[L-I] [Fwd: [lbo-talk] sex across the color line]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [lbo-talk] sex across the color line
Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2004 12:43:10 -0500
From: Doug Henwood <[email protected]>
Reply-To: [email protected]
To: lbo-talk <[email protected]>


<http://www.blackcommentator.com/71/71_wise_sex.html>

"Sex across the Color Line"
by Tim Wise

This is the story of a real American tragedy. The kind they make movies
about.

The victim - and let there be no mistake that is the only word that fits
here - is Marcus Dixon: a young man who was an 'A' student in high
school, a member of the National Honor Society, one of the best
defensive football players in the United States, who scored above a 1200
on his SAT, and had signed a letter of intent to attend Vanderbilt
University as a student-athlete in the most complete sense of the word.
And yet today, Marcus Dixon sits in a prison cell in Georgia, staring at
a 10-year sentence, because - and let there be no mistake about this
either - Marcus Dixon is black, and that makes all the difference.

Barring a reversal of his sentence by the state Supreme Court, Dixon,
who lived in Rome, Georgia, about an hour northwest of Atlanta (but
farther away than that, one suspects, in cultural terms), is going to
spend the next decade of his life in prison for having consensual sex
with a white girl. That is not a misprint and it is not a matter of
opinion. That is ultimately why he was expelled from school, why his
scholarship was rescinded, and why he may not see freedom until the age
of 28.

Though Dixon was accused of raping the young woman in question, a jury
of nine whites and three blacks took all of 20 minutes to dispense with
the charge, as absurd as it obviously was. The Rome District Attorney
had brought the case to trial based on the claim of the supposed victim,
but was soundly undone by witnesses who said the girl had admitted the
sex between she and Dixon had been consensual. Apparently she feared
that her father, a virulent racist, would kill both Dixon and herself if
he learned that she had willingly slept with a black guy. So she changed
her story, but not before undercutting her own credibility, and not
before re-enacting one of the longest-standing Southern traditions on
record: that of a white female falsely claiming to have been raped by a
black man in order to save face with daddy.

It's a tradition that speaks to the way sexism and racism have long
interacted: white men in this case, maintaining their own domination of
white women by rigidly circumscribing the sexual freedom of the latter
in explicitly racial terms, thereby hoping to keep blacks in line as
well as their own daughters, wives and sisters.

Like I said, it took 20 minutes to throw out the rape charge; so at
least that much has changed about the South. Needless to say it would
have taken fewer than that to lynch Marcus Dixon 100 years ago - so good
for us; we have become a little more civilized it appears.

Or maybe not.

Because civilization, after all, is a relative concept. And when
expectations rise about how civilized people are supposed to treat
others, the fact that they proceed to be dashed in a manner slightly
less bloody than might once have been the case is little comfort to the
injured.

And at the end of the day, the jury was still forced to convict Dixon on
the lesser-included charge of aggravated child molestation - yes, child
molestation - because at the time of the consensual sex he had just
turned 18 and the female in question was 2 years and 7 months his
junior, making him eligible for prosecution under Georgia's Child
Protection Act, which makes any sex between such persons a felony.

The Act's author is adamant that his legislation was not intended to
punish willing sex between teenagers, but to the Rome D.A. it matters
little. Neither does he seem to find it worthy of comment that no other
teens in Georgia have ever been prosecuted under this law, despite the
almost certain likelihood that somewhere, as I write this, the law is
being broken by several couples up and down the length of the Peach
State, including somewhere in his jurisdiction.

That such a charge would never have been brought against a white boy who
had engaged in consensual sex with the same girl is so obvious as to be
totally unworthy of further discussion or debate. Likewise, had Marcus
Dixon had sex with a black girl instead of one who is white, he would be
sitting in a dorm room a few minutes drive from my house right now, and
not in a prison cell.

But Marcus Dixon violated one of the oldest taboos in the book, which
contrary to popular belief has not yet been expunged from the heart of
Dixie, or the larger national consciousness in many ways. Marcus Dixon,
not unlike, say, Strom Thurmond, crossed the sexual color line. But very
much unlike Ol' Strom, has the misfortune of being on the darker side of
that line, thereby lacking the power to keep his activities secret.

By acquiring carnal knowledge of a representative of so-called southern
virtue, however willing said flower may have been, Dixon crossed the
line in a way almost guaranteed to bring about his doom.

The saddest fact of all being that he likely had no clue as to the risk
he was taking, no idea of the racial minefield onto which he had
stepped.

Which sadly brings us to an important if under-appreciated aspect of
this case; one that in part explains why Marcus Dixon was likely not to
fully understand, despite his genuine intelligence, the danger of his
tryst. Namely, Marcus was being raised by white parents, or at least
white guardians, who all but legally adopted him at the age of eleven,
thereby we are told "saving" him from a dysfunctional home environment.

But Ken and Peri Jones, for all their love, and for all their
"stability" were profoundly unprepared to raise a black male child in
this country. Many black parents aren't prepared either - after all, how
can one ever be fully ready for all the traps and snares that remain in
the path of African Americans even at this late date - but at least they
know the drill.

They're less likely to be blindsided by the racism of white people,
having learned to expect it long ago.

At least they aren't silly enough to think that love is all it takes to
raise a child into a healthy adult.

At least they would have warned Marcus; warned him that to be black, and
male, and 6'5" and 265 pounds, is to be the walking, talking embodiment
of white anxiety; it is to trigger every known stereotype in the book:
stereotypes that trump the straight-A grades and render utterly moot the
SAT score, because they are the kinds of lies that are more powerful
than truth, merely because they are believed by people for whom truth
means little and power everything.

Don't misunderstand. I'm not suggesting the Joneses were wrong to take
Marcus in. Nor am I saying that white parents should never adopt or
become guardians for black children or other children of color. I am
only saying that before white parents decide to "rescue" black and brown
children from homes they consider dysfunctional (and which may well be),
perhaps they could take a moment to consider their own dysfunction: the
kind that doesn't manifest itself in terms of poverty or daily
neighborhood violence perhaps, but which manifests as ignorance, as a
Pollyanna-like optimism about the power of love alone, and an uncritical
trust in America - the kind most people of color long ago learned to
temper with caution.

For while Marcus Dixon is first and foremost a victim of an overzealous
prosecutor playing to white fears, and a racist father of the girl with
whom he had sex, he is also the victim of white naivete and good
intentions.

Yes, the Joneses are good people, who on balance did a good thing by
taking Dixon in at a time when his mom seemed unprepared to raise him,
and his father wanted nothing to do with him. They may well have saved
his life; they surely improved it. But by virtue of their own innocence,
and I use that term in only its most ironic sense here, they put this
child at risk in a way that his black family likely would not have.

They seemed to honestly believe that people were more decent and the
society in which they lived more decent than they, or it, really were
and are. That kind of preciousness is bad enough when parents allow it
to blind them to the problems of their white children, but at least then
it isn't likely to end in those children's destruction. However, for a
black child to be raised amidst that kind of cheery naivet is to play
fast and loose with his or her life. At the very least it teeters on the
brink of neglect.

It would be comical were it not so insidious. Consider how truly amazed
the Joneses seem to have been when Kenneth's own mother moved out of
their home in disgust at their decision to take Marcus in, and when his
brother virtually disowned him because of his dislike for any form of
"racial mixing."

Or how Peri couldn't believe it when a longtime family friend said,
after the charges were made against Marcus, that raping white girls was
"just what niggers do," and suggested that the Joneses shouldn't be
surprised. "I didn't know she felt that way," Peri lamented in a recent
television interview.

Now this is stunning, even in a society whose majority is fairly
characterized as infantile in their understanding of race and its
meaning. I mean, let us really reflect for just a second on the subtext
of such wide-eyed amazement, indicating as it does that at no point in
their longstanding friendship with this person had they apparently ever
discussed matters of race - a remarkable if unintentional admission of
the magnitude of white privilege, which privilege renders the issue of
race and racism utterly off the radar screens of members of the dominant
group.

The Joneses and their white friends have been able to go through their
whole lives never thinking about race, in a way that no black person
could possibly do, and in a way that Marcus, for his own protection
needed desperately not to mimic. Yet their assumption that race wasn't
an issue - for their friends, for their community, for their own family
- was completely without foundation, as they now realize perhaps a bit
too late.

Or maybe they still don't fully realize it. Ken, for his part, doesn't
appear ready to say that racism has anything to do with Marcus's
predicament. When asked the question directly he merely says "I have no
idea of what is going on." Truer words have never been spoken. Nor,
given the circumstances, will we often hear words more heartbreaking.

Yet behind that truth and heartbreak lay a lesson, if only we are
prepared to grasp it. A lesson for Ken and Peri Jones, for white America
more broadly, and specifically for all the nice, open-minded, loving
white parents out there who are adopting or thinking of adopting
children of color. Parents who are rushing off to China, or Korea, or
South America, or the 'hood closest to their own hometown, trying to
fulfill their own desires for a child, and also give a kid a good home
who otherwise might not have one.

It is a lesson about how much they have to learn, and how little they
know at present.

Perhaps they will now understand that to raise their black or brown
child the same way they raise their white children, if they have them,
or as they would raise a white child if they did, is to set in motion a
process that may well end in tragedy. It is to ill-prepare those
children of color for the real world; a world in which they will too
often not be treated like their white siblings; a world in which they
will too often not be as warmly accepted by some family members or
neighbors, or teachers, or cops. And all because of race, which thing is
not a card dear friends, (oh, if only it were that simple and
insignificant) but rather the whole deck. Don't get it twisted.

No, not every black child raised by whites will fall victim to the kind
of institutional evil that has descended upon the life of Marcus Dixon
like fog on a cool Georgia morning. Not every black child raised by
white parents will face the kind of viciousness to which he has been
subjected. Many, indeed, will thrive. But that is not the point.

What most assuredly is the point is that so long as whites continue to
wallow in our ignorance, continue to believe in the principle of
color-blindness (which almost always means being blind to the
consequences of color even when those are profound), continue to believe
that our neighbors, our families, our colleagues and our countrymen
place higher priority on justice than on the color of their skin, we and
any persons of color whose lives we touch will be at risk. So long as we
are allowed to exercise the privilege of cross-racial adoption without
proving that we know anything about racism and how that poison might now
destroy our newly-interracial home, we will be setting the brown-skinned
objects of our affection up for a fall.

And please note that here I am not speaking of the importance of
something we famously call "cultural competence." It is most certainly
not sufficient to show that one has read a book about Kwanzaa, or bought
some Miles Davis CDs, or learned how to cook Hoppin' John, or purchased
some African artifacts, the meaning of which one doesn't even
comprehend, or filled one's closet with Kente.

For the culture white folks so desperately need to understand, if we are
going to have any constructive interactions with black people, let alone
raise them in our homes, is our own; not the ways of black folks but the
ways of white folks, for it is the latter and not the former that will
pose the danger to our black and brown friends, colleagues, or in this
case, children.

Had the Joneses understood the ways of the white folks in charge of the
justice system, even on a local level, there is no way Peri would have
advised Marcus to be cooperative with police and "tell them anything
they wanted to know," even without an attorney in the room. Few black
parents would have told their black male child, suspected of raping a
white girl, to do such a thing, and precisely because they would
understand the intrinsic danger of the lamb trying to make nice with the
wolves who have encircled it.

Indeed, it was in those early discussions that Dixon, fully aware of the
racism of his sex partner's father, initially denied even knowing the
girl, let alone having sex with her. When he later told the truth he
was, in effect, snaring himself in a lie, thereby making his story seem
less credible to a DA already likely predisposed to thinking the worst.
It's a mistake he wouldn't have had the chance to make had he been
taught a bit of self-defensive cynicism - the kind rarely practiced by
those who can afford the luxury of thinking the system is fair and just,
but which comes as second nature to those who can't.

Had the Joneses truly appreciated the ways of white folks, and
especially the ways in which sexual predator stereotypes push so many
buttons for so many whites still today, then they could have given
Marcus the kind of lessons at home that he was not likely to receive in
school.

After all, for Marcus to receive that 'A' he got in history class, he no
doubt had to memorize a lot of dates: like 1776, and 1787, and 1863. The
one he needed to know, however, was 1955.

For in truth, Marcus Dixon's life and those of other black men like him
have never hinged on whether they knew the correct year of the American
Revolution, the passage of the Constitution, or even the Emancipation
Proclamation. But his life (and little did he know it) most definitely
did hinge on whether he knew the year when Emmett Till was murdered. And
more than the year, the reason for which his body was thrown off a
bridge, into the Tallahatchie River, weighted down by a 75-pound cotton
gin fan tied tightly around Till's neck.

One suspects that the Joneses never told Marcus Dixon about Emmett Till,
about how he was murdered because he said "bye baby" to a white woman
behind the counter of a store in the heart of the Mississippi Reich.
Perhaps they don't know the story themselves. Many white folks don't.

And needless to say Till's story wasn't likely to have been prominently
featured in any American history class that Dixon might have taken. Not
in Rome, Georgia, where probably more than most places American history
is a collection of triumphalist narratives about the greatness of the
country in which its students live.

Dixon's 'A' in the class signifies that he must have learned well the
glories of the nation into which he was born, and he must have
regurgitated those glories upon demand for his teachers. But like most
American high school students, Dixon was taught a lie. That he is now
paying for that lie with his freedom, if not his life, is merely the
latest obscenity in a state, in a region, in an empire that views the
lives of black people as expendable.

Unless the lies and phony innocence stop, however, it is unlikely to be
the last.

Tim Wise is an antiracist essayist, activist and father. He can be
reached at <[email protected]>

...possible courses of action re: the previous outrage.

below are two weblinks about the case with sections about what people
can do. Among those things is a petition, though it was not clear to
whom the petition is being sent, ultimately.

http://www.actforjustice.com/

http://www.helpmarcus.com/

My suggestion, and what I am recommending to people is that they write
to the Governor of Georgia, using the information from the two websites
I mentioned re: the facts of the case, demanding that he grant executive
clemency if the Supreme Court fails to overturn the conviction/sentence,
or that he grants a full pardon if Marcus is released, so that the
"crime" would be expunged from his record.

Gov. Sonny Perdue can be reached at:

http://www.gov.state.ga.us/document.asp?doc=contacts

where you can fill out a message and send it to him

or

The Honorable Sonny Perdue
Governor
State of Georgia
203 State Capitol
Atlanta, Georgia 30334

404-656-1776


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