Prof. Judith Cramer, the Educational Technology Specialist at Teachers College, helped craft the wonderful Media Literacy unit for Teaching The Levees. (If you don’t already have a copy of the curriculum, you can download it by clicking here.) Prof. Cramer sends along the following note about a wonderful new resource that has become available online:

Please alert our readers that award-winning comics creator Josh Neufeld is posting chapters of his graphic novel, A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, on the SMITH Magazine web site. Click here to take a look.

At the SMITH site, readers may view the chapters, download them, comment, and find related audio and video files. Neufeld will be known to graphic novel fans as the illustrator of Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor, made into a memorable film featuring Hope Davis, among others. A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge interweaves the true stories of five Katrina survivors, whom Neufeld chose from many prospects. They represent a cross section of the city’s social, economic, racial, ethnic and age groups. At least 10 chapters will appear on the SMITH site, after which another 10 or 12 will be published along with these in print form.

Neufeld says in the interviews that readers’ comments have influenced him already in composing the graphic novel. SMITH Magazine’s motto is “Read a story, tell a story,” so I guess this is an example of how it works.

The “Teaching The Levees” Media Literacy Unit includes several activities related to comics and graphic novels, with examples that include one we created for this purpose. Our comic strip, “Bush Photo Op,” was made with a new software called Comic Life that works with digital photography. This means anyone who can take a picture with a digital camera can create a comic strip. You don’t have to be able to draw like Josh Neufeld! “Bush Photo Op” is available for download by clicking here.

I recommend that our readers take a look at A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, which resembles Spike Lee’s film in several respects. As director Lee has noted, the Katrina narrative is a work in progress, its ultimate meaning in the history of our society, still to be determined. Neufeld’s graphic novel another—very interesting—turn of the prism.

Over the past week, we have reported about the enterprising students in Lori Bush’s AP Government class at the Isidore Newman School in New Orleans and their video segment challenging the results of an investigation into the Army Corps of Engineers – a video that was pulled from YouTube when the American Society of Engineers threatened legal action. (See posts of 11/13 and 11/19). Click here to watch the video.

Teaching The Levees had the opportunity to interview some of the students who made the video and ask them about how the experience has influenced their attitude toward student involvement in civic affairs. Their responses should provide great encouragement to any educator who places a value on educating for active citizenship.

TTL: How did you feel about the video being pulled from YouTube?

Jasmine White: I was upset when the video was pulled from YouTube. The Corps have no proof whatsoever that the video demonstrated libel, but the fact that the Corp was so worried about a high school project meant that they must have felt threatened. I think the video accomplished its purpose of letting America know our reality, which isn’t always broadcast on the news.

Ben Mayer: I feel that it is a good thing. The controversy around the video has created a huge interest in it. People not only want to see the video, they also want to know why the Army Corp of Engineers feels so threatened by it. There is now a greater curiosity around the levees and because of this more people will discover the truth for themselves.

Michael Harris: I felt like the government was abusing its power to stop a grassroots organization for telling the people of America the truth

Arielle Schwartz: At first, when we found out that the video had been pulled off YouTube, I felt like my right to free speech had not been protected. However, now that the PSA has gotten so many more hits on different postings, I feel that having it pulled was the best way to bring attention to the video and its concepts.

TTL: What is your reaction to all the press coverage the video has received in the past few days?

Saisha Chandrasekaran: I am actually glad the issue was raised because the result of it was spreading awareness of the situation in New Orleans regarding the safety of the citizens.

Abby Sartor: Exciting, considering it is a video that we personally worked on and could be potentially be scrutinized nationally, drawing much needed attention to the government’s failure to protect and aide New Orleans.

Michael Harris: This press coverage has been very good for the people of New Orleans because it has shone a new light on our city that is in dire need of help. National interest in the issue here has gone down and this has sparked an interest all over the country.

TTL: How were you personally affected by Katrina?

Rives Cary: Although I was fortunate enough not to accompany the many who were flooded, even lost homes and priceless items, I was greatly affected by the “man-made disaster”. After a decent semester in Houston, Texas, my family moved back to New Orleans. However, my dad did not join my mom, brother, sister, and myself. Post-August 25, 2005, the business my father worked for decided to remain in Houston. While some people now think my parents are divorced because they do not see my dad often, they are actually happily still married. He currently commutes every other weekend, which forced me to assume a different role in the family. I am now the oldest man in the household, which forces me to look after my brother, sister, and mother more than before. While I guess, from a positive outlook you can say it has made me more mature, everyone still misses my dad.

Arielle Schwartz: Katrina flooded my home and affected me in other extremely personal ways. I was removed from my city and home for months at a time. When I moved back there were many people missing from my classes and I lived in a hotel for the remainder of the school year. Now I am back home but my family is still rebuilding and refurnishing our home.

Emily Rigamer: It was an eye-opening experience, and also a humbling one. I saw people all over the country give New Orleanians everything when they themselves had nothing. It introduced me to the real world outside of New Orleans.

Bayley Bash: Katrina had a great effect on my life and my high school career. After the Hurricane I moved to Houston, Texas and finished the school year there. My family had questions about returning to New Orleans and ultimately decided against moving back for the time being. After Katrina I moved four times until finally returning to New Orleans for my senior year. It is great to be back in this wonderful city.

TTL: What do you hope comes out of this experience with the PSA?

Jasmine White: I hope this video forces the government to conduct an 8/29 investigation and improves New Orleans as a whole. I am all about my city because I love New Orleans. I want to go away to college and come back to work in my city, but I want a viable city to come back to. I also hope this video shows the rest of America that we are all not the stereotypical people shown on TV looting and begging for money. We are smart and we just want what is fair.

Rebecca Title: From this video, I of course want the 8/29 investigation and the Corps to come clean about the truth behind the levees. But on a wider range, I want kids around the country to learn that their voice can be heard. Out government class, consisting of twenty kids along with our teacher Mrs. Bush, found an issue that really affects us and that we feel strongly about and decided to make a difference. Through this video, our voices were heard as well as our frustration. I think that if this happened more often then there would be less corruption in the government and we would all be better off.

Bayley Bash: At first, I just thought this video was going to be a fun, educating activity that would be passed over on YouTube. However, the excitement caused by the events going on with the video is uncontrollable. It is amazing to know that we, as students, can make a difference. I hope this video spreads nationally, so that people will be reminded of the troubles we are still having in New Orleans.

Abby Sartor: I hope that ASCE challenges Levees.org to the point where the video is circulated nationally and becomes part of a larger fight against inept government policies.

Michael Harris: I hope this is just one more stepping stone on the way towards achieving an 8/29 commission from the government.

TTL: Has this experience influenced your attitudes toward getting involved in public affairs?

Rebecca Title: Through this video I have gained a new respect for activists. To fight the government and public officials is not an easy fight; however, it is a necessary one. This video has given everyone involved a sense of pride. To say that you were a part of a YouTube video that has had thousands of hits and is getting bigger by the second is a huge accomplishment. Because of this video, in the future I would definitely get involved in issues that I feel strongly about. If people don’t get involved and state their opinions then no one will and our government will end up running us, and we need to run our government.

Ben Mayer: This experience has shown me how much power an organized group of citizens can wield. With the help of technology we were able to get out a significant issue to a huge number of people. If ever faced with an issue of similar significance, I know that I can get out a message and that this message will be heard.

Arielle Schwartz: This has been a positive experience on my involvement in public affairs. I see the power that a small grassroots organization can have on a large national basis. I have no fear that people have the power to make, or try to make, changes on a bigger level.

Bayley Bash: AP Government in general has greatly influenced my attitudes toward getting involved in public affairs. This experience through Levees.org has only furthered my desire to become greatly involved. I have learned that we, as students and citizens of America, do have a say in government. I am excited for the years to come where I can get involved throughout our community, making a difference throughout our country.

NOTE: Stay tuned for an interview with the students in Lori Bush’s AP Government class, which will be posted on this site on Wednesday.

Never underestimate the power of students.

Last Tuesday, we posted a blog about the enterprising students at the Isidore Newman School in New Orleans who made a one-minute video about the investigation into the Army Corps of Engineers’ responsibility for the failure of the city’s levees in 2005. Like the students themselves, we woke up Wednesday morning to find out that the video — which had become a bit of a hit on YouTube — had been taken down by Levees.org, the organization that had posted it and had worked with the students to create the spot.

(If you haven’t yet seen this very brief but entertaining video clip yet — proof of the old pedagogical adage that “less is more,” if such proof were needed — click here to watch it before reading the rest of this blog.)

It turns out that Sandy Rosenthal, Executive Director of Levees.org, pulled the video after receiving a “Cease and Desist” letter from the in-house counsel of the American Society of Civil Engineers. The ASCE believes the video falsely accuses it of taking bribes to hand-pick members of an investigatory group that concluded that the levee failure played only a minimal role in the flooding that took place after Katrina. The ASCE threatened “appropriate legal action” if the PSA was not taken down. It seems the video had, to say the least, touched a nerve.

In her blog on Levees.org, Rosenthal explained that her group did not have the time or money to spend defending a legal action, so the video was removed. But she insisted that “We stand behind every word of our PSA.”

The story, of course, does not end there. The New Orleans Times-Picayune got word of what had happened and plastered it across its front page Wednesday morning. Among other things, the story confirmed that the ASCE has lauched an internal ethics probe of its members who issued the controversial Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force (IPET) report. Local TV news stations were all over the story, as well. The students in Lori Bush’s AP Government class who shot the video got to spend Friday morning watching tapes of those stories and discussing the impact they were having on efforts to launch further investigations into the Army Corps of Engineers.

“We had a wonderful class today!” Ms. Bush told Teaching The Levees. “I was able to show the students clips of their PSA from the local news last night, show them the coverage of their project on your website, and then review Times v. Sullivan, which supports their project and their freedom to voice their concerns about a federal agency publicly!”

The Times-Picayune took the further step of reposting the video on YouTube as “Controversial Levee Video,” to help its readers make sense of the story. So much for the ASCE’s legal threat to silence the students. As Rosenthal notes on her blog, “It appears the Cease and Desist order from the ASCE has actually caused more attention to the video than before… In two days, the video has been viewed over 11,000 times and garnered 20 honors including #1 most viewed video in the Non-Profit section.” Add that to the nearly 30,000 viewers who had already seen the video before it was pulled by levees.org.

The bottom line here is the accountability of the Army Corps of Engineers — and the ability of ordinary citizens, in this case high school students, to increase public awareness of the issue. The main goal of Levees.org is to force a federal investigation into the Corps and the failure of the levees along the lines of the 9-11 Commission. Nothing in the recent past has done more to highlight questions about the Corps’ responsibility than this little episode with the student-made video.

Bush’s students made the video in a single school day after meeting and with Levees.org. (Rosenthal’s son Stanford attends Newman, an independent school that has been around more than a century.) Many of the 20 students in her class appear in the video, along with faculty members who enthusiastically volunteered to appear as the “students” behind the desk in the video. Bush says the actors include the school librarian, who has been at Newman for over 40 years.

Bush — who lost her home near the 17th St. Levee and found her entire neighborhood under 10 feet of water after Katrina — uses her two AP Government classes not only to teach students about how the government works, but to promote active citizenship. She teaches two sections of the course, and each is partnered with a local non-profit group.

“When working on the AP Audit for my AP U.S. Government and Politics course, I was looking for an interesting way to help my students understand the importance of citizen action,” she told Teaching The Levees. “As a former policy analyst, I thought working with a local non-profit would help them see how citizens can shape the decisions that affect our daily lives. I have two AP Government classes, so each teamed with a non-partisan interest group. My first period partnered with Levees.org and my 3rd period partnered with Agenda for Children, a local child advocacy agency. Through this partnership, they will study the role interest groups play in government activity, study and analyze legislation that affects the constituents and mission of their organization, and finally, in the spring, they will write legislation that will benefit their organization.

“Levees.org was selected as one of our partner organizations because the levee failure has impacted the lives of all of the students in my class. Regardless of their party affiliation, they all feel strongly that the federal government should be held accountable for the levee failures in New Orleans. My goal is to move them from feeling something needs to happen, to understanding that there are opportunities for them to make the change they wish to see.”

On Wednesday, we will hear from the students themselves about exactly what they’ve learned about those opportunities from their experience with the YouTube video.

While When The Levees Broke focuses primarily on the impact of Katrina on New Orleans, emergency physician Ben Marble reminds us in the film that Katrina actually made a direct hit along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, which as a result sustained some of the worst damage. (Dr. Marble, you will recall, is the young man who confronted Dick Cheney with a choice phrase during the Vice President’s tour of hurricane damage; see Act III, Chapter 2, “Polarized”.)

Tonight at 9 pm ET on PBS, Bill Moyers reminds us all that Mississippi – despite having a Republican governor with close ties to the Bush Administration – is struggling too in its post-Katrina recovery. Not surprisingly, Moyers reports, it is the poor people of the state who are facing the most obstacles to returning to their homes, even as casinos and commercial development are quickly re-appearing.

Moyers’ report focuses on the Steps Coalition, which is tracking how federal recovery money is spent, and has noted some interesting paths that money has taken. The Coalition explains that although Gov. Haley Barbour was given $3 billion earmarked for housing for lower income families, he was also given wide discretion in exactly where the money would go. The result is that 14,000 Mississippi families are still living in FEMA trailers, even as newly-rebuilt Gulf Coast casinos are attracting record numbers of visitors.

“We had an affordable housing crisis before the storm,” Steps Coalition Executive Director Melinda Harthcock tells Moyers. “Corporations were importing workers. Developers were filling in wetlands. And basically, our quality of life was tanking before the storm. But things were happening so slowly that few noticed the danger. Katrina dramatically accelerated everything.”

Moyers’ report also focuses on the results of a study issued by the Rand Corporation in late September on “Post-Katrina Recovery of the Housing Market Along the Mississippi Gulf Coast.” That report notes, among other things, that recovery has been slower for multi-family housing than for single-family units, and that coastal Mississippi, like New Orleans, now faces an acute shortage of affordable rental units.

Bill Moyers Journal airs tonight (Friday Nov. 16) at 9 pm. Click here for a complete description of tonight’s program. Check your local listings or the PBS website for times in your area. As with most PBS programming, educators are allowed to tape the program for classroom use.

NOTE: This video was removed from YouTube Wednesday by Levees.org after a legal threat from the American Society of Civil Engineers, which claimed it inaccurately portrayed their investigation of the failure of the New Orleans levees. Click here to read a news account of the ASCE’s reaction to the video. You can watch the original video clip, which has been reposted on YouTube entitled “Controversial Levee Video” by clicking here.

If you’re wondering what kind of Katrina-related projects your students can become involved with that will have an impact beyond your classroom, check out the student-made video above (just click on the arrow to play).This short clip was produced as a Public Service Announcement for the New Orleans-based advocacy group Levees.org, which has been lobbying for a 9/11-style federal investigation into the Army Corps of Engineers and the failure of the levees after Katrina. The group enlisted the aid of Lori Bush, who teaches Advanced Placement U.S. Government at the Isidore Newman School in New Orleans, where Stanford Rosenthal, son of Levees.org’s founder Sandy Rosenthal, attends school. Bush’s students helped write the script and appear in the video, which has become something of a hit on YouTube. Debuting a week ago, it has already been viewed nearly 30,000 times and generated more than 200 comments.

The students “felt disempowered after the storm,” Bush told the New Orleans Times-Picayune. “This was an effort for them to see civic action firsthand.”

Teachers don’t often view YouTube as a forum for educational efforts, but the highly entertaining clip produced by these students hints at the possibilities. Most high school students these days spend a fair amount of spare time navigating the video-sharing site; encouraging them to produce videos that are both entertaining and contain a larger message may well be a very productive pedagogical undertaking. Even encouraging students to comb YouTube for information about Katrina may prove educationally valuable. There are already dozens of different short videos now posted on the site relating to Katrina — some of them produced by students, some produced produced professionally by advocacy groups — but most of them making important information about public issues easily accessible to students. (Check out, for example, the short video “Children of the Storm,” which was shot as part of an after-school program that introduced New Orleans students to video production. Or check out this short clip on efforts to start a Farmer’s Market in the Ninth Ward.)

Levees.org is a grassroots organization that has spearheaded a campaign to hold the Army Corps accountable for the failure of the levees and promote awareness of flood control issues throughout the nation. In addition to producing a number of Public Service Announcements featuring such celebrities as Harry Shearer and John Goodman, they also encourage active civic engagement through a letter-writing campaign and petition drive. Their website includes a variety of downloads, flyers and factsheets that can go a long way toward encouraging students to become actively involved in these issues.

The team here at “Teaching The Levees” would like to to extend an open invitation to all social studies teachers (and anyone else who may be interested) to attend our presentation at the upcoming National Council for the Social Studies Annual Conference in San Diego.

We’ll be offering an exciting multi-media presentation, “Teaching The Levees: Stimulating Democratic Dialogues on Race and Class,” on Friday morning (Nov. 30) at 11:30. (Check the NCSS program booklet for the location). We’ll be offering an overview of the “Teaching The Levees” curriculum, walk you through several of the lessons, and provide you with plenty of handouts and teaching materials that you can use in your own classrooms. We’d love to meet you and hear your comments and suggestions about the curriculum, and be avaiable to answer any questions you may have.

Presenters will include several faculty members from Teachers College, Columbia University, who played an instrumental role in writing the “Teaching The Levees” curriculum, including Prof. Margaret Smith Crocco, who anchored the entire effort and serves as Coordinator of the Social Studies Program here at TC.. Associate Professor William Gaudelli III and Assistant Professor Anand Marri, both of whom teach Social Studies and Education at TC, will also be on hand, as will Anthony Cocciolo, Technology Director for the Gottesman Libraries at TC, who has helped develop the “Teaching The Levees” website. As one of the curriculum writers and blog writer for this website, I’ll be there as well, and hope to get a lot of constructive feedback from you about the blog and website.

We’d also like to invite you to a special screening of portions of When The Levees Broke during the conference’s International Film Festival Saturday night (Dec. 1) at 7 p.m. Not only will you be able to watch some of the film, but you’ll have the chance to meet the award-winning co-director, Sam Pollard, who has collaborated with Spike Lee on several films and shared in the recent Emmy awarded to When The Levees Broke for Exceptional Merit in Non-Fiction Filmmaking. (Note: you will need a ticket to attend the Film Festival; check your program or contact NCSS for more information.)

All of us at “Teaching The Levees” are excited about the upcoming NCSS conference, and look forward to getting the chance to meet you and share ideas. See you there!

If you think the news photos at right look an awful lot like the pictures of New Orleans after Katrina, you are not alone. They are not, of course, from New Orleans, but were taken in the last few days in the southeastern state of Tabasco in Mexico, which has experienced one of the worst floods in that nation’s history. The state capital, Villahermosa, was completely under water; upwards of a million people have been left homeless. The death toll so far is very low, although it more than doubled yesterday when a mudslide in a village 45 miles away swallowed 16 people.  But it is still unclear how many bodies will be found as the flood waters recede, or whether or not residents will face grave health risks in the aftermath of the storm. The latest news report indicate that at least 20,000 people still remain trapped on rooftops or in remote areas still inacessible to authorities. 

For all that, the Mexico floods seem to have been little more than a blip in the U.S. media. Last night at 6, I watched the BBC World News (it is carried by many PBS stations), which devoted several minutes to the situation in Tabasco, as it has every night for the past week, and reminded viewers that the floods have destroyed half a million homes and affected an area the size of Belgium. At 6:30, I switched to ABC World News, which came and went without mention of the Mexico floods. If we hear much about the floods in the coming weeks, it’s more likely the coverage will focus on what the storm did to Mexico’s oil industry than what it did to its people.

The paucity of coverage in the U.S. media shouldn’t be all that surprising. Every time an Atlantic hurricane misses the U.S., the coverage tends to emphasize more that “we were spared” by the storm rather than focusing on the often devastating effects on the people of Haiti or Cuba or St. Croix. (It’s the same mentality that forces every reporter, within 30 seconds of relating a plane crash halfway around the world, to let us know exactly how many Americans were on the plane, as if somehow American lives matter more than those of others.) Mexico, of course, is a country that shares a large common border with the United States and does billions of dollars of business with us a year.  Mexicans build our cars and ship us their oil. Yet for all the attention its people get from us (at least the people who don’t try to come to the United States), it might as well be halfway around the world.

This relative lack of attention to the Mexico floods could make a wonderful starting point for a discussion of cosmpolitanism — the notion that we are really citizens of a single world community rather than of one particular nation — in the classroom. You may wish to use excerpts from Kwame Anthony Appiah’s influential book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. Or if you need something a bit more concise, click here to read Martha Nussbaum’s 1994 essay, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” in which she asks educators to consider the role of national identity in today’s world:

 As students here grow up, is it sufficient for them to learn that they are above all citizens of the United States, but that they ought to respect the basic human rights of citizens of India, Bolivia, Nigeria, and Norway? Or should they, as I think — in addition to giving special attention to the history and current situation of their own nation — learn a good deal more than is frequently the case about the rest of the world in which they live, about India and Bolivia and Nigeria and Norway and their histories, problems, and comparative successes? Should they learn only that citizens of India have equal basic human rights, or should they also learn about the problems of hunger and pollution in India, and the implications of these problems for larger problems of global hunger and global ecology? Most important, should they be taught that they are above all citizens of the United States, or should they instead be taught that they are above all citizens of a world of human beings, and that, while they themselves happen to be situated in the United States, they have to share this world of human beings with the citizens of other countries?

Appiah and Nussbaum’s views are not without controversy, of course, but as with most controversial subjects, it is the avoidance of asking the hard questions that does more harm than having these questions answered in any particular way.  And certainly one of the hardest questions facing us today is whether or not we can afford — morally, politically, economically – to ignore the world outside our national borders.   

There are other many other ways in which the Tabasco floods can be addressed in classrooms, as well.  Like the recent California wildfires, the Mexico floods offer a wonderful “teachable moment” in which students can draw parallels between these disasters and Katrina (see blog of October 30), and compare the respective government responses. The headline in yesterday’s edition of the British newspaper the Independent stated that “Mexico Faces Aftermath of its Own Katrina.” Villahermosa is roughly the same size as New Orleans (its pre-storm population was close to 750,000; New Orleans had just about 500,000 residents before Katrina hit); like New Orleans, Villahermosa sits on a river (the Grijalva) that has a long history of flooding.  Both Katrina and the Villahermosa floods occurred when levees protecting the cities failed.

It remains to be seen how well the Mexican government will handle the expected shortage of food and drinking water and massive sanitation problems, not to mention the catastrophic damage to most of the crops in what is largely an agricultural region. And, already, there have been strong criticisms of the government’s early response, including the charge that too few soldiers were available to help flood victims because most of Mexico’s army was stationed elsewhere fighting the “drug war.” (Sound familiar?)  Students may want to consider how expectations for government responsibility differ in the United States and in other countries that may not have access to the same level of resources.

Interestingly enough, Tabasco lies just north of the Mexican state of Chiapas, which was also hit heavily in these floods and has a long history of political unrest. Chiapas, which is inhabited mainly by poor Native American farmers, is the seat of the anti-globalization Zapatista movement, which has staged several uprisings in recent decades and actually controls several towns.  In the United States, Katrina may have spawned widespread criticism of the government, but it did little to undermine the nation’s stability.  That may well not happen in Mexico, either, but it will be fascinating to watch how the government handles the situation in the coming weeks and months, and whether or not the people of Mexico are satisfied with that response.

Does Jena have anything to do with Katrina – apart from the serendipitous rhyme?

In recent months, the highly-publicized “Jena 6” case has become a prominent symbol of the apparently disparate treatment African-American and white Americans receive in this country. The case centers around what happened after several white students hung nooses from a tree known as “the white tree” at the high school in Jena, Louisiana, a tiny town more than 200 miles from New Orleans, in August, 2006. The incident led to a number of fights, culminating in one in which a white student was beaten at school by six black students. The “Jena Six” — including 16-year-old Mychal Bell, who was tried as an adult — were arrested and charged with attempted second-degree murder. The case sparked a massive civil rights rally in Jena this past September, in which participants expressed outrage at what they believe were excessively-harsh charges filed against the black teens, while the white teens who hung the noose received only relatively lenient disciplinary action at school. (For a detailed account of the case, click here.)

So at a very basic level, Jena certainly mirrors the concerns raised in the aftermath of the poor government response to Katrina that there are still two separate and unequal Americas, that our government views and treats its black citizens differently from white citizens. It’s a concern mirrored by the Genarlow Wilson case (see blog of October 26, “Justice Overdue,” and a brief follow-up, below) and countless other incidents that receive far less media attention.

But as Indiana University education professor Russell Skiba astutely points out in a piece on the Teachers College Record website, the Jena case illustrates a deep divide between blacks and whites about whether we are even willing to acknowledge and discuss the possibility that there are “two Americas.” Skiba writes:

When it comes to the deeply polarizing topic of race, differences in perspective may be the norm. From Rodney King to O. J. Simpson to Hurricane Katrina, it has become apparent that the color of our skin, or rather the history and experiences that skin color conditions for each of us, leads us to interpret issues of race very differently. In the wake of the Katrina disaster, an ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 63% of blacks, but only 25% of whites, saw the failed rescue efforts in New Orleans as a sign of racial inequality. Americans are even more divided over the Jena case, with 79% of blacks, but only 33% of whites, believing that the black teenagers in Jena were treated unfairly.

Skiba goes on to say that “these differences in perspective extend even to the willingness to broach the topic of race.” He ponders why Americans seem to have such a hard time broaching the topic of race, and notes that when he asks his black and white graduate students this question, they often offer different explanations: white students attribute it to anxiety about “saying the wrong thing,” while black students often see it as an intentional avoidance of a subject that may force them to give up some of their power and privilege.

“It is impossible to say who was right,” Skiba notes, “but clearly silence on the topic of race begets, maintains, and compounds misunderstanding and distrust.” (Skiba makes many excellent points and his piece should be required reading for anyone discussing Jena in his or her classroom. A link to the full text of the article, “Small Town, Big Issues: What the Jena Six Case Says about the American Racial Divide,” has been posted on the “Professional Development” link on this website (at right).  Or you can click here to read it.)

That last point is one that can’t be made often enough; no matter how difficult, we have a moral obligation as educators to bring it up as often as we can.  And that is the essential link between Jena and Katrina: whether we end up believing they were ultimately about race or not, we cannot as a nation afford to avoid the conversation. 

*      *      *

After the release of Genarlow Wilson (see post of October 26, “Justice Overdue,”) CNN aired a fascinating interview with the parents of another Georgia boy, Marcus Dixon, who faced an ordeal similar to Wilson’s.  Dixon was convicted of aggravated child molestation in 2004 under the same Georgia law as Wilson, in his case for having sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend, who was white. (The girl denied that she was Dixon’s girlfriend, and told police that she barely knew Dixon and that he had forced her to have sex while she was still a virgin.) Like Wilson, Dixon was a good student (he had been offered a full scholarship to Vanderbilt University) who ended up doing a significant chunk of time in a Georgia prison. And, as in Wilson’s case, it took the Georgia Supreme Court to get the conviction overturned.

On the heels of Wilson’s release, CNN interviewed Dixon’s legal guardians, Peri and Ken Jones – who happen to be white. Both stated unequivocally that they believed Dixon’s prosecution was entirely about race.

“Race was the reason the story was told. Race was the reason it was believed. Race was the reason that he was prosecuted the way he was so severely,” Peri Jones told CNN’s Rick Sanchez.

“I have two sons: one is white, one is black,” Jones continued. “If the allegations had been brought against my white son, we would have never been there. That would never have happened.”

Sanchez asked Jones if she thought this type of racism was prominent in Georgia. Her response, like Russell Skiba’s piece, seemed to hit the nail squarely on the head:

“I think it’s so subtle that most white people can’t see it. I think, you know, black people know. They don’t talk about it a whole lot. They know it. But if you raise a black son, you see it. You know it. And black boys are treated different than white boys in the judicial system. They just are. And I don’t think people come out and intentionally do it. I think the people that are doing it, if you ask them if they were prejudiced, they would tell you they’re not.”