Which is worse? To have worked for a bigot who once said, “You know, slavery was a hoax” as a joke? Or to have worked for an in-the-closet micromanager with a form a bipolar disorder? As someone who’s done both, they’re both difficult people to work for. But if I only had two choices, the bigot is a better boss to have any day over a bottled-up manager claiming to be a progressive. The key, of course, is to know what you’ve bargained for when taking a given job with a given organization.

I didn’t know exactly what I had accepted when working for these men between June ’99 and February ’04. Oh, my emotional instincts told me not to trust them, at least not entirely, even at the time of my interviews. Still, I needed a job. A decent or good-paying job. Part-time work in academia teaching only one class a semester only went so far. I had over $40,000 in student loan debt to pay off. And me and my soon-to-be-wife wanted out of Pittsburgh. For all of those reasons and more, I took my job as director of curriculum at Presidential Classroom — a civic education organization that brought high school juniors and seniors to DC for a week at a time — in Alexandria, Virginia in the spring of ’99. At first, it was a hokey yet relaxed place to work. Most of the staff was affable enough. Even if most of them couldn’t be accused of being intellectual powerhouses. Yet I had this sense that the other shoe had yet to drop.

It did, all right. In drips and drabs at first. With me being used as both the educational representative of an organization intent on making money through edu-tainment and as the one full-time person of color on staff. With the occasional comments that questioned my commitment and competence, based on nothing I had or hadn’t done. With the 110-hour work weeks on program with staff calling Asian students “Orientals” and Latino students “Spics,” as well as with Black students treated as if they were severely mentally retarded.

But the final straw occurred the week of my marriage ceremony, the last week of April ’00. After a semi-friendly argument between me and a co-worker over the intersections of race and gender in American history (she was and remains incorrect in her second-wave feminist assumptions), my boss walked by to tell me that “slavery was a hoax.” I already knew he was a political conservative who wanted so badly to be in the blue-blooded in-crowd of the Republican Party. I knew intuitively that he had hired me as a two-for-one show pony, a young African American male with a doctorate in history. I didn’t know that he was that bold and that ignorant, though. I was pissed, and stayed that way through the spring and summer of 2000.

Even when we had a loud argument in my office about his bigotry and my obvious unhappiness about being there, we found areas of agreement. He actually made it much easier for me to look for work while I was doing my job. I did my part as the show pony I was. And my boss continued to be the hands-off, almost neglectful boss he had been for all of the eighteen months I worked at Presidential Classroom. I couldn’t stand the man, his ignorance, bigotry and paranoia.

Still, it was easier working for him than for a progressive, in-the-closet gay micromanager whose obvious jealousies made it almost impossible for me to do my job at times. I’ve never had to manage anyone more that this boss, my immediate supervisor who was in charge of a social justice fellowship program. Ironic because if there’s any kind of job someone shouldn’t have to worry about how they’re being treated, it’s one as an assistant director for a social justice program. Ironic, too, because I wanted this job. I wanted to practice grantmaking, to help others make a difference in the world, even if it meant using a teaspoon to clean up an ocean of injustices.

Even here, there were signs early on. My eventual boss was nervous at both of my interviews. As if I were interviewing him. He also seemed quite keen on comparing his joint master’s degree program in religious studies and philosophy at Catholic University to my doctorate from Carnegie Mellon. Most importantly, he went about checking on me in my work as if I were a seventeen-year-old high school student. We met three or four times a week to go over the same tasks, ones that would normally take a person several weeks to perform, like lining up speakers for a conference, finalizing the logistics for a program, and developing a social justice curriculum. He once held up the printing of our first conference agenda because I used the word “forums” instead of “fora.” I said to him at the time, “I doubt the Fellows care what we call it.”

Like anyone with bipolar disorder, my former boss’ highs were way too high and his lows oh so low, to the point of being semi-suicidal. On the days of our conferences and retreats with the Fellows, he might as well had been on crystal meth and coke at the same time. On others, it was as if his family had been killed and that an asteroid was on a collision course with DC.

It meant that my boss paid too much attention to the details that didn’t matter and not nearly enough to the ones that did. Like one email run-in I had with a Fellow who insisted that it was his job to tell me and the rest of the staff how to do our jobs, that we “served him.” Somehow after putting up with this for four months, I was in the wrong for telling this Fellow to stop harassing me and the other staff. Of course, we didn’t receive any more condescending emails from this Fellow after that, but I was “too confrontational.” On the other hand, when our foundation told us in June ’01 that we should think about looking “for alternative sources of funding,” my boss somehow didn’t take that message seriously.

Then a meeting in New York on March 31 of ’03 happened. That was when the foundation had told my immediate supervisor that they were cutting our funding by 15 percent, and that funding would be a year-to-year decision, not a two-year check as it had been before. My boss called me from a bar around the corner from the foundation, drowning his sorrows in a bottle of MGD while telling me the news. He was obviously sloshed and depressed. Every time I hear Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus,” I think of him and that phone call.

After I realized that my boss had no clear vision for our work in social justice, I made the decision to quit, to find more meaningful, if less exciting, work. But not before he attempted to demote me for no apparent reason other than paranoid about me wanting to take his job. In the weeks that followed, he snapped, abruptly leaving a retreat-planning meeting two days after biting off the head of our organization’s CEO. My boss called me from the psych ward at Georgetown University Hospital a few days later, leaving the message that he “loved me.”

It’s been ten years since I accepted Presidential Classroom’s offer. Eight and a half since I said “yes” to the assistant director job. I’ve made a point to keep all of this in mind in the jobs I’ve held since the end of ’03 and in all of my job searches since then. There’s a reason why most people are unhappy at their jobs, even at jobs that they would ordinarily like or love. It’s not just because it’s not what they want to do or because of inadequate compensation. Working for and with incompetent, insolent and unstable people can make even a job we would otherwise love a living nightmare. I hope that no one I know ever has to go through this to make ends meet.

A few years before I finally girded up my loins to write Boy At The Window, I bought a copy of Ron Suskind’s bestseller A Hope in the Unseen (1998). It’s a book that looks at the life of one Cedric Jennings between his junior year of high school and the beginning of his sophomore year at Brown University. It’s a well-written and heartening account of how this African American teenager from Southeast Washington, DC overcomes his family’s poverty, the complete absence of his father and one of the worst school systems in the US to get into and succeed at Brown University. Suskind had won a Pulitzer in ’94 for his series of Wall Street Journal articles on Jennings during his junior year of high school in Southeast. It was and remains a great book about overcoming stereotypes and poverty and resisting the temptations that a quick and-all-too-fleeting-buck can offer. But it’s also a book that offended me as a writer and as someone who understands what Jennings went through to get to Brown.

It started when I first read the Acknowledgements section at the end of A Hope in the Unseen. In commenting about the grand achievement of reporting and writing an authentic book about a poor Black person’s experiences growing up, Suskind wrote, “I hope this book will go some distance toward refuting” the idea that “there’s simply no way a white guy can ‘get it’.” I found the comment ridiculous on its face. The fact is, “White guys” and gals have been writing about Black people’s experiences for years. Or at least, they’ve worked with us in writing about some aspect or another of an African American’s experience. The same is true for White writers who’ve worked with Latinos, Asians and people from other backgrounds to put out a book or an article. It would be like me patting myself on the back for being able to understand White male angst as presented by Pearl Jam, Live or Nirvana. Gimme a break!

I’ve known White males for years who’ve “gotten it.” Poverty, racism, ostracism — even at the individual level — isn’t all that difficult to understand. Especially if a writer or journalist, researcher or a friend simply follows one simple rule — to keep an open mind. If you have to say that your great success in writing a book about someone else’s life is that you’ve proven that you can understand something about that person’s life, then you shouldn’t really say anything at all. Now, I know Suskind is known for much more than his account on Jennings, including his even-handed coverage of the Bush 43 Administration and his look at American foreign policy post-9/11. But as an author writing a book that I expect my audience — affluent Whites included — to get, it’s strange to see those words after reading such a wonderful account.

So I went back through A Hope in the Unseen a second time in ’02. I read Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s depressing but well-written Random Family a few months later. Hers is the story of a Latino family in the Bronx struggling through crime, drugs, loves, and poverty and finding out how hard life can be when people consistently choose to make the wrong decisions. LeBlanc spent fourteen years observing, interacting with and writing about this family and the people they encountered or fell in love with. Despite the family’s many flaws and LeBlanc’s occasional need to distance herself as a writer, it’s a great book for anyone unfamiliar with the deficits in decision-making that poverty can bring.

After reading Random Family, I realized what bothered me about Suskind’s book. With Jennings there throughout, Suskind never asked the most important “Why?” questions. Oh, Suskind asked a lot of general “How?” questions, asked “Why?” questions about Cedric Jennings’ family and their struggles through welfare poverty, frequent evictions, lack of food or stylish clothes and so on. But not too many important “Why?” questions. Especially about why Jennings was doing what he was doing when he was doing it. About why Jennings kept pushing to go to Brown after eleventh grade when all he had to look forward to at school was getting clowned on. Don’t get me wrong — I think that many of the answers here are almost completely self-evident. I’m sure from Jennings’ perspective that he saw himself having little choice other than getting out of DC and going to college, getting a degree and making something of his life. The fact that Jennings never talked about — nor was asked by Suskind — about his sense of isolation and his near ostracism by almost all of his classmates is a bit puzzling.

If you peer deeply enough into A Hope in the Unseen, you can find quite a few holes in Suskind’s treatment of Jennings’ story. Although the absence of Jennings’ father does come up — frequently I might add — little about what Jennings thinks of himself as a young man or Black male shows up in the book. Maybe Suskind didn’t think it important. Maybe Jennings didn’t think that it was important either. But given the geographical, psychological and social context of the book, for this subject to have not been addressed is another disappointment. Readers Black, White, Yellow and Brown could’ve related to Jennings’ struggles to define himself beyond being the resident nerd in nearly the poorest high school in the second or third worst urban school district in the US. It would’ve given readers further insight into Jennings’ dreams and aspirations, his coping strategies for dealing with the slights and rejections he received from his peers, his intestinal fortitude to carry on to Brown and successfully transition to an Ivy League university.

This is as important — if not more important — than what Jennings actually did as a student, a mother’s child or as a Southeast DC resident before attending Brown in the fall of ’95. For sure, anyone, including yours truly, can point to handfuls of examples of people with next to no supports becoming successful as high school students, going on to college, and then graduating with honors. That message, I guess, is “I did it. So can you.” Or as one young businessman put it an assembly I was forced to attend my sophomore year at Mount Vernon High School, “I got mine! Now you go on and get yours!”

True that. Except that so much gets lost in the concentration on the achievement, the end result. Like understanding the mechanics of how someone separates themselves from the violence and poverty in their community. Or how one cuts themselves off emotionally from the ostracism and loneliness that results from their overachieving at school. Or their thought-process about making their academic dreams a reality. Or even how they see themselves beyond their burdens at home and their need to achieve academically at school. That may involve race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and the application of their aspirations to how they want to live their lives. All important and all near-absent from Suskind’s work.

So maybe Suskind was being tongue-in-cheek when he made that statement in his Acknowledgement section eleven years ago. I doubt it. He would’ve followed up with something to show that his wasn’t a statement to take literally. Unless of course, there was another message here. That Suskind wanted to let his peeps in the publishing and journalism world know that despite their socioeconomic, geographical and educational distance from the world of Cedric Jennings, they too could “get it.” At least enough to publish books that are bestsellers. Don’t get me wrong. I want to see Boy At The Window do that well. But I want readers to see the mechanics that made me who I was in doing so.

Saturday, June 3, 1989, 12:04 pm. Me and my younger siblings were at 616, watching cartoons on ABC. It was a run of old Looney Tunes cartoons, which had Maurice, Yiscoc, Sarai and especially Eri cracking up. It was a great morning, with my mother taking her Saturday classes at Westchester Business Institute, my idiot stepfather out carousing, and my older brother Darren roaming the streets like the goofball he could be. Then the late Peter Jennings broke into our local New York area broadcast to let us know that Chinese tanks were rolling into Tiananman Square in Beijing, breaking through seven weeks worth of protests over the government’s continuing limits on the civil and political rights of its citizens.

It was after midnight in Beijing, already June 4. For the next forty or forty-five minutes, images kept coming on to our TV from Tiananmen Square as the Chinese military and their tanks toppled barricades, ran over cars and literally chased thousands of protesters out of the square. When I saw the first images of a blood-splattered protester and then of another one crying, I started to cry myself. My siblings looked at me like I was crazy. Then, no more images. Jennings reported that the Chinese government had forced ABC to shut down their satellite communications from within China. My guess was that they did it at gun point.

By the time I switched to another station for my siblings to watch, I found myself wondering why I hadn’t followed the story more closely. I mean, I was actually following it. But I guess I assumed that, like the glasnost and perestroika that had been pushed by Gorbachev since ’86, that the protests would be allowed to continue in Beijing. And like many other naive Americans, we were wrong about that. We hardly knew enough about four millennia of Chinese political history to understand how important an unopposed central authority has been to this culture. If I had applied anything I learned from a semester of East Asian History at all, I wouldn’t have been surprised at all.

With me crying — albeit not audibly — my youngest brother Eri asked me what was wrong and what was going on. I explained to them as best I could that this was a government crackdown on dissidents, that the Chinese government engaged in human rights abuses all the time, and that this crackdown meant many people were dying and going to die. Those few minutes were the most in which Eri and my other siblings had shown any interest in the world outside of Mount Vernon and New York City in all of times I spent with them growing up.

In the days that followed, the occasional picture or piece of film made it out of China to Hong Kong (still a British territory in ’89) or Japan or South Korea showing images like the man standing in front of a column of tanks, ready to die in the crackdown on him and other protesters. I must admit, it moved me. It was obvious that people would go to jail, likely face torture, that many would die and many more would lick their wounds as the Chinese government would blackout all but the official state news about what really was going on.

Larry Glasco, one of my Pitt history professors, was there for a visit when the crackdown began. He said he saw dead men hanging from lamp posts, bodies of dead and injured in spots, and faced his own crisis in dealing with the military. They confiscated his camera and threatened to hold him in jail in order to make sure he didn’t take his pictures back to the US. From what I remember, he did managed to smuggle some film — not much — out after the crackdown had ended. His wasn’t the only story I would hear during the second half of ’89 about what people witnessed as tourists and researchers in looking at the Tiananmen Square protests. It was the first time I had the chance to see up close what a tyrannical government really looks like when acting to protect itself.

It’s different than police brutality or even a racist mob. For better or worse, we’ve never seen this level of government or military intervention in this country over protesters that those everyday folks in China faced down twenty years ago. Even if we count what Native Americans faced in the late-nineteenth century or the Bonus Army crackdown by General Douglas MacArthur in 1932, that would only get us to a limited sense of what the Tiananmen Square dissidents faced. It made me think about how wrong one of my Humanities classmates was when he argued about the long-term viability of communism because it would reduce economic inequality and give people a greater degree of freedom.

But we were both incorrect. Any economic or political system in which citizens and others must show deference or actually walk in fear of isn’t one that any should follow. I don’t care if the system is communist, capitalist, or socialist, or if the government is a monarchy, a constitutional monarchy, or a representative democracy. If folks living in these systems and under these governments can’t speak their minds or publish their ideas, especially if they contradict whatever the government or system says, the government isn’t a just one. Although governments and systems should fit the cultural and historical context of a given population, it also should remain flexible enough to adjust to the changing needs of a people. That’s what the regime in China failed to understand in ’89 and for years afterward.

I’m hardly advocating the overthrowing of governments or even the imposition of American democracy. If anyone’s bothered to notice, we haven’t exactly been living up to many of our ideals overseas and at home over the last six decades. I’m merely attempting to remember the events of early June ’89 that touched me emotionally, that enabled me to understand that beyond the political and economic theories there’s the reality of the human condition, the need to keep humans who have authority in check. I learned this all too well growing up at 616 and attending Mount Vernon’s public schools. Without those checks and balances, the rights and lives of others face tanks lined up in formation, ready to run them over.