A few months after my mother and idiot ex-stepfather had broken up for the last time, we were sitting together eating breakfast one weekend morning. She was asking me if I was angry with her about all that had happened between ’81 and ’89. Not directly, mind you. But in her meandering, “don’t bring me no bad news” way, she wanted to see if I held her in contempt for taking so long to kick Maurice to the curb. “No,” I lied, somewhat unknowingly, “I’m not angry with you.” After a pause, my mother then said, “You know, he fooled us all.”

I was flabbergasted (what an understatement!) by that statement. It was as if I was talking to a woman who somehow thought that I was still eight years old. Either that, or my mother thought that I was an emotional and psychological idiot when compared to her. When I pointed out my running away from home in the weeks after their marriage in ’78, my mother said, “There’s no way you could’ve known.” Could’ve have known what? That my former stepfather pretended his way through life? That he had the parenting skills of DMX and Britney Spears all within his own persona? “Apparently, the only person he ‘fooled’ was my mother,” I thought.

It was the beginning of my mother’s attempts to revise history, in her favor of course. For years, she’d explain to “the kids” (my younger siblings Maurice, Yiscoc, Sarai and Eri) that their lot in life as welfare kids was caused solely by their “no-good father.” Not to mention the “Spanish people” and “West Indians” and “Orientals” owning most of the shops on The Avenue in Mount Vernon and taking most of the good jobs in the New York City area. As someone whose knowledge of the world — being in it, if not necessarily of it — grew with each passing year, listening to these half-truths and bigoted lies became increasingly painful.

Then the big lie came, right around the time of the 616 fire in ’95. All of a sudden, my role in the family was rewritten. No longer was I the big brother/uncle/father figure that I’d been since I was twelve or thirteen years old. Now, my mother had become the only person to have taken care of the “Judah babies” (as she started to call my younger siblings). “I take care of my kids!” she’d yell at other people in public when they gave her weird looks as she’d yell at my siblings like she was a bit unhinged. Or my mother would say in exasperation, “I’m stuck with these kids! But they’re mine, and God gave them to me for a reason, so…” As if God forced her to get pregnant, forced her to give birth, and threatened her with lightning if she didn’t feed, clothe or shelter them.

At first, I took all of this as her way of coping with the trauma of homelessness and property loss — not that there was that much property to lose. But I realized — rather late I might add — that this was her way of giving herself affirmation through her bitterness about the lost years, those eleven horrible years of abuse and poverty. So what if it meant not acknowledging her oldest two children or the sacrifices they had to make on her behalf? Or not considering her own role in making matters worse than they already were, for herself and for the rest of us?

All of these issues led to my family intervention at the beginning of ’02. I was willing to sacrifice my mother-sort-of-son/sort-of-boyfriend/ex-husband relationship so that, at the very least, I could make sure that my younger siblings understood one thing. That it wasn’t just their father that played a role in screwing up their lives. That our mother had screwed up on numerous occasions as well. I wish I hadn’t had to do it. Yet I knew I couldn’t let Maurice, Yiscoc, Sarai and Eri go into their adult years merely thinking that their father “had fooled us all.”

I certainly love my mother and acknowledge that without her hard work and persistence—at least through my thirteenth birthday—that I wouldn’t be here to write. But there are many things about her I didn’t like even when I was in the midst of constant abuse from my stepfather. The nurturing, affectionate mother that so many children take for granted as their first source of emotional strength was almost never there for me. My mother often said, “I like children when they’re [between] babies and two . . . it’s all downhill from there” while I was growing up, a sign that becoming the eventual mother of six children was perhaps not the best life choice.

It’s only been in the past couple of years that I’ve realized how much NOT receiving this kind of affection has affected my relationships with women and friendships with men. Emotional intimacy and the level necessary that each of us needs to function successfully in life can be the difference between experiencing happiness in almost any situation or dying a miserably slow death in an otherwise healthy life. I can honestly say that while I’ve made it most of the way back, I still had a bit of work to do on this front. Hopefully I’m not fooling myself in the process.

The hardest thing I’ve had to adjust to over the years has been the good moment. Given my background, you’d think I’d savor every positive moment, every small victory, every tiny miracle, every gram of beauty in my life. Sadly, I don’t. I mean, for most of my twenties, I’d often tell myself not to get excited when those moments came, partly because there were so many of them, and partly because I had gotten caught up in my larger goals, my life-long aspirations.

Tomorrow my younger brother Yiscoc turns twenty-eight, which is something to celebrate, of course. But it’s also something in which I can see a bit of disappointment. Not only from where I sit, but from Yiscoc’s perspective as well. Of all of my siblings, none of them has done so little with so much as Yiscoc. Apparently, much of this has to do with Yiscoc’s own struggles with his adulthood, with being a part of the in-crowd, the need to be accepted and the need to be cool.

It’s funny. I’ve spent significant time on this blog talking about my high school experiences in relationship to my graduation class’ salutatorian, and no time talking about our Class of ’87 valedictorian. Funny because she and I maintained an acquaintanceship that turned into a friendship that lasted for a good sixteen years after high school. Funny because I got to know her and her family better than anyone I ever knew growing up in Mount Vernon, New York. Funny because I learned some important life lessons while watching her ascent to number one in our class, and the struggles she faced once she had taken on the mantle of valedictorian.

I first met “V” in eighth grade, although I had heard about her academic prowess from my other classmates while in 7S. She was above all else a classic grinder, a nerd par excellence. At five-foot-seven, she was one of the tallest folks in class. She was also blond-haired, blue-eyed and blandly pale. V was always prepared, always ready for the next task at hand even then. Our eventual salutatorian seemed like he was always running for class president, constantly seeking others’ confidence in him. His A’s seemed more natural, as if he almost didn’t have to study. Beyond that, I really didn’t think that much about them that year.

At least until I started bumping into V on my way to or from school. It was through this that I met her mother and her sister and learned that her mother had a serious illness. What kind of illness I didn’t know at the time. I assumed it was serious to V, because I remember her being upset a lot in eighth grade. I would’ve thought that V might’ve cared about something like winning the history prize. I’m sure she had an A in Demontravel’s class. V being V, her favorite classes that year were science and algebra. And given Demontravel’s ability to make the end of American slavery seem like we were watching a dog lick its ass in the middle of the desert, it’s a wonder if V even said two words the entire year.

V was and still is the biggest Billy Joel fan I’ve ever known. Schmaltzy or not, everything Billy Joel from “Piano Man” to “New York State of Mind” to “Pressure” — the entire Billy Joel catalog — was in her head as if she were double our age. By the time I’d met her, she’d already been to at least one Billy Joel concert. I liked some Billy Joel — the operative word being some — but I would’ve needed a glass of Manischewitz to listen to some of his more obscure work. This was one of our first conversations, about music and her love affair with the singer-songwriter from Long Island.

I guess the fact that I learned about her mother’s illness early on gave me sympathy for her. Whatever else might’ve bothered me about my situation, I knew that my mother wasn’t sick or had a serious medical condition like, say, Lou Gehrig’s Disease or muscular dystrophy. So I learned fairly quickly that V didn’t come from a healthy family of means. This despite that fact that her father was a prominent figure in our city. It was something we had in common, poverty based in large measure on two fathers not involved in our daily lives. I don’t think that V would ever admit it, but that commonality was the reason we were able to form a bond that year.

Our eventual valedictorian took Humanities so seriously that she had thrown herself into her work by ninth grade the way in which I worked when I was in graduate school. Along with about a dozen or so others, V took every opportunity to take the hardest courses and to participate in as many activities outside of class as she could handle. I figured out early on in the year that if a student could take every one of their classes at Level 0 (including gym) and could earn an A+ in all of them, the maximum GPA for them could be a 6.3 on a 4.0 scale, a huge weighting system for such courses. Somehow something about this seemed unfair. Of course, V was a straight A student, soaking up Geometry, Trig, PreCalc, Bio, Chemistry, and so many other subjects as if she had the answers before the teachers asked any questions. And she did.

By eleventh grade, I found myself in more of V’s classes by virtue of me taking AP US History with Meltzer, along with first period English and eighth period Physics (or was it seventh? Hmm). God, she was so focused once class started! It was as if V was Martina Navratilova at Wimbledon, ready to pound an opponent in submission in under forty minutes.

Sometimes, though, that laser-beam-like focus of her’s was to her detriment. Our English teacher Mrs. Warns had given us an essay exam looking at James Baldwin’s writings, a pretty bold assignment for a White teacher to give us in ’86 (it wouln’t be bold now, except in the Bible Belt). Warns had warned us after the last exam to underline book titles and put quotation marks around essays or we’d get twenty-five points taken off our grades. V, unfortunately, was the only one who failed to follow these instructions, of which Warns had reminded us just before the exam. Sure enough, V’s 92 became a 67, the lowest grade I remember V receiving during our Humanities years. It was also the only time I can remember V receiving the lowest class grade for any assignment in any subject.

She protested, became angry with Warns, and walked out of class in tears. We walked with her to Meltzer’s class, we being me and three female classmates. It was our attempt to console her. Except I didn’t really feel like giving V emotional support at that moment. It wasn’t as if she was going to fail the class or, God forbid, end up with a B, not for even one marking period. So her 5.6 GPA would drop maybe to a 5.5. V herself wasn’t a supportive person academically-speaking anyway. I had mixed feelings about V’s response, but I understood perfectly why Warns did it.

By the summer going into our senior year, I began hanging out a little bit with V, whose life was fully dedicated to finishing college before she started. Besides her job as an assistant with a dentist who just so happened to be the husband of our former eighth-grade science teacher — it was on my weekly route toward my father Jimme’s watering holes in the Bronx — she was working hard at home taking care of her mother and her younger sister. I know I had it hard at 616, but V’s life was comparable in a few ways. Her ailing mother had reached the point where she was using a cane to walk, but she was mostly wheelchair bound. Her mother was maybe four or five years older than mine, but they looked twenty years apart. I knew why V worked as hard as she did, given her situation. It was something we had in common, becoming an adult long before our teenage years were over.

V was also blowing through our textbook for AP Physics. She apparently had borrowed a copy from Wolf at the end of the school year and was going through it during her spare moments. She was also working her way through Calculus, just so she could take the tougher version of the two AP Calculus exams. I thought she was crazy working as hard as she was to prepare for next year. I also realized that this was V’s secret to success, taking her time during the summers to study as if she was preparing for the state bar exam. Based on what I saw, I figured that V was going to spend about two hundred hours studying for the two AP classes that summer. Unbelievable, absolutely unbelievable! I worried for her mental health, hoping that she wouldn’t burn herself out trying to be the perfect student.

Yet somehow she didn’t, at least not in ’86-’87. Like me, V scored a 5 on the AP US History exam. But that was only the beginning. She also scored a 1360 on her SAT, was ranked number one in our class with a 5.45 GPA, and would score a 5 on the AP Calc BC, AP Physics C, and AP Biology exams, and a 4 on the AP English exam. She guaranteed herself twenty-seven college credits, making her a college sophomore before she’d been given her high school diploma. Between the scores and grades, scholarship offers were aplenty, but V opted for Johns Hopkins and their pre-med program. I had no doubt that she would do just as well there as she did in high school.

Still, in the back of my mind, as I developed a regular correspondence with V all through our college years, I worried about her and her family. They all moved to the DC area right before V’s freshman year at Johns Hopkins. I knew that she was about to attempt to work, study, date, have a social life and take care of her mother and sister at the same time. I had no doubt that she’d find the strength to finish college, but I also had no doubt that all of these burdens were bound to catch up to her. My own family, school and social situation had left me with my own sense of burnout and reckoning by the beginning of my sophomore year. By her true sophomore year, they did.

Meltzer said to me on any number of occasions that “I never worried about you. I worried about V. I worried about V a lot.” I also knew that over the years he had worried about a couple of other classmates. The first time he ever said that to me was during my sophomore year of college. I was offended by the comment. “I had the least of everything when I was in his class,” I thought, “and he knew that but didn’t worry?” In the years since that first comment, I realized that the way I approached class and my life meant that I already had the tools to overcome everything I faced. I certainly didn’t realize it at the time.

What Meltzer didn’t realize was that V had the tools to cope as well. She just had to find the strength to use them, which she eventually did. I learned long before the end of high school that as analytically gifted as I was, that it wasn’t my job to be perfect, at school or at home. V learned that lesson in college, and from where I sit, learned that lesson well. It would behoove so many other parents and students to learn not to pursue perfection and excellence as if it were pure gold, to learn that life is about balance, and that learning is about more than A’s.

It’s been six years and a day since my dear friend and mentor Barbara Lazarus passed. In the years between ’93 and ’03, no one from Carnegie Mellon was more important to me and in the professional decisions I made than her. Barbara was as gritty as she was sweet, someone who made my decision to go to Carnegie Mellon to earn my doctorate worthwhile. If there was a person that I would’ve wanted to meet in a past life, it would be her.

I met her at a joint graduate school conference between the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon on diversity seventeen years ago. I don’t even remember the details of our first conversation, but I do remember that we immediately hit it off. The fact that she was an eternal optimist didn’t deter me from continuing to interact with her. When I transferred to Carnegie Mellon the following year, multiculturalism and how I defined it was a constant conversation between the two of us.

This apparently wasn’t just an intellectual exercise. Barbara wanted me to serve on her Graduate Advisory Board, which gave her input on all issues related to diversity on campus. It was a great three-year experience, and one in which I became familiar with my unofficial mentor, her home, her two children, and her dog. It allowed me to test my ideas on multiculturalism in practical ways while it also enabled me to get a better handle on the conservative identity politics of the university. She also wanted me to work for her as an assistant in the Office of Academic Affairs where she served as Associate Provost, but my Spencer Foundation award made that impossible.

Once problems with my advisor became critical in ’96, I turned to Barbara for advice and help. Her insight into my advisor and the History Department helped me immensely, and enabled me to finish my doctorate without resulting in the drastic and suicidal measure of filing a grievance against him. After the Ph.D., I continued to rely on Barbara for career advice, letters of recommendation, and insight on my more intellectual writings.

I last saw Barbara in October ’02, about nine months before her death after a two-and-a-half year battle with brain cancer. Her commitment and her care remained strong even though the rest of her was waning. She also managed to comment on how to turn my manuscript on multiculturalism into a book, asking if I thought it still wise to use the word multiculturalism in my title or in the book — the book titled Fear of a “Black” America: Multiculturalism and the African American Experience. I managed to give Barbara a hug and a final farewell that sad and sweet day. At least it was for me.

I kept in contact by email, the last one sent a month before her death. It was about an op-ed I managed to get published in The Washington Post. She congratulated me while telling me that she was no longer working on campus, and was restricted to bed rest. I knew at that point that the end was near.

It’s been more than six years since Barbara passed, and yet I still have moments when I hear her voice in my head, telling me to do something that I know I need to do. She remains one of the few people I ever considered a mentor. We acknowledged this fact, but it wasn’t something she beat her chest about. Our relationship grew out of a mutual interest in diversity and multiculturalism beyond the theoretical. I learned more from her in the eleven years I knew her than I could’ve learned from my former advisor in a lifetime, and yet I’m still not sure that this was enough. This, I have come to believe, is what friendships and mentoring situations are all about.

After hearing about the memorial service that the folks at Carnegie Mellon gave her in October ’03, I wrote a note in response to be presented at the ceremony. I couldn’t be there, between the chaos of a one-month-old baby at home and my idiotic boss at work. Here’s some of what I said:

I want to communicate to you that I am in complete solidarity with everyone who attends the gathering at CMU on October 17.  For me, Barbara’s work was more than about women’s equity in the engineering and science fields.  She was about ensuring that all (regardless of gender or race, and regardless of the degree) who attempted the grand enterprise of competing for a degree actually made it through the process … Barbara was a dear friend and mentor who truly believed in me, even in spite of myself.  I loved her, and I will surely miss her, as I am sure you will also.

And I still love and miss her very much, especially on this day.

Check your privilege. (http://redbubble.com).

Four years ago, I wrote an article for Academe Magazine titled “The Ivory Tower and Scholar-Activism.” In it, I criticized various sectors of academia for taking on the mantra of social activism, or social justice, without understanding the true meaning of such. Most had been — and many still are — saying that just by being provocative or even controversial in the classroom, that this is a form of activism. Well, maybe, but only if your job is threatened as a result of it. I pointed out that there are many good examples of scholars and intellectuals (not to be seen as the same thing) who have sacrificed all they have for a social justice cause, and that few full-time professors have that kind of dedication, despite some protestations to the contrary. I suggested that many so-called scholar-activists should become more like the social justice advocated in and out of academe in order to understand what it takes to be an activist.

Now I’m writing about social justice and privilege again, but this time from the perspective of a nonprofit manager who helped run a social justice program for a bit more than three years. It was the only non-education-related job I was excited to take, and for good reason. I would be developing a social justice and leadership development curriculum, organizing conferences and retreats, doing site visits, have input on selection and other strategic issues regarding this one-year old program.

That was back in 2000. Over the next three years and change, I’d learn some rather interesting truths about the nature of social justice activism as represented by seventy-five individuals employed with different organizations across the US. One was that almost to a person, they were a wonderful group of young men and women (and at least in one case, a transsexual woman) for me to work with. They came in dedicated, hungry, fierce and ready to take on our incomplete and unjust world. Seeing that level of enthusiasm for their work was awe-inspiring at times.

Two was the fact that many of our selections for social justice fellows were of folks who had suffered some hardship in their lives. At least one had been incarcerated, another had been homeless and a drug addict, while another was a refugee from a war-torn country in sub-Saharan Africa. That made their selections for our program all the more sweet. Still, the majority of our grantees were folks who had attended the best colleges and graduate programs in the country, from Georgetown to Berkeley to Stanford. Even for the ones with a deep well of personal experiences to draw upon for this work, seeing so many with master’s and law degrees was an interesting contrast.

Observation number three was watching how they interacted with each other and how they interacted with staff. With each other, they saw themselves as equals — at least for the most part. They talked about their work, their losses, struggles and learning curve, as well as about themselves. With staff, many of them did just that. I got to learn about these folks during my site visits, from the forests of central Alaska and Big Sky Country of Montana to more common places across the country. That part of the work was wonderful. But I also got to see grantees who thought that it was our job to serve them. One grantee my first few months on the job said as much.

That was when I realized that about a third of the social justice fellows I worked with that year, and in the years that followed, saw themselves as special, unique, both because of their experiences and because of the work that they were doing. As far as some of them were concerned, staff folk like myself were just that, staff. Whether we had done any form of social justice work or had anything of value to offer besides the fellowship itself was immaterial. Because we were staff, this group of grantees often talked to us as if we were waiters at a five-star restaurant that had just brought them undercooked fish.

It made me think, what were these people like in their public lives outside of their work? Did they treat actual customer service staff at 7-Eleven or at a dim sum brunch the same way they barked orders at us? Did they complain about me trying to keep a conference or retreat on schedule when they attended other meetings and dealt with other professionals? The answer, I’m fairly sure, was and is yes, they did and do.

It was the combination of the privilege of their advanced education combined with their selection as social justice fellows that had given some the room to actualize that privilege in their dealings with folks whom they didn’t see as deserving of their full social justice respect. It made me realize that not everyone with a background ripe for social justice is suited for this kind of activism. God knows you also need a humble and patient temperament for this kind of work as well. It may well explain why a fair number of these folks are no longer working in the social justice world. If scholars who claim to be activists need to learn a bit about activism, then emerging leaders in the social justice world could stand a little bit of humility and patience as they learn their craft.