{"id":61499,"date":"2014-10-05T21:13:06","date_gmt":"2014-10-05T21:13:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=61499"},"modified":"2022-12-26T14:21:16","modified_gmt":"2022-12-26T22:21:16","slug":"no-more-white-saviors-jonestown-and-peoples-temple-in-the-black-feminist-imagination","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=61499","title":{"rendered":"No More White Saviors: Jonestown and Peoples Temple in the Black Feminist Imagination"},"content":{"rendered":"

I boarded the plane in a fog of dream and nightmare with all the others leaving America for the last time. Nursing mothers with squealing babies in the row behind me, elders in front flipping through their bibles, Ebony magazines and Readers\u2019 Digests, eyes aglow like Christmas. On our stealth mission to the other side we wondered, watched, drank in the shifting remnants of the cities and towns below, demonic, beloved spaces that had held us close then betrayed us.[1]<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\"White_Nights_front\"<\/a>A black female writer novelizing Peoples Temple and Jonestown must weave through a landmine of memory and myth. The Jonestown canon, the reams and reams that have been written, is like a country unto itself, a kaleidoscope of porous boundaries incapable of containing the dead, the living, the in-between. In the thirty-six years since the massacre, it has been fictionalized to roaring excess, ghosting into American popular culture as the grotesque culmination of an oft-ridiculed decade. Like many, I was introduced to Jonestown through newsreel caricatures of bug-eyed cult zombies, endless rows of black corpses and Jones\u2019 aging Elvis-meets-Elmer Gantry swagger. Jonestown has become cultural shorthand for blind faith and a cautionary tale about religious obsession.<\/p>\n

But buried beneath the psycho cult clich\u00e9s is the power of black women in the Peoples Temple movement. Even though they were the largest demographic in Peoples Temple, black women have seldom been portrayed as lead protagonists in popular representations of Jonestown. Despite the horror of Jonestown\u2019s demise, its representation cannot be separated from dehumanizing cultural representations of black people in general and black women in particular. While Jonestown as cultural \u201cartifact\u201d is perversely sexy \u2013 the object of near necrophilic projection and fantasy \u2013 Peoples Temple is a historical stepchild, its legacy an unwelcome reflection of the lingering race, gender and class divide in \u201cNew Jim Crow\u201d America.<\/p>\n

Faced with this mythologizing I began my novel, White Nights, Black Paradise<\/em>, at the end. It opens with a lone child, identity unknown, partly gesturing to the loss of black girls\u2019 voices, partly to the psychobiography of Jim Jones as lovelorn singleton and partly to the naked terror that any child walking in the stifling heat among the community\u2019s dead and dying must have felt in the Temple\u2019s final moments. The book\u2019s title reflects the dual nature of PT\u2019s trajectory. White Nights were rehearsals\/demonstrations of loyalty and collective despair. They evoked both the impossibility of a worldly paradise and the (hollow) approximation of one via the church\u2019s multiracial social justice vision.<\/p>\n

My initial research into Peoples Temple was driven by what seemed to be one of the most basic and egregiously unanswered questions \u2013 where are the black feminist readings on and scholarship about Peoples Temple and Jonestown?? As historian James Lance Taylor remarked to me recently, the erasure of black women is \u201ca double victimization because the people who were victimized get hidden by Jim Jones\u2019 ego (and) it made them into a bunch of freaks. It\u2019s important to bring out that this was a significant event and it needs to be registered along the lines of major tragic events in black history.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many of the literary portrayals of black women involved in Peoples Temple have been limply one-dimensional. At stage right, the elderly self-sacrificing god-fearing caregivers who opened up their wallets and deeded their homes to the Temple with few reservations. At stage left, the loyal \u201crudderless\u201d young women who came up in the Black Church and followed disgruntled family members into the Temple collectives. From Mammy to the trusty sage black sidekick, we\u2019ve seen these stick figures trotted out ad nauseum on TV and in film. To use Toni Morrison\u2019s term,[2]<\/a> they are \u201cserviceable\u201d props to the main event \u2013 i.e., the mercurial path of the brash white savior\/rock star\/anti-hero. The 1997 film The Apostle<\/em>, starring Robert Duvall as a disreputable white Southern Pentecostal preacher redeemed by a predominantly black female congregation, wrapped up all of these Americana caricatures in a nice countrified bow.<\/p>\n

Confronting this erasure of black women\u2019s agency, the novel asks, what was the context of black women\u2019s involvement? What drove them to join, stay, leave, resist and\/or collaborate? What were the complex motivations that kept some tethered to Jones and the movement until the bitter end and how can these decisions be recuperated as rational? How, ultimately, did black women shape Jim Jones and vice versa? When she was introduced to Peoples Temple in the early seventies, Los Angeles member Juanell Smart \u201chad given up on religion, church and ministers because I had been married to a Pentecostal preacher for a number of years and knew the ins and outs of the church\u201d (Smart, 2004). Smart\u2019s comments imply that she might have been disillusioned with the sexism, corruption and moral hypocrisy that plague organized religion. Nonetheless, when she attended her first Peoples Temple service, Jones\u2019 criticism of abusive relationships resonated with her. Smart lost her four children, her mother and an uncle in Jonestown. Her article on this site<\/a>\u00a0captures her ambivalence toward Jones while she was a member of the Temple planning commission.\u00a0 She notes that, \u201cI have always been a skeptic so it was hard for me to be a true believer for any length of time.\u201d Smart\u2019s skepticism and questioning of authority led her to break from Peoples Temple. In a recent conversation with me she identified herself as an atheist<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Mainstream stereotypes of black hyper-religiosity have always precluded more complex representations of black faith and religious skepticism (Hutchinson, 2011). Hy and Taryn, the two fictional African American sisters who anchor White Nights, Black Paradise<\/em>, represent a mix of religious\/skeptical belief that is rarely seen in literary portrayals of black women. Hy is a spiritual agnostic; her sister Taryn an openly identified atheist. Because neither of them subscribe to the dogmas and social prescriptions of the traditional Black Church, they find the communal solidarity of Peoples Temple appealing. Throughout its lifetime Peoples Temple was variously described and viewed as Pentecostal, Christian, millennialist, atheist and spiritual. These shifting and frequently-conflicting designations were evoked (and exploited) by Jones according to context and expedience. All attracted different segments of the community who were willing to accept the Temple\u2019s unwieldy diversity for what they deemed to be the greater collective good. Yet there has been little examination of spiritual or religious diversity amongst the African American women members of the Temple. My re-envisioning of black female agency seeks to rectify that. For those who professed diehard Pentecostal beliefs, Peoples Temple\u2019s provisional secularism (with idolatry of Jones substituted for that of a supernatural deity) was a radical departure and compromise compelled by oppressive socioeconomic conditions. Jones\u2019 denigration of the Bible forced the most religious African American women into a new reading of Christian ethical obligations. The absence of justice and equality in the world around them made this reading palatable. Jones challenged the existence of a just God in the midst of rank poverty and obscene wealth. Peoples Temple critiqued the persistence of anti-black racism against African Americans, the nation\u2019s most devout Christian population. Echoing Epicurus, Jones and Peoples Temple emphasized God\u2019s irrelevance and rejected redemption in the afterlife. Grappling with these contradictions, many traditionalists in the PT congregation agreed that God was indeed lacking if not fictitious.<\/p>\n

The black women protagonists in White Nights, Black Paradise<\/em> come to California at the tail end of the Great Migration in the 1970s. They are driven by the same \u201cPromised Land\u201d fever that spurred African Americans\u2019 decades-long exodus from the South to the North. Originating as an unabashedly interracial church in the 1950s, Peoples Temple was a beneficiary of this movement. The church\u2019s 1973 transition to the predominantly African American Fillmore district in San Francisco was itself the third leg of an internal migration that would culminate in Guyana. In a period in which most mainline churches were white supremacist, Peoples Temple\u2019s leadership was able to capitalize on blacks\u2019 yearning for inclusion and cultural validation. In an era in which many Bay Area black churches were accused of bourgeois conservatism, People Temple touted the radical progressive rhetoric of black liberation struggle. That said, as Taylor and other historians note, the movement was ultimately insular. It provided social programs, health care, housing and jobs (in exchange for total allegiance) for its members, but did not forge lasting coalitions with like-minded movements. In the novel, Taryn meets her lover Jess \u2013 a licensed clinical social worker whose family settled in the Fillmore during the 1950s \u2013 in Peoples Temple. Jess\u2019 lineage represents the Fillmore\u2019s postwar shift from a predominantly Japanese American community to an African American one. Similar to their counterparts in Los Angeles, African Americans migrated to the Fillmore in search of jobs in the booming wartime industries. Both Los Angeles and San Francisco, transplants found that the liberal fa\u00e7ade of these cities hid an inveterately racist sexist power structure.<\/p>\n

This mix of paternalism and progressivism is a source of deep ambivalence for the characters in my novel. In her book Slavery of Faith<\/em>, Jonestown survivor Leslie Wagner alludes to this dialectical relationship vis-\u00e0-vis Jones\u2019 public posturing. Jones dubbed her his \u201clittle Angela Davis,\u201d connecting her to Davis\u2019 radical activism while playing on the still-nascent identity of a young person whose life experience revolved around the church. Wagner delighted in this comparison. Davis, after all, was a revered figure in the Temple\u2019s political pantheon, an ally and a powerful role model for many young black women during that era. Ever the savvy showman, Jones successfully manipulated the revolutionary aspirations of young African Americans reeling from the fading promise of the Black Power movement. Peoples Temple\u2019s rainbow coalition optics (epitomized by Jones\u2019 own mini-United Nations\u2019 style family) deflected criticism of Jones\u2019 motives. The church\u2019s association with Davis, the Black Panthers, American Indian Movement leader Dennis Banks and even the reactionary Nation of Islam lent it credibility among younger, more politically progressive and radical blacks disillusioned with traditional black religious organizations. Jones, the \u201canti-racist racist\u201d (Taylor, 2013), played the part of the white savior, but it was not without the imprimatur of his predominantly black congregation, steeped as it was in a heritage of white supremacy inflected through pop culture. In a nation shaped by minstrelsy and appropriations of blackness, Jones\u2019 performance of black liberation struggle was a familiar one. From late nineteenth century blackface to Elvis\u2019 theft of black musical traditions to Norman Mailer\u2019s exaltation of the \u201cWhite Negro\u201d and white America\u2019s multi-million dollar consumption of hip hop, whiteness has always been defined by the specter of black otherness. Jones was simply one in a long line of white minstrels who mined black idioms and Pentecostal religious practices. Yet what was perhaps most seductive to his black audience was the way he deftly combined white power and privilege with the stagecraft of Black Power.<\/p>\n

This interplay was also appealing to some black folk because of the devastation of the Fillmore\u2019s African American community by urban redevelopment projects (Hollis, 2004; Taylor, 2013). As Hannibal Williams contends:<\/p>\n

The times were right to produce a man like Jim Jones. The circumstances of a community that is broken up, when the relationships that bind people together fall apart the time is always right for a religious scoundrel to take advantage of our credibility. Justin Hermann literally destroyed the neighborhood and in the process he made the neighborhood ripe for anybody with any kind of solution. People were desperate for solutions, for something to follow (Taylor 2013, p. 92).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In his article \u201cBreaking the Silence: Reflections of a Black Pastor,\u201d J. Alfred Smith argues that \u201cThe 1970s were a dark age for the Black church in San Francisco\u201d (Smith, p. 139). Taylor maintains that progressive black pastors like Cecil Williams of Glide Memorial and physician\/publisher\/activist Carlton Goodlett embraced Jones precisely because they deemed most black churches in the city \u201cirrelevant\u201d (Taylor, p. 101). Jones and Peoples Temple\u2019s ascent in the political hierarchy of San Francisco reinforced their legitimacy among Bay Area African Americans.<\/p>\n

Yet although there have been numerous portrayals of PT\u2019s shrewd politicking, the racial politics of gender in the movement have gotten relatively short shrift. In my book, Peoples Temple is not only symbolic of progressive black social gospel traditions but of a racially divided secular women\u2019s movement. It is no secret that white women called the shots in Peoples Temple and that their leadership was resented by some of the black rank-and-file. The movement\u2019s veneer of interracial \u201csisterhood\u201d was compromised by the reality of white female paternalism. Wagner alludes to this in her book, and the infamous 1973 manifesto written by the Eight Revolutionaries suggests that the climate of white (female) power, control and favoritism hamstrung socialist progress. In White Nights, Black Paradise,<\/em> black women\u2019s suspicion of white women\u2019s dominance is symptomatic of the racial fault lines in second wave feminism. As with the power struggles of the women\u2019s suffrage era, the largely white middle class leadership of the women\u2019s movement (represented by groups like the National Organization for Women) was willfully ignorant of \u2013 if not downright hostile to \u2013 the intersectional experiences of women of color. At the core of second wave white feminist ideology was Betty Friedan\u2019s Feminine Mystique<\/em>, a text which universalized the experiences of white middle class women pushing back against the narrow confines of domesticity, marriage and motherhood. While revelatory for many white women, the Feminine Mystique<\/em> elided the realities of women of color, who not only had to work but often served as maids and domestics in white women\u2019s homes. Unspoken in white women\u2019s critiques of gender and power in the home and workplace was the fact that postwar wealth massively advantaged white families. New Deal institutions like the Federal Housing Administration, the GI Bill and the Veterans Administration agency allowed working class and \u201cethnic\u201d whites to move from inner cities or working class suburbs into more affluent suburban subdivisions protected from the dark other. Further, while suburban white women took advantage of job opportunities opened up by the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, black women were shut out. This fact was compounded by redlining policies which excluded blacks from buying homes in suburban communities with greater access to white collar jobs. As a result, when it came to equitable access to homeownership and professional jobs, black women were only nominally more \u201cliberated\u201d in the Promised Land than they were under Jim Crow.<\/p>\n

Thus, for many black migrants, rigid de facto segregation on the West Coast turned the postwar \u201cdream\u201d of escaping Southern apartheid into yet another bitter miscarriage of justice. In both Los Angeles and San Francisco, African Americans of all classes were tightly confined to working class black neighborhoods in South L.A., the Western Addition\/Fillmore and Bay Point. White privilege conferred the white women in Peoples Temple with mobility, prestige and decision-making power over their black female counterparts.<\/p>\n

These tensions inform the power structure of both the novel and the real world of People Temple. Black women in the book actively question and challenge white women\u2019s authority. They draw on the reality of their marginalization both within mainstream society and the church hierarchy. The slights and indignities they suffer are not just due to racism but sexism, homophobia and transphobia. Historically, black women of all sexual orientations, unlike white women, have never had the luxury of being considered pure, innocent and feminine. This dichotomy was capitalized on by Jones and his white female regime, thus eliminating any real possibility of power sharing with the very black women who comprised the backbone of Peoples Temple. Throughout the Peoples Temple\/Jonestown canon, the specter of the \u201cuneducated\u201d African American is contrasted with that of the \u201ceducated,\u201d generally middle class to affluent white woman appointed by Jones to a leadership position. Certainly black women like Wagner, Smart and Christine Miller (a Los Angeles member who was the only recorded challenger to Jones on the so-called Death Tape of November 18, 1978) did not fit the monolith of the \u201cdowntrodden\u201d poor black woman. But this contrast insidiously helps establish the agency, expertise, dynamism, and altruism of white women.<\/p>\n

For example, Mary Maaga\u2019s book Hearing the Voices of Jonestown<\/i><\/a> examines the complexity of white women\u2019s roles in People Temple but essentially flattens black women into supporting characters whose proper names merit no more than passing reference, if at all (case in point: Maaga badly flubs the name of Shanda James, a young black woman whom Jones sexually preyed on in Jonestown and drugged into submission). White women like Carolyn Layton, Grace Stoen, Maria Katsaris and Annie Moore assume center stage as lead protagonists in a chapter ironically entitled \u201cRestoration of Women\u2019s Power.\u201d There is no substantive exploration of white female racism and complicity in the white supremacist cultural politics of Peoples Temple. And Maaga goes to great lengths to evoke white women\u2019s heroic management of Jonestown in the face of Jim Jones\u2019 physical and mental decline. Painting a picture of the selfless white savior, Maaga concludes: \u201cLeading Jonestown was constant work, and neither Jones nor the members of the community seemed to appreciate the long hours and dedication of the (white female) inner circle\u201d (Maaga, p. 99). Maaga\u2019s portrayal valorizes the white female leadership in PT\/Jonestown while leaving their all-too-intimate role in the exclusion of black women egregiously unexamined.<\/p>\n

One of the ways that I attempt to address this lacuna is through the amplification of black journalism, symbolized by Hampton Goodwin (modeled after Jones\u2019 ally Carlton Goodlett) and Ida Lassiter, a community organizer and muckraker. A trailblazing publisher and physician who espoused radical left politics, Goodlett printed Peoples Temple\u2019s publications, treated Jones as a his physician and served as his adviser. Lassiter is a fictional character who mentors the young Jones, then publishes expos\u00e9s on the church\u2019s inner workings in its later years. She is the voice of independent journalism and a conflicted witness to the church\u2019s downward spiral. As the publisher of the influential black paper the Sun Reporter<\/em>, Goodlett\u2019s complex relationship with Jones is a historical curiosity. Why would an eminent black leader become entangled with Jones, and how did his involvement help boost and solidify the media profile of Peoples Temple? For black people looking at PT through a twenty-first century lens, the enigma of black complicity is a question that continues to confound. It is inadequate to say that blacks were duped, hoodwinked or even \u201cbrainwashed\u201d into staying in Peoples Temple\u2019s \u201ccult\u201d of the white savior. That narrative ultimately undermines cultural and sociological analyses contextualizing black women\u2019s particular stake in the movement. But it also undermines the interplay of passion, desire and revolutionary longing that informed their involvement and ultimate migration.<\/p>\n

In the novel I suggest that black women were especially vulnerable because of their history of sexist\/racist exploitation as well as <\/em>their long tradition of spearheading social justice activism in the church. Black women civil rights activists often faced sexist opposition from black men and racist opposition from white women \u201callies\u201d. Historically, the narrative of the charismatic black male civil rights leader has marginalized black women\u2019s contributions to the civil rights and Black Power movements (Giddings 2007; McGuire 2011; Theoharis 2014).<\/p>\n

For some black women, migration was an act of positive self-determination. In White Nights, Black Paradise<\/em>, sisters Taryn and Hy leave segregated Indiana for segregated California. Taryn finds that she\u2019s unable to advance at her Bay Area accounting job because she\u2019s not a straight white woman. Hy becomes disgruntled by the city\u2019s limited job market and its climate of racist police violence. Frustrated by these realities, their appetite for adventure is whetted by the prospect of Guyana. Ernestine Markham, a middle class school teacher loosely modeled on Christine Miller, emigrates because she believes it represents a better alternative for her troubled son. Devera, a Black-Latina transwoman writer whose family is wrapped up in Peoples Temple, yearns to be a pioneer at the Guyana settlement. Markham speaks of her desire to teach in a school system where black children aren\u2019t taught to hate themselves. Each woman is politicized by the times, her experiences in Peoples Temple and the context of being black and female in \u201cwhite supremacist, capitalist patriarchy\u201d (hooks, 1996).<\/p>\n

Faced with the ashes of stateside revolution, the betrayal of the liberal California dream and a \u201csocialist\u201d movement that preached first world apocalypse and third world redemption, migration to Guyana could be viewed as a life-affirming rational choice, a tributary of black diaspora (Harris and Waterman, 2004). The final recording of the PT\/Jonestown community reflected the trauma of this peculiarly black odyssey. Christine Miller\u2019s lone plea on the Death Tape was part of a long tradition of black female self-determination. Speaking for the voiceless, her final act of courage was a metaphor for black women\u2019s complex role in Peoples Temple. Submitting to the \u201cwill\u201d of the majority, Miller and the unidentified black women who shout her down pass into myth \u2013 reluctant \u201cexceptional\u201d heroine versus brainwashed minions. It may be comforting for mainstream America to believe that the black voices extolling suicide were simply gullible bystanders, but the truth is shaded in gray. In the Jonestown of black feminist imagination, the agency of both the living and the dead demands that these ambiguities be part of history\u2019s reckoning.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Works Cited<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

Giddings, Paula. Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching<\/em> (New York: Harper Collins, 2008).\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America<\/em> (New York: Bantam Books, 1984).Harris, Duchess and Adam John Waterman. \u201cTo Die for the Peoples Temple: Religion and Revolution After Black Power,\u201d ed. Rebecca Moore, Anthony Pinn, and Mary Sawyer. Peoples Temple and Black Religion in America<\/a><\/i> (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 2004), pp. 103-122.<\/p>\n

Hollis, Tanya. \u201cPeoples Temple and Housing Politics in San Francisco,\u201d ed. Rebecca Moore, Anthony Pinn, and Mary Sawyer. Peoples Temple and Black Religion in America<\/a><\/i> (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 2004), pp. 81-102.<\/p>\n

hooks, bell. Killing Rage, Ending Racism<\/em> (New York: Henry Holt, 1996).<\/p>\n

Maaga, Mary. Hearing the Voices of Jonestown<\/i><\/a> (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998).<\/p>\n

McGuire, Danielle. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance \u2013 a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power<\/em> (New York: Vintage Books, 2010).<\/p>\n

Smith, Archie. \u201cAn Interpretation of Peoples Temple and Jonestown: Implications for the Black Church,\u201d ed. Rebecca Moore, Anthony Pinn, and Mary Sawyer. Peoples Temple and Black Religion in America<\/a><\/i> (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 2004), pp. 47-56.<\/p>\n

Taylor, James L. \u201cBlack Churches, Peoples Temple and Civil Rights in San Francisco,\u201d from From Every Mountainside: Black Churches and The Broad Terrain of Civil Rights <\/em>ed. Drew Smith (Albany: SUNY Press, 2013), pp. 85-110.<\/p>\n

Theoharis, Jeanne. The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks<\/em> (New York: Beacon Press, 2013).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Endnotes<\/strong><\/p>\n

[1]<\/a>White Nights, Black Paradise<\/em> (Infidel Books: Los Angeles, forthcoming <\/em>2015).<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination<\/em> (London: Vintage Books, 1993), p. 25.<\/p>\n

(Sikivu Hutchinson is the author of\u00a0Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels<\/a>,\u00a0Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars<\/a>\u00a0and the forthcoming\u00a0White Nights: Black Paradise<\/a>.\u00a0Her earlier writings on Jonestown include her article in\u00a0Religion Dispatches<\/a>\u00a0(which also appeared on her\u00a0blogpost<\/a>) and a description of her book here<\/a>.\u00a0She can be reached at shutch2396@aol.com<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I boarded the plane in a fog of dream and nightmare with all the others leaving America for the last time. Nursing mothers with squealing babies in the row behind me, elders in front flipping through their bibles, Ebony magazines and Readers\u2019 Digests, eyes aglow like Christmas. On our stealth mission to the other side […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":61874,"menu_order":13,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-61499","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/61499","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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61499"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/61499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":119201,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/61499\/revisions\/119201"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/61874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}