Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education

by Mychal Denzel Smith

I wonder sometimes if that had to with who the Jena Six were, or who they weren’t. A few of them had juvenile records. And they weren’t innocent boys who were caught at the wrong place at the wrong time and just happened to fit the profile. They had actually jumped their classmate. Additionally, much of the original reporting that prompted the anger, connecting this fight to the nooses and a “white tree,” later proved unreliable. In 2011, Stanford Law School professor Richard Ford told NPR’s Michel Martin that “the Jena 6 protests were focused on a bad example of a real problem.” The real problem remains the way America’s so-called criminal justice system thrives on taking black people away from their communities and locking them up. The real problem has been the ways “tough on crime” and “zero tolerance” have translated to more arrests and longer prison sentences. It is a problem that black children at younger and younger ages have come into contact with police and the “criminal justice system.” But Ford was wrong in suggesting the Jena Six were a bad example of these problems.