Please read Automatic Preference on the Jena 6 situation. Highlights inlude:
- White students hung three hangman’s nooses from a tree near Jena High School, immediately after Black students received permission to sit under that tree.
- A fire at Jena High School, arson suspected, no arrests.
- White-initiated fistfight, no serious injuries resulted: white student charged with simple battery.
- White-initiated threat with a shotgun: Black students arrested for aggravated battery and theft after they wrested the weapon away from the white student.
- Black-initiated fistfight, no serious injuries.
There are people here saying that this is not about race. I would really like to know how hanging nooses from a tree to scare Black students away from sitting under it is not about race.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
It’s obviously racially motivated — which doesn’t mean that there are not a lot of racially motivated incidents that are more subtly contrived and would not even need the nooses to give the message.
I am currently doing some fine-honing of my paper (for publication) on Dambudzo Marechera’s writing, and how I think it has been misundertood. It is 100 per cent obvious to me that racism has been a large part of this misunderstanding. My strategies to counteract the assumptions that he was just undisciplined or neurotic have been:
1. To suggest that he was writing as one who suffered from PTSD, and was therefore acutely sensitive to forces of power (and was gifted enough to graphically depict what his sensitivities related to him).
2. That his writing follows the precise forms of Georges Bataille’s ideas, in all sorts of different (but consistent) ways. Hence, the level of metaphysical reasoning that it is possible to gauge in Black Sunlight (the novel) is unequalled (especially by expectation).
3 Thirdly, that he wrote about specific historical situations and circumstances, from the point of view of one enmeshed in these. These aspects (and the psycho-social dynamics they produced) would not be understood by somebody who hadn’t good knowledge of them, and so could be easily misunderstood as mere neurotic figurations of the imagination.
What a pity that this great work was so misunderstood. What a tragedy for the life of the author!
This sounds like a *really* good paper. And necessary. 🙂
On Mychal Bell: – they’ve vacated his sentence, y’all!
http://guyaneseterror.blogspot.com/2007/09/one-down.html#links
More to come on this.