“In September 2006, a group of African American high school students in Jena, Louisiana, asked the school for permission to sit beneath a ‘whites only’ shade tree. There was an unwritten rule that blacks couldn’t sit beneath the tree. The school said they didn’t care where students sat. The next day, students arrived at school to see three nooses (in school colors) hanging from the tree.” The students responsible were barely reprimanded, and the event has become a tipping point.
Dreadful to think that a sharply racist double-standard could still dominate justice in the south. How do these things survive the future? How do people close their eyes against their species? Makes me wonder what other bigotries are prevailing. What does a hateful judge think when a beautiful, African-American woman walks past, (a far more enchanting darkness than the stain of his wretchedly abusive decisions), in a summer blouse knotted tighter under her breasts than the fingers she later clasps praying in the court for her son’s sentence. Is he too prejudiced to find her attractive, even in the secret spaces of his discrimination?
Possibly I’m going at this from a poorly chosen direction as male concepts of women are, on many levels, likely far more difficult to shift than those on race, (biological hard-wiring’s probably against me here), but please forgive my poor example. These indecent hold-overs upset me, fog my thinking. It would be a sweet drink of water to know that such fanaticism might be chalked up only to ignorance instead of choice. Growing up in Canada, we deride each other for dogmatism, not for race. After wandering the worse areas of L.A. and seeing first-hand what such social violence does to people, I feel the prejudiced are ogres to be made visible, wrestled with, humiliated, embarrassed, and destroyed.