Sex Across the Color Line

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 That is ultimately why he was expelled from school, why his scholarship was rescinded, and why he may not see freedom until the age of 28.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.