Ponderings

Sometimes the surprise is the surprise.

A sleepy small town in Louisiana, Jena, is in the news this week and lots of important folk are feigning surprise at the apparent injustice experienced by six young teens in Jena. The facts are straightforward. After a black student raised a question about sitting under the schoolyard tree, nooses appeared in the tree. The boys who hung the nooses were expelled but readmitted after a brief suspension. Tensions peaked, accusations followed and then a few skirmishes. The story of Jena is the timeless schoolyard struggle weighed down with added baggage of simmering racism.

When a white boy was beat up at school and taken to the hospital (where he was treated and released), six black youth were charged with attempted murder with bonds set at nearly $100,000. In the intervening months, the charges have been reduced to battery and the one conviction (with an all white jury) has already been tossed. Still, one seventeen year old has not seen the light of day since he was arrested nearly a year ago.

International attention has been directed now at the sleepy town where racial bias was made visible in both the prosecution and sentencing of defendants.

One of the ways in which this bias can be measured is in the number of plea bargains that avoid the death penalty. White defendants received plea bargains 48% of the time, whereas reprieve rates for Black defendants is 25% and for Hispanic defendants, 28%. (2000 Department of Justice, quoted on www.aclu.org)

Another view of the disparity is the difference in federal drug laws regarding possession of crack cocaine and its more refined (and expensive) counterpart, powder cocaine. Just 5 grams of the cheap stuff will net the same sentences as 500 grams of the good stuff. Given the economic disparity in America, it should come as no surprise that Blacks are more likely to get caught with the cheap stuff.

The resulting disparity in incarceration rates is appalling. For every 100,000 Black men in America, 4919 are incarcerated. The rate for White males is 717 per 100,000. Do we really believe that Blacks are seven times more likely to engage in criminal behavior than Whites?

The outrage in Jena is with the glaring injustices of the system charged with meting out justice. No one claims to be surprised at the schoolyard tension and herein lays our problem. We accept the simmering level of tension that charges through the schoolyard day in and day out. Shame and sadness may be appropriate emotions when reading about the “Jena 6,” but surprise?

While the politicians were feigning surprise at the plight of young Black teens, I noted the peculiar silence of the so-called Christian media. In an attempt to read the American religious right on this issue, my suspicious mind went snooping. There isn’t much. The one place that did offer a report, CBN (the granddaddy of the Christian broadcast world), offered sympathetic support to the “many Christians” who had gathered to express their moral outrage.

Perhaps this signals the real surprise of the week - the good news that all Christians can come to the table on this one. Christians can agree that racial bias is not acceptable. Enough is enough. And this, dear friends, is a remarkable bit of grace.