For years, I’ve been perplexed with the low level of debate and serious conversation in this country. I guess it started for me in undergrad at Pitt. My first taste of a classroom debate gone awry was in my sophomore year, second semester, the spring of ’89. It was existential philosophy, in which I developed an interest because of my philosophy and AP English classes with Rosemary Martino my senior year at Mount Vernon High School. I really liked this class, but didn’t exactly like my discussion section. It was a place where no reconciliation was possible between believing in the existence of God and my teaching assistant’s atheism. It wasn’t as if I talked about my personal believe in God or Christianity much back then. But then again, I didn’t believe in confronting people on a personal level about their beliefs either.

On the one hand we had a great professor, a young and energetic recent PhD teaching in his second semester at Pitt. He made Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Camus come alive as he became excited talking about the Ubermensch (Superman) and Abraham’s “teological suspension of the ethical.” On the other hand, one of his teaching assistants, my discussion section instructor, was an Australian man in his late-twenties, with curly hair like the lead singer from Simply Red, except my instructor’s hair was a dirty blond. He spent discussion after discussion railing on Christians as “people who refuse to believe that God doesn’t exist.” One of our discussions was so anti-anything other than atheism that I found it just as bigoted as anything I’d heard from Hebrew-Israelites or out of a televangelist’s mouth, and pretty much said as much. I was ignored.

It was an excruciating hour, as most of the students in our class outed themselves as staunch atheists, berating Christians, Christianity and other religions as purely a form of social control. The two African American students in the section besides me were somewhere between angry and in tears by the end of the class that day. I was more puzzled than miffed. The attacks from our fearless teaching leaders and from the other students had nothing to do with Nietzsche or Kierkegaard. They were only actively engaged in airing their personal beliefs as strongly as they could, in an atmosphere poisoned by our teaching assistant, who obviously had an ax to grind.

I’ll admit, I was bothered by so many students — all White — who were so cocksure that God didn’t exist, that he was a mere fantasy dreamed up by nomads wandering through the deserts and hanging gardens in the Middle East who knew nothing of science and wanted illogical answers. What I was bothered more by, though, was that this became a personal debate, as if anyone who believed in the existence of a higher power was an idiot seeking to dominate others’ minds and through our modern world back to the Stone Age. I found that argument — and my teaching assistant’s support of it — equally illogical and too personal to address in a one-hour class. In eighteen years of on-and-off again teaching, I’ve never gone into the personal in order to have a free-flowing debate, partly because of what I witnessed on that day. A debate like this doesn’t work if your instructor has a personal agenda.

Unfortunately, it is a debate tactic that is all too common in our public discourse and private arguments in everyday America. It doesn’t matter if you’re watching Chris Matthews’ Hardball on MSNBC, Bill O’Reilly’s The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News, listening to Rush Limbaugh or NPR, or chatting with folks on Facebook or in the comfort of Starbucks. Friendly arguments about issues often turn ugly, and they do so because people on all sides get personal. Now, I’m not talking about having an objective academic discussion about a policy or a social issue. We all have biases, points of view, beliefs that we can and should stand on. No, what we do typically is to attack someone’s intelligence or personhood instead of attacking someone’s argument or attempt to understand why they hold so strongly to a particular argument. Or we get deeply personal about a given issue, as if our perspective is shared by so many that we can automatically win a debate because of our experiences.

There’s no debate in America where the personal doesn’t get sucked in more than on race. Whether in the classroom or on Facebook, in a casual conversation over wine or at a major conference presentation, folks just personalize the issues around race as if you’re addressing them. I’ve often discussed the long and troubling history of this country around race in all of its complexity. In response, classmates, friends, professors, students and others have all automatically made it personal. I’ve been called a “racial determinist,” “paranoid,” “Afrocentric,” “irrational,” “overly emotional,” just for saying that our playing field is still far from level or that even Whites who were abolitionists back in the day didn’t typically believe in Black equality. Others, meanwhile, have said things like, “I’m not a racist,” or “Why are you bringing this up now?,” or discussed how their father didn’t get a job because it was given to a less qualified Black. I’m not just talking about Whites. African American students in my classes have often expressed their anger and rage over perceived and real slights and over anything that involved inequality, even when it wasn’t specifically racial in nature.

What I’ve done in my debates in and out of the classroom over the years is to allow different sides of this argument to play out — with some venting, of course — before bringing folks back to the actual argument or the policy or issue around race that we were addressing in the first place. I’ve often had to say, “This isn’t about you. If you think it is, then that says more about you then it does about…” a particular policy or issue of race. It usually works, getting students and my colleagues to calm down and at least agree to disagree. It’s a starting point, hardly perfect, but something that often can be built upon.

The problem is, though, that this issue of the personal goes far beyond race, although it is often involved. Name the issue or policy debate, and you can find a commentator, pundit or everyday whose argued about it from the gut, based on some personal anecdote. Or attacked others as if they didn’t have the right to speak in the first place. Even among friends, debating an issue often means having the fact that I have a PhD or am a progressive thrown in my face as if I don’t have a right to my perspective. A fairer tax system equals “hating the rich.” Say that Rush Limbaugh’s mean because he accused Michael J. Fox of exaggerating or faking his Parkinson’s symptoms, and you’re saying that all Rush listeners are mean, too. Agree with the closing of Gitmo, and you’re accused of supporting terrorism. You can’t have a real or deep debate in this country about anything without it becoming a personal attack or a matter of deep personal conviction. If all politics local, then debating has only recently become a personal crusade.

This is the consequence of generations of privilege without responsibility, of an inadequate system of education that prefers social control to critical thinking, of self-centered pride over collective responsibility. We exaggerate the image of the rugged individualist and Horatio Alger to the point where we all think — progressives and conservatives alike — that we can go it alone. With this kind of thinking, we can’t have honest and good debate about much in this country. It’s too bad. For with global warming and climate change, torture issues and terrorism, a major economic meltdown and ever increasing energy needs, we need rational and reasonable debate more than ever. Without it, I might as well tell Noah to grab a solar generator and find the nearest cave in West Virginia when he’s my age.

What do President Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, and yours truly have in common, besides the fact that all of us are at least forty percent Black or African? We’ve all — between the mass scale of a mouse and the cosmic — experienced some hell as a result of success. Any success at all in a society not known these days for sportsmanship, patience or proper etiquette usually leads to folks on the other side losing their minds. Despite all of the talk about this being a world of significantly less racial animosity in the early twenty-first century, it’s fairly obvious that race is intertwined in much of the disagreements and snide statements about all three of us.

For President Obama, his is the most complicated of situations. He walks everyday a presidential tightrope between the powers of his office, the needs of the nation, the demands of the international community, the pressures of the market, and the laser-sights of the media, regardless of ideological perspective. So Obama’s taken a middle-of-the-road approach to governing and policy. From everything from clean energy to the tax code, his is an administration that is about one or two nanometers further left than Clinton’s, but is more intellectual and vocal about it.

Yet at every turn and with every statement or decision, dissenters abound. Now, we still have a First Amendment, and we still should use it to the best of our abilities as a nation. In many cases, we use it sparingly. Not so with Obama. The crazies have been out in force since the primaries last spring. Even now, there are folks blogging about whether he’s an American citizen, or Muslim, or the Antichrist. This week alone, Obama’s been accused of being an anti-Catholic baby killer and an anti-Jesus-in-the-closet-Muslim, one who somehow bowed to Saudi royalty on Monday while also neglecting to mention Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount analogy in his Georgetown speech on Tuesday. Not to mention the 200,000 or so protesters nationwide on Tax Day (that’s a bad protest day for any major US city, much less the nation) who came out angry about taxed Obama hadn’t raised and guns he hadn’t taken away. Even Clinton didn’t face this kind of heat until he started talking about an executive order lifting the ban on gays in the military back in ’93.

Whatever else one can say, no one ever accused Clinton of not being an American citizen, or part of a global conspiracy to put an evil Muslim in the White House, or someone who’s really the Antichrist and will enslave us in the evils of socialism or destroy us all. What a crock! Americans, unfortunately, are incredibly predictable when it comes to diversity and power. When someone, no matter how well meaning, intelligent, good-looking, or well-prepared they are for a certain task, they are metaphorically jumped on like flies swarming a turd in the hot summer sun. When Rush Limbaugh yelled, right around election time, that “IT WAS ALL ABOUT RACE! Let me say it again…IT WAS ALL ABOUT RACE,” it’s the most truth he’s likely ever spoken.

Except this isn’t about President Obama and his supporters playing the race card. It’s about dissent, but dissent based not so much on policy, politics or ideology so much as it’s based on envy. Jon Stewart said it best when he opined that the Republican Party and many conservatives were just “sore losers.” These folks don’t like Obama because he’s popular, articulate, smart, driven, successful, thoughtful (for the most part) and ready to actually do something to improve our country. And of course, no matter how White Obama actually is, he’s still Black in their eyes. It bothers many a conservative to no end that Obama beat them at their own game in the election, and has been hammering at them ever since.

That’s why folks like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Tom DeLay, Michelle Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and Dick Cheney have been stirring the pot for events like “Tea Bagging” Day. Or claiming that President Obama’s coming after American gun owners who want to hunt with an Uzi. Or saying that the country’s headed to hell in Satan’s hand basket with Obama in charge. Bottom line: they’re jealous, they’re embarrassed, and they’re angry. The usual tricks didn’t work last year, because they know most Americans want someone, anyone, who can help solve our deepest problems, even if they are Black. That’s not to say that President Obama’s answers are correct or enough. From the stimulus package to education reform, from CIA operatives and torture to his plans for universal health care coverage, I disagree with my president. But at least, I’m not up in arms about him not invoking the name of Jesus at every turn in order to satisfy evangelical conservatives. Like that did us any good with our previous president!

Of course, we don’t behave this way with folks of color in the world of sports and entertainment. That requires a different set of skills, a different mindset toward intellect, and Blacks in particular have been doing well here for decades. True, but not in every sports or in every entertainment medium. Although, maybe not so true. The Indiana Pacers-Detroit Pistons-Pistons fans brawl on November 19 of ’05 bore that out, with angry White fans yelling at Black basketball players and throwing beer on one of them in the process. But of course, race wasn’t an issue here. Alcoholism and an on-the-court fight that went into the stands was.

I digress. Golf certainly is a sport/game/”a good walk spoiled” where competitors of color have been about as common as Blacks and Latinos in graduate school programs. Then along came Tiger Woods in ’96. Even now, even after rehabilitating his left knee and missing most of the ’08 season, it’s obvious that Woods is larger than life. But even with all of the majors, all of the money won and commercials generated — for himself and for golf — all of the records and glory, Woods isn’t well liked by his peers or by many segments of the American public. From the moment Woods put on his first green jacket on April 13 of ’97, he faced pressures that no professional golfer has ever faced. Between all of the death threats while winning the Masters in Augusta, Georgia (a bit of irony there, right?) and Fuzzy Zoeller’s comments about hoping that Woods doesn’t put “fried chicken” and “collard greens” on the Champions dinner menu in ’98, the jealousy was immediate and palpable. Although, as Zoeller claimed, it was a joke about that “little boy,” a twenty-one-year-old Woods at the time.

And that jealousy remains. Look what happened when Woods showed flashes of brilliance at the Masters earlier this month, matched up with Phil Mickelson as he was. Ratings for the event shot up, the crowd followed them around like it was a rock concert. The golfers in the lead in the final round had to beg CBS for a camera to show them playing shots. Don’t tell me that doesn’t generate more envy, even as this Cablinasian makes them all richer.

Some would argue that the race issues with Woods are more obvious than with President Obama. Are they? It seems to me that when people irrationally stock up on firearms in order to protect themselves from the government when the Obama Administration hasn’t said a word about the Second Amendment, that’s an obvious sign that race was part of the fear factor. The Secret Service has noted that death threats against the president are at an all-time high, and that was a month ago. Now why would this be? Because Obama’s advocating socialism? Because conservatives are out of power in Washington? Or because Obama race and success both inspires and creates an unbelievable amount of jealousy? Take your pick.

On a much, much, much smaller scale, I can relate to a bunch of what Obama and Woods have faced and are facing. I’ve only gotten a couple of threats, from former graduate students who didn’t like the fact that a Black professor didn’t give them an A (in both cases, their grades were A-). They weren’t death threats, but I looked over my shoulder anyway. One of them emailed me so often about changing her grade and what she would do to me if I didn’t that I ended up reporting her to my department chair. I’ve had students who were obviously uncomfortable with me as their professor, or assumed that I was an airhead. Then, when I opened my mouth to teach, I often scared those students with ideas, facts and opinions that were based on my expertise as a historian. Their thoughts, for better and for worse, often showed up in their evaluations of my classes at the end of the semester.

But that’s only part of my experience, and not the most significant part when it comes to the issue at hand. My five and a half years as a grad student at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon were years where my colleagues and some of my professors felt the urge to tell me exactly what was on their minds about me. From telling me right from jump street how I didn’t belong in grad school to telling me how amazed they were that I finished my master’s in a year.
That was my former professor Reid Andrews by himself, but not alone in his assessment. From assuming that I never studied because I seldom “looked” stressed to making insinuations that I somehow plagiarized my papers. The chair of the history department at Pitt in Richard Smethurst once asked me — in the only conversation I had with him in two years of grad school at Pitt — if the reason I was there was to play basketball.

The kicker was in the first few weeks after I’d been awarded a Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in April ’95. It was somewhat of a surprise to me, but it a pleasant one. By then I was finishing up my second year at Carnegie Mellon. Not so for my advisor Joe Trotter. There was this look absolute shock and horror on his face when I told him the good news. I’ll never forget that “I can’t believe it!” look of dread Trotter had on his face. It lasted for a good three seconds before he found himself again, managed a weak smile, and told me to pass on the good news. The moral of this story is that even Black folk can have a race-based jealousy toward another Black person or person of color, despite popular opinion

It didn’t end with my advisor. Among my colleagues, John Hinshaw stopped speaking to me — for two years! At least four others walked up to me and gave me their gut-churning congratulations while telling me how envious they were of me. One wanted to know how I did it, considered that every time they saw me I was out in hallways of Carnegie Mellon “talking to” someone. By this time, my standard answer was, “When you don’t see me, that’s when I’m hard at work.” Which was the truth, of course. Yet it was entirely unrelated to their point. The real question for them was, how did I, some Black guy who often didn’t sound like an indecipherable theoretician or genius, pick up a grant without holding a gun to the head of the Senior Program Officer of the Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship Program?

It’s not that I think that all Whites are envious of the success of others of color, or that all successful people of color face petty and really serious jealousies that spin off into other, more serious threats. It’s that in our nation, any success that is based on more than sheer athletic, comedic, or musical talent for folks of color is subject to greater degrees of jaw-dropping and shock than it would be for Whites. Intellectual, academic and political brilliance — not to mention golf, a thinker’s game — even with so much evidence to the contrary, isn’t something that most expect from people of color, and men of color especially. So of course there’s greater scrutiny, jealousy, fear and embarrassment when “losing” out to one of us. I’m hardly justifying it, though.

How do we as a society overcome this? How do we deal with the envious and not-so-well-adjusted out there, who, whether conservative or just plain bigoted, would prefer to see President Obama fail, Woods’ knee explode and me to disappear, and worse? We can only live our lives, step ever more boldly forward on our respective paths, to see through whatever it is we hope to achieve. And hope that we have time enough to achieve it. That, or we can leave for greener pastures.

One-time, one-quarter-and-a-half-in-a-Thanksgiving-Day-game, Dallas Cowboys quarterback Clint Longley led the dreaded team to a victory against the Washington Redskins in ’74. He threw a game-winning 50-yard touchdown pass to Drew Pearson with 28 seconds left in the game in leading a comeback for the so-called America’s team. It was the only game Longley played in his all too short three-year NFL career. But the game he played was memorable, and not just for Cowboys and Redskins fans.

I’ve had numerous moments of brilliance in my adult life, sometimes surprising myself with how good I am at certain things. Graduate school was one period of my life where my academic abilities were both consistently on display and occasionally spiked beyond normal excellence. Today marks seventeen years exactly since I passed my master’s oral examination in the history department at the University of Pittsburgh, finishing in just under two semesters what should’ve taken me three to four. My committee had also recommended me into the PhD program. I was barely three months removed from getting my driver’s license, all of twenty-two, and finding myself in a doctoral program less than a year after finishing my bachelor’s.

That was April 14, ’92, but the story that made this triumph possible started a year earlier. I had gotten into New York University, University of Maryland and the University of Pittsburgh for graduate school. I had also applied to Berkeley and the University of Virginia — both rejected me — as well as Howard. They lost my grad school application. Meanwhile, NYU had accepted me, but I was required to commit myself to them before they would disclose their financial package for me. I didn’t want to move back to New York only to starve to death in my first semester of grad school.

The University of Maryland was worse. They didn’t lose my application like Howard did. They misplaced it. Long enough for the deadline for forwarding my application to difference on-campus fellowship program to have passed. They accepted me as a provisional student, not because of my grades, but because they didn’t have any teaching assistant or fellowship slots to hand out by the time they found my application. Provisional wasn’t so bad, although I’d have to maintain a B+ average my first year to be eligible to get a fellowship or teaching assistant position during my second year. What was I supposed to do? Live off of student loans for a whole year? I still don’t understand how I got the short end of the stick for something a grad assistant or professor screwed up.

With the history department at Pitt, the main issue was that professors like Reid Andrews and William Chase didn’t think that I was grad school material. This despite my 3.82 GPA as a history major, my 3.4 GPA overall, my GRE scores, and my having taken a history grad course my junior year, earning an A in the process. I was accepted, put on a waiting list for funding, where I’d linger at the sixth spot for over a month while folks leapfrogged me on the list. This list was allegedly based on the relative qualifications of those who were accepted into the program, in that the closer a student was to No. 1, the more qualified they were for one of the department’s teaching assistantship stipends.

I knew that my having majored in history at Pitt was a factor, because the history department wanted the best possible candidates across the country and from other parts of the world. That I wasn’t a neo-Marxist only interested in working-class history might’ve hurt me also. Intuitively, I knew that race was also involved. No so much that the professors in the department didn’t want Blacks in the program, or representatives from any other group of color for that matter. More so this unspoken notion that someone Black couldn’t handle the rigors of a graduate program as intense as the one at Pitt, which occasionally came out in my conversations with veteran graduate students and with younger professors in the department during my two years there.

I had a decision to make. Did I want to stay in Pittsburgh, at Pitt, and earn a master’s degree? What would I do then? Teach as a social studies teacher in high school? Go get my doctorate? Go back to New York and get a job with a degree that isn’t of much use outside of the education field? I turned to my mother, who told me that I should come back to New York, to help her with my younger siblings. I had made that promise to her, back when I was seventeen, had no life outside of 616 and Mount Vernon High School, and expected to major in computer science. Now she expected me to live up to my promise like it was some kind of contract. So I decided to stick it out in Pittsburgh through the end of May before possibly packing up and moving back to the New York area.

For nearly two weeks in May, I heard a voice in the back of my head that said I should go and meet with Jack Daniel (I know, and I’m sure he’s known for years), the Associate Provost at Pitt and the administrator over my Challenge Scholarship for undergrad. I’d only met him once, in the middle of my freshman year. I didn’t exactly know why I needed to meet with him. I just felt that if I did, I might be able to get money for books for the fall or sometime.

After a couple of weeks, I finally went up to the eighteenth or twenty-first floor of the Cathedral of Learning and scheduled a brief appointment with one of the highest ranking Black administrators at Pitt. A few days later, I used my lunch break from my Western Psychiatric gopher job to meet with Dr. Daniel. I told him my story about Pitt and the waiting list and so on. He got this really pissed look on his face, then he picked up the phone, called up the history department chair, and proceeded to chew him out for about five minutes.

It turned out that the Provost’s Office had created a graduate fellowship in the arts and sciences to attract more female students and students of color to Pitt. It was a one-year fellowship, one that required departments in the arts and sciences to commit additional years of funding to these students once their one-year fellowship ended. Apparently the history department chair knew about this fellowship, but never disclosed the details to me or any of the other qualified students who looked like me. After he got off the phone, Dr. Daniel looked at me and said, “It’s all taken care of. You should have your fellowship packet in a few days.” By the second half of May ’91, I had a one-year grad student assistantship with a $7,000 stipend, health insurance and full-tuition coverage. This one I chalk up to Dr. Daniel and to the grace of God.

If the powers that were in the history department were ready to ensure my failure as a grad student, they didn’t show that side to me immediately. It wasn’t until a week before the start of the fall semester that I heard from my advisor Larry Glasco, the only African American professor in the department, who, by the way, didn’t look particularly Black. He told me in so many words that this program would challenge me intellectually in ways that he wasn’t sure I was prepared for. Glasco also expected me to fulfill my language proficiency requirement in Spanish, a language he had picked up in order to do comparative research between race relations in Cuba and those in the US. I told him, “Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll do my proficiency exam in Swahili instead.” He laughed for a good twenty seconds after I said that.

You see, I had a plan, one that I’d been working on since the beginning of my junior year at Pitt. Although I didn’t know all that I was doing at the time, I did know that the College of Arts and Sciences and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (the grad school version of CAS) had obscure provisions that allowed an undergraduate student the opportunity to take grad course that could then be applied as credits in a grad program. That was part of the reason I took Sy Drescher’s Comparative Slavery course in the spring ’90 semester. I knew about the language proficiency requirement long before my conversation with Glasco, which was part of the reason why I had taken both Spanish and Swahili my senior year. I also knew that I would need a research topic that would help guide my master’s work, which was part of the reason why I took up E’s offer (see my post “The Power of Another E”) to work on an article comparing multicultural education with Afrocentric education.

I still didn’t know all that I was doing, though, so I spent the first few weeks of grad school feeling out my classes, going out to parties, reading 500 and 600-page scholarly snorefests cover-to-cover and word-for-word. Sometime around the middle of September, between seeing my Swahili professor at the hole-in-a-wall bar Constantine’s with a woman under each arm and reading my third boring book in a week, I became a monk outside of Pitt’s campus. I realized that my grad student assistantship — which was advising history majors and assisting the departmental advisors with that task — would only take up about twenty hours a semester. Other than the occasional weekend get-together with folks like Marc and Michele (or Marc or Michele or Regis or a couple others), I went after my studies in a way that made what I did my last semesters of undergrad look like I hadn’t been trying at all.

I was taking an American history (to 1865) readings seminar, History of Black Pittsburgh, an independent study with my advisor to write my research paper on the intercultural education movement and comparing it to multicultural education, and my third semester of Swahili. Plus, I had turned my summer research project into an article for publication, used it to get a spot for a conference presentation in ’92 at Lincoln University, started working on my first book review for an obscure journal, and gotten the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to apply my grad course from my junior year to my master’s work. I was busy from one day to the next, as I learned how to skim 1,500 pages of readings per week, learned the nuances of present perfect in Swahili, and did oral interviews for my paper on the Civil Rights Movement in Pittsburgh. But by the end of that first semester, not only did I have straight A’s (not a terribly difficult feat — it’s grad school, after all). I fulfilled my language requirement, was only a semester away from graduating, and had proven, at least to myself, that I belonged on this academic stage.

I’d also run myself into the ground with exhaustion, which showed a bit my second semester, as I limped toward my master’s with an A, two A-‘s and a B+ in my four courses. I had failed in pacing myself, but I had gotten so far out in front through most of that year that my second semester exhaustion was of little consequence.

The larger issue for me was the politics around finishing a degree adorned with so many requirements so quickly and with such relative ease. I knew I was working harder than I had before. To my classmates and professors, though, it looked like I was hardly working at all. In the political world of academia, there are few things that are worse than being perceived as lazy or as someone resting on their laurels. That, and my obvious preference for race issues over class and neo-Marxist ones made me a gifted grad student without a strong political ally. Glasco was hardly it. After passing my master’s orals and giving me the news that I would be a doctoral student next semester, Glasco said, “we’re going to have to slow you down next year.”

I probably was moving too fast. There weren’t exactly tons of twenty-two-year-olds walking around with master’s degrees or beginning doctoral work. Certainly no one from my life and background was doing what I was doing, and at the pace I was going too. I just wanted to get my life going, to move as far away from the Donald I’d been prior to the fall of ’88. I was both old and young, thinking that life was too short to take a stroll and study the swirling academic forces around me. I’d come to understand this all too well by the time Joe Trotter became my advisor at Carnegie Mellon.

Former Cowboys offensive tackle Blaine Nye described Longley’s twenty-one minute performance that Thanksgiving Day in ’74 as the “triumph of an uncluttered mind.” For a few months in ’91 and ’92, my mind was uncluttered, and it needed to be, as it made the road to my academic future that much easier to travel, at least for a while.

This week starting Passover Wednesday evening and going through Easter Sunday marks twenty-five years of my becoming a nondenominational Christian. As I said in my posting last December, the spiritual travels in which I’ve embarked since April ’84 have taken me many places. My relationship with The One is more complicated yet as simple as it was the day I gave up being a Hebrew-Israelite.

To think that it was only three and a half months before my conversion that I had stood on a bridge overlooking the Hutchinson River Parkway and connecting Mount Vernon to Pelham contemplating suicide. I didn’t do the deed, possibly because I heard God speaking to me, just as likely because I was still too full of myself to let my stepfather, my in-school tormentors and life push me over the edge. But I wasn’t happy, knowing in large terms what needed to happen for me to get out of 616 and Mount Vernon and to move on with my life to college and beyond.

It was this period twenty-five years ago that led me to Christianity. I’ve gone into the details of using my ninth grade classes as a entry point into other religions in the first months of ’84 in a previous posting, and covered how I eventually concluded that Christianity and Jesus was the way for me to go. The beginning of that final decision was on Passover evening ’84. It was a rather unremarkable evening of candles and raw horseradish, kosher leg of lamb and parsley, matzos and badly-spoken Hebrew about “the Lord our God the Lord is one,” or something like that. It wasn’t that the evening of sweet Manischewitz mixed with my tongue on fire again was particularly vexing or brutal. It was that I simply no longer cared one way or the other about Yahweh or Pesach or about the existence or lack thereof of the Lost Tribes. I wanted out, and more importantly, I wanted God in.

Once I made my decision, I went through a period of covert Christianity. For five months I was the only person who knew that I had done the prayerful deed. I bought my own first Bible, had started to not wear my kufi in public, and no longer considered the sabbath day from Friday evening to Saturday evening. It was only after my first day of tenth grade, when I went to school minus the kufi, that my story was out. It was only then I felt like I could say that I was a Christian and defend it with all that I believed in.

Then I went through what some folks call a baby Christian stage. I dedicated myself to being as devout as I could for about seven months. I took my Bible wherever I went. To school, on the Subway, to whatever watering hole I found my father Jimme drinking at. I proselytized at times, reinforcing my standing with a few former high school classmates in the process. But most of all, I held out in hope and prayer that God would somehow hit me and my life with a bolt of divine wisdom and intervention, transforming me into the strong person I hoped I could become and giving my life meaning beyond measure. It took the end of tenth grade and my rollercoaster Regents exams week to snap me out of that notion.

For about four and a half years after June ’85, I went through a period when I prayed, but only when I had to, and read, but more out of monotony that for understanding or peace or praise. There were too many conflicting ideas and images, too much to sort out or catch up on, for me to approach God and Christianity in a child-like manner. I only talked to God about the big questions or when I was in crisis, like during my homelessness ordeal in ’88. Otherwise, I took on what I faced in life pretty much the same way I had when I was a Hebrew-Israelite, as if it was me, and only me, against the world.

With my mother’s divorce of my stepfather final in September ’89 and my academic struggles the first half of my junior year (I barely pulled out a B average that fall, so don’t feel sorry for me), I decided to get more serious about being a Christian. I started praying more, reading more, and writing on my own. But not just about God or Jesus. I started asking God for wisdom about what to do with my so-called gifts. Despite a couple of my former classmates’ witticisms, I knew that I wasn’t put here just to play Jeopardy and win the Tournament of Champions. I realized, no, I more fully understood that it was as much up to me to seek wisdom and to put myself in position for opportunities, for God’s wisdom to touch me or intervention to make a difference. Seeing myself as more than just an emotional eunuch with a big brain allowed me to both walk with God and actually enjoy life for the first time.

That didn’t mean that I didn’t see the contradictions that were in my life. It would sometimes shock me how imperfect I was, my life was, even with my walk with God. Despite my academic success, the climbing of a steep learning curve that took me from an emotional twelve-year-old to twenty-one in less than a year and a half, I still didn’t feel comfortable as a Christian. Not fully. Not with my mother, now herself a Christian, constantly reminding me of the sinfulness that was a secular higher education, about the wrongheadedness of abortion, gay and lesbian rights, evolution, interracial marriage, and so many other pitfalls that I now must avoid. I did practice avoidance, partly through my first couple of years of grad school, where debating about the social construction of race was far easier than looking at the social construction of late-twentieth century Christianity.

It dawned on me that in my first seven years as a Christian that I’d only been to church twice. It wasn’t until August ’91 that I joined my friend Marc at his church in Wilkinsburg (just outside Pittsburgh). This place would become my church home for the next seven years. At first, I only attended about once every three or four months, during the holidays or in between semesters. Then, after another financial crisis and crisis of confidence in the summer of ’93, I decided to dedicate a significant portion of my social life to spiritual affairs, to learning how to be in God and in academia at the same time. It was a period of change, as I had transferred to Carnegie Mellon, no longer was racing back to New York and Mount Vernon for summer work, and was otherwise a full-fledged adult in every conceivable way. Yet just like Bono sang — or at least as I’m paraphrasing it — I still hadn’t found what I was looking for, as Christian as I was.

The church that I attended did provide a lot of what I was looking for. Emotional release from being in a stressful environment like lily-White Carnegie Mellon. Fellowship with mostly like-minded Christians. A pastor who didn’t just scream and holler and blather about speaking in tongues every other minute, but actually explained scripture like a good theologian. It was far better than much of what I’d cobbled together from my own studies and from the TV evangelists that were on every Sunday morning. I really got into this church. I became part of the men’s choir, tutored high school students there for a year and a half, went to Wednesday Bible study, tithed in a literal sense, and got to know about a hundred members on a first-name basis.

It was my last two years in grad school that made me realize why I was attracted to Christianity in the first place. Jesus’ willingness to forgive when most others couldn’t, and his corresponding capacity for compassion and love. Jesus’ socialistic, anti-oppression and poverty message. His standing in the breach for the downtrodden and otherwise untouchables in his life, in his world. It was in ’95 that I finally prayed and formally forgave my ex-stepfather for his abuse, not to mention my mother, my father, my former classmates, myself, for sins committed or omitted. That particular prayer gave me the release I needed to see myself as spiritually worthy, not because of anything I’ve done, but because I believe that God sees each of us that way.

It was understanding the two basic principles of Christianity — having no other gods other than God, and to love others as you love yourself — that led me to eventually leave my church home even before we moved from Pittsburgh in ’99. If there are any words in the Bible to be taken literally, the ones I just paraphrased would be the ones. Yet I saw Christians who were far more religious about their Christianity than I who’d violate these principles at every turn. I saw how the gospel of prosperity was the only sermon we’d get every Sunday. Or how gays and lesbians were to blame for Pittsburgh’s long-term decline as America’s ex-steel city (they never explained why New York, Washington, DC and San Francisco were doing so much better even though these were alleged gay meccas). Or how our lives were in disarray because we didn’t know how to live in “perfect” faith. It made me realize that the brand of Christianity practiced at my church was different enough from how I practiced it in my own life that I needed to move on.

So I did. By ’98, I was without a church home. I went to my wife’s church in Pittsburgh until we moved to DC. For the past decade, I’ve been to many a church, not finding exactly what I’d like to see there.

I’ve realized that my spiritual self is more than just this innocent, wanting-myself-and-the-world-to-be-better-than-it-is core. That even my spiritual self is far from perfect. That while there is such a thing as perfect faith, that it’s like nuclear fusion, in that we can only achieve it in a moment. That most faith, supernatural or not, is our ability to overcome the fears that exist in all of us. That spiritual, unconditional love is a choice, and that forgiveness is a choice that we need to make regularly if it’s to mean anything. Most of all, I realize that all of the perfection, balance and wisdom that is in this world but not of it isn’t the monopoly of Christians or even folks who seek spiritual guidance from a higher power. That I as a Christian have to be open to other possibilities if my choice of Christianity is to mean anything at all. That’s a lot to learn in twenty-five years.

Speaking of which, the last Seder I attended wasn’t in ’84, it was in ’95. I was invited to one by a group of first-year history grad students at Carnegie Mellon, who were amazed at how much I knew about Passover. If they only knew… Still, it was nice to go and to realize how much more orthodox Hebrew-Israelite practices were compared to this Passover commemoration. I wonder what I’ll learn in the next twenty-five years, or at least, the next twenty-five months.

Water. Earth. Fire. Air. Race. A few days ago, I decided to check on the progress of the ’10 movie The Last Airbender, the live-action version of my all-time favorite animated series, Avatar: The Last Airbender. As many other fans had already known or discovered, M. Night Shyamalan and Paramount had been putting together a cast that flew in the face of what helped make the animated series so popular in the first place. That there were White faces in the cast for The Last Airbender isn’t so surprising. That there were mostly White faces in a pan-Asian/indigenous people conception, at least until recently, was surprising.

Maybe I’m overreacting again. Maybe it wasn’t possible over the past two years to find Biracial, Asian or Native American actors to fill some of the more distinctive roles. I mean, with Russell Means, Jet Li and Kal Penn too old or unavailable, the director and producers for the film would have to find unproven or unknown actors to fill the roles of Aang, Sokka, Katara, Zuko and the other characters from the original show. Despite having about two years to do research and planning for The Last Airbender, Shyamalan and company came up with a mostly White cast by the end of ’08. There were a bunch of protests over the initial casting of Jesse McCartney as Zuko, who was replaced with Dev Patel only a few weeks ago. Because I have a kid and do watch movies made in this decade, I actually know who these actors are. None of them are Zuko, at least in look or face. Apparently no one Japanese was available to play that part.

It’s not that I would expect any studio or director to be able to go out and find Biracial folks who are Indian and German, Native American and Irish, Japanese and French, Chinese and Black, and just so happen to be good actors for this film. But I would expect them to at least try. Even in my small world of teaching, writing and nonprofit work, I’ve had students in the past years who look the role and are young enough to play these characters, assuming their acting chops are more than sufficient. So what gives?

What gives is the same old model of open, blind casting that Hollywood uses to find the best actors for a particular project. Except that open or blind casting really isn’t open or blind. It’s a way of allowing relatively unknown actors to get a role normally reserved for the more successful or famous ones. But it hardly guarantees that actors of color get a role that they would otherwise fit. Black actors have been aware of this for years. So have Asian and Native American actors going back to the days of the Western shoot ’em ups and Hollywood’s first forays into “Asian” films in the ’50s. To think that after the groundbreaking success of Avatar — not to mention films such as Slumdog Millionaire, The Last Samurai, Memoirs of a Geisha and Apocalypto — you would think that the folks involved in The Last Airbender project would use a different formula. But of course not. It took pressure from fans and critics for the Shyamalan and the cast directors to find folks like Cliff Curtis, Jessica Andres, and Aasif Mandvi.

Some bloggers and critics have said that with the casting of Dev Patel as Zuko, that the film decidedly has White actors playing the “good guys” and the darker cast members playing the “bad guys.” If the movie goes the way the casting process has gone, they may well be correct. I have a bit more faith in this end of the process than in the casting end. With the creators of the animated series (DiMartino and Konietzko) involved in the writing process for the film, they may be able to break out of the Hollywood archetype mold and build in complexity with these characters. We all know that Zuko and Iroh were complicated characters, not purely good or evil. Aang himself was both wise and naive and made lots of mistakes as Avatar. If that somehow stays in a script that these actors can somehow follow, I don’t think it would come off as White good guys versus multicultural bad guys.

Some bloggers and critics have said that the casting shouldn’t matter, since almost all of the voices for the animated series were White. Not quite true. Yes, most of the main characters’ voices were White. But Zuko’s wasn’t — Dante Basco’s Filipino American — and neither was Iroh’s, at least for two of the three seasons. So many of the other voices crossed ethnic and racial boundaries that to argue that the voices were distinctly White is a moot point. The voices matched the characters, who weren’t drawn as Whites. And to assume that a voice that isn’t White would sound “Asian” in some obvious way is about as ridiculous as blind casting for a multicultural film project like The Last Airbender.

What does all of this mean? Nothing, really, since the majority of folks who’ll turn out to see the movie will be concerned about three things: special effects — including martial arts moves — how closely the story lines follow the ones in the animated series, and whether Katara and Aang in the film live up to the animated series. For all we know, none of this will matter at all, and The Last Airbender will boom or bust Independence Day weekend ’10 because the fans will come out in droves or drips to support the franchise. As for me, I’ll wait for my trusted critics to give me a glimpse of what to expect before I spend a dime to go see it with my son. If any of the issues that have cropped up in casting or in the struggle over themes and archetypes seem to have had an effect on the film, we’re not going. This despite having become a fan because of my son. I’ll wait for DiMartino and Konietzko to create another series first. And if the worse case scenario occurs, Shyamalan will lose another fan.