White School Board Member in Jena Says District Attorney Reed Walters Prevented the Board from Seeing School's Internal Investig

Excuse me, but what you term exploitation by African anti-racism activists is entirely unfair.  You cannot divorce 400 hundred years of oppression and genocide from what you might deem acceptable responses to institutional ethnic/racial bias.  Unlike Europeans in this country, Africans have had to fight tooth and nail to go to school, to find employment that matches their skills and unlike Europeans who willingly abandoned their respective national cultures to some degree, Africans do not know their names, their languages or their cultures.  If an African person tells you that perhaps it was better to remain seperate, try seeing it from her perspective rather than the perspective you are traditionally accustomed to.

You say your family has had no hand in America's ugly side of history and practise.  Did you ever ask yourself as a White person if you have a responsibility to acknowledge that you reside on land stolen by force from more than 500 Aboriginal nations via genocide?  Or that you are a direct beneficiary of the British colonial push to free itself from the English crown financed by African slavery?  Most White people do not, but that does not in any way change the fact that in order for America to be what is, other people, not Europeans mind you, were used, abused and killed off to make this world possible for you.  And when we were made a part of this society against our will, (do the research, no one ever asked either Aboriginals or Africans if we wanted to be a part of the new United States) we were, and are, marginalised into sections of society deemed reasonable by the majority population that held, and continues to covet near-total administrative power.

Tom van B. is correct in his analysis and he has enough intelligence to apply the history of New Zealand to this case which is fair.  The Maori, the Aboriginal population of NZ still suffers from the damages of European encroachment into their country and Tom applied that history to the Jena situation.  Unlike the U.S., NZ has made more of an effort to address the Maori issue and White racism in general in that country.  Is NZ perfect? No.  But they have made a much greater effort than the U.S.  NZ has no organised White racist terror groups like the Ku Klux Klan, nor has NZ has a history of randomly grabbing Maori off the street and hanging them from trees.  Maori men and women were not beaten like dogs in the street for trying to vote.  Attack dogs were set upon women and children trying to go to school in the U.S., not NZ.  If the United States can claim a high moral ground and demean other nations for what it calls crimes against humanity, New Zealanders can also look at the U.S. and call it what it is, a moral hypocrite.

Try looking at the Jewish question.  When the Nazis were tried at Nuremberg, the American justice in the Tribunal was Robert H. Jackson who said that the nations sitting in judgement of the Germans were just as liable as they were for such conduct.  While he was sitting in judgement of European minority genocide, Indian genocide in the United States as well as the extra-legal kilings of civil rights activists in the north as well as the south were occuring while he and the other justices present handed down their decisions.  To date, Swiss banks and other businesses connected to the European holocaust are still paying victims adn their relatives, many of which never even seen a Nazi death camp.  And the fact that the world watched these people, not just Jews, be rounded up and murdered led morally to the League of Nations "giving" the British Mandate in Palestine to Jewish Europeans who used Zionist terrorism to force the hand of the British as well as the American governments to give them the land.  The result?  The refugee Jewish population which has not resided in Palestine since 70 C.E. was accorded the State of Israel and brutal genocide of the Arab population began and continues today.  No one in "respectable" circles seems to find any of this disturbingly paradoxical.  If these people were given "permission" by the world community to find their own way on their own solid politcal and territorial base, it is only fair to acknowledge that Africans and especially Aborignals in this country who have bled, fought and died for European freedoms in America should be accorded to the very same freedom to define their own liberation.

While you focus of the school fight, try focusing on the message sent by three nooses painted in the school's official colours under a tree African students had to ask permission of the principal to sit or stand under in what is supposedly the most liberal nation on Earth that led to teh confrontation in the first place.  Unless you or yours have faced that sort of disempowering and threatening violence, it is easy to sit within the comfortable confines of White privilege and say that this observer from NZ hasn't got the entire story.  Unlike most Americans, outsiders see America for what it really is, a huge mass of obvious confusions and contradictions.  And if White America is at all serious about real change, then the entire truth, no matter how unpleasant it is for Whte people, must be told and taught to all.  Accurately and without reservation.  South Africa did it, what is stopping the United States from creating its own truth commission?  Instead, we have a nation that got up in arms because an American president was willing to stand up and officially apologise for African slavery.  Pretending that what happened and happens did and does not occur is not an acceptable close to this ongoing story.