media device 10

Susan Madrak| BIO | I'M A FAN OF THIS BLOGGER

By The Color Of Their Skins
Posted September 20, 2007 | 02:20 PM (EST)

Read More: Jena 6, privilege, racism, Breaking Politics News



I had the local Fox affiliate's morning show on as I got ready for work this morning, and they made a brief mention of the Jena 6 rally in Louisiana today. They said participants were protesting "uneven" treatment by local police, saying it was racial.

"Uneven"? Yeah, I guess you could say that. There was no mention whatsoever of the fact that a black teenager was charged with attempted murder for beating someone with a sneaker in a schoolyard fight, and certainly nothing about the nooses hanging from a tree on school grounds after black kids asked why they couldn't sit there.
And I could just picture those all-American Fox viewers, turning to each other and saying, "There they go again."

You know who "they" are, don't you? Those colored folks. The ones who don't know how to behave.

I was shocked when a Taser incident involving a white college student was given so much attention this week with so little context: Namely, that minorities are unjustly submitted to indignities and even death for specious reasons all the time, and that they are quite familiar with Taser guns.

It's not so important when it happens to black people because of the unspoken assumption most white people are still privileged to hold: "They must have done something to deserve it."

I know better. I grew up in a working-class, blue collar Philadelphia neighborhood.

The boys in my neighborhood (including my own brothers) were forever being beaten up by cops; it was a fact of life. I know that whatever rationale the cops claimed, they really beat them up for some variation on the same reason: Because I can and there's nothing you can do about it. "Deserved" it? Yeah, if you can call not being able to read a cop's mind and know just how quick of a hair-trigger he had that minute a crime. Excuse me, officer, but have you gotten laid recently? Any money troubles? Kids okay?

And so white people - people who never had to worry about real-life police brutality - just tune it out. It doesn't seem logical to them, that cops and elected officials would simply treat a black kid differently for no reason other than the color of their skin. After all, they're always so polite to them.

We're still so very far from a world where we're judged on the content of our character and not the color of our skins. But still, it gives me hope to see so many college students from all over the country (including Philadelphia's Temple University) headed to Jena to stand in peaceful protest at today's rally. Kudos to those kids for standing up for their civil rights!

As for me, well, I'm just embarrassed that all these years later, we're still here.





I chose this article for a media device because all I could think of was the case of Emmett Till that we learned about from the Eyes on the Prize film. This article is by a woman who is just sick of all the injustice in the world, specifically toward people of color. She uses the Jena 6 case and another case involving a taser to show how much or how little attention white people get. In the case of Jena 6 the white people involved are hardly mentioned and when a white college student was brutalized with a taser, they got a mass amount of attention compared to blacks that have been victims of taser guns.
It was the whole seventh paragraph that really stood out and reminded me of Emmett Till; “The boys in my neighborhood (including my own brothers) were forever being beaten up by cops; it was a fact of life. I know that whatever rationale the cops claimed, they really beat them up for some variation on the same reason: Because I can and there's nothing you can do about it. "Deserved" it? Yeah, if you can call not being able to read a cop's mind and know just how quick of a hair-trigger he had that minute a crime.”
That account of her and her brothers childhood is almost exactly what happened to Till. Emmett had said “bye” to a white woman and the next day he was missing, granted in the Emmett Till case the ones who did the beating were not cops, but they were white. In this womans story the boys didn’t know why they were beaten they just were; and same goes for Emmett Till, he was from another part of the world and put into the middle of Mississippi where the same things he does in the north are not acceptable. So, basically both Emmett and this author’s brothers were beaten for being black, unfortunatly though Till was beaten to death. The author also says “After all, they're always so polite to the,” meaning black people are always so polite to white people in fear of being beaten. Which brings me back to Emmett Till, he was just being polite to the white woman and he was killed over a simple “bye.”
At the very end of this article the author says “I'm just embarrassed that all these years later, we're still here,” this statement just sums up my thoughts entirely. Now, when we look back in time we tend to forgive people for being so racist as well as the older generations, we just say “oh, that’s how they were raised”. But I am here to say that it should be unforgivable for anyone to be racist, after so much time we shouldn’t still be in this situation. I will admit, it has got much better than it was but it still is a big part in our lives.