After seeing Mellencamp’s recent video regarding racism and the events surrounding the unfair charges brought against the 6 teens in Jena, LA – the Mayor has fired back calling the song and images portrayed in the video derogatory and inflammatory. He also had this to say:
"I do not want to diminish the impression that the hanging of the nooses has had on good people," McMillin wrote. "I do recognized that what happened is insulting and hurtful."
But, he said, "To put the incident in Jena in the same league as those who were murdered in the 1960s cheapens their sacrifice and insults their memory."
That makes me laugh because this is the same guy that "praised the white supremacist groups for staging “counterdemonstrations” in Jena following the September 20th demonstration.
Why is that funny? Because the March on Jena wasn’t a pro-Black demonstration, it was a protest for civil rights, which obviously missed on the Mayor and the Klan or the “brotherhood” or whatever they’re calling themselves these days. So it’s equally funny when the Mayor defends the town of Jena as not being racist, but I’ll humor him for a bit.
Unfortunately – but thankfully Jena has become the birth place this generation’s civil rights movement. The war, events like Jena, the Bush administration and a slew of other issues have roused the sleepy Generation X and Y from their MTV haze and they're taking action. It is recognized that not everyone in Jena; not everyone in the south; not everyone in America is a bigot – but a large part of the population is. Jena draws a spotlight to a larger problem that needs to be addressed. THe justice system is not balanced. We have a long way to go when it comes to race relations. Socially, civil rights is still in it's infancy. That’s the purpose of the song, that’s the purpose of the video. Facing that is uncomfortable for some, but sometimes a dose of the truth is what everybody needs.
