I'm starting to realize that I have no place in this great big white world.

On June 21, 2005, a jury found Edgar Ray Killen guilty of manslaughter in the deaths of the three young civil rights workers who disappeared exactly forty-one years prior in Philadelphia, Mississippi. In the deaths of Andrew Goodman, 20, James Earl Chaney, 21, and Michael Schwerner, 24, the eighty year old Killen was sentenced to sixty years in prison today, the maximum twenty year sentence for each manslaughter conviction. Supposedly, this can now bring justice, peace, and closure to an otherwise bloody stain upon the history an sacred honor of the South.

I am not impressed.

This latest of the Southern 'atonement trials' can perform no other task in my opinion, but justify the continued smugness and unceasing pride White liberals have in a criminal justice system that works, a day late and a dollar short, to prosecute the most stunning examples of White supremacist anti-heroism while the real antagonists to American racial harmony go unpunished, and often assume the highest offices in the land. George W. Bush, serving as Governor of Texas, presides over the state-sponsored murder of 134 men, and is considered a stalwart champion of law and order - so much so that as President of the United States, he orchestrates an unjust, illegal war against a sovereign nation that never attacked the United States of America that causes the deaths of over 1500 American servicemen and thousands of Iraqi citizens, while he wraps himself in the virtues of conservative Christianity and the so-called 'culture of life'. In our bizarro world, Terri Schiavo's life means more than anyone who perishes from hyperbolic, unchecked capitalism (read: poverty, there is no trickle down prosperity), readily spreading acquired immune deficiency syndrome, ever-expanding drug and gang crime, first and secondhand smoke, etc. But don't be alarmed fellow citizens, because Edgar Ray Killen, former Klansman, is guilty!

So Edgar Ray Killen is going to jail. This aged, weak, wheelchair bound man with green oxygen tubes dangling from his nose shall now enjoy his earthly twilight behind bars. I wonder, as property of the state, will the taxpayers of Mississippi have to pay Killen's hospital bills? Didn't anyone consider this before convicting him of manslaughter?

Manslaughter. Manslaughter! Are they joking? James McIntyre, one of Mr. Killen's lawyers, was quoted in The New York Times saying, "At least he wasn't found guilty of a willful and wanton act. Manslaughter is a negligent act." Jurors were reported as wanting to convict Killen of murder, but lacking the evidence to do so. With so many witnesses dead and people's memories fading, this case ends on a bittersweet note for me. We don't need another show trial in America to make the general public feel better about their individual capitalist drudgery. Instead of a media lynching as was apparent in the Michael Jackson trial, the Killen verdict and sentencing emerges as nothing more than an excuse for White people in general and White liberals in particular to feel better about their own modern prejudices. While riding the Metro-North from White Plains to Grand Central Station yesterday morning, I spied several middle-aged, balding, bespectacled White professionals and businessmen in grey or blue or black Brooks Brothers suits with I-Pod earphones dangling from their clean shaven, hygienic faces reading newspaper articles about the Killen case, with smiles, frowns, and everything in between. True, I don't know what these men were thinking, and I don't care. It really doesn't matter. The articles about the 'K-K-Killer!" octogenarian were all written with an air of barely controlled relief. America, better late than never, has punished the bad man who stole our innocence away. Problem solved. Racism is dead. God Bless America. The entire sorry episode appears nothing more than one general collective appeal to discard race animosity as a overused, impotent cliche, a immature, ill-evolved throwback without parallel in modern America. For the Metro-North, Killen's conviction is the final triumph of Northeastern White liberalism over the openly patriarchal, unapologetic race and sex and class stratification of the defeated Confederacy, retarded by its own insistence upon difference. In short, racism no longer exists, so the only racists left are elderly, sickly, disease-riddled bigots, aged Archie Bunkers whose angry rhetoric no one need listen to, and who separate-and-unequal ideals the world has passed by.

And yet, without a decent suit, fresh haircut, and total foot-shuffling silence, I appear out of place on this technoorganic transport to metropolitan marvels. Women clutch purses, eye me suspiciously. Men regard me with open contempt if I interrupt their activities to secure an open seat. All expect me to stand and depart at the Harlem-125th St. stop. I am not Ralph Ellison's nameless protagonist, nor am I invisible. To exist in the Metro-North, one has no choice but to recognize and catalogue and interrogate open social contradiction; the alternative is to embrace a race/sex/class naivete that can quite frankly get one killed. One trusts the 'Good Samaritanism' of the average New Yorker at one's own peril. Hell, the false consciousness contradiction of mainstream White happiness over Killen's conviction in the 'Mississippi Burning' case is enough to make the entire realm suspect. Remember, Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were lynched in a South unenthused about equal social and political and economic rights between the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners. Today, the South is still unenthused about such equality, and rushes to atone for its former sins without reflection upon its current ones. No one gets away clean from this tragedy; the entire reason this case gained national attention in 1964 was because two young White men died. Had James Earl Cheney drove solo that night, this nation would never have cared.

Part of my vitriol over Killen's conviction stems from the modern liberal double standard over the value of human life in America. Black men are lynched all over the former Confederacy, but suddenly in 1964, (several years after the first failures to pass anti-lynching legislation through Congress) this lynching is problematic because idealistic White college students are getting caught in the crossfire. Today, every missing persons case promoted in the national media has a White female face attached to it. No one gives a damn about lost minorities. (Eugene Robinson wrote a masterful op-ed on that subject, check it out here.) I'm so sick of every new Chandra Levy, or Laci Peterson, or Jennifer Wilbanks holding the nation's collective consciousness by the throat as White America trembles with fear over its lost Victorian virtue. What we should do is have every White American female implanted with a subdermal global positioning system implant, right under the left labia majora and connected to a multi-billion dollar computerized location and identification network, replete with state-of-the-art satellites, computer mainframes, and a cadre of elite FBI agents trained to be the perfect bloodhounds, so that the federal government can protect little White girls from getting themselves 'lost'. Sure, it's a total invasion of personal privacy, an obvious affront to civil liberties, and all around weird, but if its good enough for convicted sex offenders and child molesters, it should keep the blond, the beautiful, and the brainless from getting lost in Aruba.

Hell, if you interpret the Terri Schiavo tragicomedy as another White Girl Lost case, the psychedelic Congressional imposition upon the judicial branch headed by Grand Old Party stalwarts makes perfect sense - A Republican 'coalition of the willing' was told of a pretty little White girl who was stolen away by (if you believe some Right-to-Life hysteria) the dubious actions of an evil White man with a handlebar mustache named Michael "Sauron" Schiavo, one dark night, roughly fifteen years ago. The wizard doctors could not find her, as Dark Lord Michael Sauron hid the distressed damsel within her own unhealthy brain. At first, not knowing his true intentions, the girl's family and fellow townspeople worked with Dark Lord Michael Sauron to secure for her the best medical care. However, when the years passed and she didn't completely awake from her mental prison, the family and townspeople revolted, angered that Dark Lord Michael Sauron has united with the corrupt wizard Judge Saruman Greer the White to eliminate through the removal of a nutrient tube the damsel Terri Schiavo. Ongoing battles and skirmishes between the people and the two towers occur over several years, all coming to a nauseating, elongated, two-week deathwatch a few months back, when the Schiavo family recruited their own Fellowship of the Tube to battle the Dark Lord, including Frodo Jeb Bush, George W. Aragorn, the angry dwarf Rep. Tom Gimli (R-TX), activist Randall Legolas Terry, and a special appearance by Rev. Jesse Gandalf Jackson the Black. All this for one White girl who ruled them all.

Maybe Tolkien himself wrote that phantom memo discussing the electoral benefits of supporting radical right-wing 'culture of life' craziness that emerged from Sen. Mel Martinez's office during the national Schiavo psychosis; maybe Peter Jackson directed the cinematography when Bible-beating White families got themselves and their children arrested trying to import cups of water into Terri Schiavo's hospice room, but the autoposy made Schiavo's then-disputed condition abundantly clear for all concerned. The woman was without consciousness and/or any hope for recovery, merely existing in a persistent vegetative state. Under Florida law (and the many court cases that upheld these statutes) Michael Schiavo was legally responsible for carrying out her wishes. The point? Only the lives of White people seem to matter in a nation that prides itself on it's own tolerant racial harmony. President Bush himself signed a similar Texas law that allowed for the cessation of life in cases where no medical treatment available could assist a terminally ill patient (an example being the return of a person in a persistent vegetative state to normal consciousness). This law was carried out against an African American family on March 15, 2005 without any media coverage or Christian Right fanfare. In the end, one can argue that every case, just like every person, is different, yet deserving of equal respect and tolerance. And one can kid themselves. I honestly believe that today's mainstream White American earnestly desires and works toward racial harmony, no matter how conservative. Educated or not, politically savvy or not, Americans of all hues and colors attempt to respect and care for one another. Human beings are like that.

The problems emerge because everyone and every group desires racial harmony on their terms alone. For some professional, educated, upwardly mobile African American women, racial harmony only matters if they can both excel in the careers of their choice and marry the handsome, articulate, educated, professional, upwardly mobile African American man of their choice. Interracial relationships between Pierre Delacroix and (insert random Julia Roberts wannabe here) do not appeal to the SuperSista's ideal of race harmony, as her personal desires for Black matrimony and maternity are quite compromised. What good is racial harmony in corporate America if the exceptional, efficient, and consistently profitable Lebanese-American stockbroker is continually passed over for promotion because of post-911 fears of Arabic men? American racial harmony emerges as a meaningless ideal if the tolerance equilibrium presented allows African Americans living in major metropolitan areas like Washington D.C. to become infected by HIV/AIDS at ten times the rates of Whites and other groups. Are Asian American men supposed to enjoy an American racial harmony that continually presents them as the meek, mild-mannered mechanical animals of grey corporate cubicles and white hospital wards everywhere, always displayed as the medical or technological superiority, yet never shown as sensual or sexual in any sense? Should the Mexican American enjoy a racial harmony that depicts his people as the consistent dregs of society, only good for robbing hardworking Americans of manufacturing and agricultural work without American citizenship?

If we enjoy anything close to racial harmony in the United States of America, this harmony does not benefit the majority of Americans. Rather, it keeps wry smiles on the Old Spice technocrats who surround me, and promotes racial security for a ruling class smug in the knowledge that since they haven't murdered any civil rights workers today, they can't possibly be racist. Meanwhile, since I'm not yet drained of my color, any Jamie Foxx scared negro fear I display is no more than collateral damage they need not care about.

Oh, wait... here's my stop.