Hearing of the House Committee on the Judiciary- Jena 6 and the Role of Federal Intervention in Hate Crimes and Race-Related Violence in Public School

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Hearing of the House Committee on the Judiciary- Jena 6 and the Role of Federal Intervention in Hate Crimes and Race-Related Violence in Public School

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REP. ARTUR DAVIS (D-AL): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Let me thank the panel. Reverend Sharpton, good to see you. Let me thank the panel today.

The down side of Mr. Ellison and I being fairly junior members of the committee is every brilliant insight and every passionate insight that could have been offered has no doubt been offered already. But there are some points that I do want to make, and I'll try not to cover old ground.

Mr. Washington, let me begin with you. And this is not an admonition in any way, but I think since you are one of the two people on this panel who's on the ground, literally, in dealing with the issues in this community, I do want to make one observation.

It strikes me, as someone following this case from a distance, as someone following this case through television, from the news media, that there were a lot of missed opportunities to prevent this situation from ending up in the very tragic place that it ended, because everyone in this room thinks it ended in a tragic place -- a tragic place for the six young men and their families, a tragic place for the young white man, a tragic place for the community.

This is what's notable to me, though. How in the world do you have a school in the modern era that has a principal, that has administrators, and that isn't moved to action by a white folks tree or by there being some ambience at this school or some sense at this school that, well, there's a place for the white kids to hang out but black kids don't hang out there.

Even before you get to nooses, I don't understand how that kind of physical symbolism -- that there's a place that's off-limits to certain kids because of their race -- I don't understand why that didn't have people up in arms. And frankly, Reverend Al, the sense that I get is there was a whole lot of sense of "Well, this is kind of the way things happen in Jena, and we don't like it, but this is kind of the way it is."

And if that mentality and that spirit had prevailed in my state, in the state where your mom lives, Alabama, God knows where we would be if we had settled into this attitude that, well, there are just certain customs and traditions. I don't understand why the good people in Jena, why the school administrator was not troubled by the very fact that there was a physical kind of segregation at the school. That's the first point.

The second point -- I want to say something responsive to what one of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle said earlier, Mr. King. He was making the observation that, well, the noose is a speech act, so we shouldn't be so troubled by that. And I was surprised to hear him say that, frankly, because I thought that conservatives told us over and over that our moral standards in society aren't defined simply by what we can send people to jail for and what we can sue them for; our moral standards are also defined by what draws our outrage.

And I don't care whether or not you can prosecute somebody just for hanging a noose. I'm sure good lawyers can argue both sides of that. We know the DA here could be creative when he wanted to, and I'm sure we can argue both sides of that. I'm sure we can probably argue both sides in terms of a civil liability theory. But that's not always the standard whether or not you can sue somebody or put them in jail. The question is, what outrages us?

The next point I want to make, all of the copycat business with nooses in the last several weeks in this country -- for anyone who wants to know why is speech dangerous, well, that's an answer, because speech can be provocative. And we use the word provocative sometimes as a synonym for that which titillates. Provocative can also mean literally what it says, to provoke, instigate others to action.

The final point that I want to make -- and this is frankly the most important one -- we are talking, first and foremost, about children attacking children on both sides. We're talking about black children attacking white children, white children attacking black children. And that is enormously troubling to me, because we used to have this belief in society that racism lost traction as it moved down the generational lines. We used to have this belief in this society that, well, as younger people came along, they were somehow purer. They were less diluted and they were not likely to be as contaminated by racial bigotry.

I am bothered by seeing a resurgence of racism among young people. And that's the question I would ask someone on the panel to address. What do we do about this regeneration of racism among children who ought to be the people who are most naturally coming together in the society?

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