This week marks thirty (30) years since I became friends with my one-time best friend, Starling Churn (I have permission to use his real name for all things related to Boy At The Window). It was the time of Billy Joel and Christopher Cross, Donna Summer’s “Last Dance” and Kenny Loggins’ “This Is It,” not to mention Earth, Wind & Fire and The Commodores. It was the tail end of fourth grade, the year that I discovered that I really was smart. And weird. And in need of a friend whose interest in the intellectual somewhat matched my own.

I did have other friends, other classmates I talked to or walked home with. Guys with names like Joe and Roger, Demetrius and Anthony, and a few others. None of them wanted to talk about much more than school or games or sports, not that I objected very often. We were all of nine or ten years old, and still figuring ourselves out. Still, much wasn’t the same for me after six weeks of being grounded for running away from home at the end of ’78 and into ’79 (see postings in December ’07 and December ’08). Escaping into World Book Encyclopedia and the world of books helped me in my acceptance of my mother’s second marriage and transform me into an above-average student at the same time. That put me in competition with Starling.

Ours was a friendship that began and ended with a fight, the first one on April 27, the last one, two years later, both on Fridays. In one sense, the reason for our preteen brotherly bond was also a key reason for our two fights. We were fighting over who was the smartest in our school. Silly, immature, nerdy and geekish I know, but all so true.

Our school was William H. Holmes Elementary School, one built in the mid-50s with the best of modern school architecture in mind. The back of the two-story building included a softball field, another field that was often used for flag football, a small asphalt playing area which sometimes subbed as a fifty-yard dash track, and a sloped wooded area that covered nearly a quarter-acre. Next door was the Mount Vernon Board of Education, giving the school immediate access to the district’s offices, if not its resources. This was a truly suburban K-6 school, one that could justify some of my innocence and naivete.

The back lot and wooded area between Holmes and the Board of Education was where we fought after school that April day. I won, between ripping up Starling’s shirt with a nail, punching him in the mouth, and knocking him to the ground. He ran home crying and yelling that I’d cheated in the fight by using a nail to make him look worse off than he actually was. I was just happy that I won, but sad because I had embarrassed him in front of about a dozen or more of our classmates. The following Monday, I called a truce at lunch time, and began a conversation with Starling that would last the next two years.

Starling was the first person of the same age I had ever talked to about politics, race, religion, girls, science, music, math, and war without being made to feel like I was an oddball. I was certain that this was the case for him as well. We talked during playtime before school, we ate our lunches together, hung out during recess, walked home together after school (and sometimes stopping by the neighborhood firehouse to buy locally made twenty-five cent sodas). Our classroom conversations would draw our teachers—especially our sixth-grade teacher Mrs. Bryant—into one philosophical debate after another. We’d even get our other classmates Roger, Eric, Christopher, Anthony and Ronald to participate in our carping sessions. We were two goofy, nerdy tweeners who had yet to discover the need to lighten up. But this was our world, one in which this friendship could take root and grow.

By the time we reached Mrs. Bryant and sixth grade, a good portion of our conversations turned to Christianity. I guess that this was inevitable, given that Starling was the “son of a preacher man,” a Southern Baptist pastor. Starling wanted to see me baptized and saved, an official child of God and brother in Christ. My search was one of truth and God, and if Jesus was the one who could get me there then so be it. I didn’t feel the same sense of urgency for water immersion and John 3:16 as Starling did for me. I preferred our talks about Blondie, Queen, Pink Floyd, this “thing called rap,” Carter versus Reagan and Begin versus Sadat. And I knew that Christianity lay somewhere in my future. At least I thought it did at the time.

Of course, the re-emergence of my stepfather Maurice Washington and the whole Hebrew-Israelite thing put a temporary end to my Christian enlightenment in April ’81. Him and my mother had been separated for about six months (Apparently not separated enough, as she was pregnant with my younger brother Yiscoc, to whom she gave birth in July ’81 — you do the math). During that time, my idiot stepfather had discovered the ways of Yahweh and alleged that he was a changed man. It’s strange what just a couple of changes brought to my life. I lost many of my sixth-grade friends when I showed up to school with a kufi on my head near the end of April.

Starling stopped speaking to me immediately and entirely. We’d recently celebrated—prematurely I might add—Reagan being shot by John Hinckley, Jr. on the last Friday in March. Now our friendship was over. This was what our second fight was about, our friendship, my bizarre religion and my acceptance of it. I guess that Starling at twelve was definitely his father’s son. I could certainly understand Starling’s perspective on this. I’d betrayed him when I came to school and professed that I was a Hebrew-Israelite. Starling had been talking to me for months about becoming a Christian, a Baptist, and now here I was embracing Afrocentric Judaism, similar in many ways to the Nation of Islam and its variants in terms of its racial politics. The practitioners I’d been around tended to see Black Christians as “weak,” out of touch with “their heritage,” and as “worshiping the wrong God.” Starling couldn’t accept this. We ended up in our second and final fight. I was fighting for our friendship, literally. Starling beat me to end it.

I felt betrayed myself. I didn’t understand, at least at the time, why Starling was so upset and angry with me over the whole Hebrew-Israelite thing. He had turned his back on me at a time in which I needed his input the most. I still cared about the same things, thought about the same issues, and wanted someone that I could banter with about music and politics and religion. But given Starling’s background, even back then I realized that he thought that I was well on my way to hell. Starling and I saw ourselves as adults in many ways, so he assumed that I had made a free-will adult decision for becoming a Hebrew-Israelite when I walked into Mrs. Bryant’s class with a kufi on my head. He had no idea how much I was struggling with my mother and stepfather’s decision to make our family a Hebrew-Israelite one.

So I projected the outward appearance of supreme confidence and faith in Jehovah and this slant on the ten Lost Tribes of Israel, to protect myself from being hurt and to see if this whole Hebrew-Israelite thing really was for me. Not a good move going into middle school and the Humanities Program later that year. I had no idea how much worse my life was about to become in the two years between the end of my friendship with Starling and my family’s fall into welfare poverty, bumps, bruises, babies and concussions along the way.

It wasn’t until the end of eighth grade that Starling and I began exchanging Hi’s again. Even then, this was often forced. The only conversation I had with Starling after our fight was at the end of ninth grade, with him letting me know that he was moving with his family down South. Starling Churn left with his family for Wilmington, North Carolina in the summer of ’84, still believing I was well on my way to eternal damnation.

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I decided to contact Starling at the end of May ’03. It’d been nineteen years since I’d seen or heard from the man. I ran a Google search and, lo and behold, I found Starling with one try. Apparently Starling Churn’s a rare name, so rare that his name, address, phone number, and affiliation with Mount Vernon’s public schools came up on page one of my search result. It was almost too easy and left me with new questions. Like why was he back in Mount Vernon, what got him into teaching, does he still look the same, and why hasn’t he changed his name yet?
As I sent Starling my well-tailored one-page letter, I realized that I bore him no ill-will at all. It didn’t mean that I felt nothing. The eleven-year-old in me still felt disappointment and some sense of betrayal around the end of our friendship. Yet I also understood with Starling how much time, love, and forgiveness really could heal all wounds. After all, we were only eleven and twelve years old. You’d think that most of us could get over a bad experience that happened to us at eleven. Life and people, though, have taught me otherwise.

When Starling finally responded with a phone call at the beginning of July, it was a pre-Noah high that I’d been riding—my wife was due to give birth to my son almost any day that month. I wondered why it took five weeks for him to call, as well as why now. He called me on my cell in the middle of the workday, so I told him that we needed to talk at another, more convenient time. A couple of weeks later we were on the phone at the end of my workday, talking for the first time in nearly two decades.

We talked for nearly ninety minutes. It was a really good conversation at first. I found out about Starling’s long spiritual journey from traditional Baptist to non-denominational, spirit-filled Christianity. He learned about my conversion to Christianity as well, having assumed I was still a Hebrew-Israelite. I heard this relieved sigh coming out of my receiver, like I was a prodigal son somehow finding my way home. Both of our conversions occurred within a few months of each other in ’84, in his case right after moving to Wilmington, North Carolina.

According to Starling, I was “caught up” in a “cult.” He spoke of his shock in seeing “that hat” on my head when I came to school with my kufi for the first time. I’d “made my decision” regarding my spiritual future, Starling said. His statement made sense in a way. As far as we were concerned, we were both smart enough to make adult-level decisions regardless of the adults around us.

When I thought about what occurred between Starling and me, I realized that we were both extremely arrogant and gave ourselves too much credit for our intellectual abilities. We thought of ourselves as full-blown adults at a time when puberty had yet to kick in. Starling said that “our friendship was probably no different from other adolescent young men” and that “we both were aggressive outspoken young men.” True. But we both were obsessed with assessing our place in the universe, with understanding how we could connect to God, and in making sure that we didn’t die without having a relationship with God. How many tweeners—aside from Scott Stapp, the former lead singer of Creed—spent as much time as we did attempting to access God’s wisdom? It’s this kind of thinking that could just as easily lead someone to drug, alcohol, or even sexual addiction as it could to life as a monk or a priest. The yin and yang of piety and hedonism awaits those of us whenever a parent insists on religion as the answer to all things, without debate and without understanding. Especially when kids are involved and at such an impressionable age.

Starling’s rejection of me because of my “conversion” to the Hebrew-Israelites was as much a sign of him distancing himself from a heathen on his way to hell as anything else. And knowing how seriously Starling and his Baptist family took their relations with God, rejecting me was the only way he could maintain his spiritual cleanliness.

As for Starling, he said that he “didn’t really consider our friendship to have ended, but rather time and distances and our running in different circles precipitated some separation.” This was an interesting spin on what occurred. Didn’t we fight over my conversion? Our friendship’s end wasn’t exactly gradual. I don’t remember having anyone fill the void of “best friend” or even having a good friend for several years after our fight. Nor do I recall Starling and me having reconciled in any way prior to ninth grade, which was when he told me that his family was about to relocate.

Finding out in recent years that Starling had a spiritual reawakening at fourteen after his family had moved to Wilmington, North Carolina only confirms our overblown sense of ourselves and our lack of maturity. Especially around a subject as serious as salvation. Starling has since moved back to Mount Vernon, has married and become a father, is an ordained nondenominational minister and teaches in Mount Vernon’s public schools.

None of this is necessarily surprising. Yet Starling’s road back to Mount Vernon has cost him as well. His spiritual quickening at fourteen flew in the face of his family’s more traditional, non-gifts-of-the-Spirit beliefs. Based on our conversations, Starling and his father have yet to reconcile, and around this issue of religion, it probably won’t occur in this lifetime. It appeared that despite our differences and our different paths, Starling and I might have more in common around our understanding of Christianity now than we did as tweeners.

But when it came time to talk about our friendship’s end, Starling had let me down. I was disappointed that he didn’t feel comfortable enough to discuss what actually happened. As he described my “decision” to become a Hebrew-Israelite, I said, “I don’t know what you mean by ‘decision,’ I mean, come on, we were eleven.” I don’t think he heard me, because he then spoke of the relief that he had sighed of earlier over my becoming Christian. It was as if I was now worthy of his conversation because of my allegiance to the cross.

We continued to talk, to discuss his life as school teacher and ordained preacher. His monologue about the “need to help others,” to help “Black boys stay in school” and “find their way to God” stood out the most for me. It all sounded good. Given our history, it also sounded all too familiar and disturbing.

If I could change anything I did twenty-eight years ago, it would be going to school with a kufi on my head. I would’ve been better off wearing the Star of David than wearing that kufi, especially given my own ambivalence about my family’s bizarre religion. But I learned a lot from that experience. I learned how rare a real friendship is, how hard it is to find in another person acceptance and the ability to embrace new ideas, how difficult it is to overcome the pressures of our peers and the need to be cool in our American world.

Without Starling, I learned most of all how to be a loner, to be true to myself and what I believe, about people, about God, about people who’d become my friends after leaving Mount Vernon. I learned to find my own path, one that accounted for race and religion, academics and athletics, and class and politics, but didn’t let any one dominate my thinking about myself or others. This is hard, but I thank Starling anyway.

This Tuesday is our ninth wedding anniversary! In my life, most folks I know never made it to their ninth anniversary, or their marriages were in such shambles that counting only made their prison sentence of a marriage seem that much longer. My mother was married twice, for eight and eleven years respectively. For all I witnessed, both of these marriages stretched almost any culture’s definition of such. Not only was my mother not particularly happy. Between my alcoholic father and my borderline personality and obese ex-stepfather, my mother would’ve have been better off single and without any kids. These were nightmare marriages, the kind that practically will force a man or a woman into celibacy for the rest of their lives.

For years, I’ve been perplexed with the low level of debate and serious conversation in this country. I guess it started for me in undergrad at Pitt. My first taste of a classroom debate gone awry was in my sophomore year, second semester, the spring of ’89. It was existential philosophy, in which I developed an interest because of my philosophy and AP English classes with Rosemary Martino my senior year at Mount Vernon High School. I really liked this class, but didn’t exactly like my discussion section. It was a place where no reconciliation was possible between believing in the existence of God and my teaching assistant’s atheism. It wasn’t as if I talked about my personal believe in God or Christianity much back then. But then again, I didn’t believe in confronting people on a personal level about their beliefs either.

On the one hand we had a great professor, a young and energetic recent PhD teaching in his second semester at Pitt. He made Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Camus come alive as he became excited talking about the Ubermensch (Superman) and Abraham’s “teological suspension of the ethical.” On the other hand, one of his teaching assistants, my discussion section instructor, was an Australian man in his late-twenties, with curly hair like the lead singer from Simply Red, except my instructor’s hair was a dirty blond. He spent discussion after discussion railing on Christians as “people who refuse to believe that God doesn’t exist.” One of our discussions was so anti-anything other than atheism that I found it just as bigoted as anything I’d heard from Hebrew-Israelites or out of a televangelist’s mouth, and pretty much said as much. I was ignored.

It was an excruciating hour, as most of the students in our class outed themselves as staunch atheists, berating Christians, Christianity and other religions as purely a form of social control. The two African American students in the section besides me were somewhere between angry and in tears by the end of the class that day. I was more puzzled than miffed. The attacks from our fearless teaching leaders and from the other students had nothing to do with Nietzsche or Kierkegaard. They were only actively engaged in airing their personal beliefs as strongly as they could, in an atmosphere poisoned by our teaching assistant, who obviously had an ax to grind.

I’ll admit, I was bothered by so many students — all White — who were so cocksure that God didn’t exist, that he was a mere fantasy dreamed up by nomads wandering through the deserts and hanging gardens in the Middle East who knew nothing of science and wanted illogical answers. What I was bothered more by, though, was that this became a personal debate, as if anyone who believed in the existence of a higher power was an idiot seeking to dominate others’ minds and through our modern world back to the Stone Age. I found that argument — and my teaching assistant’s support of it — equally illogical and too personal to address in a one-hour class. In eighteen years of on-and-off again teaching, I’ve never gone into the personal in order to have a free-flowing debate, partly because of what I witnessed on that day. A debate like this doesn’t work if your instructor has a personal agenda.

Unfortunately, it is a debate tactic that is all too common in our public discourse and private arguments in everyday America. It doesn’t matter if you’re watching Chris Matthews’ Hardball on MSNBC, Bill O’Reilly’s The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News, listening to Rush Limbaugh or NPR, or chatting with folks on Facebook or in the comfort of Starbucks. Friendly arguments about issues often turn ugly, and they do so because people on all sides get personal. Now, I’m not talking about having an objective academic discussion about a policy or a social issue. We all have biases, points of view, beliefs that we can and should stand on. No, what we do typically is to attack someone’s intelligence or personhood instead of attacking someone’s argument or attempt to understand why they hold so strongly to a particular argument. Or we get deeply personal about a given issue, as if our perspective is shared by so many that we can automatically win a debate because of our experiences.

There’s no debate in America where the personal doesn’t get sucked in more than on race. Whether in the classroom or on Facebook, in a casual conversation over wine or at a major conference presentation, folks just personalize the issues around race as if you’re addressing them. I’ve often discussed the long and troubling history of this country around race in all of its complexity. In response, classmates, friends, professors, students and others have all automatically made it personal. I’ve been called a “racial determinist,” “paranoid,” “Afrocentric,” “irrational,” “overly emotional,” just for saying that our playing field is still far from level or that even Whites who were abolitionists back in the day didn’t typically believe in Black equality. Others, meanwhile, have said things like, “I’m not a racist,” or “Why are you bringing this up now?,” or discussed how their father didn’t get a job because it was given to a less qualified Black. I’m not just talking about Whites. African American students in my classes have often expressed their anger and rage over perceived and real slights and over anything that involved inequality, even when it wasn’t specifically racial in nature.

What I’ve done in my debates in and out of the classroom over the years is to allow different sides of this argument to play out — with some venting, of course — before bringing folks back to the actual argument or the policy or issue around race that we were addressing in the first place. I’ve often had to say, “This isn’t about you. If you think it is, then that says more about you then it does about…” a particular policy or issue of race. It usually works, getting students and my colleagues to calm down and at least agree to disagree. It’s a starting point, hardly perfect, but something that often can be built upon.

The problem is, though, that this issue of the personal goes far beyond race, although it is often involved. Name the issue or policy debate, and you can find a commentator, pundit or everyday whose argued about it from the gut, based on some personal anecdote. Or attacked others as if they didn’t have the right to speak in the first place. Even among friends, debating an issue often means having the fact that I have a PhD or am a progressive thrown in my face as if I don’t have a right to my perspective. A fairer tax system equals “hating the rich.” Say that Rush Limbaugh’s mean because he accused Michael J. Fox of exaggerating or faking his Parkinson’s symptoms, and you’re saying that all Rush listeners are mean, too. Agree with the closing of Gitmo, and you’re accused of supporting terrorism. You can’t have a real or deep debate in this country about anything without it becoming a personal attack or a matter of deep personal conviction. If all politics local, then debating has only recently become a personal crusade.

This is the consequence of generations of privilege without responsibility, of an inadequate system of education that prefers social control to critical thinking, of self-centered pride over collective responsibility. We exaggerate the image of the rugged individualist and Horatio Alger to the point where we all think — progressives and conservatives alike — that we can go it alone. With this kind of thinking, we can’t have honest and good debate about much in this country. It’s too bad. For with global warming and climate change, torture issues and terrorism, a major economic meltdown and ever increasing energy needs, we need rational and reasonable debate more than ever. Without it, I might as well tell Noah to grab a solar generator and find the nearest cave in West Virginia when he’s my age.

What do President Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, and yours truly have in common, besides the fact that all of us are at least forty percent Black or African? We’ve all — between the mass scale of a mouse and the cosmic — experienced some hell as a result of success. Any success at all in a society not known these days for sportsmanship, patience or proper etiquette usually leads to folks on the other side losing their minds. Despite all of the talk about this being a world of significantly less racial animosity in the early twenty-first century, it’s fairly obvious that race is intertwined in much of the disagreements and snide statements about all three of us.

For President Obama, his is the most complicated of situations. He walks everyday a presidential tightrope between the powers of his office, the needs of the nation, the demands of the international community, the pressures of the market, and the laser-sights of the media, regardless of ideological perspective. So Obama’s taken a middle-of-the-road approach to governing and policy. From everything from clean energy to the tax code, his is an administration that is about one or two nanometers further left than Clinton’s, but is more intellectual and vocal about it.

Yet at every turn and with every statement or decision, dissenters abound. Now, we still have a First Amendment, and we still should use it to the best of our abilities as a nation. In many cases, we use it sparingly. Not so with Obama. The crazies have been out in force since the primaries last spring. Even now, there are folks blogging about whether he’s an American citizen, or Muslim, or the Antichrist. This week alone, Obama’s been accused of being an anti-Catholic baby killer and an anti-Jesus-in-the-closet-Muslim, one who somehow bowed to Saudi royalty on Monday while also neglecting to mention Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount analogy in his Georgetown speech on Tuesday. Not to mention the 200,000 or so protesters nationwide on Tax Day (that’s a bad protest day for any major US city, much less the nation) who came out angry about taxed Obama hadn’t raised and guns he hadn’t taken away. Even Clinton didn’t face this kind of heat until he started talking about an executive order lifting the ban on gays in the military back in ’93.

Whatever else one can say, no one ever accused Clinton of not being an American citizen, or part of a global conspiracy to put an evil Muslim in the White House, or someone who’s really the Antichrist and will enslave us in the evils of socialism or destroy us all. What a crock! Americans, unfortunately, are incredibly predictable when it comes to diversity and power. When someone, no matter how well meaning, intelligent, good-looking, or well-prepared they are for a certain task, they are metaphorically jumped on like flies swarming a turd in the hot summer sun. When Rush Limbaugh yelled, right around election time, that “IT WAS ALL ABOUT RACE! Let me say it again…IT WAS ALL ABOUT RACE,” it’s the most truth he’s likely ever spoken.

Except this isn’t about President Obama and his supporters playing the race card. It’s about dissent, but dissent based not so much on policy, politics or ideology so much as it’s based on envy. Jon Stewart said it best when he opined that the Republican Party and many conservatives were just “sore losers.” These folks don’t like Obama because he’s popular, articulate, smart, driven, successful, thoughtful (for the most part) and ready to actually do something to improve our country. And of course, no matter how White Obama actually is, he’s still Black in their eyes. It bothers many a conservative to no end that Obama beat them at their own game in the election, and has been hammering at them ever since.

That’s why folks like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Tom DeLay, Michelle Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and Dick Cheney have been stirring the pot for events like “Tea Bagging” Day. Or claiming that President Obama’s coming after American gun owners who want to hunt with an Uzi. Or saying that the country’s headed to hell in Satan’s hand basket with Obama in charge. Bottom line: they’re jealous, they’re embarrassed, and they’re angry. The usual tricks didn’t work last year, because they know most Americans want someone, anyone, who can help solve our deepest problems, even if they are Black. That’s not to say that President Obama’s answers are correct or enough. From the stimulus package to education reform, from CIA operatives and torture to his plans for universal health care coverage, I disagree with my president. But at least, I’m not up in arms about him not invoking the name of Jesus at every turn in order to satisfy evangelical conservatives. Like that did us any good with our previous president!

Of course, we don’t behave this way with folks of color in the world of sports and entertainment. That requires a different set of skills, a different mindset toward intellect, and Blacks in particular have been doing well here for decades. True, but not in every sports or in every entertainment medium. Although, maybe not so true. The Indiana Pacers-Detroit Pistons-Pistons fans brawl on November 19 of ’05 bore that out, with angry White fans yelling at Black basketball players and throwing beer on one of them in the process. But of course, race wasn’t an issue here. Alcoholism and an on-the-court fight that went into the stands was.

I digress. Golf certainly is a sport/game/”a good walk spoiled” where competitors of color have been about as common as Blacks and Latinos in graduate school programs. Then along came Tiger Woods in ’96. Even now, even after rehabilitating his left knee and missing most of the ’08 season, it’s obvious that Woods is larger than life. But even with all of the majors, all of the money won and commercials generated — for himself and for golf — all of the records and glory, Woods isn’t well liked by his peers or by many segments of the American public. From the moment Woods put on his first green jacket on April 13 of ’97, he faced pressures that no professional golfer has ever faced. Between all of the death threats while winning the Masters in Augusta, Georgia (a bit of irony there, right?) and Fuzzy Zoeller’s comments about hoping that Woods doesn’t put “fried chicken” and “collard greens” on the Champions dinner menu in ’98, the jealousy was immediate and palpable. Although, as Zoeller claimed, it was a joke about that “little boy,” a twenty-one-year-old Woods at the time.

And that jealousy remains. Look what happened when Woods showed flashes of brilliance at the Masters earlier this month, matched up with Phil Mickelson as he was. Ratings for the event shot up, the crowd followed them around like it was a rock concert. The golfers in the lead in the final round had to beg CBS for a camera to show them playing shots. Don’t tell me that doesn’t generate more envy, even as this Cablinasian makes them all richer.

Some would argue that the race issues with Woods are more obvious than with President Obama. Are they? It seems to me that when people irrationally stock up on firearms in order to protect themselves from the government when the Obama Administration hasn’t said a word about the Second Amendment, that’s an obvious sign that race was part of the fear factor. The Secret Service has noted that death threats against the president are at an all-time high, and that was a month ago. Now why would this be? Because Obama’s advocating socialism? Because conservatives are out of power in Washington? Or because Obama race and success both inspires and creates an unbelievable amount of jealousy? Take your pick.

On a much, much, much smaller scale, I can relate to a bunch of what Obama and Woods have faced and are facing. I’ve only gotten a couple of threats, from former graduate students who didn’t like the fact that a Black professor didn’t give them an A (in both cases, their grades were A-). They weren’t death threats, but I looked over my shoulder anyway. One of them emailed me so often about changing her grade and what she would do to me if I didn’t that I ended up reporting her to my department chair. I’ve had students who were obviously uncomfortable with me as their professor, or assumed that I was an airhead. Then, when I opened my mouth to teach, I often scared those students with ideas, facts and opinions that were based on my expertise as a historian. Their thoughts, for better and for worse, often showed up in their evaluations of my classes at the end of the semester.

But that’s only part of my experience, and not the most significant part when it comes to the issue at hand. My five and a half years as a grad student at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon were years where my colleagues and some of my professors felt the urge to tell me exactly what was on their minds about me. From telling me right from jump street how I didn’t belong in grad school to telling me how amazed they were that I finished my master’s in a year.
That was my former professor Reid Andrews by himself, but not alone in his assessment. From assuming that I never studied because I seldom “looked” stressed to making insinuations that I somehow plagiarized my papers. The chair of the history department at Pitt in Richard Smethurst once asked me — in the only conversation I had with him in two years of grad school at Pitt — if the reason I was there was to play basketball.

The kicker was in the first few weeks after I’d been awarded a Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in April ’95. It was somewhat of a surprise to me, but it a pleasant one. By then I was finishing up my second year at Carnegie Mellon. Not so for my advisor Joe Trotter. There was this look absolute shock and horror on his face when I told him the good news. I’ll never forget that “I can’t believe it!” look of dread Trotter had on his face. It lasted for a good three seconds before he found himself again, managed a weak smile, and told me to pass on the good news. The moral of this story is that even Black folk can have a race-based jealousy toward another Black person or person of color, despite popular opinion

It didn’t end with my advisor. Among my colleagues, John Hinshaw stopped speaking to me — for two years! At least four others walked up to me and gave me their gut-churning congratulations while telling me how envious they were of me. One wanted to know how I did it, considered that every time they saw me I was out in hallways of Carnegie Mellon “talking to” someone. By this time, my standard answer was, “When you don’t see me, that’s when I’m hard at work.” Which was the truth, of course. Yet it was entirely unrelated to their point. The real question for them was, how did I, some Black guy who often didn’t sound like an indecipherable theoretician or genius, pick up a grant without holding a gun to the head of the Senior Program Officer of the Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship Program?

It’s not that I think that all Whites are envious of the success of others of color, or that all successful people of color face petty and really serious jealousies that spin off into other, more serious threats. It’s that in our nation, any success that is based on more than sheer athletic, comedic, or musical talent for folks of color is subject to greater degrees of jaw-dropping and shock than it would be for Whites. Intellectual, academic and political brilliance — not to mention golf, a thinker’s game — even with so much evidence to the contrary, isn’t something that most expect from people of color, and men of color especially. So of course there’s greater scrutiny, jealousy, fear and embarrassment when “losing” out to one of us. I’m hardly justifying it, though.

How do we as a society overcome this? How do we deal with the envious and not-so-well-adjusted out there, who, whether conservative or just plain bigoted, would prefer to see President Obama fail, Woods’ knee explode and me to disappear, and worse? We can only live our lives, step ever more boldly forward on our respective paths, to see through whatever it is we hope to achieve. And hope that we have time enough to achieve it. That, or we can leave for greener pastures.