Okay, that's fixed

The cable modem had to be reset. On to blogging...

What is it with all the nooses popping up in the news? Are people really thinking this is a joke? That it's funny? Is it a bunch of copycats because other stories have been in the news? What? Here's what's going on, as detailed in one of the latest stories:

Hangman's Noose Targets Columbia Professor

• A noose is found on the door of a female black professor at the premier education graduate study programme in the country, at Teachers College at Columbia University.
  
  
• There's the highly publicised story of the Jena 6, sparked off by the hanging of nooses in a tree at a high school in Jena, La. (For the record I thought the white students involved with the nooses should have been expelled, not had in-school suspensions, and the black students involved in the beating of a white student should have been charged in juvenile court with assault and battery, or whatever is the equivalent in the Napoleonic system of law in Louisiana). The beating was obviously the most serious offence, though--I'm not sure I agree wholly with the marchers who protested, who seemed to be downplaying the seriousness of the assault on someone whom as far as I could tell from news reports, wasn't connected to the noose incident. Also, I think whenever Al Sharpton gets involved in a case, it becomes more about publicity than the issues. But that's just my opinion.
  
  
• A noose was found in September hanging outside a black cultural studies centre on the University of Maryland campus.
  
  
• Teachers at an elementary school run by Grambling State University decided to explain the Jena 6 story by using nooses on children and re-enacting hangings. Bad idea, although the lesson will probably remain with those kids their entire lives. It's up there with the case in sociology we always studied where they explained Nazism to elementary kids by sanctioning and treating children differently based on eye colour over the course of several days. Psychological manipulation of students isn't really encouraged these days, especially among the very young.
  
  
• At a high school at Gallaudet University seven students (including one who was black) assaulted a black student and scrawled "KKK" and swastikas all over his body with a marker.
  
  
• At the Coast Guard Academy two small nooses were found inside the sea bag of a black cadet aboard a tall ship.
  
  
• A construction worker at a Home Depot building site in Illinois found a noose made of foam packing material. Later a racial slur was found spray painted on the site.
  

Also, not noose-connected per se, but signs of racial tensions:

• An editor and editorial cartoonist at the Kentucky Kernel at the University of Kentucky apologised after a cartoon linking fraternities and sororities with a slave auction was protested.
  
  
• At a Pennsylvania High School three minority students, one Latino, one black, and one biracial were verbally attacked with racial slurs and wadded up paper was thrown at them outside the school right before classes began. Rumours were rampant that the white students would be bringing guns and staring a riot at the school.

In the multiracial, global sort of world we live in, I'd like to think we'd learnt a thing or two from the past. I'd like to think this is just stupidity in action, or the product of minds who don't get the significance of what they're doing. The most blatant racism I ever encountered (and I grew up primarily in the Deep South) was in a small town in Kansas that didn't have any minorities in it until an Asian family set up a restaurant. A teacher who'd been through the race riots in her native Detroit tried to put a stop to a lot of the jokes and attitudes she heard about blacks. But part of the problem was ignorance because they had never interacted with anyone different from themselves. (Okay, I did also encounter it in California, where I was beaten up and threatened by Latina and black girls, but that might be because I was an insufferable know-it-all with a Louisiana accent rather than my skin colour. But I tell you what--I lost the Southern accent. One incident also comes from something I unwittingly said in admiration that I now recognise was mistaken for a racial slur. In my innocence I complimented a black girl for her athletic ability (see, budding bisexual) and I was in my horsey-girly phase at the time and the only athlete I could think of was a jockey. It never occurred to me that those little plaster men they have in the front yards through much of Kentucky--almost all of which I'd seen were white--were called lawn jockeys and were primarily black. I lived in terror of that girl for weeks and I didn't understand fully what she'd thought I'd said until I was in my 30s and heard someone make the reference.)

Back to my point...nooses, uncool, folks. Use them and expect to be prosecuted or expelled. They're not just an unpleasant symbol, they can be construed as a death threat. I won't say every one is meant to convey that. We don't know all the circumstances to these cases. The professor, for example, is involved in a lawsuit with another party. Was it related to that? A disgruntled student? Someone wanting to stir up controversy--white or black? Who knows?

What is good to see is that there are plenty of people out there who protested these cases, making sure their voices of tolerance were heard. But it also shows that racist ideas still fester, although they may not be so overt to lead to lynchings--the ideas are still there. I only hope they will not explode to violence after all that simmering, especially as we become a society with more 'minorities' than the supposed majority. If you listen to whites, they feel marginalised and as if their culture is being pushed aside for everyone else's. In some ways that's true, in others it isn't. But something's going to give.

And compromise isn't always the way to take it, even though we may want to walk a moderate path. Look at the tensions between Turkey and the US over the Armenian issue. There are those who say there should be no resolution on the Armenian genocide--and make no mistake, by the definitions created the 20th century in the wake of the Nazis and other forms of 'racial cleansings', it was, indeed, genocide--because it will affect Middle Eastern peace. The Armenian question is also a sticking point with Turkey and the European Union.

The thing is, though, while we shouldn't necessarily be blamed with what our forebears did, we need to recognise that it happened. The Germans were complicitous with the attempted extermination of the Jews. Serbs tried to eradicate Croats. The Khmer Rouge killed many Cambodians. And Europeans both decimated the American Indian population and bought and sold (and in some cases, killed) people whose ancestors were brought here as slaves from Africa. The US put Japanese-Americans into internment camps, saying they'd collaborate with the enemy. Likewise, the Turks displaced and massacred the Armenians, saying they were aiding the Russians during WWI. History has known this for years. The West was aware of it at the time it was happening--like so many other genocides. But the Turkish government continues the denial.

Racial matters are never (no pun intended) merely black or white. They're messy and complicated. But if we work together, maybe we can make things a little better for our children, and their children.