Monthly Archives: February 2014

What I Didn’t Know Growing Up – It Still Hurts

27 Thursday Feb 2014

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Sports, Work, Youth

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George Bernard Shaw and ignorance, June 2013. (http://www.irelandcalling.ie/).

George Bernard Shaw and ignorance, June 2013. (http://www.irelandcalling.ie/).

“My people perish for a lack of knowledge,” it seems, is something that anyone can find in almost any religion’s texts anywhere. Heck, depending on perspective, even atheists in general can agree with this statement (of course, the issue would be what constitutes “knowledge”). I read this verse (it’s in Hosea and Isaiah, and versions of it as well as in Jewish texts and the Qur’an) for the first time when I was fifteen in ’85, less than a year after I converted to Christianity. Boy, I had no idea how little I knew about myself, my family and my history when I first read that verse twenty-nine years ago.

In light of the end of Black History Month, I wouldn’t be me without noting how little any of us know about our families, our lineages and our ancestors. But it’s not just true of the millions of us descended from West and Central Africans kidnapped, bound, abused, raped and nearly worked to death to provide Europeans (and Arabs) wealth and comfort. Most of us don’t even know what we think we know about much more recent history and events than surviving the Middle Passage or overcoming Jim Crow.

A rabbi, a priest and an imam, 2013-2014. (PizzaSpaghetti via http://www.deviantART.com).

A rabbi, a priest and an imam, 2013-2014. (PizzaSpaghetti via http://www.deviantART.com).

For me and my family, I knew so little about us that my Mom could’ve told me that Satan had thrown us out of Hell for being too brown to burn and I would’ve accepted it as an appropriate answer. All I really knew of my mother’s side of my family was that they were from Arkansas, that my Uncle Sam (I chuckled sometimes thinking of the irony) was my Mom’s closest sibling, and that they grew up as dirt poor as anyone could get without living in a thatched root hut on less than $1 a day.

I asked for more during those rare moments when my focus wasn’t on high school, getting into college and getting as far away from 616 and Mount Vernon, New York as possible. I ended up finding out about how my Mom’s mother once beat her with the back of a wooden brush for not being ready on time for church, that there were years where her father made only $200 total from cotton farming, and that she was the oldest of twelve kids. She had done some form of work either taking care of her siblings, cooking, cleaning, washing clothes by hand, and hoeing and picking cotton, since she was five or six. Oh yeah, and she played basketball in high school.

On my father’s side, I knew a bit more, if only because Darren and me went with my father to visit the Collins farm in Harrison, Georgia in August ’75. I was five and a half then, but I do remember the fresh smoked ham and bacon, the smell of my grandfather’s Maxwell House coffee, me being too scared to ride a horse, so they put me on a sow (my brother did ride the horse, though). But what people did, how a Black family owned their own land going back to the turn of the twentieth century, I wouldn’t have known to even ask about at not quite six years old.

What I didn’t know until after high school, college, even after earning a Ph.D. in knowing (that’s what a history degree ultimately is) was so much worse than I imagined. To find out at twenty-three that my Mom was a star basketball player in high school. She played center, and led her team to Arkansas’ segregated state quarterfinals in ’65. My Uncle Sam played four sports in high school (basketball, football, baseball and track and field) and was offered college scholarships, but didn’t have the grades to move forward. I learned a year later that my Uncle Paul followed in their footsteps, and played three years at the University of Houston, left early and played for the Houston Rockets in ’82-’83 (not a good year for them, or for me, for that matter) before blowing out a knee and moving into entertainment work.

My father’s family — at least the women of the family — boasted at least three college degrees. Two of my aunts became school teachers. My uncles started businesses in Atlanta and in parts of rural Georgia, working their way well beyond the farm to the work they wanted to do.

Unidentified tenant farmer, his home, automobile, and family, Lee Wilson & Company, rural Arkansas, 1940s. (http://libinfo.uark.edu/SpecialCollections/)

Unidentified tenant farmer, his home, automobile, and family, Lee Wilson & Company, rural Arkansas, 1940s. (http://libinfo.uark.edu/SpecialCollections/)

I learned all of this by the time I turned thirty-two, just a year and a half before my own son was born. How many different decisions I would’ve made about my life if I had known that one half of my family was full of athletes, and the other half was full of business owners, not to mention three aunts with a college education? I would’ve known to try out for any sport in high school — particularly basketball — and to not be afraid to fail. I would’ve known that I was only the first person in my immediate family to take a go at college beyond a certificate in dietary science (my Mom earned that in the summer of ’75), and not the first one on either side as I once thought.

Most of all, I would’ve known that though I was lonely and played the role of a loner my last years growing up, that I wasn’t alone. There were a whole bunch of people in my lineage, some of whom were alive and well, from whom I could’ve drawn strength, found kinship, felt pride and confidence in, where I wouldn’t have seen myself as an abandoned and abused underdog anymore.

If I’d known all this growing up, I wouldn’t have felt and sometimes feel robbed now, by poverty and parenting, abuse and alcoholism. This is why having knowledge to draw from is so important.

Academia’s Silence Must Be Heard

24 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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At Eternity's Gate, by Vincent Van Gogh, oil on canvas painting, Kröller-Müller Museum (The Netherlands), May 1890. (Eloquence via Wikipedia). In public domain.

At Eternity’s Gate, by Vincent Van Gogh, oil on canvas painting, Kröller-Müller Museum (The Netherlands), May 1890. (Eloquence via Wikipedia). In public domain.

I’ve learned the hard way how the world of academia treats folks who break its unwritten covenants. The ones that say accept all of our strictures about what to publish, how to write, when to write it, about tenured/tenure-streamed vs. non-tenured, adjuncts and graduate student TAs and unionization, among so many others. Those of us who make trouble, who question the archaic wisdom of those in our world, are often cast out, rendered invisible or otherwise completely forgotten about.

The funny thing about going against the grain of academia — or at least, my fields of US/African American history and American education/ed policy — has been that criticism can serve as a better sign of acceptance than hearing nothing at all. It was like this for me in grad school at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon, and even my first five years after finishing my doctorate. Whenever someone said that my work on multiculturalism and Black history was “interesting,” the flatness with which a professor or grad student said “interesting” was the key for me. If the “interesting” was completely flat, it meant “but I completely disagree with your line of research” or “this thing is too simplistic and boring for me as a scholar to get excited about.” If the “interesting” had a lilt to it or even a slightly raised eyebrow, it meant that one of my colleagues or more senior folk really found my work intriguing.

Actor Arte Johnson as the Nazi German character Wolfgang on NBC's Laugh-In (1968-73), saying "Very interresting..." per usual, September 4, 2011. (http://photobucket.com)

Actor Arte Johnson as the Nazi German character Wolfgang on NBC’s Laugh-In (1968-73), saying “Very interesting…” per usual, September 4, 2011. (http://photobucket.com)

That term “interesting” was my indication that some people acknowledged and understood the importance of my work, and that some absolutely couldn’t and wouldn’t. But over the past decade, as I’ve complained about the nature of academic writing, about the limits of scholarship and about the changing nature of academia itself (from a hiring perspective), the one thing I’ve noticed the most has been academia’s silence. The collective silence has been deafening, so much so that I finally concluded it meant not only disagreement, but a shunning as well. Like the Amish, only without the Rumspringa.

I had fleeting moments when I noticed the silence, like at my second OAH presentation in Los Angeles in ’01 on Black women intellectuals and multiculturalism. Even though my research was sound, I knew I needed to work on drawing clearer connections between how I’d been defining intellectual and connecting it with notions of cultural pluralism, and thus, multiculturalism. With forty people in the audience, and with thirty-five minutes of Q and A, no one asked me a single question. No one in the audience, it seemed, was interested in multiculturalism or historical contributions to the idea from Anna Julia Cooper, Zora Neale Hurston, Mary Church Terrell or anyone else.

I noticed even more as I submitted my first book Fear of a “Black” America for publication with the university presses prior to ’04. At least with the likes of Praeger and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, I’d frequently get a detailed response, good and bad. But with the university presses, it was deadly silence. I guess me working full-time in the nonprofit world and only teaching ed foundation courses part-time was one of my deficits.

The final set of hints of silence that came my way was in the year after I published Fear of a “Black” America. I decided in ’05 to write an article on the overuse of the term scholar-activist, an article I published in Academe Magazine that fall. Grad students tended to like it, activists outside of academia have cited it hundreds of times, and my immediate circle of friends in academia loved it. But my relevant fields within academia remained silent about it. They were silent about my argument that exercising academic freedom doesn’t automatically make one an activist, and that academic writing, even writings that lean hard to the left, don’t make an academician an activist either.

Dante in Exile (n.d.), painting by anonymous, Archivo Iconografico S.A., Itália, June 3, 2006. (Fernando S. Aldado via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Dante in Exile (n.d.), painting by anonymous author, Archivo Iconografico S.A., Itália, June 3, 2006. (Fernando S. Aldado via Wikipedia). In public domain.

I realize then I had evolved as a writer to the point where I wasn’t just uncomfortable with academic writing, the tenure process and the lack of unionization for adjuncts and grad students — I’d been uncomfortable for years. No, I wanted a teaching, even administrative relationship with higher education for sure, but not one where all of my eggs were in the academic writing basket. Unlike Joshua Rothman’s grand assumption in his “Why Is Academic Writing So Academic?” piece in last week’s New Yorker, that “[p]rofessors live inside that system [of academic writing] and have made peace with it,” I have not and will not make peace with this. Ever.

I think Nicholas Kristof is a hack, and that most of the columnists of The New York Times are hacks as well. But in knowing the sadistic silence of academia as well as I do, I also know that this world of higher education can and does grind many of its participants up, often without making the slightest sound. It’s a wonder that I’m still teaching and writing anything at all.

Over 3 Billion Blacks Killed

19 Wednesday Feb 2014

Posted by in 1, culture, Eclectic, Movies, music, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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McDonald's signage, Austin, MN, May 20, 2006. (Jonathunder via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC and GFDL.

McDonald’s signage, Austin, MN, May 20, 2006. (Jonathunder via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC and GFDL.

Do you remember those McDonald’s signs back in the ’70 and ’80s, before the corporation went global (from 6,000 to 30,000 franchises since ’92), where they said, “Over 100 Million Served” hamburgers or “10 Billion Served?” If the signage is there at all these days, it usually says “Billions and Billions Served.” That’s about as cheap as Black life is in the US as well, though maybe a bit more expensive in Western countries in general (they do use the Euro, after all!).

I’ve been thinking about the low value of Black lives for years, even in the middle of grad school at Pitt. But I must admit, it’s been on my mind more and more since George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin nearly two years ago. Now, with the hung jury over the murder of Jordan Davis, with so many who find it easy to render Black and Brown lives cheaper than dog meat in the middle of the Roman Coliseum 2,000 years ago, it seems that there’s no such thing as a dead stereotype.

Jordan Davis' Facebook picture, February 17, 2014. (via Huffington Post).

Jordan Davis’ Facebook picture, February 17, 2014. (via Huffington Post).

It’s so infused in popular culture, as life and art intertwine in a macabre dance on Black and Brown bodies. Blacks especially (and for the most part, Latinos) don’t feel pain the same way as Whites. We lack the emotional and psychological control of Whites. We’re irrational and prone to criminal behavior. We’re lazy and don’t mind living in abject poverty. We love illegal drugs, but love malt liquor and hard alcohol even more. We’ll eat anything deep-fried, and don’t mind dying before middle age just so that we can save the Social Security dollars for elderly White folk.

With that as the backdrop, it’s no wonder much of the movies, music, TV and Internet depictions of us ultimately ends in our gratuitous, ubiquitous and anonymous deaths. Yes, even in 2014! I’ve recently binge-watched the now defunct CW series Nikita (2010-14) with Maggie Q as the lead. I counted at least thirty Black actors on the series over its seventy-four episodes. Only two survived the series, and one (character played by Lyndie Greenwood) wasn’t even in the last two episodes because the actress was doing double-duty on FOX’s Sleepy Hollow!

But if anyone were to take some of the largest grossing films and franchises of all time, it would become obvious how cheap folks in the US and elsewhere think Black and Brown lives really are. Between Independence Day (1996) and The Terminator series of films (1984-2009) alone, you would have to assume that almost all of the forty million Blacks living in the US died in these fictional realities, not to mention the 1.2 billion folks of at least partial African descent living in other Western nations, Africa, the Caribbean, Brazil and the rest of Latin America. That this has occurred more than once in these films alone puts us at 2.48 billion Blacks killed.

Then, between lesser known/lesser quality films like The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Deep Impact (1998), The War of the Worlds (2005) and Hunger Games (2012-present), it would seem that in every global calamity, most Blacks draw the short straw. These movies (and, prior to these movies, books) put us easily over three billion Blacks and Browns killed. And that’s without accounting for standard action films, cops-and-criminals shows, and other cinematographic renderings of the Black and Brown as disposable human beings. Unless you’re Don Cheadle, Denzel Washington, Will Smith, Morgan Freeman (sometimes) or Halle Berry, if you’re Black or Brown, your job in popular culture is to die a violent death.

Of course, those upset with my sardonic take will say, “Well what about gansta rap? What about Ice-T, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg and so many other rappers who present Black lives as cheaper than bottled water?” Three things: 1. you really need to update yourself on today’s rap, between Lil Jon, Rick Ross and Lil Wayne, before commenting; 2. the “gansta rappers” of the ’90s were mostly rapping about a lived experience, not some fantasy life; and 3. they figured out that they could and can make money off of Black deaths in lyrical rhymes, just like folks in the movie, TV and real worlds.

Venison meat for braising, February 19, 2014. (http://www.simplyscratch.com).

Venison meat for braising, February 19, 2014. (http://www.simplyscratch.com).

This will make the likes of George Zimmerman, Michael Dunn, and substantial numbers in the NYPD and LAPD happy. Actually, what would really make them happy would be a version of the movie The Purge (2013). But instead of crime and murder being legal for one day a year, they would have to get a “coon hunting” license to kill themselves a Black or Brown person one day a year. That way, they could keep our numbers low, just like hunters do with deer every fall.

Public Education Fights To See, & Politeness Be Damned

15 Saturday Feb 2014

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

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Diane Ravitch and Michelle Rhee, the two faces of American education, October 10, 2013. (James Ferguson, The New York Review of Books, http://nybooks.com).

Diane Ravitch and Michelle Rhee, the two faces of American education, October 10, 2013. (James Ferguson, The New York Review of Books, http://nybooks.com).

Unlike the whole George Zimmerman vs. DMX debacle bandied about by idiot promoter Damon Feldman, there are some fights truly worth seeing for us Americans. Especially in the realm of public education, because it involves all of our futures, not to mention the future of our democracy. I’d pay top dollar to see Diane Ravitch pummel Michelle Rhee. Literally pummel, that is. Not just with words, sarcasm, passion and a highly sharpened argument. But with boxing gloves and an uppercut to the right side of Rhee’s jaw.

Oscar de la Hoya getting beat up by Manny Pacquiao, Las Vegas, NV, December 6, 2008. (http://beatsboxingmayhem.com).

Oscar de la Hoya getting beat up by Manny Pacquiao (or in my imagination, Ravitch beating up Rhee), Las Vegas, NV, December 6, 2008. (http://beatsboxingmayhem.com).

Okay, I’m being tongue-in-cheek. Yet there’s a part of me — the same part that wrote Celebrity Deathmatch Meets Brave New Media back in ’10 about watching politicians and journalists beat on each other — that could imagine some of these fights play out in a boxing ring. To have Bill Gates get his head knocked in by Anthony Cody. Or Leonie Haimson lay out former New York City DOE Chancellor Joel I. Klein. Or, for that matter, the White soccer moms US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made fun of giving him a full-on beatdown. Then, after the ten-second countdown, they stitch and bandage him up, and begin again.

Collage of who's who in corporate education reform and who stands against it (from top left, across and down, John Deasy, LAUSD/Gates Fdn; Anthony Cody; Haimson; Perry; Hess; Duncan, Pedro Noguera; Barth; Kopp), February 13, 2014. (Donald Earl Collins).

Collage of who’s who in corporate education reform and who stands against it (from top left, across and down, John Deasy, LAUSD/Gates Fdn; Anthony Cody; Haimson; Perry; Hess; Duncan, Pedro Noguera; Barth; Kopp), February 13, 2014. (Donald Earl Collins).

I imagine this because this fight to save our public schools from the corporate education reform agenda has been an ugly one. Folks like Gates, Duncan, Klein, Rhee, Wendy Kopp, Richard Barth, Dr. Steve Perry and several big-name others have taken full advantage of the financial needs of public schools and the greed of politicians. Not to mention the concerns and worries of parents and the perpetual fear-mongering of the media. They took possession of the conversation about the future of public education long before actual educators and parents had a chance to pick up our weapons and respond.

For those like me who saw the potential dangers of this shift to high-stakes testing-as-teaching, to punitive measures as teacher evaluations, to data for data’s sake, we politely lodged our concerns. We wrote our occasional letters to the editor and comments on blogs, and asked our questions at conferences. And all while applying for grants from the Walton Family Foundation, for jobs at Gates and consultancies with Teach for America.

Where public education fight meeting March Madness bracket, February 13, 2014. (Donald Earl Collins).

Where public education fight meeting March Madness bracket, February 13, 2014. (Donald Earl Collins).

Of course we were wrong. We may have even been hypocritical. But if folks like American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick Hess are to be believed, we’ve also been mean-spirited and disrespectful to this group of “good-intentioned” do-gooders. Speaking at the American Federation of Teachers Albert Shanker Institute on “Philanthropy & Democratic Education: Friends or Foes” this week, Hess called for educators, parents and children to be “patient” with people like Gates and foundations like the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. Why? Because, according to Hess, because “there are a lot of easier ways for them to spend their money than on education.” We need to be “reasonable,” and to “disagree without engaging in personal attacks” or jumping to conclusions about their personal “motivations.” Translation: rich people have thin skins after they’ve spent their lives in hubris and racial paternalism in playing with our lives.

Hess’ was the typical bullshit argument of a neoconservative who, instead of focusing on the fact that we’ve put our kids, teachers and schools in jeopardy, he focused on optics, and a false sense of optics at that. Hess would have poor kids kissing Gates’ ring for spending his money on reforming our schools in his image, and have impoverished parents crying tears of joy for supposedly saving them from bleak futures. Heck, Hess would have us groveling in thanks for dollars from any of these folks, because all that matters are their alleged good intentions, not the road to perdition leading from their good intentions.

Jeremy Irons as Pope Alexander VI, The Borgias series (SHO), 2011. (http://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com).

Jeremy Irons as Pope Alexander VI, waiting for his ring to be kissed by Cardinal Orsini, The Borgias series (SHO), 2011. (http://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com).

So, no, I’m not going to be patient. Nor should the millions of kids doomed to see school as a testing factory. Nor should parents who want a brighter future that they play a role in determining, not some family worth $140 billion in Arkansas. Nor should the millions of teachers who’ve been turned into scared lab technicians, worried about their jobs every minute of every day.

We shouldn’t be reasonable, because being reasonable with deep-pocketed plutocrats amounts to bowing and scraping. And for goodness’ sake, let’s not excuse foundations like Gates or Broad because of “good intentions.” Screw good intentions! We’re not personally attacking any individual program officer or an administrative assistant. We’re criticizing their leaders and their use of their foundations for attempting to remake public education into a free-market monstrosity. Period.

Racism Doesn’t Care What Year It Is

09 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by in 1, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Movies, music, Politics, Pop Culture, Youth

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Joel Ward in celebration with Washington Capitals teammates after scoring game/series winning goal in Round 1 of Stanley Cup Playoffs against Boston Bruins (all while fans chanted racial slurs), April 26, 2012. (http://www.flightunit.com/).

Joel Ward in celebration with Washington Capitals teammates after scoring game/series winning goal in Round 1 of Stanley Cup Playoffs against Boston Bruins (all while fans chanted racial slurs), April 26, 2012. (http://www.flightunit.com/).

One of the many throwaway sentences I’ve heard and read for almost all of my life has increasingly driven me more nuts over the years. In response to a racist statement or incident, an interviewee on the air or someone writing a column will say, “It’s 1984!” or “This is 2006!,” with “and we’re still putting up with this?” or “and we’re still dealing with” racism or bigotry to finish the thought. It’s the one phrase you can expect anyone White, Black, Latino, Asian and/or American Indian to use when interviewed or with access to a public platform. As if the year in which racial injustice and bigotry manifests itself actually matters!

Seriously, did people think that marches, speeches and laws alone would end up killing the complex and morphing structure of American racism that’s existed for more than three centuries? Did we really think that singing “We Shall Overcome” and quoting Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech would allow individual Whiteness and hatred to melt away? Was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 somehow supposed to end all race-based discrimination, even when fully enforced (of course, the federal government has never fully enforced these laws)?

Picture of Michael Griffith, killed by car after group of Whites in Howard Beach, Queens attempted to beat him and his friends with baseball bats on December 20, 1986. (Denis Hamill; http://nydailynews.com).

Picture of Michael Griffith, killed by car after group of Whites in Howard Beach, Queens attempted to beat him and his friends with baseball bats on December 20, 1986. (Denis Hamill; http://nydailynews.com).

Yes, we live in an ultra-modern age, where my generation and my son’s generation know more about the world, the universe and life than my mother and grandfather’s generations. But having more knowledge often means that we as humans tend to be more destructive toward each other before becoming wise enough to end that specific pattern of destruction. Or, as has often been the case in human history, until a new group comes along and topples one structure of oppression before implementing a new and sometimes kinder and gentler one.

To think about it another way, just because we’re technologically advanced and more scientifically driven doesn’t mean that humans in general — and Americans specifically — will act rationally and change their behaviors. Especially if it involves giving up an advantage — real or perceived — in the process.

Even though we invented the atomic bomb in 1945, it didn’t stop us from using it against the Japanese or racist White rednecks from beating to death Black veterans of World War II. Though we had television sets in nearly every American home in the 1960s, it didn’t stop Bull Conner from unleashing dogs and turning fire hoses on Black kids in Birmingham, Alabama, Medgar Evers from getting shot in Mississippi or Selma, Alabama marchers from getting beat up. And though we were poised to land on the Moon in July ’69, it didn’t mean that James Earl Ray wouldn’t take a moment to blow away Dr. King fifteen months earlier.

The first oracle from The Matrix (1999, 2003), played by the late Gloria Foster, February 9, 2014. (http://matrix.wikia.com).

The first oracle from The Matrix (1999, 2003), played by the late Gloria Foster, February 9, 2014. (http://matrix.wikia.com).

In my own lifetime, there’s been more of this lag between knowledge, self-interest and racism. From Yusef Hawkins in Bensonhurst in ’89 to James Byrd being beaten, chained and dragged behind a pickup truck in Jasper, Texas in ’98. From the Philly PD’s bombing of MOVE and the community around it in ’85 to Hurricane Katrina in ’05. Not to mention individual incidents and distinctions, like Trayvon Martin, Marissa Alexander and Jonathan Ferrell. As the ’70s hit by The Whispers goes, “And The Beat Goes On.” We have the Internet, social media, the ability to mobilize outrage and righteous indignation into demonstrations for human rights and social justice. But the human capacity to build oppressive institutions remains, as well as our capacity to hate.

But, to quote The Oracle from The Matrix trilogy (1999-2003), not to mention Buddha, “Everything that has a beginning has an End,” right? Of course, that quote might well have been inspired by a story written by Sophia Stewart in ’81, whom the Wachowski siblings apparently plagiarized in making their multi-billion dollar films. Again, why does the year racism manifests itself matter?

Whiteness Pressures, Blackness Falsehoods

07 Friday Feb 2014

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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What happens to a polystyrene head under pressure equivalent to 11,000m (1.25 miles) below the waves, University of Aberdeen, February 23, 2012. (http://www.bbc.co.uk).

What happens to a polystyrene head under pressure equivalent to 11,000m (1.25 miles) below the waves (kind of like being Black in the US, University of Aberdeen, February 23, 2012. (http://www.bbc.co.uk).

It can be a strain to be in the midst of Whites day after day, defending myself against the microaggressions and stereotypes that others heap upon me with their eyes, words and actions. Doctors and psychologists simply do not know how much of a toll individual, institutional and structural racism can literally take on African American hearts and minds, but our life expectancy is definitely lower as a result. But what about the falsehoods of Blackness, that there are only a certain number of acceptable ways of being Black, of acting, looking and sounding Black? How much of a toll does that take?

The short answer, of course, is that Whiteness and the racism that comes with it is a thermonuclear weapon when compared with the grenades that those who charge themselves with being the purveyors of Blackness have and do lob at me and others like me. In fact, many of those grenades are duds, sometimes scary but seldom doing any real damage in our lives.

Not so, though, when you’re younger and blessed/cursed with self-awareness about race and stereotypes. I’ve yammered about how others in my life while growing up in Mount Vernon threw around the idea that I “wanted to be White” or “talk proper” in order to get respect from Whites here before. The reality, of course, is that I didn’t sound “Black” to many of my 616 neighbors, or at least, like a “Noo Yawker,” instead of like the son of two recent Southern Black migrants from Arkansas and Georgia, one who happened to grow up right outside the city.

Their accusations, especially those of one older kid named Terry, made me even more self-conscious about what it meant to be Black. It made me decide to be quiet around my Black male peers, especially those who wore their sense of Blackness like armor. It made me wear what they considered my weirdness, or supposed gay-ness, if you will, like a weapon, fully meant to repel and repulse them at the same time. I realized they never wanted to know the real me, and even more important, never gave me the chance to figure out who the “real me” was. After the summer of ’82, all I really wanted was out of 616 and Mount Vernon, anyway, and away from these people who thought I could never be Black enough.

It’s been at least twenty years since I’ve had to deal with the likes of Terry, Joe, Ernie, Pookie, Corey, Reggie, Ray and so many others who thought it was their right to tell me how to be Black. I don’t subscribe to the idea, though, that because some of these folks have “kept it real” and ended up in prison, I’ve proven myself right and them wrong. I never though about their path versus my own. I simply wondered why they couldn’t be okay with me being who I was.

Black History = American History, But For American Stupidity

04 Tuesday Feb 2014

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

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Pythagorean Theorem (except when it comes to Black history and race), February 4, 2014. (http://ncalculators.com/)

Pythagorean Theorem (except when it comes to Black history and race), February 4, 2014. (http://ncalculators.com/)

It’s Black History Month. It’s a month that often feels more like an obligation to honor the Civil Rights Movement than it does a full month to celebrate and appreciate all African American contributions to the development and success of the United States over the previous four centuries. Yet there are many Whites, Blacks and other people of color who refuse to see this at all. Some argue for a White History Month, some argue that Blacks don’t have a culture or history at all — or at least, one worth celebrating. And some argue that the time and need for a Black History Month has passed.

Some of this ridiculousness I parody here:

No argument is more central to the reason why Black History Month needs to continue than the one I’ve heard from conservatives and former students over the years. That because Black history shines a light on America’s racist, economic loading of the dice in favor of White elites and business interests, I’m being “anti-patriotic” when I talk about or teach on this. Then, of course, I get the “love-America-or-leave-it” response.

People who respond this way are such assholes. Some of your ancestors brought my ancestors here in chains, well before most of these alleged patriots’ ancestors even thought about coming here. My ancestors built plantations, chopped down forests, grew the cash crops that made White men rich and provided the money necessary to make America an industrial capitalistic powerhouse, built the White House and the Capitol, and have fought in every war this country’s been a part of. But I’m unpatriotic when through Black history I can point out America’s flaws and great failings?

The less evolved part of me would say, at least in a street argument, “Kiss my Black ass!” But to be honest, I don’t want these folks to touch me, much less kiss my butt. What I want them to do is read, listen, watch and learn, and not just assume everything they’ve heard from FOX News, their parents and in elementary school social studies is the gospel truth. That way, they would then have the choice between understanding that US history and Black history are one and the same and wallowing in their willful stupidity.