Interview by Devika Bagchi & Shivani Khanna

Gargoyle senior editor & assistant editor
Posted Monday, Dec. 18, 2006, The OG, opinions & multimedia

Monica Fountain is a journalist who has worked for a number of publications, including the Chicago Tribune. As Uni High's assistant director of development and alumni relations, she edits the school's alumni magazine, AlumUni, and monthly newsletter, U'n'I. On Dec. 10, the Chicago Sun-Times published her column “What I will teach my black son to fear.” Monica and her husband, University of Illinois journalism professor John Fountain, have two children. Shortly before winter break, the Gargoyle interviewed her about the points she raised in the Sun-Times. Click below to listen to a podcast of Monica reading her column:

Podcast:

Q: What really prompted you to write this article?

A: I mentioned a young man in there called Marcus Dixon, and he was on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” a couple of years ago and he was a collegebound student who had a scholarship to Vanderbilt. He was living in Georgia, his foster parents were a white couple, but he still remained in contact with his mother and everything.

He was accused of raping a white classmate. He said that they had just had oral sex and it was consensual and everything, but then when she went home she cried rape. They had the trial and he was acquitted, it just didn't add up, but he was still convicted of statutory rape because the girl was 15 or 16 and he was 17, so even though a jury acquitted him he was still sentenced to something like 10 years in prison.

MONICA FOUNTAIN (yearbook
photo) (click to enlarge)

Later that was turned over — probably partially because of the publicity that Oprah called to it — but I'll never forget watching that interview. He was a nice young man and he was sitting there crying and he was very sincere, and he was just like, “I had oral sex and I made a mistake.” And Oprah asked him, “What did your mother teach you about white girls?”

Now this is what Oprah asked him. I mean 50 Cent has accused Oprah of being a white woman but even she understood what it meant for a black boy in Georgia to be involved with a white girl. And that sort of stuck with me too and prompted me to think, well, as a mother, what do I need to teach my son in order to survive in this world? And so that was the impetus of the column.

Q: In your column you brought up some important underlying ideas and issues about our society. Can you elaborate on how you think our society feels about race?

A: It's funny, there are a lot of different things, and there are towns even here in East Central Illinois, and a lot of people are not cognizant of it, but one of the points that I was trying to get across was that as a black mother raising a boy who will be a black man one day, you will have to be cognizant of these things.

And as I was saying about towns, there is a professor who is doing research here at the University of Illinois about “sundown towns.” A sundown town is a town where if you're black you better not be caught there after sundown. So that's a reality. So the essay that I wrote, I wrote it a couple years ago after one of those incidents that happened where a black man was shot by the police, and I wrote it and I kind of put it to the side, and then recently when the young man [23-year-old Sean Bell] was killed in New York on his wedding day I decided to get it out and do it again because these things keep happening.

Like when I was a reporter at the Chicago Tribune some years ago I remember one time when I went out on the story and there was a young black man who was slow mentally and had special needs and the police killed him. His parents and his family, when I went out to the scene on the South Side of Chicago, what they said was that the boy had special needs and his mother had sent him to the corner store to buy some cigarettes or some pop for her and the police saw him, and they were looking for someone else but they saw him and thought that he matched the description. He was scared and he started running and the police shot him at the back door of his house. So these are the kind of things that go on.

Q: Do you ever worry that you're making your son too afraid? How are you going to teach him to not hate cops or white girls but still understand the situation?

A: Well that's why I said “Am I racist?” and then I came back and said “I'm a realist.” And I mean I have a daughter as well, and I'm going to teach my daughter about sexual predators — and my son as well actually.

But as a girl, as a woman too, there is a ridiculous statistic about how many girls have been victims of sexual abuse - it's like 1 in 3 or something — and so it would be negligent on my part if my daughter was a high school student or a college student and I didn't tell her to walk in groups and to not walk at night by herself, because that's the reality of the situation.

Now do I want her to be afraid of every man that she sees? No, but you have to have a certain level of awareness of the dangers out there and also that people would judge you on this [the color of your skin], and they're not going to get a chance to know you and they're just going to see this — and whatever baggage they have with that, that's how they're going to see you.

And like I said, that predicament is even more dangerous for a black man … and some people don't want to understand this. But … my husband, if he's wearing a suit or something, then people treat him differently than if he's not wearing a suit. Or sometimes even when he's wearing a suit, a person might hold their purse a little closer or something, and I mean he's a professor wearing a suit but they're not going to see all that — all they see is a black man.

I mean right now my son, he's only 4 years old so these things don't come into play, but as he gets older and bigger then these things will come into play. I just want to teach him to respect women, all women of all colors and to not get involved with that whole culture — which really saddens me — where men kind of group-think that women are put here on this earth, like I said in the column, “just for their pleasure.”

So you read these terrible stories of young men putting rape drugs into girls' drinks and then taking advantage of young women, like the Colorado football team a couple of years ago — there are those kind of issues as well.

I mean some of these things I have to warn him about, but I'll tell you this, a paragraph that got cut out of the story for space was about this nephew of mine, he's 15 now but he was 13 at the time, and I said maybe he's already learned some of the lessons that I want to teach my son.

His mother told me that his friends came over and said, “Come on, let's go play basketball,” and he went and then he came back and his mother said, “Why are you back so soon?” And he said, “Mom, they weren't going to play basketball, they were going to a girl's house and her parents weren't home.” And then he said, “And she was a white girl!” So thank God he had enough sense to realize that it was a bad situation because first of all it was a girl's house and her parents weren't home, but then there was the added dimension of “Hey it's a white girl too, and you are a bunch of black boys.”

So I think that some things, too, life just has a way of teaching you as well and I think some things are just — I mean, all of us should be angry about racism and that people still judge others by the color of their skin and not by the content of their character. Have we made strides? I'm sure, but yeah, it's still a reality.

Q: Do you feel there is anything that is hopeful about this situation?

A: This saddens me incredibly, but I guess the thing that is hopeful for me is that there are … settings like Uni where people of different cultures, backgrounds, and races get to know each other as friends and get to see beyond their color and get to know people as people, and so that's hopeful to me.

My son goes to this school, Orchard Downs Preschool, and there are people from China, India, Korea, white, black and all of that, and so that's the hope. But the reality you know is that there are still sundown towns, and as I said in my article, “Do black cops kill white men for pulling out their wallets?” Sure, but I haven't read it, and if it has happened then it's been very few compared to the number of other cases where black men are gunned down by white cops because of a description “tall black male.”

And that's why too, as I said in my column, I wanted to make clear — even though I didn't want to be cliché like, “Oh my God, my best friends are white” - it's not like I'm antiwhite. I love my white sisters, but I'm pro life and it's just about teaching my son how the world really is.

It's difficult because people will say, “Oh, I didn't even know that was a problem,” and I'll say: “Yeah, of course you didn't because you're not sitting here living in my skin! So of course you didn't see it as a problem.” And they'll say, “Well, I went to school where there were no people of color.” And I'll be like, “Yeah, but you don't know what it feels like for me to be one of 10 people of color and I'm from the North Side of Champaign or wherever I'm from and I've gone to school with black kids all my life and now I'm here in a totally different culture with different people.”

We're in 2006 and these types of things still happen — that there still is racism, that there is still discrimination, that everyone isn't as open-minded and free as say people at Uni are, and maybe even some people at Uni aren't as open-minded and free as they thought they were. Like I said, though, the good thing is that there's communication and that people are willing to talk about it.