Revolution #102, September 23, 2007
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Jena… What Time It Is…
High Stakes in the Battle to Free the Jena 6
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There’s something about Jena, Louisiana that tells you loud and clear what time it is in America right now and where things are going.
Think about it: Nooses hanging from a tree. A “whites only” tree in a southern schoolyard. In 2006?!
After dozens of Black students courageously stand under the tree in protest, the district attorney at a school-wide assembly tells them he can take their lives away “with the stroke of a pen.”
After months of conflict between Black and white students, with whites initiating most of it—it is six Black youth who face decades in prison.
The federal government steps in to declare that all this is “regular.”
But think about the response to all this as well: A groundswell of anger from people all over the country. Thousands of people already acting on this outrage—getting the word out on the radio and websites, organizing campus rallies and downtown protests, raising legal-defense money, and buses heading to Jena from all over the country.
This points to how the great injustice in Jena could be stopped and a whole different dynamic in society could be set in motion.
What Time Is It in America?
Step back and look at the bigger picture.
Masses of Black people are trapped in extreme poverty, working at minimum wage jobs, if that, with worsening education, health care and housing. And for far too many of the youth, a future of prison or early death.
Step back and look at what’s been happening just over the past couple of years.
Two years ago the system abandoned tens of thousands of poor and Black people who were left in New Orleans when Katrina hit. The whole world watched in shock and horror as people were trapped without food or water, many of them penned up like prisoners in the Superdome, then callously evacuated with no way to return home. We saw the repression of people, of all nationalities and strata, who tried to help and demanded the system help the people of New Orleans. We see with the system’s “rebuilding” of New Orleans its disdain for a place that is the source of a treasure of African-American music and culture. We see the continuing abandonment of the people of New Orleans.
All this shines a glaring light on the agenda this system has for Black people.
Look at the epidemic of police brutality and murder. In New York City, police killed Sean Bell on his wedding day. This shocking murder and the protests that followed broke the silence about widespread police murder since 9/11 and brought to light many similar cases. But where is the justice, still?
Fifty years ago the Supreme Court supposedly overturned segregated schools—which turned out to be a “dream deferred.” This year, the Supreme Court effectively reversed that—the current court has made it illegal for the government to enforce any attempt to overcome the confinement of African-American children in segregated, inferior, prison-like schools. Yet another promise betrayed.
A report from the New York Civil Liberties Union exposed widespread police brutality within New York high schools, including routine police assaults, insults, and unjustified arrests of students, and even attacks on teachers and principals who dared to verbally defend their students.
To give a sense of where things have gone and are going: In 1954, there were 98,000 Black people in prison. Fifty years later, in 2004, the figure was...910,000! Nearly ten times as many. That is the “progress” given by this system. That is the future they promise. That is the “answer” this system has to the centuries-old oppression it created and continually reinforces.
No Future Under this System
America is a capitalist-imperialist system. This basic and brutal fact sets the terms for the lives of Black people in this country. For a basic understanding of how and why this has been so, down to the present day, see excerpts in this issue from the series by Bob Avakian, The Oppression of Black People and the Revolutionary Struggle to End All Oppression (pages 17-21).
Today capitalism has moved its heavy industries to the suburbs and to other countries. Black youth in the inner cities want jobs—3,000 people, mainly Black people, recently showed up on the first day of a job fair in Newark, to apply for jobs working in concessions, cleaning, food service, and security.
But the capitalists consider Black youth “too defiant.” Over the past decades they have let the schools rot and the dope trade flourish in the inner cities. They have set up a dynamic where millions of Black youth have no real alternative but prison or death. They have stepped up their vicious portrayals of these youth in the media as “savage” and “beyond redemption.” And yes, during this time a few doors were also opened—but only part way—to allow a small section of Black people to “make it” into the middle class. But their position is very precarious, and they too still suffer discrimination and oppression at the system’s hands, in all kinds of ways—including risking their lives for “driving while Black.”
For Black youth, this is not the time of rising expectation—these are the days of mass incarceration, ugly demonization, and full-out criminalization.
And this is exactly what has been on display so sharply in Jena, Louisiana. What does it say that Mychal Bell, one of the Jena 6, has been in jail for over nine months—the DA denying bail and citing Bell’s so-called “criminal record” of minor offenses? What does it mean when the judge uses a racist and perverse metaphor, telling family members and others speaking on Bell’s behalf, that they are like a “fence erected around the cattle”—and chiding them for not erecting this fence earlier? What does it mean when Black students at Jena High are told they will be punished if they wear “Free the Jena 6” t-shirts? Like millions of Black youth all over this county, these youth are being told they have no future under this system and that they better put up and shut up about racism and all the other injustices they face.
The Need for Resistance
This system has betrayed the masses of Black people. What it has in store is not just “turning back the clock.” It is even worse—a program with truly genocidal implications. This is what it means when the number of Black people imprisoned grows by nearly ten times in 50 years, when people like Pat Robertson talk about the prison population being a “stain on the land,” when others talk about “cracking down further” and deem these youth to be “super predators, incapable of rehabilitation,” and when the few opportunities that did exist are systematically shut down.
There must be a new upsurge of political resistance to all this oppression, uniting many different kinds of people with all kinds of views. Without this, there can be no fundamental change; without this, the people will be ground down and suffer even greater horrors.
All this sheds light on the importance now of the struggle to Free the Jena 6. From North Carolina to Texas, from Detroit to small towns in rural Louisiana, on campuses, breaking into the radio airwaves, at hair stylists and in front yards people are spreading the word, organizing grassroots protests, and chartering busses—challenging everyone to speak out, to step out, and to BE THERE in Jena. There is a growing feeling among all strata of Black people, and many other people too, that these young Black men must go free. And that whatever is behind all this must be exposed and gotten rid of.
There is something potentially very important emerging around the battle to Free the Jena 6. This kind of national groundswell of outrage and action, something we haven’t seen in years, must be spread, drawing links between this struggle and other key battles against the system and the overall need for revolution.
There are real stakes in this struggle. There is a real battle to WIN. The people cannot allow this injustice to go down. The people must stop, through mass political action, this violent enforcement of white supremacy and prevent yet another case of Black youth disappearing into the system’s dungeons. The Jena 6 must be freed. And all this must become part of a growing revolutionary movement.
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