It’s been six years and a day since my dear friend and mentor Barbara Lazarus passed. In the years between ’93 and ’03, no one from Carnegie Mellon was more important to me and in the professional decisions I made than her. Barbara was as gritty as she was sweet, someone who made my decision to go to Carnegie Mellon to earn my doctorate worthwhile. If there was a person that I would’ve wanted to meet in a past life, it would be her.

I met her at a joint graduate school conference between the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon on diversity seventeen years ago. I don’t even remember the details of our first conversation, but I do remember that we immediately hit it off. The fact that she was an eternal optimist didn’t deter me from continuing to interact with her. When I transferred to Carnegie Mellon the following year, multiculturalism and how I defined it was a constant conversation between the two of us.

This apparently wasn’t just an intellectual exercise. Barbara wanted me to serve on her Graduate Advisory Board, which gave her input on all issues related to diversity on campus. It was a great three-year experience, and one in which I became familiar with my unofficial mentor, her home, her two children, and her dog. It allowed me to test my ideas on multiculturalism in practical ways while it also enabled me to get a better handle on the conservative identity politics of the university. She also wanted me to work for her as an assistant in the Office of Academic Affairs where she served as Associate Provost, but my Spencer Foundation award made that impossible.

Once problems with my advisor became critical in ’96, I turned to Barbara for advice and help. Her insight into my advisor and the History Department helped me immensely, and enabled me to finish my doctorate without resulting in the drastic and suicidal measure of filing a grievance against him. After the Ph.D., I continued to rely on Barbara for career advice, letters of recommendation, and insight on my more intellectual writings.

I last saw Barbara in October ’02, about nine months before her death after a two-and-a-half year battle with brain cancer. Her commitment and her care remained strong even though the rest of her was waning. She also managed to comment on how to turn my manuscript on multiculturalism into a book, asking if I thought it still wise to use the word multiculturalism in my title or in the book — the book titled Fear of a “Black” America: Multiculturalism and the African American Experience. I managed to give Barbara a hug and a final farewell that sad and sweet day. At least it was for me.

I kept in contact by email, the last one sent a month before her death. It was about an op-ed I managed to get published in The Washington Post. She congratulated me while telling me that she was no longer working on campus, and was restricted to bed rest. I knew at that point that the end was near.

It’s been more than six years since Barbara passed, and yet I still have moments when I hear her voice in my head, telling me to do something that I know I need to do. She remains one of the few people I ever considered a mentor. We acknowledged this fact, but it wasn’t something she beat her chest about. Our relationship grew out of a mutual interest in diversity and multiculturalism beyond the theoretical. I learned more from her in the eleven years I knew her than I could’ve learned from my former advisor in a lifetime, and yet I’m still not sure that this was enough. This, I have come to believe, is what friendships and mentoring situations are all about.

After hearing about the memorial service that the folks at Carnegie Mellon gave her in October ’03, I wrote a note in response to be presented at the ceremony. I couldn’t be there, between the chaos of a one-month-old baby at home and my idiotic boss at work. Here’s some of what I said:

I want to communicate to you that I am in complete solidarity with everyone who attends the gathering at CMU on October 17.  For me, Barbara’s work was more than about women’s equity in the engineering and science fields.  She was about ensuring that all (regardless of gender or race, and regardless of the degree) who attempted the grand enterprise of competing for a degree actually made it through the process … Barbara was a dear friend and mentor who truly believed in me, even in spite of myself.  I loved her, and I will surely miss her, as I am sure you will also.

And I still love and miss her very much, especially on this day.

Check your privilege. (http://redbubble.com).

Four years ago, I wrote an article for Academe Magazine titled “The Ivory Tower and Scholar-Activism.” In it, I criticized various sectors of academia for taking on the mantra of social activism, or social justice, without understanding the true meaning of such. Most had been — and many still are — saying that just by being provocative or even controversial in the classroom, that this is a form of activism. Well, maybe, but only if your job is threatened as a result of it. I pointed out that there are many good examples of scholars and intellectuals (not to be seen as the same thing) who have sacrificed all they have for a social justice cause, and that few full-time professors have that kind of dedication, despite some protestations to the contrary. I suggested that many so-called scholar-activists should become more like the social justice advocated in and out of academe in order to understand what it takes to be an activist.

Now I’m writing about social justice and privilege again, but this time from the perspective of a nonprofit manager who helped run a social justice program for a bit more than three years. It was the only non-education-related job I was excited to take, and for good reason. I would be developing a social justice and leadership development curriculum, organizing conferences and retreats, doing site visits, have input on selection and other strategic issues regarding this one-year old program.

That was back in 2000. Over the next three years and change, I’d learn some rather interesting truths about the nature of social justice activism as represented by seventy-five individuals employed with different organizations across the US. One was that almost to a person, they were a wonderful group of young men and women (and at least in one case, a transsexual woman) for me to work with. They came in dedicated, hungry, fierce and ready to take on our incomplete and unjust world. Seeing that level of enthusiasm for their work was awe-inspiring at times.

Two was the fact that many of our selections for social justice fellows were of folks who had suffered some hardship in their lives. At least one had been incarcerated, another had been homeless and a drug addict, while another was a refugee from a war-torn country in sub-Saharan Africa. That made their selections for our program all the more sweet. Still, the majority of our grantees were folks who had attended the best colleges and graduate programs in the country, from Georgetown to Berkeley to Stanford. Even for the ones with a deep well of personal experiences to draw upon for this work, seeing so many with master’s and law degrees was an interesting contrast.

Observation number three was watching how they interacted with each other and how they interacted with staff. With each other, they saw themselves as equals — at least for the most part. They talked about their work, their losses, struggles and learning curve, as well as about themselves. With staff, many of them did just that. I got to learn about these folks during my site visits, from the forests of central Alaska and Big Sky Country of Montana to more common places across the country. That part of the work was wonderful. But I also got to see grantees who thought that it was our job to serve them. One grantee my first few months on the job said as much.

That was when I realized that about a third of the social justice fellows I worked with that year, and in the years that followed, saw themselves as special, unique, both because of their experiences and because of the work that they were doing. As far as some of them were concerned, staff folk like myself were just that, staff. Whether we had done any form of social justice work or had anything of value to offer besides the fellowship itself was immaterial. Because we were staff, this group of grantees often talked to us as if we were waiters at a five-star restaurant that had just brought them undercooked fish.

It made me think, what were these people like in their public lives outside of their work? Did they treat actual customer service staff at 7-Eleven or at a dim sum brunch the same way they barked orders at us? Did they complain about me trying to keep a conference or retreat on schedule when they attended other meetings and dealt with other professionals? The answer, I’m fairly sure, was and is yes, they did and do.

It was the combination of the privilege of their advanced education combined with their selection as social justice fellows that had given some the room to actualize that privilege in their dealings with folks whom they didn’t see as deserving of their full social justice respect. It made me realize that not everyone with a background ripe for social justice is suited for this kind of activism. God knows you also need a humble and patient temperament for this kind of work as well. It may well explain why a fair number of these folks are no longer working in the social justice world. If scholars who claim to be activists need to learn a bit about activism, then emerging leaders in the social justice world could stand a little bit of humility and patience as they learn their craft.

In some ways, I guess I’m like Sade, or at least, like her in the song by the same name as the title of this post. Certainly in the world of looking for quality work. I think that this has been the case for me for the past thirteen years. I’ve had two overlapping careers in that time. One as an ambivalent part-time academic historian and professor. The other as an unfulfilled nonprofit manager. At times I’ve enjoyed both, and plenty of times I’ve enjoyed neither. For most of that time, my expectations for myself and my jobs have been way too high.

Some of that, to be sure, came from finishing a master’s and a doctorate in history between August ’91 and November ’96. Even with me constantly reminding myself not to be too cocky about having become Dr. Collins before I turned twenty-seven, I could sometimes see signs that I might’ve had a bit too much pride in my accomplishments. So when I first started applying for jobs, I expected to get more than a few calls. And not just for academic positions either. After all, I had published in Black Issues in Higher Education, done work on the AHA’s Guide to Historical Literature and the Historical Dictionary of American Education, presented at numerous conferences, including the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting twice, and had been a Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellow.

With next to no support from my advisor or dissertation committee, not to mention my own ambivalence about the world of academe, it took longer than expected to get telephone calls for interviews. Of course, I only applied for jobs in places I knew I’d be more than satisfied to reside. No job applications went out to the University of Maine at Machias, or to the University of Northern Iowa, or to the University of Mississippi at Tupelo. Nope. I thought only of places like New York, DC, Philly, Boston, or Chicago. I applied mostly to schools of education and African American studies departments. In the meantime, I dutifully converted my doctoral thesis research into academic articles I’d send out for publication all during ’97 and ’98, with no succeed.

I did get two calls for academic job interviews. One at Teachers College (Columbia) in New York, the other at Slippery Rock. Both were for history of education positions. I finished second for one, and the other position was eventually suspended. By the time of my interview at Slip Rock, I was already on financial fumes, and was wondering how the heck I ended up doing an interview for a job that might as well have been in the middle of Idaho.

So I took a part-time job working for Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh while negotiating what would become a two-year stint as an adjunct professor at Duquesne University in their College of Education. I took it, thinking that this was God’s way of teaching me to be patient and humble, to not become prideful, to not rest on my laurels. My assumption was, even in prayer, that God will somehow directly intervene and make a way for me, giving me the career I wanted.

What happened instead was a lost year. I spent most of ’98 teetering somewhere between embarrassment and frustration over my job situation. If I wasn’t upset about working with the unwashed masses at Carnegie Library, I found myself pissed that I had such low quality students at Duquesne. I applied for only nine academic positions between September ’97 and September ’98, and about an equal number of nonprofit or other kinds of jobs. I was too good for this, I thought.

What I figured out at the end of ’98 was that I was in my own way. Pride wasn’t the main issue here. Expecting God to do for me what I was now capable of doing for myself was. Shame for letting myself go so long in a struggle that shouldn’t have been was. Recurring anger over the last year of my graduate work was. I had to forgive, let the things that didn’t matter go, and relentlessly go after what I wanted. And within eight months, I found a job in DC, working for someone I’d later learn was a bigot.

But you know what else I’ve figured out over the years? There’s no such thing as an ideal job, even if it’s in your ideal field or directly on the career path you’ve carved out for yourself. It’s about pursuing the interests that you’re most passionate about, and finding the right fit, the right balance, along the way. Acting or theater work is not the same as working in the porn industry, though, no matter how much you convince yourself that acting is acting. Teaching, writing, and consulting have kept me in a state of employment for the past seventeen months, but it’s hardly enough, and I’m not just talking about money either.

What I do know is that I know enough to continue plugging away on all fronts, to continue networking, and to say “No!” to those things that would keep me from finding my career balance. And, at least I know that the problem here this time around isn’t pride or heavenly assumptions.

It’s been twenty-seven years and five and a half hours since my idiot ex-stepfather literally whipped me with a belt and gave me a concussion because I hadn’t succeeded in finding a teenager who had stolen $10 from me. But this post isn’t about what happened to me on this date back in ’82. At least, not directly. I want to concentrate on all the things I learned about how not to be the worst stepfather in the history of stepfathers.

My stepfather was an everyday example of what can happen to you if you’re seriously love-deprived. Born in August ’50 in Richmond, Virginia, Maurice spent most of his growing-up years as a semi-orphan, shuttled between grandparents, aunts, and uncles in Richmond and in Trenton, New Jersey. Maurice didn’t know his father, and rarely had contact with his mother before he turned fourteen.

Because of the lack of maternal attention, Maurice used his imagination to make himself into the ultimate pretender. He gained a reputation in his extended family and among his friends as a smooth-talking, often boastful man who could talk as if he had a PhD and could dream up “get rich quick” schemes faster than the $700-million, junk-bond-scamming Michael Milliken. Despite his size and physique, Maurice didn’t try to become “like Mike” or, more likely, Jim Brown. His grades were good enough for him to attend Montclair State University in New Jersey in ’70, only completing one semester. He also spent a year in Uncle Sam’s service as an MP at Fort Bragg before he was discharged.

Maurice lacked a clear sense of direction for his life, as well as an understanding of who he was. My mother met Maurice when he came to work at Mount Vernon Hospital as an orderly in ’75. She’d been working as a supervisor in the Dietary Department since ’68. This wasn’t exactly love at first sight, as Maurice came into Mount Vernon Hospital with the reputation of an adulterous womanizer. He already had a five-year-old daughter from his failed first marriage.

My mother’s marriage to my increasingly alcoholic father was slowly swirling around the toilet bowl when they met. After a platonic courtship that began that summer, they had begun seeing each other on a more serious basis by the end of ’75. My mother began an affair with Maurice several months before officially filing for a divorce from my father in July ’76. Not exactly the best way to move into a new relationship.

My father’s drunken awareness of my mother’s infidelity led to a number of nasty incidents. Jimme once destroyed a glass-topped coffee table by stomping into it—in front of my mother, Maurice, Darren, and me. This happened on my seventh birthday, and left me hiding in the corner of our second-floor flat on South Sixth Avenue. Jimme had also put about $3,000 worth of my mother’s clothes and shoes into a bathtub full of hot water, thrown a thirteen-inch color TV out of a window, and had repeatedly cut up the new furniture my mother had bought in the months after filing for divorce.

This stress was more than my mother could bear. She ended up in Mount Vernon Hospital for almost two months with a serious kidney ailment that turned out to be stress-induced. Darren and I stayed with our usual babysitter, one of my father’s drinking buddies in Ida. By the time my mother came out of the hospital, which was in April ’77, Maurice and my Uncle Sam had moved us into an apartment at 616 East Lincoln Avenue on Mount Vernon’s North Side. But not before my Uncle Sam, also a big man at six-foot-four and about 230 pounds, clotheslined Jimme over a fence in front of our old place as an act of vengeance.

Moving in together was the next mistake for Maurice and my mother, along with marriage and kids between ’77 and ’81. As their relationship evolved and devolved, so did Maurice’s propensity for pretending. He tried to convince me and Darren that he had fought and killed Viet Cong, carried a briefcase because he was a doctor and a lawyer, and was a writer because he had a typewriter and would occasionally write poetry and short stories. All of this while driving a cab for Reliable Taxi. Only the part about being a writer was true, except he never attempted to do anything with it besides brag about it to his friends. I was gullible, not stupid, and when I found some of his official papers in my mother’s closet a few months before their wedding in ’78, I began to wonder who Maurice really was.

But Maurice’s biggest pretending project of all was attempting to play the role of father for Darren, me, and eventually, my younger siblings. His definition of discipline was a belt for a “whuppin’,” and his idea of play-time was teaching us how to be “men” through karate. When we first moved in at 616, Maurice declared that Darren and me “would be [his] house servants.” As few and far between my visits with Jimme were after the divorce became final in ’78, I’d always seen an inebriated Jimme as more of a father than Maurice could be if he really tried.

I witnessed Maurice on too many occasions in which his role as a father was to lie to me and abuse baby Maurice. My stepfather once beat the six-month-old boy to keep him quiet because he was trying to sleep, and would forget to change his diapers while we were in school. My mother eventually found a babysitter to watch baby Maurice, but the damage was already done. We just didn’t know it yet.

So when Maurice came back into our lives in April ’81 as a Hebrew-Israelite, had made up with my mother, and began training us to walk as proud Sons of Judah, I worked extremely hard to convince myself that his conversion was real. At eleven, I wanted a father I could talk to about God, life, school and becoming a man. With Jimme temporarily out of the picture, I decided that I’d give Maurice another chance at being a father.

Boy was I such an idiot back then! If I had possessed just a tiny understanding of the world outside what I knew about Mount Vernon, New York City, and from reading bunches of books, I would’ve known the whole Hebrew-Israelite things had nothing to do with religion. Maurice was in search of an identity that would magically transform him from the creep he was into someone successful, like Bob Johnson (founder of BET, for better and especially for worse) or Reginald Lewis (the late one-time owner of Beatrice Foods). My mother didn’t want her second marriage to fail, and wanted Maurice to be the man in our family. It was so simple, and yet, I didn’t see it for nearly a year.

By that time, I was virtually friendless, one of the weirdest folks out of a group of nerdy wackos. I had to grind for three months just to get back to par, and would spend another three years finding enough of myself to have some semblance of a life outside of 616 and school. Most of all, I was beat-up, bruised, and felt betrayed on this day. I knew for sure that there was no chance in this universe of ours that Maurice could ever be a good stepfather or man, assuming he had a clue as to who that was.

The worst thing about getting beat-up that day and off and on for the rest of July ’82 was that the mugging was a set-up. About a year after my summer of hell, I saw my stepfather and Pookie in the middle of a conversation near the Pearsall Drive projects. I was on my way home from grocery shopping in nearby Pelham. I saw them from a distance, and figured that they didn’t see me. So I hid behind a tree across the street from the Getty gas station and a closed grocery store, where Maurice and Pookie talked. They were laughing and joking around, having what appeared to be a friendly conversation. I thought that I was mistaken, but how could I forget who my mugger was? My stepfather, who knew where we were that day in June ’82, had paid Pookie with my mother’s money to mug me at the pool. My carelessness had only made it easier for Pookie to do his job. It was my stepfather’s warped way of making me a man. What he did was steal my childhood.

One day my senior year at Pitt, the Henderson twins and I were in conversation about fathers — I have no idea how we got into that. I said, “the only person I’d ever really known as a father was Jesus.” I didn’t think it was especially profound at the time. But they remembered that for years after I said it. For those times, it was so true, and in many ways, it still is.

I guess that I should be discussing the meaning of Chicago’s “Saturday in the Park,” especially with this July 4th being on a Saturday. But in light of Michael Jackson’s death last week, it’s an even better idea to discuss the effect that his music had on me at various times in my life. My first exposure to Michael Jackson came through the Jackson 5 cartoon series that was on in the early ’70s. Then he did The Wiz in ’78, and his first solo album Off The Wall came out in ’79. I remember that one of my first times hearing “Rock With You” was at an in-class dance party in my fifth grade class with Mrs. O’Daniels. Of course, who could forget Thriller and all that came with it between October ’82 and April ’84? Twenty-five million albums sold in the US alone during that time, and some 50 million worldwide. They should’ve renamed Sony “MJ-ony!”

I’ve been everywhere, man, especially when it comes to poverty. I’ve seen more kinds of poverty than I’d ever want to know. And ’01 was a banner year to see it all. President Bill Clinton might’ve gone on some form of a Southern poverty tour in his pre-presidential campaign in ’96. But I had the chance to see American poverty in all of its various forms in June ’01, and not just in the South. Although it did start for me in the South, up close and personal.

I took off a couple of days early for my social justice fellow site visit in Jackson, Mississippi. I flew into Shreveport, Louisiana — as part of an extended layover in the days before 9/11 — to do something I’d never done before. I was on my way to visiting my grandparents on my mother’s side in Bradley, Arkansas. I was there, once, physically, as a second-trimester fetus in the summer of ’69. I found myself both excited and in dread of what I’d find going there. I knew it would be poverty like I’d never seen it. And it was, even before I reached the Gill family in Bradley.

I called for and took a cab from my Holiday Inn Express next to the beat-up airport in Shreveport and paid for a forty-mile trip. If I’d been driving, I would’ve missed it. Bradley was a yellow-flashing, one-stoplight town. There was a bar, a laundromat, a church and a store on the four corners, with one side of town White, the other Black. As we drove deeper into the Black side, the houses looked more and more run-down, with corrugated rooftops and often outhouses. The section of houses that included the Gills were all shotgun ones. They had no running water and had not turned on the plumbing in their place for the past three decades, even though they were still using the toilet. The house was dirty, and not in a typical American sort of way. It was as if they lived on a garbage dump next to a toxic waste site. When I opened up a partially broken cabinet door to get a cup, I was hit in the face and head with what seemed like dozens of roaches.

I spent one long and desperate night with the Gill family in Bradley, waking up over and over because roaches crawled across my body and flies constantly buzzed. I couldn’t get myself to use their bathroom, and their outhouse didn’t work anymore. Luckily my Uncle Charles got his broken-down Chevy Cavalier to work. As soon as I returned to my hotel room, I took one of the longest showers of my life, somewhere near an hour. I was heartbroken to have seen so much poverty, especially since my grandparents were eighty-two and seventy-three at the time.

Jackson, Mississippi’s poverty wasn’t as obvious as the quasi-Global South/ Third World poverty I saw in Bradley. Still, it was all too sad. Even with a degree — albeit a tiny degree — of residential integration, the run-down Black side of town was just that. Jackson State University looked more like a cheap comprehensive high school than a major historically-Black or any other kind of university. The community around the campus varied from block to block. One block would have a series of fairly well-kept working-class and middle class homes. The next would have a half-torn-down house next to an empty lot next to another dilapidation. For all of the progress since the end of Jim Crow, Jackson might as well have been stuck in 1961.

Tulsa, Oklahoma was next, and it wasn’t pretty. I spent most of my time in its dead downtown or on its bombed-out North side. There, poor Blacks and extremely impoverished American Indians lived. There were even more monstrosities for homes, evil-looking projects and empty lots there than in Jackson. But what made it worse was getting in a car with a social justice fellow and seeing her side of town, the South side. It’s where Tiger Woods played in the US Open the following week. It’s where I saw stately mansions and an abundance of middle class homes. It’s the home of Oral Roberts University and the University of Tulsa. The contrast was greater than seeing the difference between high-priced, high-rise condos on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and where we lived at 616. It was absolutely disgusting.

After a two-week break, I flew out to Fairbanks, Alaska for the Summer Solstice. Twenty-three and a half hours of sunlight for three straight days. About half spent fifty miles of driving and thirty miles by boat away from Fairbanks, in a Athabascan fishing village. There, I did get to use the outhouse while being eaten alive by mosquitoes during central Alaska’s short but intense growing season. The kids all thought that I was either Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods. Even with the lack of technology or civilization, it was the least poor place I’d visit throughout that month.

A couple of days after Alaska, I went to Durham, North Carolina, to see the kind of poverty I had grown accustomed to growing up. It was Southern Latino immigrant poverty, but it wasn’t the grinding, never-ending poverty I had seen in Alaska, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas or Mississippi. Even with that, this relatively new community faced financial and other forms discrimination that could’ve had the effect of putting them into a hard-steel poverty, one that ages someone from the outside in. The best thing about that trip was the social justice fellow I met there, the rabbit stew I ate for dinner, and the Durham Bulls memorabilia I bought for my wife.

What made the month so depressing was the impoverished thinking I encountered throughout. From social justice workers, government officials, everyday people, the poor folks I met, including my grandparents. Despite all of the difficulties between me and my mother, I appreciated the strength it took for her to move from Bradley to the Bronx in ’66. It obviously took a lot of it. I only wished that so many others I met that month could’ve done the same.