I wrote this story about three years ago, after an incident that occurred at my organization’s volleyball game. In light of Eric Holder’s recent comments about Americans being a “nation of cowards” on race, I decided to dig this up as a example of trepidation, guilt and anger whenever race bubbles to the surface. Although it’s a stretch to call Americans cowards about race, the fact that we are less than honest or open when we discuss race is still a big problem, even for folks born well after the end of the Civil Rights Movement. By the way, the full story is also on my website under “Other Writings”

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I played on my company’s volleyball team, one that hadn’t won a set of a volleyball match in two years. With a recent change in coach and a lack of available players, we were left with seven players for a game that required six starters. For this game I was the only person of color who attended. During this match we finally won our first set, which was the match’s first set. Our new coach increased the pressure, saying that it was time to win our first match. Our team proceeded to miss a ton of balls in the second set. I mishit some easy balls, and others missed balls hit directly to them.

I noticed as the second set drew to a close that some of the players were covering spots on my section of the floor. Not just covering my section. They were literally jumping right in front of me to do so. At first, I didn’t think anything of it, chalking it up to poor team communication. But after a third time of someone nearly running into me to hit a ball I was already in position to hit, I finally noticed that there was a strange team dynamic developing.

Just before the start of the third set, our coach said, “All right, we need a victory here.” With that, the six other players were assigned spots while I sat out as a substitute player for the start of the set. I said to myself that it “figured that the one Black guy on the team would have to sit out….”

After the match, I sat in the bleachers, still processing what had just happened. In the process, I hadn’t talked to any of my teammates. Our coach came over and asked me what was going on. I said hesitantly, “Well . . . I felt that there was some bias involved the decision to have me sub out.” When asked to explain what I meant by “bias,” I said, “well . . . I felt like race was involved here, seeing that, after all, I’m the only African American on the team.” My statement was received with several moans and a sardonic “Oh God!” by my teammates. I had instantaneously transformed myself from a teammate, co-worker, writer, historian and teacher to Kevin Powell on MTV’s The Real World in their eyes—a stereotypical, angry Black man. This despite the fact I felt more confused and disappointed than angry.

Our coach said that the “rest of us are White and that’s not going to change” and that I wasn’t “being a good sport accusing [them] of racism.” “I haven’t accused anybody of anything,” I said. “This isn’t about intentions; this is about perceptions.” I went on to say that I temporarily took myself out of the game because I didn’t want to hurt the team, considering how angry and confused I was at the time. With that, all but one teammate left the gym….

As I left the gym, I found the rest of the team waiting for me in the parking lot. At least they weren’t carrying sticks and stones. It seemed like a positive gesture at the time. They wanted to “hear me out” regarding my perceptions of bias and what might have caused them. I was already emotionally exhausted at this point, and didn’t want to talk to a group that had collectively banded together as Whites to defend themselves. I repeated in four different ways my emotions and my thought process during the third set, adding that I hadn’t drawn any final conclusions about their intentions or my perceptions. “Whether it was intentional or unintentional or my perceptions were correct or incorrect doesn’t matter,” I said….

I knew that my teammates, though well-intentioned, had disregarded my perceptions around racial bias, assuming that other bias issues were involved. I knew at least one had thought I was playing the so-called race card to deflect from my inconsistent play. If I could discuss my perceptions again, I would’ve used another example. I would’ve described a company basketball team with six players, of which only five could start. Five of the six players are Black. One is White. When the White player is in the game, his teammates consistently cut in front of him to catch passes and play defense. The White player is riding the bench at the beginning of the final period. When combined with the reality that his teammates aren’t exactly NBA All-Stars, the White player recognizes that his teammates don’t trust him. Most likely he thinks that the Black players have unintentionally and unconsciously made him a bench player because he’s White.

If I had used this analogy, I’m sure most of my teammates would’ve better understood what I had attempted to say. That a group dynamic had set in. It was one in which good, well-intentioned people had brought their unconscious assumptions together in a negative, unintended way. It included the fact that some teammates were desperate to win the match. There was the fact that my play wasn’t at a level superior to my other teammates. And there was the reality that I was a relatively new teammate among the seven playing on this night. All of these were inadvertent, unconscious and unintentional factors in my teammates’ actions, ones that at a minimum proved that they didn’t trust me as a teammate. When combined with the fact of my Black maleness (with the possibility of athletic stereotypes attached), it made sense for me to pick up on these dynamics and to interpret them as I did.

That’s just it, though. As surprised as I was initially by my perceptions around the volleyball incident, I found myself equally amazed by how much stronger the group dynamic became the moment I mentioned “race” to my teammates. Their individuality as White women and men, Israeli Jew and Scotch-Irish Americans completely disappeared as they moaned derisively with one voice. The continuation of our conversation about what happened during the game confirmed for me something about the unintentional and unconscious assumptions we all make around race. As my teammates gave me their assurances, I reminded myself that many Whites and those who identify with Whiteness find it difficult to sort out how their sense of universal American privilege clouds their ability to see bias. This privilege, no matter how gently one confronts it, brings with it knee-jerk guilt and automatic anger.

This doesn’t mean that someone like me should stand by because I’m not completely certain about my colleagues’ intentions or actions or because I don’t want others to see me as the “bad guy.” Even if race wasn’t a significant motivation for their actions, their lack of trust was obvious. And mistrust in a multicultural setting by definition possesses racial undercurrents, for we are humans after all, each living our lives within a specific social context. We each need to have the space to confront group dynamics that work against us, even in public. We should be damn sure about our own perceptions before we speak of them. But we also should feel welcome enough in our group circles to raise race and be taken seriously before folks who otherwise see themselves as “colorblind” dismiss what we’ve said. Maybe it’s here—in the everyday group dynamics that occur at work, at school and in other settings—where it’s most critical for all of us to strive for a more tolerant society.

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I think that this last paragraph encompasses a lot of what our new Attorney General was attempting to say. Any conversation about race is tainted by knee-jerk reactions on all sides, whether race is an issue, not an issue, or the issue that needs to be explored. For some of us saying the word “race” is equivalent to shouting “Fire!” in the middle of a crowded theater — hence the title. For others, it’s either treated as the joker from a deck of fifty-two cards or, if we’re seriously raising the issue, it’s as if we’ve lost our minds by bringing it up for conversation.

Whether one agrees with my perceptions really isn’t the point. It’s whether my perceptions or perspective is treated with the respect that it deserves. Falling short of that means postponing a conversation that has been necessary for at least four decades in most circles, and generations longer in others. Maybe we should shout “race” in the theaters of our lives, along with “money,” “power,” and “sexual orientation.” It would mean that we as a nation would need to shed our uncomfortability around these issues if we shouted about all of this more often, and in a proactive way at that.

I neglected to mention one of the most important things of all when I discussed why I’ve been a “lying actor” for most of my life. Anyone who has ever watched a movie with me or been to the movies with me already knows this. For whatever reason, I can put myself in any film. A dramedy, a comedy, a romantic comedy, an epic film. It almost doesn’t matter. As long as the film is good and the acting is very good, I tend to be “in” the film, in the moment. I become emotional, romantic, more free of my inhibitions — at least in my head — than I would be if I had three glasses of White Zinfandel after coming home from a date with my wife.

Keep in mind, there are only two periods in my life in which I’ve watched movies regularly. One, from ’74 to ’81, and the other, since The Untouchables came out in the summer of ’87. Between the ages of four and eleven, I saw everything from Ben Hur, True Grit and Casablanca — thanks in large part to the old WNEW (Channel 5) in New York in the years before Rupert Murdoch — to Carrie, Star Wars and Breaker! Breaker!. I had no particular set of movie tastes at all. My father Jimme loved “shoot ’em ups,” he said to me over and over again years before Clive Owen starred in a movie by the same name. My mother had no movie tastes and no discernment as to whether a five-year-old like me should watch The Omen with her. My ex-stepfather only liked martial arts films — I use this term loosely — like ones with Chuck Norris, Bruce Lee, or David Carradine. I never had a chance to develop a set of tastes over time, especially during my teens.

While all of my classmates would consume movies like large buckets of popcorn, I was relegated to the occasional commercial trailer for the really, really big movies. It took me ten years to figure out why one classmate would walk into class almost every day singing “Roxanne!” a couple of octaves higher than Sting all throughout eighth, ninth and tenth grade. I didn’t see 48 Hours or Eddie Murphy’s take on The Police’s classic song until ’91. I’ve never seen E.T., Flashdance, Fame, The Verdict, Kramer vs. Kramer, The Cotton Club, Out of Africa (not that I’d really want to) or Gandhi. I’ve only seen movies like The Killing Fields, Witness and A Soldier’s Story in the past ten or fifteen years. And others, like Platoon, The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, I only got to see relatively close to their release dates because of cable (we didn’t get it until September ’85) or the Pitt Program Council.

So I appreciate the opportunity to see a good film with a good plot and great acting when I can. I easily get caught up in stories, even hokey ones, because I know I am a goofball and that out of six and a half billion people, there have to be others like me out there. I do emote at some of these films, but not usually at the obvious ones. I once walked out on Breaking the Waves because three women were sitting around me crying as the movie was drawing to its depressing close. Emily Watson’s character somehow believed that she was keeping her paralyzed husband alive by doing what he wanted, which in this case was sleeping with other men. Gimme a break! It was stupid, desperate and scary, but not something to cry about. Of course, my then girlfriend Angelia (now wife) dragged me to this “great” Indy film because she wanted a change of pace.

But I digress. I do cry at films. Usually when unrequited love is rewarded — I wonder why. Or when someone dies, especially when the other character or characters have developed a relationship with that person. Or when someone’s truth and life is vindicated. Movies like Chocolat, The Color Purple, Love, Actually, Finding Forrester, About A Boy, The English Patient, Crash, Good Will Hunting, Sixth Sense, even Jerry Maguire. Over the years, I’ve become a fan of Indy movies, quirky movies, movies that are character studies or have a plot that only a sensitive person like me can appreciate. I see a bit of myself in some characters. So when a character manages to overcome great obstacles, it makes me smile, laugh, even cry as if I’m in the film. When a character can become angry, I can be angry for them. When they fall in love, for that moment, I’m in love, too.

Still, I do watch some action films. Like Shoot ‘Em Up, Tombstone, Die Hard, and Lethal Weapon, sometimes over and over and over again. I’ve seen Tombstone at least thirty times over the years, and we own the DVD! I find myself liking the so-called bad guys almost as much as I like the lead characters. Documentaries, especially those by the ever-rabid Michael Moore, pull on my social justice strings. And, by the way, we sometimes need someone as rabid as Moore to hit us over the head about issues in which we need to take action. Of course, animation has become bigger in my movie selections of late. I love The Incredibles, Cars, the first two of Shrek. Of course, none are better in my mind than Kim Possible or Avatar: The Last Airbender — although Ben 10: Alien Force is starting to catch up.

As I get older, though, I can’t watch horror films or sci-fi films with horror or these docu-dramas that provide real life horror, like Boys Don’t Cry, 28 Days Later, or Hotel Rwanda. I can relate in the case of real-life horrors, but either the horror is over the top or just too much for me to relate to at one time.

The one thing I can’t watch at all any more are apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic movies. Because of what I’ve gone through, I can and become obsessed with the end of the world as we all know it at times. Terminator, Terminator II, The Day After, The Day After Tomorrow, Deep Impact, Independence Day (still a great film, though), and so many others. Between ’83 and ’03, I had so many bad dreams about being caught in the middle of a thermonuclear detonation that I had to stop watching Hollywood’s various depictions of Armageddon. If it happens, it happens. At least I’m experienced some form of it in my upbringing.

So, I’m a emotional sap when it comes to some movies, but also like a bit of “Movies For Guys Who Like Movies” movies, but have to back away from movies of cataclysmic pain and suffered, not to mention gratuitous violence and horror. I guess that makes me normal, and it gives me a sense of what kind of lying actor I would’ve been had I pursued this even casually growing up. Somewhere between Hugh Grant, Rob Brown, and Cuba Gooding, Jr., I guess. The best that I can do with the calling I have related to movies is to write something inspiring enough that by the time Noah’s my age, someone has used some of it in a movies. That means turning off the DVD player long enough to write or read.

Finding my calling in life has been just about the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Not because I have no talents or skills. Based on all I’ve done so far in this life, I likely have more skills than I can pursue as a calling. Trauma like domestic violence, poverty, psychological abuse, being Black and gifted in America, and overcoming ignorance justified by religion can all cloud one’s path to their unique calling. I’ve written extensively about my path to seeing myself as a writer, a two-decade-long journey that started at the age of eleven and ended soon after marrying at thirty.

For many folks, spring training and baseball is part of their rite of spring transition from America’s game (football) to America’s past-time. Or, as I like to say, to a sport whose time has long past, regardless of how many people come out to watch. I’m an ex-baseball fan for many reasons, a fair number of which I’ve discussed in my postings at the end of ’07 and in February ’08.

Much of my disdain for the sport is because of its contradictory history around race. It’s not just what happened before Jackie Robinson and the ’47 Dodgers or with Hank Aaron in chasing down Babe Ruth or with Al Campanis’ horrible comments about Blacks as managers or in the front office on Nightline in ’87. No, it’s about the everyday nature of how many Americans see baseball that reshaped my thinking around the game between high school and graduate school.

It all started with my own experience trying out for Mount Vernon High School’s varsity baseball team my junior year, in March of ’86. As much as I loved football and liked basketball, I really loved America’s favorite pastime. Having worked out with the baseball team in the fall had given me the confidence to pursue the week-long process of elimination. One of my student-athlete classmates spent some time encouraging me, although I didn’t doubt that she had doubts about me making the team. She was on MVHS’ swim team and was an excellent swimmer. This was in addition to the school newspaper, Meltzer’s mock trial team, the National Honors Society and a thousand other things she was into. Out of all of my classmates, there were few I knew who were busier — at least in school. Her day started around 5 am, with swimming at 5:30 or 6. As much as I thought that I couldn’t do what she was doing, I was often up at 5:30 or 6 am myself, ready to start the day.

Despite her ambivalent encouragements, I went for baseball as hard as I could for the most part. The second week of March was to be four days of constant competition followed by frustration. The tryouts were all after school, from three to five o’clock, in the indoor practice facility for the baseball and track teams. We did calisthenics and stretching, followed my more calisthenics and stretching, followed by defensive practice. Beyond the competition, the first thing I noticed was that out of the thirty-two of us, including the team, only four Blacks were a part of this entire process. All four of us were trying out. The team itself was all-White and virtually all-Italian. The coach was a fat Italian man in his late-thirties and not exactly the nicest guy in the world. If you made an error, even if you managed to work it out, he called you off the field immediately and tried someone else in that spot. None of us had much margin for error.

But I made two errors that week that stuck out for me. One was on Tuesday. The coaches took us outside to practice catching fly balls. I’d never practiced catching anything in the outfield, whether to run up on a ball or to back up, or even how to hold my glove. There was one hit directly to me, a line drive of a fly ball. It hit my glove fine, and then I allowed it to drop. As soon as I dropped the ball, the coach took me off the field. My second error was on Wednesday, but it did more damage to me. We were doing infield drills, and they had me at shortshop. I must’ve fielded eight or ten balls while I was out there, backhanding balls, spinning and throwing to first pretty good. One ball hit to me took a hop right off my balls. I caught it in my glove and threw it to first before I fell down and grabbed myself. It took about forty-five seconds before I felt the full force of the pain, which went away just as quickly. There was certainly a lot of laughter around that, drowning out the fact that I still made the play. The coach just shook his head.

The last day of tryouts was spent in the batting cage. Each of us were supposed to take whacks at an eighty mile-an-hour ball coming from the ball machine. When my turn came up, I had a total of four balls to swing at in the simulator. I was already over-thinking the scenario before I got in the cage. My mind went to a situation in gym last year, to softball on a humid upper-80s day. Before we started the game, I took some practice swings with a gym mate throwing the softball overhand as hard as he could. I swung as hard as I could and hit the pitch just about a hundred yards. My arms and hands, though, were numb, and my crooked left fingers in a lot of pain. I’d conjured up my own downfall. I was scared to make full contact with the baseball. And, for the first three swings, I swung and missed, swung and barely tipped the ball, and swung and missed again. I thought to myself, “This is ridiculous. If I want any chance to make this team, I have to make contact.” I slowed down the last pitch, swung and made contact, and it didn’t hurt. I wished that I’d done that sooner.

There was only one other Black guy trying out by the fourth day, someone I didn’t know, but was really athletic. He got in the cage and tore up the baseballs, making crisp, clean consistent contact with the balls. I knew he was a shoo-in after that. There was another kid, a kid I recognized from the neighborhood. It was the son of the pizza shop owner, the one whose pizzeria was just down the street from 616. This guy had missed all three days of tryouts, but was invited to batting practice on the fourth day. He too went in the batting cage and clobbered the baseball. At that point my heart sunk. I knew I wasn’t going to make the team. Sure enough, the coach posted the names of the guys who made the team the following week, with my name not on the list. I was disappointed. “[The coach] says that you’re pretty good, but you’re also a danger to yourself,” my student-athlete classmate said with a bit of a giggle. I smiled, but I wasn’t in a joking mood.

Of the thirteen people who were on the team, twelve were White, and eleven of those twelve were Italian. The one token Black guy was easily the best athlete on the team, head and shoulders over most of last year’s starters. And the kid, the one whose father owned the pizza shop near 616, the one who only showed up for tryouts on the fourth day, was among the guys on this year’s team. I may or may not have been good enough to make the team. I just felt that the Italian coaches had rigged the process, tainted it in some way to favor kids who were one of their own or played Little League with their nephew or second cousin. The experience left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. “How is this even fair?,” I thought to myself as I looked at the list. “Mom really is right. You do have to be ten times better to be equal in this society.” I knew that there was a track coach and a basketball coach still interested in me, but the racial thing stuck out to me. To recognize that baseball was an Italian’s club while only Blacks played basketball and ran track, Whites did almost all the swimming and football was the only sport where the spirit of integration lived on really bothered me. I guessed that the “content of character,” or in this case, talent or potential meant little to these coaches.

That experience did not end my love affair with baseball. It did start me on the road to becoming an ex-baseball fan, though. Ironically, it was the Mets winning the World Series in October ’86 that accelerated the process. They were my ultimate team of underdogs, a team that most New Yorkers only cared about when they were winning, which wasn’t very often. Now that they had the best record in baseball and were officially world champs, all kinds of things started coming out about Darryl Strawberry’s alcohol and drug use and Dwight Gooden’s first positive drug test. That was bad enough. Hearing what folks would say about these guys on talk radio was even worse. They were “animals,” I heard many more than a few callers into the sports talk shows say. They make “way too much money,” or they “don’t deserve a second chance,” I heard others say. Mind you, this was the era of Steve Howe, a seven-time violator of the major league baseball drug policy.

In a league full of coke heads and beer bingers, the two star Black athletes were being beat up, not by talk show hosts, but by blue-collar White callers who longed for the good ol’ days of Ruth, DiMaggio, and Mantle, or the happy-go-lucky Willie Mays. At least two of those guys regularly medicated themselves with alcohol, but I guessed that was okay, because they looked more like the people who were calling into the New York area talk shows wanting Strawberry’s and Gooden’s heads.

Moving to Pittsburgh and going to college gave me a better perspective on major league sports, especially baseball and football. Outside of baseball crazy New York, most folks I met were crazy about football, basketball or soccer, whether as grade schoolers or grad students. Baseball was boring, plain and simple. It really was. I watched enough Pittsburgh Pirates games to understand that. Even when the Bucs — as they’re called in the ‘Burgh — were good, the games were about as exciting as a Champions Tour golf tournament in the middle of August. Even with them making the playoffs three out of four years in one stretch, the media and the fans hated Barry Bonds. Now, Barry Bonds has always made himself hard to like, or to put it another way, is a surly jerk. But so are so many other professional athletes that actually have superior talent. Like Strawberry and Gooden, Bonds was vilified on the talk radio shows by folks who wanted him to be more like his grinning godfather Willie Mays.

The next and final set of turning points came in the four years before the ’94 strike and lockout. When conservative columnist George Will published his book about baseball and its wonderfully timeless symmetry and treating the game as a science, it killed my interest in the sport. I knew as a spectator and as someone who actually spent some time playing the game how simple it really is. Reading defenses in football is hard. Figuring out which club to use on a windy day at Pebble Beach is difficult. Catching a baseball is pretty basic by comparison. Waiting forever for someone to hit a ball in your direction, that’s boring and excruciating. After reading the first ten pages, I wanted to burn the book.

By this time, I had started playing basketball to relieve the stresses of graduate school. I found myself gaining confidence in my jump shot and in playing pickup games with average Joe’s and with former Pitt basketball players. I found the follies of Greg Norman and golf more exciting than watching a great pitchers’ duel between Greg Maddox and Orel Hershiser. I always enjoyed football, playing and watching. By the time Joe Carter hit his World Series ending home run against the Atlanta Braves in ’93, I no longer had a real interest in baseball. I still knew its history, or rather, its mythology around its statistics, records and glory days. But I also knew way too much about its ugly history and its seedy underbelly to continue to follow the sport.

That was why when Ken Burns’ Baseball documentary came out in the fall of ’94 — right in the middle of the baseball lockout that would cancel that year’s World Series — I declared myself an ex-baseball fan. Watching sportscaster Bob Costas drone on and on about how he cried when he walked by Babe Ruth’s statue when he was seven years old made me gag. Hearing old and crusty White guys talk about their White greats when Blacks especially were shut out from playing major league baseball pissed me off. But most importantly, the complete whitewash of continuing to call baseball America’s pastime when the sport had been in decline since the late ’50s was just too much to swallow.

Today, I see it as an American sport supported mostly by White guys between the ages of thirty-five and seventy-five, mostly living in the Northeast corridor between Washington, DC and Boston, and mostly waxing nostalgic about the heroes they barely know or knew. It was baseball that taught me one of my more bitter lessons about talent versus collusion and ethnic identification. I hope, for my son’s sake, that he never falls in love with this sport.

“Romance without finance is a nuis-ance,” I remember older generations of men saying to me in reference to courting women when I was growing up. By the time I was old enough to understand, it was a statement that had me cracking up when I heard it. The men who said it sounded somewhere between surly and downright mean, even as dapper as some of them dressed. Even CNN political commentator Roland Martin has had it with St. Valentine’s Day, the ultimate symbol of romantic love, saying that it is “nothing more than a commercial holiday created by rabid retailers who needed a major shopping day between Christmas and Easter in order to give people a reason to spend money.” I don’t quite feel that way. But I do think that we place too much emphasis on finance and not true romance when it come to expressing the kind of passion and love that comes with courtship.

If that weren’t the case, then I guess I could’ve started dating when I was in middle school or at least by the middle of high school. But it takes money to buy flowers that don’t wilt the moment they’re exposed to air, or chocolates that aren’t sold at the nearest Rite Aid, CVS or Genovese. It takes money and time to treat someone in a material way as if they’re valuable, to do more than just express love in voice or on paper. It takes money to make someone like myself to look presentable enough to say something about romance, or at least wanting to be in a romantic relationship.

I’ve listened to woman after woman complain over the years about their boyfriends, husbands, exs, and on occasion, about me, in reference to this romance and finance stuff. Women who won’t date a guy because he doesn’t own a car, or a recent model car, or because he’s only a security guard, or because he only has a bachelor’s degree. Or because his clothes come off the rack at Sears and shoes from Florsheim. To say the least, I could go on and on about women complaining about men because their wallets may not be as big as their hearts, or anything else for that matter. I could talk about how often I’ve from women complaining about their other heterosexual halves because they seem to lack passion, or are too aggressive, or don’t seem to strike the proper balance between romantic love and lust.

What I’ve learned from years of listening sessions could end up being a book one day, hopefully the opposite of Michael Eric Dyson’s drivel about Black women from a few years ago. But what I noticed throughout was how much outer appearances, including material wealth, mattered. By my life story and their definition, I probably shouldn’t have gone on my first date until I was twenty-nine or thirty-four. I still wouldn’t have been far enough along to get married or have a kid. And as things stand in my life right now, I’d have some explaining to do about my writing and pursuit of an agent and a book contract, as struggle isn’t exactly a part of romance.

Heck, as far as my female classmates from middle and high school were concerned — and some from my Pitt years as well — I didn’t have a romantic bone in my body. I was “asexual,” according to one acquaintance of mine, until my senior year at Pitt. Because I didn’t spent time developing my “game” or “talk,” I wasn’t romantic. In my defense, it’s hard to exude romance when most of your life’s been spent walking a fine line between high-brow intellectualism and grinding poverty. Both shape how one interacts with people, including women. It wasn’t as if I had any good examples of romance around me. Lust, yes. Sadness, definitely. Out-of-control anger, without a doubt. But obvious romance, I never saw.

As reported in about a dozen or so previous postings, I had three (3) crushes between the spring of ’82 and the summer of ’91 that lasted longer than a couple of days. That’s it. One in seventh grade, an off-and-on one in my junior and senior year of high school and the summer before college, and one my senior year at Pitt. Given my background, it’s amazing there weren’t more or that there weren’t more from afar. In all three cases, it mattered not whether I revealed my crush or not. It didn’t mattered if I expressed myself well enough or quietly walked around like someone struck by lightning. None of the young women in question saw me the same way I saw myself or them, or myself with them.

It’s interesting to think about this romantic love thing, because for a long time, I didn’t see myself as romantic either. This despite the fact that romantic music was always in my mental repertoire. From the slow jams of Earth, Wind and Fire, The Commodores, and Luther to more recent stuff by Anita Baker, Brenda Russell, and New Edition at the time. It’s interesting because when I thought of my crushes, I thought about things like chocolates and flowers, rose petals and perfumes, hanging out and talking for hours, going to goofy movies where we both would cry. But money for me was always a major limitation on my ability to execute romance.

Romance because significantly easier for me once I went on to grad school and had a little bit of money to work with. Still, I never forgot about the lessons I learned about romance and money. So I avoided women who were into status as much as humanly possible. I dated, but fairly rarely, preferring to exercise lust and one-night stands over love, and tended to shut down anything in between. Luckily, the last two women I dated — including my wife Angelia — were just as quirkily romantic as I was, making my practice of romance both easier and more consistent over time. It was easier and more consistent because they both recognized that little things, small gestures, acts that aren’t materially based, matter. For that at least, I thank my wife and my ex for.

But I also must recognize something important about my emotion chip. As romantic as I can be, I’ve found that controlled, channeled anger has acted as more of a catalyst in my life than falling head over heels over someone. My first crush in seventh grade is really the only exception, but even then, the abuse that I suffered at home was just as important as that crush in motivating me academically and otherwise. With the crash and burn I suffered from crush #2 came a semester where guys were “assholes” and women were “bitches,” and that pushed me all the way to the Dean’s List. The end of crush #3 freed me up to have a straight A first semester of grad school, not to mention my first publication. Sometimes the end of romance is as important as the romantic feeling itself.

So what kind of person stimulates romantic flutters in my mind and stomach? Someone who is confident, witty, has a great voice, someone whose sense of humor can be as weird as my own. Someone who isn’t afraid to laugh at themselves, someone who’s turned pain into laughter or motivation. Someone who’s sense of independence has yielded to a sense of interdependence. Someone whose ability to be romantic and intellectual could almost, but not quite, overpower my own. Few people in my life have approached this, and only one of my three formative crushes had all of this in spades. My wife of nearly nine years has a good portion of this, which may well explain why we’ve been together for so long. This is what romance is all about. Money can buy a lot of things, but romance isn’t one of them.

This week, and tomorrow especially, marks the coming together of several anniversaries. Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln turn 200, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People — the NAACP — turns 100 tomorrow. That these anniversaries are coming together, it seems to me, is no accident of the calendar. There are important issues of organizational and ideological evolution to discuss, especially when it comes to the NAACP. Especially since much of the world — begrudgingly mind you — accepts the reality of evolution.

I’ve said this to my students and to my friends (and some not-friends) over the years. The NAACP has been an organization in search of a vision or cause since Monday, May 17, 1954. That was the day the Supreme Court voted 9-0 in favor of Brown in Brown v. Board of Education (as well as the Bolling v. Sharpe decision for Washington, DC — a federal territory), overturning the Plessy v. Ferguson decision and the “separate but equal” doctrine of legal segregation. Since then, the NAACP has been behind the times. It lacked a coherent set of strategies around enforcement of the Brown decision and tactics for supporting the fledgling Civil Rights Movement of the ’50s and ’60. It didn’t retool to deal with the changing racial landscape of the post-Civil Rights era in the ’70s and ’80s. It made very superficial attempts to draw in new blood in the ’90s. And its new leadership created scandals involving misuse of funds and sexual escapades in the office, not helping with its declining and aging membership.

One thing that Lincoln and the NAACP’s founders had in common was their sense of history and adaptability. Both Lincoln and folks like W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells and James Weldon Johnson understood the need for a grand vision, for a mission that would lead to a more perfect union. But they also understood that they operated within a specific context, with a need to address the needs of the people they served, elite and everyday folks alike. That’s what the NAACP of today lacks. Most of the legal legacy of the NAACP is contained in its separate NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which in turn is limited in its ability to take on cases. A lot of what they used to do in the good ol‘ days of Jim Crow has been supplanted by the work of the ACLU and the Office of Civil Rights in the US Department of Justice — even as weak as the latter has been over the years. Its social and community work is limited in scope, often overlapping with the work of local community organizations, Boys and Girls Clubs, the Urban League, and others.

The NAACP has failed to evolve. It hasn’t set as a new vision one that is multicultural, multiracial, or even — dare I say — post-racial (ugh, not that word again). The organization still has yet to figure out a coherent message for folks under the age of forty about what privileges come with membership. The NAACP still remains exclusionary and provincial, all but limited in its partnerships with similar organizations like the National Council of La Raza, Women of Color Resource Center, the Asian American Justice Center, and so on. In recent years, most of what we’ve heard about the organization has been its searches for a new CEO or its whining about some VIP or politician not attending their annual get-together.

The decline of this historic organization is a small example of a larger problem for the civil rights generation. How to remain relevant when the heady days of your ideas and activism has long passed. This isn’t an easy thing to address. We’ve been talking about this for years. For the civil rights generation the answer is life itself. Either one puts themselves in a position to pass on the torch, or life will simply pass one by, making one’s portfolio less relevant over time. Since many from the civil rights generation have refused to pass the torch, many have had to pry it from their hands in the form of new ideas, new activities, new small “m” movements in line with our multicultural and multiracial times.

For an organization like the NAACP, it may be time to say what many only discuss privately, for fear of being blasted in public. Sometimes when a movement evolves or ends, the purpose or mission of an organization has two choices. Either morph or adapt somehow to meet the needs of its potential members for the long term. Or wither on the vine. Social justice and nonprofit advocates have been writing for years about the need for some organizations to either merge in order to address the same issue or to fold — not every issue requires a brick-and-mortar institution to address it. This may well be true for the NAACP at a century old.

For those of you ready to rip me a new one, I’m hardly advocating that the NAACP should close its doors. If the NAACP cannot come up with a vision that embraces both where its potential members and where those potential members would like to go, then it really doesn’t have a purpose. Unlike historically Black colleges and universities, which still provide an education to twenty percent of all African American college students — and a growing number of White students — the NAACP has not made any serious attempts to adapt from its elitist beginnings to reach new generations. Without evolution, I’m afraid that the NAACP’s 100th anniversary celebration is a Pyrrhic one, as its future as a leading civil rights organization will continue to be bleak.