• About Me
  • Other Writings
  • Interview Clips
  • All About Me: American Racism, American Narcissism, and the Conversation America Can’t Have
  • Video Clips
  • Boy @ The Window Pictures
  • Boy @ The Window Theme Music

Notes from a Boy @ The Window

~

Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Monthly Archives: April 2009

My Best Friend

30 Thursday Apr 2009

Posted by decollins1969 in 1

≈ Leave a comment


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.

————————————————————–

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.

Desert Rose

29 Wednesday Apr 2009

Posted by decollins1969 in 1

≈ Leave a comment


“I dream of rain/I dream of gardens in the desert sand
I wake in vain/I dream of love as time runs through my hand

I dream of fire/Those dreams are tied to a horse that will never tire
And in the flames/Her shadows play in the shape of a man’s desire

This desert rose/Each of her veils, a secret promise
This desert flower/No sweet perfume ever tortured me more than this…”

Leaving aside the fact that this borders on copyright infringement, why am I quoting from Sting’s “Desert Rose?” Because today’s the day my first “desert rose,” crush #1, turns forty. It’s a reminder that even as outer youth begins to fade, there’s a part of us that will always remain young, full of hope and dreams, and full of that youthful sense of romance and love. This isn’t an I-will-always-love-her kind of posting. For me, this is much more about how I see myself in love and in romance, with a muse like crush #1 as a backdrop.

I’ve always wondered why most of the world’s major religions can trace their roots to godly visions seen by men and women in the desert, why romantic poetry tends to come to people while traversing mountains, valleys and deserts, and why I’ve wondered about these things in the first place. The sense and vision of seeing something in myself and in others that is so different, so rare that I must sit down and write about it, or pace about and sing about it, or pass down stories from generation to generation about it. The desert’s the best place for it. Hallucinations, lack of water, plenty of life and death inspiration, a place of contemplation and romance, practicality and monotony, depending on what one’s doing and where in the desert they are and aren’t doing it.

The spring of ’82 for me was a lot of things, and I’ve talked about my last year of tweeness in greater detail than I have about almost anything else in this blog. But above all else, I was in my own desert, one created by me, my family, and Mount Vernon. I couldn’t possibly have made my year any worse if I’d shown up to school naked or been left for dead by my stepfather in a back alley somewhere. At least that’s I thought over the course of the year. I was confused about so much regarding who I was and who I wanted to become. If I’d been wise beyond my years, I would’ve realized that “I don’t know” would’ve been the best answer to any question anyone had asked me in seventh grade. From the inside out, I felt as bare as our kitchen cupboards were for much of that year.

Then crush #1 happened. She was my little mental and emotional oasis in a world otherwise gone hot and mad. It was a mirage, at least it seemed that way at the time. I knew then that there was no way that she would ever like me even half as much as I liked her, even if I had the dancing skills of Savion Glover and Mikhail Baryshnikov combined. Though a boy like me could dream, right? And daydream. And not just in the spring of ’82. I lived for the rest of the decade, even when otherwise preoccupied with other women, other crises, with my image of crush #1 as the place in my heart that would remain unsullied by the cares of this world, a place where only God could reach me. She remained my dreamy desert rose.

There’s still a twelve-year-old inside this nearly forty-year-old body of mine. I’m not looking for crush #1, for that young woman no longer exists, even in the woman that was her some twenty-seven years ago. It would be nice if I could get into a time machine and travel back to the summer of ’81, shake some sense into myself, and give the twelve-year-old me enough courage and humility to approach crush #1. That’s a pipe dream or — more to the point of this post — like “writing on the surface of a lake” (talk about mixing metaphors and Sting lyrics). A futile effort to recreate my emotional Big Bang. It echoes in my heart and head, but it only seems accessible in my dreams. Luckily, I don’t hold my wife or any other woman to those kind of emotional standards. That much passion can be dangerous and addictive.

In finishing up my World History course this semester, I’m reminded of the history of romantic poetry. In a lecture earlier this semester, I talked about the long history of the longing romantic song or poem. That you could start with Aryan nomads who made their way across the Hindu-Kush into South Asia some 3,500 years ago, bringing with them a spoken word tradition of songs about women whom they loved but yet were about as attainable as a sand storm in the middle of a desert. You’d then move on to Arab Muslim contact with the Indus River valley region some 1,500 years ago, adopting a Vedic tradition and turning it into written words and songs, among them The Book of One Thousand and One Nights (or 1,001 Arabian Nights). Fast-forward past the Crusades and you might find yourself in the age of European chivalry, including French poetry that combined the sacred and (at least for the 13th century) profane. Even in the love stories and pop music of today, there’s still this theme of unattainable, unrequited love, like a mirage of an oasis in the middle of the desert.

Despite all of the unique trimmings of poverty, domestic violence, my own struggles with my identity, and the whole Hebrew-Israelite thing, my story here is merely one as old as human desire itself. Whether young or old, male or female, gay or straight, and regardless of culture, there is that desert rose that is there but it isn’t. It’s the faint odor of that timeless oasis flower that is both rare in all of our lives, “the sweet intoxication” of romance, passion, love and inspiration that we all need in life. After all of these years, the memory of the one I call crush #1 does provide inspiration. If only because I can see myself in all of my boyish immaturity and imperfectness and realize that those “desert rose” moments are what makes life worth living. It made my life worthwhile back in the days where there wasn’t much else.

Save The Best For Last

28 Tuesday Apr 2009

Posted by decollins1969 in 1

≈ 2 Comments


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.

Not so with my marriage. There have been many highs and many lows. It’s been an emotional roller-coaster ride at times, but somewhere between content and boring for most of the past nine years. But if all we had to settle for is a lack of domestic violence, cheating, chronic drunkenness and a relative sense of sanity, then our marriage would still be lacking. In compatibility, romance, a common vision, a sense of purpose and growth, and a sharing of affection, among other things. I’m happy to say that most of this has been there for most of these past nine years.
That hardly means that everything is hunky-dory in our world. The job market and my relative underemployment as a consultant and professor and aspiring memoir author hasn’t exactly helped us financially, not that we’re starving or something. Noah takes up so much of our time that all I look forward to most of the week is time to sleep. (They say that this gets better when the kid turns seven — we’ll see.) My wife’s in the process of applying for graduate school, which could mean major (and somewhat welcome) changes for all of us. Ours is a world of constant transition, of sometimes necessary and unnecessary drama, of having reaching a major crossroads in our lives.
Add to that an even more important feeling of restlessness. We’ve not only been married for nine years. We’ve been each other’s significant other since December ’95, friends since May ’95, and acquaintances since April ’90. We’ve been together for roughly one-third of our lives, and true to ourselves, we’ve changed in those years. And not always for the better. That doesn’t mean that the marriage is in trouble or that I should find a basement room to rent somewhere in DC. It means that as much as we’re changing as individuals, we need to evolve as a couple, too.
During the seven months between friendship and dating my eventual wife in ’95, I dated another woman, one who was in graduate school at the University of Maryland. She was a Latin Americanist, as they called themselves, was fluent in Spanish and learning Portuguese. I fell head over heels in infatuation over her, even though we’d been acquaintances for a few years. It was a long distance relationship, with me in Pittsburgh and with her in Baltimore. It was made easier by my frequent travels to DC to do research for my doctoral thesis.
She was a dreamer, just like me, that’s what I think attracted me to her in the first place. But as our dating relationship progressed during the fall of ’95, I realized that I was doing with her some of the things I’d done with my past crushes/girlfriends. I was being too helpful, too in tune with her emotional swings. She was occasionally upset with her mother and one of her ex’s, but not about typical issues. You see, she’d given birth to a daughter while in undergrad, and that kid was only two years old at the time. So in addition to dating, I was constantly giving her advice about her mother, her daughter, and stepping into a former relationship’s ridiculously immature dynamics. It left me thinking about why I needed this kind of headache, especially with my thesis becoming an all-consuming writing project.
I eventually broke it off with the Baltimore girl after she stood me up for a date while I was in DC, in November ’95. Previously, I had allowed women to break up with me or simply stopped calling them. But I realized I needed to be more mature, even if it meant crying, yelling, and gnashing of teeth in the process. Which it did.
In the midst of this, my soon-to-be-girlfriend, fiance and wife listened to my every complaint and burst of infatuation. I must’ve driven her nuts. It was a bit like Vanessa Williams’ “Save The Best For Last” — where she goes, “All of the nights you came to me, when some silly girl had you free/You wondered how you’d make it through, I wondered what was wrong with you.” 06 Save the Best for Last.m4p Even though my wife’s not the biggest fan of this song, I’m sure that it had to be in her head in the weeks leading into our first date.
The fact that my eventual wife listened to me, was interested in more than my ability to sound intellectual or simply rolling around in bed with me was significant. That she really cared about what had happened in my family when I was growing up or about how I came to be a graduate student made me see her — and other women — in a different light. I became infatuated with a history graduate student in no small part because she was a history graduate student and funny. My wife was a good listener, had a unique view of life, and could be almost as sarcastic as I was. That she cared about the real me made it easy for me to see her as much more than a friend.
After thirteen and a half years of dating and marriage together, much of that hasn’t changed. I have learned that like forgiveness and faith, marriage is a choice that we can’t take for granted. It’s something that we have to choose every day if it’s ever going to stay fresh, even with the daily grind of routine. I do hold on to the hope that the best is yet to come for us, as individuals and as a family. I guess that helps to make a marriage a good one. Let’s hope that hope and love remain enough in these difficult times.

Debating the Personal

25 Saturday Apr 2009

Posted by decollins1969 in 1

≈ Leave a comment


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.

On Catherine Lacey

22 Wednesday Apr 2009

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Politics, Work, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Catherine Lacey, Friendship, Mentoring, Self-Discovery, Spencer Foundation, Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship Program


Me with Catherine Lacey at the Spencer Foundation, June 25, 2002. (Angelia N. Levy).

Me with Catherine Lacey at the Spencer Foundation, June 25, 2002. (Angelia N. Levy).

This month marks fourteen years since my plans for earning my doctorate were all but assured by a Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. It was a one-year fellowship, only $15,000, but it meant that I didn’t have to teach for a year, that I didn’t have to do grunt work for my advisor Joe Trotter, and that I wasn’t beholden to the history department at Carnegie Mellon for much of anything. It was a great triumph in my little world of graduate school. But of all the things that resulted from that award, one thing that I didn’t count on was another mentor and friend. Without a doubt, Catherine Lacey has had the longest lasting impact on my career and on my thinking, in and out of academia.

Catherine was the Senior Program Officer and Director of the Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship Program when I applied for it in the fall of ’94. She had taken over the program in ’93, with the apparent charge of making the program more inclusive and more dynamic for its participants. I’m not sure what the foundation’s dissertation fellowship program was like before. All I know is that Catherine’s seven-year-long tenure running it was one in which she practiced compassion, humility, optimism, and quiet leadership. She never sounded like an academician in directing the work, although she was a bit philosophical at times. She never sounded like a bureaucrat or a senior foundation officer who practiced the power of “No,” even though that was certainly a major part of her job. Almost from my first conversation with Catherine, I realized that she was different from anyone I’d met with an academic background or in the foundation world.

Her background was as a Catholic nun who at one point was a Catholic school teacher, at least through the late ’70s, if I remember correctly. At some point she decided to go back to school, to eventually earn a doctorate in education from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Even though she was no longer a practicing nun (whatever I mean by that, I’m not entirely sure), I’m sure that this training and philosophical approach to life and work helped her a lot in her position at the Spencer Foundation. Maybe it was also the fact that she grew up in the Midwest, North or South Dakota I believe. Whatever the case, I think that this combination of experiences made her a more flexible and generous person than most of the foundation program officers and academic bureaucrats I’d met before and have come to know since.

The first time I ever heard from Catherine was right after a two-month research stay in Washington, DC and visit home in Mount Vernon, New York. I’d just come off of weeks in the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Moorland-Spingarn Research collection at Howard University, the Sumner School Archives for DC Public Schools, and several other places doing research on my dissertation topic, multiculturalism in philosophy and practiced among Black Washingtonians. It was the end of March ’95, and it had been five months since I’d submitted my application packet for the Spencer fellowship. When I went to my Carnegie Mellon mailbox in the history department, there it was. A standard #10 envelope with only a one-page letter inside, which I knew because of the envelope’s thinness. I knew it was a rejection letter. Except that it wasn’t, at least not entirely. It had a handwritten note at the bottom of it from Catherine, asking me to give her a call as soon as I received the note.

So I did. Catherine did most of the talking, asking me about my research stay in DC, about my definition of multiculturalism and how it had or hadn’t changed because of my research. Then she talked to me about the selection committee. Apparently out of eight committee members, six voted in favor of awarding me the fellowship, one against, and with one in absentia. The sticking point was how I defined multiculturalism in my research proposal, putting me on the fence between award and no award. Although I would learn later that there were some academic and cultural politics involved in the two non-Yes votes, at the time Catherine told me that she would do everything she could to see if she could still fund my work. “I’m not making any promises,” she said before we got off the phone.

I didn’t know what to make of the call, other than the fact that Catherine cared about funding my work. That it wasn’t everyday that someone with her responsibilities called a student who had technically been rejected was also something I took away from that call. Two weeks passed. On Friday, April 14 of ’95, I got a call at home, right after 9:30 am. I assumed it was my mother or one of my friends. I hadn’t even taken the time to spit and rinse my toothpaste when I answered the phone. After the pleasantries, Catherine excitedly blurted out the good news. And I swallowed my toothpaste in response before asking how and saying thanks.

It turned out that Catherine thought that in addition to the 29 awards that were granted fellowships by the committee, that there were four others (including me) who should also receive the fellowship. Catherine had spent the previous two weeks asking the foundation for additional monies for the other four of us, and found that at least two of the original 29 awardees had accepted other fellowships. As a result, she could then give out four additional fellowships as part of her discretion as the director of the program. I was happy, to say the least about the award. But I was even happier that someone would fight for me and others the way Catherine did.

As a Spencer fellow, I learned a lot from my “fellow Fellows,” as I constantly called our group. That I wasn’t the only one whose advisor was acting as a roadblock toward our degree and career aspirations. That our colleagues on our campuses stared us all down with daggers in their eyes after learning about our awards. That hours upon hours of lonely research and intense writing and editing didn’t make any of our significant others or spouses particularly happy. Still, I learned as much from Catherine as I did from my fellow Fellows. About balance between life and work. About the realization that academia wasn’t our only career option, even as much as we thought it was at the time. That it was all right to feel ambivalent about pursuing an academic career.

This last one was of great importance to me, because my worries about becoming a publish-or-perish professor had always been there. I wanted to do something useful with my degree and life, something to benefit others, something that would allow me to help people who grew up like me, poor, possibly abused, and with the world thinking that I’d sooner go to jail than graduate high school. The one thing that Catherine’s work revealed to me was that it was possible to have a job and career that you could fall in love with, that helps others, and that enabled you to prosper financial. Her job allowed her to do all three, and very well at that.

It was that realization that enabled me to stumble my way into the nonprofit world, doing work on everything from community computer labs and civic education to a social justice fellowship program and education reform work on college access and success. Even after my fellowship ended in June ’96, I kept in contact with Catherine, attended Spencer gatherings and asked for advice. I even took my wife with me on a business trip to Chicago once to, among other things, have her meet Catherine at the Spencer offices in the John Hancock Building. I haven’t had quite the same luck of finding work that is as fulfilling as Catherine’s work was with Spencer. But I haven’t given up trying, and hope that what I have done and am doing does actually help others.

I haven’t talked to Catherine since the end of ’04. Not for lack of trying, though. Catherine decided after two years as a high-level administrator at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education that it was time for her to retire, to move back to the Dakotas, to live in seclusion, I guess. She didn’t particularly like Philly, or the grinding work that is almost pure administration. She missed Spencer, Chicago, and all of the people that she had met over the years. I think that the Bush years and 9/11 depressed her greatly

I miss Catherine. I miss asking her advice on everything from my job to whether I should turn Boy At The Window into a fiction novel instead of keeping it a memoir with narrative nonfiction elements (I know, that’s redundant) or even continue to pursue finding an agent. I miss sending her pictures of Noah or talking to her about her days at Spencer. Most of all, I miss telling her how much her friendship and unofficial mentoring have meant to me over the years. To Catherine, and really, all of my friends, many, many thanks.

Jeremy Spoke In Class Today (updated)

19 Sunday Apr 2009

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, music, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

"Jeremy" (1992), Bowling for Columbine (2004), Columbine, Dylan Klebold, Gun Violence, OAH Conference 1999, Oklahoma City Bombing, Pearl Jam, Terrorism, The Culture of Fear (1999), Timothy McVeigh, Toronto, Violence, White Angst, White Male Angst


Helena Garrett, right, mother of bombing victim Tevin Garrett, breaks down as she speaks during a ceremony for the 20th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, Oklahoma City National Memorial, April 19, 2015. (Sue Ogrocki/AP via http://sfchronicle.com).

Helena Garrett, right, mother of bombing victim Tevin Garrett, breaks down as she speaks during a ceremony for the 20th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, Oklahoma City National Memorial, April 19, 2015. (Sue Ogrocki/AP via http://sfchronicle.com).

Sometimes as Americans we can be so stupid. It’s been fourteen twenty years since Timothy McVeigh left a Ryder van in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building building in Oklahoma City filled with two and a half tons of ammonium nitrate and fuel to blow a tragic hole into it, leaving 168 women, men and children dead. It’s been ten sixteen years since two White male teens decided to lock and load at their high school in Columbine, Colorado, leaving 12 students and a teacher dead, 25 others wounded, all before killing themselves in a blaze of White male angst glory. Yet we’re still up in arms over any significant legislation to keep assault guns out of the hands of folks who may do their neighbors harm, as if the Second Amendment doesn’t itself provide limitations on the use of firearms in our society.

Right now, without any abatement, some idiotic father or mother is so depressed about their financial situation and the future of their family that they’re willing to go into their garage, pull out the 9mm pistol or .45 caliber rifle and take out their children, their spouse and themselves in a public display of psychotic-ness. It’s happened in recent months in Chicago, in Maryland, in California, in Florida, and in so many other places that the public only barely pays attention to it anymore. Then there are the folks who are literally clinging to their guns — if not their religion — because the nuts on Fox News Channel and on the conservative talk radio shows have stirred them up about President Barack Obama. That the Obama Administration had any plans to take people’s guns away from them is about as ludicrous as blaming the grunge group Pearl Jam for the Columbine massacre in ’99.

Cover art of Pearl Jam's single "Jeremy" (1992), September 25, 2005. (Tempuser123456 via Wikipedia).

Cover art of Pearl Jam’s single “Jeremy” (1992), September 25, 2005. (Tempuser123456 via Wikipedia).

To think that it’s been more than a decade since Columbine and that we as a nation have learned next to nothing from it is just a sad commentary on how fearful we as a nation are. I remember as I packed my bags for my presentation at the Organization for American Historians conference in Toronto how the events of Columbine unfolded. One of the first things that came out of the media was that songs like Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” was to blame for stirring the minds of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold into killing and maiming their unaccepting, cliquish classmates. Except that “Jeremy” killed himself in front of his classmates. He imploded — he didn’t take his rage and angst out on the rest of the world.

Harris and Klebold’s disproportionate response had little to do with Pearl Jam or grunge, and more to do with our culture of fear, as explained by Michael Moore in Bowling for Columbine (2004) through Barry Glassner’s The Culture of Fear (1999). When combined with easy access to guns and other weapons, it’s no wonder why events like Columbine and Oklahoma City, Virginia Tech and more recent ones in Binghamton, New York, Tennessee, Alabama, Pittsburgh, Oakland, Newtown, Connecticut, Aurora, Colorado and so many other places across the country are happening regularly. Kind of like the bombings and shootouts that have taken many a life of American soldiers while keeping Iraq safe for democracy since ’03. In our case, all it took was a severe economic downturn and the election of President Obama to produce disproportionate fear and rage, implosion and explosion, family annihilators and gun-hoarding psychopaths.

I would’ve thought ten years ago that Columbine would take the Brady Bill passed by Clinton and Congress in ’94 a step further, but it didn’t. I would’ve thought that Americans might become more willing to be introspective in considering the reasons for all of our senseless democracy-based violence. But we haven’t been. We haven’t even conducted national townhalls on these issues. We’ve allowed the NRA, gun-makers and others who benefit from the proliferation of assault weapons to dictate how we exercise our Second Amendment rights.

Columbine High School, Littleton, Colorado, April 17, 2008. (Ed Andrieski/AP via http://nytimes.com).

Columbine High School, Littleton, Colorado, April 17, 2008. (Ed Andrieski/AP via http://nytimes.com).

There were the kinds of things I thought about during my five days in Toronto, which seemed as far away from the violence and fear of the US as Rome at the time. I also thought about my experiences in middle school and in high school. I wasn’t bullied, at least in not any physical way. But I felt ostracized at times, and I was certainly made fun of more times than I could count. I didn’t have access to guns, and it never would’ve occurred to me to shoot the folks who were clownin’ me. In later years, in seeing signs of the US melting down economically and culturally, it wouldn’t have been in my thought process to blow up a federal building, threaten the president or another public official, or otherwise arm myself for a coming race war or war against the federal government.

No, what I thought about while in Canada was how peaceful and settled it seemed compared to anywhere I’d been in the US. I didn’t feel my skin color or race the way I usually felt it as an American citizen in America. I loved the multicultural atmosphere and the fact that folks truly embraced it there, and not just by serving hummus and falafel at parties and by taking yoga classes. If I could, I’d move all of us up there to live a less fearful and more accepting lifestyle than the one that we can live here.

Ryder truck that Timothy McVeigh drove caught on camera minutes before explosion, Alfred Murrah Federal Building, Oklahoma City, April 19, 1995. (http://murderpedia.org/).

Ryder truck that Timothy McVeigh drove caught on camera minutes before explosion, Alfred Murrah Federal Building, Oklahoma City, April 19, 1995. (http://murderpedia.org/).

Somehow, some way, we as a country need to find ways to deal with our fear of each other, of failure, of the loss of power and dominance as a nation among nations, as Whites over everyone else. Confronting these fears as part of a public display of transparency and openness will allow for angst without implosion or explosion, and dissent without a turn to ridiculously senseless violence. This is the reason why we have so many dead and wounded every year from gun use (though not usually bombs), in everything from homegrown terrorism to everyday acts of community annihilation. If not, we will continue to serve as a model of first-world dreams and third-world chaos, offering the world not much more than our hypocrisy in the process.

Green and Blue-Eyed Envy

18 Saturday Apr 2009

Posted by decollins1969 in 1

≈ Leave a comment


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.

← Older posts

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Places to Buy/Download Boy @ The Window

There's a few ways in which you can read excerpts of, borrow and/or purchase and download Boy @ The Window. There's the trade paperback edition of Boy @ The Window, available for purchase via Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Window-Donald-Earl-Collins/dp/0989256138/

There's also a Kindle edition on Amazon.com. The enhanced edition can be read only with Kindle Fire, an iPad or a full-color tablet. The links to the enhanced edition through Apple's iBookstore and the Barnes & Noble NOOK edition are below. The link to the Amazon Kindle version is also immediately below:

scr2555-proj697-a-kindle-logo-rgb-lg

Boy @ The Window on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-The-Window-Memoir-ebook/dp/B00CD95FBU/

iBookstore-logo-300x100

Boy @ The Window on Apple's iBookstore: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/boy-the-window/id643768275?ls=1

Barnes & Noble (bn.com) logo, June 26, 2013. (http://www.logotypes101.com).

Boy @ The Window on Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/boy-the-window-donald-earl-collins/1115182183?ean=2940016741567

You can also add, read and review Boy @ The Window on Goodreads.com. Just click on the button below:

Boy @ The Window

Twitter Updates

  • RT @FrankWaln: You know how Harvard’s Peabody museum announced that they have hair samples taken from native children in collections? Well… 14 minutes ago
  • RT @myronjclifton: I’ve been testing the new social media platform Spoutible and here is my pre-launch review. It launches 2/1 and I am cer… 1 day ago
  • RT @yarahawari: This morning I explained to @SkyNews how the context of decades of debilitating Israeli regime colonisation is conveniently… 1 day ago
  • RT @stevesalaita: Yet another Arab scholar faces an organized Zionist defamation campaign. Please sign this letter in support of our belov… 1 day ago
  • RT @JuliaCarmel__: All five officers who murdered Tyre Nichols are currently out on bond, while (in New York) a cash-poor, legally innocent… 1 day ago
  • RSS - Posts
  • RSS - Comments

Archives

  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009
  • January 2009
  • December 2008
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • September 2008
  • August 2008
  • July 2008
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
  • January 2008
  • December 2007
  • November 2007
  • October 2007
  • September 2007
  • August 2007
  • July 2007
  • June 2007

Blogroll

  • Kimchi and Collard Greens
  • Thinking Queerly: Schools, politics and culture
  • Website for My First Book and Blog
  • WordPress.com

Recent Comments

Eliza Eats on The Poverty of One Toilet Bowl…
decollins1969 on The Tyranny of Salvation
Khadijah Muhammed on The Tyranny of Salvation

NetworkedBlogs on Facebook

NetworkedBlogs
Blog:
Notes From a Boy @ The Window
Topics:
My Life, Culture & Education, Politics & Goofyness
 
Follow my blog

616 616 East Lincoln Avenue A.B. Davis Middle School Abuse Academia Academy for Educational Development AED Afrocentricity American Narcissism Authenticity Bigotry Blackness Boy @ The Window Carnegie Mellon University Child Abuse Class of 1987 CMU Coping Strategies Crush #1 Crush #2 Death Disillusionment Diversity Domestic Violence Economic Inequality Education Family Friendship Friendships Graduate School Hebrew-Israelites High-Stakes Testing Higher Education History Homelessness Humanities Humanities Program Hypocrisy Internalized Racism Jealousy Joe Trotter Joe William Trotter Jr. K-12 Education Love Manhood Maurice Eugene Washington Maurice Washington Misogyny Mother-Son Relationship Mount Vernon High School Mount Vernon New York Mount Vernon public schools Multiculturalism MVHS Narcissism NFL Pitt Pittsburgh Politics of Education Poverty President Barack Obama Race Racial Stereotypes Racism Relationships Self-Awareness Self-Discovery Self-Reflection Sexism Social Justice Teaching and Learning University of Pittsburgh Violence Whiteness Writing

Top Rated

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Notes from a Boy @ The Window
    • Join 103 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Notes from a Boy @ The Window
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...