{"id":64770,"date":"2015-10-28T21:25:10","date_gmt":"2015-10-28T21:25:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=64770"},"modified":"2026-02-27T13:54:59","modified_gmt":"2026-02-27T21:54:59","slug":"on-white-negroes-jim-jones-and-sista-rachel","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=64770","title":{"rendered":"On White Negroes, Jim Jones and \u201cSista\u201d Rachel"},"content":{"rendered":"

(This article was originally published in <\/em>The Huffington Post<\/em><\/a>.)<\/p>\n

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<\/a> and prominent black politicians Willie Brown and Mervyn Dymally among his supporters. It\u2019s been said that when the Reverend Jim Jones took his parishioners\u2019 hands and looked deep into their eyes, it was like they were the only ones in the universe.<\/p>\n

Although many commentators have drawn parallels<\/a> between former Spokane NAACP head Rachel Dolezal<\/a>\u2019s 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 \u201cWhite Negro-hood\u201d<\/a>, Jones\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 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-\u00e0-vis the infamous 1978 Briggs initiative<\/a>, an unsuccessful law that would have prohibited gays and lesbians from teaching in public schools). Back then there wasn\u2019t a radical-progressive issue the church didn\u2019t espouse or go to the barricades for, regularly pushing back against the city\u2019s segregationist power elite in rallies, editorials and political campaigns.<\/p>\n

In his very public private life, Jones\u2019 performance as revolutionary Elmer Gantry in blackface was unequaled. He adopted a black son in 1959 and named him Jim Jr., paraded around his \u201crainbow\u201d family of orphaned children and held court in the city\u2019s multiracial Fillmore District as a white \u201cblack\u201d man who proudly referred to himself as a \u201cnigger.\u201d Throughout the Peoples Temple movement, Jones, like Dolezal, speciously claimed to have received death threats and been the victim of racial harassment.<\/p>\n

Indeed, racial persecution<\/a> was one of the ostensible reasons for the church\u2019s relocation to Guyana, dubbed the \u201cPromised Land.\u201d 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 \u201cdeath tape\u201c of November 18, 1978, he beseeched, \u201cAre we black, proud and socialist?\u201d The question was couched in an overripe narrative of white betrayal in which Jones blamed white conspirators for bringing down Jonestown.<\/p>\n

So while Jones didn\u2019t technically \u201cpass\u201d as black like Dolezal, his fierce identification with the lives and struggles of his parishioners was definitive. In their view, Jones\u2019 version of blackness was no facile lifestyle choice, fetish or \u201cmissionary\u201d calling but a full-bodied identity that spoke to their legacy of resistance. It was this belief that ultimately blinded some to the church\u2019s moral corruption, setting the stage for their complicity with Jones\u2019 authoritarian control.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s final \u201crevolutionary\u201d resistance to the evils of racial apartheid. Jonestown and Peoples Temple\u2019s tragic end are a cautionary tale of the price the African American community has paid for political minstrelsy and reverse passing.<\/p>\n

(Sikivu Hutchinson is the author of\u00a0<\/em>Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and the forthcoming\u00a0<\/em>White Nights: Black Paradise<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0<\/em>A November 2015 interview with Dr.\u00a0Hutchinson about <\/em>White Nights, Black Paradise\u00a0appears here<\/a>. Her earlier writings on Jonestown include her article in\u00a0Religion Dispatches<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and a description of her book <\/em>here<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 <\/em>She can be reached at <\/em>shutch2396@aol.com<\/em><\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(This article was originally published in The Huffington Post.) 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":64612,"menu_order":14,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-64770","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/64770","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=64770"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/64770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":134194,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/64770\/revisions\/134194"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/64612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}