A Lesson In Stupidity

Teachers at the Alma J. Brown Elementary School decided that the only way for kindergarten and first grade students’ to truly understand racism is to have a noose around their little necks.

On Sept. 20, 2007, the same day of the national protest march for the Jena Six, teachers decided to hold their own march to support the six black males accused of beating a white male by having the young students circle their playground.

Alma J. Brown Elementary School is located on the campus of Grambling State University, in Grambling, La. Pictures of the event were taken by the university’s newspaper, The Gramblinite.

“(One picture shows) a young girl in a school uniform being held up by a woman while someone else, mostly hidden by a tree, holds a noose around her neck and up to a branch,” reported FOX News.

Thankfully, these teachers had enough sense to not tie the noose to the tree itself. The president of the university is having a full investigation into the matter. But the point is, why would anyone in his or hers right mind think it would be a great way to teach young children about racism by placing a noose around their necks?

Heaven forbid if one of these kids gets the idea of doing the same thing when there are no adults around. After all, these are little kids who really don’t understand the concept of mortality. These teachers should be fired over this.

We should all be grateful the teachers didn’t tie two baseball bats together to form a cross and set them on fire.

Another concern that is just as dangerous, but certainly nowhere as deadly, is the lesson these educators were trying to teach the children about the Jena Six case. It hasn’t been reported on what exactly was taught to them but there has been a lot of unreported information about the Jena Six that many adults are not even aware of. For example:

• There was an all white jury for Mychal Bell’s trial. But what you will have a hard time discovering is that out of the 150 people summoned for jury duty, only 50 people showed up, none of them were black, however.
• And Bell's court-appointed black public defender, Blane Williams, really dropped the ball by not challenging the jury pool, or for not calling any defense witnesses and he urged the teenager to take a plea deal.
• And both black and white students were playing with the three nooses on a tree in Jena High School, which many have stated started the recent racial tensions.

These facts, and others, certainly paint a very different picture than what has been reported. Of course, that doesn’t excuse the nooses placed on the tree and hateful people like Richard Barrett, the founder for the white supremacist group the Nationalist Movement, doesn’t help matters by having a counter demonstration during the Jena Six march.

If the children really need to be taught racism at such a young age, even though they may not fully understand it, let’s hope they learn the most important lesson of all: There are both good and bad people out there in all colors and sexes.