Jim Schutze was born in 1946, spent his childhood in Ann Arbor, Michigan and attended high school at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, after which he was an automobile assembly-line worker in Detroit for six years. He is retired from a decades-long career as a newspaper columnist writing about local politics in Dallas, Texas.

Schutze's book on race relations in Dallas, The Accommodation, was pulled from the presses by a local publisher and suppressed in 1986. Re-published 35 years later in the wake of the George Floyd murder, it was selected for a citywide reading program in Dallas.