THE LEARNING TREE

by Malik Isasis























"I can make your lives disappear with a stroke of a pen," said white District Attorney Reed Walters to a group of black high school kids standing under a tree in protestation. Jena is a small rural throwback town in Louisiana, reminiscent of the antebellum south. The black students were protesting the three nooses that were found hanging from the “Knowledge Tree” after a black student took refuge in the shade of the “Knowledge Tree”, which is reserved for white students. The tragedy of the Jenna Six Case in Louisiana unearthed the shallowly buried Jim Crow laws that ushered in Apartheid for Black America after the American Civil War.

District Attorney Reed Walters continues the American tradition of lynching, hanging black men from trees but only in the 21st Century lynching involves mass incarceration, and state-sponsored violence. Either way, black men lives are being destroyed.

America refuses to deal with the 800-pound gorilla that is white supremacy. The white collective not only suffers from selective amnesia but also selective mutism. If we don’t talk about it, they won’t bring it up. If they bring it up, we’ll just deny we know anything. This is the approach that is taken when discussing race in America with white people. When we discuss race, they want to make us feel like we’re crazy. Not even after, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina did white people believe that the criminal neglect by the federal government was due to racism.

“I Can Make Your Lives Disappear with A Stroke of a Pen.”

The audacity of such a statement is mind bending but doesn’t it mirror a much broader, systemic illness? Walters’ sentiment is the white American male indoctrination into the American society. White people, white men in particular see themselves as God and since God is theoretically infallible, they see their actions as infallible.

I won’t waste a breath in asking why The Jena Six isn’t being covered in the corporate media. You know why.

THE CASE OF THE JENA SIX

Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!

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