>There's no doubt of their love that I can detect in the article,
>only a doubt of their fitness, given the harsh necessities arising
>from racism and their unfamiliarity with these matters, to advise
>their son with sharp, faith-in-the-system free eyes during this
>personal crisis.
>
>And regarding what advice they might have given him had they been
>the sorts of racial minefield savants Wise wishes they'd been, there
>is this passage, which I believe provides a decent outline...
>
><begin excerpt>
>
>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 [the
>mother] 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.
The advice should have been not to tell anyone -- much less the police -- anything without an attorney in the room in all cases, not just in the case of a young black man suspected of raping a white girl, and that's civil liberties 101: avoid making any self-incriminating statement. The question, though, is whether Marcus Dixon made any unwise statement to the police without legal counsel that _led_ to his conviction, and reports on the case don't prove that he did. Only if Dixon ended up getting convicted due to what he did having followed his parents' advice can Tim Wise claim that they "innocently" set "the brown-skinned objects of [their] affection up for a fall." (Do Dixon and his parents, in the midst of their shared trouble and distress, need to hear Wise say such a thing, adding a fresh injury to injury, so to speak?)
Wise's focus on "white privilege" of Dixon's parents (the main focus in his essay) -- a problem that is not the cause of Dixon's fall -- diverts our attention away from the main problems: the interlocking system of race and class that makes criminal justice what it is; racism that makes consensual sex a crime in the eyes of racists; the sexist culture that prizes virginity for girls, which makes a broken hymen "an injury"; the reactionary climate of exaggerated fear that has led to increasingly harsh mandatory sentences for many crimes, especially what are defined as sex crimes (a surprise to some jurors who ended up forcing the judge to sentence Dixon to ten years in prison without intending to do so). -- Yoshie
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