Word: jena
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...black people just stop whining and get with the program?” It allows race relations to be solely a black issue, and not a national issue—it’s the reason why the vast majority of people who care enough to march down to Jena, La. to protest racially motivated injustice are black. The more white people see themselves as the rational and intelligent ones here, and black people as the opposite, the more it reeks of the superior beliefs that are the hallmark of racism...
...character. With a bristly face and a slightly ironic tone, Hirsch might have the angry post-grad down better than Jake Gyllenhaal. Sean Penn, directing his fifth feature film, likely used some of his celebrity muscle to pull in supporting cast members Vince Vaughn, William Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden, Jena Malone, and Catherine Keener. Like Hirsch, most of the actors play against type. For example, Hurt portrays an abusive husband, and funny-man Vaughn is a mundane grain farmer. Like something out of an IMAX movie, the sweeping shots of natural vistas in the film are breathtaking, heightening the rawness...
Last Thursday, 10,000 civil rights activists from across the country rallied in Jena, La. to protest and commemorate events that occurred in and around the local high school. A series of racially-motivated altercations culminated in a cafeteria brawl in December 2006. The victim, a white student who allegedly taunted the black students with racial slurs, was hospitalized but released a few hours later and attended a party that evening. The defendants, six black minors, were arrested and charged with second-degree murder...
They’ve become known as the Jena...
Though many of the facts of the situation are still unclear, the final violence in Jena seems to stem from an incident in August 2006 in which white students placed nooses on a schoolyard tree after black students had the audacity to sit under it. The fact that neither the local prosecutor nor the federal district attorney could find statutes that such an dastardly and hate-filled act of intimidation violated points to a major problem with federal and local hate crime statutes...