A posting on facebook tells me that there is such a thing as “Beat Up a White Kid Day,” apparently a kind of May-day ritual.

I was astounded and first thought it must be some kind of prank, but there it is on wiki:

“However he [Judge Russo] concluded that “based on the evidence I’ve heard, May Day is reality and the evidence was overwhelming that this was an attack based on May Day and that the victim was chosen because she was white.” In drawing such a conclusion, Judge Russo suggested that white students in Cleveland’s integrated public schools have reason to fear assaults by minorities in so-called May Day attacks every May 1.”

Lila:

The judge in question was Cuyahoga juvenile court judge Russo, who was ruling on the beating up of Melissa King, a 13 year old student at Wilbur Wright Middle School in Cleveland, Ohio, on May 1, 2003, by a group of black and hispanic children. Although the immediate cause in this case was a personal vendetta, almost everyone in the case, seems to have acknowledged the reality of “Beat Up a White Kid Day.”

Since there’s been so much talk about white supremacists and their links to tax protesters and militia groups, I thought it was only right to show that such ideologies don’t rise in a vacuum. There’s plenty of hate anger to go around. [Lila: hate is misused as a word so I changed it to anger] And here’s one instance.

What was the reaction?

In Cleveland, the original story brought a flood of more than 100 letters to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, in which readers wrote that in fact this had been a May-day ritual for many years in desegregated communities and that many of them had been afraid of going to school on that day.

I’ll be retuning to this blog post  to add any links to interesting aspects of the media coverage of this (or lack of it).

(And yes, I know I have two other posts I have to return to to update…bear with me).

OK.  Remember Jena in Louisiana ? In 2006 a white student, Justin Barker, was attacked by six black students, setting off a case that had the whole country in a ruckus.

In this Alternet piece, a black commentator looks at Jena and sees excessive fear of young black males that leads to their being sentenced much more stiffly than whites for comp[arable crimes.

On one site. black readers’ comments show that the central fact of the Jena case for them was the hanging of nooses.

That was seen by many of the whites in Jena as a prank.

For the whites the physical beating far outweighed the symbolic threat of the nooses (equivalent to cross-burning).

Here’s a Counterpunch article on it that plays up that angle. But there are some interesting slants in the piece which grate on me a bit. Picking apart the language of Jena residents (who refer to “coloreds” and “our blacks”) is a bit silly. Small town people without requirements to be PC in their language are going to express themselves in ways that are not as ‘sensitive’ as less insular society demands. This probably means nothing.  And what was the need to emphasize that there was only one black person on the 9 member school board and only one black man in the 10 member parish government?  Jena had a little less than 3000 people at the time. The African-American population is around 3500. That means the Af-Am percentage was at the time a bit over 10%. That means the racial make-up of the board seems quite fair, even if you subscribe to such numerical tests. [Correction: I have to go back and look at the hispanic population and find out how much of a difference to my calculations adding it would make].

But I digress. While I can find any number of articles on the Jena 6, most of them focusing on southern racism and noose hanging, I can find hardly any on Beat Up a White Kid Day. And on forums I’ve seen, the attitude is that there can be no race hatred among minorities because racism is related to power structure.

With Barack Obama now president, that leaves us with several possible positions.

One. Blacks now are part of the power-structure and can be as racist as whites.

Two. Blacks really aren’t part of the power-structure, and Obama is just a figure-head.

[In that case we need to ask who really is in power].

Three.  There are many kinds of power. Opinion-making is also power.

Media Coverage:

On the Jena story, digging through links, I got an American Journalism Review piece which covers the media coverage (always the most interesting part of an American news story). The piece shows that the national media actually didn’t touch the story until 5 months later, when black bloggers and activists like Alan Sharpton had made a furor over it, and then they almost uncritically accepted the version put out by an activist called Alan Bean. The AJR piece questions Bean’s portrayal of the story, raising several points that also struck me.

Here’s a quote from AJR:

“Out of 57 stories:

Only eight stories allude to Mychal Bell’s prior criminal record….

Ten stories use the phrase “all white” to describe the jury that found Mychal Bell guilty of aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated second-degree battery. None explains why the jury was all white…..

Multiple stories describe the tree the nooses were found on as a “white tree”…… No stories question if the description is correct, and none asks students about the tree. Only the L.A. Times does not describe the tree as “white.”

Descriptions of white student Justin Barker’s medical condition vary from paper to paper and from story to story.…….. [Lila: here’s a link to what is seems to be an injured Justin Barker. From the looks of it, the beating doesn’t seem too bad. ]

The Washington Post, the L.A. Times and the Chicago Tribune never, in months of coverage, mention Barker’s medical bills. [Lila: the medical bills seem to be equivalent to the cost of an ambulance, ER, stitches and a bit more – roughly $12,000; again, more like injuries in a school brawl)……….

All four papers link the events in Jena multiple times, without ever explaining why they’re linked…………

Thirty stories quote civil rights activists, organizations or advocates. Eight stories quote Jesse Jackson; twelve quote Al Sharpton; others quote the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the NAACP. Six quote Alan Bean of Friends of Justice five of them in the Chicago Tribune………

….. In a piece titled “How One Man Fired Up Jena 6 Case,” [Jason] Whitlock wrote that the media blindly accepted Bean’s story, to the detriment of the truth. Why? Because it was easy, he says.”

Lila: To put this in perspective, consider another race-hate crime in the last two years:

The Megan Williams torture case: in which a twenty-year old black woman was held captive for several days, sexually abused, forced to eat faeces, and stabbed by six whites, according to this AP report.

One of the defendants in this case got 10-25 years for second-degree sexual assault and another got three consecutive sentences, one for 10 years for violation of civil rights and the others for 2-10 years for assault.

Put this against what Mychal Bell, the 16 year old defendant at Jena, was initially charged with. He was charged as an adult with attempted second-degree murder (Lila: surely excessive). Later, this was reduced to aggravated second-degree battery.

At his initial conviction Bell faced up to 22 years in prison. On retrial, this was reduced to simple battery and finally he served 18 months altogether.

Lila (May 6):

Well, I don’t agree with the comment that “blacks are not part of the power structure” unless you want to say the president of the USA , the AG and a number of other positions are completely devoid of power. In which case, whites haven’t been all that powerful either. I think the third position is the correct one. There are many kinds of power: there’s money power, there’s political power, there’s public opinion, there’s academic opinion, there’s moral force, there’s biological power….

We tend to focus on money power/political power to make claims about the power or lack thereof of minorities. And largely, I think that’s correct – when you’re talking about structures of law, administration and institutions where those kinds of power hold sway. But there are other realms, as I’ve indicated.

My point is our discussion of race is abysmally simple-minded. We think in slogans and in memes. And that gets echoed in real life.  Ultimately, this kind of mass thinking drives real life victimization, especially in troubled times. Exactly how it does this needs to be explored.

But this post is long enough now, and I’ll leave it at that.

PS (May 6): The context that is ignored in all this is inter-racial crime, crime that is not characterized as hate-crime officially, but is felt among whites as racially motivated. But since a post on this would be lengthy and involved I’ll address it separately.