This post might be a bit much for many of us. It may well be too much for me. For it’s about some of why I became ambivalent about the academic enterprise. It also describes some of my cynicism — that’s right, cynicism — toward ’60s-style liberals in America, including those whom, as liberal as they may be, aren’t really progressive in any cultural or sociological sense.

You see, I took a class my first semester as a grad student at Carnegie Mellon University called Comparative Working-Class History. It was mostly a study of the beaten-down, pre-industrial and Industrial Revolution-era workers who lost their control over the tools of production, and their Marxist-like struggles to regain some control over such tools. Either directly, or through the state (socialism), or through over, violent means. Not that I didn’t sympathize, but I always thought this story too simplistic, not concerned enough with the psychology of human nature or the social constructs under which people are willing to live, even at the expense of their own improvement.

Anyway, the course was taught by a professor whose research looked at the role of Russian women in the economic transition between Czarist Russia and the Stalinist Soviet Union. Although I had no real personal stake in this course initially (I was too busy plotting ways to make all of my courses about multiculturalism, my dissertation topic), I eventually did because of an incident on the first day of class. The Saturday before, August 28, 1993, the great British Marxist E.P. Thompson had passed away. The writer of The Making of the English Working Class (1963) had lived to the age of 69, but apparently had been sick for nearly three years before his death. It was a sad time, for a generation of historians had been influenced by Thompson’s work. His 1963 publication was a cornerstone manual for addressing what most historians now call social history. Unlike so-called socialized medicine, it’s not when the government rewrites history. It’s about people writ large, about how groups of folks have responded to large-scale change, to oppression and exploitation, to difficult if not impossible circumstances.

Certainly Thompson wasn’t the only historian of his time to write in this manner — and hardly the first (anyone ever heard of W.E.B. Du Bois or Franz Fanon?). But for those historians whom had embraced neo-Marxism, if not scholars of color who wrote like neo-Marxists, Thompson was their Edward R. Murrow or Dwight D. Eisenhower. This was also the case of our professor, whom, in discussing E.P. Thompson’s death, her memories of him (more on that later), and his significance to the field, started sobbing in front of the twelve of us. I couldn’t believe it! I wanted to say, “There’s no crying in a graduate seminar!” She was crying as if this were a dear mentor or a close friend. This wasn’t about gender for me, it was about professionalism — she was a tenure-track professor, after all. I knew that there would be some long days in this class after her crying episode.

And they were. All semester, there was a three-way tug-of-war between me (and occasionally, my former Pitt grad school colleague who decided to hop the bridge to Carnegie Mellon to take this course), ten brown-nosing students who’d agree with her despite the evidence, and her. I didn’t expect my now fellow Carnegie Mellon grad students to take my side. But I did expect them to read Thompson and Wilentz and other folks for themselves and not just to get an A out of our professor. There may have been one or two other classes I dreaded more in three years of grad school. Yet I saw no one more unaware of their biases than our professor in this course.

It all came to a head when it was time to discuss David Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness (1991) and, indirectly, Sean Wilentz’s Chants Democratic (1984). Both authors looked at the formation of the White American (and male) working-class in the first half of the nineteenth century. Our professor, as usual, took the stance that the only ideology of significance was one that proclaimed class inequalities the predominant issue explaining the radicalization of the American working-class. Finding this a bit laughable (a mistake on my part), I pressed my argument that at least in the case of US history, race and class distinctions have been and remain intertwined. So much so that a typical neo-Marxist analysis of the American working-class couldn’t apply.

The next two hours were me and my Pitt colleague against ten brown-nosers and our professor. Luckily in my case, I could not only quote Roediger and Wilentz, but Herbert Gutmann, W.E.B. Du Bois, and a host of other scholars to press home my counterargument. At the end, our professor said to me, in utter exasperation, “I guess we should just go back to original sin.” It meant that I was being a racial determinist, which I suppose was suppose to be an insult as well as her version of “No mas, no mas!”

I learned a lesson beyond my grades or my head-long march toward my doctorate that day. That most so-called liberals in America, whether an assistant professor or an avowed ’60s radical, are really not leftists at all, at least on issues involving race. They may not believe in promoting inequality or racism. But they don’t necessarily see groups of color as actors, activists, or as capable of taking actions independent of their ways of thinking about the world. They explain issues of inequality in ways that actually degrade the achievements of Americans of color who’ve managed to overcome such inequities. In my professor’s case, even as the wife of a prominent soon-to-be Pitt history professor, whose work has helped us as historians better understand the relationship between trade, ideas and economics on four sides of the Atlantic.

Still, the worst thing I learned is that it took Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness to confirm ideas that Du Bois had begun writing about nearly a century before. That, for me, made me apprehensive about wanting to work with scholars who may well see me and my work as well-intentioned, but inferior to theirs. I guess I could’ve cried in despair about this, but I didn’t.

There weren’t a whole lot of things during my Boy @ The Window years outside of 616 that were worse than the guidance — or the lack thereof — I received from my guidance counselor Sylvia Fasulo. She was the ultimate Doubting Thomas, one that would probably make Jesus himself shake his head. It wasn’t just that she never thought that I was up to handling any Humanities or AP course while in high school. It was obvious that Fasulo thought that I wouldn’t amount to anything at all. Some of this, I realize, was about race, gender and class — I was a poor Black male, after all, and she was one of the few people that even knew about the poor part (for worse, not for better). But I also knew, even then, that it was about me. Fasulo didn’t believe in me, as a person or a student. When I figured this out, it made my moments in her office a form of torture only slightly above my wonderful moments with my idiot ex-stepfather.

About a week before the start of of high school, in September ’83, I met Fasulo for the first time, as I had to sign up for my freshman year classes. Meeting her was a sure sign that I hadn’t stopped growing. I towered over the four-foot-nine middle-aged woman. But boy could she smoke up a storm! If any of us nonsmokers who had Fasulo as a counselor picked up lung cancer immediately after high school, we should’ve gotten together to form a class action!

I wondered to myself, almost aloud, why Fasulo was a guidance counselor at MVHS. The woman had an A.B. — as some Ivy Leagues and other pretentious universities still call them — from Vassar. Class of ’49 as a matter of fact. Her diploma was on the wall in her small office, letting every one of her students know that she wasn’t exactly from humble beginnings. My first meeting with her was the first of many conversations — or soliloquies I happened to be present for — about her glory days at Vassar.

For the next three years, I put up with her constant “Are sure about…” questions regarding the classes I took. She didn’t think I could handle five Humanities Level 1 courses in a school year. Then she made me get permission from a teacher I despised to take AP American History even though I had the grades necessary to take it. Her always telling me that this class or that class “might be too hard for you,” as if I were a child with a severe mental disability. Fasulo was a piece of work, and I trusted her about as much as I trust law enforcement when they’ve told me that I “fit the description of” so-and-so when I’ve been stopped for walking while Black.

Fasulo’s favorite phrase for me by the beginning of my senior year was, “There goes Donald, always daring to be different.” It referenced my refusal to join our chapter of the National Honor Society and my insistence on carrying three AP courses and applying to schools like Columbia, Yale and the University of Pittsburgh that year. When it came to helping me work through my preparations for college, Fasulo was about as helpful as redneck would be in giving me directions to my White girlfriend on the White side of a Southern town — if I had one at the time, of course.

It’d be an exaggeration to say that Fasulo had it in for me. Yet she wasn’t exactly helping me with good advice about the quality of the schools I wanted to apply to, whether they had good history or computer science departments, or whether the schools had more than a handful of Blacks attending. These were the questions I wanted her to help me answer. I did almost all of that research myself.

What Fasulo was good at was communicating her low expectations of me. She emphasized “safety schools” over and over again, as if I didn’t stand a chance in heaven of measuring up with the more selective schools. “You need to pick a safety school,” she’d say. Or “SUNY Buffalo’s a good safety school,” she said a fair number of times.What, was she going to get a kick-back from someone at SUNY Buffalo for my enrollment there? Per her constant advice on this, I wasted an application and applied there. But not without insisting that Columbia, Yale, and Pitt would stay on my application list. Pitt, of course, was the one school that didn’t fit and the one that Fasulo shook her head about the most. “They’re out of state!,” she said to me in a bit of exasperation about my choices. I explained that the University of Pittsburgh’s out-of-state tuition was actually less than the in-state tuition of any of the New York State schools, and by a wide margin. Not able to resist, Fasulo responded, “There you go again, daring to be different,” adding a frustrated chuckle.

Because of my research, I also ended up applying to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Rochester Institute of Technology, the University of Rochester and Hobart & William Smith Colleges. Five schools in Upstate New York, two Ivy Leagues, and Pitt. No wonder Fasulo was confused. I hated having Fasulo as my counselor at this critical crossroads. She was condescending, demeaning and chain-smoked up my clothes for my troubles. Most of all, I hated having to reveal things about myself to her that I otherwise wouldn’t have shared. Like my family’s financial situation. Fasulo became only the second person I would tell that we were on welfare, that my father and mother had divorced and that he hadn’t made a child support payment since ’78. I had to talk to her about my role in my family as acting first-born child and my responsibilities. It was necessary and humiliating at the same time.

Despite and not because of Fasulo, things worked out for me in the end. Going to Pitt, meeting the people and the professors I’d become friends and colleagues with, was probably one of the best decisions I ever made. Still, I had one parting shot from her in the middle of my junior year at the University of Pittsburgh. It was the holiday season in ’89, and I took time during my time back in Mount Vernon to visit my favorite teacher Harold Meltzer. I had just missed him, but bumped into Fasulo. It was about as fortuitous as having diarrhea and being no where near a toilet or toilet paper.

She asked me where I was in school, and I told her about my considerations for graduate school, law school and the world of work. It was a toss-off sentence, my attempt to end a conversation, not begin one. “Being a lawyer’s hard work,” Fasulo said in response. She then went on to tell me about 70-hour work weeks and billable hours and the bar exam, as if any of this was supposed to be surprising or would somehow scare me. I cut her off, saying “You know, you’re not my counselor anymore, so thanks but no thanks for your advice,” and left her office while she tried to explain her idiotic perspective.

So what’s the lesson here? That we have a strong sense of how to seek wisdom, and from whom, so that we don’t end up going down the wrong rabbit hole in our lives? That short Italian guidance counselors born in the late-1920s have no business advising poor smart Black males? No, the real lesson is that anyone either being paid to advise students or playing that role in some capacity, official or not, has to understand that this isn’t about them, it’s about that student or group of students. When it becomes a way of weeding out students based on some preconception of talent and where that talent fits, that’s when it’s time to seek another job or role, one that doesn’t involve the possibility of damaging someone’s life.

Privilege and entitlement. We assume it only applies to people in positions of power or influence. Or that it’s something that rich folks, famous people, professional athletes, musicians, artists, writers, or actors exercise. But from years of observation, I’ve come to understand this. That in a nation as imperial as ours, as rich as ours, as powerful and power hungry as ours, that privilege permeates everything. It’s why our social safety network is so deeply flawed. It’s why universal health is greeting by many as if Armageddon is just around the corner, while the cruelty of American Idol and The Bachelor might as well be manna from heaven. It’s why the allegedly richest nation in the world has mediocre public education, even in its wealthiest school districts. It’s why we can’t walk down the street without being smacked in the face by privilege.

Yes, even walking down the street. Most people in this country don’t even have the decency to say “excuse me” or to move slightly to the side whenever other people approach. Couples act as if there couple-ness gives them the absolute right to take up an entire sidewalk, as if it’s alright for other people to step in mud or out in the street. Groups of folks who think that their numbers give them the right to be oblivious to the rest of the world, forgetting that a public sidewalk is just that. It’s as if others have to beg for the right to exist in order to walk a block in a standard American downtown.

I used to think that this was a racial issue, and it very well may be. But privilege exercised in this manner does cross racial, socioeconomic, even regional barriers. And not just on sidewalks. In getting off elevators or trains, in which people refuse to step to the side and expect you to say “Excuse me” to them in order to get off before they get on. In meetings, where people will cut you out of a conversation if at all possible, as if manners don’t matter at all. From cashiers giving you bills, change and receipt all at once, as if you’re five years old, don’t own a wallet or purse, and are supposed to shuffle off at warp speed so that they can serve the next customer. To people constantly cutting you off in traffic without using turn signals or even hand signs.

So many have written about civility and etiquette as if they only went out the window because the very nature of American culture changed in the good old ’60s, because dissent and rebellion became a common part of it. As a Black male who has been called the N-word in public before, and for all of the other persons of color who’ve experienced far worse, the culture isn’t that much difference in terms of language than it was fifty years ago. What’s different now is that there’s virtually no pretense of manners. This isn’t due to dissent or rebellion. It’s because of privilege. It’s privilege that enables people to lack the simple social skills of politeness, to not say “Excuse me” when they blatantly step on your foot or cut in line.

If this were caused by dissent or rebellion, there’s no way our government could’ve gotten away with the Patriot Act, with the two Gulf Wars, with Iran-Contra or Supply Side Economics, with “mend-it-don’t-end-it” welfare reform or not ratifying the Kyoto Agreement. We’d be more like France or Germany with workers shutting down the country in order to force our government to change. No, the attitudes that most of us exhibit in public are ones of complacency, of the need to get away from as many people as possible. We’d rather drive our cars and talk on the phone than put some music on, watch out for pedestrians and think of the fellow drivers around us. Or walk and window shop in a mall like an oblivious fool as if we’ve phased out of our world and into a parallel one. Or better still, act as if others don’t matter at all.

The sense that the public sphere belongs to them, and them alone, is so common that we only seethe when we actually pick up on these everyday sorts of slights. I’m convinced that the last six decades of American dominance in the world has left us at home with the feeling that no one else’s feelings, ideas, beliefs, theories, and lives matter. It’s why we can be all right with the deaths of 1.7 million Vietnamese in a war of little meaning, but only be heartbroken by the loss of 59,000 Americans. It’s why we can be ho-hum about three million homeless Americans (and growing certainly within the past year) and upset that a stimulus package will keep several hundred thousand Americans from joining them on the streets. It’s why we can avoid a “dangerous neighborhood” with a wink of glee in our eyes and fall apart when one violent crime occurs in a middle class or affluent community, often saying “I never thought that it could happen here.”

I’ve always wondered how Americans (and, for that matter, other Westerners) could be the way that they are in an increasingly interdependent, global, cooperative world. The answer’s been here the whole time. With the end of the Second World War, America was literally half of the world’s economic engine, had the atomic bomb, the world’s second largest army and the largest navy. We were, as they say these days, the shit, and we’ve let the world know if for the past six decades. Like an aging beauty queen, even with the cracks and wrinkles, we act as if we’re still in our prime. We’ve borrowed from China and Saudi Arabia to botox our forehead, to have collagen injected into our lips and cheeks, had liposuction on our midsections and otherwise to keep up appearances. Like every empire of the past, we’ve entered a dangerous phase, a make-or-break period in which our decisions to exercise privilege or to see beyond ourselves could make the difference between a well-fed and good-looking corpse or a nation that understands that the world is not ours, it’s everyone’s.

The oblivious, sheep-like sense of entitlement that we exercise in our everyday interactions is directly tied to how we operate as a nation. We can’t expect one to change without the other changing as well. If we want a government that’s responsive, efficient, and truly bipartisan, then we need to insist on living our lives in a less privileged manner. Otherwise — to quote the artist Sting — for those of us who at least recognize the dangers of privilege, we might as well be “singing in the wind or writing on the surface of a lake” for all our words might matter.

I’ve learned so much over the years about mediocrity, authority and leadership that I should be about as jaded as a Buddhist statue. Yet I sometimes still find myself shocked when I encounter people in leadership positions who may be incompetent, but who are definitely jaded and borderline sadistic. Among those who’ve disappointed me the most are educational administrators — deans and department chairs, advisers and guidance counselors. No one, though, was more shocking to listen to than my high school principal, Richard Capozzola.

My first day of high school was one that introduced me to the reality of self-fulfilling prophecies and the damage that low expectations can do. On a day in which we were beginning Humanities at the high school level, our principal announced over the PA system that the freshman class was to assemble in the auditorium. It was third period, the first of two study hall periods for me, so I saw this as an opportunity to learn more about MVHS. Our principal, Mr. Richard Capozzola, was welcoming our incoming class to high school. He was an old-looking man in his late-forties, I guessed, balding but doing the comb-over thing to cover his hairless middle. This was before he went the toupée route. He was short, like most of the Italian administrators, wore a bushy mustache and generally acted as if he were a warden instead of the chief administrator for an educational institution. After welcoming us, Capozzola said, “There are 1,075 of you here today. Four years from now, only half of you will graduate” from MVHS.

My mouth fell open, and not just because of what he said. I couldn’t believe that someone whose job it was to make sure as many students received the best possible education would assume that only half of his students were capable of finishing high school. For a moment I thought what Capozzola said was for effect. But the look on his face and the words that followed said it all. Capozzola talked about “discipline” and “behavior,” “detention,” “suspension” and “expulsion” throughout the rest of his speech. Nothing about grades or test scores, Regents exams or graduation. The only message he was trying to send was that he’d prefer if the students who didn’t plan on graduating dropped out by the end of the day. If I’d been a student who had struggled academically and socially before high school, that’s the message I would’ve taken with me out of the auditorium that day. Instead I was pissed with Capozzola and anyone who thought that this was the way to make students feel at home. It felt racist, considering the school was about three-quarters Black, Afro-Caribbean and Hispanic by then.

I also had two run-ins with my Capozzola in April ’87, a couple of months before I graduated from MVHS. It was a day in which I managed to escape my AP Physics class and was awarded a small college scholarship. I was about to find out how quickly life can turn full circle.

That morning, I already had survived one confrontation with “Capo.” I was standing outside the school waiting for the doors to open to start the day, like I had for the past four years. I had my Walkman on as usual, when Capozzola walked up to me and demanded that I turn it off and take it off.

“No, I don’t have to do that,” I said.

“What did you say?,” the balding, rug-wearing runt said to me in response.

“I’m well within my rights. I have headphones, which is all that sign requires,” I said, pointing at the various “No”s sign of what MVHS prohibited on its grounds. A Walkman with headphones wasn’t on the list. I continued.

“The first bell hasn’t rung, and I’m outside of the school building, and you have no right to tell me to turn my Walkman off.”

“You and me better not cross paths anytime soon,” Capozzola said, slightly flustered by my barrage and turning pinker by the second, before walking through the front doors and then to his office.

“Capo” and his crack security team made every effort to punish us for any misdeed. By ’86-’87, this included tardiness for getting from one class to another. We had five minutes to get from one class to another on a twenty-three acre, two-story building and campus. Because students would take more than five minutes to arrive to class, Capozzola, Carappella and company created a random “sweeps” policy. At random times each day, the security staff would lock down various parts of the school, temporarily trapping students who hadn’t made it to their next class on time. The guards would then “sweep” up the miscreants, who’d either end up in detention or, depending on their frequency of being caught by the guards, suspended from school.

That afternoon, I left AP Physics for Division E principal Dr. Zollicoffer’s office, one of the few Blacks in authority at MVHS. He was a very tall and big man, at least six-four, and well over two hundred and forty pounds. He apparently had been aware of my existence for the past four years. In his gravely, football-player-like voice, said, “The Afro-Caribbean Club has decided to honor your achievements with dinner and a $500 scholarship.” I sat there, completely shocked. I hadn’t heard of this club, barely knew who Zollicoffer was, and hadn’t been expecting anyone to give me a scholarship, at least not anyone from Mount Vernon. He spent the next few minutes chatting me up about how significant a person I was to the Black and Afro-Caribbean communities in Mount Vernon, my responsibility to “give back” to “my people,” about where I was going to college and what my major would be, and so on.

The period-ending bell had rung and students had been shuffling through the hallways by the time he gave me the chance to say “Thank you. Thank you very much!” and leave. I ran through the hallway and around the building to get my stuff from AP Physics, and proceeded to the gym on the other side of the school when the second bell rang. At that point, I was about eighty feet from the gym, and trapped between two gates.

The guards escorted me to Capozzola’s office, who immediately smirked at this turn of events. Even though this was my first offense, he wanted to make an example of me.

“I can make it so that you’re not only suspended, you won’t graduate with your class,” Capozzola said.

“I was in Dr. Zollicoffer’s office and on my way to gym when the sweep happened. You can ask him yourself,” I said.

Reluctantly, Capozzola picked up the phone and called his Division E principal, who I heard laughing on the other end of the phone at one point, as Zollicoffer explained that I’d been awarded a small scholarship.

“You can go, but I’ve got my eye on you now,” he said, almost with a sigh, after he hung up the phone. I was smart enough not to say anything else in return. But my sarcastic smile probably said it all.

The last time I saw Capozzola was little more than a year later. I was on one of my meandering walks lost in thought about what I needed to do to find a summer job, during my unemployed summer of ’88, when I bumped into my former principal at the corner of North Columbus and Euclid. The toupée was gone, as was his prison warden swagger. Capozzola recognized me immediately and stopped me to talk. He apparently had been forced to resign as principal. Of course, he said that he was burned out trying to save the school. I don’t remember much else. I was in college now, in between my freshman and sophomore year, and listening to an a-hole go on and on about his trials and tribulations. To say the least, I didn’t feel sorry for him.

But I have thought about that conversation in recent years, with all the work I’ve been a part of around K-16 education reform, about how teachers and principals experience burnout, often never to recover. At least most of them know that it’s time to go when that happens. Maybe Capozzola was a great principal or teacher once. Somehow I doubt that. What I do know is that thousands of students attending MVHS never had a chance to become decent students or graduate, thanks to his leadership. That’s the damnable part about having someone like Capo in a crucial leadership position.