However, the problem here is not that these idiots are in the spotlight, but why they are there. To find the reason why, look no further than the bolded sentence above which is nothing more than a myth.
The myths started when a Jena High student asked a silly question about who could sit under a campus tree to extend a school assembly, writes Franklin, whose wife teaches at Jena High. Blacks and whites routinely sat under the tree.
The next day, three white students put nooses on the tree. They said it was a prank aimed at white friends on the school rodeo team. They’d got the idea from watching “Lonesome Dove.”
The committee further concluded that the three young teens had no knowledge that nooses symbolize the terrible legacy of the lynchings of countless blacks in American history. When informed of this history by school officials, they became visibly remorseful because they had many black friends.
Three months later, when six blacks ambushed a white student and beat him unconscious, nobody mentioned the noose incident as a reason for the attack. The victim had nothing to do with the nooses.
The “Jena 6″ became a cause célèbre because some seemingly unjustifiable charges were levied against six black students in what was a felonious enough assault to begin with. Then the usual race-baiters came along and turned the ordeal into a circus.
But the circus could have ended there if it were not for a media completely incapable of, and apparently uninterested in, doing its job. The “noose myth” survives to this day (much like the manifold Katrina myths) because the people who write, edit and distribute the news don’t care about getting it right. All they care about is producing a story that fits within their predominant world view where a noose equals racism in all cases, where white racism is the cause of every problem (especially in the South) not laid at the foot of free-wheelin’ capitalism, and where a high school student getting beaten by six thugs had it coming because he’s a white southerner and the thugs were black victims. In short, news reporters don’t report anything; they tell stories and expect us to accept them as fact.
When myths are presented as fact, the natural consequence is that the media creates space for idiots like the Nationalist Movement to stand firmly upon and shout their nonsense. Whites are being demonized in this instance for no good reason because that’s what the narrative tells the media to do. Just like with the Duke Lacrosse fiasco, the media saw an angle and ran with it, despite the copious evidence revealing just how wrong their narrative is. Now marchers will clash in Jena, the media will tell a new story conveniently equating all white people in Louisiana with the Nationalist Movement, and helpfully suggest that this is the underlying cause of the horrible injustice perpetrated upon those fine young citizens who shall forever be known as the “Jena 6.” And the biggest casualty of all will be the truth, which holds no court on this day in Louisiana.
I honestly don’t think this is what Dr. King had in mind when he wrote:
So the question is not whether we will be extremist but what kind of extremist will we be. Will we be extremists for hate or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice–or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?
There is no justice when truth is murdered.
One last comment: few things bother me more than willful ignorance. Admittedly, I’m not one to suffer fools gladly, but simple ignorance is mostly curable while refusing to acknowledge reality in favor of a “narrative” borders on true evil. I say borders because, in my mind, true evil is the total absence of truth, the negation of rationality, and the tyrannical rule of myth. Where true evil reigns, your thoughts are not your own, but instead are the subject of an omnipresent authority that completely encompasses your reality. You can’t believe your lying eyes because it is illegal to do so, and you will be found out. So when the media actively creates, fosters and promotes myths as truth, they do so in support of evil.
With respect to the Jena 6, it is evil to blame others for their own problems, and to cast them with virtues they have not earned. It is evil to overshadow questionable prosecutorial practices with made-up racial hate crimes and thus deny the justice that was due in favor of myth creation. It is evil to perpetuate that myth when the truth is not just known, it is actively eschewed. It is evil to report myth as fact.
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