White Riot

1 in 5 black males
Before the year 2000
Will be detained or deceased
No justice
No peace
You scared? Got to church
--Snoop

Dear America,

Get well soon...to quote the Guess Who:

Don’t come hangin’ around my door
Don’t wanna see your face no more
I don’t need your war machines
I don’t need your ghetto scenes
Coloured lights can hypnotize
Sparkle someone else’s eyes

Here's a report from the dark underbelly of the beast:

A WOMAN who was sexually abused, beaten and forced to eat rat and dog faeces while being held captive in a West Virginian home for at least a week may be the victim of a hate crime. [ed.-may be a victim?]

Six people arrested including a mother and son, and a mother and daughter, are white. The victim, a 23-year-old woman, is black.

The FBI plans to investigate whether racism played a part after one of the suspects, female Frankie Brewster, allegedly cut the victim's ankle with a knife while telling her she was a "n*****", USA Today reported.

"The things that were done to this woman are just indescribable," Logan County Sergeant Sonya Porter said.

Yes, there are other countries where this kind of thing has happened, but why does it happen with so much frequency in the US? Hell, it's not like its even confined to one area, either:

One small town in Louisiana is showing the country that, no matter how far we think we've grown in mending race relations and building united communities, we still have a long way to go to get past our most ingrown of prejudices.

The town of Jena has recently turned into a hotbed of controversy over charges that were filed against six black teenagers involved in a fight with fellow student Justin Barker. The fight happened last December, but to fully understand what has happened in Jena, we need to go further back to August.

During a school assembly, a black freshman jokingly asked principal Glen Joiner of Jena High School if he could sit under the "white tree", referring to a tree on campus that most of the school's white students gathered around. Joiner answered that students could sit wherever they wanted. Presumably, everyone had a good laugh.

Until the next day, when three nooses suddenly appeared in the previously mentioned tree. Upon learning of the three students, all white, who were responsible, Joiner called for their expulsion. The Lasalle Parish School Board and school superintendent Roy Breithaupt disagreed, calling the incident a harmless prank, reducing the students' punishment to three days of in-school suspension. As a result of the decision, fights between white and black students began to break out at the high school.

Fast forward to Dec. 1. Five black students, including 16-year-old Robert Bailey, attempted to enter a party attended mostly by whites and were denied entrance by the woman at the door. When the group persisted, insisting that they had been invited, a white man stepped between the five students and the woman and began attacking the students. The fight was broken up, and all six were asked to leave. They were again attacked by a group of white men, one of whom, Justin Sloan, was later charged with simple battery and placed on probation.

The following day, Bailey and his friends got into an argument with a white student, who ran to his truck and produced a shotgun. Bailey wrestled with the student and managed to take the gun from him, walking away with it after refusing to return it. Bailey was charged with theft of a firearm, second-degree robbery and disturbing the peace. The white student who had brandished the weapon at Bailey? No charges were filed against him.

That Monday, Barker bragged about how Bailey had been beaten up by a white man. Upon leaving the gym later that day, Bailey and five students confronted Barker and knocked him unconscious when a punch caused Barker to fall and hit his head. The six students were arrested and eventually charged with second-degree murder by the district attorney. Barker was released from the hospital two hours after entering with a swollen eye.

The resulting trial was itself, a sham of justice. A charge of aggravated second-degree battery, which the charges were later reduced to, requires the defendant to have been attacked with a deadly weapon. The murder weapon used by Mychal Bell, one of the students charged? His tennis shoes, according to District Attorney Reed Walters. Despite the absurdity of a pair of tennis shoes being considered equal in force to, say, a shotgun, as well as the fact that no one was really even sure if Bell had even been involved in the fight, the all-white jury found him guilty, handing him up to 22 years in prison, to be decided on Sept. 20.

Oh geez.