Since this is in Louisiana, I get to talk about it.

Apparently if you do something to taunt a protected group and you get suspended from school for the taunting, that’s not a severe enough punishment.

And if you’re a member of the protected group and you and your buddies, six of you in total, want to get together and kick and beat a member of the unprotected group, then not only should you NOT be prosecuted, but you get Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and several thousand others to march in support of you.

Read this guy’s whole column.

COMMENTARY
Lessons from Jena, La.
By JASON WHITLOCK

Now we love Mychal Bell, the star of the 2006 Jena (La.) High School football team, the teenage boy who has sat in jail since December for his role in a six-on-one beatdown of a fellow student.

Thursday, thousands of us, proud African-Americans, expressed our devotion to and desire to see justice for the “Jena Six,� the half-dozen black students who knocked unconscious, kicked and stomped a white classmate.

…

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.

The fact that we waited to love Mychal Bell until after he’d thrown away a Division I football scholarship and nine months of his life is just as heinous as the grossly excessive attempted-murder charges that originally landed him in jail.

Reed Walters, the Jena district attorney, is being accused of racism because he didn’t show Bell compassion when the teenager was brought before the court for the third time on assault charges in a two-year span.

Where was our compassion long before Bell got into this kind of trouble?

That’s a good question. Where were the stars of the African-American world when this young man needed guidance in how a MAN is supposed to conduct himself?

There was no “schoolyard fight� as a result of nooses being hung on a whites-only tree.

Justin Barker, the white victim, was cold-cocked from behind, knocked unconscious and stomped by six black athletes. Barker, luckily, sustained no life-threatening injuries and was released from the hospital three hours after the attack.

A black U.S. attorney, Don Washington, investigated the “Jena Six� case and concluded that the attack on Barker had absolutely nothing to do with the noose-hanging incident three months before. The nooses and two off-campus incidents were tied to Barker’s assault by people wanting to gain sympathy for the “Jena Six� in reaction to Walters’ extreme charges of attempted murder.

More facts on the case that won’t be shown on the mainstream media’s florid prose about the march. They desperately want to relive the 60’s when there WERE real injustices and marches meant something. Today the marches are generally publicity stunts made to keep Sharpton and Jackson in dough high above the crowds they purport to help.

Much has been written about Bell’s trial, the six-person all-white jury that convicted him of aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated battery and the clueless public defender who called no witnesses and offered no defense. It is rarely mentioned that no black people responded to the jury summonses and that Bell’s public defender was black.

It’s almost never mentioned that Bell’s absentee father returned from Dallas and re-entered his son’s life only after Bell faced attempted-murder charges. At a bond hearing in August, Bell’s father and a parade of local ministers promised a judge that they would supervise Bell if he was released from prison.

Where were the promises and supervision before any of this?

Today’s tragedy: Absentee fathers. It’s not just a black thing, it’s getting all too common everywhere. But it’s worse in black communities, and as mommas struggle to raise righteous children, the black role models are absent, unless they’re fine people like Jackson and Sharpton who’ve never done an honest day’s labor in their lives, or they’re sports figures like Michael Vick, multi-millionaires who play games for a living and squander resources on “gangsta” lifestyles, or the stars of the black music scene, the rappers themselves, who surround themselves with ‘posses’ of thugs. When this is what guides your youth, there’s little hope for good outcomes.

It’s rarely mentioned that Bell was already on probation for assault when he was accused of participating in Barker’s attack. And it’s never mentioned that white people in the “racist� town of Jena provided Bell support and protected his football career long before Jesse, Al, Bell’s father and all the others took a sincere interest in Mychal Bell.

You won’t hear about any of that because it doesn’t fit the picture we want to paint of Jena, this case, America and ourselves.

We don’t practice preventive medicine. Mychal Bell needed us long before he was cuffed and jailed. Here is another undeniable, statistical fact: The best way for a black (or white) father to ensure that his son doesn’t fall victim to a racist prosecutor is by participating in his son’s life on a daily basis.

Amen! But when are you going to hear Sharpton and Jackson preach THAT message? Don’t hold your breathe while you wait.

I imagine it will be an easy step for somebody to characterize me as a racist. I mean, if you look at the standard portrayals, I , a balding, fat old white guy, born and raised in the South, I fit the mold. The portrayal is wrong. It has to be. I work with too many people, and this isn’t the south of the 1950’s where blacks were relegated to menial tasks. I work with technical people, and some of them happen to be black. I work with people of various levels of competence, and skin color is not any sort of an indicator of level of ability. It’s just NOT. And I don’t go to work every day expecting to be unhappy with my co-workers, so I’d better not be uncomfortable working with black folks, and Asians of various origins, and all manner of white people, including Yankees.

What I don’t like, though, is professional victims. I find it distasteful to see Jackson and Sharpton grabbing onto any unfortunate situation like this Jena business and using it to fan the flames that keep their boilers stoked. I prefer to call a thug a thug, regardless of skin color. Believe me, I see plenty of young thugs, and black youth doesn’t have a monopoly on the genre. A crime is a crime. I don’t care if your daddy is the district attorney or he hasn’t been seen since your momma went to that party one night. If you do the crime, then you get judged on the crime.

And if that was allowed to happen in Jena without ten thousand people showing up to march in the streets, the country would be farther down the road to real racial harmony.