The "Jena 6"

Jason Whitlock, a black sports writer, is clearly guilty, himself, of bias in his deliberate attempts to discredit any “cause” that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton involve themselves with. His Sept. 30th column on the “Jena 6” doesn’t address the attempted murder charges, at all, and he still proclaims that the nooses incident had nothing to do with it - his words, not the words of the young men involved.

I am not sure of what relevance it is whether the boys go to church or not and who they were living with at the time. Just because people like Alan Bean, Jackson and Sharpton make a scene doesn’t mean there is nothing to the story. And the fact that a teenager has been in trouble with the law before is not reason to dismiss everything he has to say, throw him in jail and throw away the key, along with all of his friends.

How is it to Whitlock’s credit that he, being more mature and accomplished, can so easily disregard the pointed intent of nooses hanging from a schoolyard tree? Maybe it is this callousness that got him where he is today? Does his apparent embarrassment over these media circuses entitle him to speak for everybody else?

As reported on Friday, black babies born here in the U.S. are twice as likely to die as infants and there seems to be no explanation except “the stressful effects of racism,” according to a new series of studies from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies’ Health Policy Institute.

It says the causes of black infant mortality can be attributed to poverty, poor nutrition, inadequate prenatal care, teen pregnancy, heredity, high blood pressure, stress, obesity, low birth weight and prematurity. But, over the past few years, it has become clear that whether rich or poor, well educated or barely literate, African-American women were still more likely than white women, first-generation, poor Hispanic immigrant women and foreign-born black women to have premature and low birth-weight babies.

Some things are not so easily explained away.