If Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton believed raising Cain in Jena, Louisiana, would rekindle that old-time religion, they were sadly and predictably wrong.  They hoped to reprise the glory days of Selma and Montgomery, but the media and most Americans forgot their vaunted march as quickly as its slogans wafted into the Bayou State’s muggy miasma.  It doesn’t help the cause, after all, when your movement bases its grievance on six black thugs who stomped and kicked a white boy because he was, well, white.

This, however, is the Race Mafia’s brand of “racial tolerance.”  Black gang smashes white boy: Protest the arrest.  White boys don’t rape black girl: Learn about racism.  Either way, the game is rigged: Heads, blacks win; tails, whites lose.

They lost in Jena, where the beating of Justin Barker at Jena High School on December 4, 2006, joined the growing list of flagitious black-on-white crimes of late, which included the shooting of Emily Elizabeth Braddock in Moore County, North Carolina, and the mauling of a 13-year-old white boy in Virginia Beach—both in September.  A few years back, Kansans were treated to the Wichita Massacre.  A few months ago, it was the vicious carjacking and murder of a white couple in Knoxville, Tennessee.  But the unique feature in Jena is that no one disputes that a lad named Mychal Bell, along with six other boys, beat the custard out of Barker.

The Race Mafia showed up in Jena because the “Jena Six,” as they are now known, were unjustly prosecuted; i.e., authorities created a climate of racial intolerance by refusing adequately to punish racial incidents provoked by whites.  This, of course, is another of the excuses that explains black-on-white crime.  The shorthand is “black rage.”  If whites had provoked the attack in Jena and gone unpunished, Jackson and Sharpton might have had a point.  As usual, however, the case is what it is.

To its credit, the Associated Press uncovered some unpleasant facts about the incident, undoubtedly helped by the Jena Times, the town weekly, and the Town Talk of Alexandria, the area daily.  But the national media’s whopper, apparently swallowed whole by the 20,000 marchers who descended upon the benighted town, follows the typical script for a racial wilding, which goes as follows: At a school assembly in August 2006, a black student asked whether blacks could sit under the “white tree,” so named, supposedly, because only white students congregated under its arboreal splendor.  The next day, three nooses were hung from the tree, and school authorities collared the guilty students and suspended them for three days.

On November 30, an arsonist torched the high school, and two racial fights involving Jena Six defendants occurred on December 1 and 2.  On December 4, Mychal Bell, a football star, and five other boys tussled with Barker in what Washington Post columnist Colbert King called a “schoolyard fight.”  Bell is an excellent student with no criminal past, we are to believe.  Witnesses said Barker taunted a member of the Six at lunch, even using the dreaded N-word.  That, and all the recent white “intolerance” and “injustice” in Jena, sent Barker over the edge.  He snapped.  Authorities wrongly charged the Jena Six with conspiracy to commit second-degree murder and attempted second-degree murder.  Later, the charges against some of the defendants were reduced, but an “all-white jury” convicted Bell of aggravated second-degree battery in July.  A judge overturned that decision because Bell, he concluded, was wrongly tried as an adult.  Bell was freed in late September on $45,000 bond and awaits trial in juvenile court.  Other cases are pending.

When Al and Jesse showed up, the story went national and the “Jena Six” was born.  The courageous David Bowie donated $10,000 to their cause, and black congresspersons took up the case.  Curiously, no one, including the dirty half-dozen’s supporters, claims they are innocent.  For them, the issue is “equal justice.”  The white kids who hung the nooses, and others involved in the racial fights, did not suffer appropriate penalties.  The prosecutor’s charges against the Six were unjust.

Problem is, the only accurate part of this account is that Bell and his gang put a beat down on Barker, and the Six now await their fate.  The real story, which the AP, Jena Times, and Town Talk reported, is as follows: When the black student at the assembly asked whether blacks could sit under the white tree, all the students knew it was a lighthearted joke, and all the students, white and black, laughed.  The so-called white tree was not an exclusive preserve of whites; only two nooses, not three, hung from its leafy canopy; and, in any event, school officials removed them early in the morning.  Most of the students didn’t know about the nooses until a published report appeared.  The federal prosecutor for the area concluded that the students who hung the nooses did not do so for racial reasons, but they landed in a different school for a month, then received a two-week, in-school suspension.

As for the racial fights following the fire, one occurred after a group of black students, at least one of whom became a Jena Six defendant, tried to crash a private party.  The other “fight” involved three black students trying to a rob a white boy at a convenience store.  Two of these three are Jena Six defendants, and one of them crashed the private party.  So one of the Jena Six was involved in both racial fights.

On December 4, whatever Barker said at lunch, Bell sucker-punched Barker from behind.  Bell’s mighty blow knocked Barker out, the Jena Times reports, and seven black students kicked and stomped him as he lay defenseless and “lifeless” on the ground.  Reported the Town Talk, “phrases like ‘stomped him badly,’ ‘stepped on his face,’ ‘knocked out cold on the ground,’ and ‘slammed his head on the concrete beam’ were used by the students in their statements” about the attack.  Other students, the Times reported, blocked teachers from stopping the feral attack.  The teacher who got to Barker first thought he was dead.  What happened to the seventh participant, we are not given to know, but a few of the boys were juveniles, which means their court files are sealed.

And young Bell is no angel.  As the Town Talk’s headline reported on August 25, “Bell denied bond due to criminal history.”  The day he attacked Barker, he was on probation for a battery on Christmas Day 2005, and he had been convicted of another battery in September 2006, as well as property-damage incidents in July and September.  Other members of the Six, two sources say, are notorious local criminals as well.

As for the “all-white jury,” the AP reported, “though black residents were selected randomly by computer and summoned for jury selection, none showed up.”  And the Jena Times reported that “the investigation so far has revealed no link between the fire or noose incidents and several fights throughout Jena over the previous weekend involving black and white students of JHS.”  Federal gumshoes participated in the investigation.

Could the racial angle be a hoax?  The AP found Ben Reid, 61, a black resident of Jena “who set down roots in Jena in 1957 and lived here throughout the civil rights era.”  Said Reid, “this whole thing ain’t no downright, racial affair.”

Or at least not the usual racial affair.  Whites did not “provoke” the attack.  The prosecutor filed the appropriate charges.  The national media helped the civil-rights crowd smother the truth.  Racism was at work in Jena, all right, but the most dreaded ism of them all had nothing to do with nooses and bedsheets.  It was antiwhite racism among blacks, including Jackson and Sharpton, which is not part of the media’s monochromatic meme.  So the story swiftly transmogrified from a heinous crime against a white boy into the “white tree,” the nooses, and the saintly football star, culminating in the obligatory parade of seething marchers.

A version of this story replays monotonously, sometimes once or twice year, sometimes every two: Tawana Brawley; the Duke Lacrosse Players; the Jena Six. These events suggest the ugly, unnerving possibility that Jackson, Sharpton, and their gang aren’t just race hustlers, but are bitter antiwhite bigots quite happy to see young blacks rape, murder, and otherwise attack whites.  Such crimes are a double opportunity to punish whites for their sins—past and present, real and imagined—and permit the Race Mafia not only to revel in the tangible physical punishment blacks inflict upon individual whites but to mete out ideational social retribution and stigmatization upon whites in general.

Guilt-ridden whites, particularly conservatives, want to ignore this explicit and odious antiwhite racism.  They hope it will go away.  But it won’t go away, and ignoring it merely enables the Race Mafia to continue their explicitly antiwhite racial tactics, which, in turn, enervates resistance to those tactics and the nefarious strategy to portray whites as hopeless bigots.

The coin toss, again, is rigged.  When will whites stop pretending it isn’t?