In Jim Jones\u2019 worldview, \u201cblackness\u201d was a concept to be celebrated, and that concept was embodied in the racial composition of his congregation. It was an opinion, he readily admitted, that was not universally shared. The skin color of African Americans was the sole reason for discrimination and prejudice against them, and no matter if they claimed otherwise, most white people could not get beyond that one simple fact to consider black people as people.<\/p>\n
There were a number of reasons for this prejudice: blacks were brought over from Africa as slaves, and even after they were freed, they were still considered second-class citizens; that second-class status contributed to their second-class education, housing, and vocational opportunities; the consequent ghettoization of black populations, with accompanying higher levels of crime, turned them into a population to be feared.<\/p>\n
But there was another factor at play. As Tim Reiterman and John Jacobs pointed out in their book,\u00a0Raven<\/em>, Jones was concerned about the connotation of the word \u201cblack\u201d as evil or unsavory. The plague of the mid-14th century in Eurasia and Northern Africa was known as the \u201cBlack Death.\u201d The black arts refer to witchcraft and sorcery. A blackguard is defined as thoroughly unprincipled person or a scoundrel. There are black marks, blacklists, black bag jobs, and the Black Mass of Satanism. In fact, as Jones saw it, almost every reference to \u201cblack\u201d was negative.<\/p>\n So he changed it. In Temple parlance, extortion of money from a person with the threat of exposure of a criminal act was \u201cwhitemail.\u201d An underground economy became a \u201cwhite market.\u201d One of\u00a0Edith Roller\u2019s journals<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 written while she was still in the United States \u2013 spoke of a meeting in which Jones said the powers-that-be \u201cwant to whiteout, white list and white ball us.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course, the most well-known example of this practice was the description of a community in deep despair or crisis as bring in a \u201cWhite Night<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n There were slip-ups, to be sure \u2013 such as self-correcting “blackmail” into “whitemail” at Q 738<\/a> and Q 741<\/a>; or converting a “black market” into a “white market” at Q 298<\/a> and Q 991<\/a>; and once on Q 259<\/a> translating \u201cblack lung disease\u201d as “white lung disease,” even as Jones let the other references to pneumoconiosis stand \u2013 but as time went on, and the new terms became commonplace, they came more easily.<\/p>\n There are reports that Jones periodically referred to the president\u2019s residence in Washington D.C. as the \u201cBlack House\u201d \u2013 thereby flipping the use of black and white in the other direction \u2013 but this has not yet been verified in Temple documents or tapes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In Jim Jones\u2019 worldview, \u201cblackness\u201d was a concept to be celebrated, and that concept was embodied in the racial composition of his congregation. It was an opinion, he readily admitted, that was not universally shared. The skin color of African Americans was the sole reason for discrimination and prejudice against them, and no matter if […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"parent":60520,"menu_order":6,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-123245","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/123245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=123245"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/123245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":123260,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/123245\/revisions\/123260"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/60520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=123245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}