Look past symbols of Jena

A week ago, folks were marching in Jena, La., using symbolism to attack the hard reality of racism.

Marchers were calling for justice for the Jena Six, black high-school students accused of beating a white student.

The six are hardly heroes and they certainly deserve punishment for their actions.

I wouldn't have rested my case on their heads, but I think I know why some people did.

The case provided a simple story, easier to grasp than the complexities of race in the present.

The powerful feelings people brought to Jena are rooted in history and fed by contemporary issues of disproportion in the justice system and in education, by discrimination in hiring and home buying, by daily evidence that we've not fully achieved the goals of the civil-rights struggle on which that march was modeled.

Criminal justice, education, banking, you name the institution and you will find inequality built in.

Jena is about people trying to be heard.

I've been hearing about the Jena Six for months in e-mails and blogs by black people.

When stories arrived in the mainstream media, I didn't always see the same context, the same string of events leading up to anger about the treatment of the six.

All of the stories talked about the tree under which white students at the local high school would sit and that after a group of black students sat there, nooses were hung from the tree. Nooses hanging from a tree is powerful symbolism.

But not all the stories mentioned that the school superintendent overruled the high-school principal and gave the students responsible for the nooses light punishment.

Some didn't mention that there were several fights at the school. White students were often not punished at all, but black students were charged with felonies in some cases.

And the need for context extends beyond Jena. Different levels of punishment for black and white students is — and long has been — an issue across the country.

People aren't as eager to examine such failures as they are to celebrate progress.

This week marked the 50th anniversary of the Little Rock Nine, the black students who had to be guarded by Army troops when they integrated Central High School. We've made progress since then in every area of society, but we still don't have equality — just a day ago a story highlighted the gap in test scores between black and white students in Washington state.

The progress we've made can mask the problems that remain, and the absence of the most overt racism makes it easy to assume race is a nonissue. People can dismiss the reality of institutional racism, so we grab for something more concrete, easier to see, hence the flawed Jena Six.

People want their evidence simple and clear cut, but life's rarely that way.

Studies and statistics don't have the same impact as the powerful symbols on display in Jena, but any progress we make will be painfully slow as long as symbolism is the only thing that gets attention.

Jerry Large's column appears Monday and Thursday. Reach him at 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.