The prosecution of six young black anti-racist high school students in Jena, Louisiana—collectively know as the Jena 6—challenges the idea that the war in Afghanistan is good while the war in Iraq is unjust.

If you don’t know about the Jena 6 case you can find info here.

The war in Afghanistan is supposed to be the just war where the US overthrew a terrorist regime and is building democracy. But what democracy could the US possibly be exporting to Afghanistan if what's happening in Jena is part of the US "justice" system?

In Jena, among many incidents, a racist white high school student pulled a shotgun on several of his black pupils. The black students wrestled the gun away from him but later police arrested one of the black students, Robert Bailey, Jr., for theft of a firearm, second-degree robbery, and disturbing the peace. The white student who pulled the shotgun in the first place was not charged.

Can any war abroad be just when this passes for justice at home?

The racist students, police, and courts in Jena are not some isolated backward southern racists left over from the reconstruction of the civil war. Just look at what's "normal":

• The dozens of unarmed men murdered by US police every year are overwhelming black and latino.
• Harassment, detention, and deportation of Arabs and Muslims has increased since 9/11.
• Homeland security raids and the Minutemen and terrorize working class latinos.
• The US has the highest number and proportion of its citizens in jails or prisons and more than 70% are black or latino.
• In New Orleans hundreds of thousands of residents, mainly black, are being actively discouraged from rebuilding and returning to the city while 100,000 were left to die.
• Just last week in Palmdale, CA school security guards pummeled a young black high school student, Pleajhai Mervin, to the ground, broke her wrist, and later had her arrested for not picking up crumbs off the cake she had spilled and picked up off the floor (story and video here).

If murder, unjust imprisonment, torture (mainly in prisons), and humiliation of blacks and latinos are a systemic occurrence in the US; if over 2 million Iraqi people have been killed by the two US wars and the US/UK backed sanctions; then how can Afghanistan be an exception to the systemic murder, torture, occupation and racism?

Recently, even the President of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai has recently reprimanded U.S.and NATO forces for their apparent disregard for Afghan civilian life. Haji, the racist term the US military uses to call Iraqis, was actually first used by US forces in Afghanistan before the war in Iraq. Still, many consider the US/NATO occupation of Afghanistan justified.

The way I look at it, wars abroad is nothing but the war at home exported. And it’s no wonder that blacks are leading resistance against both wars by going AWOL and avoiding recruitment in higher numbers than any other racial group. There’s no reason to fight for freedom abroad when there’s no freedom at home.

Activists including IVAW often see the connections between racism at home and racist wars of exploitation—a.k.a. imperialism—but in practice we remain divided.

IVAW, like the big anti-war marches, is disproportionately white and the Jena 6 rally on September 4th was mainly black. We could do a whole lot more to consider Jena 6 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of the same struggle against injustice. All are part of racist terror and to defeat imperialism and racism the oppressed have to stand united. Having more IVAW members participating in and leading anti-racist marches, forums, film screenings, and conferences would help encourage more resistors of color to the ranks of IVAW.