My Post-Doctoral Life

18 Sunday May 2008

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, earth, wind & fire, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, race, Youth

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Betrayal, Carnegie Mellon University, Jealousy, Mother-Son Relationship, PhD, PhD Graduation, Pittsburgh

PhD Graduation Group Photo – May 18, 1997. A great photo, except for the one (my mother) who was missing – note my mother-in-law gesturing to her. (Angelia N. Levy).

Today is the eleventh anniversary of my marching across stage to officially end the formal student phase of my life. Around 2 pm, I shook hands with the president of Carnegie Mellon University and the Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences to accept my PhD in History. It could’ve and should’ve been a joyous moment, but it wasn’t. After all, I had learned that my mother was about as happy for me as some of my former fellow grad students, who threw around words like “envious” and “jealous” in the year before my official graduation.

I tell this story in Boy At The Window this way: “The proverbial someone once said that a picture is worth a thousand words. But…even in the age of megapixels, pictures miss what words can say. Such is the case with a picture of me and my closest folk on my PhD graduation day in May ’97. On this sultry and sunny spring day, I stand in my polyester black cap and gown with my future mother-in-law dressed in a yellow-gold blazer and flower-print skirt on my right, and my longtime high school friend on my left. My friend’s one-time ‘surrogate’ son and her twenty-three-year-old sister, as well as my graduate-school friend and colleague Ed are also in this picture, from my friend’s left through the rest of the four-by-six-inch print. They all look hot and happy, as if they went through the doctoral thesis process in one afternoon. At the least, they looked ready for air conditioning or shade. I’m happy too, if only for that moment.

The Carnegie Mellon University-wide ceremony was anticlimactic. I’d finished my dissertation with approval from my committee six months before I marched across stage. Yet I had reason to smile the smile of relieved happiness. Relieved that the outdoor graduation ceremony had concluded and happy to see my then girlfriend Angelia grinning ear-to-ear as she snaps the picture of the six of us. Noticeably absent from this picture is my mother, who stood outside of our huddle (to the right of Angelia’s mother). If you look closely at the picture, you can see Ms. Levy gesturing—presumably to my mother—to get her into the picture. What you don’t see is my mother shaking her head and looking at the rest of us with discomfort as we set up for Angelia’s shot. What you also don’t and can’t see is the pride that everyone involved in the picture possessed about my accomplishment. It was an almost overwhelming experience to receive so much emotional support after so many years without it.

But pictures, no matter how well orchestrated, only capture a moment in time, a moment that could be connected to a string of events or an off-the-beaten path tangent from events already in motion. Or a picture can be a snapshot of a transition point between events. For all of us, I think, this picture symbolized major turning point in our lives, ‘the way we were,’ if you will. My relationships with my mother, my soon-to-be mother-in-law and wife, and my friends all changed or were in the process of change.

How I saw my mother had changed forever a few days before Angelia snapped the picture of me and the others. The best evidence of this is the next picture in this photo album, at the time the next picture in the roll of film from that day. It was of me angrily stomping down a spiraling flight of stairs at The Thackeray Club on the University of Pittsburgh’s campus. I held my doctoral diploma for the camera as if I wanted to hit someone with it. My face looks dark, and not just because I’m Black and had been on five hours’ sleep per night for the past ten days. My face looks frozen between anger and disappointment. Anger about my mother comparing my nine and a half years of undergraduate and graduate education to being ‘in school long enough to earn another high school diploma.’ Disappointment in her later telling me, ‘I don’t have to tell you that I’m proud of you. I tell other folks, just not you.’

Angelia’s picture captures the dark mood that my concrete expression struggled to show. I privately acknowledged that my mother had never cared about my degree or other accomplishments because I somehow was ‘showing her up.’ I had worked for nearly fifteen years to make this moment in my life happen, a moment where my dreams, my ultimate make-believe fantasy life had finally begun to merge with 3-D reality.

Then my mother had decided at the last minute to catch an earlier flight. And just as my individual, Department of History celebration was about to start. To say that my reasonably close—sometimes too close—relationship with my mother hasn’t been the same since would be like saying Hiroshima was never the same after the Enola Gay unloaded her deadly payload.

She needed to go to the airport for her flight to take care of ‘the kids’—my four younger siblings. ‘The kids’ were between thirteen and eighteen years old, and had been without my mother’s supervision for two full days before her airport request. During the trip to the airport in my graduation robe, I thought about crying, yelling, even about shaking my mother to see if she could show any emotion other than a blank disdain. I chose instead the most uncomfortable silence I could summon.

When we arrived at the gate, I finally said to her that she had ‘ruined every event in my adult life’ that I had given her the opportunity to attend. And this was the first opportunity my mother had taken advantage of—she couldn’t get to my other graduations because neither of us had the money to pay for her transportation. I certainly understood that reality, because I grew up in it. This was different. This was telling me that even if money weren’t an issue, my mother wouldn’t have been able to show any sense of pride or joy in what I had done. The irony of that fateful day was that my mother’s six o’clock US Airways flight was delayed more than two hours due to thundershower activity in Pittsburgh and New York. It was after eleven by the time my mother arrived home, according to one of my brothers.

It would be a month before we talked again, and that only occurred because my seventeen-year-old brother Maurice was about to graduate from Mount Vernon High School….In the years since my graduation, I’ve learned that even a parent can be jealous of their children. Especially if a parent attempts to live the life that they would like to have through them.”

What I don’t discuss in the manuscript are other details to this week eleven years ago. Including the fact that I was living on four or five hours of sleep for a week and a half. That I started the week of my Carnegie Mellon graduate in New York interviewing for an assistant professor job at Teachers College. That my mother marched for her associate’s degree at Westchester Business Institute in White Plains five days before my graduation, and that her comment to me about my years of working on a second high school diploma came the day after her graduation ceremony. What I don’t talk about is how my mother and eventual mother-in-law, in their first-ever meeting during my mother’s time in Pittsburgh, spent three hours discussing their failed marriages and the horrible nature of Black men the day before my graduation. And finally, that for the next four days after my graduation, I had a severe gastrointestinal infection, no doubt made worse by my sleeplessness and emotion distress.

The last eleven years have been a struggle to have a career as satisfying and as successful as my post-high school academic experience, with many more positives than negatives. At the same time, my struggles in career and in my life in general are the reason that I find myself in constant self-reflection about my life. It’s this self-reflection that helped me in writing Boy At The Window in the first place.

But the most difficult aspect of the things that I do struggle with centers on trust. Between my mother and my former advisor, not to mention some of my former fellow grad students and others on my dissertation committee, I felt a sense of betrayal that I hadn’t felt since the day my stepfather had knocked my mother unconscious. It took about a year and a half for me to recover from the dissertation process and from what my mother did during my graduation weekend.

I certainly was sarcastic before, but I know that I’m jaded about trusting others these days. Especially folks in positions of authority who happen to be somewhere between flighty and absolute fakes. Some people I’ve worked with in publishing come to mind. Others I’ve worked with and for, though, are far more typical in my world of being careful with whom I divulge my information and life experiences to. Most of time, I find myself much more deliberate about the company I keep and the folks I talk to about my world beyond my job, my teaching and my writing.

I’ve had to learn a second time how to overcome betrayal and distrust. The first time, I could almost trust anyone. This time, I have much more choice as to whom I trust and for how long, which also makes it all the more difficult. As for my mother, I have long since forgiven her for the things that she did and said eleven years ago, although I have to work hard at standing in that forgiveness sometimes. But with my memory, in which I can tell you what I had to eat for dinner on May 12th of ’97, it’s hard to forget.

Meltzer and Mentors

13 Tuesday May 2008

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This blog is dedicated to my dear late mentor Harold I. Meltzer. He died on 9 January 2003 at the age of sixty-six, all too young and all too bitter about his years as a high school history teacher. But dealing with entitled parents and unrepentant administrators in Mount Vernon, New York for thirty five years would do that to most people. Despite all that, Meltzer was a rock as a teacher, the first teacher since my elementary school years that I genuinely trusted with my family secrets and my inner self. He was the first teacher I had in my six years of Humanities who actually seemed like he wanted to teach us. Meltzer actually seemed human, at least to me.

It all started at the end of tenth grade, in June of ’85, after a year of constant change. I couldn’t stand my lazy, chain-smoking, couch-lounging, teaching-anything-other-than-the-curriculum teachers from my sophomore year. Many of my affluent White classmates were leaving Mount Vernon or MVHS, something I noted but only saw the significance of later on. I was at a point where my then three-year march toward college and leaving 616 and Mount Vernon altogether was cluttered in anger and disappointment. With myself, my grades, my family, and our poverty. I was a disillusioned new Christian, having thought that my life would all of a sudden become a better one just because I gave my heart to Christ.

Then I met Meltzer. It was the last day of tenth grade, after three days of finals and Regents exams. He had summoned fourteen of us to “Room 275 of Mount Vernon High School,” as the invitation read. We had all registered to take Meltzer’s AP American History class in eleventh grade, our first opportunity to earn college credit while in high school.

Meltzer started off talking to us about Morison and Commager — who I now know as the great consensus historians of the ’50s, until the social history revolution made their textbooks irrelevant by the ’80s — as we sat in this classroom of old history books and even older dust and chalk. Meltzer himself looked to be in his late-fifties (he was actually about to turn 49 at the time), tall and lanky except for the protruding pouch in the tummy section. His hair was a mutt-like mixture of silver, white and dull gray, and his beard was a long, tangled mess. The way he spoke, and the way his eyes looked when he spoke made me see him as a yarmulke-wearing preteen on his way to temple. He seemed old and young at the same time. The force with which his words would leave his mouth hit me immediately. If I believed him, Morison and Commager had created the greatest textbook in the history of history as a subject. As much as I noticed how frequently spit would spew out of Meltzer’s mouth, the rhythm of his speech was slow and sing-song, like an elder or grandfather taking you on a long, winding, roller-coaster-ride of a story.

Meltzer spent at least twenty minutes explaining the Morison and Commager textbook as if the book alone was the key to scoring the precious “5” on the AP American History exam. As he went on and on about how this was his college textbook “at Hunter College in 1958” and how it changed his life, he gave each of us Morison and Commager to read in preparation for the next school year. Upon receipt of the black hardback book, I turned it over and looked at the last page because the book was so thick. It was 508 pages long! I gasped at the thought of reading so many pages over the summer and during school. I could only think of trying to read this book—one almost completely absent of pictures, maps, and other visuals that could take up space—in my home of horrors and hysterical young’uns. Then I looked up to find a couple of my classmates snickering or looking overwhelmed as well.

One of the next things Meltzer did moved me from jaded to interested in him as my teacher. It was so out-of-the-way goofy that it made me want to show up for class in the fall. He noticed that one of my classmates had completely zoned out on his elevator speech on the importance of American history via Lincoln. Then a blackboard eraser zipped past my right ear and landed on the floor by one of my beloved classmates in the back second row. I don’t know about my comrade, but Meltzer got my attention. Meltzer said,“If I catch any of you napping or not paying attention . . . a book” or eraser will “fly by your desk.” It surprised me, made me laugh, and had me ready to see what the quirky Meltzer would do next.

Meltzer was somewhere between downright weird and absentmindedly eccentric. Yet with all of that, he was by far the most intriguing and involved teacher that I would ever have. After the first week of eleventh grade, Meltzer took my class on this long-and-winding road toward the American Revolution, the Founding Fathers and the US Constitution through an unusual set of stories, testing us in the process. He’d tell us stories about his first trip to the Metropolitan Opera House in Manhattan in ’39 (I later learned that he would’ve only been three at the time) and somehow tied it to Jefferson’s vision of an egalitarian society. Meltzer would take us to eighteenth-century Britain’s House of Commons, giving us a picture of photographic-memoried savants as newspaper reporters and connect this to freedom of the press. Or he would tell us about some Broadway show—like Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma—and connect it in his wandering way to social mobility or slavery and inequality.

Of course all of this was well beyond my 616 and Humanities Program experience. But we all needed to see the shape and direction of Meltzer’s stories. He’d ask us questions throughout the class, asking us to draw unlikely connections between obscure opera singers, concert conductors and violin virtuosos and US expansion, the Constitutional Convention, and the Civil War. It was completely counterintuitive to what we normally did in any class, Humanities or otherwise. A normal class was us asking the teacher questions to make sure we’d know everything that we needed to do for the next test or writing assignment. This “What do you think?” stuff was new and should’ve been exciting. It felt bizarre, but it was also a breath of fresh air. Right, wrong or somewhere in between, my hand was almost always up and I was fully willing to participate in Meltzer’s asymmetrical student engagement process of learning. On the few occasions my hand wasn’t up, he’d call on me anyway, saying “I know you’ve got something to say.” He was teaching all of us the critical thinking skills we needed for college, and most of us didn’t even know it or care to know it.

For me at least, Meltzer’s unusual space extended beyond our academic needs. He was the first teach I had since before Humanities who’d ask me if things at home were all right. He was the first to ask me about how poor my family was. And he was the first teacher ever to ask if I had a girlfriend. Needless to say, these questions were unexpected. Yet through these questions, Meltzer had begun to crack my thin, hard wall of separation between school and family. By the time I was in graduate school, I could talk to him and most of my friends about almost anything.

It turned out that I was one of three students who earned a 5 on the AP American History exam in eleventh grade, twenty-two years ago on this date and day as a matter of fact. at least another five students earned 4s and several more turned in 3s. In all the three of us who earned 5s had automatically earned six credits toward college, and the students who scored 4s at least three college credits. It was an amazing year, for me and for Meltzer, but as usual, it went unacknowledged by MVHS administration. Perhaps our ethnic diversity was a factor, but the fact that Meltzer wasn’t well liked by the powers that were certainly didn’t help.

Because Meltzer cared deeply about reaching students — about reaching me — our student-teacher relationship because a quasi-friendship after high school and a mentoring one as well. I wasn’t looking for a mentor, and Meltzer was only being Meltzer. Still, his stories about his battles with MVHS administrators, Board of Education folk, and with upper-crust parents who believed their kids were entitled to A’s just for showing up were filled with lessons of perseverance, patience, and looking beyond everyday headaches in order to reach people. While this wasn’t a factor in my becoming a part-time college professor, these stories have helped me over the years.

Meltzer stands in direct contrast to others who either sought to mentor me without my permission or were tasked with the job of advising or mentoring me. The person who comes most to mind is Joe Trotter, my dissertation advisor during my Carnegie Mellon University years. It should’ve been a good match. He was a twentieth-century African American historian, and I aspired to be such. He was a tenured Black professor, meaning his job was pretty secure. And Trotter was fairly well known in his field. How that dream turned into a near nightmare!

“I’m looking out for your best interests” was what my dissertation advisor typically said in discussing my future with me. As far as Trotter was concerned, he was in charge of the rest of my academic career, determining everything from whether I would finish my doctorate to where I would live and work after I graduated. But as I would discover by the end of my education, he was not nurturing my career at all.

Virtually all of my achievements as a graduate student occurred despite Trotter rather than because of him. This was because my advisor often discouraged my attempts to publish, to obtain grants for my research, to participate in major conferences, and to apply for jobs when it was apparent I had nearly completed my doctoral thesis. Of course I did all of those things anyway, in most cases without informing him. On the few occasions that I did — or if he learned of something from one of my colleagues — Trotter would “run interference,” as he would say, acting in his role as my advisor to protect me politically from the other, White senior professors. Somehow, my publications or presentations would cause their consternation to fall on my head. My advisor would frequently say “You’re not ready” to take on a particular project or to apply for a grant or job to hinder my efforts.

One of our last official meetings as advisor and student covered this particular issue. Six chapters into an eight-chapter dissertation, I was still being told that I was “not ready” to apply for jobs or to attend major conferences. Trotter had in fact contradicted some of what he had said about my work in a previous meeting. So when he declared for the eighteenth time in this particular meeting that he was not giving me his support to apply for a job because he was “looking out for my best interests,” I sarcastically replied “Yeah, right!” I defiantly said that I didn’t believe him, that somehow this was about his interests, whatever those were. I knew that my interests weren’t central here, because he never asked me about them. My defiance led to an eight-month long battle to finish my dissertation and to get my committee to approve it. On the week before Thanksgiving in ’96, it finally was.

But our academic relationship was never the same. I’ve only talked to Trotter twice since I finished the thesis, once to tell him that I didn’t want to just apply for jobs in Nebraska and Iowa, the other to let him and the sense of betrayal I felt about working with him go. It took working a few years to understand his situation. As the first tenured Black professor in Carnegie Mellon’s history, Trotter was the HNIC (Head Negro in Charge) on campus, making him a political target, especially in having a Black student who made graduate school look like a coronation. It was mostly paranoia on his part. I do believe, though, that my former advisor was in the midst of a career and midlife crisis, in having a student half his age ready to finish a doctorate and become a scholar contributing to the field well before my thirtieth birthday. As incredulous as it may sound, I believe that there was some jealously on Trotter’s part toward me and other students.

Meltzer knew intuitively something my former advisor will likely never know. Legacies aren’t just built by writing about things as obscure as proletarianization, by having others who are of like minds respect your work as a scholar. In the case of teachers and advisors, legacies become realized in working with students, helping them reach their potential as human beings, by being real and honest with them as people and not just as experts in a given field. That transparency is the difference between mentoring and “running interference.” While I learned quite a bit from Trotter about being a scholarly historian, I learned a lot more about history and life by having Meltzer as a teacher, friend and mentor, including the fact that mentors often come to us in surprising and unexpected ways, regardless of race. He’s someone that I think about and miss many a day, today especially.

The Race Card?

05 Monday May 2008

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Most of this election cycle, I’ve sat on the sidelines and not expressed strong opinions about the presidential candidates or their positions on all issues foreign and domestic. I’ve been quite busy reaching out to agents regarding Boy At The Window, looking for more permanent work and the daily business of family, teaching and contract work. At the beginning of the year, I said that I thought that either John Edwards or Barack Obama would be the best candidates for president. In February and March, I talked a bit about the issues surrounding Obama regarding race, especially in the context of his pastor/mentor Jeremiah Wright. I put all of those things in a larger context, because I believe that for most thinking folks, the issue isn’t about what Rev. Wright has said as much as it is about Obama response(s).

As Obama has completely denounced Wright in the past week — and for good reason — I can’t help but think how unfair and dishonest our nation is when it comes to any issues that revolve around race. Not race as a obvious issue, mind you, but not so subtle that most average people don’t notice, either. It’s this notion that Derrick Bell discussed in his Faces at the Bottom of the Well (1992), that there are “Rules of Racial Standing,” in which Blacks are held to a double-standard in the public spotlight. Bell applied them to the legal process (criminal and civil) in his book, but they apply equally well to other public spectacles. Without rewriting my article “Rules to Live By,” I can say that Bell’s Rules basically break down this way. If a Black person regardless of status or socioeconomic background says something that can does offend many Whites, expert Blacks — representative Negroes to some — are virtually required to come out and condemn both the message and the speaker thereof. The only major exception to this if it Whites — and not just White liberals — in fact back up what the offending Black person has said.

In the case of Wright v. Obama, the presidential candidate attempted to amend Bell’s Rules by separating Wright’s message from the reverend himself. He gave an uplifting and wide-ranging speech that most Americans should see as an excellent oration on Bell’s Rules and the need for our nation to confront them. But these rules really weren’t created by Bell in 1992. They’ve been in existence in this country for the better part of three and a quarter centuries. Forty-five years of civil rights and social justice work has done little to change that. Although Obama’s numbers did take a hit as a result of his nuanced high-road response to Wright, it was the media’s response and continued coverage that should be of more concern to most of us.

This ridiculous idea of the race card — made universally known as such by the O.J. Simpson trial of ’94- ’95 — is interwoven within Bell’s Rules. The notion that Blacks only cry about race or racism or bigotry in the public arena when it suits our purposes. To deflect attention from our own failings or missteps. To blame Whites or other folks for our lot in life. To get away with everything from affirmative action to murder. That’s what the race card is in the minds of most Americans. It’s as if any Black person who confronts race head on is shouting “Race!” in a crowded theater, no matter how erudite the statement or how reasoned the argument. We’ve somehow pulled a joker card out of the deck to make others laugh and cringe at the same time. But rarely do people ask about the deck of cards from which Blacks are playing. Or about who the dealer is.

As America has fallen in love with watching Poker on TV and playing it on the Web, it’s interesting to me that so many can take enjoyment out watching something that is so boring unless you’re actually playing. But that’s another blog for another day. At least with these shows, you know that there are other players, a dealer, a smoke-filled room with alcohol available. Or a computer with Internet connections keeping track of the cards. In the court of public opinion, the media in all of its forms deals the cards. And it’s a stacked deck. It almost always has been. It’s so strange how most Americans complain about the media, its liberal or conservative bias, its constant attempt to stir the pot on any number of issues, its inability to bring us real news. Yet when it comes to race, we suddenly become the docile consumers of objective news and information that we otherwise complain about these days.

So when it comes to something like Wright v. Obama, of course the deck is stacked. Once the YouTube video was posted and the media picked up on it, Obama was left with few cards to play. The media had a straight, and Obama needed a royal flush. He tried at first to take the high road, to not up the ante and pick up the card that would condemn the man who led him to spiritual salvation as a Christian. Wright, though, decided to play along with the media, at the National Press Club, no less, revealing himself as a egotistic and bitter man and not a shabby poker player at the same time, forcing Obama’s hand (pun intended). It wouldn’t have been any different if Spike Lee or Steven Spielberg had put together a script on this.

Certainly there are other examples. The recent decision to acquit NYPD officers of murder in a case that involved shooting or shooting at a groom at a wedding more than fifty times. But I guess I’m paranoid and irrational if I think that this is about race. Or how Bill Cosby has become the new voice of Black progress in the past four years. Yeah, a near-billionaire comedian who decided enough was enough as he entered his eighth decade of life. Cosby, by the way, is the other side of the coin around Bell’s Rules. His words support the general view that many Americans have of Blacks, giving him what Bell would call enhanced or superenhanced standing in the public eye. (That’s not to say that some of what Cosby says isn’t true — it’s far from the complete catalog on the realities of poverty and race in this country. Yet another story for another blog.)

But given what’s at stake between now and November 5, Wright v. Obama could well determine whether I want to keep playing poker in the voting booth or with the media at all. It’s a game that I’ve been forced to play all of my life, and I’m starting to get tired. I’m not sure if I want my son to have to play this game in order to grow up here. NAFTA or not, Canada and Mexico look pretty good right now. And to address the famous blogger who’d say that when Whites get tired of the state of affairs in this country, they often talk about moving to Canada, I say that I’m Black, and depending on how things turn, I plan to do much more than talk or play my hand.