Jena 6

      Do you believe in racism? I never believed that blatant racism in American society could even exist without some sort of punishment until a few weeks ago, when I heard the story of the Jena 6. Six African American teenagers were charged with attempted murder for hitting a white student who was harassing them with racial slurs, who later went to a dinner party with NO INJURIES...and the town wants them in jail for twenty two years or more for this schoolyard fight.

      Think it's racism now? Maybe not....but then you'd have to hear the rest of the story: it started when a black student asked the administration at his high school if he could sit under the only shade tree in the school courtyard. A tree that was, by unspoken rule, reserved for only white students. The administration. of course, told him that he could sit wherever he wanted to. So he did. And the next day when he came to school, three nooses in the school colors were hung on the tree's branches. Predictably, no one could figure out who'd done it. And also as predictably, the African American student body was outraged. They staged a sit-in under the tree until a white district attorney told them that he could end their lives "with a stroke of [his] pen." Later that week, a group of white students, unprovoked, attacked a black student at a party after harassing him with racial slurs. A wek after that, black students were driven to retaliation by an overzealously racist white student. The same white student who not three hours later attended a dinner event and mentioned nothing of the incident. And now one of the six boys accused of attempting to murder him has been convicted by an all-white jury and faces twenty-two years in prison for making a bad decision in a moment of anger.

     This story is just ridiculously unbelievable to me. At first I thought it was something that had happened back in the civil-rights-movement days, but this is happening right now, and it's happening in small (mostly southern) towns all over hte country. This should be taken as a sign that, even though we all think it isn't important anymore, racism is still alive and kicking in American society...and it's up to ordinary people like us to stan up and say something about it, because if no one does then this will happen over and over again... but that's how I feel. If you want to help the boys, there's an online petition you can sign up for: just click here: http://www.colorofchange.org/jena/  . Thanks for reading!

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