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DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS
OF AMERICA
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September 21, 2007
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NEWS FROM DSA |
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YDS and DSA JOIN JENA PROTEST
Yesterday in Jena, La., DSA and YDS members joined the tens of thousands rallying against the racism still ingrained in the fabric of American society. The story behind the Jena outrage is stark and simple: six African-American teenagers involved in a skirmish with white classmates were singled out and charged by a legal system that failed to prosecute or even name those that threatened to lynch those same black teens for making use of public property deemed "white turf.”
Americans celebrate the accomplishments of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, as if the job was done. It’s not. The criminal justice system boasts more African-American young people in prison or jail, on parole or probation than attending college. Racial disparities in sentencing for similar crimes are common; the most notable are found in cocaine-related drug convictions. In health care, stark contrasts in life expectancy remain between minorities and whites, not all of them attributable to income or class differences. Child-mortality and disease rates point to the lack of health care services in minority communities, not simply to poverty rates, even as African-Americans and Latinos are disproportionately poor. An economic draft that entices minorities by providing benefits otherwise unavailable to them produces a military disproportionately made up of people of color. Our education system features suburban school systems that are largely white and well financed, in contrast to inner city schools that are largely minority and—with some few recent exceptions—underfunded.
Even our political debates are colored by race. The immigration debate focuses on undocumented, typically darker-skinned Latinos and ignores larger populations of undocumented immigrants from Ireland and other European countries who are typically white, identically “illegal,” as if humans could be illegal, and compete for the same low-waged jobs.
Those, usually on the right, who claim they are upholding the tradition of the civil rights movement by seeking a colorblind society, need instead to confront the persistence of institutional racism. Those who take comfort in the idea that Jena is a small and atypically retrograde community far away in the Deep South should be disabused. Jena is here, and now. Jena is about injustice and institutional racism. It is a milepost signaling not how far we have come, but how far we need to go to achieve a just society.
In solidarity,
National Director
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Paid for by the Democratic Socialists of America PAC, 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 505, New York, NY 10038; not approved by any candidate or candidate's committee.
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