By Sikivu Hutchinson
He was a charismatic white preacher-activist who could riff
on the racism of the Bible one moment and the virtues of radical black
liberation struggle the next. Elderly
black women were his most cherished audience, and he counted Huey Newton,
Angela Davis, activist publisher Carlton Goodlett and prominent
black politicians Willie Brown and Mervyn Dymally among his supporters. It’s
been said that when the Reverend
Jim Jones took his parishioners’ hands and looked deep into their eyes it
was like they were the only ones in the universe.
Although many commentators have drawn parallels
between former Spokane NAACP head Rachel Dolezal’s passing-in-reverse
minstrelsy and white pop culture icons, the historical example of Jim Jones and
his Peoples
Temple church is more germane. In the packed annals of “White Negro-hood”
Jones’ appropriation and
manipulation of blackness represents an especially insidious brand of political
minstrelsy. For both Jones and Dolezal, racial
stagecraft earned them real dividends in terms of income, credibility and
access to policy makers, politicos and the activist black community.
Years before he relocated the Peoples Temple congregation
from San Francisco to the eponymously named Jonestown settlement in Guyana
Jim Jones was an undisputed rock star—a black-identified white man and respected
public official who was also a closeted bisexual. Peoples Temple championed the Black Panthers,
the American Indian Movement, affirmative action, anti-police brutality
initiatives, affordable housing and LGBT equality (most notably vis-à-vis the
infamous 1978 Briggs
initiative, an unsuccessful law that would have prohibited gays and
lesbians from teaching in public schools).
Back then there wasn’t a radical-progressive issue the church didn’t
espouse or go to the barricades for, regularly pushing back against the city’s segregationist
power elite in rallies, editorials and political campaigns.
In his very public private life, Jones’ performance as
revolutionary Elmer Gantry in blackface was unequaled. He adopted a black son in 1959 and named him
Jim Jr., paraded around his “rainbow” family of orphaned children and held court
in the city’s multiracial Fillmore District as a white “black” man who proudly
referred to himself as a “nigger”. Throughout
the Peoples Temple movement, Jones, like Dolezal, claimed to have received
death threats and been the victim of racial harassment.
Indeed, racial
persecution was one of the ostensible reasons for the church’s relocation
to Guyana, dubbed the “Promised Land”.
Jones incited fear of an impending race war in the U.S. (in which black
people would be sent to concentration camps) to justify emigration and keep
members from leaving the jungle settlement.
Rallying Temple members on the notorious Jonestown “death tape” of November 18,
1978, he beseeched “Are we black proud and socialist?” The question was couched
in an overripe narrative of white betrayal in which Jones blamed white
conspirators for bringing down Jonestown.
So while Jones didn’t technically “pass” as black like
Dolezal, his fierce identification with the lives and struggles of his
parishioners was definitive. In their
view, Jones’ version of blackness was no facile lifestyle choice, fetish or
“missionary” calling but a full-bodied identity that spoke to their legacy of
resistance. It was this belief that
ultimately blinded some to the church’s moral corruption, setting the stage for
their complicity
with Jones’ authoritarian control.
When Jones and his Temple faithful ordered members to drink
the toxic mix of flavor aid and cyanide that would kill over 900 people in the
settlement, he was in full flaming White Negro-hood. Death, it was believed, would
be the community’s final “revolutionary” resistance to the evils of racial
apartheid. Jonestown and Peoples
Temple’s tragic end are a cautionary tale of the price the African American
community has paid for political minstrelsy and reverse passing.
