Category Archives: Mount Vernon New York

Touré’s Post-Blackness ≈ I’ma Be Me?

01 Monday Oct 2012

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Illustration of red wolf with dinner after a hunt, by Sandra Koch, September 29, 2012. (http://nc-es.fws.gov). In public domain.

I know, I know. Touré’s Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness (2011) has been out for over a year, and I’ve finally, finally managed to read it in the past couple of weeks. I did not want to like this book. I found — and still find — the title to be pretentious and over the top, a perfect fit for Touré’s Twitter and TV persona. Touré values his ideas like they all are new finds of platinum or a form of safe and sustained nuclear fusion. Sometimes Touré can be cutting-edge, but many times, he goes over the edge (as was the case in August on MSNBC with his “niggerization” of Obama comment).

But in Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness, Touré puts forward a variety of ideas and insights that I’ll be contemplating in my blogo-neighborhood off and on over the next few months. Touré’s is a very good book. It’s one that is both intellectual and yet revealing about the challenges Blacks face inter- and intraracially in the early twenty-first century.

The premise — once I got past the ridiculous term post-Blackness — is that African Americans and America has advanced just far enough in terms of race for all of our old conceptions of Blackness to have now become meaningless. That Blackness is fully infused in American — maybe even world — culture. That there was never one way to be Black in the first place. Touré himself says, “[t]here is no dogmatically narrow, authentic Blackness because the possibilities for Black identity are infinite. To say something or someone is not Black — or is inauthentically Black — is to sell Blackness short. To limit the potential of Blackness. To be a child of a lesser blackness.” (p. 5).

Litmus paper used in litmus tests, September 29, 2012. (http://chemistry.about.com).

Ironically, though, much of Touré’s book picks apart the notion that the US has become post-racial in the past couple of decades, as best exemplified by the election of President Barack Obama in 2008. Of course, Touré uses notions of Blackness and where it has expanded beyond the authenticity litmus test to show that race/racial bias/racism is still alive and well in America. At the same time, Touré shows how post-Blackness has also provided opportunities for millions of Americans White, Black and Brown to reach beyond their own misconceptions of race and themselves, to enrich our lives in politics, scholarship, the arts, not to mention through hip-hop.

One of my main criticisms of Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness is that Touré uses a term like post-Blackness (mind you, I hate terms like post-structuralism, post-modernism, and post-racialism too) and doesn’t try in any way to provide a definition that distinguishes it from post-racial. For the purposes of this post, though, the main issue I have revolves around Touré virtually ignoring poor and struggling African Americans in his post-Blackness tour-de-force.

I get it when Touré says that he “never lived a typical Black experience.” (p. 53). At least, I think I do. That despite Touré middle class upbringing, middle-class neighborhood, private school experience, that his is but one representation of Blackness. And that Touré’s experience is as representative of Blackness as my experience of being a Hebrew-Israelite preteen in a working poor family while enrolled in Humanities in Mount Vernon, New York would’ve been thirty years ago (see my post “A Question of My Blackness, Sexuality and Masculinity” from September ’11). Or, for that matter, Wanda Sykes’ comedy special I’ma Be Me (2009) was for her.

That’s great for us, for anyone with enough intellectual power, outsider status, unusual amounts of wisdom, or just plain middle class standing to get the details of Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness. But when Touré does bring up the twenty-five percent of Blacks who aren’t part of this post-Blackness elite, he talks at them, and not to them. Yes, I completely agree that Blackness isn’t to be defined in terms of poverty, prison, and projects. No, Blackness shouldn’t be defined by how “down” one is with an impoverished community or how “hard” someone is for beating the shit out of another person (see my “Raised on Hip-Hop?” post from April ’10).

Hakeem Olajuwon posting up Patrick Ewing, 1994 NBA Finals, June 1994. (http://rgj.com).

Still, while I stand with almost one hundred percent of what Touré says in Who Afraid of Post-Blackness in ’12, I don’t think that this book would’ve reached me thirty years ago. The way I would’ve seen it in ’82 or even ’87, a middle class Black guy telling me about how my poverty is insignificant to who I was would’ve been excommunicated from my life for eternity. It wouldn’t have helped me at all deal with the pressures I faced socially, academically and in my family (see my “The Silent Treatment” post from June ’10).

Touré wouldn’t have been able to provide for me a roadmap for how to be me and to ignore the crowd of those in my life — White and Black — who regularly told me that I wasn’t authentically Black or that I was “talkin’ White.” If mild-mannered me at twelve wouldn’t have been reached by Touré’s chapter on Black artists taking Blackness and standing it on its head, I imagine that young African Americans growing up in poverty or struggling with identity issues would find Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness about as easy to embrace as Bill Cosby’s criticism of poor Blacks in ’04.

For me as a writer, the question of how to reach beyond the already converted is always an issue. Touré, as good as he is in his book, merely affirms the path I’ve traveled over the past thirty-one years. He doesn’t really reach those whose path of Blackness has barely begun.

School of Dreams (and Nightmares)

10 Monday Sep 2012

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


School of Dreams (2003), by Edward Humes, September 9, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

Yesterday was the thirty-first anniversary of my first day of seventh grade at A.B. Davis Middle School, my first day in a six-year slog in Mount Vernon public schools’ Humanities Program. The academic pressures that came with being part of a gifted-talented track magnet program were such that the lessons I learned during those years remain with me to this day. The unique lessons about who I was and whom I wanted and needed to become, though, are the kinds of lessons reserved for a memoir, like, say, Boy @ The Window.

But there are other lessons, other issues that anyone who has gone through such a program, is in one, or has kids in one, should heed. Perhaps the best book I’ve ever read about the experiences of high ability students in a gifted track middle or high school has been Edward Humes’ School of Dreams: Making the Grade at a Top American High School (2003). Despite some of the flaws in the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and author’s account covering a year in the life of Whitney High School in Cerritos, California, this is a book I’d use in many of my future graduate seminars in US educational history.

A particularly poignant passage was where Humes wrote, the “combination of a school built upon high expectations and a student population whose dominant culture elevates learning to a high priority—and hard work in school to an absolute necessity—makes for a kind of education echo chamber” (p. 340). Humes meant this as a positive comment on the academic culture of a public high school in Southern California.  But it also reflected a constant tension between learning and zero-sum competition.

Starbucks double chocolate chip frappucino, September 10, 2012. (htttp://wwwcoffeespitfire.blogspot.com).

Humes somehow doesn’t fully take stock of this tension beyond the context of the high school in which he embedded himself in 2000-01. There were stories, disheartening stories about seventh graders hitting up Starbucks for coffee before school, during lunch and after school to stay awake. Of parents who shunned their kids’ artistic talent and aspirations in their quest to ensure they earned a degree in a STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) field. Of students taking as many as six AP (Advanced Placement) courses in a single school year, or colluding to cheat on a calculus or physics exam when the pace of study and testing proved to be too much.

Yes, despite this, Whitney has produced thousands of elite college-goers, and 4.0 is the standard, not the exception, that its students shoot for. But now, in an age in which high-stakes testing is the norm, what’s the social and psychological message that we’re communicating to the current crop of K-12 students in the US today?

For me, the best way to answer this question is to look back on my own experience and the experiences of my former Humanities classmates. Based on my own writings and findings, there’s plenty of evidence that intensive academic rigor and competition — like intensive athletic training and competition — will produce excellent students well prepared for college, but not necessarily well prepared for life. Many of my former Humanities classmates (and many of the students Humes tracked and interviewed for School of Dreams) were socially inept, put themselves under constant stress (not to mention experiencing psychological pressures from each other, their parents and teachers) and lacked the deeper critical reasoning skills necessary to make college a worthwhile experience.

The students had a “cram-and-exam” methodology to learning, spending hours learning techniques and concepts and little time in applying them beyond the classroom in the vast majority of their subjects. Often when students discovered a new talent, particularly in writing, the arts or in music, many of their parents pounced into action to admonish teachers for encouraging these developments or to force their kids into their way of thinking about their future. Bottom line: while many of these high-achievers were willing to slit each others’ throats for an A, an AP “5” or an SAT 1600, they hadn’t really made up their minds about who they wanted to be, the talents they wanted to explore, or the world in which they wanted to live.

“Nightmares & Daydreams” episode screen shot, Avatar: The Last Airbender, September 10, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws due to pic’s low resolution.

When I first read Humes’ School of Dreams nine years ago, it forced me to think about these parallels. I realized that if Starbucks was within a mile of either A.B. Davis Middle or Mount Vernon High School in the ’80s, our class alone would’ve spent about $160,000 a year there on coffee and pastries. That most of us were sane enough to only take three or four AP courses my senior year. That our standard for a minimally acceptable SAT score was a 1200. That, instead of kids crying or running away from home for two days over a B, attempted suicides or a turn to crystal meth would’ve been more common. I guess by Whitney’s standards, we would’ve been slackers.

Still, more than a quarter-century since my last Humanities course, with tighter budgets and far more high-stakes testing (see the correlation?), the crush of intense academic competition has made our public schools a poor place for polishing students into well-adjusted young adults. Yes, I know that this is primarily a parent’s responsibility. But then again, public schools are meant to be far more than an octagon ring with No. 2 pencils.

Crooked Fingers

31 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, race, Work, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,


My crooked left fingers, August 31, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

It’s been a bit more than thirty years since I’ve had surgery on two left fingers in an attempt to straighten them. These fingers are symbolic of what happens when a family slides off a cliff in the Himalayas into deep poverty, of when a nation doesn’t have an adequate social safety net or adequate healthcare for the poor.

At the very end of my glorious summer of ’82, I needed surgery on the ring and pinky fingers of my left hand to remove two benign tumors. The tumors had apparently been there since I was eight and had caused the two fingers to grow crookedly, to the point where I couldn’t use them. After the hospital strike (see my “The Quest For Work, Past and Present” post from earlier this month) and my ordeal with Maurice had ended (see my post “Boy, Interrupted” from July ’12), my mother realized that I needed to see a doctor, and within a week I was at Mount Vernon Hospital in surgery.

They removed the tumors, straightened my fingers, stitched them up and put them in a cast. If all went well, after a month, they’d remove the cast and the stitching. That, and a few checkups to check the progress and scar tissue buildup on my fingers, and I should’ve been good to go. But that happy ending wasn’t to be. After the casts came off in early September, I didn’t see a doctor again until April ’85.

Why? My mother had been downgraded to part-time status at Mount Vernon Hospital by October ’82, and after the birth of my sister Sarai in February ’83, could not work and take care of five kids at the same time. We went on welfare in April ’83, and with that, received Medicaid services. Those services, as anyone who has spent any serious time in America’s worst poverty should already know, are limited in scope, and don’t exactly cover the removal of post-surgery scar tissue.

Choppers and Westchester County Medical Center, Valhalla, NY, August 31, 2012. (http://nymc.edu)

So, a year or so after my tumor removal/finger-straightening surgery, my left ring and pinky fingers went crooked again. By the time me and my mother had schlepped on the old Bee-Line Route 41 bus to Westchester County Medical Center in Valhalla in ’85, my fingers were about half as crooked as they had been before surgery in August ’82. The doctor, of course, misdiagnosed my fingers as having keloids, and offered steroids to shrink them down. Injections, by the way, not covered under Medicaid at the time.

But that wasn’t the only problem. My crooked fingers itched a lot, and made it difficult for me to make one-handed grabs in football tryouts in ’84, not to mention wearing a baseball glove for baseball tryouts in ’86. Some girls at Mount Vernon High School grilled me with questions whenever they noticed them, as if I was a Yeti who decided to visit Western civilization for the first time. One of them told me point-blank, “I can’t go with you — your fingers are too ugly.” A young woman said something to the same effect to me my freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh.

It wasn’t until the fall of ’02 that I finally saw a specialist at Johns Hopkins about my finger, one who confirmed the initial diagnosis of tumors from ’82. Between two doctors and a physical therapist, I gained about two-thirds of my total range of motion in my ring finger, but only five degrees’ worth of motion in my left pinky by the time my son was born in July ’03.

I got to the point where I could finally palm a basketball in my left hand. But ultimately, that was all I could do. It turned out that I’d have to lose a joint in my crooked fingers — to have them fused — in order to straighten them. Otherwise, there was nothing wrong with the bones. It made more sense to leave them crooked.

Maybe this is good thing, though. That no matter my past, present or future successes, that I have them as a reminder of how far I’ve come. They also serve to remind me how many others suffer in the US because of poverty.

Moving (On) To Pittsburgh

26 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Politics, race, Religion, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


241st Street-Wakefield Subway Station, Bronx, NY, August 25, 2012. (jag9889 via http://flickr.com). In public domain.

I’m now a quarter-century removed from leaving my original hometown, Mount Vernon, New York, for Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh. Wednesday, August 26, ’87 wasn’t my first day of adulthood, but it turned into my first day of freedom from the disappointment that my years in Mount Vernon and at 616 East Lincoln Avenue had turned into. It’s been a long road of triumphs and setbacks, of mistakes and sins, of excellence and miracles (see my post “Trip to the ‘Burgh” from August ’09).

But I’ve frequently wondered what would’ve happened if I’d stayed in Mount Vernon, or, at least, somewhere in or near New York City. Would I have turned out like my older brother Darren, a forty-four year-old who’s never been able to shake off the years of psychological torture he endured at 616? He was caught between my mother believing him to be retarded and being in a school for the mentally retarded as a kid with an above-average IQ for fourteen years. Darren never had a chance to build on him teaching himself to read at three and teaching me how to read at five (see post “About My Brother” from December ’07).

Outside of the upper-crust lily-Whiteness that was his Clear View School experience, Darren’s never known a middle-class adult life, a middle-class education or people he could talk to about his experience in order to move on from it. My brother lives around 233rd Street in the Bronx, as isolated now as he was at 616, trapped in our 616 past and in the warped thinking that has retarded his growth as a human being for nearly forty years.

Or would I have turned into my youngest brother Eri, a twenty-eight year-old frequently angry with the world? He’s been taking solace in a father (my ex-stepfather) who was never there for him and in his father’s twisted sense of Afrocentric Judaism? Unlike me and my older brother Darren, who at least knew what it was like to live in a time when even we experienced some sense of the old American Dream, Eri never had that chance.

Poverty, the grinding-with-millstones kind, and joblessness are really all that Eri’s seen the past three decades. Job Corp and the Army National Guard have really been his only times away from the daily anguish of 616 and Mount Vernon. And with the death of our sister Sarai two years ago, I know that he’s felt even more angst and isolation. Leading Eri to begin the process of re-upping with Uncle Sam for this fall.

Amtrak’s Pennsylvanian passing the 1895 Bryn Mawr Interlocking Control Towerat Bryn Mawr, PA, en route from New York to Pittsburgh, June 6, 2011. (Centpacrr via Wikipedia). Permission granted via cc-by-sa-3.0.

If I had stayed, my story would likely have ended up somewhere between Darren’s and Eri’s. I would’ve somehow gone to college, maybe Westchester Community College, Hunter or possibly Fordham. But the drama of living at 616 and the constant reminders of the worst years of my life all around me would’ve made demon-slaying a near-impossible task.

It was bad enough occasionally bumping into Crush #1, Crush #2 or one of my silent treatment classmates during the holidays and summers I was away from Pittsburgh between ’87 and ’92. Seeing them regularly and knowing that they only saw me as a twelve-year-old asshole or socially-inept seventeen-year-old? That would’ve stunted me (see my post “The Silent Treatment” from June ’10). I simply wouldn’t have felt that I had the space — geographically or psychologically — to move on from those morbid times.

Even if I somehow found the focus of Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan combined to complete a bachelor’s degree, I would’ve needed to make the decision to leave the area anyway. Especially if I had any other aspirations besides helping my mother take care of my younger siblings, including going to graduate school.

All the decisions I made after August 26, ’87, in fact, wouldn’t have occurred if I had stayed at 616, in Mount Vernon, even anywhere in the New York City area. I would’ve been too close to allow my mother to be beaten by my ex-stepfather again. I would’ve been too embarrassed by my father’s increasing alcoholism. And I would’ve been too angry with myself for all of the fun I’d denied myself while my former high school classmates were living what I assumed was the equivalent of Sheila E’s “Fabulous Life.”

There would’ve been no decision to even risk being homeless my sophomore year for a degree — much less actually being homeless for nearly a week. There then wouldn’t have been a decision to change my major to history, much less rediscovering myself as a writer years later. I wouldn’t have ever seen myself as worthy of happiness, or seen myself as handsome, or seen myself through the eyes of others as funny or charming or goofy. Instead, I could’ve counted on anger, rage, disappointment and misery to be my four emotional companions, ever ready to introduce themselves to the New York City area.

We often need change to move on from the demons of our past and present. Thank God I made the decision to literally leave 616 and Mount Vernon for Pittsburgh. That decision has enabled me to remember the past without wallowing in it.

The Quest For Work, Past and Present

21 Tuesday Aug 2012

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Down and out on New York pier, 1935, June 2009. (Lewis W. Hine via FDR Presidential Library). In public domain.

Election ’12 should be about how to generate more jobs and how to grow the economy. Sadly, it hasn’t been about these issues, and given the toxic political and cultural climate, it will not be about jobs or the economy when this cycle ends on November 6.

I’ve seen this horror movie of economic downturns and mini-depressions in American society and in my own life now three times in the past thirty-five years. Each time, I’ve been better prepared, more informed, more able to ride out the storm. And each time, I’ve seen the ugly side of what we call the United States of America, a place that has and will continue to punish the unemployed and underemployed for problems beyond their control. Especially if they were and are women, young, over forty, of color, and among the poor.

In the period between ’79 and ’83, when the effective inflation rate for that four-year period was more than thirty-five percent, when we experienced a double-dip recession, when interest rates reached 22.5 percent. My mother’s meager income of $12,000 in ’79 didn’t keep up, even as it reached $15,000 in ’82. We were late with our rent at 616 by an average of three weeks each month and didn’t have food in the apartment the last ten days of any month, going back to October ’81. Things were so bad that my mother, a supervisor in Mount Vernon Hospital’s dietary department, brought food home from the hospital kitchen for us to eat for dinner several times each month.

“Negro Women,” Earle, Arkansas, July 1936, August 21, 2012. (Dorothea Lange via Library of Congress/http://libinfo.uark.edu). In public domain.

The good news was, Mount Vernon Hospital’s employees went on strike for higher wages and increased job security in mid-July ’82. The bad news was, although Mom was a sixteen-year veteran, nearly fifteen of those as a dietary department supervisor, Mom never joined the union. She didn’t want to pay “them bloodsuckers” dues, and said that she “couldn’t afford them” anyway.

I can only imagine how much spit and venom Mom faced on her way to work every day for three weeks. Considering our money situation, which I knew because I checked the mail and looked at our bills every day, picketing and getting union benefits might have been better than working. It wasn’t as if there was food in the house to eat anyway. As much as I enjoyed Mount Vernon Hospital’s Boston Cream Pie, I thought that picketing for a better wage was the way to go.

Soon after I started eighth grade, the other shoe dropped. Mom, so insistent on not joining Mount Vernon Hospital’s union, was the odd woman out. The hospital’s concession of five percent increases per year over three years left them looking to cut costs. The only personnel left vulnerable were non-union service workers and their supervisors. My Mom had been cut to half-time by her boss Mrs. Hunce. Mom was screwed, but it was a screwing partly of her own making. It was the beginning of a two-decade-long period of welfare, underemployment, unemployment welfare-to-work, with an associate’s degree along the way. So much for hard work leading to prosperity!

I’ve gone through my own periods of unemployment and underemployment over the years. The most severe one for me was between June and September ’97, right after I finished my PhD. It was the first time in four years I hadn’t had work or a fellowship to rely on, and it was brutal. I did interviews with Teachers College and Slippery Rock University for tenure-track positions in education foundations, only to finish second for one job, and to see the folks at Slippery Rock cancel the other search. In the latter case, I think that they felt uncomfortable hiring someone of my age — twenty-seven — and my, um, ilk (read race here).

What made it worse was the fact that I couldn’t simply apply for any old job. I did actually try, too. McDonald’s, UPS, FedEx, Barnes & Noble, among others. I couldn’t even get Food Stamps in July, because my income threshold for March, April and May ’97 — $1,200 per month — was too high. And because I technically was a student for tax purposes my last two semesters at Carnegie Mellon — even though I was adjunct professor teaching history courses — I didn’t qualify for unemployment benefits either.

Shuttered Homestead steel mill, 1989, August 21, 2012. (Jet Lowe/Historical American Engineering Record). In public domain.

I had to omit the fact that I had a PhD to get a part-time job at Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, which began after Labor Day ’97. I ended up teaching as an adjunct professor at Duquesne University’s College of Education the following year. Still, my income level did not return to where it was my last year of graduate school until June ’99, when I’d accepted a position with Presidential Classroom in the DC area.

I am nowhere near those times of being considered or treated as a statistic, marginalized in media and in politics as being lazy, shiftless, not smart or hard-working enough. But as a person who teaches near full-time and has more than occasional consulting work, I know how precarious and temporary work can be.

Ironic, then, that the people making decisions that have put people like me and my Mom in terrible financial straits have never missed a meal or not paid a bill because they were choosing between heat and not making phone calls. That most Americans regardless of party affiliation shun the poor, unemployed and underemployed is a shame and a pitiful example of how we really don’t pull together during tough times.

These attitudes are why rugged individualism and hard work aren’t enough to get and hold a job. An education, a real social safety net, even regulation of the job market, would help level the playing field for millions. Or, maybe some of us should learn Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Arabic or Portuguese and move to where the jobs really are.

The Human Race Addendum

13 Monday Aug 2012

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,


Two years ago, I wrote a post about a curious observation I made about inequality, unfairness and humanity, all courtesy of my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Pierce (“Hard Work and the Human Race,” September ’10 – see below). In the thirty-four years since this observation, it’s fairly obvious that the great college football coach legend Barry Switzer was right about how people like Romney think about their station in life. “Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.”

GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s pick of Paul Ryan as his vice-president is a confirmation of the idea that there are folks in America who truly believe that their success came only as a result of hard work, luck and prayer. But to use a better analogy, it’s easy to be a winner when your born in middle of the fourth lap of a 400m race, while someone like me had to fight just to get in the starting block. Politically, Carter and Reagan was the spark for my understanding of economic inequality. Three and a half decades later, the Romney-Ryan ticket reflects the long and winding road this mythology of “equal opportunity, not equal outcomes” has taken our nation. Only, equal opportunities do not exist for most of us, as the track and field analogy illuminates.

===========================

When I was nine years old, my fourth grade teacher at Holmes, Mrs. Pierce — a grouch of an older White woman, really — talked about the human race and attempted to describe our species’ variations. She tried to do what we’d call a discussion of diversity now. It went over our heads, no doubt because she didn’t quite get the concept of diversity herself.

Holmes Elementary School, Mount Vernon, NY [Top left corner was Mrs. Pierce’s classroom in 1978-79 year], November 22, 2006. (Donald Earl Collins).

Like the fourth-grader I was, I daydreamed about the term, human race. I thought of Whites, Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, young and old, male and female, from all over the world, all on a starting line. It was as if four billion people — that was the world population in ’79 — were lined up to run a race to the top of the world. In my daydream, some were faster than others, or at least appeared to be, while others hobbled along on crutches and in wheelchairs. Still others crawled along, falling farther and farther behind those who were in the lead, the ones that looked like runners in the New York City marathon. Before I could ponder the daydream further, Mrs. Pierce yelled, “Wake up, Donald!.” as if I’d really been asleep.

A high school friend recently gave me some much-needed feedback on my Boy @ The Window manuscript. Her feedback was helpful and insightful, and very much appreciated. But some of it reminded me of the realities of having someone who’s a character in a story actually read that story. Their perceptions will never fully match up with those of the writer, which is what is so groovy and fascinating about writing in the first place.

One of the things that struck me as a thread in her comments — not to mention in so many conversations I’ve had with my students about race and socioeconomics — was the theme of individual hard work trumping all obstacles and circumstances. As if words, slights, and mindsets in the world around us don’t matter. As if poverty is merely a mirage, and bigotry, race and racism merely words on a page. Sure, a story such as the one I have told in this blog for the past three years is about overcoming roadblocks, especially the ones that we set ourselves up for in life, forget about the ones external to our own fears and doubts.

At the same time, I realized what my weird daydream from thirty-one years ago meant. Some people get a head start — or, in NASCAR terms, the pole — before the race even starts. That certainly doesn’t make what that individual accomplishes in life any less meaningful, but knowing that the person had an advantage that most others didn’t possess does provide perspective and illuminates how much distance the disadvantaged need to cover to make up ground. Those who limp and crawl and somehow are able to compete in this human race have also worked hard, likely at least as hard as those with a head start, and more than likely, harder than most human beings should ever have to work.

2009 London Marathon. (http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/)

Plus, there are intangibles that go with race, class and other variables that determines how the human race unfolds. “Good luck is where hard work meets opportunity,” at least according to former Pittsburgh Penguins goaltender Tom Barrasso. Most human beings work hard, but all need opportunities that may provide a real sprint to catch up or take a lead in the human race. Family status, political influence, social and community networks, religious memberships, being in the right place at the right time, all matter and are connected to race and class, at least in the US.

The moral of this story is, hard work matters, individual accomplishment matters. Yet a panoramic view of the race in which humans are engaged matters more in putting our individual successes and the distance that remains in some reasonable perspective. Without that, we’re all just pretending that individual hard work is the only thing that matters, when that’s only half the battle, or half of half the battle.

Working With Wackos, Part 2

10 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, Work, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,


Daniel Craig in Layer Cake (2004), October 4, 2010. (http://www.guardian.co.uk).

This is the second of my two posts about my last summer working with a group of misfits and backstabbing micro-managers at the Mount Vernon Mental Health Clinic (as part of Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health) in ’92. I left off by talking about the decision I faced when the head of the clinic, Dr. Williams, wanted me to write a report that would implicate Johnstone as both an incompetent and capricious office manager. It would’ve been a report that would’ve led to Valerie Johnstone’s firing (see my “Working With Wackos, Part 1” post from last month).

Luckily I had the weekend before my last week at the job to think it through. I approached my task the same way I approached a research project. I interviewed my co-workers — at least in a way without them knowing that I was doing a formal interview — about their problems with Johnstone and about their refusal to learn the new computers and billing system for the office. I documented various incidents that I either experienced or witnessed in which Johnstone was far from professional. I even discussed the overall office dynamics and argued that they were the reason why the clinic had fallen behind twice in the past decade on hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Medicaid and Medicare billing to New York State.

But I did more than that. I in fact put together two versions of the report. One version was specifically for Dr. Williams, one that could justify the demotion — if not the firing — of Johnstone. The other, much fuller version was one in which I made the case that Dr. Williams and Johnstone were both culpable as they created an unprofessional and chaotic atmosphere at the clinic.

The Things We Think And Do Not Say “Memo” from Jerry Maguire (1997), August 9, 2012. (http://theuncool.com).

I made the point in the second version that it wasn’t just their violent language and their nasty public and private arguments. Nor was it just their disappearances from the office for hours at a time or showing up hours late looking hung over. Their mercurial natures and their lack of respect for the office and each other had trickled down to the office staff. So much so that some summer office worker like myself had no chance of training staff on how to use a computer or a new billing system.

On my last day at work, Friday, July 31, I handed in version one to Dr. Williams, who was giddy with delight, and gave me a hug and a handshake. I left work early that day, and immediately took the 40 bus up to White Plains, to the main Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health on Post Road. I went to Bob Beane’s office (the department’s director), and dropped off version two of my report. Beane had already left for the weekend. I sneaked in and out that day, as I had worked at this office the summer and holiday season ’90, and I didn’t want questions from my one-time co-workers about why I was there.

The following Friday morning, as I got ready to walk from 616 to the Mount Vernon clinic to pick up my final summer paycheck, the phone rang. It was Beane on the other end of the phone, asking me questions about my report. He asked me how much of what was in it was true. “All of it,” I said. “I need you to come into the office so I ask you some more questions,” Beane said in response. Since I was already about to walk out the door, I hung up and went into my warp-factor-9-walk to find out what was going on (and to get my paycheck without a lot of fuss).

Heads Will Roll sculpture, Embarcadero Center #4, San Francisco, June 25, 2010. (http://artsysf.buzznet.com).

I walked into the equivalent of an emotional tsunami. One of my former co-workers was in tears, while another looked completely stunned. Beane pulled me into Johnstone’s office, and closed the door. I explained what had been going on at the office between Dr. Williams and Johnstone over the previous eight weeks, and likely over the previous three years. Beane paused, then told me what had occurred when he read my report earlier in the week. He decided to fire Dr. Williams, while he demoted Johnstone and moved her to the Yonkers clinic. Beane was in the process of meeting with my former co-workers to verify what was in my report.

After he apprised me, Beane handed me my final paycheck. Then he said, “Thank you. What you did here was very brave and very helpful. But you know you can’t work here again.”

“I know. I knew that when I gave you my report,” I said. Thus ended my career working for Westchester County government.