My wife asked me the other day why I haven't had anything to say about what's been going on in Jena, Louisiana.

"YOU are from the south and YOU have an opinion about everything else on this earth," she said ... kind of emphatically, too, I might add.
"So how come you're one of the only folks not talking about this?"

Opinion about everything else on earth?
Well, that's going a little too far. Although I do have a lot to say about a lot of things.
But I did get her point.

What's happening in Jena ... racism raising its ugly head to come front and center stage in America yet once again ... is a bigger crime than what both the white and black kids did there to fuel the issue in the first place.

To briefly recap:
*Black kids ask Jena High School principal if they, too, can sit under a tree that has customarily been where only white students sat in the past.
*Principal says yes.
*Black kids sit under tree.
*White kids hang nooses from tree the next day.
*Trio of them admit hanging nooses as prank and are suspended from school for three days.
*Group of black kids later have chance encounter off campus with one of the perpetrators.
*Fight ensues (Note: Black kids say they were provoked because white kid called them "niggers").
*White kid beaten badly. Goes to emergency room. Released three hours later.
*Six black kids arrested. Charged with attempted 2nd degree murder (Say what?).
*Five later released. One ... Mychal Bell ... remains in custody for 10 months with no bond, charged as an adult because he was identified as person who was most violent during the attack.
*America's black community outraged.
*50,000 people, all dressed in black, descend on Jena (pop. 2,971) for protest march.
*Days later, charges against Bell reduced. He is released on bond.

I haven't had anything to say about Jena up to this point for a lot of reasons.
Particularly because I am from the south, I did grow up around serious racial hatred in Alabama where some people even lost their lives and ... quite frankly ... because Jena invoked so much disgust and anger inside me that I literally wanted to grab somebody by the throat myself.

My daddy taught me a long time ago, that when you get that angry about something ... as I am about Jena ... you need to take your ass somewhere and sit down before you or somebody else gets hurt.

But, my wife was right.
What folks like nationally syndicated radio host Michael Baisden, Rev. Al Sharpton and other African Americans did to send a peaceful but powerful message to people in Jena was something that had to be talked about.  

Typically, some white American's whom I'm truly convinced do want racism to go away always either say there is no racism in this country anymore or (and I love this one) it's a lot better than it used to be.

News flash!:
Not only does racism still exist in America ... and is thriving in places like Jena ... but I'm not quite so sure this country's handling it any better than it did in the 60's.

Nothing .... Repeat: N-O-T-H-I-N-G ... will ever change where racism is concerned in this country until the entire dynamics of the racial phenomena America was built on becomes so important to society that it's actually taught in our schools.

I heard a white man in Jena being interviewed on television who said:
"There's no racial tension in Jena. White people and black people here get along just fine."

I'm sure he did an in-depth survey of all the blacks in Jena before reaching that conclusion, too.

Let me translate what the gentleman was really saying, as it was meant when said this same way in the 60's: "Our black folks here know their place."

And, sadly, too many black people in rural Southern towns like Jena do indeed know their places because the racists who run those towns still run them the way they want to ...hidden from the public eye and oblivious to changes that have taken place in other, larger cities.

From elementary school to college ... from Jena to Chicago ...  racism needs to be adroitly taught and intelligently discussed as a structured class to help both blacks and whites understand where it came from and why it has survived for all these years.

It's also important that it be taught now more than ever as several other diverse cultures migrate into our society, and are themselves targets for racial hatred that had previously been between just blacks and whites. 

Instead of burying our heads in the sand, Americans must come to grips with the fact that racism is part of this country's history and ... sadly ... part of its future, too.

It ain't going nowhere.

Teaching kids about it and how to deal with it isn't a bad thing ... it's a smart thing.

(Darron Patterson is an award-winning freelance journalist based in Detroit and President of WriteStuf Communications, LLC ... www.writestuf.com)