Those Jena Six Kids Are Starting To Get On My Last Damn Nerve

"They should have never gave you niggas money!" - Dave Chappelle as Rick James

You'd think that after the outpouring of national support of their charges for that 6-on-1 assault, the Jena 6 kids would learn a thing or two from this whole ordeal and proceed in life wiser for wear, not worse. Instead, these dummies are plagiarizing a page from The Trent Benefield/Rodney King Book of No-Longer-Sympathetic Victims.

I caught a lot of flack last week when I suggested that just maybe it wasn't the wisest of ideas for two of the Jena Six to be invited to the BET Hip Hop Awards. After all, while these guys were inordinately charged for their actions, they aren't exactly innocent victims. An assault did occur, despite whatever provocation might have lead to it. By parading them on stage as new millennium Civil Rights Heroes maybe we're not choosing the best cause, or at the very least not choosing the best faces of that cause.

Of course, I got chewed out for this by some commenters, and it's true, you can't choose the face of a particular issue. Intelligent, law abiding citizens aren't always the victims, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't call out injustices when they exist. I pretty much agree with this, but still something about this whole thing just smells really bad.

Exhibit B: YouTube has a video montage of several MySpace photos of Robert Bailey, one of other Jena kids, posing with several hundred dollar bills in his mouth. This money may or may not be some of the very donations that people have sent in for his legal defense fund.

Here, peep the video yourself.



I'm sure Trent Benefield is smiling inside.

The MySpace page has since been taken down, but these photos were up there as recently as two days after that pointless historic March. And as much as it pisses me off, the more I think about it, I can't really blame these Jena kids for their silly actions now that this thing has blown up.

Question: Where the hell are the parents? Don't these kids have uncles? Grandaddies? Don't they have somebody in their lives who has lived through the real civil rights movement, and knows to give these kids a big ass "thump on the back of the head"? These are after all, just teenagers, they don't know any better. But somebody who does know better should have told Robert Bailey to put that money in the bank, and those other two kids to stay their asses off BET. Of course, I'm making the generally unproven assumption that these very same adults aren't somewhere with money in their mouths as well.

The Jena Six should be remembered as a testament to the collective power of the blogosphere to bring attention to social, racial, and judicial inequalities. Instead, since these kids and the adults responsible for them keep proving they're morons, we just get yet another black eye added to the increasingly embarrassing legacy of modern day Civil Rights heroism.

Emmitt Till is crying inside.

Jena Six Alleged Myspace Photos [KATC3]