Privilege is the trump card, and not just in rural Jena

Add to American shorthand on racial inequality Jena Six, the now-famous case of six black high-school students who face outsized versions of justice for allegedly beating up a white classmate.

The case is nearly a year old but nationwide attention is recent, in part, because it takes place in rural Jena, La. Attention matters because it helped reduce criminal charges for the six and they no longer face 100 years in prison. Still, justice moves slowly for some of us. One youth remains in jail despite having his conviction by an all-white jury overturned by an appeals court.

Few here in the Northwest knew or cared much about the case until pictures of tens of thousands marching on the rural town made front — page and network television news. Suddenly, those who believed race is an outdated concept suspected something was amiss in the melting pot.

Suspicion was confirmed when President Bush and Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton began speaking about the case and another presidential contender, Barack Obama, was accused of being black and not speaking about it. A whiff of cause célèbre, courtesy of rocker David Bowie and his $10,000 contribution to the Jena Six legal-defense fund, cemented the case's news value.

Even so, Jena Six stands for many as merely an amusing anecdote about a Southern town stuck in a racial time warp. Consider the juicy details: a tree on the Jena High School campus commonly accepted as the whites-only tree; a black student seeking permission to sit under it — in 2007!; three nooses were later discovered hanging from the tree.

There's more. Three months — and no surprise, a great deal of simmering racial tension — later, a schoolyard melee sends a white student to the hospital with cuts and bruises. Six students, all black and 16 or younger, were charged with attempted murder. Outrage over the excessive charges led to lower charges of aggravated battery. A dose of irony: Louisiana law required the new charges to be supported by use of a dangerous weapon. Hence, tennis shoes became brick bats.

But let's stifle those knowing grins about the South and racism. True, the two-lane town has some serious racial baggage, but check out the luggage racks in our own backyard.

No one in Seattle would hang a noose from a schoolyard tree. How rude and utterly classless! But just as Jena has come to symbolize the racial unevenness of America's brand of justice, the seven-year battle over the Seattle School District's use of race, and its disappointing end at the U.S. Supreme Court last winter, will come to represent one of the last stands against educational inequality.

Seattle thought using race as one of several ways to pick students vying for limited seats was no more or less unfair than giving extra points to students with a sibling at the school or whose family lived in the right neighborhood.

But whether in Jena or Seattle, privilege, not fairness, is the trump card. In Jena, six students beating up a classmate rightly warrants punishment — including criminal charges — but attempted-murder charges and life prison sentences invoke that Southern bildungsroman, "To Kill a Mockingbird." Just as that Pulitzer Prize-winning novel exposed the harsh color of justice, Jena shows the lethargy of change.

By the same token, a half-century after President Dwight D. Eisenhower used Army paratroopers to escort nine black students safely into their classrooms in Little Rock, Ark., a good education in Seattle is easier to come by if you're white or live near well-resourced schools in the largely white sections of the city.

And when someone challenges the status quo, things can get ugly. The saga of Jena — from a whites-only schoolyard tree to the lives of seven youths, six black, one white, who will never be the same — is an example of how ugly things can get.

No worries though. Seattle will never be like Jena. That isn't our style. When it is time to get ugly, we'll hire lawyers. Preferably, ones willing to work pro bono so our hands are never soiled by cash, which, as my grandmother constantly warned, would make me faint if I inspected it under a microscope.

A T-shirt inspired by the Jena Six case features images of a water fountain, a bus and a tree. Below them is a Martin Luther King Jr. passage:

"Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and that in some not-too-distant tomorrow the radiant starts of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty."

More likely, Jena will learn to cloak its prejudices in nicer finery. Take it from Seattle. Image is nothing to sneeze at.

Lynne K. Varner's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is lvarner@seattletimes.com for a podcast Q&A with the author, go to Opinion at seattletimes.com