Fire that reporter: Misreporting on Mychal Bell and the Jena 6

So I happened to run across this story about Mychal Bell, the first member of the Jena 6 to be convicted. If you take a moment to have a look at it, you will see that … it spends one paragraph vaguely explaining why he is in jail and the rest of the article regurgitating old news. At the end of the story I was thinking, “What the fuck? How did this kid start in a routine hearing and end up sentenced to 18 months in prison?”

Thanks to MTV apparently having a better news arm than CBS (now isn’t that scary … although, I believe they are actually owned by the same company, so it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense either … although to be fair, the CBS story is actually thanks to AP), there’s a story about it here at MTV which explains what happened.

In case you don’t want to go through the trouble of reading, I will summarize this shitastic piece of injustice for you:

• Mychal Bell, a minor, was unfairly convicted in adult court of certain crimes relating to the incidents in Jena, Louisiana, which are now famous, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, and you live in North America, please remove your head from your sphincter and use google. If you don’t like in NA, I won’t assume you’ve had your head up your ass, but I kindly direct you to google “Jena Six” or follow either of the links to your right.
• Mychal Bell was scheduled to be sentenced a few weeks ago, but thankfully, a judge overturned his conviction, saying that his case should have been heard in juvenile court.
• It turns out that Mychal Bell had prior juvenile convictions. And it seems that in light of Bell’s altercation relating to the famed Jena 6 case, the judge at the hearing decided Bell had violated his parole and sentenced him to jail for 18 months.

This is outrageous. He has yet to be PROPERLY convicted of any wrongdoing in this case, yet he is essentially being punished for the crime. So much for innocent until proven guilty. I realize that legally, in the US, if you accept the status of parolee, you forfeit this right. And I won’t get into the yada yada of how this obviously disproportionately impacts young Black men just like Mychal Bell, ensuring that instead of walking away from lives of crime, they are packed into the justice system until they are past their youthful prime.

But I want to say that he is innocent until proven guilty, and as such, it’s disgusting that a judge would throw him in jail just because he technically can. Land of the fucking free, indeed.

Please meditate on the tragedy of this. This is a young man with his whole life ahead of him. All he did was try to stand up for his own. I don’t want to get into a debate about how he did it. Maybe he did commit assault — but not with a deadly weapon and not in any serious way — the guy was at a party the same night the fight happened. Does he deserve to pay for it with the next year and a half, maybe the next 20 years of his life for it?

Mychal Bell is 18. In October of 2000, two months after I turned 18, I was safely ensconsed in my first residential house at Harvard. Sure I was freaked out about a lot of things, but I knew that most things in life, most doors, they would open up to me. I can only imagine how to Mychal the world seems to be closing, shrinking. And as I sit and think about my freedom to get into my Jetta and drive across the US-Canadian as many times as I wish, I remember the young Black men who were held up at the border with me last September when I was kicked out of Canada as I attempted to get my study permit. They had the same names as people from completely different states as them with convictions and/or warrants out on their arrest. (Brooklyn yes, South Carolina was definitely not their point of origin) They were thrown out of Canada on the understanding that they are not to return. Mychal Bell is now one of those young men, confined to prison, confined to the nation that barely seems to want him.

If you haven’t already, sign the petition, donate money toward legal fees, head out to a local protest for the Jena 6 … and stand up for the young women and men of your communities who are tragically being locked up into a life in the justice system for errors that in the greater scheme of things don’t require a lifetime of penance. As his father said on Democracy Now a few months ago, “This is what it means to be Black. If he didn’t know that before, he’ll know it now.” I thought I knew it then, but I feel I know it even more now. We all begin to know it now, although not nearly as painfully as Mychal and his family.

To remind everyone of how powerful solidarity can be, I’m offering this image of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics after winning the 200m. They stood there, at the top, knowing that back home their people were suffering. And they helped turn the world’s eye toward American Injustice. Do the same as you can. Speak out against these legal lynchings. (and click on the image for more info on the 1968 Olympics Black Power Salute.)

In lieu of lyrics … Smith’s comments about his actions at the olympics: Smith later said “If I win, I am American, not a black American. But if I did something bad, then they would say I am a Negro. We are black and we are proud of being black. Black America will understand what we did tonight.”