My First Walk (and Making Plans)

15 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, race, Religion, Youth

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Affluence, Bronxville, Child Abuse, College, Coping Strategies, Domestic Violence, Eastchester, Economic Inequality, Making Plans, New Rochelle, Pelham, Phyllis, Poverty, Racism, Tuckahoe, Walking

Thirty-one years ago this week was the beginning of an inadvertent coping strategy that would lead me away from 616, out of Mount Vernon, New York, into Pittsburgh, and college, and grad school. (And eventually, to a worn-out right knee, leg exercises and a running regiment that I’ve adhered to for nearly a decade.) It was a walk that was literally my only time away from home and my summer of abuse at the hands of my late idiot ex-stepfather Maurice Washington (or Judah ben Israel). It was a walk in which I began to plan my escape from the madness.

From Boy @ The Window:

“It was August ’82, and I didn’t know if I’d make it to the end of the year.

“If masturbation were the only thing that I discovered that month, I might’ve begun aspiring for some other kind of life. Instead, I decided on another boring August day to do something else novel. I didn’t want to go to Wilson Woods again. We didn’t have any money anyway. I decided to take my siblings on a walk on the wild side, to walk outside our immediate neighborhood. First Darren and I took baby Maurice and Yiscoc in his new stroller out of 616 and walked to Pelham…The four of us walked and strollered down East Lincoln Avenue, across the stone bridge over the Hutchinson River Parkway into Pelham, and turned left on Fifth Avenue to go north. This was uncharted territory for all of us, especially me. I hadn’t been down in the city all year, and my life for most of the summer was spent between Wilson Woods, Pearsall Drive, and 616. North Pelham might as well have been Helena, Montana to me.

‘We don’t know where we’re going,’ Darren said.

‘Yeah, and?,’ I said in response.

‘Okay, but it’s your fault if we get lost, Donald,’ Darren said.

“We didn’t get lost. We walked until we hit Chester Heights, the beginning of the village of Eastchester. It was amazing in that it was much more suburban than Mount Vernon or the part of Pelham that I’d known up until that moment. The homes were luxurious by my standards. Everyone seemed to own a BMW, Volvo, Mercedes-Benz, or Peugeot. There weren’t many sidewalks around, only well-manicured lawns. We had walked into a ritzy community without any warning. But instead of becoming depressed or angry, it made me introspective. ‘Look at these houses!,’ I said to Darren as we walked by one Tudor-style home after another three-story mansion, broken up only by a few cul-de-sacs.

We walked across another bridge, this one with an overhanging meshed metal fence, across the Cross-County Parkway, and ended up in Mount Vernon for a brief moment. We veered right as we walked up a hill and out of Mount Vernon again. After walking through what appeared to be an enchanted forest, we discovered we were in Bronxville. Even at twelve, I knew that Bronxville was just about the richest community in America. And it looked like it, too. I began to think that the world was a cruel place, having rich Whites living so close to us yet their lives were so far apart from ours. Darren, having been around rich Whites through Clear View for nearly eight years, didn’t think too much of it.

“That’s when it hit me. If I wanted to live a better life, to have a nice house and a car and a family, it seemed to me that I needed an education, a college education. I wasn’t going to get there just graduating from high school, especially in Humanities, where the expectations for college were so high that some kids already knew that they were going to law school. I just knew that I couldn’t go through another summer of abuse. So I said to myself, ‘I’ve got to get through the next five years. I’ve got to go to college.’ I knew almost intuitively that my choices were to continue to experience abuse without reaching for something that I thought I could do based on my smarts. Yet it seemed like an impossible task.

“So as we walked through the villages of Bronxville and Tuckahoe, ending up on North Columbus Avenue/Route 22, I began to think about what I wanted to get out of eighth grade. It seemed to me that the most important class for my future was Algebra, since that led to higher forms of math. I knew English and Social Studies would be really easy, but with success in Algebra, I could go into high school with a little more confidence.

“That’s when we passed by a ranch-style home with a stone facade. I looked and saw someone out in front I hadn’t seen since the end of the school year. It was Phyllis, outside in the front yard with her sister, apparently back from bike riding. She called us over, and the four of us talked. Phyllis asked what we’d been up to over the summer. This was the first Black family I’d seen during our two-hour walk.

“Of course I didn’t go into any detail about what we’d been up to. After all, the one thing that the past year had taught me was not to open up my mouth and say everything that was on my mind! So I let her and her older sister Claudia do most of the talking. They’d gone somewhere, somewhere down South to visit family. It looked like they were having a good time, the time of their lives compared to us.

‘Do you live around here?,’ Phyllis asked.

‘Oh, we’re on a long walk and just happened to be in the neighborhood,’ I said.

‘Okay,’ she said in response.

“In the neighborhood. Sure, if Bronxville, Eastchester, Pelham and 616, all part of our eight-mile trek, was all part of one gigantic neighborhood. After about ten minutes, we continued home. Darren was more excited about seeing Phyllis and her sister than I was.

“Yet it wasn’t that I was unexcited… I finally had a plan, a long-term plan, for dealing with the situation at 616. I knew that there would be a lot of smaller steps that I’d have to take before even getting to college, much less getting a degree…Otherwise I really didn’t have anything else to look forward to, except what I thought would be a very painful life and an extremely early death.”

That walk — and the hundreds of walks (and runs) I went on all through eighth grade and high school –was the difference between becoming a professor and a writer and having died well before the turn of this century. If not literally, then certainly psychologically.

“The Negro Problem,” “The Jewish Question,” & “Closing the Achievement Gap”

10 Saturday Aug 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race

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Anti-Union, Booker T. Washington, Closing the Achievement Gap, Corporatized Education Reform, Crisis in Education, Education Reform, Eugenicists, Eugenics Movement, Frederick Hoffman, High-Stakes Testing, Jewish Question, Negro Problem, Parallels, Private Foundations, Teacher Effectiveness, Teachers Unions, Technocrats, W. E. B. Du Bois

Logo of the Second International Congress of Eugenics, 1921, May 9, 2005. (Fastfission via Wikipedia). In public domain.

What do these three disparate phrases have in common? This came up during my recent lunch with my friend Andrew at Lebanese Taverna a little more than a week ago. Among other things, we were lamenting the dominant theme of education reform as union-busting and the supplanting of teachers with high-stakes tests and Teach for America substitutes.

As we discussed Andrew’s second book on the 1990s culture wars and their roots in the 1960s conservative movement, it occurred to me that what both of us have thought of as recent or new really wasn’t. The efforts over the past decade to “close the achievement gap,” an actual problem really, are based in the nineteen and twentieth-century eugenics movement more than it is in a real sincere effort to confront the barriers to high academic achievement for students in poverty and for students of color.

Satirical cartoon of Rudyard Kipling’s The White (?) Man’s Burden (“white” colonial powers being carried as the burden of their “colored” subjects), Life Magazine, March 16, 1899. (Travb via Wikipedia). In public domain.

“How does it feel to be a problem?,” W. E. B. Du Bois asked numerous times and wrote in numerous ways in his The Souls of Black Folk (1903). The Negro problem for White scholars and politicians at the turn of the twentieth century varied from Frederick Hoffman’s 1896 statistical eugenics argument that predicted the “extinction of the Negro” to the much more common struggle of how to educate the Negro (but not educate them too well). Hoffman’s White supremacy argument was a bit outside the mainstream even for his Whites-are-always-right era. The more mainstream problem of Negro education became one of “practical” vocational (or, as it was called at the time, industrial) education as advocated by accommodationist Booker T. Washington versus Du Bois’ higher education and leadership preparation for the Black Talented Tenth.

We’re here again, in the early twenty-first century, with the technocrats in government and White paternalists in the private foundation world sounding the alarm that there’s an achievement gap between the affluent and the poor, as well as between Whites, Blacks and Latinos. Except that this achievement gap’s been around for a half-century. Except that the biggest single factor in raising student achievement rates is family income and occupation(s), not more testing or a theory of change to assess teacher effectiveness. Except that schools in the districts in which the achievement gap is the most obvious — segregated, mostly poor and of color — are underfunded when accounting for inflation and other factors (e.g., age of school buildings, teacher-student ratios).

So too with the “Jewish question” in comparison to this crisis in education. One of the worst kept secrets in the first half of the twentieth century was that the Jewish question wasn’t just a Nazi German one, but an American one as well. The real Jewish question for American educators was how to explain Jewish overrepresentation as high achievers in public education and as the best and brightest in higher education. That despite the work of eugenicists — the technocrats of their day — to tweak IQ tests and entrance tests in favor of affluent White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

They couldn’t answer their Jewish question in higher education, except to limit the number of Jews accepted in elite institutions like Harvard, Yale and Princeton (in the latter case, to the point of exclusion). But we know how Nazi Germans decided to address their Jewish question — exclusion, discrimination, persecution, and the Final Solution. All to the detriment of advanced science and technology programs, not to mention the German economy. Vast resources went to a deadly and ultimately useless cause, all in the name of racial purity and betterment for “Nordic Aryans.”

“Mind The Gap” warning in London Underground, Victoria Station, November 27, 2011. (Reinhard Dietrich via Wikipedia). Released to public domain.

In a very limited sense, the same is occurring with the education reform movement these days. Educators and politicians all pulling billions of dollars that could otherwise go to free breakfast and lunch programs, psychological services, physical education and arts programs for an eugenics-light agenda. No one from this movement has suggested a final solution as such, but they do believe that teachers unions, bad teachers and not enough STEM programs are the problem. Note that though the goal here is to “close the achievement gap,” the actual things that occur at schools in which most of the high-achieving Whites and Asian Americans (many of whom attend private and parochial schools) aren’t on the table at all.

Ultimately, the problem with the fear-mongering crowd on the “problem,” the “question” and the “gap” is that their perspective is one of the all-knowing, all-seeing White paternalist. One whose ideas about a situation or a group comes out of thin air, in some strange attempt to help said situation or group. In the case of today’s version of education reform, the only end-game is to destroy public education while exacting a profit in the process. Closing the achievement gap? Yeah, if “closing the gap” is defined by closing schools, killing unions and leaving most of America’s poor and of color students with no alternative for a better future.

Terri and Mr. Asexual

07 Wednesday Aug 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Apartment Hunting, Asexuality, Bipolar Disorder, Biracial, Clubbing, Clubs, Dallas, Friendship, Friendships, Mother-Daughter Relationships, Night Life, Terri, Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health

Asexual pride flag, September 18, 2010. (Wikipedia). In public domain.

One of my inner circle of friends during my undergraduate years at the University of Pittsburgh was Terri. She was one of the more interesting folks I met during all my years at Pitt and in Pittsburgh. She was so smart, so intriguing, so whimsical, so troubled, so much in fear of success and so flawed. I learned so much from Terri without ever really trying, because she herself was in search of something during all the years I knew her.

I first met Terri in January ’89 at Pitt’s William Pitt Student Union, in the TV room where a bunch of us were watching Dallas (the original series on CBS that Friday night).

William Pitt Union (as viewed from Cathedral of Learning), University of Pittsburgh, July 28, 2012. (Mackensen via Wikipedia).

(From Boy @ The Window) “At five-two, she had short dark-brown hair and also wore glasses. There was something about Terri that I knew was different, that she wasn’t just “Black,” whatever that meant. She was one of the first biracial women I’d come to know. It seemed like those were the first words out of her mouth. Maybe not. But Terri did tell us she was “half-Black and half-White” before the night was over….She immediately jumped into our growing conversation once they sat down and criticized Dallas as one of many examples of lily-Whiteness on TV. That launched a whole new discussion, with everything from The Cosby Show to 227.

“After about an hour of debates, jokes and wonderful conversation, we all went out into Oakland. We started at The O, the nickname for Original’s. It had already been a mainstay for students and steelworkers in need of cheap food and beer since ’60. The Pitt football team often drank and caroused there, often getting into fights with Pitt Police. This Friday it was overcrowded and dirty, and we wanted to talk. Terri had become the leader of our pack, and took us over to Hemingway’s as an alternative. The bar and restaurant was The O’s opposite, very quiet, very reserved, with a very much older and Whiter crowd. It was also the first time I’d been carded, so I couldn’t have a drink even if I wanted to.”

Terri was the one who could truly bring out my adventurous side, as she introduced me to Pittsburgh’s night life — Black and White. She didn’t seem to care that I was still only nineteen or twenty years old. Terri could talk herself — and me — into a private over-twenty-five club in Homewood or Penn Hills, or out of trouble with police like no one I knew back then. I met all kinds of Pittsburghers as a result. Gay and straight, older and younger, college educated and working-class stiff. Hanging out with her was a constant balance between a real social life and one when being out too late may have put her or us in danger.

Apartment building at corner of North Aiken & Centre Avenue in Shadyside, Pittsburgh, PA, August 7, 2013. (http://pittsburgh.olx.com).

My shift to a more regulated schedule with Terri began during the summer of ’90. I came back to the ‘Burgh the first week of August after nearly two months working at Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health. I wanted to find my first real apartment, not just a room in which I shared a kitchen and bathroom with six others in South Oakland (which I’d done in the two previous years). I stayed with Terri and her mother at their new place in Shadyside for a week, fairly close to all the neighborhoods in which I hoped to find a place.

At first, the late nights of talking and hanging out were fun. But by the third day, I was knee-deep in apartment listings and phone calls to landlords in Oakland, Shadyside, Squirrel Hill, Wilkinsburg, Bloomfield, Point Breeze, Homewood and East Liberty. Terri wasn’t exactly a happy camper, with me, her mother or her various suitors for that particular week. Terri and her mother had several arguments that week, about money, dating, even over her treatment of me. The most remarkable thing what hearing Terri call her mother a “bitch” over and over again one night, as if it was a period at the end of a sentence.

My problem, of course, was that I was “asexual” according to Terri. It wasn’t the first time someone had described me as such, and it certainly wasn’t the first time Terri had called me “asexual.” This time and week was different somehow. I guess that Terri thought that I’d look at a couple of places and then spend the rest of the week partying. But given my finances, I couldn’t just plop down money on a $400 a month one-bedroom with bay windows. I don’t think that she understood this, though, not the way Terri spent money back then.

I assumed, right or wrong, that she felt spurned by my lack of interest that week in spending my late nights out on the town with her. For that week at least, I wasn’t into the Terri Show. As up and charming as she could be, Terri had a dark side, one in which her mother obviously faced much more than anyone else. I still considered her a friend, even a good friend. I just couldn’t be the kind of friend that could be what she wanted me to be on whim and demand. And over the next six years, I gradually also stopped being the friend that would listen to all of Terri’s gripes about life and race, identity and bad boyfriends.

WWMLKD (What Would Martin Luther King Do) – and Say Now?

05 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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"I Have A Dream" speech, "I've Been To The Mountaintop" speech, "Return of the King" (2006), Aaron McGruder, Activism, Black Elite, Black Gen Xers, Civil Rights, Civil Rights Generation, Civil Rights Leadership, Civil Rights Movement, Elitism, Institutional Racism, March on Washington, Martin Luther King, Memphis Sanitation Worker's Strike, MLK, MLK Assassination, Post-Civil Rights Generation, Racism, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Socioeconomic Status, The Boondocks, WWJD

“Return of the King” screenshot, Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks, originally aired, January 15, 2006. (Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use due to picture’s low resolution and direct subject of this blog post.

Perhaps the most famous episode of Aaron’s McGruder’s award-winning series The Boondocks was his “Return of the King,” which originally aired on the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday in ’06. In it, King survived his ’68 assassination and came out of a coma into an early twenty-first century America and Black America in which his style of activism was no longer in vogue.

Instead, in McGruder’s vision, King came to realize how generations of younger Blacks have become lost in their overt materialism, as symbolized by ass-shaking, hip-hop and rap culture, the constant use of “nigga” in public, and the self-aggrandizement of Black televangelists and other purveyors of the cult of prosperity. In response, McGruder’s King said, “I’ve seen what’s around the corner, I’ve seen what’s over the horizon, and I promise you, you niggas have nothing to celebrate! And no, I won’t get there with you. I’m going to Canada!”

McGruder’s attempt to address the generational and socioeconomic divide between the Civil Rights generation and the post-civil rights generations that have followed was a limited one. It certainly represented well the views of a Black elite nurtured at the altar of the Civil Rights Movement. But despite the hilarity and the double-meanings, I don’t think that The Boondocks‘ “Return of the King” episode is even close to a decent representative of what King would’ve been like had he lived to see the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington and his “I Have A Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial.

Extrapolating from King’s last years:

The best and easiest guess in thinking about what King would’ve said or done in the years between that dreaded first Thursday in April ’68 and today would be to look at what King was doing in the last months of his life. Openly protesting the Vietnam War and the oppression of the poor and of color in the US and abroad. Breaking with other civil rights leaders on the Vietnam War and issue of addressing the collusion between institutional racism, income inequality and anti-union efforts in Memphis, in Chicago and in other places in the US.

Memphis sanitation workers’ strike/march under “I Am A Man” picket signs, Memphis, TN, March 29, 1968. (Ernest C. Withers via http://workers.org).

Alienating a president in Lyndon Baines Johnson — the most radical supporter of civil rights and anti-poverty efforts of any president ever — was what King did in expanding his words and deeds beyond “I Have A Dream” and “We Shall Overcome” mobilizations to end segregation and overt racial discrimination. Moving beyond the grassroots movement paradigm of respectable Negroes (i.e., traditional church-going, middle and some working-class Blacks) to include Black men and women who weren’t relatively well-educated and in good jobs — like the sanitation workers in Memphis — was where King had already moved himself.

This is the King that would’ve evolved over the previous forty-five or so years had he lived. Based on this actual King, it would be a bit mystifying to hear him give speeches on, grant interviews for or write op-eds in which his main theme would be to eviscerate the American poor, Blacks and Latinos for buying into a material capitalistic hip-hop culture. Or to spend all of his waning moments lamenting the perpetual stereotype of teenage welfare mothers looking for a handout instead of a hand up. Or to devote his remaining energies to blaming Black males for their inability to wear waist-fitting pants and then connecting hip-hop to a criminal culture, a drug culture and general thuggery (That’s Bill Cosby’s and Don Lemon’s jobs, apparently).

Don Lemon, CNN picture, August 5, 2013. (http://cnn.com).

King would’ve probably withdrawn from public life by now, maybe even to Canada, as McGruder’s version suggests. But not before an additional two or three decades in which he would’ve boldly gone after the military-industrial complex, corporate welfare, government corruption, the War on Drugs and insufficient investment in America’s public schools and infrastructure. King would’ve seen all of them as factors that would have a negative impact on the life chances of the poor, especially poor African Americans.

Assessing blame – or not:

No doubt that King would’ve also found aspects of how Blacks have expressed themselves in pop culture and in the public sphere over the past four and half decades problematic. Yet based on the last years of his life, I think that he would’ve saved much of his ire for the aging Civil Rights generation for resting on their laurels and standing in judgment of younger Blacks, poor Blacks, or anyone else who didn’t follow directly in their now elitist footsteps. As King evolved in the four years, seven months and one week between the March on Washington and his assassination, so had his views of civil rights leadership. Well-meaning but pretentious, with the assumption that fixing the South would clear the way for Blacks of every socioeconomic stripe everywhere.

What’s most important to realize, though, is that King, had he lived, would’ve seen what most Americans regardless of race have seen in their own lives. Decline in wealth and income, a gulf of wealth between them and the top one-percent of income earners, a significant decline of well-paying union jobs replaced by minimum-wage non-union ones, rising unemployment, and expensive housing and healthcare. These are among so many other things that 240 to 270 million of us face on various levels that didn’t exist at the end of King’s life, things that disproportionately affect the poor, especially the poor and of color.

King and the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement:

The movement never evolved to address such issues, King would’ve said. Individuals did. Jesse Jackson, at least in the 1970s and 1980s, did. But the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement as a whole didn’t. They assumed that eliminating all forms of deliberate and overt discrimination in public institutions would bring down barriers for all African Americans. King would’ve said they were incorrect, and knew as much by the time of the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike in February and March ’68.

Unlevel playing field (soccer in this case), August 5, 2013. (http://funatico.com).

Despite the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (both of which have obviously been weakened by the Reagan Years and this year’s Supreme Court Shelby County v. Holder decision), the life chances for any Black person born into poverty haven’t improve much at all. They remain in segregated communities, despite the movement toward mixed housing. They send their kids to underfunded and overcrowded schools, despite the paternalistic efforts of the so-called education reform movement. Jobs that pay a living wage are few, and conditions that promote neighborhood stability are better but still rare.

To assume that Blacks a half-century removed from the March on Washington and King’s “I Have A Dream” speech would be eternally grateful for the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement in the wake of subtle yet pervasive discrimination on the basis of both race and socioeconomic status is ludicrous. It would smack of the elitism in which those who benefited most from the movement have displayed over the years. King would’ve realized the same thing, certainly well before the turn of the twenty-first century.

That anyone poor and of color in particular can overcome such barriers to, say, earn a doctorate or write a book is something akin to a miracle. Or to become a professional athlete or a music artist, a bit more common, if stereotypical, for that matter. King would’ve seen this and brought an analysis to the legacy of civil rights that didn’t put the movement and its leaders on a pedestal or proclaim victory where defeat was obvious.

What King would’ve (maybe) done:

King wouldn’t have given speeches in the years after the height of the movement to Black Gen Xers where he would’ve said, “I’ve got mine. Now it’s time to get yours,” or blamed hip-hop culture for so-called Black-on-Black crime. Instead, King would’ve listened, learned, facilitated and spoken without accusing those most vulnerable to discrimination of being the only ones at fault, if he would’ve faulted them at all. In terms of what he would’ve done beyond the attempt to form multiracial coalitions to fight for better conditions, it’s unclear. It would’ve been better than chest-thumping and belly aching, though.