Jena Six

I found the way Rankine addressed the Jena Six beating to be really unique. She starts the section off by describing how the presumably white perpetrators "noosed the rope looped around the overhanging branches of their tree" (99). For context, this refers to the series of nooses hung outside the local high school prior to the beating. While racially charged, the event was swept under the rug until it's potential relation to the later crimes was called to question.

Rankine then goes on to describe the incident itself in her usual matter of fact, graphic detail. Not knowing what had actually happened I assumed the gruesome beating to be yet another hate crime in line with the others described in this section, yet as I read her conclusion I realized the roles were in fact reversed. The incident involved several young black men beating a racist white peer, contrary to the usual narrative. It initially seemed odd to include this completely different example that highlights a moral grey area of racial justice, perhaps detracting from her overall point in the section about hate crimes.

The last line however clarified the relevance of this story to her theme: "...the fists the feet criminalized already are weapons already exploding the landscape and then the litigious hitting back is life imprisoned" (101). The point is not to mull over the ethically ambiguous motivation of the beating, but instead the harsh response to it. The previous noose incidents were largely ignored and on a larger scale racially motivated attacks in general are often written off as "depraved", "tragic", and otherwise not indicative of a larger societal issue. The 6 boys guilty of beating their racist classmate were arrested and tried (one as an adult) in contrast to the treatment of their white counterparts.

Rankine uses this story to highlight another component of the hate crimes she describes. Not only are they horrific in their own right, but our suspiciously mild societal and legal reactions to them are problematic as well. By juxtaposing the instance of young black men being vigorously prosecuted for a violent but debatably justified attack, she makes apparent the dichotomy in our perception of black and white individuals in relation to racially motivated crime.