Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Thuggery

Down in Jena, Louisiana, they're some real bigoted, narrow-minded folk. They seem to think that when 6 people gang up on another, beat him unconscious and kick and stomp him on the ground, that's a serious crime deserving of serious punishment. The national media knows better, and has been on a crusade to depict this incident as the second coming of the Scottsboro Boys. But it only shows how decrepit the civil rights movement has become.

If there is any outrage in this case, it is about the common prosecutorial conduct of piling on multiple versions of the most serious criminal charge conceivable in order to force a plea out of overwhelmed plaintiffs. Rather than simply charging the boys with aggravated battery, which is what this clearly was, the prosecutor charged them with attempted murder and conspiracy. Prosecutors do this all the time with all defendants - white, black, rich, poor, man, woman - and it ought to be stopped, in my opinion.

But the outrage isn't about this practice. Just what it's about I'm really not sure. There were clearly some racial tensions brewing at the high school, leading to a dispute over who could sit under a disputed tree - white kids or black kids. But look at how the media naively portrays this dispute:

In September 2006, a black student asked the vice principal if he and some friends could sit under an oak tree where white students typically congregated. Told by the vice principal they could sit wherever they pleased, the student and his pals sat under the sprawling branches of the shade tree in the campus courtyard.

Of course it didn't happen that way - I have no idea what exactly went down, of course, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't quite like that. At any rate, 3 white students - two of them pretty serious losers, it seems, and pretty un-intimidating ('doofuses' is one's first impression) from their pictures I saw on CNN - hung nooses from the tree. Because they weren't expelled - they were suspended 3 days and required to attend sensitivity training - many in the black community were sore. Two of them eventually dropped out of school, anyway. A couple minor incidents occurred over the next 3 months, but nothing serious until this beating.

What this seems to be about is the growing assertiveness of the civil rights community - think Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson - to have veto power over the prosecution of blacks alleged to have committed crimes against whites and to be able to demand prosecutions of whites who are thought to commit crimes against blacks. We see this in not just the Duke rape case but also in the prosecutions of police for using deadly force on the job as well as in the wrist slappings handed out in the heinous beatings of two white girls on Halloween in Long Beach. Using organized protests and throwing around the "R" word, activist can easily intimidate most politicians, prosecutors, and judges into seeing things their way. No, the civil-rights movement ain't what it used to be.

Which, as I have argued before, explains Rudy Giuliani's popularity. Everybody in the country knows that he told these people to eat shit and stood his ground, much to the enmity of the civil-rights community. This is indeed admirable in the man. Unfortunately, it may be his only admirable quality.

See also Chris Roach's take on this. Here's CNN's Roland Martin attempting to explain what it's about. Read his ramblings and tell me he isn't essentially validating my assertion above. CNN has really been on the 'cutting edge' of this issue, airing an astonishingly credulous "Special Investigation" last evening.