When Their Lies Become The Truth

16 Monday Aug 2021

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, music, New York City, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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"Billie Jean", Distractions, Doctoral Thesis, Failure, Fear of a "Black" America, Michael Jackson, Plagiarism, Theft, Whose America?, Writing

Michael Jackson in the middle of his first public moonwalk while singing “Billie Jean” (cropped screen shot), *Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever, May 16, 1983. (NBC/Starvista;* *https://www.smoothradio.com/artists/michael-jackson/first-moonwalk-motown-video-1983*/)

This is the third of my multi-part series on my paths as a writer. This piece is one that I’ve work on for nearly a year. Mostly because of the issue to out or not out the guy who plagiarized me in 2002. Partly because I do not really want the kind of attention this post could bring. But the more uncomfortable and painful a writing becomes all the more reason to share it with readers.

There is an ugly truth that inhabits every arena of work. Racist, misogynistic, and elitist politics make all workplaces toxic, some dangerously and lethally so. The never-ending palace intrigue, the perpetual ambitious drive and thirst for clout, the absolute must of self-promotion. All of it makes the idea of “just here to do a job” laughable.

With this toxicity comes the need to lay claim to words and works that are not one’s own. In academia, it means stealing ideas, references to primary resources, even actual words from the work of lesser known academicians. All for the lofty prize of permanent tenure and plum professorships at elite universities. All while destroying careers and breaking people.

I was a victim of such a theft. The plagiarist was one Dr. Jonathan Zimmerman, today a decently prominent full professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, with a career that was undoubtedly helped along by a book about the so-called culture wars. It nearly broke me as a writer. It took nearly 15 years for me to fully recover. In some ways, I am still recovering.

My story is a case study of how easily White mediocrity can trump Black excellence unless or until the latter forces acknowledgment out of the world. But it is also my tale of an aspiring academician snuffed out in his younger years, a wonder-man who had yet to decide the kind of thinker, writer, educator, and gift-user he wanted to be.

I was only partly aware of the possibility of being plagiarized in the 1990s. Oh, I was paranoid enough. As a Black doctoral candidate at lily-White Carnegie Mellon University, I worried about losing my own work and not finishing. By the summer of 1996, I was mailing out seven 3.5-inch, not-so-floppy-disks-at-a-time to my trusted circle, because I had little trust for folks in my academic world, including my dissertation advisor. But I had no idea that I should have extended my lack of trust to trained academicians who were so devoid of ideas and so bereft of imagination that they would steal from little-old me.

My off-and-on dealings with Zimmerman was where I learned eggs should never mix with stones. In 1994, Zimmerman was an assistant professor in the subfield of social and historical foundations of education at West Chester University. I and a couple of other Black doctoral students (the latter two from the University of Pittsburgh School of Education) had promised to present our work at a conference Zimmerman had organized, but reneged at the last minute. The two thirtysomething Black students felt leery about the invitation. “This is very disappointing…I wish you’d let us know sooner…I was so looking forward to reading your work,” Zimmerman said haltingly over the phone with a tone that combined reassurance with condescension when I informed him of our cancellation. Zimmerman had me agree to send him a copy of my dissertation, “A Substance of Things Hoped For”: Multiculturalism, Desegregation, and Identity in African-American Washington, D.C., 1930–1960, once I finished it.

I bumped into Dr. Zimmerman twice at scholarly conferences after that, in 1996 and 1997. He sought me out about my dissertation, for what purpose, I wasn’t sure. I was too worn out after finishing my degree to find out. The next and last time I saw Zimmerman was at the end of April 1999. New York University invited me to their campus for a job interview in the school of education. It was for a social foundations in education opening. I learned that Zimmerman was on the search committee. He had moved on from his previous job, and was now a tenured associate professor.

I gave a seventy-five-minute job talk about my dissertation research and soon-to-be book topic, titled “Fear of a ‘Black’ America: Multiculturalism and Black Education in Washington, DC.” During the talk and Q-and-A session that followed, I noticed Zimmerman had brought with him a paperback copy of my doctoral thesis to the talk. He must have ordered a copy from ProQuest, the main depository for dissertations in the US.

“Can you tell me more about why Black parents didn’t want Little Black Sambo taught in DC Public Schools?,” Zimmerman asked. “Why do you keep using ‘multiculturalism’ to describe what happened in the past — isn’t this anachronistic?,” he inquired with a bit of disdain. “Do you have a publisher lined up for your manuscript?,” I remember him probing, as if that was really his damn business.

It should have been obvious, but at the time, I honestly wasn’t sure why Zimmerman asked me so many questions. Between a two-year-long search for full-time work, of living off fumes from the one $1,850-class I taught at Duquesne University every semester, of burnout and rage from completing my degree, my head wasn’t right. I also wanted to move on from Pittsburgh. “I’d just about have to wait for Joe or Larry [my former dissertation and graduate advisors] to die before I’d get a job that pays around here,” I said to my significant other numerous times.

I didn’t get the NYU job. Six weeks after that interview, I ended up with a job in civic education in suburban DC, working with high-potential high school juniors and seniors. Soon after, I landed a literary agent with my book proposal for Fear of a “Black” America.

Three years and two jobs later, I heard from Zimmerman again, indirectly. I had stumbled into an opportunity while already working as a nonprofit administrator for the New Voices National Fellowship Program to teach a graduate course in social foundations of education at George Washington University. In looking for books suitable for the class, I discovered Zimmerman had published Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools, his book on a century of America’s culture wars as embodied in history textbooks. I decided to buy it in case any of my students wanted to research this topic.

In those pages, Zimmerman carefully avoided referring to the book Little Black Sambo. Instead, he used the term “Sambo” in reference to mainline history textbooks from the 1940s and 1950s. But in one paragraph, Zimmerman’s skill in textual microsurgery broke down like an old and rusted-out car. Where Zimmerman had written, “[e]ven champions of so-called intergroup education in the 1950s turned a blind eye — or a disdainful frown — on black text protests,” I had written, “the Washington Post [in September 1947] published an editorial on the Little Black Sambo controversy that accused the [NAACP-DC] Branch and the…black Washington community of overreacting.”

Where he had wrapped his quote with “opined the Washington Post, denouncing blacks’ ‘humorless touchiness’ about the term ‘Sambo’ in textbooks,” I had the fuller quote, as “the Post could not ‘believe that the humorless touchiness reflected in these protests represents the attitude of Negroes in general.’” And where Zimmerman cited the original sources as the Washington Post from September 30, 1947 and some reference to papers from the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, I also had those same references, plus additional references to the Washingtoniana Division of DC Public Library.

If this theft of ideas and research was pure coincidence, then so is the existence of systemic racism in the US. Zimmerman had access to my doctoral thesis for at least three years before the publication of his book. The likelihood that Zimmerman independently went through the same files at Moorland-Spingarn to address the specific issue of “Sambo” references in textbooks during the 1950s when the controversy over the children’s book Little Black Sambo occurred in 1947 is infinitesimally low (he doesn’t refer to Moorland-Spingarn as a place he visited to conduct research in Whose America?).

The specific Washington Post quote could be coincidental, but not when combined with the Moorland-Spingarn citation. Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, one couldn’t just do a Google search for a then-55-year-old article. One either had to dig it out from among the thousands of files in archives like Moorland-Spingarn at Howard University, where I spent nearly two weeks in March 1995 uncovering information about issues like the 1947 Little Black Sambo controversy. Or, a researcher would have had to go through reels of newspaper microfilm at libraries looking for clues and key words, like I did for another two weeks at the Washingtoniana Division of DC Public Library’s main branch, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, in February 1995. My doctoral thesis was never cited as a source in these sections, either.

A couple of weeks later, I found Dr. Zimmerman’s NYU email address. I wrote to him about his erasure of my years of sweat, tears, and even blood (in the case of paper cuts) in gathering the information that had gone into my dissertation. “I don’t know who you are,” was his one-sentence response, as was and remains the typical retort from those who are caught using another’s words, work, and ideas as their own. “Fuck it,” I said to myself after that exchange. I definitely should have found a lawyer back then.

I received a note a few days after I discovered Zimmerman’s thievery from my one-time agent Claudia Menza about the acquisition editors at Random House. They had come close to accepting my book, but ultimately rejected Fear of a “Black” America for publication. It was a gut punch while walking carelessly through Central Park on a cloudless early fall day. The kind of punch that leaves one falling on their ass while exchanging pain for air, trying one’s hardest not to cry or scream for fear of embarrassment. I eventually self-published my book in 2004, a shell of the dream I originally held for this manuscript.

I hated academia and academicians. I hated myself for the desperate academic/nonacademic/non-writing writer-who-also-wanted-to-write-more it turned me into. I hated that I had earned a PhD, only to find myself working as a nonprofit administrator where the only thing people cared about was bringing in more multimillion-dollar grants. Most of all, I hated that I had never thought enough of the possibility that others would find ingenious and craven ways to steal from me, and that I couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

Fast-forward more than a decade later to 2018. I am no longer working as a nonprofit administrator chasing dollars for watered-down education and social justice efforts. I am teaching full-time as contingent faculty between two universities. My writings are now meant for the world, and not for academia. After reading a story about how a plagiarist had copied and pasted huge portions of the author Leta Hong Fincher’s words from Leftover Women, it dredged up my experiences with Dr. Zimmerman.

This is how the big dogs do it. They steal your ideas, your ideals and your soul, really. They do it while simultaneously erasing you from the public record. They violently make you into the intellectual undead, a ghost that exists, but cannot haunt. Like with Napoleon allegedly blasting away at the Sphinx’s nose for fear that the truth of ancient Egypt as a Black civilization would drown the myth of white Egypt. The big dogs make you feel the theft, the death, and the erasure, right down to them blowing your bits of graphite, wood pulp, and synthetic rubber off of history’s pages.

“And mother always told me be careful of who you love/And be careful of what you do ’cause the lie becomes the truth.” These are the last two lines of the second stanza in Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” That Michael Jackson — the Black genius that he was — also was a pedophile who preyed on star-struck children and their naive parents. He lied by omission and commission, for nearly half his life. The topic of multiculturalism, and being able to profit from it, no longer matters to me. But having people like Zimmerman out there profiting from their theft and their lies does.

Agents and Not Agents, The Hard Way

10 Tuesday Aug 2021

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, music, New York City, Patriotism, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Barbara Sizemore, Book Publishing, Claudia Menza, Failure, Fear of a "Black" America, Joe William Trotter Jr., Literary Agents, Mistakes, The Business of Writing, The Hard Way, Writing

Agents from The Matrix (1999) screenshot (cropped), August 8, 2021. (https://matrix.fandom.com)

This is the second of several posts I’ve put together about my journeys as a writer. Please laugh when and where appropriate.

“You always gotta do things the hard way, don’t you?” my one-time professor Barbara Sizemore said with some sighed frustration. It was in response to me telling her I had decided to stay at Pitt, to pursue my history doctorate at the University of Pittsburgh and possibly transfer to Carnegie Mellon to complete it. It was April 1992. We were standing in the main corridor of the third floor of Wesley Posvar Hall (née Forbes Quadrangle), I was on my way back to my grad student cubicle in the History Department. Sizemore was heading back to her office in the adjacent Africana Studies Department. If I had known this would be my last conversation with the prickly educator, her of squinty eyes and well-manicured afro, before she return to Chicago, took a position at DePaul, and passed away in 2004, I would have done more than given Sizemore a blank stare. As the tall, lanky, and sarcastic 23-year-old I was, I probably would’ve said, “Why yes, professor, I really do!”

I knew what Sizemore was really saying. It was about attending a lily-white university, where there were only four tenured Black professors out of 800 total faculty. My advisor Joe William Trotter, Jr. was one of them. Sizemore assumed that going to Ohio State or Temple to earn a doctorate in Black studies would have been my best move. But even though Sizemore was incorrect about my education decision, she was definitely correct about me taking “always doing things the hard way” paths toward so many of my goals.

Claudia Menza became my first (and so far, only) literary agent in July 1999. The idea of finding a literary agent to help me publish my first book was something I had played with as an idea for nearly a year. At least once I had begun to emerge from my state of rage, depression, and sheer burnout from my years finishing my doctorate at Carnegie Mellon and having Professor “running interference” Trotter as my advisor. I made the decision to turn my doctoral thesis into a book that would straddle the fence between the scholarly and the general. I wanted to publish what would become Fear of a “Black” America for a larger audience, to include both the academic and the personal in the same book. No one told me this was impossible. No one said this was the harder road for a first-time book author. I owned books by scholars that had mainstream imprints and labels. And many, if not most of them, had an agent helping them.

Soon after I finally found my full-time gig with the nonprofit Presidential Classroom in the DMV, I went ahead, did some research in those big, thick books on books and lit agents at Pitt’s Hillman Library, and wrote pitch letters to seven of them. Three weeks later, Menza wrote me back offering to represent me.

She started querying publishing house editors in October 2000, just as I was leaving Presidential Classroom for a higher paying nonprofit job working in social justice in DC. I was so busy with work and my New York family and with married life that I took my eye off the process. One year went by, with a few rejection letters here and there. Then 9/11 happened. I met up with Menza in New York six weeks later. I was already there to do a site visit with a social justice fellow. That’s when I learned Menza at this stage of her time as an agent predominantly represented fiction and poetry. Still, she had some high-powered authors under her belt. I remained confident in her and the mysterious process of finding an editor willing to publish me, in between bites of delicious pasta at a wonderful Italian bistro in the Village.

Two more years went by after that. I received rejections from Basic Books, Random House, Palgrave, Oxford University Press, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, among others. Some stood out because the acquiring editors met to debate the merits for my book before ultimately rejecting it. Some stood out for being two-sentence rejections. I remember Menza saying, “I don’t understand why they don’t want your book.” That was at the end of 2002. By then, even though I remained outwardly confident, I had given up on finding a mainstream commercial publisher. “Maybe I need to go learn how to write again,” I said to my partner more than once. This, just after she became pregnant with our first and only egg.

With the ugly transition between jobs within my nonprofit organization and the birth of and caring for our one and only son, I knew I didn’t have it in me to continue the process of pitch-and-reject with Menza. I was also thinking about writing a memoir, something that could explain how I got to be me. I wrote Menza in March 2004, formally cutting ties with her as my agent. “I wish it had all worked out,” she wrote back.

That July, with some encouragement from my new boss and from my significant other, I decided to look at Fear of a “Black” America one last time, but this time, to self-publish. I went and found a house that did its own reviews of manuscripts and provided adequate enough copyediting to make sure I didn’t embarrass myself. Sometime in that process, Barbara Sizemore died. I read about her death in a nicely done obituary DePaul University put out (The Washington Post obit, not so nice about her years as DC Public Schools chancellor). I imagined Sizemore looking down at me that July and August, shaking her head.

The book came out at the end of August. Somehow, despite myself, I sold over a thousand copies in 16 months, did radio and newspaper interviews and talks and signings all over the DMV. I was happy and a bit bitter, like a cup of black coffee not sugary enough for my taste buds. This book could’ve been so much more, I thought so many times in 2004 and 2005.

But none of this is Menza’s fault, or Trotter’s, or even my fault, not in any direct sense. The world of book writing is more mysterious than the cloistered world of academia, and much more mercurial, too. It’s a popularity contest cloaked in American -isms, especially individualism and elitism (which of course contains racism and misogyny, too). It puts all the effort and blame on you and me. In my case, for not having a job in academia that lined up with my expertise in writing Fear of a “Black” America. For not having a degree from an Ivy League institution, or for not having enough successful writer contacts in my genre(s) or in general. For not living in New York as a writer. Maybe even for not being light enough or good-looking enough.

And, even in the four-and-a-half years of having an agent, for not paying close enough attention to how the industry had become a set of six monopolies. All with independent presses being squeezed, to sell out, to fold, to become niches for a small group of aspiring authors. It went from being an industry where you could pitch your books directly to publishers with or without an agent to “Get outta here!” unless you do have an agent. So many agents would prefer DIY schlock or books that easily fit the tastes of elite or hokey white readers than to ever read a query from me. I’m too eclectic, too determined to write for Black folk and beat up on white ways of thinking. I received more than 130 rejections from agents for my memoir Boy @ The Window, between 2007 and 2011, including one that read, “Alas, another book on childhood abuse!”

So, is it really me making it more difficult, because I like to “do things the hard way?” Is it because I have frequently put the need to pay bills and eat over pursuing my art and craft first? Is it because my writing sucks and agents see that immediately? Is it because I don’t know what I’m doing, or because of all of the above? Well, fam, what I do know is that I need help. I don’t quite know what I need to know to navigate this strange world of finding representation. I don’t quite know what I need to know to make publishing with a reputable press work without representation. Kenny Loggins says “when you can’t give love, you give out advice.” Advice with love is preferable, and usually, specific to where I am.

More Confessions From an Educated Fool

03 Tuesday Aug 2021

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

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Calling, Careers, Educated Fool, Failure, Foolery, Gift, Jobs, Journeys, Writing

Me and my receding hairline, May 22, 2020 (Donald Earl Collins)

This is the first of a series of essays and posts that I am doing this month about my journey as a writer, an educator, and a fool over the past four decades, simultaneously between Medium and my blog. I hope to educate, to entertain, to make people laugh and cry laughing, but (hopefully) not to feel too sorry for me. I am who I am, a work still in progress, even as my knees and my neck ache, even as my mind and spirit are exhausted. Still, I want to fly. “Ain’t that crazy?,” to quote music artist Seal, this as his song “Crazy” turns 30 this week.

—

Serving as a contingent faculty member at two different universities with few benefits, few avenues for promotion, and having lived through one obsequious toad for a supervisor after another year after year? This was not how I imagined my life would end up by the time I reached middle age. I didn’t even think I’d make it to 30 when I was a fourteen-year-old, so there’s that. But when I was 11 in 1981, I did discover my first true calling. I wanted to be a writer, what kind of a writer, I wasn’t sure. But after two years of reading World Book Encyclopedia and more than 40 college-level or higher books on World War II — mostly by British authors — I was ready to write something. That spring, I wrote a 500-word essay as part of a city-wide writing contest in Mount Vernon, New York, back in the days when this New York City suburb had its own separate newspaper, the Mount Vernon Daily Argus. I don’t remember what they asked us K-12 students to write about, probably something civic-minded and somewhat trite. But I finished second overall out of hundreds of entries. The first-place winner was a high school junior. I won something, on my first try, too. Yay, me!

I got a note in the Daily Argus, along with an invitation to an awards ceremony at A. B. Davis Middle School that June, where a photographer took my picture and a representative from the newspaper handed me a $15 check. Technically, this was the first time someone paid me for my writing. This wouldn’t happen again until I was a doctoral student at the University of Pittsburgh. Between that and me introducing the keynote speaker for our graduating class of sixth-graders earlier that morning — the eventual Mount Vernon mayor Ernest Davis — I was truly inspired. I thought, for the first time in my life, This is MY gift! I want to write! I want to be a writer!

I went for it a week after graduation. I decided that I would write a book about the latest in American military hardware and how this would create the most efficient killing machine “in the history of mankind.” I wrote about the prototypes of the B1 and B2 bomber and bomber-fighter planes. I wrote about the prototype of the original M1 Abrams tank, which had recently come into service. I even jotted down paragraphs on ICBMs (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles) MX and MX2s and SLBMs (Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missiles), the Trident-class missiles and the Ohio-class submarines being built to house them. Unbelievably, I wrote a letter to the Pentagon to get pictures of these machines of destruction, and they obliged me with more than a dozen color photos a month later. I was sure that at least two pictures were classified.

By the time my mom had birthed my then youngest sibling Yiscoc (this is a form of Hebrew for Isaac), and my next youngest brother Maurice had turned two, both at the end of July, I had written 48 pages of what was to be a nearly 100-page book. It wasn’t a children’s book. I wrote about the modern United States military and its ability to wage a traditional war and a tactical nuclear war, and what that meant for the rest of the world. And then I hit a wall, and fell into a sinkhole somewhere in Florida. I couldn’t reconcile my fascination with these weapons and the tens of millions of people who could be killed by such weapons. My 11-year-old mind could not grapple with the real-life consequences of such expensive and deadly military hardware. And as a still immature preteen, I didn’t want to consider the vaporizing and pulverizing ugly side of military weaponry. After more than a week of trying to move into another section of this book, I stopped at 52 hand-written pages. It was mid-August, and middle school and all the hell that would come with it was just three weeks away.

Did I mention that as I wrote my first book in the summer of 1981, my stepfather had converted me and my siblings and my mother to Judaism, making us Hebrew-Israelites, without asking me or my 13-year-old older brother Darren for our opinion? Or that I was a month away from social suicide in the classroom, in the magnet program I would be a part of for the next six years, all because I had to wear a kufi outside our two-bedroom apartment? Or that the Carter-Reagan years and two more kids had left my mom broke, and us without food in the house on the regular? All of this was in process even as I was writing my summer away. It would be one of the only times in my life where being blissfully ignorant of the future while pursuing my gift as a writer with all of my heart and mind was such luxurious joy. Where time itself was as abundant as all the atoms in the universe.

I lost my way after that. The growing-up years had already been brutal, between a sexual assault I endured at six and a half, a suicide attempt, and years of therapy my mom administered with homophobia and a belt. With us sinking into welfare poverty, no food at home a third of the time, and my bullying, constant threatening no-good stepfather, my childhood love for reading and writing would take a beating. And still, when I emerged from the eight years of constant abuse to see my true face in my mind’s mirror, I still saw a writer. And then I lost my way, again. This time, to academia, to career-chasing, to chasing dollars, to the responsibilities of living an adult life.

My story is one of constantly denying who I am as a writer, and paying for it with blood, tears, and a damaged spirit, every single time. It doesn’t matter if I am a particularly good writer or a mediocre and overwrought one. After all, there are horrible writers who’ve published best-selling books, and great writers who’ve died before their work was ever read by more than a handful of family members or friends.

No, my story is about how the pursuit of all America pretends to offer can really fuck up one’s priorities. My story is about the spiral of falling in and falling out of love with life and the pursuit of making one’s life better, the illusion of choices, and the hypocrisy of the US, embedded in all of its institutions. My story is about the elliptical ebbs and flows of life, about my journeys as a writer, and how much of an educated fool I have been in these journeys. I promise laughter, sadness, and anger, and joy and victories, too.