“CAPTAIN . . . ZIMBABWE!” was what “A” spontaneously yelled out loud to me one day in Doris Mann’s art class. It was late in the school year that was seventh grade, sometime in the middle of May ’82. I didn’t know where A got the idea for his new nickname for me. All I can remember was that I was wearing the same white shirt I’d worn on the first day of school, only that after about fifteen washes it probably wasn’t as white anymore. Of course I had my white kufi on. I’m sure it needed some washing. I probably needed a haircut, and being the tweener I was, I didn’t exactly wash, clean, grease up and comb out my knotty roots the way I needed to. My best guess was that A took a look at me in class and decided I looked like some primitive African attempting to wear Western-style clothing for the first time, as if I were in some Tarzan film or some other movie with Whites on safari.

It pissed me off to no end that A would say such a thing. What made it worse was that the “Captain Zimbabwe” moniker stuck in the minds of several of my other 7S classmates. A.N., A.Z., A.C., and others from the “Italian Club” picked up on A’s cue and took turns calling me “Captain Zimbabwe” for the rest of the year. I protested as much as I could. I said that they didn’t know what they were talking about. I certainly didn’t like being called it. Among other classmates, my eventual crush #2 and even crush #1 protested on my behalf. But to no avail. Even if they didn’t call me “Captain Zimbabwe” in homeroom or in English or in art class, we all had Italian together, and there weren’t any other non-Italian classmates around who’d step in on my behalf. So for the last month of the year, I’d occasionally have to hear this weird chant of “Captain Zimbabwe” from the Italian Club in Italian class. It was probably the closest, wittiest term they could come up with without calling me a nigger.

What struck me as odd during this latest episode of “Making Fun of Donald” was that it was contained to a specific group of boys in Italian class and that it didn’t spill over into all of 7S. I never understood “Captain Zimbabwe” as anything other than a racial slur. Something that A and company thought that they could get away with because it wasn’t obviously racist, at least to them. They assumed that others in 7S would have their back. Once they realized that other classmates weren’t all that cool with calling me “Captain Zimbabwe,” they were smart enough to just do it in Italian before our teacher—who was usually late—showed up.

Besides the looks of meanness and glee that appeared on A’s and others faces during these rounds of calling out “Captain Zimbabwe,” something else struck me as weird. Of all the folks in our class, I was surprised that A.Z. was involved in this. Not that A.Z. wouldn’t have participated. But given the fact that he was part Black as well as part Italian, it would’ve made sense for him to have sat this one out. That he didn’t was interesting only in understanding how much more he identified more as Italian in Italian class versus how he may have seen himself outside of Italian. He certainly didn’t identify himself as similar to me. I was too weird, too different to be considered “Black” by him. He let me know as much on any number of occasions. That ability to establish different parts of his identity in different settings may have justified A.Z.’s participation in the “Captain Zimbabwe” teases, but I saw it as a betrayal anyway.

A was by far the leader and the most interesting contradiction-of-a-person in what I called the “Italian Club” even before we had an Italian Club in high school. His was a world of cool, at least an updated ’80s Italian version of it. He acted like he was a twelve-year-old John Travolta with blond hair and blue eyes. Or like a younger version of “The Fonz,” Arthur Fonzerelli as played by Henry Winkler on Happy Days, still a hit TV show on ABC by the time we started seventh grade. The way the A.N., A.Z., A.C., J.S. and D.M. spent time with him, you would’ve thought so. The way some of the Italian girls would seem to swoon over him and laugh at his constant banter in class, you would’ve thought A was a future rock star, Billy Idol or something.

But A wasn’t cool, at least not to the rest of us, and certainly not to me. He was a smart ass who didn’t know when to stop making light of folks and their faults. Like the times he’d just go after Brandie Weston about being fat. I don’t remember his multitude of comments, just the fact that he made them. It wasn’t that Brandie didn’t respond. But how often would anyone want to get into a war of words with A, especially since the more you said the more excited he was about saying something even more outrageous or offensive in response? After a few months, I learned to just lodge my own protests but otherwise ignore him. It wasn’t worth the time and effort to yell, complain, plead and threaten A when he went into his Rodney Dangerfield mode. To be a good class comedian, it’s as important to know when to stop as it is to deliver a good joke.

Only A never knew when to stop. A couldn’t just stop with touching a nerve by joking about any fault he noticed about you. Your identity was often a topic to poke fun at, especially if you seemed uncomfortable with it or if you were more than a little different. It wasn’t just me that A went after. The Jewish students got to hear A’s rendition of The Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” where he’d sing “Nah, Nah, Nah, Nah, Nah-nah-nah-nah, Nah-nah-nah-nah, Hey Jew. . . .” One girl in my eighth grade homeroom was a “monkey” and a “baboon,” two references to her West Indian heritage and her au naturale. Although he never said it to the biracial (or at least, allegedly so) in our classes directly, the terms “mixed” and “mutt” were ones that he’d use if they peeved him in any way. It was usually meant for only A.N. to hear, though.

A must’ve fallen in love with the Eddie Murphy film 48 Hours, because every chance he got he sang The Police’s “Roxanne” refrain the same annoying way Eddie Murphy did in the film. I can still remember his “Roooooxxxxanne” yelp as A walked into class on many a morning. A also loved to belt out Devo’s “Whip It” as a subliminal message to some of our Italian female classmates on occasion. In eighth grade, A and A.N. came up with the brilliant “kufis-on-the-half-shell” joke to make fun of my multi-holed hat.

A wasn’t all bad. Whenever students outside of Humanities picked on me and he was around, he came to my defense. There was an incident in eighth grade in which a Black kid snatched my kufi from my head and started to run up the hall with it. The incident occurred as me, A, and D.M. were in the middle of an errand for a teacher. I immediately ran the boy down, knocked him to the floor, dusted off my kufi, and put it back on my head. The boy got up and threatened to beat me up. It was at this point that A intervened, saying that he would “have to take on all of us” if he wanted to fight me.

It could be that by then that A had matured. But that wouldn’t be the whole truth. I think that despite all of his search-and-destroy efforts that A never got over the fact that there were other students—Jewish, Black, Afro-Caribbean, affluent White, Latino, Biracial and female—whom were at least as smart and as witty as he was. Not only wasn’t he the smartest kid in class, he wasn’t the coolest either, certainly not outside his cloistered Italian Club.

A didn’t seem comfortable with the reality of an academically-gifted multicultural classroom until we were in tenth grade. By then, for so many of us, A was an academic afterthought, someone who could be a pain in the ass, but otherwise was somewhat harmless, like a gnat in the summertime heat. I learned to like A only because I saw him more and more as a class clown that likely had larger issues at home than any one of us would ever want to know. I could see it because I could look at my life at 616 and see how little anyone really knew about me as well.

Why didn’t folks come to each other’s defense when A was on the prowl? My best guess was that it was the fear of competition, of giving anyone in Humanities an added advantage. It was a fear, a worry, an anguish that was with most of us every day regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, religion or level of affluence. Perhaps A and his lot could get away with their brand of verbal harassment because the alternative meant sticking your neck out for someone whom you might prefer not to be in competition with in the future. If you were weak enough to knuckle under because A called you a “monkey” or a “brainiac” for a month, then you didn’t deserve to be in Humanities. A program where the ultimate show of strength was your grades. Not to mention your ability to negotiate the social terrain of the in-crowd, the folks from Grimes and Pennington who’d been taking courses together since at least second or fourth grade. If you failed in one, you had a chance to redeem yourself with the other. If you failed at both, you’d likely either drop out of Humanities or fade into the background.

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I interviewed A for Boy At The Window in March ’07. Sometimes it’s amazing how much a person can change in two decades. This wasn’t the same person I met in 7S or by the time we graduated high school in ’87. He seemed more humble, more truthful, more accepting of people not like him than the person who spent a month calling me “Captain Zimbabwe” so long ago.

So I asked him about the Captain Zimbabwe taunt and where that came from. “I never called you that!,” A said, likely realizing that he actually did. He’d borrowed the title from one of his older neighborhood friends. That friend had called a mutual friend of theirs “Captain Zimbabwe” because of his dark brown dot in the middle of his Italian forehead, “like the red dot Hindus have,” A explained. “That’s where Captain Zimbabwe came from.” His explanation made me chuckle. It was the first time I admitted to myself how goofy the bigoted joke was. How many kids even knew about Zimbabwe (known as Southern Rhodesia until ’80) when we were growing up, or know about the nation now? I think we both knew how racist the “Captain Zimbabwe” label was, but it still required some level of nerdy wit to coin the title in the first place.

A’s identity issue revolved around being cool, not cool and White or cool and Italian, just cool. That our other Italian classmates gravitated to A because of his coolness reflected as much their insecurities in Humanities as it did A’s. Because he was younger that most of the kids he grew up with in his Mount Vernon enclave near Davis, he was motivated to attract their attention, to be the best jokester and athlete he could be. “The only thing I could do get acceptance was to play baseball,” A said. He learned by seventh grade that “it wasn’t cool to be smart,” especially around Davis’ majority African American student body. Davis’ Black students were “different . . . they were older, bigger, bully types.” With all of us grouped together in Humanities, A thought that it was his obligation to fight the nerd tag. “Back then, of course I thought I was cool” and “a freakin’ know-it-all . . . when I met you in 7S, I knew I could push you around,” he said.

I’m in no way condoning A’s use of “Captain Zimbabwe” toward me, or any of his other Rush Limbaugh-like comments towards my other former classmates for that matter. I’m merely empathizing, if only to understand how different folks from different backgrounds approach a weird and nerdy multicultural environment. The irony is, A’s married to a Puerto Rican (or Nuyorican, I guess) woman and has two kids, and seems to be generally comfortable with other people now. Maybe Humanities contributed to that, maybe it didn’t. The important lesson here is that people can and do change, even if it takes years for them to do so. The “Captain Zimbabwe” episode made me tougher in school, and five years of Humanities may well have made A more sensitive to his own bigotry. Perhaps there’s hope for us all.

This might not be the most pressing question I’ve ever faced, but it’s still an important one. I’ve been playing basketball pretty much year-round since ’92. I’ve played pickup basketball, intramural basketball, basketball with friends, and mostly just shot around, trying to make myself into a mediocre basketball player. At thirty nine, my jump shot range has declined a bit, but I can still make the occasional NBA-range three-point shot. I’ve been working on my mid-range jump shot the past two years, trying to get it consistently around forty percent — without a hand in my face. Even with these caveats, most of my friends — the ones that are in the DC area, that is — refuse to play basketball with me. Their either not interested or see no point playing with someone who’s at least six inches taller than them. Oh well! 

This week marks thirty (30) years since I became friends with my one-time best friend, Starling Churn (I have permission to use his real name for all things related to Boy At The Window). It was the time of Billy Joel and Christopher Cross, Donna Summer’s “Last Dance” and Kenny Loggins’ “This Is It,” not to mention Earth, Wind & Fire and The Commodores. It was the tail end of fourth grade, the year that I discovered that I really was smart. And weird. And in need of a friend whose interest in the intellectual somewhat matched my own.

I did have other friends, other classmates I talked to or walked home with. Guys with names like Joe and Roger, Demetrius and Anthony, and a few others. None of them wanted to talk about much more than school or games or sports, not that I objected very often. We were all of nine or ten years old, and still figuring ourselves out. Still, much wasn’t the same for me after six weeks of being grounded for running away from home at the end of ’78 and into ’79 (see postings in December ’07 and December ’08). Escaping into World Book Encyclopedia and the world of books helped me in my acceptance of my mother’s second marriage and transform me into an above-average student at the same time. That put me in competition with Starling.

Ours was a friendship that began and ended with a fight, the first one on April 27, the last one, two years later, both on Fridays. In one sense, the reason for our preteen brotherly bond was also a key reason for our two fights. We were fighting over who was the smartest in our school. Silly, immature, nerdy and geekish I know, but all so true.

Our school was William H. Holmes Elementary School, one built in the mid-50s with the best of modern school architecture in mind. The back of the two-story building included a softball field, another field that was often used for flag football, a small asphalt playing area which sometimes subbed as a fifty-yard dash track, and a sloped wooded area that covered nearly a quarter-acre. Next door was the Mount Vernon Board of Education, giving the school immediate access to the district’s offices, if not its resources. This was a truly suburban K-6 school, one that could justify some of my innocence and naivete.

The back lot and wooded area between Holmes and the Board of Education was where we fought after school that April day. I won, between ripping up Starling’s shirt with a nail, punching him in the mouth, and knocking him to the ground. He ran home crying and yelling that I’d cheated in the fight by using a nail to make him look worse off than he actually was. I was just happy that I won, but sad because I had embarrassed him in front of about a dozen or more of our classmates. The following Monday, I called a truce at lunch time, and began a conversation with Starling that would last the next two years.

Starling was the first person of the same age I had ever talked to about politics, race, religion, girls, science, music, math, and war without being made to feel like I was an oddball. I was certain that this was the case for him as well. We talked during playtime before school, we ate our lunches together, hung out during recess, walked home together after school (and sometimes stopping by the neighborhood firehouse to buy locally made twenty-five cent sodas). Our classroom conversations would draw our teachers—especially our sixth-grade teacher Mrs. Bryant—into one philosophical debate after another. We’d even get our other classmates Roger, Eric, Christopher, Anthony and Ronald to participate in our carping sessions. We were two goofy, nerdy tweeners who had yet to discover the need to lighten up. But this was our world, one in which this friendship could take root and grow.

By the time we reached Mrs. Bryant and sixth grade, a good portion of our conversations turned to Christianity. I guess that this was inevitable, given that Starling was the “son of a preacher man,” a Southern Baptist pastor. Starling wanted to see me baptized and saved, an official child of God and brother in Christ. My search was one of truth and God, and if Jesus was the one who could get me there then so be it. I didn’t feel the same sense of urgency for water immersion and John 3:16 as Starling did for me. I preferred our talks about Blondie, Queen, Pink Floyd, this “thing called rap,” Carter versus Reagan and Begin versus Sadat. And I knew that Christianity lay somewhere in my future. At least I thought it did at the time.

Of course, the re-emergence of my stepfather Maurice Washington and the whole Hebrew-Israelite thing put a temporary end to my Christian enlightenment in April ’81. Him and my mother had been separated for about six months (Apparently not separated enough, as she was pregnant with my younger brother Yiscoc, to whom she gave birth in July ’81 — you do the math). During that time, my idiot stepfather had discovered the ways of Yahweh and alleged that he was a changed man. It’s strange what just a couple of changes brought to my life. I lost many of my sixth-grade friends when I showed up to school with a kufi on my head near the end of April.

Starling stopped speaking to me immediately and entirely. We’d recently celebrated—prematurely I might add—Reagan being shot by John Hinckley, Jr. on the last Friday in March. Now our friendship was over. This was what our second fight was about, our friendship, my bizarre religion and my acceptance of it. I guess that Starling at twelve was definitely his father’s son. I could certainly understand Starling’s perspective on this. I’d betrayed him when I came to school and professed that I was a Hebrew-Israelite. Starling had been talking to me for months about becoming a Christian, a Baptist, and now here I was embracing Afrocentric Judaism, similar in many ways to the Nation of Islam and its variants in terms of its racial politics. The practitioners I’d been around tended to see Black Christians as “weak,” out of touch with “their heritage,” and as “worshiping the wrong God.” Starling couldn’t accept this. We ended up in our second and final fight. I was fighting for our friendship, literally. Starling beat me to end it.

I felt betrayed myself. I didn’t understand, at least at the time, why Starling was so upset and angry with me over the whole Hebrew-Israelite thing. He had turned his back on me at a time in which I needed his input the most. I still cared about the same things, thought about the same issues, and wanted someone that I could banter with about music and politics and religion. But given Starling’s background, even back then I realized that he thought that I was well on my way to hell. Starling and I saw ourselves as adults in many ways, so he assumed that I had made a free-will adult decision for becoming a Hebrew-Israelite when I walked into Mrs. Bryant’s class with a kufi on my head. He had no idea how much I was struggling with my mother and stepfather’s decision to make our family a Hebrew-Israelite one.

So I projected the outward appearance of supreme confidence and faith in Jehovah and this slant on the ten Lost Tribes of Israel, to protect myself from being hurt and to see if this whole Hebrew-Israelite thing really was for me. Not a good move going into middle school and the Humanities Program later that year. I had no idea how much worse my life was about to become in the two years between the end of my friendship with Starling and my family’s fall into welfare poverty, bumps, bruises, babies and concussions along the way.

It wasn’t until the end of eighth grade that Starling and I began exchanging Hi’s again. Even then, this was often forced. The only conversation I had with Starling after our fight was at the end of ninth grade, with him letting me know that he was moving with his family down South. Starling Churn left with his family for Wilmington, North Carolina in the summer of ’84, still believing I was well on my way to eternal damnation.

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I decided to contact Starling at the end of May ’03. It’d been nineteen years since I’d seen or heard from the man. I ran a Google search and, lo and behold, I found Starling with one try. Apparently Starling Churn’s a rare name, so rare that his name, address, phone number, and affiliation with Mount Vernon’s public schools came up on page one of my search result. It was almost too easy and left me with new questions. Like why was he back in Mount Vernon, what got him into teaching, does he still look the same, and why hasn’t he changed his name yet?
As I sent Starling my well-tailored one-page letter, I realized that I bore him no ill-will at all. It didn’t mean that I felt nothing. The eleven-year-old in me still felt disappointment and some sense of betrayal around the end of our friendship. Yet I also understood with Starling how much time, love, and forgiveness really could heal all wounds. After all, we were only eleven and twelve years old. You’d think that most of us could get over a bad experience that happened to us at eleven. Life and people, though, have taught me otherwise.

When Starling finally responded with a phone call at the beginning of July, it was a pre-Noah high that I’d been riding—my wife was due to give birth to my son almost any day that month. I wondered why it took five weeks for him to call, as well as why now. He called me on my cell in the middle of the workday, so I told him that we needed to talk at another, more convenient time. A couple of weeks later we were on the phone at the end of my workday, talking for the first time in nearly two decades.

We talked for nearly ninety minutes. It was a really good conversation at first. I found out about Starling’s long spiritual journey from traditional Baptist to non-denominational, spirit-filled Christianity. He learned about my conversion to Christianity as well, having assumed I was still a Hebrew-Israelite. I heard this relieved sigh coming out of my receiver, like I was a prodigal son somehow finding my way home. Both of our conversions occurred within a few months of each other in ’84, in his case right after moving to Wilmington, North Carolina.

According to Starling, I was “caught up” in a “cult.” He spoke of his shock in seeing “that hat” on my head when I came to school with my kufi for the first time. I’d “made my decision” regarding my spiritual future, Starling said. His statement made sense in a way. As far as we were concerned, we were both smart enough to make adult-level decisions regardless of the adults around us.

When I thought about what occurred between Starling and me, I realized that we were both extremely arrogant and gave ourselves too much credit for our intellectual abilities. We thought of ourselves as full-blown adults at a time when puberty had yet to kick in. Starling said that “our friendship was probably no different from other adolescent young men” and that “we both were aggressive outspoken young men.” True. But we both were obsessed with assessing our place in the universe, with understanding how we could connect to God, and in making sure that we didn’t die without having a relationship with God. How many tweeners—aside from Scott Stapp, the former lead singer of Creed—spent as much time as we did attempting to access God’s wisdom? It’s this kind of thinking that could just as easily lead someone to drug, alcohol, or even sexual addiction as it could to life as a monk or a priest. The yin and yang of piety and hedonism awaits those of us whenever a parent insists on religion as the answer to all things, without debate and without understanding. Especially when kids are involved and at such an impressionable age.

Starling’s rejection of me because of my “conversion” to the Hebrew-Israelites was as much a sign of him distancing himself from a heathen on his way to hell as anything else. And knowing how seriously Starling and his Baptist family took their relations with God, rejecting me was the only way he could maintain his spiritual cleanliness.

As for Starling, he said that he “didn’t really consider our friendship to have ended, but rather time and distances and our running in different circles precipitated some separation.” This was an interesting spin on what occurred. Didn’t we fight over my conversion? Our friendship’s end wasn’t exactly gradual. I don’t remember having anyone fill the void of “best friend” or even having a good friend for several years after our fight. Nor do I recall Starling and me having reconciled in any way prior to ninth grade, which was when he told me that his family was about to relocate.

Finding out in recent years that Starling had a spiritual reawakening at fourteen after his family had moved to Wilmington, North Carolina only confirms our overblown sense of ourselves and our lack of maturity. Especially around a subject as serious as salvation. Starling has since moved back to Mount Vernon, has married and become a father, is an ordained nondenominational minister and teaches in Mount Vernon’s public schools.

None of this is necessarily surprising. Yet Starling’s road back to Mount Vernon has cost him as well. His spiritual quickening at fourteen flew in the face of his family’s more traditional, non-gifts-of-the-Spirit beliefs. Based on our conversations, Starling and his father have yet to reconcile, and around this issue of religion, it probably won’t occur in this lifetime. It appeared that despite our differences and our different paths, Starling and I might have more in common around our understanding of Christianity now than we did as tweeners.

But when it came time to talk about our friendship’s end, Starling had let me down. I was disappointed that he didn’t feel comfortable enough to discuss what actually happened. As he described my “decision” to become a Hebrew-Israelite, I said, “I don’t know what you mean by ‘decision,’ I mean, come on, we were eleven.” I don’t think he heard me, because he then spoke of the relief that he had sighed of earlier over my becoming Christian. It was as if I was now worthy of his conversation because of my allegiance to the cross.

We continued to talk, to discuss his life as school teacher and ordained preacher. His monologue about the “need to help others,” to help “Black boys stay in school” and “find their way to God” stood out the most for me. It all sounded good. Given our history, it also sounded all too familiar and disturbing.

If I could change anything I did twenty-eight years ago, it would be going to school with a kufi on my head. I would’ve been better off wearing the Star of David than wearing that kufi, especially given my own ambivalence about my family’s bizarre religion. But I learned a lot from that experience. I learned how rare a real friendship is, how hard it is to find in another person acceptance and the ability to embrace new ideas, how difficult it is to overcome the pressures of our peers and the need to be cool in our American world.

Without Starling, I learned most of all how to be a loner, to be true to myself and what I believe, about people, about God, about people who’d become my friends after leaving Mount Vernon. I learned to find my own path, one that accounted for race and religion, academics and athletics, and class and politics, but didn’t let any one dominate my thinking about myself or others. This is hard, but I thank Starling anyway.

This Tuesday is our ninth wedding anniversary! In my life, most folks I know never made it to their ninth anniversary, or their marriages were in such shambles that counting only made their prison sentence of a marriage seem that much longer. My mother was married twice, for eight and eleven years respectively. For all I witnessed, both of these marriages stretched almost any culture’s definition of such. Not only was my mother not particularly happy. Between my alcoholic father and my borderline personality and obese ex-stepfather, my mother would’ve have been better off single and without any kids. These were nightmare marriages, the kind that practically will force a man or a woman into celibacy for the rest of their lives.

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.