It's not only 'the Jena 6': you could be next! Georgetown University professor and author of Know What I Mean? Reflections On Hip Hop delivers a warning

It would be a tragic mistake to think that the plight of the Black male youths in Jena, La.--dubbed "the Jena 6"--is a unique one. There are many lessons that young Brothers around the country can learn from the Jena 6. First, the overprosecution, and as a result, the overincarceration of Black youth, occurs with frightening regularity. We have known for the longest time that Black youth simply don't get a fair shake in the criminal justice system. The same offenses for which White youths are slapped on the back of the hand, Black youths are sent to juvenile detention, which creates the greater likelihood that they will serve time in jail or prison.

Nearly a decade before the Jena 6, we knew that although Black youths between the ages of 10-17 make up only 15 percent of their age group in the U.S. population, they account for more than 26 percent of juvenile arrests, 32 percent of delinquency referrals to juvenile court, 41 percent of juveniles detained in delinquency cases, 46 percent of juveniles in corrections institutions and 52 percent of juveniles transferred to adult criminal court after judicial hearings.

These statistics prove that Black youths are extremely vulnerable to zealous prosecutors out to throw the book at them while proving to the broader society that they are tough on crime. Unfortunately, Black youths often become the trophies of success for unprincipled tugs of war between the custodians of the criminal justice system over who should serve how much time for which crimes. It's no secret that our youths get the short end of that racially braided rope.

Second, while Jena 6 occurred in the Deep South, Black youths in urban centers across the North and beyond face brutal miscarriages of justice. This happens in part because of the persistent stereotyping of Black youth as crime-prone social misfits. It doesn't help that many hip hop music videos carry the image of Black youths committing crime or glorifying the gangsta lifestyle. But we can't scapegoat Black pop culture as the source of the problem. We must acknowledge that the lyrics and lifestyles promoted in rap music track (but didn't create) the image of Black male youth as pathological and deviant.

There is a vigorous history of Black male youth as the scourge of Northern urban society. As Whites fought to divide themselves from Black inner-city life--a life made more brutal by White flight to safe suburban neighborhoods--they mischaracterized Black youth as the source of social decay. Black youths were blamed for everything that made Black life in the inner city harsh: crime, poverty and drug addiction.

In fact, the ballyhooed war on drugs of the 1980s was a war on Black and Brown youth. Long before Jena 6, President Reagan and members of his administration targeted Black male youth as the source of urban suffering and sought to drag them to jail in the greatest wave of mass imprisonment in U.S. history. Never mind the alleged complicity of the Reagan administration in the flooding of poor Black urban communities with crack cocaine to fund an illegal war in Nicaragua.

Finally, Jena 6 should teach young Black males, and the rest of us, to be vigilant in the fight for justice. Many have suggested that the Jena 6 case could spark another chapter in the civil rights struggle. That remains to be seen. What shouldn't be in doubt is our determination to vote, protest, resist, organize, mobilize and to write--books, essays, op-eds, rap lyrics and letters to Congress--about the cruel miscarriage of justice that too often lies in wait for our youth. As the outpouring of awareness and outrage around Jena 6 proved, if we don't speak up and act up for ourselves, no one else will.

COPYRIGHT 2007 Johnson Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning