If 70% of the murder victims at Jonestown were white, instead of black (45% black women), I think the nation would treat it like it was 9/11.

We talk about Jonestown, but if those 918 people had been white teens who got sucked into a weird cult, that horrible “drank the Kool-Aid” reference would not be the extent of our collective memory.

There would be a colossal memorial, a day devoted to it every year, it would be seen as the defining moment of the 1970s.

Right now it’s something your US history teacher runs out of time to discuss after covering Vietnam. It was a mass murder of Americans (1/3 being children), not a “suicide pact”. They killed a sitting US Congressman.

And the reason Jones got to START a cult was because of the allure of his message of anti-racism and socialism in a profoundly racist community. Which is just the sickest part of all, to me. “Saving” families from racism and capitalism through mass murder.

And I don’t think it would have mattered that it wasn’t on American soil. 918 dead mostly-white Americans in any nation would be the biggest event imaginable. We have a movie about Americans heroically tackling terrorists on a French train.

Thank you for listening to my Jonestown obsession, I have been researching it since I was a weird teen and I just fucking hate that it’s not a bigger deal.

And that you still commonly see it described as a “murder-suicide” or a “suicide pact” instead of a mass murder, which it was. No one truly committed suicide at Jonestown except for Jones.

If you’re white, when did you learn that the vast majority of the victims of Jonestown were black?

The replies to that question are really depressing and it’s a journalistic and a cultural failure, not the fault of any individual who just never learned about it.

Oh, one more thing: https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2018/jonestown-moscone-milk/