Their Noose, Our Noose
September 27, 2007
If you don’t think there’s a noose that will fit around an innocent Asian American’s head, you’re sadly mistaken.
At least one Asian American of Filipino descent has told me it has happened right here in San Francisco.
That’s how strong the hate has been historically in this country toward people of color. All people of color.
That’s always in the back of my mind as I read the recent news updates from Jena, La., where six black students (the so-called “Jena 6”) were accused of beating a white classmate unconscious.
More than a school fight, the story has generated interest because the black students were charged with attempted murder. A tad excessive? Of course. Five of six of the defendants had the charges greatly reduced, and the sixth had his conviction for aggressive battery thrown out last week because he was tried as an adult.
But that miscarriage of justice wasn’t the reason that 10,000 protestors, a new generation of civil rights activists, converged on the town last week.
They were there because of the emotional power of the noose.
Before the school fight in Jena, some students hung nooses on a shade tree, known as the “white” tree, on campus – as in “whites only.”
The nooses were a symbol for blacks in the predominately white town to stay away. Hanging trees are a sad part of America’s race history.
But were the nooses and the fight in Jena linked in some way? Could it have contributed to what started the fight? You couldn’t tell by how punishment was meted out. The black kids got the book thrown at them.
The pranksters got suspended for a few days.
Prosecutor Reed Walters said in an op-ed in The New York Times that he saw the fight and the noose incidents as separate and unrelated.
Prelude to a hate crime? What hate crime?
Here’s Walters in The Times about the display of nooses in question: “It broke no law. I searched the Louisiana criminal code for a crime that I could prosecute. There is none.
Similarly, the United States attorney for the Western District of Louisiana, who is African American, found no federal law against what was done.”
That makes it sound like he’s got the support of the black community, which of course, he does not.
But the absence of a stronger hate crime law in his state gives Walters a false high horse to ride.
He wrote: “A district attorney cannot take people to trial for acts not covered in the statutes.
Imagine the trampling of individual rights that would occur if prosecutors were allowed to pursue every person whose behavior they disapproved of.”
Well, it does happen every day. The only difference here is that some people may still actually believe in the symbol of the noose. Unless a noose is specifically outlawed, I suppose Walters is just happy to be doing the “people’s business.”
Bring on the protestors, and rightly so.
But Walters’ kind of thinking does expose the real weakness of hate crime laws in general. In most cases, they are used as “enhancements” in sentences. Is that enough?
Hate crime laws never quite seem to get across to perpetrators and the general public that historical symbols like a noose can trigger real fear and intimidation in the hearts and minds of people of color.
But the technicalities of hate crime statutes have always seemed to prevent real justice from taking place. In the end, they are too often meaningless to render a satisfying resolution. In Jena, they certainly fail to offset the vile memories that come from a noose.
A Filipino Lynched
The Jena case reminded me of one Asian American of Filipino descent, the son of a Filipino immigrant from the ’20s, who recalled a lynching in San Francisco.
It indicated the kind of hate Filipino Americans felt here in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s. It was a time of extreme racism toward Filipino American males who were brought over by the thousands to provide labor in California at the time. They created a cock-of-the-walk bachelor society, attracting the attention of the native women and the scorn of the native men.
That in turn created trouble, which made a lynching quite plausible.
The fact that there was no newspaper account or public record doesn’t mean a thing.
If there are shootings and killings no one hears about today, what can we expect of a time when Filipino Americans were considered the lowest of the low?
They’re all plausible because the hate in California in those times, like the most racist times in the Deep South, was real.
My source stands by his memory 100 percent. In the end, I simply choose to trust his powerful memory of the noose.
Comments
3 Responses to “Their Noose, Our Noose”
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Actually the fact that there was no newspaper account of this lynching, which despite your claim would have been rather unusual for 20th century SF, means everything. You choose to believe your source because his story conforms to your own preconceived notion of history. As for the so-called Jena six, you excuse the racially motivated ambush and beat-down of a white student who had nothing to do with the noose incident. But then, you once wrote that you “knew in your heart” that mass murderer Chai Vang didn’t fire the first shot in his stand off with the white hunters in Wisconsin so apparently violence against whites by people of color is always excusable.
Emil,
When I read this article, the phrase, shameless travesty of an Asian comes to mind. You’re commentary is a lopsided, misinformed and starkly racist.
Without the Eurocentric forebearers of this nation, there would not be the America of today.
What a shame that newspapers publish this stuff.
-FE
Well, I don’t see where your article is racist…I just don’t see why it’s necessary. I totally believe things hate crimes happen to Asians nowadays that don’t get any attention. What I don’t understand is why some Asians 1) feel the need to compare their experiences to blacks when they are not exactly on the same commonality/intensity level, and 2) oftentimes when Asians try to point to instances of injustices against Asians they always go back into history. To me, that’s like how Jewish and other ethnic European white people try to justify feelings of not fitting in today or somehow being disadvantaged by pointing to the past. I was not aware that the noose incites fear in “people of color” or was directed at–particularly nowadays, although I’m aware it was a bit different in the past–”people of color”…just black people. And you can bet that most of the time, when a noose or a KKK outfit is put in plain sight now, the message is really for black people, not anybody else–though with the issue of immigration becoming more important, things might go back to how they were. So I just view an article like this as someone really just not getting it, almost to the point of diminishing the amount of hatred that exists towards blacks or trying to augment/draw attention to any hatred that has ever existed towards Asians at the expense of blacks. I just think Asians should focus more on the issues they face today instead of going back in time so much and looking like they’re trying to one-up or stay tit-for-tat with every sob story blacks can pull out. The Jena case is not about you today.