On race and racism: A noteworthy reading.

Here is an interesting and noteworthy article excerpted from the Herald Leader for you reading pleasure:

Don't become numb to racism
By William H. Turner

More often than many like to admit, something comes up to remind Americans that our dilemma with race is far from over.

Like hibernating frogs, many of us are dormant and asleep while all about us policies and practices that don't match our democratic ideals about fairness and justice regularly boil over, like an unwatched pot.

The latest illustration of this is the case of the Jena Six, shorthand for the black teenagers in a sleepy Louisiana village who were charged with attempted murder for a schoolyard fight. But what is new about six black boys going to jail in America, what does that all-too-commonplace episode have to do with cooking frogs?

Country people of my generation, like those in the Appalachian backwoods of Harlan County, where I was raised, were taught that the expert and most humane way to cook a frog -- unless one prefers to kill the amphibian outright, slice the legs off and then cook it -- is to place it in a pot of room-temperature water, in which the frog feels right at home. Then, as the frog settles into its comfort zone, increase the water temperature slowly, systematically and incrementally, desensitizing the poor amphibian. In due time, it is on a plate.

Such is the case of the way in which countless numbers of young black males have been consigned to the criminal justice system in America over the past 40 years. Jena Six-like incidents occur so regularly and so systematically that most Americans have become unresponsive and unmoved by the distressed plight of the multitude of helpless and hapless young black men.

Last year, the Dellums Commission reported on the disproportionate number of blacks behind bars. While they were but 6 percent of the U.S. population in 2000, black males made up nearly half of the nation's 2 million prisoners. By comparison, white males are incarcerated at a rate of 649 per 100,000 white males in the population, while black males are incarcerated at a rate of 4,810 per 100,000. Since the 2000 Census, the prison population has increased to 2.2 million, with 56,000 new prisoners added to the ranks last year.

Some attribute this scenario to the last two generations of black males having gone to, or been put to, sleep. They do not live in the world where middle-class values and behaviors -- such as stable family lives, personal responsibility and independence --abound, and neither do they know anybody who has been rewarded for such investments.

Whether these frogs jumped voluntarily into the pot or were thrown or railroaded into it, as the conspiracy theorists argue, the end result is the same.

Or, is it the rest of us who are the cooked frogs? Many of us are smugly and self-righteously insensitive at best, and in outright denial at worst, about racial discrimination, inequality, injustice and prejudice in the American criminal justice system.

Once a year, many gather at the annual compassion celebration known as Martin Luther King Day. The rest of the year, unless O.J. Simpson, Mike Tyson, Michael Vick or some other spoiled black male athlete or celebrity captures the headlines with some deviant or criminal act, we are dead to the world of young black males.

That is why it was so unforeseen and unexpected -- front-page and prime time news -- when so many of all races rallied last month to open the fiery furnace into which these young Americans, the Jena Six, have been thrown.

Sometime, soon I hope, we will see that we are all in the same pot, our destinies inextricably bound together, as King noted.

We had better wake up, or we're all cooked.

William H. Turner holds the National Endowment for the Humanities Chair in Appalachian Studies at Berea College.