Category Archives: Patriotism

Agents and Not Agents, The Hard Way

10 Tuesday Aug 2021

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

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Agents from The Matrix (1999) screenshot (cropped), August 8, 2021. (https://matrix.fandom.com)

This is the second of several posts I’ve put together about my journeys as a writer. Please laugh when and where appropriate.

“You always gotta do things the hard way, don’t you?” my one-time professor Barbara Sizemore said with some sighed frustration. It was in response to me telling her I had decided to stay at Pitt, to pursue my history doctorate at the University of Pittsburgh and possibly transfer to Carnegie Mellon to complete it. It was April 1992. We were standing in the main corridor of the third floor of Wesley Posvar Hall (née Forbes Quadrangle), I was on my way back to my grad student cubicle in the History Department. Sizemore was heading back to her office in the adjacent Africana Studies Department. If I had known this would be my last conversation with the prickly educator, her of squinty eyes and well-manicured afro, before she return to Chicago, took a position at DePaul, and passed away in 2004, I would have done more than given Sizemore a blank stare. As the tall, lanky, and sarcastic 23-year-old I was, I probably would’ve said, “Why yes, professor, I really do!”

I knew what Sizemore was really saying. It was about attending a lily-white university, where there were only four tenured Black professors out of 800 total faculty. My advisor Joe William Trotter, Jr. was one of them. Sizemore assumed that going to Ohio State or Temple to earn a doctorate in Black studies would have been my best move. But even though Sizemore was incorrect about my education decision, she was definitely correct about me taking “always doing things the hard way” paths toward so many of my goals.

Claudia Menza became my first (and so far, only) literary agent in July 1999. The idea of finding a literary agent to help me publish my first book was something I had played with as an idea for nearly a year. At least once I had begun to emerge from my state of rage, depression, and sheer burnout from my years finishing my doctorate at Carnegie Mellon and having Professor “running interference” Trotter as my advisor. I made the decision to turn my doctoral thesis into a book that would straddle the fence between the scholarly and the general. I wanted to publish what would become Fear of a “Black” America for a larger audience, to include both the academic and the personal in the same book. No one told me this was impossible. No one said this was the harder road for a first-time book author. I owned books by scholars that had mainstream imprints and labels. And many, if not most of them, had an agent helping them.

Soon after I finally found my full-time gig with the nonprofit Presidential Classroom in the DMV, I went ahead, did some research in those big, thick books on books and lit agents at Pitt’s Hillman Library, and wrote pitch letters to seven of them. Three weeks later, Menza wrote me back offering to represent me.

She started querying publishing house editors in October 2000, just as I was leaving Presidential Classroom for a higher paying nonprofit job working in social justice in DC. I was so busy with work and my New York family and with married life that I took my eye off the process. One year went by, with a few rejection letters here and there. Then 9/11 happened. I met up with Menza in New York six weeks later. I was already there to do a site visit with a social justice fellow. That’s when I learned Menza at this stage of her time as an agent predominantly represented fiction and poetry. Still, she had some high-powered authors under her belt. I remained confident in her and the mysterious process of finding an editor willing to publish me, in between bites of delicious pasta at a wonderful Italian bistro in the Village.

Two more years went by after that. I received rejections from Basic Books, Random House, Palgrave, Oxford University Press, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, among others. Some stood out because the acquiring editors met to debate the merits for my book before ultimately rejecting it. Some stood out for being two-sentence rejections. I remember Menza saying, “I don’t understand why they don’t want your book.” That was at the end of 2002. By then, even though I remained outwardly confident, I had given up on finding a mainstream commercial publisher. “Maybe I need to go learn how to write again,” I said to my partner more than once. This, just after she became pregnant with our first and only egg.

With the ugly transition between jobs within my nonprofit organization and the birth of and caring for our one and only son, I knew I didn’t have it in me to continue the process of pitch-and-reject with Menza. I was also thinking about writing a memoir, something that could explain how I got to be me. I wrote Menza in March 2004, formally cutting ties with her as my agent. “I wish it had all worked out,” she wrote back.

That July, with some encouragement from my new boss and from my significant other, I decided to look at Fear of a “Black” America one last time, but this time, to self-publish. I went and found a house that did its own reviews of manuscripts and provided adequate enough copyediting to make sure I didn’t embarrass myself. Sometime in that process, Barbara Sizemore died. I read about her death in a nicely done obituary DePaul University put out (The Washington Post obit, not so nice about her years as DC Public Schools chancellor). I imagined Sizemore looking down at me that July and August, shaking her head.

The book came out at the end of August. Somehow, despite myself, I sold over a thousand copies in 16 months, did radio and newspaper interviews and talks and signings all over the DMV. I was happy and a bit bitter, like a cup of black coffee not sugary enough for my taste buds. This book could’ve been so much more, I thought so many times in 2004 and 2005.

But none of this is Menza’s fault, or Trotter’s, or even my fault, not in any direct sense. The world of book writing is more mysterious than the cloistered world of academia, and much more mercurial, too. It’s a popularity contest cloaked in American -isms, especially individualism and elitism (which of course contains racism and misogyny, too). It puts all the effort and blame on you and me. In my case, for not having a job in academia that lined up with my expertise in writing Fear of a “Black” America. For not having a degree from an Ivy League institution, or for not having enough successful writer contacts in my genre(s) or in general. For not living in New York as a writer. Maybe even for not being light enough or good-looking enough.

And, even in the four-and-a-half years of having an agent, for not paying close enough attention to how the industry had become a set of six monopolies. All with independent presses being squeezed, to sell out, to fold, to become niches for a small group of aspiring authors. It went from being an industry where you could pitch your books directly to publishers with or without an agent to “Get outta here!” unless you do have an agent. So many agents would prefer DIY schlock or books that easily fit the tastes of elite or hokey white readers than to ever read a query from me. I’m too eclectic, too determined to write for Black folk and beat up on white ways of thinking. I received more than 130 rejections from agents for my memoir Boy @ The Window, between 2007 and 2011, including one that read, “Alas, another book on childhood abuse!”

So, is it really me making it more difficult, because I like to “do things the hard way?” Is it because I have frequently put the need to pay bills and eat over pursuing my art and craft first? Is it because my writing sucks and agents see that immediately? Is it because I don’t know what I’m doing, or because of all of the above? Well, fam, what I do know is that I need help. I don’t quite know what I need to know to navigate this strange world of finding representation. I don’t quite know what I need to know to make publishing with a reputable press work without representation. Kenny Loggins says “when you can’t give love, you give out advice.” Advice with love is preferable, and usually, specific to where I am.

“On the Next Episode of ‘Dumb MFers’…”

04 Saturday Jan 2020

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, My Father, New York City, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Pre-speech prayers over President Donald J. Trump (led by Pastors Paula White-Cain — laying on hands — and Guillermo Maldonado), Evangelicals for Trump coalition rally,, El Rey Jesús International Ministry, West Kendall neighborhood, Miami, January 3, 2020. (Tom Brenner/Reuters via https://nationalpost.com/).

My wife can attest to this. Since the days of HBO’s The Wire (2002-2008), I have had the idea of Idris Elba doing a voice over leading into the next episode of an alternative television series. But instead of Elba narrating in his smooth American Russell “Stringer” Bell baritone, “On the next episode of The Wire,” I’d have him say, “On the next episode of Dumb Muthafuckas,” said exactly the way I’ve spelt it here. Then, the no-so-happy highlights from the next episode would ensue!

On the use of the MF word. I grew up around folx who didn’t use the n-word (with the notable exception of my idiot ex-stepfather, who said and wrote the n-word as “niggah” or “nigguh,” such were the influences of the late-1960s and 1970s on him). My mom would either say “Ns” or “Ens” (depending on spelling), or would grunt “un-un” in reference to Black folk she felt were assholes or fucking up in some way. But motherfucker, particularly the AAVE (African American Vernacular English) way of saying it as muthafucka? That could flow freely like the Hudson River after a spring or summer rainstorm, even during the Hebrew-Israelite years, though less so since we went evangelical Christian in the late-1980s! It could start a sentence and end a sentence, and in heated, violent arguments, often at the same time.

Screenshot of a younger Idris Elba as Stringer Bell in HBO’s The Wire (2002-2008), January 4, 2020. (https://hbo.com).

But it wasn’t just Mom. My father said “muddafucka” when he was in drinking mode growing up. I once played a game in my head, and counted up the number of times he used it at a bar in the Bronx to describe the other drunks, the barkeep, and other folks in the city. I lost count after 50, between “po’ ass muddafucka,” dumb muddafucka,” “git out of here, muddafucka,” and “Suck my dict, muddafucka!” And that was all in 45 minutes!

Their friends, their kids, and so many others I was around in Mount Vernon, the Bronx, and in Manhattan growing up all used variations of MF. I didn’t become regularly acquainted with the n-word outside of Roots or A Soldier’s Story until I went off to college and Pittsburgh. But when Bruce Willis said the line to Alan Rickman’s character Hans Gruber in Diehard (1988), “Yippee-ki-yay, muthafucka!,” he said it the way the Black and Brown folk I grew up around said it, and not the wimpy ways most Whites tend to use it. And every Black who was in the theater with me that night audibly gasped with delight

So when I use MF here, I am being tongue-in-cheek and as serious as a muthafucka. Especially when it comes to America’s daily reality TV show, 45 and his cabal of mostly obese in body, mind, and spirit privileged White man hell-bent on making America a blatantly White supremacist country again (see Mike Pompeo, William Barr, and Rudy Giuliani here, among a legion of others). They are stunningly craven, which also makes them stunningly stupid. They collectively are the person who comes along and knocks down the Jenga tower you have carefully constructed and deconstructed over several hours with a sledgehammer, and then burp in your face immediately afterward. All while not knowing the chain of events they have set off for themselves and for you. They are too orgasmically high on power and drunk off of spreading lies and fear to contemplate playing checkers, much less picking up a bishop to play chess.

And that’s why the show should be titled Dumb Motherfuckers. Because the 45 thesis is to destroy all of former President Barack Obama’s proverbial statues, statues, paintings, treaties, deals, orders, and obelisks in order to restore Whiteness in the White House. The problem is, the Obamas merely brought their Blackness to the White House. The government remained steeped in Whiteness in policies and in attitude the entire time Obama wore the trappings of American imperial power. But when your racism and narcissism is so great as to think that the first Black president was an affront to millions of Whites and some footsoldiers-for-racism Black and Brown folx, being a bunch of dumb motherfuckers lighting up the US and the world with tiki-torches is the result.

Screenshot of ancient Egypt’s Sphinx, complete with closeup of its smashed nose, January 4, 2020. (https://education.abc.net.au).

Now America enters season four of Dumb Motherfuckers. Season three ended with a cliffhanger, as the House of Representatives voted in favor of impeaching 45 on two counts. But, what will Nancy Pelosi do next? Will Mitch McConnell continue his pledge to march “in lockstep with the White House,” like a jackbooted SS officer in a parade at Nuremberg? Will 45 continue to play golf while the US continues its march toward full-on corporate plutocratic fascism? Stay tuned!

As of 36 hours ago, Dumb Motherfuckers‘ producers threw us a plot twist, assassinating Iran’s leading general, Qasem Soleimani, a sort of declaration of war, and certainly a violation of the Geneva Convention. Sure, this plot twist is a distraction from impeachment and the 2020 election cycle. But it is also another drumbeat toward a war that will cost hundreds of thousands of Black and Brown lives, and displace millions of people from their homes and their possible futures. But that doesn’t matter, right? Ratings, a.k.a., votes, do.

45 and his minions of motherfuckers don’t care about all that. Nor are they smart enough to know where this new plot direction will take them or the rest of the US and the world. What they do know is that there are roughly 60 million Americans who are down for anything that 45 does. If 45 ran over a White family with a steamroller, killing three children under the age of five and their Scottish terrier in the process, his fans would find an excuse, say he’s “making America great again,” call me a racist, and threaten me and my life. So know that they would support, “Bomb bomb bomb/Bomb bomb Iran,” just like the late Sen. John McCain did during his 2008 election run. And apparently, through prayers and supplications, through megachurches and the Gospel of Prosperity.

This is what makes watching Dumb Motherfuckers so frustrating, because it is all so predictable. The thinly-veiled imperialism, the rank anti-Black, anti-Brown, anti-Jewish racism, xenophobia as World War Z, and Islamophobia, the obvious women-are-meat misogyny, and the wicked hoarding of wealth. The use of blind patriotism and Christianity to rally Whiteness and White folk into supporting utter stupidity. Just like in 1968-1969, 1973, 1983, 1989, 1991, 2001, and 2002-03, from Vietnam and Grenada to Panama, the First Gulf War, and Afghanistan. Dumb Motherfuckers isn’t dumb just because the characters are dumb. It’s dumb because it will eventually leave the Whites who want to be rich and want Black and Brown people to suffer thoroughly and lethally screwed as well. But give the (White and internalized racism Black and Brown) public what it wants, right? Dumb muthafuckas — it’s a shame and a pitiful!

The “Anti-American” Trope and Being a Black Writer

04 Thursday Jul 2019

Posted by in 1, Academia, culture, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work

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Malcolm X quote from his “By Any Means Necessary Speech,” Organization of Afro-American Unity, New York, June 28, 1964. (https://azquotes.com).

This week, I published yet another article article in Al Jazeera English, this one titled “How US history is whitewashed in high school exams.” It’s about my experiences scoring AP US History and AP World History exams for the College Board through Educational Testing Service as a contingent faculty member. It was also about how the two organizations consistently present a sanitized version of both histories, excluding and marginalizing those of African, of Latinx, and of indigenous descent in the process. My biggest concern was that folks would find my treatment of the work of the College Board and ETS unfair. Or, that readers would disagree with me personally, attacking my intellect and my race purely out of racism and jingoism.

On the second concern, I was mostly right, but not quite in the way I expected. At least three trolls accused me of being “anti-American” and “anti-patriotic.” Really? So, no critique of American education or of two education organizations can stand without it being a referendum on whether I am a patriot for America as it is instead of what I’d like it to be? The narcissism I see out of the mostly male, nearly all White set in the US — it must reside in a bottomless pit. Or in the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

Is calling out folks who believe themselves to be educators because they favored Japanese internment during World War II as an example of state-sponsored mass violence over slavery in colonial America/US really anti-American? Is pointing out the flaws in the politics around K-12 and college education in the field of history an example of my anti-patriotism? Should I be subjected to jingoistic scorn because I dare say that “[c]hattel slavery will always serve as a complicating counternarrative to The College Board’s trope of the West’s continual social and political progress?” If this is anti-American, then so is racism, misogyny, anti-Latino and anti-Arab xenophobia, and rolling tanks into DC on the 4th of July.

But, there was more. At least two trolls tweeted and messaged me about Al Jazeera publishing my article this week. One called me a “fool” because they saw me as a mere tool for their otherwise anti-Black stances and tropes in their coverage. Another tweeted twice, “QATAR LAW: Since 2004, Article 296 of the current Penal Code (Law 11/2004) stipulates imprisonment between 1 and 3 years for sodomy between men.” This because Al Jazeera is partially owned by the Qatari government. Last I checked, the British government partially owns the BBC. The US has repugnant laws and policies in place toward Blacks, Latinxs, Native Americans, women, LGBTQIA folx, and the millions living with poverty. Yet I’m supposed to not publish a piece with one of the largest news outlets in the world because it might make me a tool of the Qatari, and therefore somehow anti-American? Give me a break!

Ultimately, I published with Al Jazeera this time around because they allowed me the most space to air my first-hand account and analysis, without delay and without editing out my direct experience. As a freelance writer and someone with an affinity for the journalistic, that’s really all any professional can ask for.

What I cannot nor will not do, though, is back down or renegotiate my critiques about the US, as is my right as an American citizen. Nor will I attempt to tailor what I write for folks who otherwise stand in opposition to a curriculum that holds fast to Western sacred cows and American mythologies.

At a job interview I did a couple of weeks ago in New Jersey, a search committee member asked me this. “What will you do to reach those people on campus who don’t just have concerns” about my work and the work of the department I could’ve represented, “but are in opposition to your work” and the department’s very existence? “Ultimately, I don’t believe it’s my job to reach folks who stand in opposition to equality, to my insistence that I am equally human. Why would I want to spend time and energy trying to reach those people? We’ve tried that already. With respectability politics, with assimilation. It hasn’t worked,” was my response.

The same goes for the trolls on the Internet, who’ve never seen an idea from a Black man or a Black woman that they’ve respected, who will find anything short of an endorsement from 45 anti-American. I am not writing for you. I am writing for everyone else but you.

Toronto and Miscellaneous Items

26 Sunday May 2019

Posted by in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Patriotism, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Sports, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Yonge Street in downtown Toronto, ON, Canada, March 20, 2017. (https://torontostoreys.com).

I meant to write about this a month ago, but after the Toronto Raptors’ not-so-surprising Game 6 win against the Milwaukee Bucks to make it to the NBA Finals for the first time, it’s still relevant. Last month made 20 years since the last time I’ve been north of the border (but not in Alaska, as I was in 2001). Last month was also the 28th anniversary of me finishing my bachelor’s degree at the University of Pittsburgh, and the subsequent decision to spend my first post-baccalaureate summer in Pittsburgh working and securing funding for my first year of graduate school. April 20 also marked two decades since Columbine, something that was very much on my mind during that Toronto trip and presentation at OAH there in 1999.

I can say that there are only a handful of times in my life since the end of first grade and being sexually assaulted in the summer of ’76 that I have felt “free.” By that, I mean free from the toxicity that is the US, on race, on gender, on class, on religion, on family, on friendships, on breathing, on eating, on walking, on daydreaming, on talking, on being contemplative, on laughing, on merely being myself. Those five days in Toronto to present my research on multiculturalism, to meet up with a couple of friends, to hang out in different neighborhoods and catch their subway. That was one of those times. Maybe the six months my Mom and my deceased idiot ex-stepfather Maurice spent separated between October 2, 1980 and April 13, 1981 was one of those times. Certainly when I proposed to my wife and then moved to DC and Silver Spring later on in 1999 was another. And, how can I forget the sheer ecstasy of watching my son emerge from my wife’s womb in 2003 at Sibley Hospital?

But while all of those and more experiences brought happiness, even orgasmic joy, I’ve spent more than 40 years of nearly 50 looking over my shoulder. In the back of my mind, the idea that the other shoe’s going to drop is never that far away. Even with the lack of American toxicity during my times in Toronto, I knew that this cosmopolitan city had its own unique edge. This despite the poutine, maple syrup, and Molson’s.

Plus, even with going to vegan restaurants, confirming my 1994 research on public housing policies in Toronto, seeing the diversity and freedom of movement sans the gaze of American Whites, it was still a very White city. And that Canadian Whiteness left room for a different (or really, indifferent) kind of gaze. It meant dealing with questions about Columbine and gun violence as if I could explain the actions of narcissistic White males steeped in patriarchy and entitlement. It meant remembering in subtle ways that while Canadians I met were both far nicer and kinder than most Whites in the US, they were still White. And Whiteness, like Arya Stark’s many-faced god, takes numerous forms.

I was free in ways that I couldn’t have been in the States. I walked in White neighborhoods without police following me around. I noticed how most folks didn’t lock their doors at night. I sensed that no one looked over their shoulders for a mugger. Everything was written in metric-system English, which I was happy to use in real life for the first time. It was just different, as if White Canadians hadn’t spent four centuries sitting around and figuring out even more ways to grind down Black people. I sensed that this wasn’t the case with White Canadians and First Nation tribes, though.

I didn’t feel anywhere near this free when I graduated with Degree #1 in April 1991. The immediate need of reporting to my $5.20 per hour job at Western Psych, three weeks of starvation, and the miracle that Dr. Jack Daniel performed meant that I was pensive and then relieved by May 26. I knew more twists and turns awaited me.

I want to visit again, this time with my son, and hopefully before the Fall Semester begins. I want him to see Caribana there, to breathe freer air, and to get away from the Lower 48, if only for a few days. But that’s not all. I want him to go overseas, to visit South Africa, and Nigeria, and Tanzania, and Ghana, and Mali, to see himself in everyone around him.

As for the Raptors, congrats on drudging your way to the Finals! Your organization is finally free to play for an NBA title. With Kawhi Leonard, I wouldn’t bet against you. But I’m not exactly rooting for you, either. Know that win or lose, I love your city, and the questions about freedom that it generates for me.

ICE is America’s Gestapo, the White House the Waffen SS

18 Monday Jun 2018

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Movies, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Two pictures: ICE raid to arrest foreign nationals. February 6, 2017, (Charles Reed/ICE; http://amsterdamnews.com); Gestapo in midst of a raid, circa 1939-40. (http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com). Both in public domain.

I may have developed my sense of thinking on the issue of inclusion and migration from the ostracism I experienced via the cool class of Black classmates from Mount Vernon High School. Maybe. Maybe not. But, it was on this date 31 years ago that the Class of 1987 graduated. And, within minutes of us tossing our mortar-board caps in the air, people who were the “cool ones” in the graduating class began ignoring my greetings and staring through me like I was invisible whenever and wherever I saw them. A silent treatment that I went through for two summers with this group.

This is not unlike the way the media and this 45 presidency deals with most marginalized Americans and the daily indignities and atrocities from which they suffer. Especially those who migrate without papers and those would-be-migrants and asylum-seekers. The amping up of a policy that separates parents from children at the US-Mexico border is nothing short of kidnapping and taking hostages. However, the policy isn’t entirely new, and the media coverage of it until a week and a half ago was scant. President 45 and his minions had truly believed that they could keep something like this under wraps, because undocumented migrants and asylum-seekers have no representatives, no voice, and no support among many Americans.

The cries of outrage across this country have proven them partly wrong. Still, the “cooler” — really, crueler — class of Americans, White, White privilege, White patriarchy, Whiteness-is-always-right-thinking Americans (which unfortunately also includes Americans of color) remain all for body snatching. They have either been silent or have made some lame-ass excuses for fuckery worthy only of superficially-cool high school graduates.

I’m reminded of the first time I saw America’s cruelty in kidnapping kids and tearing apart families. For me, it started with Roots in 1977. I watched through Kunta Kinte’s  capture and Middle Passage across the Atlantic, his arrival in colonial Virginia, and later, the selling off of his daughter Kizzy to a slave owner who raped and impregnated her with Chicken George. Kizzy (played by Leslie Uggams) never saw her father alive again (she’s somehow able to visit her father’s grave, though), and her mother Bell is sold off to some Deep South plantation.

Leslie Uggams as Kizzy Kente in Roots (screen shot), 1977. (http://roots.wikia.com).

At seven, I cried at least three times watching this. At ten, when I saw all of this a second time, I cried and got angry. Especially at Sandy Duncan’s character, Missy Anne. Because Kizzy had the audacity to have a boyfriend and attempted to help him escape, Missy Anne shunned Kizzy and put up no protest as her father sold off her childhood playmate. And I learned that this is how nice people do people like me, especially the times when we need their help the most.

Later, I learned about the Fugitive Slave Laws. I learned how Congress, starting in 1793, passed a series of laws making it possible for every White American to act as a secret police. Whites were on the lookout for runaway African slaves in places as far-flung as Charleston, South Carolina, Bangor, Maine, Buffalo, New York, and, by the 1850s, Arizona Territory and California. The assumption of African enslavement was so pervasive that thousands of free and freed Blacks could end up being sold and re-sold into slavery, merely because some random White person wanted to make an extra $10 in the 1830s (12 Years a Slave comes to mind here).

Later, I’d learn about the Trail of Tears, Indian Removal, and the long, bitter march of indigenous peoples onto reservations between the late-1820s and 1890. A population of perhaps three million Native Americans reduced to 250,000 by the time of the 1900 Census. All federal policies as the US Army executed them. All so that mining interests could get to gold and coal, all so that railroads could be built. In the process of assimilating “the savages,” the federal government also snatched thousands of Native American children from their tribes and families and put them in boarding schools. With White families all too willing to teach them to forget about their long and proud histories, languages, and peoples.

But before learning all this, I also learned through my mom’s years on welfare just how easy it could be for a government and willing neighbors to have children and parents separated. More than once, a social worker swung by in the years between 1983 and 1990 to inspect my younger siblings, to make sure there wasn’t a man in the house, to ensure that my family’s deep poverty was real. More than once, a neighbor would threaten to call Social Services on my mom (and at least once, on me when I was a teenager) because my four younger sibling kept up too much noise. The policies that now comprise what some experts call “Jane Crow,” of separating allegedly neglectful and abusing parents (mostly Black women) in the name of protecting children, were very much alive and well during my teenage and early adulthood years. Because of course, poverty in America to the point of needing a few dollars and some Food Stamps is illegal.

Signs and protesters at “Families Belong Together March,” Los Angeles, June 14, 2018. (Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images).

With all this history of breaking up families to control African slaves, free Blacks, Native Americans, and poor people, why would the sudden ramping up of separating children from their parents at the US-Mexico border surprise anyone? It doesn’t surprise me. ICE has been brazen in their modern-day execution of its Fugitive-Slave-Act-esque charge to “round up all the illegals.” The White House has 45 and an army of minions who spend every waking moment of every day figuring out ways to quash dissent and foment support for policies that would make the US a Whites-only country.

But for all this to work, there have to be millions of Americans willing to help them. And there are. Some out of pure ignorance, some out of willful ignorance and denial, and some because they are racist sociopaths. All, though, are fully steeped in the idea that America would be better off if Whites remain the majority, if White men and White women sire most of America’s kids, and if all the Black and Brown people submit to their rule and oppression with bright smiles.

People, America isn’t becoming a fascist state. For so many of us, America has always hung in the balance between freedom and fascism. Fascism for Americans of color, and freedom for good, Christian-as-racism White folks. This. Is. America.

68 Days in 1968

28 Wednesday Mar 2018

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Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivering his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, Mason Temple, Memphis, TN, April 3, 1968. (http://youtube.com).

Over the next week or two, America will talk incessantly about the fiftieth anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in Memphis, Tennessee. Many Americans will memorialize MLK this April 4th, one day from the actual day of the week James Earl Ray’s rifle shot took the great one’s life at a two-star motel. This was a moment that shook the nation. It certainly was a moment that blew up in the minds of nearly every Black American. There were more than 100 riots — actual riots, and not the random vandalism the media’s all too quick to call a riot — in cities across the country. It changed the nation enough to where, at least for a few years, African Americans once denied educational and employment opportunities could suddenly find themselves at elite White universities, with major corporations, and with big private foundations, and often, for the first time.

But as much as I want to memorialize Dr. King, his life and his death, I do not want to resurrect him as a zombie-like poster child for ridding the US of racism. Especially when I know all too well that it’ll likely take the The Rapture, and not a rally, to make this impossibility a reality. I’ve long since tired of King as a marble statue of unattainable goodness and perfection for Whites and conservatives of color who use him as a cudgel against any Blacks who haven’t materially progressed or who have exposed the nation as racist. I’m also tired of progressives who call out racism as only hate, and King’s life and death as an attempt to fight it, when King was speaking truth to power, and organizing poor people to siphon that power. That’s what King died over, ultimately.

President Lyndon B. Johnson’s speech on Vietnam and not running for reelection, White House, March 31, 1968. (http://gbpnews.com).

Even more than King, though, is the reality that America has a string of fiftieth anniversary milestones to contemplate. In a sixty-eight day period in 1968, the true nature of American power dashed the delusion of an easy path to ending systemic racism and gross economic inequalities in which millions of naive Americans had once believed. Between LBJ’s refusal to run again on March 31st, MLK’s execution on April 4th, and RFK’s assassination on June 5th, any traditional Democrat, White liberal, or even someone with some sense of hope in America’s future must’ve been devastated. If I’d been at least ten years old in 1968, I would’ve been, too.

Sadly, President Lyndon Johnson tried to fight a War on Poverty and build the Great Society while also escalating a war over communism in Vietnam and in the rest of Southeast Asia. He bled the nation’s wealth and its poorer class of men dry in Vietnam, and starved his modestly radical domestic programs in the process. While so much of Johnson’s legacy remains, none of it remains strong. Every administration since Johnson announced, “Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President” has weakened his attempts at a comprehensive welfare state. Including Social Security, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, and of course, aid to single parents with younger children.

The front-runner for the Democratic nomination in the weeks after President Johnson’s “no mas” announcement was Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-NY). His victory in winning the California primary on June 5 had mostly sealed that deal. He barely had more than a few minutes to enjoy it, though. After his victory speech that night, Sirhan Sirhan killed RFK, and with it, the center-very-very-very-slightly-left Democratic coalition of the 1960s. Johnson, of course, died in 1973. No president has come close to being transformative since.

A facsimile of the JFK, MLK & RFK painting that used to hang over many a Black home’s mantle, August 27, 2013. (http://robertktanenbaumbooks.com).

I was born in 1969, so I didn’t get the chance to experience living through these horrible events. But I did learn about them early on. Seeing paintings of MLK, JFK and RFK (or of MLK, JFK, and LBJ) in the living rooms of my mother’s friends. Through John Lennon’s music and CBS’s All in the Family. That sense of lingering hopefulness in changing the world that I did see at the end of America’s Vietnam era. In some ways, I’m as much a “child of the 60s” as anyone who was ten or fifteen years old at the time of RFK’s death.

Yet I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, a time in which most White liberals and Democrats decided to forget about the overall message of change and social justice that LBJ, RFK, and MLK represented. The youthfulness and motivation that was JFK in the early 60s. The sense that by breaking down barriers and encouraging the end of those practices that leave many Americans behind, our nation would retain its strength as a beacon of democracy, freedom and equality. Of course there was a great tension there. And in that tension, America returned to its center-right script, symbolically using a marble and granite King while chipping away at welfare state protections and regulations, and promoting virulent racism.

Those 68 days in 1968 proved more than anything else that while Americans can envision a multitude of Americas, there was and remains only one America. The one in which money, power, racism, misogyny, and homophobia rule the day. Americans can fight for a better nation, and Americans should, if only to blunt the full fury of America’s ills. But make no mistake. The America that assassinated MLK, RFK, and JFK, and put LBJ in an early grave. That’s the same America that elected 45 and allows police to shoot unarmed Black and Brown people like rabid dogs. This. Is. America.

Is “Never” the Best Time for a Critique?

03 Saturday Mar 2018

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

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Rev. Billy Graham, 2003. (David Hume/Getty Images). Cropped slightly; qualifies as fair use due to cropping and subject matter.

I’ve been watching the variety of responses to the death of the late great Billy Graham over the past seven or ten days. Most people have been in mourning, which was something to expect. Many, like UPenn religious studies professor Anthea Butler, have reminded the world of the White nationalist, segregationist, and sexist views Graham either represented or excused during his six-decade-long run on the national stage.

And like mechanical clockwork, those who have Victorian and transactional notions of Christianity have defended, deflected, and denied on Graham’s behalf. It’s led to this series of questions for me. When can we critique the legacy of a famous person? While they’re alive? “No siree! That would be disrespectful.” If they claim to be serving God, they’ll add, “That would be blasphemous!” If I were to ask, When they die?, they’ll respond, “Now’s not the time — can’t you see their family’s in morning? The Bible says, ‘Judge not, lest thou be judged’.”

Translation: apparently, we’re never supposed to question what some famous person has done. Especially if they have the word “reverend” or “pastor” as part of their official title. It’s a thought process that imbues power to religious leaders, so much so that we might as well make them god-like, since our job is merely to obey and stay quiet.

But as I’ve learned over the past three-and-a-half decades, religious leaders are fallible. They aren’t sacrosanct. And while seminaries or other religious institutions have ordained them, that doesn’t mean that every vision they’ve ever had came straight from God. Meaning that we can question. Meaning that we can critique. Meaning that we can provide evidence that humanizes whom others would consider a pedestal perfect being. For those whom aren’t Christian, it certainly means they can judge Graham, too.

To err is human, no? Which means we shouldn’t have any sacred cows. Graham might’ve saved millions of souls for eternal life. But that shouldn’t automatically exempt him from a critique of his unwillingness to help those same souls while they were still here on Earth.