A quick addendum to my normal Monday blog musings must be made today. Several articles have appeared in recent weeks over social scientist Robert Putnam’s (author of the bestseller Bowling Alone, which looked at the decline in civic and community participation in the US) bleak look at the short-term effects of diversity on civic participation. It’s been reported that in his survey of dozens of communities over the past five years, Putnam has found that members of diverse communities in the short-term tend to lead lives isolated from the rest of their community, not in open hostility or disenchantment, mind you. Just a lack of interest in crossing racial and ethnic lines to meet neighbors from different background, or in the case of African Americans and Latinos, folks from different socioeconomic backgrounds or who may be recent American arrivals.

This is the first release of the results of his data, in a speech given for an award he received in Sweden, titled “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century” and published in the journal Scandinavian Political Studies (June 2007). Despite some conservatives loving the results of Putnam’s work, some are dissatisfied with the fact that this data troubles him. Conservatives like Pat Buchanan are especially unhappy with Putnam’s wait to release more data until he can come up with ways to deal with this short-term diversity malaise, because scholars should just “report data, not write about what to do about it.” That’s just a load of crap because conservatives think anything about diversity–especially anything in favor of it–is evil.

But Putnam’s study and the conservative response is a bit beside the point. Boy At The Window is hardly scientific. But in discussing my life and the lives of my former classmates, my neighbors, my teachers and others in my hometown, Mount Vernon, New York, it’s clear that recent upsurges in diversity in a relatively un-diverse community can cause folks to hunker down in their homes and to become more protective of their mini-neighbors and neighborhoods. My bedroom suburbs wasn’t just half-White and half-Black. It was working-class Italian, middle class Jewish, affluent and WASP, middle class Black, recent-migrants-from-the-South-Black (and working poor or welfare poor), Afro-Caribbean, and increasingly Latino when I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s. In a school district that had mostly Black and Afro-Caribbean students and a mostly Italian school board, the diversity malaise frequently became much more hostile. Putnam’s point is well taken. To publish a book on short-term challenges to civic participation due to increasing diverse is irresponsible when most of the research in this field show long-term benefits to diversity in the workplace, in education and in other settings.

But my story notes a cautionary tale when a community or any group of folks–conservatives included–decide that diversity is a bad, unwanted thing that we shouldn’t do anything about. My first hometown doesn’t have the vitality that the best of all of the groups mentioned earlier brought to it during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. So many folks necessarily leave Mount Vernon for a better, easier life elsewhere, because the city offers so little for so many. I’m sure that some of my former classmates will disagree with this, but let’s be real. Mount Vernon has rarely confronted its diversity challenges with inclusion as an answer to White flight and middle class Black flight, increases in crime and poverty, and declining public services. And when inclusion has been invoked, it’s been there as a political plum for someone in city council or on the school board to take advantage of.

So I applaud Putnam for sticking to his guns regarding his research. His research confirms my own work as a researcher (see my other book, Fear of a “Black” America) and my own lived experience. I just hope that he convenes a diverse group of folk to help him write up his remedies for the diversity malaise he’s uncovered all over our country.

It’s unfortunate, but today is my last day as an adjunct professor at Howard University. I know, I know, I barely started teaching there two months ago. The reasons? There are so many that to list them all would make today’s blog a rant about the administrative incompetencies of Howard and typical of many HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities). Oh well.

I ended up teaching a six-week course titled Teaching Black Studies, even though the course was all about research methods and helping undergraduates learn how to do research using various methods. At the time I began teaching the course, my paperwork hadn’t been processed by Howard’s Provost Office, paperwork that would’ve authorized me to teach at the university. This meant that I couldn’t prove that I was a teacher at Howard, at least without calling the chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies in case security gave me a hard time. Three students were on the roster for my course, but only two–including one not on the roster–showed up for the first class, the day after July 4th. I wouldn’t know for two weeks whether Howard would cancel the class or not.

Well, they didn’t cancel the class, but they should’ve. When I first agreed to teach at Howard, it was for evening classes, once a week. Now I was teaching a two-hour per day, four day per week class after work in the heat of a Washington, DC July. More days than not, only one of my students showed up for class. The other student was attentive when there but not ready for a class of this sort. Neither of them bought the books for the class until the fourth week, but blamed me for not going into the nuanced of these books even though they didn’t have them. The worst thing that happened, though, was that my less attentive student was robbed at gunpoint in his off-campus housing during week four of my course. I didn’t see him for more than a week.

This wasn’t the only raw deal that affected me or my two students. I never received a post-registration period class roster, so I never knew how many students had actually registered for the course. I never received confirmation that my employment paperwork was processed, which also meant that I didn’t get a paycheck for this course. No one–not the Provost Office or the Dean’s Office or my department chair or her secretary–ever notified me of my employment status or course schedule with Howard for the summer or Fall.

So when I went to Howard’s website one more time to look at the Fall 2007 course schedule, only to find that Teaching Black Studies had been scheduled for Tuesdays and Thursdays, from 5:10 to 6:30 pm, I realized that it was time to put my foot down. I sent the department chair an email asking for the class to be once a week, from 5:10 to 7:30 pm, a reasonable request I thought. Especially in light of what I originally asked for in October 2006. Instead I get a phone call five days later in which she accused me of “not caring about the students” and “not being fair to her or the students.” Plus, she said, “all of our classes are Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays or Tuesdays and Thursday”. Howard apparently doesn’t offer many evening classes for undergrads, much less one day-a-week evening ones. I made the only reasonable decision I could. “If you can’t reschedule the class, then I can’t teach it at these times,” I said. Of course, it turned out that no one had registered for the class anyway.

What did I learn from this experience? That the administrative and attitudinal problems of HBCUs like Howard are as good as advertised. My course ends today, and I’m still not officially teaching there yet. I’ve assigned grades for my two students, and yet I haven’t been paid for my work. I’ve taught at five other universities over the years besides Howard — University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon, Duquesne, George Washington, and the University of the District of Columbia — and yet Howard has the proud arrogance to say that they don’t offer evening courses once a week at the undergrad level, and even the evening schedule request isn’t typical. No wonder Howard has a hard time surviving a research/teaching university. It still acts as if it’s some small liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere, the only game in town for African Americans.

It’s a recurring theme in Boy At The Window that some Blacks in my life have their own sense of race and individual advancement more in mind for themselves than for other Blacks. Such is the case with my experience at Howard and my knowledge of happenings at other HBCUs. It’s sad but true that the folks I’ve been dealing with at Howard, while they purport to care about their students, are more about taking the path of least resistance (e.g., incorrect naming of courses, refusal to see benefits in scheduling a course on research and research methods for only once a week, putting an unofficial faculty member between a rock and a hard place) than about doing the right thing. Even if it means filling out forms in triplicate.

Today marks twenty-four years since one of the six most bizarre events in my life. It was a triple-H Sunday afternoon at Wilson Woods Park in Mount Vernon, New York. Our family was picnicking in the part of the park near the Hutchinson River, which due to the lack of rain, was little more than a dribble of a stream. My mother had gone all out, making macaroni and potato salad, grilling kosherized hot dogs and hamburger meat, barbecuing chicken leg quarters, and baking two cakes–one chocolate on buttery Duncan Hines yellow cake, the other a vanilla on lemon cake. She had laid out about half our monthly allotment of food stamps on everything from A-1 sauce to two watermelons.

Under normal circumstances this would’ve been a wonderful time to have a feast. After all, it had been a year since the last time my stepfather had tried to punch and choke me into submission. My inebriated father Jimme was providing me and my older brother Darren some much needed funds every week, giving us some of our childhood back. And even though my mother was now unemployed and on welfare and there were now three younger siblings, there was food in the house from the beginning to the end of the month for the first time in two years.

But these weren’t normal circumstances. My mother had put together this picnic to celebrate two things. One was the fact that my sister Sarai was six months old–a big deal because she had sickle cell anemia (neither my mother nor my stepfather checked with the prenatal care folks to see if they both had the trait). Two was our celebration of my stepfather’s thirty-third birthday. I wasn’t exactly happy about my sister’s birth. I’d asked my mother to have an abortion at the end of her second trimester.

To celebrate my stepfather’s birthday, though, was a slap in the face, one that went on for hours throughout that weekend as I went back and forth to the C-Town store in Pelham to buy this bounty for the fat slob. By now Maurice was well over three hundred pounds at 6’1″, with skinny frog legs and a stomach that could stop nine-millimeter bullets. I couldn’t believe my mother was still having sex with this abusive asshole, much less throwing him a party.

What was the most bizarre of it was how embarrassed those who didn’t live with us at 616 seemed while they were there. My Uncle Sam–my mother’s brother–was as pissed as I’ve ever seen him. He had the look of someone whose mouth and fists wanted to do something destructive, but couldn’t. A voracious eater himself at 6’4″ and nearly 240 pound, Uncle Sam ate next to nothing during this shameful picnic. My stepfather’s friend Dennis made small talk with all of us throughout the affair, but was obviously uncomfortable around us kufi-wearing Hebrew-Israelites. Nothing to say of the obvious tension between me and Uncle Sam and my mother and stepfather. Darren, the opportunist that he was, just stuffed his face as always, pretending not to notice the agitation that was present that afternoon and evening.

My mother’s brother left after helping with some of the clean up. I would bump into Uncle Sam at the local bookstore on Gramatan Avenue thirteen months later, but I wouldn’t see him again in a happy mood until I graduated from Mount Vernon High School in ’87. I wouldn’t see Dennis again until after my mother and stepfather divorced in ’89.

Why did she do it, why did she go out of her way to please someone whose greatest family achievement was a six-month trial separation in ’80 and early ’81? Was it an act of desperation, to prove that this was a family worth preserving, to show that despite it all, that she still loved someone undeserving of her love? Was it an attempt to save herself from potential abuse in the future–did she sense that if she didn’t throw the SOB a party that he would snap and beat her unconscious again? It was probably all of the above, especially the sense of despair that comes with a failed second marriage, welfare poverty–something my mother swore would never happen to her–and five kids. I was angry with her, but I wanted my stepfather to stuff himself until he went into a coma and died from a brain hemorrhage.

What I learned from that day on it took about six years to undo. I learned not to trust my mother, to not give much trust to authority figures unless they worked damn hard to earn it, to not even trust myself or my own ability to discern the feelings and motivations of others. I stopped being a Hebrew-Israelite that day. I wanted to believe that there was a God, one who cared about what happened to me. This God of the Lost Tribes of Israel, though, wasn’t it. If I couldn’t trust homo sapiens, at least I could find a God I could trust. I needed answers to all of these, and in the weeks that followed, I started searching for a savior, one religion at a time.

This isn’t a blog on Huey Lewis & The News’ awful album from ’86 or a revisit to the critique of it, as offered by Christian Bale’s character from the 1999 movie American Psycho. My son Noah turns four today. Four! It’s unbelievable that we’ve made it this far.

But I wonder how he’ll see me once he’s old enough to understand Boy At The Window. Assuming that I’ll find a publisher and everything goes well, that is. How will Noah see his dad when he’s nine or thirteen or seventeen? Will he see a pathetic wimp of a person? Will he want to emulate me? Will he spend his time brooding over the pressure he may feel to measure up or to live down what he inherits from me?

Truth is, I don’t have a clue as to how Noah will see me by the time he’s old enough to understand the life that I lived twenty or twenty-five years ago. Heck, by the time Noah’s nine, much of what Boy At The Window’s about would be more than thirty years in the past. U2’s The Joshua Tree and Michael Jackson’s Thriller would be twenty-five and thirty years old by the time Noah can understand why his father would want him to understand the meaning of redemption or how to overcome heartbreak. Even the music I listen to now–from Anthony Hamilton to Nickelback–would be at least a decade old by the time he’s ready to load up his own (wireless) MP3 player.

I hope that me and my wife give Noah the gift of balance, of not just having a dream and pursuing it but also the ability to take time to smell the flowers, to enjoy the process. To feel joy and not have the sense that his world will come crashing down if enjoys himself too much. To pursue his education to the best of his ability but also to know that his best is good enough, for us and for this world. To be a well-rounded person who cares about others but isn’t gullible enough to be pressured by his peers into saying or doing something he should. To see others as they are and to imagine them as they could be without overindulging his reality or his dreams.

I want so much for Noah to have experiences and to enjoy his growing-up years in ways that I couldn’t or couldn’t imagine. I just hope he doesn’t think less of me because of the person I used to be, the enigmatic loner whose world was crashing around me. It may be too much too soon for me to be thinking about. Especially since Noah’s life has been pretty good so far. And after all, Noah’s only four.

Given my recent blogs, why in the world would I write a book about the worst years of my life? Years in which my wonderful moments were sprinkled in between segments of loneliness, hostility and betrayal? Am I a fool or just an arrogant SOB who has nothing better to do than blather on about his rather ordinary life?

The answers to why write and publish Boy At The Window now are simple, so much so that they surprise me. I’m motivated by the reality that my adult life has been much more pleasant than my life was twenty or twenty-five years ago. Not only my education. My social life, my family life, my Christian life, my career choices have almost all been good experiences, successful endeavors, wonderful choices. But even with all of that, I’ve remained unhappy when I otherwise should be, continue to see myself as an underdog, and in want for more in my life. This despite all of the blessings that have befallen me since leaving Mount Vernon for college. I want to know what in my past has made it difficult for me to celebrate a milestone like finishing a degree, enjoy the work I do, to not worry about money even when all the bills are paid.

Boy At The Window has helped me figure out much of what is ailing me. I tend to see myself as an underdog, so I put myself in positions where I’m fighting against a system, whether it be academia, the nonprofit sector and my supervisors, or the materialism of modern-day Christianity. Even though I’m optimistic about my own ability to succeed in life, I tend to expect the other shoe to drop, as it did a week and a half after I was awarded a Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in April 1995. That’s when my mother and four younger siblings were rendered homeless by a fire at 616 East Lincoln in Mount Vernon. They began a nearly three-year-long odyssey of homelessness and semi-homelessness before moving back to 616. I’m almost always on the lookout for something that could threaten my future or that of my son and wife. Nuclear annihilation. Global warming. A high debt to income ratio. 🙂

I know, I know. I should’ve gotten over all of the misadventures I experienced growing up by now. And for the most part I have. Yet that doesn’t mean that there aren’t scars, that there aren’t things going on within me that I’m otherwise unconscious of. So many of us who do “make it” out of poverty and abuse “by the grace of God” refuse to look back to see how much of our lives continue to be determined by the forces that shaped our upbringing. In order to be truly free, which for me means to be free to be happy in every way possible, it means confronting the past in a way that allows it to stay in the past.

It also means realizing that there are other people like me out there, maybe a ten ot twelve or sixteen-year-old who doesn’t think much of himself (or herself) or his community or parents. Someone flying right under the radar at school but a person who has talents and abilities that they can’t quite imagine unleashing in a way to transform their life. Someone who believes that there’s more to life than what they’ve experienced but doesn’t exactly know how to get there. Someone willing to make sacrifices, to take risks to make their life worth living, if only someone or something were there to help them. I hope that Boy At The Window can reach them and teach them a way to trust without being gullible, to hope without worrying about loss, to be happy even when it might seem that there isn’t a reason to be so.

Some of you may think that Boy At The Window is mostly a dark, depressing tale of struggle and strive with bits and pieces of silver lining mixed in. That’s not true, but the context for what pushed me into the journey that I’ve taken over the years arose out of moments like the one that I described on Friday. On the positive tip, the one silver lining, the one theme from 1982 that helped me get through an otherwise soul-destroying year was my seventh-grade crush.

Not that the girl whom was the object of my infatuation ever noticed. We fought twice, and for most of the year, we exchanged barbs and insults, most of them of the ridiculously stupid variety. But after watching her ballerina performance in class one day, I was smitten with attraction. It was the first time in my life that I had a crush on anyone my own age, much less a classmate. I found myself daydreaming about kissing her in class, my heart skipping a beat before pounding in my chest. My stomach would tie itself into knots upon seeing her arrive at school with her entourage at hand.

I don’t know when my crush on her turned into a metaphor for redemption. Somewhere around the time of my witnessing my ex-stepfather’s abuse of my mother, my classmate became more than just an attractive, fierce, and abundantly gifted individual. She became the type of person I aspired to be. Someone confident, fearless, able to take on the world. Someone who could defy gravity and my otherwise emotionally enigmatic self and pull out of me passions and possibilities that I never knew existed. That’s what she became to me at twelve. I’ve hoped ever since to meet people throughout my life that reminded me of my one-crush, at least the way I saw her back then.

By the time I began to get my head kicked in, I had transferred some of my feelings and thoughts about my crush to my mother. That gave me the strength that I needed to get through the summer. I know that this transference set me up for attraction to two kinds of people (women especially) in my life — those who are passionate, purposeful, and represent “damsels in distress,” and those who are popular and could be passionate and purposeful.

After a quarter-century, I’ve come to appreciate the different (and different) kinds of folks whom have been a part of my life because of my basic need for inspiration, for passion, to be saved, most of all from my past. I stopped pining away for my favorite ballerina years ago. But there is still a twelve-year-old in me who wouldn’t mind going back in time to steal a kiss, to grab her hand and thank her for being there (even if she didn’t know she was “there”), for waking me out of my childhood slumber.