The large demonstrations this week in Jena Louisiana, protesting the apparent disproportionate punishment of six African-American high school students for beating up a white fellow student, raise many questions about race and justice in America.  And Mencius can address some of them.

    Several things stand out in this case for me: 1) the black students were initially charged with attempted murder, which seems quite disproportionate, given the circumstances; 2) charges were later reduced to felony assault with a deadly weapon (the weapon in this case was their shoes), which can carry a sentence of up to 20 years or so; 3) the first of the black students to be tried under the felony assault charge had his case vacated by an appellate court because, since he was sixteen at the time, it should have been brought in a juvenile court; he should not have been tried as an adult as he was.

      All of this suggests demonstrates disproportionate treatment, and in the highly charged and now politically mobilized racial context, it appears that the black students were being treated too harshly, perhaps because of their race.

     If Mencius were brought in to judge his case I think he would immediately agree with the appellate court: that the cases should not be tried in adult court. Justice, or redress for bad behavior, is, for Mencius, fundamentally a learning process.  Everyone involved needs to stop, look inside themselves, and ask: am I doing the right thing here?  How can I change my behavior to make the situation better.  A process needs to be created that will turn people toward this sort of thinking.   Harsh punishment will likely not cultivate the self-reflection and learning that is necessary.  Rather, some sort of more engaged and consistent intervention, reaching back to the initial racial tensions surrounding the "white tree," is called for.

     Let’s remember this Mencius quote, which I posted just a couple of days ago in reference to another story:

Mencius
said: “In good years, young men are mostly fine. In bad years they’re mostly cruel and
violent. It isn’t that Heaven endows
them with such different capacities, only that their hearts are mired in such
different situations. Think about
barley: if you plant the seeds carefully at the same time and in the same
place, they’ll sprout and grow ripe by summer solstice. If they don’t grow the same – it’s because of
the inequities in richness of soil, amounts of rainfall, or the care given by
farmers. And so, all members belonging
to a given species of things are the same. Why should humans be the lone exception…(11.7)

     The approach here is not to pull up the barley by the roots or flatten it, but to recognize how the environment shapes its growth and development.

     In cases of juvenile justice, which is what the Jena 6 is all about, Mencius would believe that adults must step up and assume responsibility for the moral education of children.  It is the adults who must show that racial taunting is unacceptable; it is adults who must show, through their own actions, that brandishing weapons (a shotgun was present in one of the events leading up to the ultimate fight) is unacceptable; and it is the adults who must show that violence of any sort is unacceptable.

      The Jena 6 should, from a Mencian point of view, be punished in some manner.  But so should the white students who taunted them.  Felony charges and long prison sentences are counter-productive. All punishments should be geared toward moral learning, not mere retribution.  Perhaps if the white students were compelled to work with black families in need, and the black students were also placed in a situation that would bring them closer to white families, the Humanity of all would be revealed.