The Jena Principle

It’s great to see thousands of people marching against the racist railroading of teenagers in the Jena 6 case. Let’s hope the grotesque injustices taking place there and no doubt in a dozen other places that aren’t as notorious as the Louisiana town are overturned. Too bad it takes a resuscitated civil rights movement to restore basic equality before the law.

But I have another question since my job takes me to Louisiana and other southern states all the time: why weren’t the national Latino leadership all over this issue, lending support to the marches and calls for racial justice? Here was a golden opportunity to defend a principle and forge a link with Latinos’ natural allies for when the time comes to debate repressive immigration laws and racial violence directed against Mexicans and Guatemalans. Why don’t La Raza and LULAC and all the rest of the official Hispanics have any strategic sense?

It’s depressingly consistent among our biped brethren that we are stirred to outrage only when bad things happen to us, our relatives or the people we identify as our peers. When it’s the next guy, we don’t exactly ignore injustice—it simply doesn’t register on our mental radar.

I saw it in stark relief when living in South America and hearing people say how glad they were that the military regime had ‘restored order’ or ‘reduced crime’, then witnessing the same individual switch gears and squawk about an abuse committed against their Uncle Pedro.

In Jena you heard it in the comments of the white townspeople: the incidents were ‘blown out of proportion,’ they said consistently, meaning the case didn’t bother them since it was just the kids from across town whose lives were being wrecked. For the 16-year-old facing a murder charge for a schoolyard fight, the proportions were already pretty substantial.

If these inconsistencies are part of biped make-up, it’s up to our cultural and political traditions to combat them actively and explicitly. We need to teach children and adolescents that human selfishness is our default reaction and that to maintain a decent, safe polity we need to swim against that current through an act of will. What a contrast to the messages we’re getting from the repugnant Bush crowd that nothing matters except our safety and that a thousand innocent people tortured matters not at all if a single terrorist act against ME is prevented. To which the great majority will readily, if silently, agree.