Thoughts on the Jena 6

[cui bono?]

Nice. Four previous juvie raps. Emmit Till he ain't ...

yeah I really wasn't feeling the comparison...or the t-shirts made up that reflected the comparison. 

   Wow!  I missed all that.  I wish it weren't so, but I'm not surprised, I suppose.  ::smh:: From the LIttle Rock Nine to the Jena 6 -- we need to do better, black people!

Yeah I was too through once I saw the t-shirts.  WTF 

[Miss P]

You are better than most, P.

Thanks, Sands.  This means a lot coming from you.

The controversy was about two things (1) whether the officer clearly identified himself as NYPD when he approached (and touched) the car with his gun out and (2) whether Bell was trying to hurt him or was instead just trying to get away.  Either way, the police have a policy of not firing into moving vehicles.  Even if you believe the police identified themselves clearly and that Bell was trying to hurt them, these facts are insufficient to overcome the clear judgments underlying the policy.  It was very dangerous, and we are lucky that no one else was killed or seriously hurt.

While I appreciate your time and you have added to my knowledge of NYPD procedures, what you're describing isn't racism.

I didn't say it was.  I suggested, instead, that the way police respond (e.g., with a willingness to violate policies like this one) to black neighborhoods and black male suspects is different from the way they respond to other neighborhoods and suspects, and I believe this is, in part, a result of racial bias.  In any case, remember, this discussion of police homicides in NYC arose first out of your contention that African and West Indian black men aren't subejct to the same mistreatment as African-American black men (IIRC, I made a list of the most recent police shootings of unarmed civilians, all of whom were black men, and only one of whom -- Bell -- was African American) and extended to a discussion of the Bell shooting in particular only because of your insistence that people mourning Bell's death were a sign of what was wrong about contemporary African-American culture.  You're welcome to try to advance this position.  Perhaps you can even gain a friend in California Cougar out of it.

[Miss P]

Nice. Four previous juvie raps. Emmit Till he ain't ...

yeah I really wasn't feeling the comparison...or the t-shirts made up that reflected the comparison. 

   Wow!  I missed all that.  I wish it weren't so, but I'm not surprised, I suppose.  ::smh:: From the LIttle Rock Nine to the Jena 6 -- we need to do better, black people!

Yeah I was too through once I saw the t-shirts.  WTF 

I've had an eye on the Jena Six for a good part of the last six months, and I've never seen a t-shirt comparing the boys to Emmett Till.  What does it say?

Sorry. I must hazard a rephrase: "we must do better, PEOPLE." It's not just blacks who get fooled into thinking a victim of one racial bias must be himself unblemished.

I appreciate your thoughts, though I stand by what I said.  I think we both can agree that my statement is just as true as yours.  Nonetheless, I am chiefly concerned in this instance not with the responses of "people" in general wrt Jena 6, but with particular black people's misguidedly shallow parallels that reveal a lack of understanding of what it looks like when justice is truly thwarted.  jsia

IMO, justice has been thwarted in this case regardless of Mychal Bell's wrongdoing.  I don't see why he has to be innocent in order to receive fair treatment.

[naturallybeyoutiful]

IMO, justice has been thwarted in this case regardless of Mychal Bell's wrongdoing.  I don't see why he has to be innocent in order to receive fair treatment.

I hear you, Miss P, and do agree.  But I just think some are too quick to forget that just because someone is treated unfairly doesn't make him innocent. We don't need conflate these two notions by making Ernie Greens and Emmett Tills out of Mychal Bells.  That's all I'm saying...

[Miss P]

IMO, justice has been thwarted in this case regardless of Mychal Bell's wrongdoing.  I don't see why he has to be innocent in order to receive fair treatment.

I hear you, Miss P, and do agree.  But I just think some are too quick to forget that just because someone is treated unfairly doesn't make him innocent. We don't need conflate these two notions by making Ernie Greens and Emmett Tills out of Mychal Bells.  That's all I'm saying...

I understand, though I think part of the reason people do this is because of pressure from folks like final_id to find poster children.

[cui bono?]

Nice. Four previous juvie raps. Emmit Till he ain't ...

yeah I really wasn't feeling the comparison...or the t-shirts made up that reflected the comparison. 

   Wow!  I missed all that.  I wish it weren't so, but I'm not surprised, I suppose.  ::smh:: From the LIttle Rock Nine to the Jena 6 -- we need to do better, black people!

Yeah I was too through once I saw the t-shirts.  WTF 

I've had an eye on the Jena Six for a good part of the last six months, and I've never seen a t-shirt comparing the boys to Emmett Till.  What does it say?

I didn't see the whole t-shirt and I'm not sure if it caught on.  But in one of the news clips there were a few black teenagers with a black shirt with white lettering.  I think there was a picture in the middle of the shirt of Emmett Till.  The white lettering on the bottom said something to the effect that what's happening to Bell is like a 2007 version of Till.  said something about 50+ years later...Bell

Can some pls 'splain the comparision?  There's really no similarities that I can see other than they were both black young men.   

[cui bono?]

lots more t-shirts

http://www.cafepress.com/buy/Jena/-/cfpt2_/x_27/cfpt_/source_searchBox/copt_/y_2

cant find the one of Till tho

[Miss P]

There's a shot of the scene now (lovely stump) in this PDF document, scroll on down:

http://www.t4sj.org/clientimages/39669/revealingracistroots2.pdf

... but it's not directly linked so I can't just img-code it, and I can't find another one on the web.

But the question is: did something catch fire there? 

There was a fire at the high school, yes.  I couldn't find the pictures of the stump.  Do you have a page number or anything?

[Miss P]

I didn't see the whole t-shirt and I'm not sure if it caught on.  But in one of the news clips there were a few black teenagers with a black shirt with white lettering.  I think there was a picture in the middle of the shirt of Emmett Till.  The white lettering on the bottom said something to the effect that what's happening to Bell is like a 2007 version of Till.  said something about 50+ years later...Bell

Can some pls 'splain the comparision?  There's really no similarities that I can see other than they were both black young men.   

I think it's a pretty terrible comparison, particularly since white mobs killed Till completely outside of the criminal justice system.

If there's any similarity at all, it's about the protection and cover some prosecutors and police offer to the perpetrators of racially motivated white-on-black crime (Till's murder and the barn incident, nooses, etc., in Jena).  But even this seems quite a stretch to me.  Still, what's happening in Jena is part of a longer narrative about bias in our criminal justice system -- one that runs through the Scottsboro Boys and the Trenton Six, not Emmett Till. 

[Miss P]

False comparison is:

Till is wrongly accused and punished

Jena six are punished

therefore (assumption!) Jena six must be wrongly accused.

Kind of like an LSAT question ... 

I haven't seen anyone deploy this analogy but you; you are setting up a straw man.

It makes no sense for reasons beyond the one you've identified: (1) it equivocates on the term "punished" (extrajudicial murder vs. prosecution, if selective and biased, within our criminal justice system), (2) Emmett Till was never formally accused of a crime (whether he said dirty things to Carolyn Bryant or not), and (3) there's no clear evidence that Till was innocent of having whistled or dirty talked.   The issue in the Till case is that his killers were motivated by a pathological, racist protection of white women from black men and killed Till because he whistled or flirted or dirtytalked; it matters very little which of these things he did.