Family’s Value

Here we go again. A young, white, blond-haired blue-eyed woman is abducted, presumably by some dark-skinned nefarious person. The media play swells into hyper, almost orgiastic über-coverage. The military gets drafted to search for the damsel in distress, and, in the latest round, the governor calls for the death penalty and holds candlelight vigils.

Excuse me if I sound just a little bit cynical about the overwhelming national outpouring of emotional stuff about Dru Sjodin. Yes, the abduction and presumed murder of Sjodin is tragic. However, I cannot shake this deep-seated resentment that wells up inside me whenever I read yet another story about her abduction.

I want to shout in anguish: What about the nameless black women and American Indian women who have been and continue to be stolen, raped and murdered? Do we launch dramatic rescues to save them? Do we send the National Guard looking for them? Does the governor make an impassioned plea to bring back the death penalty because something bad happened to them?

Are you kidding? This is America, where certain lives have a greater value than others.

A good friend of mine told me to be careful about this column. After all, I have a blond-haired, blue-eyed wife. Yes, I do. And I also have a dark-haired, dark-skinned sister and mother. As much as I love my wife, it makes me mad as hell to realize that, in all probability, her abduction would rate more media attention than one of her dark-skinned sisters-in-law.

With our nation’s sordid past of measuring one’s worth based on appearance and ethnicity, why should we expect anything different? The men who wrote our Constitution explicitly held that black people were worth three-fifths of a white person, placing into law what most white people accepted without much thought—that a black life was worth less than a white one.

There is a collective memory that most black people share, at some deep level, of the day-to-day humiliations, of beatings, cross-burnings, and Jim Crow, that even bourgeois black folk cannot completely exorcise. And the goal of the beatings and burnings was to keep the races separate, lest white women be ruined. Ever since we have been in America, we have seen white women held up as a commodity to be protected at all costs, especially from the swarthy men who were most likely to do them harm. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas knew full well what he was doing when he called his confirmation confrontation a high-tech lynching. He knew that black people, regardless of political orientation, would instinctively circle the wagons to keep another brother from being lynched from the tree of sexual impropriety.

Now, Alfonso Rodriguez Jr., Sjodin’s alleged abductor, is not a “brother”; however, with his Latino surname and less-than-ivory skin tone, he is close enough for many Minnesotans. Governor Pawlenty has had a year’s worth of criminal mayhem to pick from as the launching pad for his death penalty crusade. Yet this so-called pro-life governor picked the snatching of an attractive Scandinavian princess, and not the murder and/or abduction of a dark-skinned Minnesotan, to bring back the state-sanctioned snuffing of a life. That speaks volumes about whose lives have the most value.

I am sure that some of the more jaded readers are thinking, “There he goes again, playing the race card.” I am upset about Dru Sjodin because it was such a terrible crime. Race had nothing to do with it.

Many readers probably believe that I am race-baiting. OK, name one abduction of a woman of color in Minnesota that led to any of the following—national media coverage, a National Guard search, a gubernatorial press conference complete with a vow to kill sexual predators that prey on the Dru Sjodins of this state.

I am not advocating that we ignore things like the Dru Sjodin abduction. I readily admit that it is newsworthy and it is upsetting when these kinds of crime happen to people. I just want the people who look like Dru Sjodin to be just as concerned and outraged when the people who look like my sister have bad things happen to them. Why is it news only when the victim is white?