Two weeks ago, sports talk radio pioneer Art Rust, Jr. passed away at the ripe old age of eighty-two. Other than a few short obits in the New York Times and Daily News and a few other choice newspapers, hardly a word was said about Rust’s passing. Almost no mention on WFAN in New York, or on other sports radio talk shows in places like DC or other parts of the country. I guess for even knowledgeable reporters, columnists and talk show hosts on the sports side of the media, Rust’s passing was as remarkable as mine would be to the academic, nonprofit and writing worlds in which I inhabit. It’s much more than a shame. It’s all too typical that we as a people and media types especially forget about trailblazers in the field.

That Rust was Black only makes almost total blackout of news of his death all the more atrocious. I’m in no way suggesting that race is the reason why there was almost zero coverage of Rust. Most of this has to do with generational differences and timing. Rust because a vanguard of sports radio talk some two and a half decades before most forms of talk radio were the norm on AM or FM. He was sometimes a cutting-edge figure, other times an over-the-edge and controversial figure, as evidenced by his first book, Get That Nigger Off the Field (about the history of Blacks in baseball). Rust could be a bit over the top in his comments and corniness, constantly using the term “poppycock and balderdash” with generations of fans who had never seen nor heard the term before. But if it weren’t for Rust, whole generations of sports talk radio hosts — especially ones of color — wouldn’t have had the opportunity to make an impact on how we view and participate in sports Americana.

Rust was as much as personality as much as he was a voice imparting views and information about sports like baseball and boxing. His work in Harlem and the rest of New York in the years between ’54 and ’81 had given him the opportunity to know many an athlete, from Joe Di Maggio and Joe Louis to Muhammad Ali and Darryl Strawberry. If you wanted insight beyond a sports writer’s column or article about an athlete — especially a Black athlete — you had to listen to Rust. He either interviewed them, or knew the person well enough to play pop psychologist about them. It’s what made him a minor icon long before I was born and the folks who host now were aspiring to be beat reporters anywhere.

I started listening to Rust during his WABC-770 AM days, between ’81 and ’87, during the last of his good years on talk radio. He could talk about any sport, about the connections between race and sports, about any issue that came up, really, because he believed that he had lived long enough to have seen it all. One of the reasons I came to appreciate baseball so much in those days was because I had to listen to Rust wax poetic about the game time and time again, bringing a perspective and knowledge to it that didn’t exist on the airwaves otherwise. Long before I read books about Satchel Paige or Josh Gibson or the Homestead Grays and the Negro Leagues, I could at least listen to Rust talk about such things in airy remembrance or in interviews with former players. Heck, Rust might’ve been the reason I stopped liking baseball, as I came to understand the sport’s ugly history.

So too was I turned off to the Yankees and the fans who’d call in to Rust’s show. Besides the fact that the Mets would always be underdogs as long as they shared New York with the Yankees — no matter how many good things the Mets did — there was one simple fact. The most delusional sports fans in all of the world in the ’80s were Yankees fans. And Rust would patiently, then impatiently, set Yankees fans straight about the abilities of a team with Pags, Winfield and Mattingly but little else — as they traded away minor league talent year after year — to have a winning season, much less win the AL East. And, of course, there was the more than occasional caller who would call in with a racist comment or a racial epithet directed at Rust. But Rust would respond with dignity and courage and hyperbole and disdain, something that probably drove the drinking-caller-public nuts.

I didn’t get into his conversations about boxing as much. I could care less about Larry Holmes or Marvin Haggler or Sugar Ray Leonard or a host of others. It was already a dying sport, and Rust knew it. Rust spent a lot of time on his show going after Gerry Cooney and his promoters in the mid-80s. Too bad Cooney turned out to be one of the highlights in Michael Spinks’ career.

The end of Rust’s run came with the emergence of 24-hour sports radio talk in ’87, turning my beloved Mets station WHN (which also played country music, and really old country music at that) into WFAN. WABC let him go to WFAN. Unfortunately, with the mercurial idiot Howie Rose leading WFAN into this brave new world, Rust’s age and his lack of appeal to a younger audience made his short time on the station an unsuccessful one. I lost all respect for Rose, by the way, when he would critique Lionel Richie’s music as “boring.” For me, the end of my relating to Rust came in ’87 as well, with my move to Pittsburgh and college that summer.

So much reminds me of Rust in the radio world now. At least, anything that’s any good. The Tony Kornheiser Show and his moodiness and his friendly chats with his chummy guests. The constant interplay of music on The John Thompson Show. Interviews off the beaten path on the Tom Joyner Show. Of course, Rust wasn’t the only pioneer, but so much of what Rust did is now commonplace. So much so that it’s disheartening to know that so many have made nary a mention of the man and his work. Which is why I have today.

There’s another side to what happens in my mind and heart when I’m asleep. And with the work in putting together Boy @ The Window, when I’m lost in thought in between new sentences, deleted paragraphs, and old emotions. Just because my life’s turned out much better than expected in the years since Humanities and Mount Vernon doesn’t mean that I don’t have any baggage from my lost years.

Even now, precious sleep can be hard to come by as rain is for a desert. Even with all the accomplishments, accolades and affections, sleeping well remains a difficult thing. When I finally do sleep, my dreams and nightmares are populated by others’ threats and my fears from my past. My ex-stepfather, my ex-crushes, the beatings and the longing. The scars and the people whom those scars represent are still there to draw upon, seek wisdom from, and occasionally respond to with justified retribution.

I’m often naked in my nightmares while fending them all off. My high school classmates, my ex-stepfather and my mother, and a cast of others who represent the physical and psychological violence of my growing-up years. For years, I could count on fighting my ex-stepfather in my dreams and nightmares. Sometimes I won, sometimes I lost. A few times, I managed to kill him. Most of the time, I woke up before I could do anything at all.

Then there was Crush #1. She seemed to show up in my dreams at the most inappropriate of times. No girlfriends, girlfriends or marriage, somehow a younger version of her would show up periodically to give me sage advice. As much as it felt good for her to show up in my dreams, her presence usually left me out of sorts. I knew that a part of me loved her, but that part could never be fulfilled. Not with so many other nightmares associated with her.

The one I have most often is one of me metaphorically exposing myself, and not just ones where I’m down to my birthday suit. It’s a dream — but more often a nightmare — where I’m being interrogated about something I said that particular day or week. No matter how wonderful a day I’ve had, I find myself in a room or in a public place being questioned about something I’ve said or done. By God. Or by one of my former professors. Or by friends and acquaintances from my past.

If there was only a way for me to turn it all off, to not wait for the other shoe to drop. To forget about all of the hurt, the bitterness, the betrayals from my childhood, if not the actual events themselves. To have a completely clean emotional state, to be able to start over would make sleep much easier to find, and rest as common as the air itself.

I understand that I’m the ultimate questioner, but it sure would be nice if I could stop beating myself up with the regrets I have about the Humanities years. Not to mention the lean and mean times at 616 and in Mount Vernon, New York. It was the prism through which I understood my Reagan years world.

These nightmares and daydreams aren’t ones that happen every day or night, nor are they the majority of my images and events that populate my asleep world. But they are there, laying in wait, ready to pounce upon me from time to time. Although I don’t see myself as a five-foot-four and 125 pound tweener anymore, and haven’t for at least twenty-one years, that person is a part of me. Instead of ignoring or suppressing these “bad” or “evil” dreams, I’ve decided to learn something from the avatars embodying them. At least when I’m asleep. I’ve stopped running in these dreams, and I’ve stopped being embarrassed at my nakedness in them.

I guess that this may coincide with having put a moratorium on revisions for the book. Maybe yes, maybe no. What I do know is that my conversations with my tweener and teenage years avatars make more sense than almost all the actual conversations I had with them in the real world. I guess that, despite the baggage, these nightmares and daydreams are a good thing, for they present a wisdom, an insight or a foresight that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

I have a beef with those who make a job search into a tryout for American Idol and Top Chef wrapped into one. It seems to me that job recruiters, human resource managers and search committees have become lazy in their approach to sifting through the resumes and cover letters that they receive for jobs. I guess that a ten percent unemployment rate and seventeen percent underemployment rate would make anyone involved with the hiring process confident to the point of arrogance about how they deal with applicants. As someone who’s teaching part-time and has had a feast-or-famine time as a consultant over the past two years, I’ve applied for full-time, part-time and consulting work to bring in a decent income. I have been through some indifferent, even bizarre moments on phone interviews and in face-to-face interviews, with for-profits, private foundations, universities, and think-tanks. But nonprofit entities are truly a unique animal when it comes to process, so unique that the beef of their processes really add up to nothing more than beef-flavored tofu.

This isn’t sour grapes over not being hired. I could’ve written a dozen postings about the unfairness of life, about my not knowing enough people in high places to help find the work that I want. I haven’t, mostly because I understand that even people with the best of experiences and credentials get rejected for jobs. It’s part of the job search process, and it’s necessary, especially since I might not always be happy at a job I end up accepting. No, this is about some of my more unusual moments over the past few months in dealing with really strange job search processes in the nonprofit world.

Take my experience with the Posse Foundation. I applied for a position with them last year, and did two interviews with staff before they decided to move on with another candidate. Not unusual in any way. Except for the fact that this wasn’t their typical way of hiring folks. Usually they do a group interview in a big room, for every position. From the administrative assistant to director-level positions, applicants compete in a room for the attention of interviewers, as if these were applicants for the show Job Search (no such show, although it would likely be on NBC if it did exist). Somehow I managed to bypass that bit of humiliation. Yet, more characteristic of my previous job searches, my second interview was an afterthought, with another candidate already with staff for lunch while I was being interviewed. I had to contact them some two weeks later for an official rejection for the position.

Of course, Posse’s explanation for this is that its group interview process will give applicants a feel for what potential Posse Scholars will go through to obtain a slot for a four-year scholarship to a university through one of their university scholars. Maybe so. But at least the students receive a rejection letter or other assistance after the process is over. Nor do students sense on some level favoritism during their interview process. Not to mention the fact that most of your applicants are well above the age of seventeen or eighteen.

Another example of the unusual in a job search was a job I should’ve never applied for with The Washington Center for Internships and Academic Seminars. I managed to get an interview with folks who had all the professionalism of college students working at Jerry’s Pizza and Subs. For an hour, they asked me all kinds of questions about what I knew to be a part-time position, based on their own job advertisement on Idealist.org. I guess I should’ve been more curious, given that five people were in the room grilling me. When I finally asked a question about the flexibility of their schedule, they looked shocked. The folks finally got around to tell me that I was interviewing for both a full-time and a part-time position at the same time, with the full-time one being the priority. Then one of their directors quickly herded me outside a side gate — I guess he wanted to make sure that I felt sufficiently humiliated as a Black male — to end the interview. Needless to say, these un-professionals never did send me an official rejection notice.

But nothing, absolutely nothing, is more irritating than doing extra work for a position per the request of a potential employer, completing it and then not being interviewed at all. This was the case with The New Teacher Project (TNTP). I applied for a work-at-home position in data and policy analysis with them. The original application asked for a writing sample, but I couldn’t attach one on their application webpage. A few days later, I received an email from TNTP asking me to complete a series of exercises crunching and analyzing data regarding teacher effectiveness. This included writing a memo to prospective funders based on one set of data, importing another set of data into MS Access, running queries, filters and calculations, filling out tables and making appropriate suggestions based on this other set of data. I received this assignment Thursday evening at 6:18 pm a couple of weeks ago, but TNTP wanted my completed exercise by Sunday. I managed to get an extension for Tuesday and completed the assignment, only to receive a generic rejection from TNTP thirty-six hours later. It turned out that others “more closely fit” the position requirements.

I was miffed, and sent them a note saying so. It was lazy — to say the least — to push applicants into an exercise process before being interviewed, only to reject them based on something other than the exercise itself. I could’ve just as easily provided my published writing samples of my use of data on education policy related issues. To use valuable time to work on this when I could’ve applied for other jobs made this process ridiculous. Not to mention the fact that in going this route, TNTP should’ve paid folks for their time and effort. They gave me a generic excuse equivalent to the rejection note, saying that this was the best way to identify the best candidates. I have a better idea — how about interviewing folks first, then asking them to complete an exercise!

Academia and other fields have their own quirks and nuances. But at least you know going in what those are. The nonprofit world just makes up stuff or pulls ideas out of a “How To Do a Wacky Interview” book and expects its applicants to roll with it. I don’t expect a job search to be fair — after all, I live in a who-you-know world. What I do expect is for the search process to make sense, be consistent in its unfairness and a bit of transparency in terms of what these entities are looking for. That some haven’t even met this minimal requirement says a lot about how far professional standards have dropped, and why nonprofits are often seen in a bad light.

What do E.D. Hirsch’s books on Cultural Literacy, the commercials about nine-month-olds who can read, Harry Reid’s comments about President Obama and Pat Robertson’s admonishing of Haitians and Haiti have in common? They’re all about us, ignorant Americans, arrogant and all-assuming in our cultural norms. They all contain seeds of Whiteness, maybe even Whiteness as an assumed sense of right and wrong, of good and evil, of better intelligence, benevolence and wisdom. There may even be a touch of eugenics involved in all four, as if the White American way (which unfortunately is still one and the same) is the only right to speak and think in this world.

It’s amazing that we’re still dealing with the idea that there is only one path to intellectual development and growth in our society. This despite all of Howard Gardner’s work on multiple intelligences, and the work of so many others like Gardner. We still think that we should buy Mozart, Beethoven and Bach mp3’s, put them on our iPods, and put the headphones on the bellies of pregnant American citizens so that their children can be proficient third-grade readers before the age of five. We still believe that behaviors that promote individuality and unthinking critiques of everything are the best behaviors for our often lonely and uncritical thinking children to grow up with.

Hirsch was the main guru of a new movement of American intellectual development with his books on Cultural Literacy back in the ’80s. Now we have a series of commercials exploiting the worries of suburban and White parents with YourBabyCanRead.com. Nine-month-olds, two- year-olds and five-year-olds of the world unite in the unyielding quest to become voracious and critical readers, writers and thinkers. An all-consuming task in front of all other goals, like potty training, learning how to use a fork and a spoon, and learning how to listen to parents without whining or throwing a tantrum.

These commercials hearken back to the thinking of the first half of the twentieth century, to the wonderful world of the eugenics movement, in which scientists and pseudo-scientists sought to improve the intellectual and athletic skills of the human race — at least the “pure” and White part of it — by experimenting with those most pure. Or, more often, by experimenting (and ultimately, exterminating) those who were deemed much less pure or even dangerous to keep in the human gene pool. Blacks, Jews, gays, developmental disabled and mentally retarded all found themselves in the latter category. Most of the derogatory terms we use today as youth and adults — retard, moron, dull-minded, imbecile, even nerd — were spawned by leaders of eugenics and its off-shoots between roughly 1900 and the ’50s.

Now, I’m not arguing that a kid under the age of five can’t become a proficient reader. My older brother Darren — who learned to read without any assistance by the time he was three — is a case in point. But he didn’t do it through coaching, flash cards or Mozart. Heck, my mother — when she played music back then — would play Al Green, Diana Ross and the Supremes and The Temptations. So why the emphasis on classical music, coaching, flash cards and the pseudo-science of the baby brain here? Because it has been ingrained in the minds of most Americans — especially White Americans — that intelligence is a White thing. And in a world of increasing educational competition, that intelligence no longer has time to develop. What will Jill or Johnny do if they won’t be ready for a gifted and accelerated learning program in school by the time they’re seven years old? How will they ever get into Harvard, Yale or Princeton? How will they ever be ready to be a neuro-surgeon or a corporate lawyer?

Of course, the commercial shows one example of a kid whose interests included basketball and other sports, and not just literacy and mid-elementary level books, a nod to the need for physical stimulation (and indirectly, a nod to eugenics as well). But isn’t it interesting that not a single person in the YourBabyCanRead.com commercial was of color? Not one, not even a token one? As the late Art Rust, Jr. would say, that’s a bunch of poppycock and balderdash.

So too are the witticisms of Sen. Reid (D-NV) and televangelist Pat Robertson. Between “light-skinned Black,” “Negro dialect,” and two-century-long deals “with the devil,” we could just write the comments off as the bleating of stupid White guys. That’s far too easy. Because they were and are communicating and connecting mostly with other people like them — folks in powerful positions to influence our culture. Even though Sen. Reid didn’t mean his statement to be one for public consumption, it was meant for a private group of powerful people. And Robertson knew full well that his argument about a wrathful Old Testament God seeking vengeance on darker-skinned people who didn’t obey their masters (not to mention the Voodoo stereotype) would resonate well with his “White is Right” audience.

How does this make us ignorant? We assume that we’re the richest and most powerful country on Earth for two reasons. One, because we’re smart and hard-working individuals from mostly immigrant (and White) backgrounds, taking advantage of this nation’s resources. Or two, because we’re God-fearing Christians, faithful to the core, and because God blessed us with the bounty of this nation’s resources. That is to say, we’re good enough, we’re smart enough, and doggone it, God loves us. But apparently, not all of us, and certainly not folks who aren’t White and outside of the US. Our quest for a singular culture, for super-intelligence, for a world that only makes sense to a select and powerful few has left tens of millions of Americans as ignorant about the world as Americans would believe those in Port-au-Prince are these days. Except that with the ignorant and powerful people to their north, Haitians never were as ignorant as us.

It must’ve been everyone I’d come to know. About twenty-five or thirty of them in all. Led by Crush #1, her eventual first love and my Italian Club tormentors, they all were marching down East Lincoln near where I lived, sticks and stones in hand. More like bricks and baseball bats and chains as they got closer. They were all dressed in Sergio Valente and Jordache, Benetton and OshKosh, Levi’s and Gap attire. They were all after me, my kufi, my life, my eternal soul. They weren’t running after me. They were marching in formation, like Soviet troops in Red Square, only with ridiculous smiles of mayhem giving away their intentions. I felt scared. But I had resigned myself to my fate. If I was goin’ down, gosh darn it, I was gonna put up a fight and take some of them with me!

Dreaming about your classmates in any other way than out of adoration or infatuation isn’t healthy. They served as a metaphor. They were an obstacle between me and my inner peace, a constant reminder that the odds were against me escaping 616 and Mount Vernon for the brighter pastures of a life and education elsewhere. They were symbols all right, symbols for everything from abuse and fear of abuse to undying and unrequited love. I woke up, sweating and with a panicked heartbeat from the nightmare. I looked at all of my body parts to make sure that I still had them in place before getting out of bed.

Later that snow-melt Saturday in early ’84, my mother sent me to the Fleetwood Station post office in the northwest corner of Mount Vernon to pick up a certified package. She had a PO box there, set up originally to protect sensitive documents from thieves in the building. I assumed that she was using it now to keep Maurice from getting his hands on any checks or other sensitive information. This was yet another task that I’d become the go-to-child for. I got dressed in my hand-me down winter coat and blue sweats and began the slushy trek to Fleetwood.

Then deja vu struck. I found myself standing at the northeast corner of Lorraine and East Lincoln, unusually quiet because of the snow and the cold front that came with it the night before. This was where the metaphorical forces of destruction had lined up and marched against me. I laughed out loud, hoping at the same time that no one saw me. I looked down at the curb and sidewalk as the slush-ice was turning into mini-glacial streams and rivers, all blending as they ran toward a storm drain. In a semi-frozen pack nearby lay ten dollars. It had been trapped by the icy H2O. “My luck is getting better every day,” I said to myself. This happened to me, someone who never found more than a penny at a time on the streets and sidewalks of Mount Vernon.
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It’s funny how things like this happened to me at the beginning of a year. A dream, nightmare or vision that helped to guide me or gave me no choice but to gird my loins. A crisis, financial or otherwise, that left me so motivated and focused that the work that followed helped bring the crisis to an end. Maybe it’s because at the beginning of a year, whatever baggage I’ve brought from the previous year has left me open to wisdom and understanding beyond my actual abilities. Maybe it’s been in the quiet of a cold month of January or a cold winter season that I’m most susceptible to a quiet voice of reason and imagination, insight, foresight and hindsight that works better in a calmer mind.

I had planned to discuss this nightmarish dream of twenty-six years ago this week, but the cataclysmic events in Haiti and other issues have distracted me. To imagine that so many people — through no fault of their own — lost their lives as quickly as it would take a nuclear bomb to knock out electricity and send out a devastating blast wave. It’s saddening and chilling right down to the marrow in my bones. Except that I don’t have to imagine. The BBC and CNN have done much to make sure of that. So many are considered dead that it’s hard to see Haiti ever recovering from this earthquake.

Except that this is more than about a 7.0 Richter scale shaking of the ground. The poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, and one of the poorest on Earth, was hit by this quake. A nation that has struggled with the scorn of idiot imperialists like Pat Robertson specifically, and the economic imperialism of the nations of Europe in general since those once enslaved there revolted against their French owners nearly 22o years ago. The richest colony in the French Empire quickly became as poor as anyone in the US Delta region or a Hurricane Katrina survivor from Ward 9 can imagine.

Civil wars and warlords and a light-skinned hierarchy, informal embargo-enforced economic inequality, and natural disaster have practically been a part of Haiti’s history ever since it officially became independent in 1804. With poverty and economic and political instability comes poor building structures, limited public infrastructure in terms of doctors, nurses, police and firefighters, and a lack of the construction and demolition equipment that we take for granted in the US. Just across the street from us is an almost-finished high-rise and state-of-the-art, solar-powered office building. There’s enough there to help dig out dozens of still trapped Haitians buried in rubble — the living and the dead.

Even in the midst of all of this horror, even with the smells of rotting corpses, the moans and screams and blank stares of the injured and living, and the sights of collapsed buildings and chaos, there is hope. For I’m certain that there’s a kid or an adult whose dreams remain unshaken. A tweener whose vision for his or her life remains their guidepost. A man or woman whose hurt, upset, and devastated, but refuses to surrender their wisdom and their hope because of this. And as those who hold out in hope that we can help in some way, we must not surrender our dreams either, for Haitians or for ourselves.

I have a beef with the world of folks who still use the word “minority” to describe people like me. Most of them are White, a small minority are Black or Latino or Asian. Almost all of them are from Generation X or older generations. The final straw for me was the past week of listening to sports reporters talking about the NFL’s Rooney Rule, the one that requires teams with coaching vacancies to interview at least one “minority” candidate before making a final hiring decision. Although I think that there are many benefits to the Rooney Rule, I don’t think that calling one group of people Whites and everyone else minorities, especially if done continually, sets up the so-called others/non-Whites as outsiders, not the norm, people who need a handout from the dominant White folks who own the teams and control the hiring process.

I suppose that if the roles were reversed and we were calling all Whites “minorities” that there would be some gnashing of teeth on the part of White folk. Not necessarily. There is a power relationship issue that goes well beyond the numbers aspect of majority vs. minority. Financial, economic, social, military and cultural dominance that won’t depend on Whites continuing to be the majority of the nation’s population. This is something that folks who use this term without any regard to the diverse groups that they’ve lumped together don’t understand. For those people, White is normal, White is powerful, White is dominant. “Minorities” are the other, in constant need of help, have little regard for our nation’s cultural norms, deserve little in the way of educational, economic or other kinds of opportunities. Our individual and group identities are inconsequential and irrelevant, as they have little to do with the White world.

So Whites who use the term “minority” are racists, while the “minorities” who use the word are misinformed old farts, right? Absolutely not! I think that folks who use the term are lazy more than anything else. Even though the more appropriate term for people who aren’t White is “people of color” — and the term’s been around for at least three decades — many don’t know it or refuse to use it even if they do. “Minority” or “minorities” is one word, “people of color” or “persons of color” is three. It takes up too much space in a newspaper article and takes too much time to say those extra two words. Saying “people of color” sounds too politically correct, because it actually makes folks see in their minds’ eyes people who are Black, Latino and Asian in background. I would argue that this isn’t true, that using the term “minority” is the more sterile — and thus more politically-correct — term being used, but used in a casual and lazy way to describe 110 million people.

This is something that’s bothered me since the middle of my junior year in high school. The term “people of color” was in its infancy then, but I knew that I didn’t like being called a minority, as if someone White could call me anything they wanted without my input. It was bad enough that the powers that were at Mount Vernon High School could tell me what to wear, where to go, when I could read my Bible in school. But to also be called a “minority” as a lazy substitute for Black or something else I found insulting in ’85. These days, it remains lazy and insulting, and shows a disdain for the consideration for how those who are so-called minorities see and characterize themselves.

The same is true on the issue of the use of the term racism and race. Although I do see the issue of race involved in many issues that at first glance might seem to not involve race, that is hardly the same thing as saying that something is racist. There are folks who scream “racism” whenever a Black public figure finds themselves in hot water, and there are folks who scream “this isn’t about race!” to every claim of race or racism, which for them is the same thing. This happened again, this time with the emerging evidence that Washington Wizards scorer and flaky idiot Gilbert Arenas semi-threatened one of his teammates with supposedly unloaded guns in the locker room of the Verizon Center in DC. Folks have spent the past few days calling Arenas’ much-deserved vilification in the media “racist,” and commentators denying that any of this anything to do with race.

The folks who are calling the Arenas coverage “racist” are as idiotic as Arenas. To say that what Arenas has done is typical of what Blacks from our generation grew up with are dumb asses who couldn’t have an honest conversation about race if they were kneeling at the throne of Almighty God on Judgment Day. Those radio, TV and Internet commentators and bloggers whom say that this isn’t about race or culture are correct, of course, but they miss one point when they make that point. That is, that anyone who is of color and learns about another famous person of color who gets themselves in legal or media trouble experiences a cringing moment. These few examples of successful individuals of color, once they become public pariahs — like O.J. Simpson, Tiger Woods or Gilbert Arenas — reflect badly on everyday people of color, especially Blacks. That is the backdrop to the moronic comments of folks defending Arenas against “racism.”

So, do things like the Arenas situation or the revealing of Woods’ recent affairs involve race? To say that it does means accusing Whites of racism, at least according to White mouthpieces. To say that it doesn’t completely discounts that feeling of weariness that Blacks and other folks of color experience when rich and public people who look like us screw up legally or otherwise. Perhaps the bigger point here is that Whites who refuse to understand the dynamics of race are so tied to the notion of individualism that they’re blinded to the realities of race, while folks of color are double-bond to their individual and group affiliations. Until those in the public arena can understand and articulate these tensions, we will continue to talk past each other as if one group is speaking Russian and the other is speaking Mandarin Chinese.

Comedian Chris Rock probably put it best in his Bringin’ The Pain concert in ’96. He said that “there are two kinds of Black people — there are ‘Black people,’ and there are ‘N____s’.” I’m not so crass as to use the N-word to describe the likes of Arenas or jailed Louisiana ex-congressman William Jefferson (the guy with $90,000 in cash payoffs in his freezer), nor so naive as to think that these imbeciles represent me and what I’m doing with my life. But I’m also not so tied to the White notion of individualism to think that no one White doesn’t equate the behaviors of prominent people of color with the millions of everyday people of color. Between the lumping together of peoples of color as “minorities” and the refusal to acknowledge that race (not racism) plays a role in our perceptions and perspectives on individuals’ words and deeds, our public world needs to get into the ’90s before the ’10s get here. Oh wait a minute — I guess I should revise to “before the ’20s get here!”