Monthly Archives: December 2008

Made-Up Memories

30 Tuesday Dec 2008

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As an author in search of an agent and a book contract for a memoir about my experiences growing up in poverty and with domestic violence, not to mention around more affluent folks in a gifted track program, it does irk me when I read about these stories of people embellishing their memoirs these days. The latest story involves Herman Rosenblat’s Angel at the Fence, a memoir and love story involving him and his eventual wife while he was in a concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Europe in World War II. Rosenblat was in a concentration camp. But the idea of him meeting his wife as a kid while she gave him apples through a barbed wire fence was shown recently to be about as plausible as me marrying my second Humanities years crush. At least they caught the lie before they published Rosenblat’s book.

This comes on the heels of the Love and Consequences debacle in March. Margaret B. Jones, the pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, claimed to be half-White, half-American Indian, raised by Black parents in South Central LA and a drug runner for the Bloods. It took 19,000 copies of the book for folks who knew Seltzer as an affluent attendee of a private school in North Hollywood before the truth about her completely fabricated story came out. What a crock! Lest I forget, there’s also James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003), on the Oprah Book Club list until some major aspects of his otherwise truthful account were proven as lies.

This is typical of an industry that prides itself on being relatively high-brow but uses low-brow, make money for us in nanoseconds techniques in book publishing. Like expecting ready-to-publish-tomorrow manuscripts from lit agents in order to save money on copy editing and proofreading. Or not having fact-checkers in house to verify the more provocative, outlandish, or sexy aspects of a book manuscript. Forget about the more typical issues around marketing or promotion. Unless you’re an established author or some “fresh” first-time author, your advance is your marketing and promotion budget.

But I’m jumping too far ahead. An advance assumes an agent, a publishing house with an enthusiastic, interested editor, and a book contract. All need to happen (for the most part) before you or I can successfully publish a book. With the publishing industry using ex-editors and lawyers as agents/gatekeepers, authors face at least two layers of scrutiny to get a definitive “Yes” for their manuscript. This scrutiny, though, isn’t based on the quality of writing or the story. It’s based on what can be packaged and sold quickly and without a whole lot of line-by-line reading. A love story in the midst of the Holocaust — of course! A memoir about a White female growing up with and around Blacks and becoming a gangbanger — great! A coming-of-age story about a Black male finding himself, but no easy answers, in the middle of poverty, abuse, and high-brow education — sounds interesting, but…

Part of the problem, I think, is that the publishing world lacks the intellectual and multicultural diversity necessary to be successful in this century. It seems that most big-named editors and agents all attended the same exclusive private schools and elite liberal arts colleges. Smith, Vassar, Wesleyan, Bryn Mawr, not to mention the Ivy Leagues. That’s the world they know, and that’s typically the world they publish. Anything that sounds close to the world they know, and yet takes an unexpected turn is considered “cutting-edge” or “sexy.” Like the Holocaust memoir or the gangbanger story. With few exceptions, most of the folks who are given the opportunity to wax poetic about the experiences of the poor and/or folks of color aren’t authors of color. They’re White journalists like Ron Suskind or Adrian LeBlanc, because they dared to venture into a different world.

I know, I know. Many of you may think that I’ll stop complaining and start acting like these folk once I find an agent and publisher or if I decide to give up on this strange world altogether. or if Oprah gives me a call and has me on her show. Some of you may even think that I’ve made up some stuff about my past. Here’s a simple test to use about my story or any other autobiography to prove its truthfulness:

1. Does the author present themselves in simplistic terms — as a mere victim or as someone who actively shapes their own destiny? Or does the author show themselves as a work in progress, with advances and setbacks, triumphs and struggles, and issues that still need to be worked out even after achieving a major goal?

2. Even as unbelievable events unfold in the story, does it ring true with the kind of descriptions and depictions used in the rest of the story? Or does it seem like a twist more consistent with a fiction novel than with the way a real person’s life would evolve?

3. Is there much “tell-all” involved in telling the story, and did the author do much research beyond themselves in telling the story, such as comparing national, local and personal events, interviewing people, including additional facts about other people and places? Or does the story seem like a very involved stream of consciousness?

It’s far more plausible that I would’ve had two crushes on two classmates that went unfulfilled, given how I describe myself at the age of twelve or seventeen, than it would be for a young biracial “White” woman to be a drug runner in a major LA gang. A prostitute maybe, but not a drug runner. It makes more sense to describe myself as both a victim, a slacker, a passive activist in my family, among other things, than it would to discuss a bond over an apple that survived the Holocaust and led two people who re-met a decade later to marriage. It makes more sense to use evidence from local events that influenced my educational experience and that of my classmates to show the validity of my story than it does to keep writing without evidence as if no one can disprove your story.

I know I’ll publish Boy At The Window eventually. I just hope that the nonfiction memoir fiction writers out there don’t make it harder for me to sell my work.

“Holiday” Odds and Ends

29 Monday Dec 2008

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What a way to end a year, huh? We’re within three days of ’09, and chaos and fakery remain two mainstays in our news cycle. For once, the holiday season and the solar and lunar calendars aligned over the past week, as Xmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and first day of Muharram have overlapped over the past eight days. 

Yet here we are, witnesses to another big break in the Middle East stalemate between Israelis and Palestinians. With 1,000 men, women, and children dead and injured, PM Barak calling for an “all-out war” against Hamas in the Gaza strip, with hundreds of airstrikes and tanks lined up at the border to go after the group. As usual, the Israeli response to Hamas rocket attacks is atrociously disproportionate. I do think that Israel has a right to defend itself and to go after Hamas. But in light of other recent events — like the Mumbai terrorist attacks — maybe Israel should’ve taken a step back and used its vaunted special forces units to take Hamas rocket sites and other areas of activity out. If other nations were to take a page from Israel’s response, we would be at Def Con 2 right now. Because of what happened at Mumbai, maybe India should’ve nuked the disputed Kashmir province or Islamabad in retaliation to prove to Pakistan that they could “defend” themselves.
I’m sure some of my readers are thinking or saying, “What business of this is yours?” or “Why do you care?” I don’t want American foreign policy tied to a simplistic defense of Israel at all costs, regardless of Israeli policies and actions. I don’t think that the only true democracy in the Middle East can be truly democratic when bombing its immediate neighbors indiscriminately or by making all Palestinians in or outside its borders the enemy. But I guess I can’t possibly understand. After all, I’m not Jewish. I’ve never learned the history nor lived under everyday abuse, persecution or possible annihilation just because of my ancestry or religion. I don’t know what it’s like to face terror or the threat thereof everyday. Oh, wait a minute…I guess that I’ve had enough experiences to emphasize with the Israeli perspective and still see flaws in its policies and military actions. 
On a less important and less charming subject, I’m getting that feeling again. You know, a gnawing sensation at the back end of my frontal lobe. I feel it every time I turn on CNN or MSNBC or NPR. It’s an itch I can’t scratch, and it comes when the media praises itself for being interesting or provocative. Like the Washington Post puff piece done by Howard Kurtz last Monday about Mika Brzezinski and her role as the one who “balances” conservative ax-grinder Joe Scarborough. Give me a break! Whether on radio or TV, I can’t take more than fifteen minutes before needing to switch to ESPN’s Mike and Mike in the Morning for real balance. 

Morning Joe might as well be FOX News’ Hannity and Colmes. Brzezinski plays the role of the soon to depart Alan Colmes. She’s someone who’s willing to sit throw every one of Scarborough’s poorly reasoned diatribes about the liberal media — so liberal they hired him — Or about his so-called colorblindness with regard to President-Elect Obama or his berating of others qualifications for office, at least others whose views differ from his. Brzezinski’s opinions, as few as they are, usually get drowned out by Scarborough, who often yells to make his point. I don’t think that Kurtz’s piece makes a good case for her or for Morning Joe. It’s a puff piece of praise from one journalist to another while side-stepping the reality behind the MSNBC show.
There’s also these trivial issues over Caroline Kennedy and her qualifications for office and over what the Obama transition team knew about Blagojevich and when they knew it. The short answer is, who outside of the journalism field cares, really? Kennedy may sound like a Valley Girl at times and be shy around the media. The Obama transition team may have sensed that Blagojevich was a sleaze bag. Neither get us anywhere near the issues that most of us care about. Maybe that’s why the media and the press (which, because of corporate interests, are pretty much one and the same) have been hit hard by the global recession.
“Barack the Magic Negro?” Are you kidding me? Sometimes, despite our First Amendment right of free speech, it’s good sometimes to just shut up. This story’s been on and off for the past 20 months, and only rose up again because the RNC wannabe chairman decided to put a CD together and distribute its to RNC committee members. It was a “parody” meant to poke fun at the LA Times, political correctness and liberals. Unless Chip Saltsman wants to change fields and become a comedian, his attempt to bring laughter to his friends has backfired miserably. I’ll take the Valley Girl any day over Saltsman.
I find our discourse about as poor as soil in the Arctic this time of the year. And the stories mentioned above prove it. It’s supposed to be the most wonderful time of the year. I guess the Israeli government and our media didn’t get that memo.

Close Encounter of a Different Kind

27 Saturday Dec 2008

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Friday, December 30, 1988. One of the more pleasant, interesting and thought-provoking moments occurred on this day. After three semesters at Pitt and my bouts with homesickness and a broken heart, summer joblessness, sophomore homelessness and general pennilessness, I came back to Mount Vernon and 616 with a sense of hope that I hadn’t had in years. New friends, real friends, a somewhat steady income and my tuition fully paid, back-to-back Dean’s List semesters, and understanding trust for the first time in my life after going through all that will change one’s outlook on life.

The valedictorian of our class, one of only four folks from high school I dared called a friend, came up from Johns Hopkins to visit her father in Mount Vernon over the holidays. She got together with a friend of hers from MVHS who graduated earlier in ’88, the year after us. She wrote a letter to me before the holidays announcing her visit and wanting to get together, but I didn’t believe her. I didn’t say so, mind you, I just didn’t respond. So my friend got bold herself. She came over the next-to-last day of ’88 and rang the downstairs security bell to get in 616. That was amazing to me. It was the first time anyone I knew from my Humanities days — and someone White, no less — would march into ghetto territory and do something like that. 
I was washing dishes from a breakfast of grits and eggs, the house a pitiful mess as usual. The Price is Right on CBS was on the TV in the living room, so it was about 11:30 am. Before I could get to it, one of my younger siblings had buzzed them in. I was in no way ready to go out, and the house was too disgusting for any visitor, especially anyone I knew. I was wearing a blue-and-white checkered ex-dress shirt, my green-blue Bugle Boy jeans, and a pair of new Nike’s I’d bought post-Thanksgiving. My mother was in a panic. “Donald, get downstairs before they get up here. They can’t see the house like this!” she said nervously.
As soon as I got out the door, the two out-of-place women were coming onto the third floor from the stairwell next to our apartment door. I said my “Hi” and gently coaxed them back downstairs to my friend’s old Chevy Chevette. She gave me that “What gives?” look. I used code to say that the apartment was a mess — saying that the place wasn’t “ready for visitors” — but I knew that she didn’t buy that for an explanation.
It didn’t seem to matter. We talked all the way over to the great JD’s house about school, school and more school, stopping off and picking up our former eighth-grade math teacher in the process. The valedictorian and the teacher, a first-year teacher and a graduate of Adelphi University in ’82, only four months before we had her for Algebra that fall, had become close friends between eighth grade and my friend’s second year at Johns Hopkins. I found that odd and fascinating. It was a cold yet clear day, with snow all over the place from recent storms. We went to JD’s house, where one of my high school nemesis was already waiting. 
The house was in Fleetwood, and it wasn’t a house to me. It was a palatial mansion compared to most of the houses I’d seen and the handful I’d been in up to that point. The hardwood floor looked like they’d been put in yesterday, lacquered the night before and sterilized that morning. The place was laid out, the type of house you’d see in Better Homes & Gardens or on a slightly less affluent Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous with Robin Leach. I tried as best I could to hide my awestruck feeling at that moment. 
I wasn’t jealous. It just finally hit me why there was so much social distance between me and most of my classmates. That’s not to say that I thought their lives were perfect. Still, the distance between sleeping on beat-up pillows in the living room or my old bedroom with six kids and my mother on welfare and a family with more net worth than my mother had made in a lifetime was the distance between the Sun and Alpha Centauri (about four light-years away). I met JD’s aunt for the one and only time.
Once JD made his grand entrance in the living room, we all left to go to the nearest pizza joint on West Grand in Fleetwood. The pizza was good, but the conversation was better. There was a lot of “everything’s goin’ well” type of discussion going. Yet I got the sense that things weren’t all that great. Then JD admitted that he was a semester away from academic probation at Berkeley. His engineering classes were kicking his butt. From the looks of things, he was doing much better athletically than anywhere else, having bulked up to 190 with twenty extra pounds of muscle. My nemesis then admitted that his academic and social life at Georgia Tech wasn’t exactly going as planned. He didn’t seem to know which one was worse. He’d grown four or five inches since MVHS, good enough to put him around five-five or five-six. 
My valedictorian friend, of course, had a killer GPA at Johns Hopkins, had an Asian boyfriend, and just loved things there. What she didn’t mention, between home and school, was that she was on the verge of burnout, 3.6 average or not. I don’t remember much about the college freshman who came with us or her comments about her first semester of school, probably because she was just a freshman.
We hung out for about an hour and a half, gave each other our well wishes, and went our separate ways. Despite all of the posturing and initial attempts at one-upmanship, I enjoyed the outing and was glad my friend had pulled me away from 616 to see some of our mutual ex-classmates. I learned an important lesson about why I searched for the kinds of friends I now had at Pitt and would have over the next twenty years. I also learned that my internal bullshit detector worked just fine, even picking up my own bs in the process. It had, in fact, worked all the years I was in Humanities and MVHS. Maybe that was why I refused to participate in most of the school’s activities over the years. I wasn’t scared. I was skeptical, which in turn made my scared of dealing with most of these folks.
My friend dropped me off and gave me a big hug, all the while still curious about why I intercepted her before she reached the front door to the apartment. I supposed that “Because the apartment’s a mess” wasn’t a good enough excuse as many times as I’d been to her place on Rich Avenue while we were in Humanities. But it was the only explanation I had. What else could I have said? That my younger siblings looked unkempt, that my obese stepfather walked around in dingy gray-from-sweat-and-dead-skin underwear, that my mother was embarrassed, even more so than I would’ve been? I guess. 
It hit me for the first time why I liked the folks I’d met at Pitt so much more than my former classmates. I didn’t have to pretend that my life was going great in front of them, that I knew everything or had my career all figured out. I didn’t even have to feel embarrassed about how little furniture there was in the house or feel interrogated like I felt with my friend at that moment.
But she did do something that my Pitt folks would’ve done. She stopped herself from escalating the conversation about 616. She just gave me a dear friend hug. “Have a Happy New Year,” she said. “Happy Birthday,” I said, as her b-day was also on January 1. “Maybe there’s hope for some of my classmates, at least,” I thought. Those last few months had proven that there was plenty of reason to hold out hope for myself as well. 

My Kind of Christianity

25 Thursday Dec 2008

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It’s Christmas Day ’08, so I probably should be discussing my son’s reactions to his gifts, like his new basketball hoop, Ben 10 Omnitrix watch or Thomas Trackmaster Canyon Train set. But that would only reveal my understanding of Christmas as a commercial affair, a 150-year-old attempt at spreading cheer through material giving and receiving, not to mention egg nog and hot chocolate. Still, I’m sure my family will enjoy my sweet potato pie, fried chicken, corn bread, and mac & cheese (we’ll see how they’ll feel about the salad).

I’m a Christian. I’ve been one for nearly twenty-five years. I started the search for a savior, any savior, my savior and guide around this time a quarter-century ago. But my kind of Christianity has been an evolving one. It’s both too simple and too complicated a term for me, not to mention loaded for some of you who don’t believe in God or in my understanding of God and Jesus. That’s perfectly fine. There have been plenty of moments where I’ve approached the agnostic myself. 
Despite the idiot televangelists like Frederick K.C. Price, Kenneth Copeland, John Hagee, Jimmy Swaggart, the late Jerry Falwell, Oral Roberts, Creflo Dollar, and the granddaddy of them all in two-time (at least) presidential candidate in Pat Robertson, I’ve come to realize over the years that there’s a difference between the proclamation and the practice of Christianity. I’ve learned that there are plenty of people who aren’t obvious Christians — or devout atheists, as it happens — who practice Christianity every day. I also discovered ages ago that there are plenty of Christians who talk all the time about how much they love God, are “all into Jesus,” can quote chapter and verse from Genesis to Psalms, Matthew to the Revelation of John, and put little effort into practicing the simplest of Christian principles, of which there are only two. One is to have no other gods other than God. The other is to “love thy neighbor as you love yourself.”
I’ve come to realize something about the Pharisees and Sadducees of our current age. They’re extremely judgmental, close-minded, xenophobic, as an unloving of self and others as one can be and still call themselves Christians. One of many things I’ve learned over the years is how difficult it can be to love yourself, warts and all, and then exhibit that same kind of tolerance and acceptance toward others. I came to Christianity only about three and half months removed from a jump off a stone bridge on the Mount Vernon-Pelham border on my birthday in December ’83. I had so much work to do to practice love of self and “doing onto others” from the point of my spiritual rebirth to get to where I am now. Hardly perfect, but much better than twenty-five years ago. But I wouldn’t even be half of who I am today if I had followed in the footsteps of conservative, evangelical “the poor will be with us always” and “hate the sin not the sinner” Christianity that has been the American standard since the ’70s.
My mother came to Christianity, as it turned out, two years before I did and seven years before she told me about it. In was in the midst of my mother’s abuse at the hands of my ex-stepfather, her losing her job at Mount Vernon Hospital, and her pregnant with my sister, the third of four kids born to our family in five years. Her Christian walk evolved with the kind of the Christianity that I’d come to dread during the ’80s. By ’89, with my ex-stepfather gone, my mother had emerged as a modern-day Christian, with all of the bells and whistles. She prayed in tongues, in fact, she constantly prayed to and praised God, in front of me and my younger siblings. Imagine my surprise after a semester at Pitt to come home and see my mother walking around the apartment in nothing more than a housecoat singing hymns and speaking in tongues while my younger brothers and sisters are either snickering or pissed off because they can’t turn the TV away from the 700 Club. 
I chalked it up to her newness to Christianity until I discovered that my mother had converted to Christianity in the middle of our Hebrew-Israelite years (more about how I felt about that later). That and her anxiousness for the end of days, the Rapture, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse made me nervous about her conversion. But as a relatively new Christian, I also wanted to be as good a Christian as I could, and since I didn’t know a whole lot of good examples at the time, I looked at my mother and what was around me to figure things out.
One of my turning points came in the summer of ’90. My mother had always been a bit of a bigot. She called Jamaicans and other Afro-Caribbeans “West Indians,” Latinos “Spanish people,” Asians “Orientals” or “Chinks,” and so on. Now as a fully-realized Christian, she toed the Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell line, saying that America was headed to “hell in a hand-basket” because of “abortion” and “faggots,” that Israel should use its nukes to begin Armageddon, and that anyone who didn’t speak in tongues wasn’t a real Christian. I never believed any of this, and hearing my mother rant on about these things actually scared me. It was one thing to see the Christian Broadcasting Network and Ever Increasing Faith Ministries on TV and quietly discount much of their un-Christian Christian statements. It was another to hear it coming out of my mother’s mouth, completely unfiltered by her brain and spirit.
You see, I’ve always been a thinking Christian. I go to church, but for most of my twenty-five years, it’s only been on occasion. I’ve never liked the denominational differences that have led to intolerance even among Christians. I’ve prayed at least once a day almost every day for over fifteen years, but have realized that prayer is only one step on the ladder to wisdom, understanding, acceptance and all the other qualities that exemplify Christianity. I never had a particular opinion about abortion or pro-life, gays or the “gay lifestyle,” climate change or “drill, baby, drill” in my first years as a Christian. I had the naive hope that God would somehow swoop into my heart, mind and life and transform it into one that would be easy for me to live, to make me a success, to bring people who loved me into my life and enable me to love myself at the same time. But I came to realize that God or any higher power that one believes in can only help in proportion to the amount of work one does to receive that help. A more complicated take on “God helps those who help themselves.”
As a result of realizing my need to be proactive as a Christian, to seek insight and foresight beyond myself, to find balance between love, forgiveness, toughness, faith, hope, but with a critical mind that allows for doubt, for questions, for tolerance, and for acceptance, even when we think people may be in the wrong. That has allowed my views on any number of social issues to evolve from indifference and apathy to full-blown progressive activism in some cases. I don’t see how it advances us as Christians to condemn the poor, so-called minorities, and “homosexuals” to second-class citizenship merely because someone found a couple of vague quotes in the Old Testament, a book meant for the ancient Hebrews. I don’t see how a mantra of prosperity with emphasis on giving and tithing advances the economic prosperity of the poor when it’s those of us who have who should give more, and the poor who should receive more. And I don’t see how we can advance in love and end our nation’s participation in immoral wars and social policies if we allow other, intolerant Christians to define people like me. 
Theirs isn’t my Christianity, and my Christianity cannot be made to fit into something as limited as a Christianity that has no room for anyone who seems different or quirky. Merry Christmas!

Dispelling A Myth

22 Monday Dec 2008

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I have an interesting semester teaching at UMUC this fall. Teaching an online course in African American history from 1865 (the end of slavery) to the present, which in this case was through the historic election of a Black, biracial, post-racial (whatever that means) man as President. One in which I went through five weeks of “training” to use an online technology I probably could’ve taught myself — given my computer science background — while my students had about as much savvy with these technologies as I did when I was twelve. Not to mention no training for them from UMUC.

But I digress. My students this fall generally lacked the basics necessary to take a college course in second-semester African American history, including critical reasoning and interpretation, writing and analysis skills. Not their fault, considering the sorry state of American education and the distrust of history it generates with horrible “names, dates and battles” teachers. Not to mention UMUC’s wonderful policies that lead few to a usable degree or certificate. 
Again I digress. Some of these issues showed up during our online “discussions,” which weren’t really discussions because they can’t take place in real-time. With students being students, since many of them didn’t do the readings — or read the textbook and my lecture outlines selectively — they often fell back on their opinions or limited knowledge of Black history to answer questions and make comments. Some of them sounded like those whom I quietly called the “Afrocentric league” when I was in undergrad, others like ’60s-era civil rights activists who believe that no one born after April 4 of ’68 has done anything that matters. At times, they sounded like downright conservatives. I’m certainly all for different point of view, even ones that I don’t agree with and think are incorrect. But I also expect an informed opinion and analysis to come with any perspective, something lacking with many comments I received.
One of the more baffling comments I received from a student was in response to a question I asked regarding the impact of the Reagan Years on African Americans socioeconomically. The response referenced the overused Biblical phrase, “the poor will be with us always.” I was floored upon reading it. During the Reagan Years, it was used out of context by neoconservatives constantly to justify their disdain toward the New Deal and Great Society programs they dismantled or weakened in the name of “trickle-down” and “supply-side economics.” To take a verse about much more than material poverty and apply it to the economic inequality that many Blacks faced in the ’80s was insulting to me twenty five years ago, but merely puzzling now. I sent a response to my student, a polite one about the realities of growing Black poverty in a decade in which the poor were denigrated by most policy wonks.
This isn’t so much about my students per se, or about neocons. It’s about taking twisted statements at face value, not thinking about the meaning of your words before speaking them or writing them down. It’s about dispelling a myth, that since people are always going to be poor relative to others, that there’s nothing we can do to help improve their lot in life or to help them with their efforts to improve their circumstances. 
I wish that we as Americans did take more time to think through the meaning of our words, the context of our quotes, and the impact of others’ thinking on our own. One of the reasons why we’re doing so poorly educationally is because we deliberately don’t teach critical thinking and analysis skills. We just teach and learn criticism skills, sarcasm and apathy, spin control and obfuscation. The biggest myth of all is that we’re supposed to accept things as those in authority see them, something that I haven’t accepted since I was twelve.

The Gifted Label

17 Wednesday Dec 2008

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Yesterday the Washington Post put out an article about Montgomery County Public Schools (Maryland, suburban DC) dropping the “gifted” label for students in their schools, stating that the label is both “arbitrary” and “unfair.” I read the piece, and didn’t think much of it at first. Then I read the comments from the idiot parent fringe out there. Some had interpreted the dropping of the gifted label as the end of accelerated academic programs in the county school districts. Others thought that this would “dummy down” the curriculum and put really smart kids in an academic straitjacket as the “mush heads” took their time to catch up to them. Many of these wonderful examples of American education even argued that there has always been an academic pecking order of sorts, of the smart and the dumb, of those who finish “first” and those who are “last,” and that removing the label amounted to “political correctness gone awry.”  This is why the average teacher burns out in about five years.

I commented on this on the Washington Post comment section for this article myself. As someone who was once labeled as “gifted,” as a parent, and as an educator. It’s appalling, to say the least, to read about parents who want every advantage for their child at the expense of other children merely because they somehow think that this helps their kid win the race for diplomas and dollars. It was shameful to see parents who eagerly labeled kids who hadn’t been labeled “gifted” as “mush heads.” It shows a deep and fundamental disconnect between the education reform movement of the past two decades and public discourse on education. Parents only care about their child, as if the thousands of other kids and their learning have no impact on their child. And anyone that voices concern for education beyond their child, especially if it doesn’t tilt K-12 education in their favor, is a socialist who wants to help disadvantaged kids at the expense of brainiacs. What bullshit!
What MCPS is doing is nothing more than attempting to dissipate some of the arrogance and inequity that comes with labeling someone as “gifted.” Yes, many of us are “gifted,” but in the case of schools, that only meant academically gifted. And academically gifted means what, really, in K-12 education? The ability to memorize facts and techniques faster and more accurately than others, right? Yes, that is a gift, and for those of us whose memories approach the photographic, a gift that can give us an advantage. 
But last I checked, schools were about much more than memorization, especially once kids made it past elementary and middle school. Education is about discovering and developing the whole child, about kids finding their way to understand their abilities, their talents, beyond memorization while learning as much as they can in preparation for the real world. In our case, a 21st century world where a minimum of two years of education beyond high school is necessary for a job with a living wage. A high enough wage to pay bills, buy a car, move out from under your parents, get married, to actually have a career and not just a job, to have more educational opportunities later on in life. You can’t get there in a school district that sets the bar low for most of its students and high for those it labels “gifted.” We can’t be competitive as a county, state, region or nation if we continue to act as if most kids should be excluded from material that they can’t get instantly.
I get what MCPS is doing. Even though I was “gifted,” I learned early on that even among the gifted, many of us were rather ordinary kids with arrogant, affluent parents, doting teachers from first grade on, and blessed with access to books at home, access to travel abroad, and with parents with a high level of education to boot. I wasn’t one of those kids. And if I hadn’t had a sixth grade teacher with connections in my school district, I would’ve never been noticed as “gifted” in the first place. This despite three years of straight A’s. Even with all of that, I didn’t understand myself as a writer until I was thirty, learned how to interact with folks from various racial and socioeconomic backgrounds the hard way, and felt like my gifted program was fundamentally flawed by the time I reached tenth grade. 
The label is meaningless in a world where many of the gifted lack the psychological, social, and emotional intelligence necessary to work, network, and interact with the average “mush head.” For that matter, I can tell you after seventeen years of on-and-off teaching of college and grad courses that most of these gifted students lack the critical thinking, leadership and writing skills necessary to compete in the real world. Or, more accurately, have underdeveloped skills because schools spend more time shoveling facts in their heads rather than putting kids in positions where they have to think critically, act and react decisively, and write clearly. 
No, I think that as someone who believes in reforming and realigning schools so that universal higher education of some sort is possible for all Americans — nerds, geeks, jocks, and clowns — that dropping the gifted label is only a minimal starting point. A single-track, college-prep, multiple pathway system of K-12 education that sets high academic standards for all of its students and caters to the allegedly gifted with even more rigor is the way to go. Should school districts like Montgomery County not move toward this, we can look forward to more articles about education reform in ten, twenty or thirty years where parents act as if their kid is the only one that matters and that everyone else’s child is lazy and stupid.

The Real, Ambivalent and Reluctant, Me

15 Monday Dec 2008

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I find it amazing sometimes when I hear from folks from my past about the way they saw or see me. I’ve been described as “sober,” “serious,” “studious,” “disciplined,” “hard-working,” “asexual,” “different,” and “eclectic,” as if I was Data from Star Trek: Next Generation (or TNG for my slightly younger readers). Or as if I had planned to become a Jesuit priest or Franciscan monk, boring, with no aspirations, passions, or life beyond books and big ideas.

In more recent years, I’ve had numerous acquaintances and colleagues who only see me as Dr. Collins or Professor Collins, someone who is defined and who defines himself by his degree and academic expertise. One of my colleagues still describes me to others as an “African American historian,” even though about half of the courses I’ve taught and much of the work I’ve done has been on history of education or education reform. I wish I could say that none of this bothers mean, that I know who I am, and that others can take from that what they will. But it does bother me sometimes, not a lot, and not in ways that make me me doubt myself. Because I realize that most people, unfortunately, don’t pay enough attention to the folks in their lives to recognize that none of us are only one thing. Nor are most of us self-aware enough to recognize our own sense of reluctance or ambivalence about certain aspects about our persona, how we project it, and how other perceive it at different points in our lives.
The truth is, all of the adjectives I listed are accurate ways to describe me. At various jobs, my first couple of years in college, in some specific dating situations, between May 30, 1982 and June 15, 1989 at 616 East Lincoln in Mount Vernon, New York, at professional conferences and conference presentations, in the classroom, and in my moments of quiet despair.  But these adjectives aren’t me. At least not the person I see myself as or the person I’ve become or the person I’ve been or wanted to be over the years. To quote Alana Davis (one of my wife’s favorite singers from the ’90s), “I am 32 flavors and then some.”
First and foremost, I am a writer who has always had a unique way of looking at people and the world, who has spent many a daydreaming moment contemplating the universe, my existence, my role in it, and the senselessness of people’s actions in it. I am a writer who knew more about writing at eleven than I did at twenty-nine, someone who had lost sight of their calling for years, yet operated in it under the guise of scholarship and academia. I am a writer who spent years sensing that my purpose in life was more than absorbing the world around me with the mind of a titanium-plated steel trap, more than bearing witness to the horrors of poverty and domestic violence. 
But even that oversimplifies who and what I am and have been over the years. For as much as I remember things like the constant winter chill in our apartment at 616 East Lincoln in the early ’80s or roasting in 100-degree triple-H weather in summer with my wild-eyed younger siblings, I also remember days without food in the house, nights hunting down my alcoholic father, weekends avoiding being at home around my idiot stepfather, and moments wondering where my mother went wrong. Maybe my sobriety and studiousness come from a sense that if I didn’t make sure to secure my future educationally and economically that I would repeat the cycle that I grew up in and around back in the good old ’80s. 
Except that even that’s not the whole truth. As much as I became a serious student, especially in grad school, I became a sarcastic goofball. If I had allowed myself to, I could poke fun at and apply dry wit to just about any person or any situation. I found hypocrisy, unfairness, and just the sense of irony of American people and how we’ve lived our lives funny, a macabre humor for me to dwell on over the years. Like the sense that my classmates either worked too hard or hardly hard enough to get into college and to prepare for it. Or the reality that most of what we were doing to one-up each other didn’t matter. Or that most of the so-called cool folks were about as cool then as Pee Wee Herman is now. I learned to laugh at myself, at first because it protected me from the occasional taunt, but over the years because I found myself funny, quirky, even weird.
Still, I am also an ambivalent academician. As much as I felt at home once I adjusted to college life, and as much as I excelled in grad school, I always sensed that I wasn’t fully an academic historian. Sure, I’ve published a few things. I’ve presented at conferences, obtained a couple of grants, even been quoted by other scholars and academicians. I just knew that something about the academy and the way it operated bothered the heck out of me. Perhaps it was the weird use of foreign languages by historians in the middle of articles and books about slavery and the herrenvolk, the collapse of Booker T. Washington’s influence in Black American and fait accompli, the constant use of “therefore” and “indeed,” as if real people talk this way. Or maybe it was my sense of contempt for authority in general. After all, I lived with and went to school with lots of examples of people who either were incompetent or misused their authority and privilege for years. So participating in a system that forced folks to earn job security through some pseudo-medieval apprentice didn’t seem like a good way to spend most of my thirties.
I’m also a reluctant leader. I’m not a naturally-born leader who loves being around people as a networker or as someone who has a vision that others automatically gravitate to. I’ve become who I am because of several crises in my life and spirit over the years. In a span of five years, I went from being the younger of two children at age nine to the second oldest of six at fourteen. Since my older brother Darren had long ago decided it was better to act retarded rather than take on new responsibilities, it became my job to be the oldest in the family. That theme has played out several dozen times in my life. With my family, in educational settings, in my various jobs, even with my wife. I take charge over situations usually because no one else wants the responsibility and not because I’m looking for a leadership opportunity.
Despite all of the seriousness that is my life, I’m also an innocent, somewhat incurable romantic that has walked a tightrope between fanciful romance, love, and full-blown lust over the years. It’s why I could fall in love with Avatar: The Last Airbender, Katara and Aang (or Kataang for Avatar fans) and with Kim Possible. It’s why I was so surprised to ever have a crush on anyone, much less two young women from my dreaded Humanities days. It’s also why I tended to separate the women I dated from the women I hung out with. At least until I turned twenty-four. 
I am also the most ambivalent person I know when it comes to trusting or not trusting others. I’ve either not trusted others as a general rule, which was the case from seventh grade through my freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh. Or trusted folks too much, which was true from my sophomore year at Pitt through the last year of my doctoral work at Carnegie Mellon. Or not trusted my own instincts, as was the case with some of the jobs I’ve taken over the past twelve years. It takes time to figure out yourself, especially if crises get in the way.
I don’t think that I’m all that complicated. I’ve been hurt by people who I’ve closest to, helped by foes under desperate circumstances, have attempted to suppress memories in order to make something of myself, and have come full circle to make me a better me. But I’m obviously not an easy person to describe. So call me “sober,” “studious” or “serious” if you will. I’ll just know that those who do don’t really know me at all. And that’s just too bad.