And if threat was a last resort the first resort was equally manipulative. Dr. Dixon is a master at emoting and shedding tears on cue but I have my doubts about his sincerity. From his first minute in Duluth he choked up with one lie, possibly two, calculated to impress his listeners that he was sensitive about racism. I suspected them both and eventually confirmed that one was a lie. Amazingly both of them become part of a video record.
Dixon had only been in Duluth for a few days when he was invited to a remembrance of the City’s infamous lynching back in 1920. A local videographer gathered a collection of locals together to talk about racism and the new Superintendent was one of them. His comments were so striking that its not surprising they were included in the resulting 30 minute video.
Dr. Dixon tells an anecdote about his mixed race granddaughter who tells him she wishes she wasn’t so dark skinned. When he passes this information along he becomes so choked up he can not continue and apologizes for his display of emotion.
I’m sure this made an impression on his listeners. Dr. Dixon managed to cry frequently at similar meetings with parents. I’ve had at least one person tell me how impressed they were at this display of Dr. Dixon’s caring.
Dixon said that two of three grandchildren were biracial which could easily be explained through adoption. Still, I’m not the only one to suspect Dixon’s honesty here. One of the participants at the video, Maureen Booth, told me that Dixon’s comments struck her as questionable. She swore me to secrecy when she added that our previous Superintendent Julio Almanza felt Dixon was dishonest. I think Maureen’s recent death discharges me from my promise. She didn’t want Julio to find out that she had broken a confidence. I’m not certain that Julio was reacting to this particular story but as a Hispanic he would have been sensitive to such claims. He spent a short time showing Keith Dixon the ropes and I suspect, as a matter of courtesy, they shared some of their backgrounds with each other.
Whether the biracial part is true or not its hard to imagine such a ruthless man breaking up so easily over it. Ten years before President George H W Bush proudly told his nominating convention that he had mixed race grandchildren that he called, if I remember correctly, his little brown ones. Even if the choking up wasn’t an act it seems to suggest a sense of hopelessness about his grandchildren’s plight. How unhelpful. Maureen was African American and called things the way she saw them. She thought she was listening to a bunch of BS from Dixon. She felt the District and the minority community had been so badly hurt by his policies that she filed to run for the school board in 2009. I’m sorry she lost.
Dixon made a second claim at this first introduction to Duluth that was clearly a lie although I had to confirm this later. He said that he had become familiar with black suffering, calling it “white privilege,” by spending many evenings talking with his black college room mate.
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There were two things about this that made my bullshit detector jump. First, “white privilege” was not a phrase that black kids were using in the 1960’s when Dixon was in college. Its true that Dixon might simply have been using current terminology to stay current. If so, it was a mis-characterization of the real complaints of blacks back in that Era. Concerns about white privilege would come later. Back when Dixon was in college in the 1960’s they were legally forbidden from marrying white people in some states, denied the vote and forced to use “colored” bathrooms.
The second thing that didn’t ring true was the idea that Dr. Dixon would have a black roommate in a Colorado College back in the 1960’s. In the Sixties Colorado’s black population was negligible. The chances against Dr. Dixon having a black roommate seemed astronomical.
I stewed about the improbability of both of his statements for a good half year before I decided to ask him about the latter. After a school board meeting I waited until Dr. Dixon was in the hall and forced myself to be briefly jovial and comment with surprise that I had heard that he had a black college roommate. Without hesitation he broke into a broad smile and reminisced about his roommate, Oscar Reed, who happened to have been a great college football player and coincidentally a Minnesota Viking. Then he then told me that he had gotten reacquainted with his old roommate the year before at a “Men as Peacemakers” meeting in Duluth and reminded Oscar about the good old days. I was utterly deflated. The embellishments were so good he couldn’t have been lying to me and I resignedly said as much afterward to several of my supporters at Let Duluth Vote. Well as it happened. The story Dixon told me was too good to be true.
I let Dr. Dixon’s romance stand for a year before I worked up the gumption to call Oscar Reed himself. Mr Reed remembered the meeting very clearly because he was surprised that Duluth’s superintendent claimed to have been his college roommate. “He must have been mistaken,” Oscar told me in a great understatement. Oscar Reed didn’t know Dr. Dixon from a hole in the ground. There were no late night talks about the plight of Negroes.
This odd story leaves me wondering to what extent Dr. Dixon manages to convince himself of his many inventions. He sure as hell had me convinced for a long time with a deft embellishments. Embroidery is the hallmark of all accomplished liars.
