Remembering Syl Jones, opinion page provocateur

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For an editor who used to handle Syl Jones, there is a special poignancy in noting that his death came just five days after Donald Trump was elected to another term in the White House (obituary, Nov. 13).

Excuse me. Did I say I used to “handle” Syl Jones? There was no handling him. His presence on this publication’s opinion pages was a challenge — to editors, to readers, to Minnesota, to the establishment and to the human conscience most of all. It was also a gift — one that sometimes felt like a curse.

His commentaries spared nothing and nobody from his criticism, least of all editors who tried to coax him into less sweeping condemnations of the racist attitudes that he saw as underpinning our society. Jones seemed to take special delight in flaying well-meaning white people who were proudly, perhaps smugly, trying to do the right thing. Myself included.

“It is a mistake to believe that good intentions alone can produce excellent results in any endeavor,” he wrote in a 1990 critique of this newspaper’s reporting on race relations. “[G]ood intentions may be viewed as just another attempt by a paternalistic white organization to assuage its conscience.” Elsewhere in that essay he declared that the Star Tribune’s editors had displayed the “height of hypocrisy.”

Jones’ contributions to the Star Tribune spanned more than two decades, beginning with that essay in 1990. He had moved on to other endeavors by the time Trump first ran for president. The archives of his work show only fleeting references to Trump, like this one in 1993: “A capitalist democracy often inspires disenfranchised citizens to become small-time hustlers and criminal entrepreneurs — shadow figures of Donald Trump and Michael Milken.”

Today, we can be sure, the references would not be so fleeting. Jones’ columns were master classes in the dissection of racism, conducted with extra-credit seminars in racism that goes by other names, like “insensitivity.” He would see the nascent Trump administration as a target-rich environment.

And not just for its likely impact on people of color. He believed in high moral standards, which also seem out of style in Trump’s Washington. A column Jones wrote in 1993 charged that “the rule of law is not respected by the vast majority of Americans because it has no meaning in daily life. Why shouldn’t an individual run a red light if there are no cars coming? What’s wrong with smoking pot or drinking to drunkenness? Why not defraud customers if you can get away with it? The answer — that when we violate the rule of law we compound the injustice of society and embrace our own destruction — is widely ignored.”

“The world in which we live,” Jones wrote, “will never be safe until we relinquish these contradictions and unashamedly embrace goodness as the standard by which we live.”

That may not seem like an especially debatable sentiment. His critics, of whom there were always a few and sometimes more than a few, found plenty of other assertions to debate and denounce. Among his other talents, Jones was an accomplished playwright, and he sometimes wrote in the voice of an invented character. Most often he turned his column over to Dr. Wilton T. Jabazz, a fictitious professor emeritus of Northern Racism Studies at Bemidji State University.

The fictitious Dr. Jabazz would answer letters from equally fictitious readers and speak in a distinctive style not usually found in the opinion pages of the Star Tribune. Among the lightning rods that bristled from the Jabazz columns were the terms “Sun folk” and “Ice people.” Here’s a sample:

“Dear Dr. Jabazz: Why don’t you and Kwesi Mfume tell it like it is? You know very well that whites are afraid of blacks because of the crimes they commit, not because of their skin color. – Tony B., Bryn Mawr.

“Dear Tony-Baloney: People like you give Ice folk a bad name. If Sun people thought like you, images of Ted Bundy, Richard Speck and other mass murderers would keep us inside with the doors locked. You better get somethin’ on your mind.”

If he were still with us, Jones would no doubt fire back an email detailing the ways my reflections had missed the point and misrepresented his work. How glad I’d be to hear from him again.

Eric Ringham was commentary editor from 1982 to 2009.