I read this with interest in keeping tabs with the Jena 6 issue:
What I find interesting is that these men are not from Jena…Seems like outsiders (of all colors) love to come in and make more trouble. I hope they are prosecuted to the fullest. How shameful! – Alexandria Town Talk commenter on the story of the vandalism at the Jena church
Those words – “Seems like outsiders (of all colors) love to come in and make more trouble” – reveal more than their writer intended. For any native Southerner (like this one), they’re part of an old, old code that goes all the way back to the “peculiar institution” in which Southerners spent the first 60 years of the 19th century. They’re inherently paternalistic, racist, and xenophobic.
Code did you say?
Now things are clearer for me as well.
I remember talking to a black woman who is a district attorney. She told me a story about how things were better in the past things were better because the ‘white people stayed over there, and the blacks stayed over here’ advocating segregation. I realized her words, but they were merely an omen to a more ingrained acceptance of prejudice and role-playing by members of both sides.
I remember a professor actually stopping a class, expounding to us from on high about how things in life would be difficult for us because we were black. The funny thing is that, when he told me about what he thought about the universities discrimination about my research, he said that I was a trouble maker.
Guess it takes all kinds from both sides of a relationship to maintain a dream…or nightmare.
