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Monthly Archives: December 2021

How Does Self-Determination Work in a Place Determined to Kill Me?

27 Monday Dec 2021

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work, Youth

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Abuse, Faith, Fake People, Fake Unity, Imani, Kujichagulia, Kwanzaa, Maulana Karenga, Nia, Poverty, Self-Determination, Suicide, Ujima, Umoja, Unity


Kujichagulia, the Second Day of Kwanzaa, the principle of self-determination (cropped), December 27, 2021. (Caroline Moman via Pinterest).

Today is my 52nd birthday. My born day always coincides with the early Capricorn season, winter breaks, and falls two days after the celebration of Jesus’ birthday (which is NOT December 25th, no matter what dumb white people and unthinking Christians think). My birthday sometimes falls in the middle of Hanukkah (I think it did one time during the Hebrew-Israelite years, but I’d have to look that one up). My date of birth is also always on the second day of Kwanzaa, known as Kujichagulia, Swahili roughly meaning “self-determination.”

On this last one, I must confess. I learned a bit about Kwanzaa growing up, but it was in my Black Studies courses I learned about Maulana Karenga and his Afrocentric visions and philosophy. Kwanzaa was among the creations of Karenga and other like-minded brothas and sistas from the more radical part of the Movement. That was more than 30 years ago. I am not a Kwanzaa celebrant. But I fully believe in all its principles. Mostly because I would not be here at 52 if I didn’t.

Kujichagulia was a principle I understood long before I took my first Swahili class in Fall 1990. I had to. Between poverty, physical abuse, suicidal ideations, and the occasional bouts with bullying and ostracism, not taking some charge over my life would’ve ended it. Seriously. But too much self-determination without others’ help or guidance (Ujima or Nia) between twelve and a half and my 14th birthday left me one leap off a bridge away from death. Somehow, I managed not to take my own life that day, or in the 38 years since. 

Self-determination has been very good to me, despite the bruises and busted up body parts I picked up early on. I determined I should cut my own path, to the chagrin of my teachers and a good portion of my middle school and high school classmates, not to mention my guidance counselor. I learned how to cook like my mom despite her not wanting to teach me how to cook, a week or so after my youngest brother came into the world. The same thing goes with shooting a J, dribbling left and right handed, writing, jumping rope, loving and forgiving others, moving on (eventually) from those who have hurt me, and a million other things I cannot name because Kujichagulia has been my everything since 1982. I am so fully into Kujichagulia that I’ve made my own birthday cakes and desserts most years since my 15th birthday in 1984. This year, I made myself German Chocolate cupcakes!

But Umoja is just as important. Unity as a principle has been as hard for me as Kujichagulia has been easy. Most people in my life have given me little reason to trust them in their truth, in their half-hearted offers of help, in their words consistently not matching their deeds or follow-through. I live by the words, “do unto others as you would have others do unto you,” but so many have failed to live up to those words, my family members included. Even when I ask for help, what I often get back is silence, or few offers in kind, and usually no equivalent measure in deed. Maybe it’s because I never joined a frat, never found a permanent church home, was never particularly “cool,” or have worked in affluent spaces around folks who would never get my one-generation-removed-from-sharecropping-but-lived-with-welfare-poverty-for five-years self. What makes me truly sad is the Black folks who should get me, but choose not to.

But none of this is really about me. It’s about people who want unity without self-determination or purpose or faith. Umoja cannot work without Kujichagulia, Nia, and Imani. We live in an especially narcissistic age, on top of the half-millennium of narcissism that systemic racism, nationalism, and capitalism has wrought. I am not trying to be popular. I am trying desperately to be me, the best version of me I can be. 

I have a couple of more mountains to climb. One is to finally publish a book in a more traditional way, so that all the work isn’t on me (alternatively, I were to self-publish, maybe raise $20,000 or $25,000 through GoFundMe — probably not). I suspect this goal is not the mountain I have built it up to be. The other is to get out of the adjuncting ratrace. If that means leaving academia again, or leaving the US and living overseas, or even giving up on writing for a time. Whatever is next, I hope that Kujichagulia is the principle guiding me to these places and spaces, and not fake Umoja. There’s already been too much of that in my life.

Another Year of Not Seeing Family

20 Monday Dec 2021

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

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Anti-Vaxxers, COVID-19, Dysfunction, Family, Home, Hypermasculity, Jealousy, Misogynoir, Mixed Feelings, Patriarchy, Vanity


The Welsh word hiraeth, not easy to say, but easy to understand, December 19, 2021. (Reddit.com)

I wish I could say I am fine with going into my eighth year since my last visit with my mother and sibs in Mount Vernon, New York. I am and I ain’t. The one thing this pandemic has exposed is how little things have changed with my folks back in the New York area, and how little and how much I have changed living away from them and New York in the past couple of decades.

I had originally planned to visit my mom in March 2020 during my “Spring” Break week from teaching at American University and University of Maryland Global Campus. But we know what began to occur in the US due to bad policies combined with brutal narcissism, racism, and capitalism. COVID-19 Alpha slammed into the Big Apple like one of those ginormous worms from Dune, and ate into it faster than a supernova. My mom was sick by mid-April, as was my younger brother Maurice. If you ask her, my mom would say her “tests came back inconclusive,” but given the accuracy of her tests and the reality of her symptoms, she had COVID Alpha. My youngest brother contracted the virus a month later. I do not know for certain if I would have contracted COVID-19 if I had gone through with my plans in March 2020, but had I done so, I very likely could have infected my wife and then 16-year-old son, unacceptable by my standards then and today.

Then they started doing the unthinkably ignorant. They started having gatherings sans masks and vaccinations. My mom had my siblings and niece and nephew over for Thanksgiving 2020, and babysat the young’uns all during this shitstorm. My mom’s apartment is barely 800 square feet. Ten people gathered in the living room/kitchenette area of her place, nine not masked at all. My older brother Darren wore a KN-95, “except when [he] was eating and drinking,” he said. I all but facepalmed my forehead into mashed potatoes.

When the vaccines finally came on line for emergency use last December and the beginning of 2021, I assumed my mom would reluctantly but definitely get hers. After all, she worked for Mount Vernon Hospital and Westchester County Medical Center for a combined 27 or 28 years. Boy was I wrong! We last discussed it in May. “I don’t know what’s in it,” she said. “I wanna wait and see how it affects people,” she also said. Keep in mind, the younger brother between Maurice and the youngest one (convoluted, I know, but the 40-year-old doesn’t want me to mention him on my blog anymore) and his wife caught COVID-19 Delta earlier that month. They went out to eat at a restaurant, unvaccinated. “Probably got it off a fork or something,” my mom said.

After I explained the facts, that at that point, a billion people had been partially or fully vaxxed, she gave her usual defensive response. “I know the facts, Donald. You think I’m stupid?” Even now, though I may think, No mom, but you are acting as stupid as stupid can be, I don’t say it. It’s all part of her vanity, her anger and misunderstanding of me. At this point in her life, I couldn’t convince my mom that water is wet and the sky is blue, not even if I quoted Jesus himself. So I conceded. Do what you want. But it’ll be a long, long time before I come visit again. Don’t expect a lot of phone calls or letters or cards moving forward, either. For me, this was and remains about self-preservation, body, mind, and spirit, and not about anger or spite.

I last checked on my mom and brothers during Thanksgiving last month. I didn’t even bother to ask my mom about her vaccination status or her health. I knew she wouldn’t tell me the truth about her decisions, anyway. But my brother Maurice. Yep. He too refused to vaccinate. “I don’t know what’s in that stuff!,” he raised his voice while lilting on “stuff.” He was out of work, too, because New York State’s not allowing unvaccinated people to work for them.

He said one other thing that made me truly sad. I asked about what being unvaccinated has done with his social life. “I can’t be around these…’modern women’,” Maurice said with a pause and the feel of air quotes around the term. Somehow, a woman who doesn’t need a man to “take care of them” is “modern,” and made Maurice feel obsolete. All I could think was, Wow! Mom’s misogynoir and patriarchy really rubbed off on you. You, and all of us at some point.

Nick Nolte’s character about ready to kill James Coburn’s (screen shot, cropped), Affliction (1997), December 20, 2021. (http://www.camera-roll.com/raging-bulls-affliction/)

There’s this not-so-famous 1997 movie Affliction, starring the late James Coburn, Nick Nolte, and Willem Dafoe. The cycles of physical and psychological abuse, the obvious misogyny and hypermasculinity, the mental breakdown, the need for distance from family, are all part of this movie. Nolte’s character eventually kills his father (Coburn), and eventually loses his grip with reality. His withdrawn and recluse brother (Dafoe), a writer and English professor, wrote down his brother’s story for posterity. This as Nolte’s character disappears to Canada, where someone eventually finds a cadaver matching his physical features. 

I wonder if I am Willem Dafoe’s character. Probably not. At least, I don’t think my partner since 1995 and my 18-year-old see me that way. But I do feel the lurch to stay away from people, especially my immediate family outside of Silver Spring, Maryland. It’s not like I don’t want to see them. But they have never ever seen me, not even during all the years I stared them in the face.

The Black Man-White Woman Matrix

05 Sunday Dec 2021

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Marriage, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Alfonso Ribeiro, Binary Thinking, Dave Chappelle, Homophobia, Hubert Davis, Misogynoir, Misogyny, Patriarchy, Pitt, Sexual Harassment, The Matrix (1999), Transphobia, White Supremacy


Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus in The Matrix (1999) chained up (screen shot), accessed October 14, 2021. (https://racism.org/articles/defining-racism/338-thematrixa).

There have been and will be tons of think pieces about the misogyny, the homophobia, and the transphobia in Dave Chappelle’s The Closer, his latest/last stand-up comedy special for Netflix. Within that maelstrom of using the stage as a 75-minute patriarchal therapy session, I noticed how most of the people whom Chappelle apparently discussed his id issues with were white women, whether straight, lesbian, or transgender, including the late Daphne Dorman. “Maybe he should spend time with transgender Black women. They are among the most marginalized in the US, with deadly results, between suicides & murders,” I tweeted. But Chappelle never would. His hypermasculine defense of transphobes and homophobes like Harry Potter billionaire J. K. Rowling, fellow comedian Kevin Hart, and rapper DaBaby, means seeing the binary and non-binary white women he referenced throughout his latest stand-up concert as a sign of personal progress, or even, as part of a televised revolution.

From a deeply emotional and psychological level, I fail to understand this penchant for Black men like Chappelle to use and idolize white women as if they are the pentacle of all that America ought to be. Hubert Davis and Alfonso Ribeiro have publicly uplifted their marriages to white women as a commentary on racial progress. “I’m very proud to be African-American. But I’m also very proud that my wife is white, and I’m also very proud that my three very beautiful, unbelievable kids are a combination of us,” Davis said during his opening press conference as the first Black men’s head basketball coach at the University of North Carolina. Ribeiro of Fresh Prince fame believes “the Black house” has ostracized him. “I am in a mixed relationship….And it’s not easy to make that choice…I’m never going to be white and I’m never going to be fully supported in the Black house,” he said in an interview with Newsweek in August.

Davis’ and Ribeiro’s are both very strange statements. Somehow they and many other Black men have convinced themselves that marrying white women is a sign of racism’s end. Somehow, this is the televised revolution the US needs. Somehow, marrying white will dismantle the latticework of racism on which this nation is built. But, as sociologist Crystal M. Fleming wrote in her How to be Less Stupid About Race, “we’re not going to end white supremacy by ‘hugging it out.’ And we’re certainly not going to fuck our way out of racial oppression. That’s not how power works.” The US Supreme Court’s 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision that legalized interracial marriage was groundbreaking, but it never was the “promised land” that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. envisioned the night before his death in 1968.

My first time thinking through the social and political implications of Black men and white women together in union or solidarity was in 1990, my third year at the University of Pittsburgh. At the student union one day, I sat down for lunch in between classes to hang out with three of my friends. Two were already in the middle of conversation about a growing visible concern on campus — young Black men dating young white women. The two of them (one man, one woman), were biracial themselves, each the child of a white mother and a Black father. One other Black girlfriend also chimed in. They were decidedly against the idea of interracial dating and marriage. At one point I said, “If they love each other, what does it matter?” My two Black biracial friends both sighed and side-eyed me, and then laughed like I was telling a cruel joke. 

What they understood and I didn’t get in 1990 was that while universal love ultimately conquers all, romantic love and friendships will never negate racism in any of its forms. I also knew about Emmett Till’s lynching for winking or whistling at a white woman. I definitely knew from the movie Birth of a Nation (the original one) the deadly dangers of white women accusing Black men of rape or unwanted flirtations. 

I also knew this from personal experience. The year before, and with the support of my one-time boss, a 26-year-old white woman at my campus computing lab job who was my supervisor’s high school friend accused me of sexual harassment. This after she had groped and squeezed my ass cheeks on two occasions during our shifts. I was 19 years old at the time.

In his Afropessimism, Frank B. Wilderson III wrote, “You marry White. It doesn’t change…What do you do with an unconscious that appears to hate you?” The bigger question is, why would any Black man ever expect to end the latticework of American racism and anti-Blackness through interracial marriage? This is  the typical combination of Black mens’ colorism, hypermasculinity, and seeking the same status as white men through white women. “Those black men who believe deeply in the American dream…a masculine dream of dominance and success at the expense of others, are most likely to express negative feelings about black women and…desire [for] a white woman,” as bell hooks wrote in her Ain’t I A Woman.

Davis, Ribeiro, Chappelle, Wilderson, and many other Black men are too susceptible to the idea of interracial relationships as their revolution, their American Dream. The late critical race theorist Derrick Bell foresaw this in one of his lesser known allegorical essays from Faces at the Bottom of the Well, “The Last Black Hero.” It’s a story about a leading Black revolutionary who fell in love with a white woman. As Bell wrote, many whites in power see Black men with white women “as proof that black men in such relationships were, despite their militant rhetoric, not really dangerous.” For anyone working to dismantle the matrix of American racism, though, this way of Black-man-thinking (and white-woman-thinking) is very dangerous. Especially in the words and deeds of people like Chappelle, Davis, Ribeiro, and Wilderson.

This is why if the revolution does come, not only will it not be televised, it will rely predominantly on Black women binary and non-binary to lead it from imagination to actuality. Like in The Matrix movie series, there are too many Black men and white women who have “the world pulled over their eyes,” a world of white binary hypermasculine and patriarchal racism. Too many Black men — whether they are entertainers in need of long-term therapy like Chappelle or are people who see themselves leading revolutions — are too compromised by their own gendered privilege and social status desires to be the leaders they’ve all been waiting for.

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