Complicity Has Its Cost: An
Open Letter to the Mayor of Jena
by Tim Wise
"Does it not give you pause that two-thirds of
Jena's white folks voted for neo-Nazi, David Duke in 1990 and 1991?"
This article originally appeared on LiP magazine.
Dear Mayor
Murphy McMillin,
I hear that
you're angry.
Me too.
But it
appears our outrage is directed at decidedly different targets.
I, for one,
am angry at the three young white men in your town who, last year, hung nooses
from a tree after a black student dared sit under it, thereby touching off
several months of racial tension. And I'm mad at their parents for whatever it
is they taught their kids - or failed to teach them - that would allow their
children to believe such a thing appropriate.
But it is
not these persons who have elicited your anger.
I'm mad at
the school superintendent, who declared the noose hanging an "innocent
prank," and refused to as much as criticize those responsible, let alone
truly punish them.
But it is
not the superintendent with whom you are upset.
I'm angry
at the District Attorney, who threatened black students in Jena that he could
make their lives disappear with a stroke of his pen, if they didn't stop all
the complaining about the noose incident. And I'm even more enraged by his
decision to charge six young black men with attempted murder for beating up a
white student (one who had been taunting them prior to the attack and whose
family recently had a leader in the white supremacist movement as a guest in
their home), while only charging a white man with misdemeanor battery for
beating up a black kid a few days earlier.
But the
D.A. is not the target of your ire. Indeed, I'm told that you two are
friends.
"Neither the jury, nor the incompetent public defender seems to
concern you."
I'm angry
about the conviction (since overturned) of one of the young black men, Mychal
Bell, by an all-white jury, and by the utter incompetence with which his
court-appointed attorney defended him--calling no witnesses to impeach the
testimony of those called by the prosecution, even though there were several
who had made clear they were available.
But neither
the jury, nor the incompetent public defender seems to concern you, at least
not enough to have inspired you to write or speak as much as one solitary
sentence to that effect.
Yet, today
you broke your silence and showed us all your anger, an anger that is aimed not
inwardly at those in your town who openly express racism or at those who sit by
silently and do nothing in the face of it, but rather, outwardly, at
singer-songwriter John Mellencamp for daring to release a song about it.
You might
have been a Mellencamp fan in the past. Lots of folks in small towns are,
seeing as how he has long sung the virtues of such places. So long as he wrote
about little pink houses, he'd have been alright by you. But with his latest
release, in which he implores your town to "put away your nooses,"
Mellencamp has, apparently, gone too far.
I guess you
feel it isn't fair, all this negative publicity. You (and most whites in Jena)
think your town is getting a bad rap. The actions of a few, you insist,
shouldn't be allowed to paint an entire community with the broad brush of
bigotry.
That's
understandable, I suppose.
Of course,
I do find it interesting that neither you nor any white elected official in
Jena have seen fit to label the noose-hanging a racist act and its perpetrators
racists. It's as if you can't come to say the words, no matter how obviously
they fit. Oh sure, you said the act was "hurtful," but nothing more.
And you wonder, dear sir, why 20,000 people descended on your town to let you
know what they think of you?
"Neither you nor any white elected official in Jena have
seen fit to label the noose-hanging a racist act and its perpetrators racists."
Does it not
give you pause that two-thirds of Jena's white folks voted for neo-Nazi, David
Duke in 1990 and 1991, when he ran for U.S. Senate and Governor?
Or perhaps
you were among those two-thirds? After all, you did recently tell white
supremacist leader Richard Barrett that you were grateful for the
counterdemonstrations he's been seeking to foment in Jena, in answer to the
mostly black protests of last month.
Maybe you
too supported Duke: a man who not only led the nation's largest Ku Klux Klan
group in the 1970s, but who, as head of the National Association for the
Advancement of White People (with which he remained affiliated until the early
90s), called for dividing the U.S. into racial sub-nations and breeding a
master race of high-IQ whites. From the back of Duke's newsletter, he even sold
books praising Nazi Germany and denying the Holocaust, but perhaps that wasn't
a big concern of yours.
Perhaps you
voted for Duke, as most of your white brethren in Jena did, even though you
must have heard the radio ad that was airing right up until the Gubernatorial
election in 1991: the one featuring a tape recording from just five years
earlier, in which Duke responded to a fellow Nazi's boast that "Hitler
started with just seven men," by noting, "We can do it here too if we
just put the right package together."
Yes indeed,
how dare John Mellencamp besmirch the good name of a town like yours, filled
with such stellar exemplars of racial amity as could vote for someone like
that. How dare he, and how dare we - those of us who have spoken out against
the perverted system of justice you dispense in your hamlet - offer our opinions
about people and places we don't know.
But here's
the thing Mr. Mayor: we do know you.
Oh sure,
Jena is not any worse than a lot of other places. And yes, it's always easy to
beat up on some little southern town, making it the presumed seedbed of
everything racist, rather than seeing the racism therein as symptomatic of a
larger national problem. I'll give you that much. As a proud southerner that
burns me up too.
But we know
you just the same.
"Mychal Bell and the other five could have rotted in jail
for the rest of their lives for all you could have cared."
The one
thing we know for sure, that I know as certainly as I know my own name, is that
your town is filled with good Germans. The kind who, irrespective of their own
racism, almost uniformly refuse to condemn the racism of their fellow citizens,
fellow churchgoers, neighbors or family.
Your town
is filled with people who never expressed any concern about this case until it
brought them, and you, bad publicity. Some white folks now are saying that
those attempted murder charges were extreme, but where were they a year ago?
Nowhere to be seen or heard from, Mr. Mayor, that's where. Mychal Bell and the
other five could have rotted in jail for the rest of their lives for all you
could have cared, and so long as the media never made mention of it, everything
would have been fine.
Thus the
lesson for today, Mayor McMillin, and please make note of it: complicity has a
cost.
And here's
the sad irony embedded within that lesson - one which you and your compatriots
utterly fail to recognize, and which whites have failed to understand going
back to the days of slavery, when most whites didn't own slaves, but also never
spoke out against or challenged those who did: namely, that all of this could
have been avoided. You and yours could have prevented it. You could have made
it all go away: the angry denunciations, the demonstrators, the Reverends
Sharpton and Jackson, the T-Shirts reading, "Free the Jena Six,"
Mellencamp - all of it.
If you had only
taken racism seriously from the beginning, none of your current embarrassment
would have been made necessary. Had you stood up as whites, after those nooses
were hung at the high school - had you stood up and said "We as whites are
offended by this act of racial intimidation" - and called for the
expulsion of the students, your town could have remained an obscure outpost,
familiar to no one beyond central Louisiana.
Had you
stood up to the school board - had you demanded that black students be allowed
to speak at a board meeting in September, after that body refused to let them
raise concerns about racial tensions at the school, because, in the mind of the
white-dominated board the noose incident had been "adequately
resolved" - then perhaps the issues in Jena could have been addressed,
productive dialogue furthered, and you would have been able to avoid the public
spotlight altogether.
"Had you stood up, perhaps you could have remained
anonymous to the rest of the world forever."
Had you
stood up in December of last year when that white man beat up a black student
outside a party, breaking a bottle over his head, only to receive probation -
had you stood up and demanded that the assault be treated like the serious
crime it was - perhaps you could have remained anonymous to the rest of the
world forever.
Had you
stood up when a white student pulled a gun on black students outside a
convenience store the next day and yet wasn't charged (while the black kids who
got the gun away from him were charged with stealing the white kid's firearm) -
had you stood up and demanded that the charges be dropped and perhaps that kids
shouldn't ride around with guns in their pickup trucks - none of this would
have happened.
And had you
risen up in opposition to your D.A. buddy when he charged those six young black
men with attempted murder, claiming with a straight face that their tennis
shoes were a deadly weapon - had you risen up and said, these charges are
ridiculous, and had you sought to recall him perhaps - I assure you, Jena would
have never come to the attention of anyone. And if it did, it would only have
been to praise it, for having so many whites willing to stand in solidarity
with their black neighbors, and demand equity and justice for all.
But you did
none of this. You did nothing even remotely like it. Good Germans never do.
They remain silent in the face of such things and then complain when others
give them a hard time about it.
There is a
cost to pay for your silence, Mayor McMillin. A cost that grows in direct
proportion to the degree of your complicity. It has always been so. Had whites
stood up and demanded better of our own, of ourselves, beginning centuries ago,
so much about this nation's history could have been different. Had more whites chosen
to be allies to black and brown folks, joining them in resistance to oppression
and domination, all the anxiety we feel now - the fear of being called racist,
or thought of as such by folks of color - could have been mitigated.
That
tradition, the tradition of resistance, is there Mr. Mayor, for the joining. It
has always been there. And the fact that you know nothing of it - that none of
the whites in Jena likely do - merely suggests the glaring failures of the
American educational system, which has spent years teaching us even the
smallest, most insignificant detail of our history (so long as it serves to
boost the patriotic mood) but which has told us next to nothing about white
antiracism through history. No wonder whites in Jena feel under siege. You
don't even realize that the fight of those 20,000 people who visited your town
is your fight too. It is a fight for human liberty and justice, and one
in which whites have joined with folks of color for generations. Not enough of
us, to be sure, but some just the same. What's more, it is a fight to break out
of the boxes in which we as whites have been placed by our own collaboration -
it's a chance to say that we will not be defined and have our humanity limited
by the weight of history and the fear of forging a new path.
"If you choose instead to remain on the side of white
denial and silence and obduracy, you will pay a price."
You could
choose to be a part of that fight. Your entire town could. If it does, you will
be welcomed to the struggle, I assure you. But if you don't, if you choose
instead to remain on the side of white denial and silence and obduracy, then
please know, you will pay a price. You will not escape judgment, And you will
have to get used to many an article, many a speech, and many an unflattering
reference in the songs of artists, all condemning your community to a special
place in hell, whether viewed in literal or metaphorical terms.
And your
protestations of innocence will fall like raindrops in the Seattle autumn: so
common as to not even be noticed or justify so much as a moment's
consideration.
Here's
hoping that you make the right choice.
Tim Wise is an antiracist
essayist, activist and educator. He is the author of White Like Me: Reflections
on Race from a Privileged Son, and can be reached through his website at www.timwise.org,
or at [email protected]