Author: Clinton Collins

Behind every news exposé, be it sporty (Barry Bonds and steroids), vengeful (outing CIA operative Valerie Plame), or just plain titillating (those tidbits about Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress), there is almost always a confidential source. Without confidential sources (and the reporters who love them), Watergate would simply refer to an upscale Washington hotel and C.J. would be out of a job.

News sources, as well as their close siblings, whistleblowers, understand all too well that the only difference between being a confidential source and an unmasked source is the reporter’s promise to keep their identity a secret. It’s purely a matter of trust, with no legal recourse should a reporter, sensing that someone might have to take a bullet for the team, renege on his promise and reveal his source. Or he might simply decide that the name of the source should be part of the story. In either case, the source can do nothing but suck it up.

That is, until Dan Cohen, author of the soon-to-be-published Anonymous Source, successfully sued the local dailies for outing him as the confidential source of political dirt that effectively ended the career of one high-profile politician, and tarnished the reputation of another. Cohen was the Minneapolis City Council president back in the late sixties, when Republicans actually got elected to office in Minneapolis. After briefly helping to run the Peace Corps during the Nixon administration, and making failed bids for Minneapolis mayor and county commissioner, Cohen settled into the advertising business. He also remained a loyal foot soldier for Republican candidates.

In 1982, he was carrying water for Republican gubernatorial candidate Wheelock Whitney, who, less than two weeks before the election, was trailing the ultimately victorious Rudy Perpich by twenty points. Cohen, hoping for one of those October miracles, volunteered to make public copies of police records that showed Perpich running mate Marlene Johnson had a shoplifting conviction. He took the information to the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press.

Before Cohen gave up the goods, he secured promises of anonymity from both papers. The dailies ran the story next day—with Cohen’s name and picture. Soon thereafter, the Star Tribune ran a cartoon depicting him crawling out of a garbage can, and Cohen lost his ad agency job. When he managed to get a small advertising gig with the University of Minnesota, Strib columnist Doug Grow self-righteously castigated the U of M for consorting with a bottom feeder like Cohen.

Within weeks, Cohen was virtually unemployable. He was broke, and a political pariah to boot. With his back to the wall, Cohen believed he had nothing to lose by, in his words, “suing the bastards.”

All the legal wrangling aside, wasn’t what Cohen did—leaking an opponent’s ancient shoplifting conviction days before an election—well, dirty politics? Cohen had a ready answer. “On reflection, I admit that it was mean and if I had to do it all over, I probably would not do it. However, it was not dirty. I gave the newspapers truthful information about a candidate’s criminal history. Before I ran for county commissioner I got arrested for scalping Kentucky Derby tickets. I wrote a humorous column about it so the voters knew. I got my butt handed to me in the following election, but everything was out there. I did not lie to or conceal anything from anyone. Playing dirty is when you promise to protect someone and then you rat them out.”

So many years later, why should people care about Cohen’s story? He had an answer for that as well. “The media is all over Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd’s Free Speech Protection Act of 2004, which will give reporters federal protection for refusing to reveal their confidential sources. I am not opposed to that, but they have protection. Reporters have big media on their side. Guys like me, we are totally on our own. If the media decides to burn us, as they did me, we burn—humiliated and totally abandoned to our fates.”

Dan Cohen may not be the most sympathetic figure in the world, but he does have a point. Let’s face it: People in power are usually not going to voluntarily reveal damaging information. And even though there are some courageous people who have the cojones to publicly reveal what they know—Jeffrey Wigand, who blew the whistle on Big Tobacco, and FBI agent Coleen Rowley come to mind—most of us will only do so under the cloak of anonymity. We need to know that if anyone is going to take a bullet for our truthful whispers in the shadows, it will not be us.

In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, farm animals overthrew the evil Mr. Jones and created a utopia where “all animals are equal.” However, the pigs, who led the uprising, gradually began acting more like the hated Jones. By the book’s end, the pigs had morphed into porcine Mr. Joneses and the farm into a place where “some animals are more equal than others.”

Orwell’s classic tale was an allegory about the 1917 Russian Revolution, but it was also aimed squarely at the very human tendency to create a pecking order based on perceived differences in status. Over the years, African-Americans, tired of fighting for social acceptance, have created their own groups in which they can feel comfortable. However, critics claim that some of these African-American groups have become as exclusive—some would say as discriminatory—as the white organizations that once spurned blacks.

One institution often singled out for excluding the “wrong” kind of black person is Jack and Jill, a social club for upper-crust African-American children. Jack and Jill was created in 1938 so that young African-Americans could “network with each other and meet each other,” as alumnus Lawrence Otis Graham, author of Our Kind of People, put it. Founder Marion Turner Stubbs Thomas said she wanted a “means of furthering an inherent natural desire … to bestow upon our children all the opportunities possible for a normal and graceful approach to a beautiful adulthood.”

When it comes to joining Jack and Jill, it is not who you know, but who knows you. Potential members must be sponsored by a current member. And not all who are called upon are chosen. In fact, not so many years ago, the biracial children of a well-known Minneapolis barrister were nearly rejected because their mother broke an unspoken taboo by having a white spouse. Even to this day, the local Minneapolis chapter doesn’t include any biracial families with a white mother as a member. When I asked a Jack and Jill member if my decidedly non-African-American wife would be welcome, she told me that she would support it, but she conceded that some of her sisters might be a tad lukewarm about bringing a white woman into the fold. And despite its billing as a family organization, this is a group run by women. (The role of men, who are relegated to an “auxiliary,” is made clear by their “under construction” page on Jack and Jill’s web site.)

However, Murvyn Baker Kelsey, the organization’s National Recording Secretary, claims that Jack and Jill is much more “receptive to today’s culture.” Yet even she concedes that old habits die hard. “We are not a racist organization,” she told me recently. “We just want to make sure that our children have contact with other quality black children. Class, more than race, is the dividing line.” Kelsey said that she had seen white moms at a Jack and Jill function once on the West Coast, though she could not tell me which chapter they belonged to.

She also asked plaintively, “You aren’t going to write something bad about us, are you? You sound like a professional, educated man. Don’t you want your sons around people that are going to uplift and support them?”

Indeed, I do. I have to admit that there are certain kinds of people with whom I do not want my sons to associate. My wife and I have candidly discussed whether we have the gumption to continue our Northside “urban adventure” once my youngest son starts school in three or four years. Like others, I do notice where people went to school. And I usually find some discreet way of asking my oldest sons about the parents of their new friends, what they do to put bread on the table.

Martin Luther King Jr. dreamt of an America where his four young children would be judged not by “the color of their skin but the content of their character.” However, his dream tacitly acknowledged that it was entirely appropriate to judge children, as long as it was for character using criteria that they could control (or perhaps more accurately, that their families could control).

Maybe Jack and Jill is just honest about what the upwardly mobile of all races have always secretly believed: People may be created equal, but when it comes to shaping your children’s character and hence, their future, some are more equal than others.

On November 2, 2004, perennial candidate Kevin Kolosky will achieve something that few, if any Minnesota lawyers ever have: He will have run for judge nearly as many times as he has argued before a jury. Starting in 1994, literally weeks after passing the bar exam, Kolosky started campaigning, opposing whatever hapless soul he believes is the weakest judge in the herd. In 2002, five elections later, he came within eight percentage points of toppling African-American judge Harry Crump. This time, he has set his sights on Judge LaJune Thomas Lange. Interestingly, all but one of Kolosky’s five previous opponents have been females or minorities. Given Kolosky’s growing name recognition and Lange’s challenged rankings in recent lawyer preference polls, the “underwhelming” Kolosky, in the words of one judge, just might bag his prey.

Every lawyer has the opportunity to “strike,” or remove, a judge from a case, no questions asked. Over the years, lawyers have come to use the resulting statistic as a barometer of a judge’s effectiveness. Lange, appointed by Gov. Rudy Perpich in 1985, was a relatively popular choice. In her first ten years or so on the bench, her removal numbers were consistent with other Hennepin County judges.

Recently, however, her numbers have gone dramatically south. In fact, a third of all lawyers slated to appear before her in the past year have struck her from their cases. Some trace the spiral to 1995, when a group of Hennepin County District Court judges publicly accused Lange of lagging behind in processing juvenile court data. The Minnesota Board of Judicial Standards, which then investigated Lange for “undermining public confidence in the judiciary,” eventually exonerated Lange and even paid her legal fees.

Lange is not the only judge who finds herself targeted by certain constituencies—onetime criminal defense attorney Jack Nordby often gets booted by prosecutors who think he is too soft on bad guys. But no one gets struck from cases nearly as frequently as Lange. Some of the lawyers who diss her claim that she relies on her clerks too much and is not “engaged” enough with the litigants in her courtroom. Her supporters, on the other hand, such as campaign co-chair and former Republican state senator Wayne Popham, say she gets high marks from crime victims, cops, and many county prosecutors, who appreciate that she is tough on criminals.

The judges I spoke with, even those who are not big Lange fans, overwhelmingly support her over Kolosky. However, at least one judge believes much of Lange’s support would evaporate if “a Don Lewis [a well-regarded African-American trial lawyer] or someone equally respected” were to run instead of some non-entity with “baggage” like Kolosky. Said “baggage” stems from an incident during Kolosky’s first campaign, when, in addressing a debate question about combating domestic assault, he admitted that he had hit his wife. Asked to explain his comments, he said, “Yes, I was arrested for domestic assault. My wife and I both hit each other and a neighbor called the police. I am sorry that I did it and I do not think it should disqualify me from being a judge.”

Unlike Lange, who has a number of endorsements ranging from the Minneapolis Police Federation to the Academy of Trial Lawyers of Minnesota, Kolosky boasts that he has none because he is not out there “kissing any butt.” Kolosky concedes that he has virtually no trial or appellate experience; he claims his strongest qualifications are his pro bono work and the hours he has spent watching “good judges.”

Kolosky declined to comment on Lange’s abilities, saying he was not “going to dish any dirt on her.” He says he chose to run against her because her judicial evaluations indicated certain “vulnerabilities.” Race, he adds, “has nothing do with it.”

Maybe Kolosky believes that. Several Hennepin County judges and lawyers with whom I spoke do not. According to one judge, who declined to be named, “Race has a lot to do with it. Judge Lange is revered in the African-American community as a role model and leader. She has served the international legal community, for example, helping out South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Kolosky has done little but make a career out of running against women judges and black judges. Replacing her with Kolosky would be a real shame.”

Remember Brian Herron? Just three summers ago, the former Minneapolis City Council member was the poster boy for political graft after the FBI videotaped him accepting a $10,000 bribe. This very public crash-and-burn earned him a year in prison and spawned an investigation of the entire Minneapolis City Council. Political wags claim that Sharon Sayles-Belton still blames Herron for fueling the political firestorm that blew her out of City Hall.

Today, Herron describes himself as “better, not bitter.” He is out of prison and working for the Greater Minneapolis Council of Churches. He has returned to the same house and the same wife he had “back in the day,” when he was a comer in Minneapolis politics. Reflecting on the past three years, he thanks God for leading him on what he calls his “spiritual journey.”

This is not the same Brian Herron I talked with in June 2001, forty-eight hours before he publicly acknowledged the charges against him. He stopped by my office for what I thought was a casual visit. We bantered for a few minutes about his upcoming reelection and then he grabbed me as if on the verge of physical collapse and said, “Clinton, I’m in real trouble. The FBI videotaped me accepting a $10,000 bribe.”

For the next hour, I listened to his story, which was punctuated by heart-wrenching sobs. The FBI had told him bad things would happen if he told anyone, even his wife, about its investigation; I advised him to tell his wife immediately. Two days later, with his wife and father standing beside him, Herron publicly announced his resignation from the Minneapolis City Council. Eight months later, he began serving a yearlong sentence at the federal penitentiary in Duluth.

For most Minnesotans, that was the ignominious end of Brian Herron. Nearly everyone—from the formerly ardent sycophants to the City Hall establishment running for cover—wanted the man, now a the convicted felon, simply to go away. Most did not consider him worthy of forgiveness, if they considered him at all. And, politically speaking, he might as well have been dead.

There is a popular narrative pattern in literature called “absence, devastation, return.” In this pattern, the hero leaves the scene. In his absence, all sorts of bad things happen. He ultimately returns and restores order to the world. The hero’s absence can be emotional, spiritual, or physical.

Herron now admits that he was absent—from his family, his friends, and most important, his own spiritual values—long before the FBI came calling. This absence devastated his political career and very nearly destroyed him. “Over the years, I had become too busy for God,” he said. “I got lost, caught up in being everything to everybody, all things to all people. My ego and my pride twisted my moral compass. I was raised by a black Baptist preacher. I knew right from wrong. And I was doing wrong.”

Herron is grateful for his stint in prison, which he calls a yearlong spiritual retreat. “By the time I arrived at the federal prison camp in Duluth, I was empty,” Herron admitted. “For the first several days, I just read my Bible and kept to myself. Even though I knew I had messed up, I viewed myself as somehow different from the other inmates. On the third day, one of the brothers confronted me. He said, ‘We know who you are and why you are here. Maybe you don’t belong here, but you are here. Many of the cats here can learn from you and you can learn from us. Why did you want to be a councilman?’ I told him, ‘To help people.’ ‘Well, you can help us. God sent you here to be a light to us.’” Those words saved Herron. “Through them, God taught me a lot. Humility, gratitude, forgiveness, and the power of unconditional love.”

Our culture revels in watching people be brought down. From our perch in the grocery store checkout line, we tsk-tsk the human implosions displayed on the front pages of tabloids, much like gawkers at an auto accident. Our morbid curiosity leaves little, if any, room for compassion. Herron realizes that many believe he got what he deserved. But having been through his ordeal, he says he is stronger, wiser, and better equipped than ever for community service. “I am ready to serve in whatever way God has planned for me,” he says. In fact, he does not rule out a return to politics, “if that is God’s will.” Continues Herron, “People have approached me and asked me to get back into the game. The other day, an older white guy kept looking at me and I thought, oh boy, here we go. Instead, he broke into a big grin and said to me, ‘The cream always rises to the top.’”

Thirty columns ago, in the very first issue of The Rake — March 2002 — I wrote that “being a real brother is not as important as being a real man. Real men think for themselves and live with the consequences of their decisions.” I admit that I took some defiant pride in the not-so-veiled assertion that I was above race. In fact, I accepted the Rake gig with the clear understanding that I was not going to be the magazine’s “head nigger in charge.” I was a writer who happened to be African-American. When it came to topics that would be covered in this space, the world was my oyster.

However, I found myself writing about race-related stuff and the challenges of living in north Minneapolis more than I envisioned in 2002. Over time, readers began emailing, calling, and stopping me on the street to say things like, “Finally, someone is writing about us.” Even people who initially thought that I was suspect because I didn’t shy away from being critical of black people decided that I deserved my “brother card” after all.

In fact, I began to view my column not so much as an exclusive possession, but more like American Indians historically viewed the land—as something that I merely managed as a steward. This became especially clear to me over the past several months, when I wrote about the bad guys who shattered my front window after I confronted some neighborhood wannabes about drug dealing. That column, and the one that followed, about Bill Cosby airing African-American “dirty laundry,” generated more letters from readers than any of my others. I felt simultaneously flattered and trapped by the response. All writers love knowing that they are connecting with readers. There are few ego strokes sweeter than to have a stranger leap out of a crowd and tell you “I really loved your last piece. I can’t wait to see your next column.”

Yet I also began to feel more like a spokesman than just a writer. I am all too aware of how few African-American writers in this city have had the writing platforms that I have in the past dozen years. In fact, when I started writing for the Star Tribune in 1992, I was that newspaper’s first African-American editorial writer since Carl Rowan—in the 1960s. Things haven’t changed much since then. You can count on one hand the number of African-American columnists in major (i.e. white-owned) media outlets in this town and still have a finger or two left over.

There is a scene in the film The American President when an advisor played by Michael J. Fox tells the president, played by Michael Douglas, that “the people want leadership! In the absence of genuine leadership, they’ll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They’re so thirsty for it they’ll crawl through the desert to a mirage and when they discover there is no water, they will drink the sand.” I believe that a number of Minneapolitans are in a similar position—which explains the powerful response to those recent columns. Many of us, especially those on the Northside, feel like our problems and our pain may get headlines, but that month after month, year after year, we are denied the resources to deal with them.

I am grateful for the support I have received from Rake readers. I will never forget those who encouraged me to fight the drug thugs and not lose hope. But as much as I care about Minneapolis and the gritty issues confronting the Northside, I must respectfully resist the temptation to allow this column to become a monthly collective cry for help from disenfranchised parts of the city. This is too big a burden for one writer, armed with only one column, to carry.

On the other hand, it’s an entirely appropriate burden for all of us, as a community, to shoulder. We need to shake down the system and let the people who run it know that we are thirsty for real leadership—the kind of leadership that is just as fed up as the rest of us with the gangbangers, the drug dealers, the users and abusers destroying North Minneapolis. And, we need to let our elected officials know that we are willing to stick with this fight even if it means taking down members of our own families if they refuse to get with the program.

Truth is, I want to write about other topics—and not feel that I’m letting down my community if I do so. Like it or not (and I do not always like it), I do have a special responsibility as an African-American columnist in a mostly white town. Yet those loyalties can never be greater than the one I have to myself as a writer to take on all the things—and there are many—that trip my trigger.

This past May, my mother told me that my father, Clinton Collins, Sr., was probably going to be posthumously inducted into his high school hall of fame. Right about that same time, actor Bill Cosby began catching hell from certain so-called African-American leaders and their liberal apologists because he said publicly what most black people have said privately—the teen pregnancies, the underachievement, and the gangbanging—ain’t all Mr. Charlie’s fault. Cosby recently went one step further and told those who fault him for airing “dirty laundry”: “Your dirty laundry gets out of school every day about 2:30….It’s cursing and calling each other ‘nigger’ as they’re walking up and down the street. They think they are hip. They can’t read; they can’t write. They’re laughing and giggling and going nowhere.”

Initially, I did not link one event—a well-deserved recognition for a Mississippi Civil Rights pioneer—with the controversy surrounding Cosby’s observations. However, during my trip last month with my mother and sisters to accept my father’s award, I came to understand why Cosby is so angry that many younger African-Americans have squandered what my father’s generation bought through sacrifice, courage, and just plain guts.

My father graduated in 1946 from Oak Park High School, Laurel, Mississippi’s black high school. Before the school opened in 1929, Laurel did not provide any formal education for its black citizens beyond the eighth grade. Whites saw the high school primarily as a place where, in the parlance of the times, the “local Nigras” could learn a trade. However, the black people of Laurel and the black teachers at Oak Park saw something far greater: a place where students could acquire the education to escape the feudal confines of a racist and dirt-poor Mississippi.

My father’s life growing up in small-town Mississippi in the thirties and early forties was hard. He knew first-hand the stomach pangs from going to bed hungry. White folks called him “nigger” so much that he was surprised when they did not. He used an outhouse until he was seventeen years old.

The other students at Oak Park also came from what by today’s standards would be Third World-level poverty, but the school’s all-black faculty did not permit that as an excuse for mediocre work. To keep the white folks happy, they made sure every student learned a “trade.” They also taught them how to write well, made sure they read great works of literature, and ensured that everyone learned “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” an anthem of black pride and old-fashioned patriotism.

In other words, they were taught that they could achieve. They learned to shun mediocrity and to be proud of their African-American heritage.

At the Oak Park hall-of-fame induction ceremony, I saw a group of proud, happy people whose collective credentials would be impressive in any setting. Oak Park graduates include opera star Leontyne Price, Olympic gold medalist Ralph Boston, university professors, medical doctors, lawyers, real estate moguls. Sitting there in Laurel, I thought about my North Minneapolis neighborhood and all the dysfunctions that exist there—teen pregnancies, trash-dumping, drug-dealing—and the collective accomplishments of the Oak Park crowd become even more impressive.

How did generations of Oak Park students achieve more in the face of overwhelming adversity than many of today’s African-American kids, who have barely swallowed crumbs of the crap my dad was forced to eat every day?

Then it came to me. Pain—induced by hard-core racism and the segregation it spawned—motivated the Oak Park crowd to take affirmative steps to improve their lives. What’s more, their families, most of which had a father at the helm, supported the teachers. And for the teachers, education was not just a paycheck—it was a calling.

Each speaker in his own way said largely the same thing. Retired Army General David Price, who graduated with my dad in the Class of 1946, told of being rousted out of a theater by the assistant principal while cutting chemistry class. “Hopefully appreciation of your education will come later,” he was admonished. “But you are sure as hell going to class right now.”

If Oak Park could do so much with so little, then young African-Americans have few excuses losing ground with the far greater resources available to them now.

Until a month ago, I did not think that I lived in “the ghetto.” North Minneapolis, the inner city, and even, on occasion, the ’hood—but not the ghetto. However, that was before a string of troubling incidents occurred in my neighborhood—and before I got some surprising reactions to them from some of my South Minneapolis friends. I’ve seen first-hand what happens when urban geography, race, and our notions of individual self-worth get mixed together.

“Ghetto” derives from the name of an island near Venice where Jews were forced to live in the 1500s. Now, according to Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, a ghetto is a “thickly populated slum area, inhabited predominantly by members of an ethnic or other minority group, often as a result of social or economic restrictions, pressures or hardships.”

Things started to get strange a few weeks ago when I asked some of the young men in my neighborhood about the dramatic increase in cars parked near my home at odd hours and often with suspicious-looking passengers. I made it clear to these men that I would report any drug dealing or other criminal activity to the police.

A few days later, a young African-American man approached me as I was headed to work. “I heard you were asking about drug dealing around here,” he said. “Nobody is dealing drugs. But you gotta understand—you live in the ghetto.”

I was just a little perplexed. “I live in the ghetto? What does that mean? Am I supposed to accept trash in my yard, open drug dealing, and general mayhem because of my ZIP code? People in Linden Hills or Kenwood don’t have to put up with this.”

“Brother, you don’t live in Linden Hills or Kenwood.”

“Fair enough,” I replied, “but my parents placed their lives on the line in Mississippi during the Civil Rights movement so that black people could live in decent neighborhoods. I am not going to disrespect our struggle as a people by accepting that kind of defeatist thinking.”

Then our eyes locked for a moment, each looking at the other with mutual bemusement. He clearly did not understand me, and I surely did not understand him. Did I challenge his expectations of what he and other Northsiders were entitled to from their surroundings? He probably thought I was setting the bar too high with my Kenwood comparisons, and I thought his ghetto comments provided an excuse for condoning subpar living conditions and bad behavior.

Less than thirty-six hours later, a ten-pound rock crashed through my living-room window at three o’clock in the morning. Was there a connection? Was I being punished for being too bourgeois and not accepting the consequences of my geographic place?

When I told two of my best friends, both Southsiders, I thought that they would surely empathize. Instead, I got lectured about “ghetto life” and strongly encouraged to “git while the gettin’ was good” to the relative safety of South Minneapolis. “I warned you about messing around with those Northside Negroes,” one told me. “They don’t look at the world the same way you and I do. You are dealing with men who don’t value their own lives, let alone yours.”

My other ABC (“ace boon coon,” Southern lingo for close personal friend) largely agreed. “You’ve got a choice to make,” he began. “If you don’t do anything else, they probably won’t either. Don’t start a neighborhood block group, don’t write about this in your column, and for God’s sake, do not challenge them again. Next time, you might just really piss them off. Inside your own home, say whatever you want, but do not ruffle their feathers by trying to impose your view of appropriate behavior on them. Accept that you live in a ghetto, populated with bad people who, if pushed, will do bad things to you.”

However, I am not going to ignore trash in my yard and criminal activity on my street because of my address. I strongly encourage my fellow “Northside Negroes”—and Northside Hmong, Latino, and all the other hyphenated Americans—to have zero tolerance for bad behavior. We’ve got to let the bad boys and girls know that the heat is on. We all deserve what people in Kenwood and Linden Hills take for granted—clean, relatively crime-free neighborhoods.

Assigning guilt by association is as American as motherhood, apple pie, and Chevrolet. The thinking goes something like this—if X is a bad person, and you are somehow tied to X, then you must be a bad person, too. This becomes especially true if those ties are familial, and person X is accused of a crime considered so heinous that the governor wants to bring back the death penalty because of it. In fact, in the eyes of some, you must be even worse than the accused if you are part of the family that spawned such a monster.

Just ask Angela Dellatorre, sister of Alfonso Rodriguez, Jr., the accused murderer of Dru Sjodin. Dellatorre, who asked that I not use her real name, lives near New York City and called me after she heard about a previous column about the level of publicity generated by the search for Dru Sjodin, compared to cases involving missing women of color.

“I had to thank you,” she began, “for not writing something that trashed my family the way the press has in the Grand Forks area.” I replied that I did not necessarily write a piece supporting Alfonso Rodriguez. I simply wanted to point out that the blond, blue-eyed Sjodin’s disappearance garnered far more media coverage than the disappearance of a black or Mexican woman ever has in Minnesota.

“I understand that. Still, by pointing out that race makes a difference in how people have viewed this, you were supportive. You cannot imagine how hard this has been on my family, especially my mother, who is seventy-two years old.” Angela said there is a gag order that prevents her family in Crookston from talking to the media. However, she added, “the gag order has not stopped the people in Crookston and Grand Forks from writing the most hateful things you can imagine about our family to the local newspaper. Hearing all this stuff just reminds me how tough it was growing up poor and Mexican in Crookston. Our family was never really accepted in that town.”

How did the Rodriguezes end up in such an inhospitable part of the country? Angela’s parents were migrant workers who came north every spring from Laredo, Texas, to pick vegetables. “Eventually, they got tired of the back-and-forth and decided to put down roots in northern Minnesota,” she said. “We were one of the first Mexican families in town. I am not making excuses for Alfonso or anything like that, but it was hell. I cannot count how many times we were called ‘dirty Mexicans.’ We were a different color and lowly migrant workers. We got harassed in school constantly. I remember a teacher telling me, ‘I am sure that someday I will see you barefoot and pregnant with a bunch of babies.’ Within a year of graduating from Crookston Central High School I was on my way to the East Coast, vowing to never come back to live. And I have kept my vow.”

Angela continued: “We have a good family. My mother was a wonderful mother—quiet, gentle, and hard-working. She and my dad raised five kids—three girls and two boys. My brother who lives on the West Coast has a good job and so do the three girls. Two of my sisters have college degrees.”

Angela’s summary of her family’s accomplishments had one painfully obvious omission—Alfonso. As much as I wanted to, I carefully avoided directly asking about the Dru Sjodin accusations. And Angela, at some intuitive level, sensed my curiosity. Whenever the conversation drifted too close to the events of the past six months, she wearily said, “I do not know if I should be talking to you.” At one point, Angela whispered, “They are putting my family though hell up there. My poor mother… she has beat cancer twice, but this is killing her. She says now that she does not want to live anymore. My sister who lives in Crookston tells me that her three kids get tormented at school every day. What are we going to do, Mr. Collins?”

Unfortunately, the destruction of the family and close associates of a notorious accused person is simply considered “collateral damage,” especially if the victim is a member of a socially privileged group and the accused is not. I cannot offer any advice to Angela Dellatorre and her family. I can’t even assure them that things will get better for them. Because in the months to come, now that the feds are prosecuting Rodriguez and will most certainly ask for the death penalty, they’re bound to get worse.

My mother taught me that little ditty in 1968, when I was nine years old. We had just become the first black family within a country mile of our new home in the then lily-white southeast Denver. I was no stranger to the word “nigger.” I heard it often from the lips of black people. However, hearing it come from white people was a new experience for me and my mother wanted me to have a retort ready when it happened.

So when I got “niggered,” I dutifully whipped out my rhyme, along with my fists and some other new words I learned that summer, many with only four letters. In 1974, I saw Blazing Saddles with some of the “brothas” and laughed at loud at the dialogue, which was laced with “nigger this” and “nigger that”. In fact, my posse was so badass cool that we could allow white people to sit next to us and laugh along with us.

After all, it was “our” word. Only we could say it with the right attitude and inflection. How else could I accept my family’s regular references to blacks as “nigger” without simultaneously acknowledging that we were hypocrites for trashing white people who“niggered” us?

I got my sisters—Renee, who lives in Huntsville, Alabama, and Rosalyn, who lives in suburban Denver—on a conference call to do my own family reality check. I told them about the political firestorm that consumed former Minnesota Public Safety Commissioner Rich Stanek over his admission that he had said “nigger” and told racist jokes twelve years ago. I told them that even before this came out, Stanek had been the target of at least two police brutality lawsuits, and not trusted by many black leaders around town. Both agreed he deserved to go down in flames.

However, when I asked them if it was wrong for black folks to call each other “nigger,” the line went quiet for a long beat. Then, virtually at the same time, they both replied, “it depends.” I pushed them harder. “So, when it comes to using this word, we are privileged and white people are not?” Renee, who, along with her husband, boasts a Ph.D., replied, “Black people know the rules and understand the context. When my husband tells me that he is going out with ‘the niggas,’ I know what that means. We’re talking about ‘us.’”

Okay, I said, let’s take it one step further. “We all agree that my Swedish-Irish wife is part of our African-American family now. Does she now have the right to use ‘the word’?” Again, there was another very long pause. Rosalyn offered, “If she is willing to work within our cultural norms, our context, and not use it to slam us, well, I suppose it would be okay.”

My sisters’ views are consistent with those discussed in Randall Kennedy’s bestselling Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. Kennedy, a Harvard Law professor, wrote that acceptable use of “nigger” depended on whether the user was trustworthy as far as black people were concerned. If the person was not a true friend of the “brothas and the sistahs,” then he or she was not to be trusted with the word. By that definition, for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be caught saying “nigger” would be a lynchable offense. Most African Americans see him as a Judas. Lyndon Johnson, however, who, as architect of the most sweeping civil rights legislation since the Civil War gained considerable credibility among black people, could be forgiven for his remarks to an aide in choosing to appoint the dark and well-known Thurgood Marshall over the lighter skinned and virtually unknown A. Leon Higginbotham: “The only two people who have heard of Judge Higginbotham are you and his momma. When I appoint a nigger to the Supreme Court, I want everyone to know he’s a nigger.”

Are there any lessons from my musings with my sisters for the Rich Staneks of the world, who, as they floated along the river of life, have said “nigger,” “spook,” or “jigaboo.” Clearly, “nigger” is a loaded word, one that must be handled with extreme care, especially if the user is anyone other than a black person.

However, it doesn’t matter if it’s Rich Stanek or Clarence Thomas, if a person has not demonstrated that he can be a trustworthy ally of black people, then being outed as having uttered “nigger” is a crime for which the statute of limitations never runs out.

Remember when Sammy Davis, Jr., belted out, “don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time” in the theme from Baretta? The message was that you should be willing to pay the price if you’re willing break the law. But the implication was that punishment for the crime had a clear beginning and end. In other words, once you did “the time,” you earned the right to move on with your life.

Our Constitution expressly forbids trying a person twice for the same crime. The prohibition against double jeopardy goes to the heart of what our legal system is all about: equal justice under law. That sentiment should be extended to make sure a person is not punished repeatedly for the same crime, even a politically unpopular crime.

The sad reality is, that has never quite been the case. Convicted felons have a hard time getting jobs and housing, and in many states, they never regain the right to vote or sit on a jury. In other words, they are sentenced to certain forms of punishment that endure for the rest of their lives.

Fortunately, ex-cons at least have equal access to federal student loan assistance—unless they have a drug-related conviction. In 1998, President Bill “I didn’t inhale” Clinton approved a law, the brainchild of conservative House Republican Mark Souder of Indiana, that barred anyone with a drug conviction from receiving federal student financial aid. The law does not recognize differences between drugs, nor amounts used. Getting caught with an ounce of pot is the same as selling a kilo of coke: Either will get you permanently barred from eligibility for federal student loans and grants.

Souder and his fellow drug busters believed that receiving taxpayer-funded federal student financial aid is a privilege, not a right. Money talks, goes their argument, and the consequence of losing financial aid dollars might prove a powerful deterrent to drug use.

And yet, in a recent New York Times article, Souder conceded that the law went way too far. He claimed he never meant it to be so mean-spirited. He simply wanted to discourage students from experimenting with drugs. Souder now says that students who are denied federal financial aid for crimes committed before college should sue the government.

Needless to say, this law has a hugely disproportionate impact on blacks. African-Americans make up twelve percent of the nation’s population and thirteen percent of its drug users; yet they comprise a whopping fifty-five percent of drug-use convictions—the same convictions that will disqualify them from ever getting a student loan.

George W. Bush wants to amend the law by limiting its scope to those busted for drugs while in college. Those with criminal convictions for drug use before college would remain eligible for federal assistance, no matter how serious the conviction. So under the Bush plan, the crack cocaine dealer who got religion before applying to college would remain eligible for financial aid, but a current college student caught with a joint would lose her financial aid. According to studies, more than a third of all college students used drugs in the mid-nineties. Are the Bushies really prepared to yank financial aid from such a large chunk of the population? More to the point, Bush’s so-called “fix” completely sidesteps the underlying problem with this fundamentally ill-conceived law: it treats drug-users differently from other lawbreakers.

Don’t get me wrong. I am adamantly against illegal drug use and believe that those who break drug laws should be punished. However, in meting out such punishment, we must ensure that we do not create a cure more devastating than the disease. Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank was absolutely right when he said, “We should abolish the whole rule. We should not encourage drug use, but you shouldn’t single that out as being worse than rape or arson or armed robbery.”

Are all drug users really beyond rehabilitation, where rapists, arsonists, and burglars are not? Should any college student who indulges in drugs be promptly expelled, and have the doors of higher education forever slammed in his face? Why do drug users not get the same equal justice under the law?

It’s time to reconsider how our so-called war on drugs is compromising basic Constitutional tenets of fairness. You do the crime, you do the time—once. Then you should be done.