Colbert King, columnist for The Washington Post, made this point without intending to do so. “Next time -- and there will be a next time, unless that unfair prosecution is reversed and our unjust criminal justice system is changed -- there’s no telling what an angry community acting in solidarity can and will do,” he wrote on Sept. 22. His veiled threat refers to the black community, of course, and seems intended to hint that he sees a justification for violence in the future.
But the real threat is that the unending allegations of racism will encourage the white community to resegregate. If you’re going to be painted as racists, you might as well act like racists.
This may already be happening. The Civil Rights Project reports that black students made up 43.5 percent of students in majority white school southern schools 20 years ago. Today that number’s dropped to 27 percent.
That’s too bad, because students in an integrated school have the best chance to grow up believing everyone’s equal. Left to grow up this way, today’s co-educated students will be as unprejudiced as it’s humanly possible to be.
But one of the lessons from Jena is that, if a single student does something stupid, any integrated school can be subject to the full wrath of the Jackson-Sharpton race-baiting machine. They make their living by stirring up racial conflict. One foolish child can give these men the power to paint an entire school as a hotbed of racism.
It’s easy to say, “Oh, that’ll never happen.” But isn’t that what people in Jena would have said a couple of years ago while watching the town’s integrated high school football team play? Now, they’re a national laughingstock, treated in the press as if the town’s full of KKK members out of the 1920s. “We found no evidence of any real Klan activity in Jena,” CNN’s Phillips noted. Thanks for looking.
Resegregation is a word so ugly it’s not in this computer’s dictionary. Microsoft Word wants to replace it with “desegregate,” and it would be lovely if we really could change things with the press of a button. It’s sad that in this day and age, when our nation is closer to equality than ever, there are people still working to divide us by race.
If you want to know why, just follow the money.