Category Archives: Mount Vernon New York

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.

Death and Debt

11 Saturday Jul 2020

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, race, Youth

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Sarai & Noah, November 2003. (Donald Earl Collins).

My post today will be short. Today marks a full decade since the Sunday morning my youngest brother Eri called me, waking me up with the news that my only sister Sarai had died overnight at Mount Vernon Hospital. It was due to complications from sickle cell anemia, the disease that denies the body sufficient oxygen for carrying out it functions, ever debilitating and ever more painful as one grows older with it, as anyone with the disease can attest. Too many blood transfusions, too many invasive procedures, not enough healing. Sarai Adar Washington, who did live, and did try her damnedest to live her life her way, died at 27 years young.

Yes, I love her, and miss her still. There isn’t a week that goes by where I don’t think about her and the life that she didn’t get to have, the life that she did live, and how my life was affected by her existing. It causes me, Sarai’s older brother — one 13-plus-years older than her when my mother gave birth to her, one at one point argued for abortion to save us and her the anguish of the disease — to let out the occasional tear or feel a sense of loss. I can only imagine how much deeper the loss is for my mom, of course, and for my three younger brothers, who truly grew up with her. My only solace today is that Sarai isn’t here to try to survive the pandemic, because she most surely would not have made it if she had contracted COVID-19.

On the other end is the week that reminds me of one of the worst best decisions I have ever made. To take out the first $2,625 of what would be over $41,000 in loans between July 1987 and October 1996. I paid out the principal of my loans at least three years ago. But Sallie Mae (and PHEAA and Marine Midland Bank before that) set the interest rates back when those rates were much higher. Eight percent on a series of loans taken out between 24 and 33 years ago would be incalculable to a 17-year-old in July 1987. But as a 50-year-old, it translates to debt peonage, more than double the actual loans themselves. Except that I know that one way or another, this debt will go away, if only because I will stop living this life, eventually.

The proverbial “they” say the only two constants in life are death and taxes. No, there are at least three constants — death, debt, and taxes. Maybe in my death I can finally see my sister again, and see my debt and taxes burn in the fiery pit in the event horizon of a black hole.

A List of the Unwritten Rules I Wish I Had Known, in 1990, 2000, and 2010

19 Tuesday May 2020

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Me, 23 years after my PhD graduation, May 18, 2020. (Donald Earl Collins).

As a confessed educated fool, I readily admit that there are a ton of things I understood but did not act on. But I also know that there are solar system loads of unwritten rules that I didn’t and couldn’t possibly have known going into my professional future toward the end of my undergrad days at the University of Pittsburgh. And, there’s the stuff that falls in between. The rules that are not hard rules, ones that can be bent, twisted into pretzels, and/or broken or even shattered. The things that I didn’t know I knew, the ideas and principles that are ingrained or splinters in my mind, but not quite accessible until the moment I needed them, or, even worse, right after I really could’ve used that extra bit of knowledge and wisdom.

This list is merely the beginning of the most important rules I could impart to my younger self, at 20, 30, and yes, 40 years old. Donald’s 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, and 2.5 all believed that his mind, his imagination, his hard work and achievements would all carry the day, would win him a slice of prosperity, a sliver of intellectual respectability, a piece of popularity, even. All to have moments and flashes of all three, but not usually at the same time, and all to realize that talent and hard work for Black folx in a Whiteness world matter not. Not even among most Black elites. I could list 1,000 unwritten rules and other ideas that I wish I had known or — if I did somehow already know — taken advantage of. But the real theme here is that the meritocracy is a lie. Whether in the form of rugged individualism or a belief in K-16 education as a social mobility equalizer, merit through talent and hard work is an American mythology like Abraham Lincoln “freeing the slaves” and America as always good and righteous.

1. You are a writer. Whatever the job, whatever the career path, whatever the familial and relationship and marital responsibilities, you are a writer. Yes, despite it all, your calling is to write about it all. Period. It does not matter if you think most of your writing is crap. All writers think their writing is crap. It does not matter if you’re really good at organizing conferences, retreats, and learning institutes. Or, if you are excellent at curriculum design, a tough but caring history and education professor, a science nerd and a talented computer science geek. Nearly every writer has another set of jobs and careers besides writing. Just because your co-workers, colleagues, and even family might not see you as a writer first, does not mean that you are not a writer.

And, here’s the real deal. Not everyone needs to know that you are a writer. Some dumb muthafuckas will use your expressed calling against you, especially if and when they do find out about your creative side and your one troy ounce of success. Some of your enemies, nemeses, and family members and friends will literally laugh in your face when you discuss your aspirations with them. You have to know whom to trust and not trust with this truth about yourself. You will learn, in time, to keep your own counsel, to not let everyone in your world in on your not-so-secret secret.

And you will learn that to write is not just putting pen to paper or fingers and thumbs to a MacBook keyboard. It’s reading, beyond the academic tome, beyond the occasional novel or Walter Mosley detective mystery. It’s reading folx who’ve struggled with writing just like you. It’s people-watching on trains and the Metro. It’s listening in Univision or Telemundo programs while folding clothes at a laundromat with a mostly Salvadoran, Nicaraguan, Nuyorican or Dominicanyorka audience. It’s thinking of an idea while cleaning chicken thighs for dinner or on the occasions you end up jacking off for lack of sleep. It’s all the vivid dreams and nightmares — really, visions — that you’ve had of present, future, past, past-future, future-present, and ever-present, about escape, about overcoming, about being trapped. That’s all a part of the process.

2. Degrees matter, and yet, degrees don’t matter for shit. I cannot believe that your dumb-ass self believed for years that getting the “PhD would be a passport for doing what [you] wanted to do in [your] life.” You must have said this to 50 of your closest friends, acquaintances, and even a couple of folks who you eventually realized were your enemies back between 1990 and 1997. At your most stressed times, those sudden, bolting-upright-in-the-bed-at-3am moments, with your heart thumping like you were Bugs Bunny ogling Lola Bunny, you believed the doctorate was the ticket. You kept telling yourself this, even as you had doubts about what the degree meant as you finished your coursework in 1994. You cast yourself atop this hill, especially after becoming a Spencer Dissertation Fellow in 1995, even though you and many in your cohort were all obvious misfits in the grad school system.

Yes, in the narrow sense of job qualifications, degrees matter. But, you earned your master’s degrees in History in April 1992. At 22 years old! You were all-but-dissertation at 24. 24! You could’ve taken time off, earned a teaching certificate in a year, gone on to teach at public, private, or parochial school, or even earned a degree in a more practical field, like psychology, social work, education, journalism, creative nonfiction, or sociology. So admit it, damn you! You were attracted to some aspects of the tenured faculty lifestyle. Not most of it, to be sure. Yet the idea of having a schedule where you spent lots of time doing research and writing. You secretly craved being paid to write whatever you wanted to write. Even though you already knew that you could only do this if you willing to write like a cold, dispassionate White guy well-off enough to not care about reaching an audience outside of his extremely narrow field.

So you convinced yourself for nearly two decades that you could do and be both. A writer for mainstream organs and readers and a writer for academe. You weren’t wrong. Your eclectic writing style can accommodate complex scholarly ideas and personal tales and dramas, even creative techniques to transition between them. But the world of the privileged rarely allows for the crossover-dribble equivalent for writers. With a doctorate, you are an egg-headed scholar to the average editor, and cannot possibly write in any other way. For journal editors, your style was never gonna be scholarly enough. For newspaper and magazine editors, your style was always too cerebral. And, despite your degree, you had a hard time convincing others of your expertise. You only earned a PhD in History from Carnegie Mellon University, okay? Not from UCLA or Berkeley or Stanford, or certainly not from Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, or even UPenn, Georgetown, or Columbia. Your years of published works and a couple of self-published books would be barely enough to convince Ebony to take a look at your work when you hit your mid-40s. Forget about trying to bifurcate and make your degrees work for you. Get a good job, and just find more and more ways to keep writing, and hopefully, you won’t be dead before people start reading your stuff.

3. Academia, the nonprofit world, and the writing world only make room for Blacks and other people of color when then either completely conform to its -isms (tokens), or when we prove ourselves to at least be moderately successful mavericks. There is no in between, there is no best-of-both-worlds, or straddling the fence, or finding yourself as the Emissary that can cross between worlds. You are not Avatar Aang, the Last Airbender or Captain Benjamin Sisko of DS9. Even among other Black folks, like when I was offered a tenure-stream position in the Department of Africana Studies (née Afro-American Studies) at Howard University in 2000, it came with the implicit stipulation that I needed to conform, to always respect my elders — no matter how elitist and exclusionary I thought they were. At nearly every job I have held since 1996, I have been hired as a token toward diversity with the added benefit of my degree and/or specific expertise, or because I went against the grain to do or write something counterintuitively.

But if that were all, you may have figured some aspect of this out during the Reagan years. The layers of intersectional elitism, from whole institutions like lily-White, College Republican, and two-comma-kid Carnegie Mellon, to department-level beliefs of assuming that you as someone who grew up with poverty would somehow survive summer after summer without financial support. There were also the professors, who to a person assumed that “a few years of hazing will be good for you,” as if you grew up without a material care in the world. After all, how could a Black guy from Mount Vernon, New York with your familial and socioeconomic background find themselves in the hallowed halls of major universities?

Yeah, man. There are almost as many layers of elitism in the working world as there are folds in the gray matter of an alleged Mensa genius. Racial paternalistic elitism, neo-Marxist elitism, misogynist elitism, Marxist elitism, socialist elitism, misogynoir elitism, White feminist elitism, Afrocentric elitism, corporate elitism, technocratic elitism. There’s also Ivy League elitism, HBCU elitism, country-club elitism, affluent Black elitism, African Black elitism, Afro-Caribbean elitism, Puerto Rican elitism, and biracial elitism. And lest I forget, there’s that from-the-5-boroughs-New Yorker elitism, served-in-the-Peace-Corps elitism, revolutionary elitism, anti-revolutionary elitism, and even contrarian elitism. Cutting through all these layers over several decades might leave you in a rage, ready to holler at a moment’s notice, and with some bouts of exhaustion and high blood pressure. But the truth is, none of these dumb asses know how deep in The Matrix they are, putting on enough airs to crush entire cities into oblivion.

4. You will have moments of serious doubt. You will have days, weeks, months where you will be depressed. You will have “waiting for the other shoe to drop” emotions, even when everything is going well professionally. You will feel that you do not belong. Not in academia. Not in the nonprofit world. Not as a writer. Not as an American. Sometimes, not even as a Black American. You will have bouts with what we call imposter syndrome. And yes, you do not fit in easily anywhere, because you have spent so much of your life trying to learn how to cope in places and spaces that never wanted you. Your experiences with millennialist religions, with poverty, with Blackness, with growing up in Mount Vernon/New York City, will help you cope. But you will never be a fit in any place you inhabit in this lifetime.

And, you need to know that this will be perfectly fine. Fitting in never brings you the material and psychological benefits you will seek for yourself and your loved ones. Fitting in only brings you headaches on the regular, endless cycles of diarrhea and constipation, a nearly permanent insomnia. Fitting in makes you almost forget your training as an African American historian and your expertise in understanding the human condition. Fitting in nearly kills the writer you so desperately need to become before you even fully acknowledge that you are one.

So, do not ever fit in. Do not even try. Be you. Be your best you. If that isn’t enough, that’s the problem of a world full of bullies, Head-Negro-in-Charge micromanagers, White moderates, paternalistic White women, and other who would prefer brown-nosers to free thinkers. Not to mention, the armies of sycophants these assholes tend to hire.

So, the meritocracy is a neoliberal lie, and a debt-ridden deadly one. You might never break through as a writer in all the ways that matter to you. Or you just might. Or, you may fully break through, only to find out that you are so much more than the writer you will eventually become. But do not look for approval. Especially not from the US academic and literati set. Let them continue to eat their shitty cake.

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.

Intermittent Starvation

22 Sunday Mar 2020

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Empty fruit and vegetable section shelves, Asda store, London, UK, March 14, 2020. (Yui Mok/PA via AP; https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/mar/15/trump-tells-people-stop-hoarding-and-buy-normal-am/).

A fair number of people I know have gotten into this trend we collectively call intermittent fasting. It’s the idea that you reduce your caloric intake by either reducing you total number of meals per day or take a set of days to not eat at all. When combined with rest, sleep, and exercise, one can become healthier, lose weight, and roll one’s body back to the days of normal blood pressure and glucose numbers. In the somewhat Apocalyptic times in which we live, some have said that intermittent fasting may be the new normal. Especially if or when stores and supermarkets begin to run out of foodstuffs. We will see what we will see come May, June, and the summer.

In the department of limited food intake, I have years of experience. Between the fall of 1980 and the winter of 1999, there isn’t a year where I didn’t have to scramble for scraps. I unknowingly made the lack of food at 616 part of my escapism in those earlier years, especially in Peanuts Land, where I used empty styrofoam McDonald’s and Burger King containers to construct the eatery sections of my imaginary capital city. It was partly why I liked it when my father would show up every third Saturday between April 1979 and April 1981 to take me and my brother Darren out for a few hours or even the whole weekend, sober or drunk. It didn’t really matter to me. Being able to eat fast food was a godsend this time four decades ago. Arthur Treacher’s Chicken and Chips, Mickey D’s, Carvel’s soft-serve ice cream, Papaya’s hot dogs, Wakefield’s brownies and greasy-spoon diners. Once, I even ordered and ate three Big Macs in one sitting at the one-time McDonald’s on the Avenue in South Side Mount Vernon. I was ten in 1980! Ah, those were great days!

But those days came after many days of well-balanced but often meager food options that Mom provided. Chicken and dumplings, pinto beans or black-eyed peas with rice, pork neck bones, and corn bread, and cabbage, cabbage, cabbage! By the end of 1980, cereal was no longer a regular household staple, and snacks were a rarity. Heck, when Mom and my idiot stepfather Maurice separated for six months that October, he cleaned out weeks’ worth of pork chops, lamb shanks, chicken, ground beef, and steaks on his way out of our apartment.

Then, the Hebrew-Israelite years came, and with it, intermittent fasting. That is, with extreme urban poverty. With the start of middle school in September 1981 came days at a time where I didn’t eat or ate very little. Our conservative take on Judaism meant that we would all have to fast for three days prior to Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Passover. Since Darren and I weren’t adults, we were supposed to fruit and juice fast. That would have worked if there had been fruit juice and fruit in the house regularly! Our first Rosh Hashanah was the only time in those three years where I ate oranges, apples, grapes, and bananas for all three days. But with my family’s economic decline came days where I simply went to school and did not eat at all, upcoming high-holy day or otherwise.

So many days I watched my classmates eat full lunches while my stomach growled from drinking water. Pride and watching the older students clown others for being on free and reduced lunch kept me from picking up and filling out the application. And even if I hadn’t been raised to not expect handouts and to not see free-lunch as a sign of familial failure, the Hebrew-Israelite years complicated matters for me. Most Fridays at school, the cafeteria served grilled ham-and-cheese sandwiches with French fries.

It got way worse before it got better. From October 1981 through April 1984, we went between seven and 10 days every single month with little or no food at 616. After the 20th of any given month, I knew I’d miss meals, or it would be cabbage and corn bread or Great Northern beans and rice again. Keep in mind, Mom worked at Mount Vernon Hospital for most of that time as a dietary supervisor, so she worked around food while often hungry herself. One weekend in October 1982, all we had in the kitchen was some dried up cabbage, sugar, a little bit of flour, and a one-year-old box of Duncan Hines Devil’s Food cake mix. Things were so bad the summer and fall of 1982 that Mom was bringing home scraps from her job for us to eat. I got sick of days’ old Boston Creme Pie, hospital version.

Life improved slightly when Mom went on welfare after my late sister Sarai’s birth in 1983. But the food shortages continued into 1985, when Darren and I began working with my father regularly, and then began getting our own jobs. But while the malnourishment and starvation left me scarred, they also left me prepared for future crises that for many would have been calamities. Homelessness, malnourishment, and no money while at Pitt in 1988. Difficulties with rent, bills, and food in 1990 and 1991, when I graduated from Pitt. Summers looking for work and living off fumes in 1992, 1993, and 1997, when I was in grad school and after I finished my doctorate at Carnegie Mellon. The beginning of 1999, when me and soon-to-be-wife stretched $20 over ten days, eating makeshift gravy with instant mashed potatoes while teaching nearly every day for a week at Duquesne.

Maybe that explains why I once thought about becoming a chef while growing up. Maybe that’s why I took so quickly to cooking family-sized meals when I was 14. Maybe that’s the reason I made a point of cleaning off every plate of food I fixed or someone else put in front of me until I was 31. It’s certainly the reason behind my OCD around shopping, cooking, storing, and giving food, for myself, my family, and for others, for so many of my 50 years. It very well could explain my G-I tract issues and IBS for much of my adult life.

But with this COVID-19 pandemic could come food and other shortages. The land of endless plenty could have pockets of starvation if millions get sick and stay sick for too long. I have thought for years about buying a composite bow and some arrows with which I could shoot a deer in the neck. I already know I can do it, having killed two dozen mice and rats over the years — some with a broom handle, a hammer, and my bare hands. I have beheaded and gutted fish, chickens, and turkeys. I have eaten venison and rabbit stew before. Or, I could hop on down to Home Depot and buy some seeds to grow snap peas, green beans, maybe even squash or potatoes. We do have a back yard!

Maybe this is all overblown. Maybe this isn’t the Apocalypse. We still have electricity, cable, and wi-fi, after all. Yet the Romans still had gladiatorial games at the Coliseum during two years of siege and starvation at the Visigoths’ hands before it fell in 410 CE. Thousands and perhaps a few million could go without food, even if the power plants and Comcast and Verizon never shut down.

So, intermittent fasting may well work for many. As for me, I’ve tried it, and I still do it from time to time. But you cannot fast your way out of a crisis. You can hunt and grow your way out of one, though.

Ugly

12 Sunday Jan 2020

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Me in April 1975, Sears Picture Studio, Mount Vernon, NY. (Cropped/Donald Earl Collins).

Another title for this could be “Ugly Donald,” an homage toward Ugly Betty. But one word should cover it!

All this talk over the past few weeks about who is and who isn’t “ugly,” or “fat,” or just “too dark” take me back to how I felt about myself for most of the 1980s, and sometimes even as I gotten older over the 30 years since the Reagan decade. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve been in a camp of vipers like this since my preteen and early puberty years, where I definitely had my own excited utterances toward Black boys and girls in particular (also, the occasionally flat-butt White girl and bed-headed White boy, but I digress). So I never understood the need for deliberate meanness toward people over something that they would have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to fix for a group of misogynoirist assholes who aren’t worth a nanosecond of thought.

Whether Lizzo, Blue Ivy Carter, Bria Myles, Ari Lennox, or Teyana Taylor, these mofos who made fun of their looks, or called them a “rottweiler/German shepherd mix” (sic), or told them to workout to lose weight are such boring-ass losers. These women are beautiful. Black women are beautiful. Full stop. You got time to waste running down an active entertainer over your bullshit? Your ugliness is the kind that takes years of therapy, prayer, active listening, and educational reprogramming (i.e., reading lots of books on Blackness, Black feminisms, and intersectionality) to overcome, if you overcome it at all.

I have a bit of experience with ugly over the years. Usually from family and classmates throwing it in my direction. “Whatcha makin’ that ugly face for?,” my mom would say to me many, many times growing up. “You ugly, faggot!,” I remember hearing from folx in around the 616 and 630 apartment buildings on East Lincoln in Mount Vernon from the time I was nine. “Ain’t no one gonna eva wanna be with your ugly ass!,” an older girl who once attempted to molest me said to me when I was 12. I was ugly, alright. I felt ugly, living with poverty and abuse and anti-Black ugliness in the many places I went in Mount Vernon. It was probably why I felt more comfortable around my father, especially when in the Bronx or down in Manhattan doing work. The anonymity of the city meant that for hours or even days at a time, the centrality of my ugliness could disappear.

I felt so ugly inside and out that I wanted to take my own life at 14. I was so ugly that it scared me to look at myself in the mirror for more than a few seconds, mostly to make sure toothpaste or dried drool or eye crust was off my face. I kept my face as blank as I could, like Jamal Wallace (played by Rob Brown) in Finding Forrester, just so I wouldn’t have to endure more put-downs about my tall, lanky ass and my ugly features on top of that.

Me at Prom Dinner, White Plains, NY, May 21, 1987. (Suzanne Johnson neè De Feo).

But the worst of all this was my senior year at Mount Vernon High School. My final days took an ugly turn the moment my classmates learned I was ranked 14th out of 545 students (509 of us eventually graduated in June 1987). I’ve written ad nauseam about how my White Humanities classmates responded to my ranking, as if I threatened their worldview of them being more intelligent than the Black folx they went to school with every day. Months before my soon-to-be former Black classmates began to stare through me like I was a ghost, they began to clown me. I’d blow by them in the hallways, and they’d bust out laughing. They’d comment on my ugly, brittle hair, talking about how my “hair could break picks.” They’d talk about my “cheap clothes from Taiwan” — which they were from, by the way (how did they know that?). Or, they’d simply shake their heads, as if my existence was a “shaking my head” moment on par with Raven-Symoné declaring herself “not Black.”

Clyde was among that group of Black guys and gals who made a point of telling me I was ugly throughout my senior year. He did it so many times that somewhere around February of that school year, I lost track of the number. “You ugly. There ain’t nothin’ in the world that’s gonna fix that,” Clyde said to me once. Most days, I ignored it, because what would have been the point? We were graduating, and my plans for college were bigger than any insult any asshole could muster. But, one day before winter break, Clyde just said, “You ugly, Donald. You ugly.” It took every bit of the low energy I had to not cry, and not pick up a desk and tear his fucking head off with it, like the chair revenge scene in Moonlight.

It took getting away and going to college for me to stop seeing myself and my own unique blend of Blackness as not ugly, even handsome. A bout of homelessness here and months of struggling to pay rent and eat there will begin to harden you against the bullshit of muthafuckas who would prefer to tear you down rather than build something for themselves or others. As Flavor Flav from PE would say, “Motherfuck them any damn way!”

After those days of sleeping on concrete slabs or eating tuna fish out of a can until I could eat it anymore, it didn’t matter how the Clydes, Gordons, and Tomikas saw me. I saw myself clearly, for the very first time. And I clearly saw my naysayers, too, as the short-in-body and in mind, coloristic, Blackness-but-only-so-much, racist, sexist, and homophobic pieces of shit for whom they were. Why should it have ever mattered what they thought of me?

One Saturday in early February 1989 in the shared bathroom in the Fu rowhouse on Welsford Avenue in South Oakland, I looked at myself in the mirror. I had just finished washing up. I was six-two, maybe 175 pounds, and six weeks past my 19th birthday, with barely enough facial hair to clog up my right nostril. I must’ve stood there staring at every angle of my face for two or three minutes. Then I chuckled. “You’re an okay-looking guy. You’re not Billy Dee or Denzel, but you’re not bad-looking at all.” Nor am I Idris Elba. But being me since has almost always been okay enough. The truth is, it always should been, for any of us.