Who is Victoria Wilson?
The civil-rights commission’s illegal member.

By John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru
December 11, 2001 11:15 a.m.

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.

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