I have a beef with those who make a job search into a tryout for American Idol and Top Chef wrapped into one. It seems to me that job recruiters, human resource managers and search committees have become lazy in their approach to sifting through the resumes and cover letters that they receive for jobs. I guess that a ten percent unemployment rate and seventeen percent underemployment rate would make anyone involved with the hiring process confident to the point of arrogance about how they deal with applicants. As someone who’s teaching part-time and has had a feast-or-famine time as a consultant over the past two years, I’ve applied for full-time, part-time and consulting work to bring in a decent income. I have been through some indifferent, even bizarre moments on phone interviews and in face-to-face interviews, with for-profits, private foundations, universities, and think-tanks. But nonprofit entities are truly a unique animal when it comes to process, so unique that the beef of their processes really add up to nothing more than beef-flavored tofu.

This isn’t sour grapes over not being hired. I could’ve written a dozen postings about the unfairness of life, about my not knowing enough people in high places to help find the work that I want. I haven’t, mostly because I understand that even people with the best of experiences and credentials get rejected for jobs. It’s part of the job search process, and it’s necessary, especially since I might not always be happy at a job I end up accepting. No, this is about some of my more unusual moments over the past few months in dealing with really strange job search processes in the nonprofit world.

Take my experience with the Posse Foundation. I applied for a position with them last year, and did two interviews with staff before they decided to move on with another candidate. Not unusual in any way. Except for the fact that this wasn’t their typical way of hiring folks. Usually they do a group interview in a big room, for every position. From the administrative assistant to director-level positions, applicants compete in a room for the attention of interviewers, as if these were applicants for the show Job Search (no such show, although it would likely be on NBC if it did exist). Somehow I managed to bypass that bit of humiliation. Yet, more characteristic of my previous job searches, my second interview was an afterthought, with another candidate already with staff for lunch while I was being interviewed. I had to contact them some two weeks later for an official rejection for the position.

Of course, Posse’s explanation for this is that its group interview process will give applicants a feel for what potential Posse Scholars will go through to obtain a slot for a four-year scholarship to a university through one of their university scholars. Maybe so. But at least the students receive a rejection letter or other assistance after the process is over. Nor do students sense on some level favoritism during their interview process. Not to mention the fact that most of your applicants are well above the age of seventeen or eighteen.

Another example of the unusual in a job search was a job I should’ve never applied for with The Washington Center for Internships and Academic Seminars. I managed to get an interview with folks who had all the professionalism of college students working at Jerry’s Pizza and Subs. For an hour, they asked me all kinds of questions about what I knew to be a part-time position, based on their own job advertisement on Idealist.org. I guess I should’ve been more curious, given that five people were in the room grilling me. When I finally asked a question about the flexibility of their schedule, they looked shocked. The folks finally got around to tell me that I was interviewing for both a full-time and a part-time position at the same time, with the full-time one being the priority. Then one of their directors quickly herded me outside a side gate — I guess he wanted to make sure that I felt sufficiently humiliated as a Black male — to end the interview. Needless to say, these un-professionals never did send me an official rejection notice.

But nothing, absolutely nothing, is more irritating than doing extra work for a position per the request of a potential employer, completing it and then not being interviewed at all. This was the case with The New Teacher Project (TNTP). I applied for a work-at-home position in data and policy analysis with them. The original application asked for a writing sample, but I couldn’t attach one on their application webpage. A few days later, I received an email from TNTP asking me to complete a series of exercises crunching and analyzing data regarding teacher effectiveness. This included writing a memo to prospective funders based on one set of data, importing another set of data into MS Access, running queries, filters and calculations, filling out tables and making appropriate suggestions based on this other set of data. I received this assignment Thursday evening at 6:18 pm a couple of weeks ago, but TNTP wanted my completed exercise by Sunday. I managed to get an extension for Tuesday and completed the assignment, only to receive a generic rejection from TNTP thirty-six hours later. It turned out that others “more closely fit” the position requirements.

I was miffed, and sent them a note saying so. It was lazy — to say the least — to push applicants into an exercise process before being interviewed, only to reject them based on something other than the exercise itself. I could’ve just as easily provided my published writing samples of my use of data on education policy related issues. To use valuable time to work on this when I could’ve applied for other jobs made this process ridiculous. Not to mention the fact that in going this route, TNTP should’ve paid folks for their time and effort. They gave me a generic excuse equivalent to the rejection note, saying that this was the best way to identify the best candidates. I have a better idea — how about interviewing folks first, then asking them to complete an exercise!

Academia and other fields have their own quirks and nuances. But at least you know going in what those are. The nonprofit world just makes up stuff or pulls ideas out of a “How To Do a Wacky Interview” book and expects its applicants to roll with it. I don’t expect a job search to be fair — after all, I live in a who-you-know world. What I do expect is for the search process to make sense, be consistent in its unfairness and a bit of transparency in terms of what these entities are looking for. That some haven’t even met this minimal requirement says a lot about how far professional standards have dropped, and why nonprofits are often seen in a bad light.

What do E.D. Hirsch’s books on Cultural Literacy, the commercials about nine-month-olds who can read, Harry Reid’s comments about President Obama and Pat Robertson’s admonishing of Haitians and Haiti have in common? They’re all about us, ignorant Americans, arrogant and all-assuming in our cultural norms. They all contain seeds of Whiteness, maybe even Whiteness as an assumed sense of right and wrong, of good and evil, of better intelligence, benevolence and wisdom. There may even be a touch of eugenics involved in all four, as if the White American way (which unfortunately is still one and the same) is the only right to speak and think in this world.

It’s amazing that we’re still dealing with the idea that there is only one path to intellectual development and growth in our society. This despite all of Howard Gardner’s work on multiple intelligences, and the work of so many others like Gardner. We still think that we should buy Mozart, Beethoven and Bach mp3’s, put them on our iPods, and put the headphones on the bellies of pregnant American citizens so that their children can be proficient third-grade readers before the age of five. We still believe that behaviors that promote individuality and unthinking critiques of everything are the best behaviors for our often lonely and uncritical thinking children to grow up with.

Hirsch was the main guru of a new movement of American intellectual development with his books on Cultural Literacy back in the ’80s. Now we have a series of commercials exploiting the worries of suburban and White parents with YourBabyCanRead.com. Nine-month-olds, two- year-olds and five-year-olds of the world unite in the unyielding quest to become voracious and critical readers, writers and thinkers. An all-consuming task in front of all other goals, like potty training, learning how to use a fork and a spoon, and learning how to listen to parents without whining or throwing a tantrum.

These commercials hearken back to the thinking of the first half of the twentieth century, to the wonderful world of the eugenics movement, in which scientists and pseudo-scientists sought to improve the intellectual and athletic skills of the human race — at least the “pure” and White part of it — by experimenting with those most pure. Or, more often, by experimenting (and ultimately, exterminating) those who were deemed much less pure or even dangerous to keep in the human gene pool. Blacks, Jews, gays, developmental disabled and mentally retarded all found themselves in the latter category. Most of the derogatory terms we use today as youth and adults — retard, moron, dull-minded, imbecile, even nerd — were spawned by leaders of eugenics and its off-shoots between roughly 1900 and the ’50s.

Now, I’m not arguing that a kid under the age of five can’t become a proficient reader. My older brother Darren — who learned to read without any assistance by the time he was three — is a case in point. But he didn’t do it through coaching, flash cards or Mozart. Heck, my mother — when she played music back then — would play Al Green, Diana Ross and the Supremes and The Temptations. So why the emphasis on classical music, coaching, flash cards and the pseudo-science of the baby brain here? Because it has been ingrained in the minds of most Americans — especially White Americans — that intelligence is a White thing. And in a world of increasing educational competition, that intelligence no longer has time to develop. What will Jill or Johnny do if they won’t be ready for a gifted and accelerated learning program in school by the time they’re seven years old? How will they ever get into Harvard, Yale or Princeton? How will they ever be ready to be a neuro-surgeon or a corporate lawyer?

Of course, the commercial shows one example of a kid whose interests included basketball and other sports, and not just literacy and mid-elementary level books, a nod to the need for physical stimulation (and indirectly, a nod to eugenics as well). But isn’t it interesting that not a single person in the YourBabyCanRead.com commercial was of color? Not one, not even a token one? As the late Art Rust, Jr. would say, that’s a bunch of poppycock and balderdash.

So too are the witticisms of Sen. Reid (D-NV) and televangelist Pat Robertson. Between “light-skinned Black,” “Negro dialect,” and two-century-long deals “with the devil,” we could just write the comments off as the bleating of stupid White guys. That’s far too easy. Because they were and are communicating and connecting mostly with other people like them — folks in powerful positions to influence our culture. Even though Sen. Reid didn’t mean his statement to be one for public consumption, it was meant for a private group of powerful people. And Robertson knew full well that his argument about a wrathful Old Testament God seeking vengeance on darker-skinned people who didn’t obey their masters (not to mention the Voodoo stereotype) would resonate well with his “White is Right” audience.

How does this make us ignorant? We assume that we’re the richest and most powerful country on Earth for two reasons. One, because we’re smart and hard-working individuals from mostly immigrant (and White) backgrounds, taking advantage of this nation’s resources. Or two, because we’re God-fearing Christians, faithful to the core, and because God blessed us with the bounty of this nation’s resources. That is to say, we’re good enough, we’re smart enough, and doggone it, God loves us. But apparently, not all of us, and certainly not folks who aren’t White and outside of the US. Our quest for a singular culture, for super-intelligence, for a world that only makes sense to a select and powerful few has left tens of millions of Americans as ignorant about the world as Americans would believe those in Port-au-Prince are these days. Except that with the ignorant and powerful people to their north, Haitians never were as ignorant as us.

It must’ve been everyone I’d come to know. About twenty-five or thirty of them in all. Led by Crush #1, her eventual first love and my Italian Club tormentors, they all were marching down East Lincoln near where I lived, sticks and stones in hand. More like bricks and baseball bats and chains as they got closer. They were all dressed in Sergio Valente and Jordache, Benetton and OshKosh, Levi’s and Gap attire. They were all after me, my kufi, my life, my eternal soul. They weren’t running after me. They were marching in formation, like Soviet troops in Red Square, only with ridiculous smiles of mayhem giving away their intentions. I felt scared. But I had resigned myself to my fate. If I was goin’ down, gosh darn it, I was gonna put up a fight and take some of them with me!

Dreaming about your classmates in any other way than out of adoration or infatuation isn’t healthy. They served as a metaphor. They were an obstacle between me and my inner peace, a constant reminder that the odds were against me escaping 616 and Mount Vernon for the brighter pastures of a life and education elsewhere. They were symbols all right, symbols for everything from abuse and fear of abuse to undying and unrequited love. I woke up, sweating and with a panicked heartbeat from the nightmare. I looked at all of my body parts to make sure that I still had them in place before getting out of bed.

Later that snow-melt Saturday in early ’84, my mother sent me to the Fleetwood Station post office in the northwest corner of Mount Vernon to pick up a certified package. She had a PO box there, set up originally to protect sensitive documents from thieves in the building. I assumed that she was using it now to keep Maurice from getting his hands on any checks or other sensitive information. This was yet another task that I’d become the go-to-child for. I got dressed in my hand-me down winter coat and blue sweats and began the slushy trek to Fleetwood.

Then deja vu struck. I found myself standing at the northeast corner of Lorraine and East Lincoln, unusually quiet because of the snow and the cold front that came with it the night before. This was where the metaphorical forces of destruction had lined up and marched against me. I laughed out loud, hoping at the same time that no one saw me. I looked down at the curb and sidewalk as the slush-ice was turning into mini-glacial streams and rivers, all blending as they ran toward a storm drain. In a semi-frozen pack nearby lay ten dollars. It had been trapped by the icy H2O. “My luck is getting better every day,” I said to myself. This happened to me, someone who never found more than a penny at a time on the streets and sidewalks of Mount Vernon.
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It’s funny how things like this happened to me at the beginning of a year. A dream, nightmare or vision that helped to guide me or gave me no choice but to gird my loins. A crisis, financial or otherwise, that left me so motivated and focused that the work that followed helped bring the crisis to an end. Maybe it’s because at the beginning of a year, whatever baggage I’ve brought from the previous year has left me open to wisdom and understanding beyond my actual abilities. Maybe it’s been in the quiet of a cold month of January or a cold winter season that I’m most susceptible to a quiet voice of reason and imagination, insight, foresight and hindsight that works better in a calmer mind.

I had planned to discuss this nightmarish dream of twenty-six years ago this week, but the cataclysmic events in Haiti and other issues have distracted me. To imagine that so many people — through no fault of their own — lost their lives as quickly as it would take a nuclear bomb to knock out electricity and send out a devastating blast wave. It’s saddening and chilling right down to the marrow in my bones. Except that I don’t have to imagine. The BBC and CNN have done much to make sure of that. So many are considered dead that it’s hard to see Haiti ever recovering from this earthquake.

Except that this is more than about a 7.0 Richter scale shaking of the ground. The poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, and one of the poorest on Earth, was hit by this quake. A nation that has struggled with the scorn of idiot imperialists like Pat Robertson specifically, and the economic imperialism of the nations of Europe in general since those once enslaved there revolted against their French owners nearly 22o years ago. The richest colony in the French Empire quickly became as poor as anyone in the US Delta region or a Hurricane Katrina survivor from Ward 9 can imagine.

Civil wars and warlords and a light-skinned hierarchy, informal embargo-enforced economic inequality, and natural disaster have practically been a part of Haiti’s history ever since it officially became independent in 1804. With poverty and economic and political instability comes poor building structures, limited public infrastructure in terms of doctors, nurses, police and firefighters, and a lack of the construction and demolition equipment that we take for granted in the US. Just across the street from us is an almost-finished high-rise and state-of-the-art, solar-powered office building. There’s enough there to help dig out dozens of still trapped Haitians buried in rubble — the living and the dead.

Even in the midst of all of this horror, even with the smells of rotting corpses, the moans and screams and blank stares of the injured and living, and the sights of collapsed buildings and chaos, there is hope. For I’m certain that there’s a kid or an adult whose dreams remain unshaken. A tweener whose vision for his or her life remains their guidepost. A man or woman whose hurt, upset, and devastated, but refuses to surrender their wisdom and their hope because of this. And as those who hold out in hope that we can help in some way, we must not surrender our dreams either, for Haitians or for ourselves.

I have a beef with the world of folks who still use the word “minority” to describe people like me. Most of them are White, a small minority are Black or Latino or Asian. Almost all of them are from Generation X or older generations. The final straw for me was the past week of listening to sports reporters talking about the NFL’s Rooney Rule, the one that requires teams with coaching vacancies to interview at least one “minority” candidate before making a final hiring decision. Although I think that there are many benefits to the Rooney Rule, I don’t think that calling one group of people Whites and everyone else minorities, especially if done continually, sets up the so-called others/non-Whites as outsiders, not the norm, people who need a handout from the dominant White folks who own the teams and control the hiring process.

I suppose that if the roles were reversed and we were calling all Whites “minorities” that there would be some gnashing of teeth on the part of White folk. Not necessarily. There is a power relationship issue that goes well beyond the numbers aspect of majority vs. minority. Financial, economic, social, military and cultural dominance that won’t depend on Whites continuing to be the majority of the nation’s population. This is something that folks who use this term without any regard to the diverse groups that they’ve lumped together don’t understand. For those people, White is normal, White is powerful, White is dominant. “Minorities” are the other, in constant need of help, have little regard for our nation’s cultural norms, deserve little in the way of educational, economic or other kinds of opportunities. Our individual and group identities are inconsequential and irrelevant, as they have little to do with the White world.

So Whites who use the term “minority” are racists, while the “minorities” who use the word are misinformed old farts, right? Absolutely not! I think that folks who use the term are lazy more than anything else. Even though the more appropriate term for people who aren’t White is “people of color” — and the term’s been around for at least three decades — many don’t know it or refuse to use it even if they do. “Minority” or “minorities” is one word, “people of color” or “persons of color” is three. It takes up too much space in a newspaper article and takes too much time to say those extra two words. Saying “people of color” sounds too politically correct, because it actually makes folks see in their minds’ eyes people who are Black, Latino and Asian in background. I would argue that this isn’t true, that using the term “minority” is the more sterile — and thus more politically-correct — term being used, but used in a casual and lazy way to describe 110 million people.

This is something that’s bothered me since the middle of my junior year in high school. The term “people of color” was in its infancy then, but I knew that I didn’t like being called a minority, as if someone White could call me anything they wanted without my input. It was bad enough that the powers that were at Mount Vernon High School could tell me what to wear, where to go, when I could read my Bible in school. But to also be called a “minority” as a lazy substitute for Black or something else I found insulting in ’85. These days, it remains lazy and insulting, and shows a disdain for the consideration for how those who are so-called minorities see and characterize themselves.

The same is true on the issue of the use of the term racism and race. Although I do see the issue of race involved in many issues that at first glance might seem to not involve race, that is hardly the same thing as saying that something is racist. There are folks who scream “racism” whenever a Black public figure finds themselves in hot water, and there are folks who scream “this isn’t about race!” to every claim of race or racism, which for them is the same thing. This happened again, this time with the emerging evidence that Washington Wizards scorer and flaky idiot Gilbert Arenas semi-threatened one of his teammates with supposedly unloaded guns in the locker room of the Verizon Center in DC. Folks have spent the past few days calling Arenas’ much-deserved vilification in the media “racist,” and commentators denying that any of this anything to do with race.

The folks who are calling the Arenas coverage “racist” are as idiotic as Arenas. To say that what Arenas has done is typical of what Blacks from our generation grew up with are dumb asses who couldn’t have an honest conversation about race if they were kneeling at the throne of Almighty God on Judgment Day. Those radio, TV and Internet commentators and bloggers whom say that this isn’t about race or culture are correct, of course, but they miss one point when they make that point. That is, that anyone who is of color and learns about another famous person of color who gets themselves in legal or media trouble experiences a cringing moment. These few examples of successful individuals of color, once they become public pariahs — like O.J. Simpson, Tiger Woods or Gilbert Arenas — reflect badly on everyday people of color, especially Blacks. That is the backdrop to the moronic comments of folks defending Arenas against “racism.”

So, do things like the Arenas situation or the revealing of Woods’ recent affairs involve race? To say that it does means accusing Whites of racism, at least according to White mouthpieces. To say that it doesn’t completely discounts that feeling of weariness that Blacks and other folks of color experience when rich and public people who look like us screw up legally or otherwise. Perhaps the bigger point here is that Whites who refuse to understand the dynamics of race are so tied to the notion of individualism that they’re blinded to the realities of race, while folks of color are double-bond to their individual and group affiliations. Until those in the public arena can understand and articulate these tensions, we will continue to talk past each other as if one group is speaking Russian and the other is speaking Mandarin Chinese.

Comedian Chris Rock probably put it best in his Bringin’ The Pain concert in ’96. He said that “there are two kinds of Black people — there are ‘Black people,’ and there are ‘N____s’.” I’m not so crass as to use the N-word to describe the likes of Arenas or jailed Louisiana ex-congressman William Jefferson (the guy with $90,000 in cash payoffs in his freezer), nor so naive as to think that these imbeciles represent me and what I’m doing with my life. But I’m also not so tied to the White notion of individualism to think that no one White doesn’t equate the behaviors of prominent people of color with the millions of everyday people of color. Between the lumping together of peoples of color as “minorities” and the refusal to acknowledge that race (not racism) plays a role in our perceptions and perspectives on individuals’ words and deeds, our public world needs to get into the ’90s before the ’10s get here. Oh wait a minute — I guess I should revise to “before the ’20s get here!”

A few years ago, a former classmate of mine — Crush #1, in fact — had this to say about the eventual turn to forty. She called it the Forty F___-Its, because when you turn forty, “you should just say ‘Fuck it'” to the stuff that doesn’t matter. I know full well that she didn’t create this saying, but it sounded original coming from her. Of course, the more common saying is that forty is the new thirty. Tell that to former professional athletes who are in their forties! There is a qualitative difference, because even if our bodies are tuned up, our bones don’t lie.

But my one-time crush and now married mother of two is correct. By the time we reach our forties, we should realize that there are some things we should just say “F___ it” to. I have a list of what I need to say “F___ it” to now that I’m firmly on the other side of forty.

1. Hiding my intelligence. I’ve been a miserable failure at this anyway. Still, I can be incredibly conscientious of the words I use and how I speak in situations and settings in which my intellectual skills are shunned, including the workplace. No more of that! I learned long ago that people are fickle, and that those who have problems with the occasional fifty-cent word should use their mobile phones to look up Dictionary.com instead of laughing or pretending to understand what I’ve just said. I’m not talking about talking over people’s heads. I’m talking about being truer to myself.

2. Being ever more truthful about my life. For the most part I can’t complain about the directions I’ve gone in my life over the past twenty years. Between my educational journey, teaching, nonprofit management, dating, marriage and my son, things have been pretty good for a while. But the past two or three years have been tough on us financially, despite prayer and effort. My life is far from perfect, yet from the outside looking it, I guess it looks better than what I think it is. That’s fine for others. As for me, I can’t look at my life through others’ eyes. I don’t have that luxury. We have a bit less than twelve years to get things in order so that Noah can have real choices as a young man, from the college he wants to attend to a used hybrid car to drive. That means seeing where we are now and knowing where we need to go so that all of our futures are secure.

3. Career vs. calling. For most of my time in the workforce, especially in the years since finishing my doctoral thesis at the end of ’96, I’ve “been stuck in a moment,” so to speak (thanks U2!). I’ve been ambivalent about academia as a full-time profession, and over the years, have discovered myself as a writer. I’ve also worked for a decade with one crazed nonprofit entity after another, picking up plenty of management and program development skills along the way. In the past couple of years, I’ve attempted to reconcile my calling with my career and job aspirations. To little avail.

One thing I have decided is that my doctorate can hurt me as much as help me on the job front, and that it matters only somewhat if my job or next job fits with my authorship aspiration. What does all of this mean, anyway? Should I go back to school and earn a law degree, a degree much more flexible than a doctorate in history? Should I decide to teach high school history for a steadier income and the ability to reach students before they go to college unprepared for its rigors? These are questions in need of an answer, but in order to answer them, I have to say “F___ it” to all of my assumptions about my career up to this point.

4. Live my dream and not just dream. Okay, this sounds weird, because I thought that for most of the past two decades, I had been doing this, and doing it well. Not quite true. Between our finances, my career goals and Boy @ The Window, I feel sometimes as if I’ve gotten close, but not nearly close enough, to making my visions for my life real in my life. It’s clear to me now, though, what else needs to happen. I have to step up my efforts just one notch more, to recognize that I need to be bolder and more willing to network than I ever have before. At the very least, this will get me out of the house and classroom more often.

5. Move on. Sometimes I can be obsessed with a project or a person or an idea, sometimes all at once, as was the case with Crush #2 in ’87 and ’88. At times this has been the case with Boy @ The Window. I’m convinced that one of the reasons that it’s taken me two years to make significant revisions to the manuscript is because working on it has caused me to relive many of my memories and emotions from all those years ago. Not so in the past few months. I’ve been able to do substantial revisions, to imbue the manuscript with words and emotions that might not have come through in previous drafts. Now that folks are reading it and liking it, now that I’ve revised or rewritten every section of the book at least five times (and the first chapter at least eight times), it’s time to move on to other writing projects, even as I seek publication of Boy @ The Window. Let the chips fall where they may, although I think they’ll fall in the right order this time.

6. You can’t go home again. Nothing has borne this out better than in my work on Boy @ The Window and in my communications with former classmates and teachers on Facebook and through email correspondence. This isn’t a knock on them or on me. There were good reasons for why I didn’t become friends with them growing up, and going on twenty-three to thirty years on, I can see why through our expressions of thoughts and feelings now. But, Facebook and other correspondence have also reminded me about the good friends that I did and do have in my life in the years since Humanities and leaving Mount Vernon, including a couple from Mount Vernon. That good friends are hard for anyone to find, especially if you tend not to trust the people around you. And, at least in my case, why would I want to go home again anyway?

These are the ideas about where my life should go next as we enter a new decade. While the shape of things to come remains as uncertain as our world as a whole seems to be at the end of ’09, I’m certain of some things. That I’m creative enough, smart enough, successful enough and spiritual enough to get where I want to go, and that it won’t take until my son’s in college to get there. That the people I’ll meet — including the people I need to meet — will be ones who add something positive to my life, to the lives of my wife and child. And that there will be enough faith and wisdom, love and grace along the way. Happy New Year and decade, everyone!

It’s a shame to see what’s happened to Tiger Woods in the wonderful media over the past three weeks. At the rate things are going, I could claim to have had a tryst with the man the week of the ’01 US Open in Tulsa because I did a site visit for one of my previous jobs there. Of course, much of this is his own fault. Rampant infidelity. No Jordan-esque rules of sexual engagement, including a legally-binding contract. A certain lack of self-control in his personal life. And his refusal to face the public, not because we demand it, but ultimately, to protect his brand, his image. Yet none of those things are ones I want to discuss. I feel more compelled to discuss the race rules of interracial relationships and marriage in America.

As biracial — or Cablinasian — as Woods is, he is for all intends and purposes in this country, a Black man. Between the Choctaw and Irish blood (and who knows what else is in my genes), I can claim to be Cablin myself. Yet I know full well that I’m seen and see myself demographically speaking as Black or African American. Because of this, once one of us enters into an interracial relationship — especially with a White woman — smooth sailing is the only option we have in order to not be seen as pariahs. No financial problems, no hitting and certainly no cheating is allowed. There’s little to no margin for error, and any major ones will be met swiftly with retribution. By the White wife or girlfriend, their family, your White friends (and some Black ones, too), and if a public figure, the media and the blogosphere as well.

What makes Tiger’s transgressions worse for him are two additional components. One, his wife Elin is a blond, and not just White. Two, unlike many of the White women Black men tend to date or marry, she is perceived as attractive by many folks, if not most. The combination in our zero-sum race rules around Black men with White women means that someone like Tiger Woods can’t act like anything other than the perfect husband. I’m not condoning his cheating one iota. All I know is that we were less hard on John Edwards, a guy whom was only running for President of the United States, and could’ve brought the Democratic Party down with him if he had made it to the nomination stage. We’re harder on Tiger, not just he projected a solid image, not because he let the media and the public down, but because he’s a Black guy cheating on an allegedly beautiful and blond White woman.

If you think that this is all poppycock and balderdash, anyone remember O.J. Simpson and Nicole Brown between ’92 and ’97? Those were the years that it was painfully obvious that White guys I knew were ready to form a mob, march over to Santa Monica, and kill the Hall-of-Fame running back for first hitting Brown before their divorce in ’92, then killing Brown in ’94. The last three weeks have been about the same issues. The media just refuses to see it that way. Sure, there’s shock and outrage about what Tiger’s done, and Tiger should go public to protect himself. But this is about race, and not in way Rush Limbaugh would yell about it either.

It’s funny. There’s no outrage about the fact that Tiger’s wife smashed in the back window of his Cadillac SUV with a golf club. That he was obviously attempting to get away from her. That he was treated for more injuries than running into a fire hydrant would account for. Yet, I guess, it’s okay for a blond White woman who’s been cheated on by a Black man to flip out and commit an act of domestic violence. If the tables were turned, billionaire or not, best golfer on the planet or not, Tiger would’ve gone to jail, and might still be in jail.

I’m not exactly speaking from my own experience in dating White women, because I haven’t. Not because I didn’t have the opportunity to do so. Mostly because as enlightened as I am, I’m also a bit old school on the issue of interracial dating and marriage. That it should be more about who I am than what I look like, what I stand for and not just how much money I have in my bank account this morning, love and not just lust. But my own experiences, going back to the end of high school, have shown otherwise. Getting accused of sexual harassment after a White female co-worker had made several advances toward me was a learning experience. One of many in which my interests were primarily platonic and theirs sexual in nature. One of at least half a dozen where once my intentions were clear, I faced harassment and berating, as if I was supposed to be attracted to a White woman because they’re White.

I could be crude and say that butt shape, or the lack thereof, is the reason why I never sought to date anyone White. I could be a bit more honest and say that the prospect of having to deal with their baggage while having to constantly explain my own would be another reason. Let’s face it. There aren’t a lot of folks who do get me, but most of them are of color. The full truth is, though, that in the area of relationships, I haven’t trusted the words and deeds of White women. Not friendships, just relationships. Now, maybe that’s prejudice on some scale, or maybe that’s preference. It may even be a bit of both. Still, given responses I’ve seen to folks with way more going for them than me, like O.J. and Tiger, can you really blame me?

At the same time, though, I don’t believe — like a lot of other Black folk — that Tiger would’ve been okay had he married a sista. Infidelity is serious and marriage-destroying, after all. He likely would’ve been better off not getting married at all. If you couldn’t keep it in your pants before marriage, then it is highly unlikely that you could after getting married. Marriage is hard work, no matter how beautiful and attractive you think your spouse is. Perhaps the biggest lesson here is that Woods didn’t have the capacity to work more on his marriage than his golf game.

But for me, part of the lesson here is related to race. Maybe it’s important in a multicultural society for all of us to date outside of our primary demographic group before settling on a mate. Just not to the exclusion of folks that are most physically similar to us. Maybe it’s not. It’s not like there’s a rulebook for this. It just seems that there’s way too much emphasis on Tiger’s cheating and not enough on the class, gender and racial dynamics of his marriage. Not to mention the fact that we can’t possibly know what that marriage has been like from the outside looking in. My issue here really is about how we as a public get to sit and judge someone else’s mess when most of us are wallowing neck-deep in our own crap. It’s ludicrous and a shame — on us.

The other day, a student of mine made a reference that very much reminded me of, well, me, the person I was twenty-two years ago. It was as part of a conversation about looking for work. She didn’t want to be another starving artist, living in some basement apartment somewhere, “smearing paint on a canvas” while waiting for a big break. I thought that the idea of a starving artist had all but died out in the era of bling-bling.

But it made me think for a while about the choices I’ve made with my life and career in the years since the middle of my senior year at Mount Vernon High School. As I talked about in a posting a few weeks ago, I once said to my AP English teacher Rosemary Martino that I didn’t want to be a starving artist “like Edgar Allen Poe” all those years ago. Now a student had made a similar — although better developed — reference. I think I understand better the momentary look of shock on my teacher’s face now.

It made me wonder if the quality of my life and career would be better these days if I had embraced the promise Martino saw in my writing back then. I mean, I was already a slightly malnourished six-foot-one and 160-pounder at that point anyway. The inner struggle to put thoughts to paper creatively would’ve been much easier at seventeen than it is as a forty-year-old.

Maybe so. But until Noah or one of his progeny design a time machine, I can’t rewrite my history in order to make me embrace what I now see as my calling. All I know is that those words I uttered in March ’87 have stayed with me for nearly twenty-three years. The question of finding and following my calling has always been juxtaposed with my need to eat and pay the rent and other bills. How do I do both without dropping one of the balls that I’m juggling?

The issue for more than half of my adult life was finding my calling. Along the way, I spent the summer of ’88 unemployed, the first week of my sophomore year at Pitt homeless and three weeks in May ’91 losing sixteen pounds for lack of food. Not to mention six weeks of unemployment in ’93, walking to Carnegie Mellon many a time in the snow with holes in my sneakers in ’94, and two and a half years of underemployment from December ’96 to June ’99. I was a starving writer long before I saw myself foremost as one. When one doesn’t follow their calling and doesn’t follow a typical path to making a buck, the tendency is insufficient funds.

The point is, we as Americans in a post-modern, post-industrial world have to get paid and pursue our dreams in order to succeed and survive. For educated folk like myself, “we have to get a little bit crazy,” as Seal would say. If it takes a pay cut or less job responsibility to find the time to write, then maybe that’s what it takes. Or maybe it’s a bunch of all-nighters (non-consecutive, of course) with your manuscript, only to drag yourself into work for a full shift the next morning. Or maybe it’s risking your spouse, your comfortably uncomfortable way of life, your financial present, for a more fulfilling and profitable future. Maybe it’s all of these things, maybe it’s none of them. There isn’t a single formula or one simple path to both, not as an artist and certainly not one as a writer.

Creative abilities, even genius, may well drive people mad, but most folks in pursuit of their calling aren’t fools. No one, including the starving artist, wants to starve. Some of us, though, have a desire for much more than the ability to get a job, any job, and hold one long enough to see our own kids graduate from college and meet someone they truly love. Even with the responsibilities of adulthood, we shouldn’t give up on our own aspirations, for it’s those things that we reach for (although not at all costs) that will help others — including the most important folks — in our lives pursue their own calling.