I am doing a number of personal projects, and one of them is reading books about Peoples Temple, especially earlier historiography, in order to determine how research on the topic has changed over time and how cultural memory has both shaped and is shaped by what people write in history books.

One of the books that I had the pleasure to read from my university library is Our Father Who Art in Hell by James Reston, Jr, published in 1981. This book, obviously, has biases, but one claim in the book stood out to me the most and has been bothering me for almost an entire month.

In a chapter about Peoples Temple seeking possible refuge in Russia, the author references Q042 (aka “the death tape”) in a “reconstruction” of the final debate before the community drank (or were forced to drink, or were injected with—we honestly don't know, and we're still debating whether everyone was actually murdered or whether most of the adults committed suicide) cyanide-laced Flavor-aid and extinguished itself. The reconstruction starts with this:

From the assembled, a sixty-one-year-old white woman, Christine Miller, rose. (p. 200)

This seems innocuous enough, right?

Well, no. It's not. It's wrong, or we wouldn't be here talking about it. But you might not realize just how much fail is loaded in that one sentence, especially if you were new to the topic and have never heard or seen a picture of Christine Miller. Well, I'm going to fix that.

This is Christine Miller. Take a look at this, and then go back and reread that sentence, and let the horror dawn upon you as you realize how badly Reston screwed up.

Yes, he white-washed a sixty-year-old black woman and made her white.

For the record, Christine Miller is very important. She is the only person on Q042 who argues for the preservation of the community and against the suicides/murders. Also, here's a demographic factoid related to Peoples Temple: 68% of the Temple members residing in Guyana were black. So, uh, this basically has some very unfortunate implications, besides the white-washing problem.

I can hear you all yelling now. “But this was published in 1981! What if he didn't have access to passport pictures?”

First of all, it's still stupid to assume a person's race, and you really shouldn't do that if you honestly don't know. Second of all, he did have access to passport pictures. There's an entire chapter about a woman named Jann Gurvich, and in that chapter, he describes her passport picture. Reston has no excuse.