Thanks for steering the conversation regarding this topic back to a constructive vein.

I believe you slightly misunderstand my post. I’m on your side. Like you, I don’t believe Mr. Barker suffered any trauma after he was rendered unconscious.

And a mea culpa is indeed in order. From my first perusal of your article, it was unclear to me that an actual “beat-down” at the hands of the Jena Six even occurred. I thought they merely pled “no contest” as part of a plea agreement (I'll admit, I'm not an expert on the law) and I wrote my post accordingly. But even if a “beat-down” did occur, I’m not sure it changes my stance on this matter.

Mr. Barker was an embodiment of the toxic environment that had been created when the DA and school superintendant refused to call a hate crime a hate crime. It’s a terrible thing, indeed, when hatred and violence are ignored or much worse, are excused or justified. What choice did these young men have?

Am I concerned about the slight overreaction of the Jena Six? Sure, I'm just as concerned as you are. Am I far more concerned about the bizarre overreaction of the prosecutors? Absolutely!

Like you, I look forward to the future contributions of all of these young men. And like you, I look forward to a future where racial tensions aren’t exploited by ideologues and hucksters who gravitate to such incidents to forward their own reputations and agendas.

And on that point, I think we can all agree.

I agree. I don't think that anyone is trying to justify the beating on Justin Barker. However, White kids have done similar sorts of assaults on Black kids and were not charged or else got slapped in the wrist, whereas the Black kids were initially charged with attempted murder. The problem is the inequity of justice.

I just came back from Philadelphia, Mississippi. Here those of us in the 1960s civil rights movement had a memorial march for all of the martyrs who were slaughtered during that time and no justice was done; the murderers were let off scott-free due to racist justice.

Here is a website of the original notice of this event (the article was written before the event happened). We had the march and it went just as the notice said.

http://www.crmvet.org/anc/0906ms.htm

Alan Bean
Friends of Justice

BlueDeacon is right. In your naive obsession with so-called facts, you've overlooked something more important: narrative. We in the mainstream media have created a narrative that will help you (and your conservative bully boys who are still so fixated on your precious “facts”) understand why these things happen in the first place.

And don't give me any of that “liberal media bias” nonsense. Like my esteemed colleague Blue, I've worked in the media for a very long time. And let me tell you, I would be able to recognize my own bias as easily as I could recognize a plank in my own eye.

The issue here isn't who violently assaulted whom. The REAL issue is who created the environment that made the actions of Jena Six justifiable, or if you ask me, necessary. The real enemy here is George Bush in his continuation of almost 30 years of Reagan-era policies that have forced young men like the Jena Six to take the defensive actions that they did.

To call what they did “violence” is to do violence to the word violence.

The only crime here is our failure to properly honor the courage of the Jena Six. Everyone here seems to forget how much damage one unarmed man can do to a group of six so-called assailants who are kicking him. Hasn't anyone here ever seen a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie? Just a movie, you say? Well, you may see those movies as mere entertainment, but I promise you, they're as genuine as Alan Bean's concern for justice!

As far as anyone knows, the victim didn't have anything to do with the nooses. Your logic has a dangerous conclusion. Basically you are saying that these six young men were justified in kicking their lone victim senseless because other people who shared his race committed offenses against other black students. Would they have been justified in killing him or just beating him?