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 he
resume of commissioner-for-life Victoria
Wilson — who believes herself to be a member of the U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights even though her term on the panel ended
last month — doesn't exactly overflow with civil-rights scholarship
or activism. Instead, she's an editor at Knopf, and is best known
for publishing the vampire novels of Anne Rice.
She does, however,
have a small link to a Washington scandal from nearly a decade ago.
Remember John Frohnmayer? He was head of the National Endowment
for the Arts during the first Bush administration, but was forced
out when the agency's spending came under scrutiny. It was discovered,
for example, that an NEA-funded magazine had published a poem written
from the perspective of a teenager who rapes a Central Park jogger.
The author of the poem also linked Jesus Christ to a sex act that
wasn't much discussed in DC's polite society prior to the Lewinsky
scandal.
The author's
name was Sapphire (her real name is Ramona Lofton), and what proved
toxic to Frohnmayer's career was a boon to hers. A few years later,
Sapphire wrote a short novel called Push, which told the
story of a 15-year-old black girl who is molested by her mother
and twice impregnated by her father. She's also fat, illiterate,
and HIV-positive. The publishing world went bananas, with lots of
talk about "authenticity" and so forth. Push was
sold to Knopf for half-a-million dollars, where Victoria Wilson
became Sapphire's editor. "Here is an electrifying book that
is shaking me, bringing me into a world where no white person wants
to go, which they'd rather drive by in their car and not know about,"
Wilson told the Washington Post when Push was published
in 1996.
Others didn't
quiver with so much excitement. "Why does the publishing industry
have this morbid fascination with the most depraved, violent, misogynist,
vulgar, low-life element in the African-American experience?"
asked Vaughn A. Carney in the Wall Street Journal. (Today,
according to Amazon.com, people who buy books by Sapphire also buy
books by Sister Souljah — another person who turned a stupid
statement into a whole career.)
It all suggests
a new topic for the civil-rights commission. In the words of Carney:
"We must understand the degradation dynamic for what it is;
too many in the publishing industry refuse to see blacks as anything
other than inferiors, victims, social work cases, and reclamation
projects — and rarely as equals, individuals, or, God forbid,
competitors. Until this changes, we can expect little more than
the persistent showcasing of such debasement for fun, profit, and
a twisted sense of white superiority."
Maybe the commission
should hold hearings on this topic and issue a report. Its first
expert witness could be Victoria Wilson.
Happy
Birthday
Today is the 30th birthday of the Libertarian Party.
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