Category Archives: eclectic music

About That Time at Van Cortlandt Park, and Other Bricks in the Wall…

28 Monday Sep 2020

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, music, My Father, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Van Cortlandt Park screen shot (parade grounds, cropped), June 4, 2020. (https://www.thisisthebronx.info/a-van-cortlandt-park-living-room-picnic/).

I don’t consider myself to be a seer. Not exactly. I might have gotten a thing or 1,000 predictions correct in my life. But since I usually prefer to expect good outcomes, I do not indulge the dreams I have of destruction, or the muses who conjure the possibilities of apocalypse, whether for me, my family, or at larger scales.

But the last half of 1980 was different for me. I’d come into my own as a kid. I finally had a posse of classmates and friends, between the two Joes, Starling, Chris, Ronald, Vanessa, Eric, Ray Ray, Sean, Lajuan, and Dahlia, among others. I was kicking ass academically, and was on the verge of discovering other talents, including writing. After my last summer camp with Darren at Clear View, and rereading the late Lerone Bennett Jr.’s Ebony Pictorial History of Black America, I understood my Blackness, really and truly, for the first time.

But I chose to see the glass as half full, both for myself and for Black folk in the US. Why wouldn’t I have? Somehow, in the middle of what I call “deep summer,” when the previous school year and the start of the first day of the next school year are about equally far away, it happened. My stepfather Maurice got a call from his music-obsessed friend Dennis (who was also a professional musician, by the way) in the middle of a Sunday afternoon in mid-August about going to some concert in the park in the Bronx. There was no mention of who the headliners were. I just remember playing Peanuts Land with my Matchbox cars and driving down along the shoppes in the nightlife district of the city underneath my bed when Maurice came in and rushed us to get dressed.

Mom, Maurice, Darren, little Maurice, and me. We piled into a cab over to Van Cortlandt Park, where we met Maurice’s friend Dennis. He knew a couple of the headlining people who were playing. I don’t recall tickets, but I do remember flyers everywhere. It seemed like this was a spontaneous gathering, where people somehow knew where to go and where to gather. I remember it being sometime around 7 or 8 pm when the jamming began, with all the music of the late-1970s and 1980. It was mostly an MC mixing a string a songs together, between Chic and “Good Times”, The Whispers’ “And The Beat Goes On,” and Michael’s “Off The Wall.”

But maybe 45 minutes in, three guys got on the stage to do their performance, Sugar Hill Gang, and the crowd of hundreds erupted into a roar as they rapped to “Rapper’s Delight.” They did a bunch of songs beyond the “a hip, hop/the hippie, the hippie/To the hip hip hop/a you don’t stop…” I was into it like everyone else, doing my terrible version of a Michael Jackson dance routine while clapping my hands to the beat. Sometime between 10 and 11, we left, I think, between a cab and Dennis giving Maurice and Mom and little Maurice a ride home. Even Mom looked like she had a good time. It would be just about the last good time we would have as a sort-of-family.

But the music didn’t stop with Van Cortlandt Park or the Sugar Hill Gang. The spring and summer of 1980 was the transition to a new decade of music, as homophobes from New York to Detroit and L.A. had spent the past year killing disco by smashing vinyl and smashing in Toyota Corollas and Datsun Zs. (By the way, for those who are still kicking and screaming over Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP,” go on YouTube and listen to the late Donna Summer’s “Love To Love You Baby“. It’ll probably make you question the meaning of your false sense of morality.)

Kool and The Gang had crossed over with “Ladies Night,” and were about to walk the fine line between success and selling out with “Celebration.” All summer on the bus back and forth from Clear View with Darren, SOS Band’s “Take Your Time (Do It Right)” was on at least once a day. There was also Teddy Pendergrass, the one, the only, and emerging, Luther Vandross’ “Searching” (yes, not his official solo debut, but), and of course Stephanie Mills with “Never Knew Love Like This Before”. And all that because my father had introduced us to Toni, a new drinking budding of his, herself a professional singer. Not to mention, a couple of bartenders in Mount Vernon and in the Bronx who didn’t mind a 12 and a 10-year-old sitting around on off nights in July and August.

On the AM side of things with 770 AM WABC radio, there was still Billy Joel, Kenny Loggins, Barbra Streisand and her collabs with The Bee Gees, “Guilty” and “Woman In Love.” Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” was the second half of the summer of 1980, old and yet new, at least to me.

But as that summer moved into fall and 6th grade, I sensed something was changing, and not for the better. I sensed it in music, more than I did with Jimme’s alcohol abuse and fewer visits, more that even in Mom’s inability to keep food in our stomachs or in her failing marriage with Maurice. The music seemed more sinister, less hopeful, darker somehow. Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust” somehow conjured “No mas! No mas!” and Roberto Duran giving up against Sugar Ray Leonard that November, the same month Reagan beat a beat down, haggard Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election. The beginning of four decades’ worth of hollow promises to White Americans, millions willing to sell the rest of us to Hell for their macabre pleasure and some tax breaks.

But no song signified the transition of the US for me in 1980 more than Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall”. It was likely the first true music video I ever saw, courtesy of my 616 friend Tré, who lived on the second floor. I spent a lot of time hanging with Tré, his older sister Renee, and her friend Stephanie (who I had the tiniest of crushes on, but I digress). It was during the months after Maurice and Mom had separated, with him taking the TV and a month’s supply of mail-ordered meats out of our two freezers. Tré, Renee, and their mother made me feel welcome between that first Saturday in October and when the Hebrew-Israelite bullshit began six months later.

“We don’t need no education. We don’t need no thought control…” It was about much more than strict teachers and social control over students. It was a prediction of a future, my future, our collective futures. That’s what I thought about this time 40 years ago. I had conversations with my classmates about this, about Reagan, about double-digit inflation and unemployment, about the Iran hostage crisis, about the rumors that the US had given Israel nukes, and Israel had, in turn given nukes to apartheid South Africa. “You’re so weird!” they’d say. Or, more often, “You worry too much, Donald!” Only Starling understood. But he expected me to “become one with Jesus,” as if Jesus alone could stop me from worrying about the future.

In short order, the Reagan Years came and gutted the relative economic security of the US, disrupting the shaky gains Blacks had made in the years between 1946 and 1980. Mark David Chapman murdered John Lennon to ring in the holidays, and Blondie’s Debbie Harry badly rapped her way through their January 1981 hit “Rapture” while Mom began to talk about being raptured up for the first time. My family was at the edge of an abyss, a mini-apocalypse that would ultimately transform all of us. It would certainly sidetrack me from my calling as a writer for years to come.

But the world didn’t stop spinning. Nor did life stop handing me days of happiness, of contentment, of miracles and even some joy. It just meant that I would be more cautious, anxious, depressed, worried, on edge. Because America believes itself above reproach, even as it deals in shit and blood, and drags the rest of us into the burgundy-soaked muck with it. The distance between 1980 and 2020 might be 40 years, but with Trump and his army of minions, I might as well be in the same moment. Only, I’m 50 now, and I know much better about listening to my inner voice and my muses.

Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad P(Vagina)y? Men, in a Word

13 Sunday Sep 2020

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon New York, music, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Layered anatomy of the anatomical male and anatomical female body, June 5, 2016. (https://naturopathicdoctorwizangwira.wordpress.com/).

The first time I became self-aware of myself as a male with male parts was when I was five. At our second-floor flat on South Sixth in South Side Mount Vernon, New York, sometime in the summer of 1975, I walked in on my mother in the bathroom. She had just finished peeing and was wiping herself. All I could do was stare at her vagina area, seeing mostly what wasn’t there. “Maywa,” I said (a mash of my mother’s name Mary with Mom) “what happened to your pee-pee?” My mother explained that she didn’t “have a pee-pee” — without explaining why she didn’t have one. “When I get some money, I’m gonna go to the pee-pee store and buy you one,” I responded.

There are maybe 20 stories growing up where it seems me and my mother both share and end up smiling, with a sense of real warmth and affection, and not just base-level love, and without irony or a hidden sense of jealousy or disdain. The pee-pee story is one of them.

But this is more than just about the time before sexual assault, domestic violence, child abuse, neglect, and a massive slide into poverty changed my sense of the world. It’s about how men learn to fear all things vagina and vagina-related, and how that fear so easily turns us into misogynists and misogynoirists. It’s about how we as men fail to educate ourselves about women, about patriarchy, and ultimately, about who we are and who we need to be to end patriarchy.

A few years after discovering the differences between the anatomically male and the anatomically female, I knew a bit more, in both an intellectual and social sense. I no longer accidentally danced under my mother’s and other older women’s dresses at the parties my mother took us to when I was five and six years old. I guess if you get slapped upside the head enough times, you recognize why acting like you’re playing hide-and-seek with your mother’s dress as a prop might be socially inappropriate.

But that’s not all. By 1978 and 1979, we had World Book Encyclopedia at 616. Once I began plowing through it to learn all I could — and not just as a way to punish my mother for punishing me — I learned even more about the body than any eight or nine-year-old ought to learn on their own. The “Human Body” section contained celluloid slices of the male and female body, which would layer together to form a full body. From bones to muscles, from muscles to blood vessels, from blood vessels to nerves and organs and systems, and then to derma and coverings for orifices.

I remember the reproductive system either being the last or among the last of the sectional celluloids to form a male or female body. I learned about ovaries, testes, scrota, urethras, and vaginas long before I could say these words correctly. This also meant that I understood where babies come from, without fully understanding the drive that led to human reproduction.

A year later, near the end of fifth grade at William H. Holmes ES (I think it was the third week of May 1980), me and my classmate Joe were on our way home (we both lived in the A section of 616). We were talking shit about girls, about boys, about life in general, maybe with a few “yo’ mama” jokes thrown in. Suddenly, Joe hits me with the question, “Have you ever seen a pussy before?” “No!,” I lied, and loudly too. Joe teased me about it, saying, “You can’t even say ‘pussy,’ can you?” I just laughed it off, not knowing what to say, really. Even at ten, I knew enough to know I couldn’t reveal I’d seen my mother’s vagina at five or that I had seen the encyclopedia’s White female rendering of one.

I didn’t use the word at all until June 1988. It was after I escaped yet another attempt by my idiot stepfather Maurice to make me see him as my father through the use of his fists. He ended up falling into a tub of bathwater meant for my youngest siblings Sarai and Eri. What made this even more ridiculous? This was after my first year at Pitt, a year where I knew more than enough about the world, about the predicament at 616, and about myself to recognize I didn’t have to put up with this bullshit. But I slid back into my old role as teenaged man-child anyway.

This was what happened afterward, via Boy @ The Window

All I kept muttering to myself was, ‘I’m a pussy,’ because I still could’ve gone to the cops for his attempted assault. After a couple of minutes, he said, ‘Get this through your head, boy. Me and your mother are happy together, and we’re gonna be together long after you leave here and go out in the world. The world’s a dangerous place, and we’re just gettin’ you ready for it.’
Huh? What? I knew not to laugh right then, but I was laughing at him on the inside. I knew right then that him and Mom would be over sooner rather than later.

Even in that moment, it felt weird to call myself “a pussy.” I never saw myself as weak, or women in general as weak. It didn’t occur to me that I was afraid, not of getting beat up or of being weak. I was afraid that I would never become the person I wanted to become. I was afraid that mfs like Maurice would continue to come at me because they saw the version of me that I presented at 616, the shell that seemed weak, just like how they saw women, just like how they saw anyone with a vagina.

This is the fear of all boys and men unknowingly or fully conscious of the patriarchy, masculinity, and the world, of folks on the verge of misogyny, misogynoir, and hypermasculinity. The fear of being seen by other men and women-as-patriarchy’s-footsoldiers as pussies, weak in body, mind, and spirit, and therefore as exploitable to the point of being used as a punching bag.

This was why there was such a ludicrous outcry over Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP” last month. The responses weren’t about Christianity and morality. Not really. They were about the need to keep women from freeing themselves and their vaginas from the clutches of patriarchy. The angry gasbags on Instagram and Twitter venting their spleens were expressing their need to keep women and their pussies in a locked box, fully under the control of men and women-as-patriarchy’s-footsoldiers, for use only in case of wanting to make a sanctified baby (especially White ones). Anything short of this total control weakens men, weakens patriarchy, and makes us vulnerable to questioning ourselves.

The truth is, heterosexual men especially are scared because we as a group cannot be as strong as women, queer/transgender women included. None of us can be strong when we refuse ourselves the right of vulnerability, the need to feel feelings aside from anger, rage, and bravado, the courage of solidarity and love, and the humanity of affection with and for others — including for the men in our lives. This isn’t just about men needing to cry when in each other’s presence (although I am more than sure that would be helpful for millions). It’s about the need to connect with the parts of ourselves that we refuse to acknowledge. For most men, it’s as if we are all M1 Abrams tanks, ready to kill and destroy at a moment’s notice.

But as so many Black feminists in my life have reminded me over the years, the vagina is a really strong muscle. After all, the vast majority of humanity has passed through one on the way to being born. It is a muscle that can be strengthened, stretched, and even repaired, something we as a species and world so desperately need. Try as men might, there are no dick exercises in which any anatomical male can do reps with his penis and build strength. At least not yet.

Constantine’s, No Longer Around, Missed Anyway

19 Wednesday Aug 2020

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, music, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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The East Liberty CVS on Penn Avenue (where Constantine’s once stood), August 2017. (Itay Gabay via Google Maps).

“Last call for the alcohol!,” the half-bartender, half-bouncer would yell about 20 minutes before the two o’clock closing of the hole-in-the-wall joint that spend a few too many Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays in between the summer of 1991 and January 1995. It was my time “bein’ around my peeps,” sitting around to nurse two or three drinks, dance, people-watch, and occasionally go back home with a patron. It was my time to not think about what I feared, especially God and graduate school. It was my time to forget that I was the second of six kids who had the triple responsibility of father figure, oldest brother, and caregiver. Mostly, it was just a place to allow my horny and bored-with-the-world ass hang out and not be so intellectual and weird all the time.

Constantine’s was where the East Liberty CVS on Penn Avenue in Pittsburgh now sits. It was less than two blocks from where I lived on Penn Circle South, my first on-my-own flat that I didn’t have to share with no one. I have no idea what was there in that rickety and beaten up old one-floor building before Constantine’s. Maybe it had always been a bar or a club, one that had seen better days in the decade or two before I was born. Maybe it was once a hardware store or a dry cleaners. Who knows?

All I knew was, in the month or two after I moved into my Penn Circle South studio apartment, I stumbled onto the place. It would’ve been October 1990, just cool enough for Pittsburghers to start wearing winter gear, Steelers jerseys, and enough Steelers and Pirates pleather and leather to scare a herd of charging bulls. A group of 20-somethings were packing their way through Constantine’s front door. There was a bouncer, I guess, checking IDs to make sure everyone was over 21. Judging by the way some of the youngest women were made up, though, I didn’t think the bouncer was consistently checking folks.

I didn’t go in that day. Too many bills, not enough money, and too many thoughts about What would Mom think? and What temptations would harm my soul? So I forgot about the place for the remainder of my senior year at Pitt.

It wasn’t until I started having problems with my friend E during my first full summer living in the ‘Burgh in ’91 that I started carving out me-time at Constantine’s. I went in on a sweltering mid-June Wednesday, and as would become ritual over the next 3.5 years, the so-called bouncer didn’t check me for ID. The joint was tacky as hell. The tables and chairs on the left were either plastic or plywood, Kelly green or harsh white.

Ving Rhames in Dave (1993), Screen Shot, August 17, 2020. (https://MovieActors.com).

The barstools on the right were of better quality, up against a bar with a prickly middle-aged-looking Black dude who maintained his fresh Ving Rhames-in-Dave (1993) haircut under any and all circumstances serving drinks. He was so mercurial. He could be, “Wassup man? How you be?” one Saturday, and “We don’t serve your kind!” another. One Friday, I ordered a screwdriver (Vodka and O.J.) without any pushback. The next Friday, he was all like, “Muthafucka, just call it a vodka and orange juice! I don’t mix screwdrivers here!”

There was a well-proportioned Black woman who always, always, always, sat in the middle of seven barstools, just to the right of the cash register. She was maybe about five-two, skin the color of mahogany, her hair in a ’90s-style perm or in ruffles. She either wore skin-tight dresses or jeans with a revealing blouse, never danced, and rarely greeted anyone. I figured she was either the gruff bartender’s girlfriend or that Constantine’s was her favorite watering hole. Whatever. She probably could drink the entire group of men (and sometimes women) who hit on her every night under the table and under the concrete foundation, too.

Much of what remember from my Constantine’s outings were the fights. There were so many fights. Fights between two guys over a woman would break out in the middle of the dance floor one Friday or Saturday after another. I once saw a guy beaten until there was a pool of blood in the center of the floor, with a trail of blood leading into the alleyway that led to the side entrance of my apartment building. It wasn’t unusual for women to throw down either, knocking each other out somewhere between PE’s “Can’t Truss It” and Daddy Freddy’s “We Are The Champions.”

Speaking of the music, it was the early ’90s, so the vibe went from New Jack Swing, Babyface and Tony! Toni! Toné! to Jodeci, MJB, and PE, with bits of Kriss Kross, Tribe Called Quest, Naughty By Nature, TLC, Dre, MC Lyte, and LL Cool J thrown in. But it was reggae — specifically dancehall — and gansta rap that was mostly in our ears at Constantine’s for most of my time attending. Shabba Ranks was so big at Constantine’s. So was Patra and Buju Banton and fake raggamuffin Shaggy. Outside of Pitt, I didn’t know African Caribbeans lived in Pittsburgh until I started sipping drinks at Constantine’s.

I also didn’t really know how to dance until I started hanging out at this smoked-filled and slick-floored destination. I went on the floor maybe once every three trips. Sometimes I was more interested in observing than in participating. Sometimes I was too stressed and horny to do anything else but stare at faces, breasts, hips, and asses for a few hours. But I did dance, at least, as best as I could. I used my halfway decent post-up moves from the basketball court as the basis for decent footwork. But, as I began realizing that some of the women wanted to grind, I learned how to do that too.

I had some awkward moments. Like the time my Swahili instructor and I found ourselves at Constantine’s one really warm Wednesday night in the fall of ’91. He had a woman on each arm. All three of them were from Tanzania, not the typical group of Constantine attendees. We greeted each other, and proceeded to ignore each other the rest of the night. Class the next afternoon was pretty much about my and his after-hours habits.

Sometimes I almost got into it with a guy here or a woman there because I looked at them the wrong way, said the wrong thing, sounded too educated or “White,” or because someone’s conversation with me ran on too long. In 1992, one woman laughed at me and kicked me in my rear on my way out the door after I revealed that I was “also working on my master’s” — she obviously didn’t believe me. Until she saw me on campus a week later. After that, I lied, and told folks who asked that I was a “part-time college student.”

I was too young, stressed about grad school and life, and excited and aroused to be scared. I should’ve been. On two occasions, someone threw a large liquor bottle in my direction when I was on my way out of Constantine’s. One other time, I swear, a bullet whizzed past me and into the window of a parked car.

The last time I went to Constantine’s was the beginning of February ’95. I kid you not, they were running the place with a portable electric generator plugged into an outdoor outlet — someone hadn’t paid their Duquesne Light bill. It kept the lights even dimmer than normal. There was no heat. This is a bar in Pittsburgh, before climate change made American winters into the wet season in Guyana. It was 15 degrees Fahrenheit that day, and it felt like it at Constantine’s that night, even with nearly 30 dumbasses like me in the bar that night. I left after 45 minutes.

Three days later, I was in Washington, DC, working on my dissertation project. When I returned at the end of March, Constantine’s was gone, bulldozed to make way for East Liberty’s first CVS.

Truly, if my field had been sociology, cultural anthropology, or social psychology, creative nonfiction writing, my times at Constantine’s would’ve made a great project, with me as subject, too. The misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, and hypermasculinity on display, side-by-side with intersectionality, feminism, sexuality, all in the midst of the beginning of this neighborhood’s gradual shift toward gentrification. It was, well, fascinating. Thankful, though, to not feel that awkward at this stage of life.

Jordan Was Great, But He’s Also an All-Too-Typical American Narcissist

07 Thursday May 2020

Posted by in 1, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Movies, music, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Sports, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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John Starks (NY Knicks) dunking on MJ, Horace Grant (Chicago Bulls) in final minute of Game 2, NBA Eastern Conference Finals, MSG, New York, May 25, 1993. (Getty Images).

I’ve been thinking on this for a few weeks now. Ever since the buildup to the first episode of the documentary The Last Dance that aired on April 19, I contemplated the idea of a docuseries on the last Chicago Bulls run for an NBA title, hoping it would be a larger commentary about Michael Jordan, about the Bulls, about basketball and the NBA, about sports and society and so much more. And, in a number of important ways, The Last Dance is a larger commentary. But mostly not in a good way. Mostly, it nakedly celebrates American racism and American narcissism, embodied in Michael Jordan, and enmeshed in every aspect of the docuseries’ text, context, and subtext.

Two of my favorite sports and society columnists have it right. Chuck Modiano writes in Deadspin that The Last Dance is “Michael Jordan’s 10-Part Nike-Approved Commercial.” And although I believe Dave Zirin is correct to describe Jordan as “showing us who he is—exactly who we thought he was” — an “antihero” — he is so much more typical than that. He is an American narcissist, one who has internalized and interpersonal racism issues, sprinkled with patriarchy (like, where are women in this series, particularly his wife and ex-wife?) and Black masculinity and gross classism to the point of zero empathy for marginalized people. All this makes Jordan all-too-typical, and all-too-ordinary, in the broader scheme.

I have written a bunch on the connections between American narcissism and American racism over the past four and a half years, on this blog and in mainstream publications. What I have not touched on much are the connections between American narcissism and American racism in popular culture. Mostly because the narcissism, racism, and cultural appropriating in pop culture is obvious. It’s more than just low-hanging fruit. It’s the fruit laying all on the ground, ripe and rotten, ready for folks to eat and to throw out, and at the same time.

Ah, but pop culture icons are by definition narcissists, no? They must be, because they self-aggrandize, they’re extroverts, they navel-gaze, they refer to themselves in the third-person, etc., right? Sure, as a general rule, whether a Hollywood actor, a bankable music artist, an over-the-top rapper, a famous out-in-the-world writer, or an athlete among the “greatest of all time,” narcissism might be a significant part of their personality matrix.

But, there’s a difference between confidence — even cockiness and bravado — and actual narcissism. For starters, narcissists tend to lack empathy, the ability to even begin to put themselves in the position of acknowledging the pain, suffering, and difficulties people who are not them face in life, some of which they may have caused themselves. So many in pop culture put on airs and take on public personas who are only a facsimile of who they are in real life. Some artists create an alter-ego in order to cope with the pressures of being in the fickle world of celebrity and fandom. It would be unfair to ascribe narcissism to every individual who has ever “made it” through movies, music, writing, or athletics.

However, so many like Jordan show us exactly who they are, and in the process, show us who we are as a society. And ours is a narcissistic society, of winners and losers, of great disparities in wealth justified with systemic and collective racism. That Jordan’s sneakers still sell for well over $100 million a year for Nike nearly two decades after his retirement says more about the US and the world, and about the narcissism we possess as a society and have exported around the globe, than anything else.

Air Jordans are as much a projection of American narcissism and racism as is the US military, a McDonald’s Big Mac and Coke, and a Starbucks’ venti latte. China has been producing Air Jordan’s at its factories for decades, where workers frequently make $120 a month to produce a pair at $16 raw value. They sell in the US and in the world for between $110 and $250 for mass-produced models, and as much as $100,000 for one-of-a-kind pairs or creations. I couldn’t afford Air Jordans in the years between 1985 and 1999, when they often sold for $150 a pair (and kids were mugging and killing each other over them). In the decades since, I have found that my feet need ergonomic support, something Jordans typically do not provide. Figures. So I am happy to say that while I have tried on a pair or two, I have never owned a pair.

But as for The Last Dance, Jordan’s fourth lap around the world is the text, but him getting in his digs at his friends’, nemeses and haters’ (real and imagined) expense is the context and subtext. His constant put-downs of former Bulls’ GM, the late Jerry Krause went quickly from funny to sad to mercilessly demeaning, all in Episode 1. Jordan’s lack of empathy and leadership, though, comes through with Episodes 2 and 3, in the side story of Scottie Pippen. Jordan, who would have zero titles without Pippen, did nothing but shake his head at Pippen’s low pay and contract woes. Seven years, and you couldn’t be bothered to use even one percent of your influence to get Jerry Reinsdorf to renegotiate for your compatriot? That alone makes Jordan not the GOAT, not in basketball, nor in terms of his humanity.

His complete ignoring of both Isiah Thomas and the Detroit Pistons in the universe of all-time great teams of his era, another example of Jordan’s narcissism, and quite frankly, racism. Pull up any quote from Jordan about the great teams he and the Bulls had to beat to get their first rings. Always “Larry and Magic,” “the Celtics and the Lakers.” Nothing about Isiah and the Pistons, not unless a reporter forces his acknowledgement, not unless Jordan can be begrudging and dismissive in the process. Hey, Jordan! The Pistons beat the Bulls three straight years in the playoffs, 1988, 1989, and 1990, on their way to three straight Finals appearances and two titles. Isiah played well in all the closeout games. Isiah may be an asshole, but he’s been far more gracious in victory and in defeat than you will ever be. But I guess that you needed to keep your distance from a man who has been calling out racism since his playing days. Because as we all know, “Republicans [really, White folx] buy sneakers too.”

As a die-hard Knicks fan, I knew there would be a snippet in an episode or two about the 1990s Knicks, Patrick Ewing, John Starks, and one-time Pitt Panther Charles Smith and their failures against Jordan and the Bulls. So I didn’t bother to watch those episodes. I mean, I lived and died by the Knicks every March, April, May (and sometimes June) between 1990 and 1999. Seeing Jordan smirk and smile in real time about my team and their blown layups, the uneven refereeing (Smith was fouled at least twice at the end of Game 5 of the Eastern Conference Finals in 1993), and the long scoring droughts mostly because of streak slumps and poor shooting choices was bad enough.

Why would I want to relive these memories via a self-serving docuseries? It would be like White men celebrating how their ancestors used to enslave Black men and rape Black women, and how their grandfathers and great-grandfathers used to lynch Blacks with impunity. Oh wait a minute — White men still do this! With idiotic protests to reopen states, with stand-your-ground laws, and by taking law enforcement jobs. And Jordan is the same way, but with a basketball and a microphone instead.

So, after watching parts of the first four episodes of The Last Dance, I am done. Jordan will never be the GOAT in basketball, as great as he was to dance between 1982 and 1999. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Wilt Chamberlain will always come first, with LeBron possibly somewhere in between. Objectively, MJ’s in the top three or four, but the other three have carried teams to the NBA Finals. But, more importantly, Jordan is the worst combination of American narcissist and indirect supporter of American racism the US has. Just like millions of other ordinary Americans. History will remember, because despite what autocrats think, history is as much determined by the downtrodden as it written by the victorious myth-makers.

Revealing in Cloaked Blindness/I Heart Kendzior’s Work

30 Thursday Apr 2020

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Front cover of Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America (2020), by Sarah Kendzior, April 30, 2020. (Donald Earl Collins).

In the past four years, I have read so many good and great books, fiction, nonfiction, and mixed genre. Black and Brown writers — especially Black women and Latinas — have written nearly all of them. Brittney Cooper (crunk, crunk!), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Colson Whitehead (masterclass!), Crystal Marie Fleming, Darnell Moore, Bassey Ikpi (poetic masterclass!), Erica Armstrong Dunbar (literally brought together the academic with creative nonfiction) , Ijeoma Oluo, Kiese Laymon (Black abundance and excellence, of course!), Mona Eltahawy, Morgan Jerkins, Patricia J. Williams, the ever-great Roxane Gay,  Tressie McMillan Cottom, Raquel Cepeda (a New Yorker after my own heart!), Imani Perry (3 books in two years — this woman has range!), Leta Hong Fincher, Jose Antonio Vargas, Alondra Nelson, Mycheal Denzel Smith, and likely another ten or fifteen I can’t remember by name.

All of them (really, all of y’all, since I have had conversations with you all in person, on social media, or in my head since 2016) have confirmed so many of my ideas around racism and narcissism, about the use of the interdisciplinary, about the hard-nosed work of writing. They have strengthened my voice around Black feminism, critical race theory, Afrofuturism (a term I was chagrin to use about my own writing this time seven years ago), and queer studies. They all have shown what I have been teaching since I was a PhD student in 1993 — the connections between -isms-laden ideas and deliberately punitive policies meant to cower the ordinary and crush the marginalized.

Sarah Kendzior has done so much on this last theme, uncloaking the connections between the ambitions of brazenly craven rich White guys (and some women) to enrich and empower themselves while destroying the US that came to be with FDR, the New Deal, and the post-World War II superpower boom. And Kendzior does so unassumingly, with bits of memoir that parallels the US glide path toward naked autocracy since the mid-1970s.

I’ve been reading Kendzior since her freelancing days with Al Jazeera, so, somewhere around 2012 or 2013. So many of the themes in Hiding in Plain Sight are familiar, if only because those themes of a hollowed-out St. Louis, a systemically racist and autocratic government, where corrupt and unaccountable leaders are front and center in nearly everything that Kendzior writes. Plus, I am a half-century old Black man and historian who grew up in malnourished welfare poverty and around eschatological cults in Mount Vernon, New York and in New York City. Everything Kendzior has written over the years, I know down to my bones and veins.

Because of that, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to buy Hiding in Plain Sight, forget about reading it. But Kendzior uses her book to build a case better than Perry Mason and Jack McCoy (of Law & Order lore, played by Sam Waterston) could on their best days. Kendzior’s thesis is that Trump as POTUS was inevitable, as the “elite criminal network” of which Trump is a part “has been building for decades.” This network includes “right-wing Republican extremists, apocalyptic religious movements of varied faiths, social media corporations, advocacy groups like the National Rifle Association, and part of the mainstream media.” According to Kendzior, what makes them new and lethal to the US is their “transactional nature and reliance on non-state actors.” Ultimately, this cabal “will take your money, they will steal your freedom, and if they are clever, they will eliminate any structural protections you had before the majority realizes the extent of the damage.” Along the way, they are transitioning the US “from a flawed democracy to a burgeoning autocracy” (pp. 8-9).

Kendzior skillfully uses her own growing up and adult experiences and the places she’s inhabited in building the interconnections between Trump’s lifetime of enabled narcissism and criminality and the rise of the American autocracy. She starts where she usually does, in Missouri, “the bellwether state turned corruption capital, the broken heartland that got the sneak preview to the national shitshow” (p. 20). Kendzior makes the case that Missouri and St. Louis even more specifically represents well the erosion of democracy all over the US with the infusion of dark money and out-of-state money and operators in state and local elections. I do think that she oversells the assumption of Missourian and Rust Belt irrelevance here, if only because every White American actor attempts a Missourah or Midwestern accent in the standard movie, TV show, or internet series not centered in New York.

But I digress. The gutting of Missouri and the rest of the Midwest between St. Louis and Pittsburgh (although so many cities outside the Rust Belt could say the same, like my own original hometown) was a deliberate one, meant to destroy unions, to line politicians’ pockets, and to enrich already filthy-rich folk. People like one Donald J. Trump.

Kendzior again builds a Mayan-step-pyramid-of-evidence to show how Trump had aspirations toward the presidency at least since the 1980s, and had gotten away with grifting projects and Ponzi schemes since the 1970s. And with those twin motivations, how Trump could easily become comrades with Russian mobsters and the likes of the infamous Roy Cohn, with Paul Manafort, with Roger Stone, and the rest of this crew of the craven. And Kenzior ties this one up with a macabre dystopian bow, bracketing Trump’s almost inevitable rise with the story of how her mother taught her about George Orwell’s 1984, a timeline her “mother laughingly assured [her] did not exist” (p. 76). “We are living in the future Orwell warmed about” now, Kendzior wrote.

Among the more heartbreaking vignettes in Hiding in Plain Sight is the story of Kendzior’s own personal experience with the new normal of constant job and financial insecurity born from a false Great Recession recovery in the years after 2008. The collective we have often looked back at the Obama years with fondness. But all the while, the US kept rolling down the same road to autocratic perdition, chewing up everyone not affluent along the way. Kendzior’s experience is no different from my own, and no different from at least 150 million others.

For over a year I would wake up shaking. The economic nightmare I had documented for years as a journalist had finally gotten me, like a monster I had tracked but failed to slay…It made no difference what we could offer the world. We only knew what the world could take away…The rage, though — that stays with you. (pp. 133-135).

Kendzior wrote a book that few who truly understand the nature of the evil that has infected the US since the 1970s could argue is incorrect. Her analysis is nearly as excellent as the prose, to be sure.

I do have a few bones to pick. Mostly because I had a hard time figuring out the audience Kendzior was attempting to reach. Was it other journalists? The broader American public? Anyone who needs a Laurence Fishburne-style “Wake up!!!” call from School Daze?

I landed on nearly-disillusioned-White-Americans as Kendzior’s audience, the ones still clinging to the hope of the American Dream with their fingernails, the ones who all but realize that the Dream is a lie and a nightmare for almost all of us. “I am trying to show them [her children] our country was always vulnerable, always flawed, but that people fought back. We’ve survived as long as we have due to self-criticism and sacrifice, a willingness to examine our faults and try to fix them,” Kendzior wrote (p. 213).

I’m sorry, but this is the America I read about in a Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich textbook from fifth grade in 1980, not the America in which I have lived for 50 years, worked in since I was 14, and studied for three decades. This is a part of the American mythology, this idea of self-correction. The only times the US has changed to mete out symbolic half-measures toward its ideals has been when the marginalized through years and even decades of resistance have forced it to. Full stop. To suggest otherwise would be to suggest a land that believes in anti-racism, Black feminism, reproductive rights, non-binary sexuality, and democratic socialism. Where is this US? I am still looking.

Another criticism is around Trump himself, and about the arc of the autocratic glide path of the US since 1968. Yes, just as Kendzior and others have written, I have also written that Trump was an inevitable consequence of rampant criminality and grifting, of lying in the same bed with mobsters and autocrats from Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the US. But really, in a country as racist, misogynistic, and narcissistic as the US has always been, someone like Trump was always the danger, and has happened on some level in the past (see Andrew Jackson, see James Buchanan, see Teddy Roosevelt, see even FDR’s four terms in office, as good as his New Deal policies were). The US is just two months removed from Mike “will get it done” Bloomberg running for president, a much more competent billionaire and grifter, with his own ideas for autocratic rule. It ended up being Trump, but it could have been any of a dozen aspirants we’ve seen from the top 1% over the past three decades, starting with Ross Perot.

Kendzior’s centering of Trump is disturbing because the “burgeoning autocracy” has always been an autocracy for Blacks and for indigenous Americans, going back to the days before the US even existed. In modern politics, the dividing line isn’t Trump or the Great Recession. It’s Vietnam and Richard Nixon and his “Southern Strategy” in 1968. It’s the Reaganomics and the corporate deregulation of the 1980s, followed up with gutting the social welfare state that has occurred with every president since Reagan, including Mr. “Mend it, don’t end it” himself, Bill Clinton. As Malcolm X said in his “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech at King Solomon Baptist Church in Detroit, Michigan in 1964, “Oh, I say you been misled. You been had. You been took.” But not by Trump, at least not just. Trump was the one Kendzior and so many others saw coming, but could do nothing about, because Trump wasn’t the first.

“The Bush Legacy” editorial cartoon, Nate Beeler, January 13, 2009. (https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2010/11/13/919739/-; Washington Examiner). Fair use applies due to low resolution of screen shot and subject matter.

And if Trump was inevitable, then what does that say about our first family of autocrats, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush? The amount of international meddling in which these two presidents engaged? The trillions spent on wars, all for more access to Saudi Arabian oil, their autocracy, and their money, and all to line their pockets and the pockets of cronies, especially those within the military-industrial complex? Dubya and Cheney used 9/11 to push the Patriot Act in Congress, the single biggest autocratic move in American history since the Electoral College? The players on the US side of the table may be different in 2020, but the evidence gathered in the years since 2000 show significant foreign interference and at least one rigged election. But I’m supposed to believe that Trump’s version of autocracy is worse because his corruption is much more obvious and because his flaunts it with buffoonery and a deluge of lies? Anyone remember a Dubya presser between 2000 and 2009?

I am a big believer in both-ands. Binary either-or explanations may be simple, but they are usually incomplete. Kendzior argues that Trump’s a master of using buffoonery and deception to bamboozle an audience and distract them from his daily crimes. Most of the rest of us think Trump is as dumb as shit. But why can’t he be both? Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler are all proof-positive that one does not need great analytical power to be savvy, brazen, and bullying enough to make one’s stupidity work for them. And when someone like Trump comes from money, it is that much easier.

There’s this song “Silent Running” by the ensemble pop/rock group Mike + The Mechanics — with Mike Rutherford of Genesis, Paul Carrack of Squeeze, B. A. Robertson, et al. — from 1985-86. Kendzior may have heard it growing up. The music is eerie and an homage to resisting totalitarianism. The lyrics, though, so poignant, both to Hiding in Plain Sight and to where my mindset has been about the US since the 1980s.

Take the children and yourself
And hide out in the cellar
By now the fighting will be close at hand
Don’t believe the church and state
And everything they tell you
Believe in me, I’m with the high command…

Swear allegiance to the flag
Whatever flag they offer
Never hint at what you really feel
Teach the children quietly
For some day sons and daughters
Will rise up and fight while we stand still

That’s what I hope my descendants (literal and figurative) will take with them, and that’s what I hope for Kendzior’s children. Anything about a primrose American past in the time before cronyism and Coronavirus, though, would belie this “Silent Running” truth. I strongly urge everyone I know to read Kendzior’s book. Just be sure to find the words “Bush,” “Dubya,” and “both-and” along the way.

My Alex and America’s 45, Bullies with Fan Boys on the March

05 Monday Aug 2019

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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45’s fans at campaign rally, Greenville, North Carolina, July 17, 2019. (Carolyn Kaster/AP; https:/usatoday.com).

At least one person will undoubtedly find my latest post unfair and offensive this time around. My Humanities classmate Alex, whom I interviewed as part of my book Boy @ The Window, will likely not be too happy with me this week. So Alex, if you do find yourself feeling this is unfair and my post offensive, I apologize in advance.

But either way, that’s okay, because the comparison between the person he once was and the person who is 45, America’s usurper-in-chief, is apt. Not because Alex was ever a malignant narcissist in need of constant adulation from his entourage. But because even small-d demagoguery around putting down so-called others out of insecurity, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, religion, a sense of superiority, and/or willful ignorance will still lead to violence and bullying. On a societal level, that is mass violence, that is fascism within a democracy, and nation-state sanctioned. No matter what the College Board and ETS says.

The thing I didn’t really allow myself to understand, even after I interviewed Alex in 2007, even after writing my first eight drafts of Boy @ The Window regarding Alex and the “Italian Club,” was this. That people like having leaders, folks they can relate to, even as preteens. In our times, that means someone who’s cool, or at least, pulls off the cool aesthetic well. Alex did. Whether you liked him or despised him at A. B. Davis Middle School in Humanities in seventh or eighth grade, Alex had a certain prepubescent charm. He was playful, goofy, corny, and fully engaged in pop culture as an up-with-everything 12 and 13-year-old.

And that attracted a specific group of folks into Alex’s solar system. Some of them knew him from their mutual time together at Columbus ES, but several in his entourage were from other schools prior to Davis. All of them were disaffected boys in some way or another, mostly Italian (or at least in one case, half-Italian), but almost to a person, not comfortable with the multicultural pressure cooker of relative uncoolness that was our magnet middle school program.

Alex led his “Italian Club” in acting out. Like a wolf pack, they looked for prey in the classroom to pick on, to call the wittiest names, to occasionally get physical with. Many times, they messed around with corny lines for girls like Sandra and Marianna. But I ended up on their radar early on. Between my kufi, my big but slow-talking mouth, and my fight with Brandie, I was ripe for Alex and his band of predators.

On November 2, 1981, the bullying started in earnest, as Alex and his band jumped me after school in the area near the side door exit from Davis. About a third of my classmates watched as the “Italian Club” knocked me to the ground, punched and kicked me until I began to cry. Alex himself never put his hands on me, but watched with glee as his fanboys did the dirty work.

But that wasn’t all. I had to endure seven months of being “dumb,” “stupid,” and a “monkey” from Alex’s band of brothers. It was topped off by a month of “Captain Zimbabwe” chants in May and June 1982, typically in Mrs. Sesay’s homeroom, but after counter-protests from other classmates, it moved to Ms. Fleming’s Italian class.

Eighth grade was nowhere near as bad, partly because I grew four inches over the summer, and partly because they likely sensed my rage from my summer of abuse with my idiot stepfather. Still, this didn’t stop Alex from messing with me or other vulnerable classmates that year or in ninth grade. I remember him greeting Josh a couple of times with the refrain from The Beatles “Hey Jude,” except it was, “Na, Na, Na, Na-Na-Na-Na, Na-Na-Na-Na, Hey Jew.” I remember him and his entourage calling my other classmates “monkey.” He once went after our class’ eventual valedictorian, “she’s a brainiac, a brainiac,” adapting a song from the Flashdance soundtrack.

This was the Alex I knew between the ages of 12 and 15. Comparing him to a 73-year-old who has the impulse control of a nine-year-old hopped up on crystal meth is somewhat unfair, as Alex isn’t that teenager anymore. Still, what 45 has done on a far larger stage than Davis’ Humanities program is essentially the same thing. Except that there are millions of folks — especially White men — attracted to his intersectional message of “this is our [read, ‘A White Man’s’] country.” And anyone not for White men first, second, and always needs to get out, or at least, get out of the way.

There’s a video clip making its social media rounds via Bloomberg editor Tim O’Brien from 45’s rally in Panama City, Florida on May 9. In it, you have 45 and many in his audience laughing at the idea of shooting “illegals” coming in from Mexico as a solution for stemming the tide of “invasion” from Central America.

This is hardly the only blunt signal 45 has sent to his anti-Black, anti-Muslim, and anti-Latinx fanboys and footsoldiers-for-the-patriarchy (thank you for the truth, Mona Eltahawy) fangirls over the years that their intersectional -isms are justified. But it is one direct example that those who really believe a race war is coming can use to take up arms and shoot to kill Black and Brown folks for existing in the US. That’s what Patrick Crusius and Connor Betts did this weekend in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio to their dozens of dead and injured victims. That’s what 45’s entourage has been doing with increasing frequency over the past decade. This is what demagogue bullies do. They build a following. They jizz their racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and homophobia all over their followers. Those most predisposed to lap up such vitriol and act on it then do the not-so-subtle calls for violent action and take it out on truly random marginalized people.

For a variety of reasons, not the least of which, attending a majority-Black-and-Brown high school and perhaps recognizing his own racism and misogyny, Alex wasn’t the same Billy Idol-worshipper I’d known in eighth grade. By our senior year, he even seemed like-able, and spend way more time with a group of Black and Latino friends than he did with his one-time entourage. I assumed he matured. Good for him. Really.

But it’s way too late for 45 to grow out of his -isms. It’s way too late for millions in his entourage to grow out of their violent fantasies for mastery over vulnerable others. We have to disarm them, with the repeal of the 2nd Amendment. We have to disarm them, by calling them out for the bullies and intersectional terrorists they are. We have to, if we’re going to survive them.

There’s No Starman Waiting in the Sky For Us

20 Saturday Jul 2019

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James Cromwell as Zefram Cochrane making first contact with Vulcans screen shot, from Star Trek: First Contact (1996). (http://www.startrek.com/)

This week of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing has been yet another reminder that humanity’s evolution has not kept up with its aspirations for exploring and colonizing the universe. A week that is supposed to be one of celebrating NASA’s work and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon has become a week about the immutability of racism and misogyny (really, misogynoir) in the US and beyond. Telling four Black and Brown congresswomen “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” 45 once again showed his xenophobia and misogynoiristic racism and exposed the -isms of millions of Americans. 45’s campaign rally in Greenville, North Carolina on Wednesday specifically targeted Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and descended into a Ku Klux Klan gathering, as the presidents fanboys and foot soldiers chanted “Send her back! Send her back!” for thirteen seconds.

A century before 45’s latest racist, Islamophobic, and misogynoiristic spewings, and a half-century before the Apollo 11 landing, Whites across the US engaged in Red Summer. It was part of a World War I and post-World War I response to the first wave of Black migration out of the Jim Crow South and Black prosperity across the US. A violently racist response made worse because the US plunged into recession in the two years after the end of World War I. The Fourth Estate trafficked in racist stereotypes around “Negro Man Rapes White Girl,” further fanning the flames of racism and xenophobia in the years around and after the Great War. Whites marched into Black communities to beat up, main, rape, kill, burn down Black businesses, and otherwise terrorize Black men, Black women, and Black families. To call these “race riots” implies that Blacks did the same toward Whites, a lie about as close to the truth as 45 has been in the past 50 years.

East St. Louis, Illinois really set the pace for these “race riots” in 1917. But in the Red Summer of 1919, it was Washington, DC, Chicago, Elaine, Arkansas, Omaha, Nebraska, and dozens of other cities and towns in which Whites went off to show Blacks the true nature of racism. Whites exerted their power and violence on Black populations out of an out-of-this-world narcissism, in that everything belonged to them. They were angry because Blacks had taken “their jobs” and moved into “their neighborhoods.” They also wanted laws changed so that White ethnics couldn’t come to the US and take jobs and depress wages, ultimately pitting White immigrants against Black migrants in these White terrorism efforts.

Sound familiar at all? It should. White terrorist attacks on Blacks in Tulsa (Greenwood, a.k.a., Black Wall Street) in 1921 and Rosewood, Florida in 1923 were the culmination of White supremacist violence stemming from the narcissistic need for dominance and economic distress. The Immigration Act of 1924 effectively shut off immigration from most of Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean in an effort to preserve “White Anglo-Saxon stock” and as a way to appease White men angry about not finding work post-World War I. It was the third anti-immigration bill Congress had passed in the previous seven years.

The parallels between 45 and this week in American racism and the Red Summer of 1919 are enough to prove that humanity is most definitely not ready to meet extraterrestrials from elsewhere in the multiverse. We humans are ill-prepared to make contact with beings with technologies that help them traverse a radiation-filled void in a fraction of the seven years it took the Cassini probe to reach Saturn. We humans lack the emotional, psychological, moral, and spiritual capacity to cope with such a history-altering event. We Homo sapiens are devoid of the humility necessary to meet the challenges that will come after finding out that first contact with an advanced civilization is both an end and a beginning.

Here’s a short list beyond 45 of leading people and recent events that prove humans are as ready for first contact as a newborn baby is for a seven-course meal. Jeffrey Epstein. R. Kelly. Marine Le Pen. Kim Kardashian. Vladimir Putin. Boris Johnson. Xi Jinping. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Nigel Farage. Richard Spencer. Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Rodrigo Duterte. Theresa May. Bashar al-Assad and Syria. Kim Jong Un and North Korea. Jair Bolsonaro and his anti-LGBTQIA work in Brazil. Myanmar’s ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims. Capitalism. Neoliberalism. Misogyny and misogynoir. Islamophobia and anti-Black and Brown xenophobia. Patriarchy’s foot soldiers. The very need for Black Lives Matter. The limited response thus far to man-made global climate change. Hollywood. Las Vegas. The endless fighting over resources and enslavement of peoples for a narcissist’s dream of independence, freedom, power, and wealth. That’s already enough for me to never want to meet humanity!

Can anyone who possesses a reasonable amount of empathy and knowledge imagine what the most powerful and learned members of an advanced alien civilization would think of humanity’s stewardship of Earth? They’ve heard and seen us in action for at least a century, since humans started broadcasting on wireless radio. In that time, there have been been two World Wars, ethnic cleansing and mass murder (e.g., Stalin’s Five-Year Plans, the Holocaust, China’s Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot and Cambodia, and Rwanda), the Cold War, and the nuclear arms buildup. Powerful nations and corporations have repeatedly exploited indigenous peoples, the most poverty-stricken in Asia, Africa, and the Western Hemisphere, and the planet’s biosphere. I am sure sentient aliens have seen us and feel just as welcome to visit Earth as migrants from Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East feel in the US and Europe right now.

Is it possible that sentient extraterrestrials might find some exceptional humans potentially worthy? Sure. Science folk like Michelle Thaller, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Hakeem Oluseyi, and the late Claudia Alexander come to mind. One might be able to make the case for humanitarians and social justice activists, for the best writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, vocalists, and actors out there. But from a sentient alien’s perspective, why should any of these humans be exceptions? These beings are likely able to use dark matter or dark energy to power faster-than-light spacecraft. They may possess the ability to convert matter to energy and back again at a whim, to make food and weapons out of thin air and bio-waste. They may even be able to fold space and create wormholes and black holes. There’s no way they could see any humans as deserving of first contact.

There is also the real issue of what it would take for an alien civilization to become advanced without blowing itself up in the first place. These advanced beings would be collaborative and cooperative to a fault, would’ve long ago assured equity and inclusion as their reason for existence and exploration. They would likely avoid war-loving civilizations like the ones on Earth, while looking to break bread (or the alien equivalent) with more stable, peaceful, and advanced civilizations out in the galaxy.

They may make exceptions, though, for the most vulnerable of sentient beings and other species trapped in warring worlds like our own. These aliens may decide someday to “rapture up” indigenous peoples, vulnerable minority groups, the poverty-stricken, certain women and children, to save them from the leading Western nations and other developed countries on this planet, who seek to oppress and exploit them. It’s something writers like Octavia Butler and Derrick Bell contemplated for Black and Brown folk. It would be the humane thing— maybe even, the godly thing — to do.

Humans should continue to explore space and its endless scientific revelations and mysteries. But humanity should refrain from colonizing the Moon and Mars, much less anything interstellar. All humanity will end up doing is spreading its Whiteness-driven elitism, racism, patriarchy and misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, and life-destroying narcissism. The species remains too primitive to be worthy of prime time on a galactic stage. We’ll have to wait for a more just, verdant, and glorious age before first contact will work out well for us. We’re not ready.