Racist Fucktards Is Us
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OK, you’re probably really tired of pictures of plants by now, so I promise this is the last one for a while (barring the irresistable, like a 400-pound tomato in the garden or something). This is a hens-n-chicks I’ve had for a few years, and it keeps growing tentacles and stuff. I’m waiting for it to leap onto my face and deposit eggs in my mouth.
You may also wonder what’s with the disappearance of all the Deep Thoughts on my blog lately. Well, I’ll tell ya. I’ve been taking a break from the insanity for the past couple of weeks. Usually when shit gets me down, I just reach into my trusty Fucket Bucket, grab a piece of candy, and keep on blogging. But the other day I ran across something that made me crawl head-first into the Bucket and not want to come out.
Around about the last week of May, the writers of the blog Pandagon informed me that there are still some racist fucktards in the good Old South. I know, I know - like, duh. But it’s always hard to face racist fucktards, and even more so when some of them are children. You may have already heard about this, but in case you haven’t and don’t have the stomach to read the (excellent) blog post itself, here’s the gist:
Some black students in a high school in Jena, Louisiana decided to partake of the shade of a tree that grows in a part of the schoolyard traditionally claimed by the white students. The next day, a noose or three were hanging from said tree. The white kids who hung them were suspended for three days for “playing a prank.” Then some of the white kids got into fist-fights with some of the black kids. Within hours of one such fight, three black kids were arrested and charged with attempted second-degree murder. If convicted by their all-white jury, they face probable life imprisonment.
So the hoisting of nooses is a prank that gets three days, and the fist fight is attempted murder that gets life. Right.
The tendency when reading about atrocity is to shake one’s head and mutter, “How horrible. Those damn racist southern fucktards.” It’s a way of distancing, an attempt at self-protection which is ultimately quite delusional. As Lydia Bean, founding member of Friends of Justice, put it so well on their blog:
Many bloggers across the nation are clicking their tongues about Jena as a vestige of the old Jim Crow, and despairing that progressive politics could ever flourish there, in that muggy, exotic, backward place we call “The South”. What progressives don’t realize is that the South is Us. Repeat after me, progressives: The South is Us.
[There’s] nothing exotic about Jena, Louisiana, except that the white kids got away with hanging three nooses in the public school. The sad truth is that young black men are routinely demonized by police and prosecutors all over America. Our nation has set up a direct pipeline from high school to prison for young poor black men, so that we have more black men in prison than in college. And for the most part, nobody cares unless someone does something exotic like hang up a noose. Without the nooses, nobody would have cared if these young men had been prosecuted on bad evidence on a petty charge, and thrown away for life like so many of their generation.
Ouch.
The silver lining in all of this, I guess, is that due to the awesome power of this newfangled Information Highway the internet, this incident is getting a lot of really bad press which is reaching a lot of people, and maybe in the long run, it will help things get a little better.
Maybe the fact that this kind of slavery-era shit - black kids facing life sentences for fist-fighting with white kids - will make us realize that it’s our children that pay the price of adults’ hatred, and as their protectors we are obligated to climb out of our Fucket Buckets, step up to the plate and enact federal hate-crime legislation.
That’s what I’m gonna do. I’m all out of brandy truffles anyway.
Technorati Tags: Jena Louisiana, hate crimes, racism
Filed under Act Uppity, Human Rights, Rib Eye |4 Responses to “Racist Fucktards Is Us”
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Now I have to disagree with Uppity. I don’t want a government that throws out the first amendment, that punishes people for having the “wrong thoughts” or for being politically incorrect.
It is the act that should be punished, not the motivation for it. Sure, hate is a bad thing, but I don’t agree with enhanced penalties for what people think, only for what they do.
It’s only a short distance between doubling penalties for having the “wrong” idea, to having a thought police, punishing people for saying the “wrong” thing, and there goes one of our basic freedoms. I can disagree with what you say, but I will defend your right to say it.
Hey Jo, I would never, ever want a Thought Police government and I didn’t mean to imply that in my post.
My support of hate crime legislation is not so much about “enhanced penalties” for those crimes, as it is about enabling federal prosecutions when state and local authorities are unable or unwilling to do it. That’s what the recently enacted Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act does.
In a perfect world, all criminal acts would be investigated, prosecuted, and punished appropriately by our law enforcement agencies. But the reality is, hate crimes have always been under prosecuted due to bias in the community and even in our own laws. The LLEHCPA offsets those systemic biases.
Under-prosecuted and over-prosecuted, depending on local sentiment. I still think that punishment based on the ideas of the accused is a slippery slope down which no good will come. Mixed metaphor anyone?
It’s an example of the band-aid approach. Plus, it does no good at all for those who are treated more stringently because of who they are rather than what they did.
I still think that crimes should be punished for what they are and not for what the perpetrator (alleged or convicted) thought or believed. I am in favor of fixing a broken system rather than trying to patch it like an old bicycle innertube.
Well, now I need to crawl into my Fucket Bucket for a day or two. I’ve lived in the South for nearly 33 years, and I’m not backwards or inbred or racist. It’s getting damn old being stereotyped because of where I live.
It IS ridiculous that the black kids are being charged with attempted murder. That’s bullshit. But the same thing could have happened anywhere else, and geography wouldn’t even be mentioned.
Fuck it. I’m going to eat some Oreos.