FBI Investigates White Backlash re Jena
A white backlash reportedly is under way against six African-American high school students in Jena, La., who are being prosecuted in what many perceive as a racially discriminatory manner.
The FBI is investigating apparent Internet threats made against some of the six defendants in a racially charged high school attack on another student, according to the Chicago Tribune. Besides posting names, addresses and phone numbers for some students and their families, a neo-Nazi Web site has urged readers to find them and “drag them out of the house,” the newspaper reports. Other white extremist Web sites and blogs also are “filled with invective about the Jena Six case,” it says.
“There is a major white supremacist backlash building,” says Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “I also think it’s more widespread than may be obvious to most people. It’s not only neo-nazis and Klansmen.”
As discussed in earlier ABAJournal.com posts, thousands marched last week on the tiny, 85-percent-white town, in protest of a case that they see as emblematic of a racist justice system. However, the situation is more nuanced than some news accounts suggest, writes the Associated Press.
Authorities say the white student allegedly attacked by the Jena Six has also been threatened, reports another Associated Press article. And, from a broader perspective, blacks also need to take some responsibility for societal problems underlying the case, writes an African-American columnist for the Kansas City Star.
“There are undeniable racial and economic inequities in our criminal justice system, and from afar the ‘Jena Six’ rallies certainly looked and felt like the righteous protests of the 1960s,” writes Jason Whitlock. “But the reality is Thursday’s protests are just another sign that we remain deeply locked in denial about the path we need to travel today for true American liberation, equality and power in the new millennium.”
