Craig Franklin and Jena
Radley Balko | October 25, 2007, 11:05am
Alan Bean of the advocacy group Friends of Justice responds to Craig Franklin's article about the Jena 6 (blogged by Nick yesterday) here. I'm not sure why much of the blogosphere is pronouncing Franklin's take on the case to be definitive. Much of his piece consists of little more than denials from the public officials accused of wrongdoing in the first place. Hardly surprising. Franklin is also clearly a partisan for the town, the school, and the town officials, just as Bean is clearly a partisan for the Jena 6. I guess it boils down to which of the two you find more convincing.
Advocates for the Jena 6 did clearly make some mistakes. Not disclosing Mychal Ball's prior criminal record while holding him up as a victim of injustice was one big one. So was the ensuing effort to make the six black youths look like heroes, which I think a lot of critics rightly saw through.
But that doesn't mean there aren't problems in Jena, or that the town's black residents were wrong to see the case as confirmation of a two-tiered system of justice. Nor does it mean Franklin's account of events leading up to the lunchroom beating ought to be believed over Bean's (especially given that the latter's account has been corroborated by other journalists).
I should note that it was Bean who first introduced me to another case in Louisiana that I'll be writing about in a future issue of our magazine. Thus far, my reporting has confirmed most of what he told me about the case, with a couple of exceptions. It has also confirmed much of the sentiment bubbling over in Jena.
As for Franklin, I find his description of Jena a bit too idyllic to be believed. He writes:
Jena is a wonderful place to live for both whites and blacks. The media's distortion and outright lies concerning the case have given this rural Louisiana town a label it doesn't deserve.
[...]
As with the Duke Lacrosse case, the truth about Jena will eventually be known. But the town of Jena isn't expecting any apologies from the media. They will probably never admit their error and have already moved on to the next "big" story. Meanwhile in Jena, residents are getting back to their regular routines, where friends are friends regardless of race. Just as it has been all along.
"All along?" Really?
As recently as the early 1990s, LaSalle Parish (where Jena is located) voted for white supremacist and former Klan leader David Duke by a two-to-one margin. In fact, they gave him that margin twice—for governor, and for U.S. Senator. In 1996, the parish again gave Duke the majority of its votes for U.S. Senator.
The parish is reliably and overwhelmingly Republican, save for the odd anomaly of the 2003 gubernatorial election. In 2003, the parish gave Democrat Kathleen Blanco 60 percent of its vote over Republican Bobby Jindal. Jindal also happened to be the GOP's first non-white nominee for governor. The next year, the parish went 80 percent for George W. Bush in the presidential election. Curious, that.
Oh, and then there's the matter of the mayor of Jena sitting down for an interview with the leader of a white supremacist organization last month.
Paul S. | October 25, 2007, 12:47pm | #
Alan Bean himself says, in the article to which you link, that the Franklins run a first-class weekly newspaper, yet can’t keep from the disdain when he disagrees with something.
While Bean offers some decent though not irrefutable thoughts on the inherent logic problems of the alternative noose explanations, he also says that he has no doubt that the white students would have felt remorse if the full symbolic impact of the nooses was explained to them.
And yet a bit later, back on attack mode with regard to the statements of the prosecutor Reed Walters, he says Walters knew he was in the gymnasium because of some black students and parents being outraged that the noose incident was being treated as a “childish prank” rather than a hate crime.
I’d say Mr. Bean evidently accepts the view that it was a childish prank, or at least closer to that than a hate crime. In fact he says it outright: it wasn’t a hate crime, in his opinion.
And since he doesn’t respond he evidently is accepting as fact the punishment Franklin describes: “not a three-day suspension, but rather nine days at an alternative facility followed by two weeks of in-school suspension, Saturday detentions, attendance at Discipline Court, and evaluation by licensed mental-health professionals.”
In short; I’d say the punishment as described – which does in itself offer evidence of the media’s inaccurate and distorting reporting – fits the incident as he sees it. So what’s his basic beef with Franklin? And Mr. Balko, what’s your basic beef with the notion that this was a situation responded to about as fairly as could be done, and in a way that certainly does not prove overwhelming racism in the town?
Paul S. | October 25, 2007, 1:47pm | #
The town is about 85% white, according to the “facts about Jena” page which seems ot have some kind of relationship with the Jena Times, but unless proven otherwise I’ll accept it as basically accurate.
http://jenala.net/AboutJena.html
In short, assuming the racial mix of the town holds for the school in large part, white students don’t have to do a damn thing to sit with each other.
I’m not blaming black students for sitting with each other, if that’s in fact the substance of the “segregation,” as I suspect. I’m saying that the local manifestation of the national reality of races sitting with each other would, here, primarily involve actions by black students. Unless you can provide any evidence of white students forcing black people not to sit with them.
Speaking of which, the racial composition affects the idea of the “whites only tree,” too.
It sounds, to me, like the tree was the most desirable spot to gather, being shaded. Most students went there. Most students were white. The black students, if they as one would expect were often/sometimes looking to congregate, would have, of necessity, been forced to do it somewhere else. Not forced by white people; forced by geometry.
The resulting reality – whites get the shade – could easily be both largely innocuous and the source of some nervous attention by the students. Which by the way provides a backdrop to the possibility of the black student’s question at the assembly being a joke, an edgy joke. (Mr. Bean claims to see no possible rationale for a joke. He’s not trying very hard.)
Paul S. | October 25, 2007, 3:01pm | #
Joe:
“Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that there aren't white and black sections in the auditorium - just for the sake of argument.”
Well, I’ll accept it for more than that, as I hope you actually do too since there is not one bit of evidence for anything like a formal segregation system. Someone assuming, as you may, that there must be such a system would make me question his association with a little thing called reality, but whatever.
“But yes, I am claiming that the expectation”
Huh? Observation = expectation and therefore racist acquiescence? Hm. Go write a paper.
“of racial segregation as the social norm is, all by itself, a bad thing. There will always be consequences, especially in a high school, for people who step outside the social norm.
Do you really think it's value-neutral from that conformist dynamic to back up racial segregation?”
I guess not, as long as we’re entering into sophomore-year discussion time. Myself, I haven’t said there’s nothing wrong with voluntary segregation. Although I am closer to that position than yours, that it represents some kind of dark racism.
My point is: it’s everywhere, it’s almost entirely voluntary, and its presence in Jena would be utterly unsurprising and indicate absolutely nothing about the responses to the various crimes being likely racist.
“Do you think that, maybe, someone experiencing and responding to those consequences could turn into a problem?”
Yes, I do. It’s life and life only. Although even Mr. Bean’s account makes it clear that the large majority of white students had absolutely no problem with the later “sit-in” by black students under the tree.
By the way, an unacknowledged potential undercurrent of Bean’s breathless though nearly substance-free “alternate” version is that any white student anger resulting from the rising black protests may have had to do with anger at being called racist: not anger at blacks daring to sit under a tree.
Cajie | October 25, 2007, 7:38pm | #
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