African American Student Gets 10 Years In Jail For Consensual Sex With A White Girl

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rescinded, and why he may not see freedom until the age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 naiveté 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 naiveté 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.

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