Experience, not rhetoric
By Brandon Astor Jones
"Forty-four percent of Black teens who date said they [have] dated a White. Thirty-eight percent said they [have] dated a Hispanic, although, in this country, Whites overwhelmingly outnumber Hispanics. Only 17 percent of White teens who date have dated Asians ... Blacks outnumber Asians in this country nearly 4 to 1." — Jet magazine
I am reminded that 45 years ago (at age nine), I sold Jet from one seat to another aboard Chicago's subway system. At that time it was the only black pocket-size news magazine in the United States.
A lot has changed since then, due, in large part, to progressive actions of black and white youth. But a good deal more has stayed the same with regard to race and racism. Indeed, some things have become worse, but in far more subtle ways than in times past. More often than not you have to be a person of colour to see and understand.
After absorbing Jet's statistics on the dating habits of US teens, taken from a USA Today Gallup poll, I opened a letter that had just been handed to me. In that letter there was also a portion of the Australian Financial Review's October 10 issue. The article, entitled "Race and marriage", is yet another by a (well-intentioned) white man who thinks things are progressing well in race relations in the US.
Steve Sailer's article left me feeling that, no matter how inadvertently, most white journalists cannot write about racial issues without reducing a portion of racism's victims to culprits. It is as if there is an unwritten law that forbids some of them from writing about racism's true perpetrators.
Appropriately enough, his article begins by detailing the indignity suffered by the late and esteemed African-American jurist Thurgood Marshall and his Asian wife as they searched for "their dream house in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C., but could not lawfully live together in the State" because of the miscegenation law that forbade marriage or cohabitation between white and non-white persons.
Sailer wrote further, "Fortunately for the Marshalls, in January 1967 the Supreme Court struck down the anti-interracial-marriage laws in Virginia and 18 other States". I agree that it was fortunate, but as Sailer's text unfolds, it digresses into the mire of misplacing blame in a manner that is so indicative of white men who write on the subject of race in the US. I will comment about that later.
Throughout Sailer's text, the underlying theme suggests that things are much better today than they were 30 years ago. That simply is not true.
As I sit in this Georgia prison cell, I am sadly reminded that in the neighbouring state of South Carolina, at this very moment, there is a law that bans interracial marriage; according to the Independent-Mail newspaper (of Anderson, South Carolina), it reads: "The marriage of a white person with a negro or mulatto, or person who shall have one-eighth or more of negro blood, shall be unlawful and void".
While the previously mentioned 1967 ruling renders that South Carolina law unenforceable, the sad fact that it is still on the books bespeaks how deeply hate is intricately woven into the ugly racist fabric that so many like to refer to as "America the beautiful".
Getting back to blaming the victim: as Sailer's discourse expanded, he managed to reduce a number of African-American women and Asian-American men to little more than angry ogresses and ogres because a very vocal but very small number of both groups speak in anger about white women who marry and/or date black men, and Asian women who marry and/or date white men.
The angry members of both groups are a minority. Sailer's article incorrectly suggests that they are the majority. It is clearly too easy for poorly informed readers to miss the point. Journalists should be trying to fight racism on all fronts, not blaming certain segments of its victims.
I do not consider all white men to be racists, but all white men are capable of racist behaviour if they do not make a conscious decision not to be unconscious or intentional racists.
In the November 24, 1997, issue of Jet, Robert Harris and his wife Hazel proudly posed for their 50th wedding anniversary. Back in 1947 Harris, a white man, married a black woman in Baharna, North Carolina. I cannot say what laws were on North Carolina's books at that time, but I can assure you that North Carolina was no less racist than South Carolina was then, or is now.
I mention the Harrises because well-intentioned people like Sailer need to understand that if Harris had been black and his wife had been white, they would most certainly have been — at the very least — brutally run out of town, or he would even have been lynched.
When I tell you that little has changed, it is the truth. Proof of that can be found in the fact that the Harrises' grandson, according to Jet, "was murdered 11 years ago in a hanging in Silver Spring [Maryland]", a suburb of Washington, D.C. So please, let us not praise US progress in race relations. It is way too early for that!
If I could speak directly to Steve Sailer, I would suggest to him that journalists have a responsibility to be extra careful not to create images that reduce racism's victims to human pallets upon which uninformed readers can indiscriminately heap every manner of blame. I would remind him not to render his poorly informed readers blinder for having read his writings. That is very easy to do.
Responsible journalism is about illumination and the placing of blame — where racism is concerned — precisely where it belongs (squarely at the feet of white men). To those who really want to know what it is like to be victims of racism, I would suggest asking some of the victims instead of listening to or reading second-hand accounts by the descendants of racism's perpetrators past and present.
Even those of us in prison know that much of what is being said and written is very misleading. You can write to me too, but do so only if you want the truth. I will give you the facts about racism and racists born of first-hand experience, not popular rhetoric.
[The writer is a prisoner on death row in the United States. He welcomes letters commenting on his columns. He can be written to at: Brandon Astor Jones, EF-122216, G3-77, Georgia Diagnostic & Classification Prison, PO Box 3877, Jackson, GA 30233, USA. Brandon and his friends are trying to raise funds to pay for a lawyer for his appeal. If you can help, please make cheques payable to the Brandon Astor Jones Defence Account and post to 41 Neutral St, North Sydney NSW 2060, or any Commonwealth Bank, account No. 2127 1003 7638.]