Black Lives Matter and My Dreamy Heaven

01 Friday Jan 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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#BlackLivesMatter, Black Lives Matter, Dreams, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, God, Heaven, Institutional Racism, Jordan Davis, Life and Death, Michael Brown, Nature, Photons, Police Brutality, Quantum Energy, Quantum Mechanics, Racism, Renisha McBride, Revelation, Sandra Bland, Self-Reflection, Structural Racism, Tamir Rice, The Universe, Trayvon Martin, Walter Scott, White Vigilantism

A shower of photons, December 31, 2015. (http://www.theallium.com).

It was a strange place, this place of peace and comfort. To realize that at the quantum level, we each were all bundles of energy, that our bodies were but vessels that carried our real selves in our earthly years. That heaven was much, much more. Pearly gates and a white-bearded God? Nonsense! Try singularities and endless connections between the past, present, and future, between multiple universes and realities! We existed everywhere and in every time. There was no pain and no need, because we were everything and everything was in us and with us.

A high-resolution picture of the Pillars of Creation, in the Eagle Nebula, 7,000-light-years from Earth, via the Hubble Telescope, circa 1995, retouched January 5, 2014. (Armbrust via Wikipedia via NASA). In public domain.

In this space and place, I met them. The ones that once left us behind. The entities who once lived in the earthly realm, whose bodies were decimated, whose minds had been wounded. It was here that I met Trayvon Martin, Renisha McBride, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Kindra Chapman, Samuel DuBose, Joyce Curnell, Ralkina Jones, Raynette Turner, Christian Taylor, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Jordan Davis, John Crawford, and Jonathan Ferrell.

There were so many more bundles of light and energy in my presence that I felt myself cry. Not real tears, because while I could see and hear everything, I didn’t have any eyes or ears. I wanted to hug them all, but didn’t have any arms. I wanted to embrace them, but didn’t have any lips.

But there was one thing I could do. I merged my little bundle of energy with theirs. It was a joining more real and miraculous than anything I ever felt when tethered to Earth. I felt so alive, so free, so one with the universe. It was as if my material life was a nightmare and a dream, and this heaven the one true real.

In an instant, every feeling and thought I had merged with the feelings and thoughts of hundreds, if not thousands of other lights. And in that instant, the one question I had they asked and answered before I knew what my question was.

Don’t feel for dead. We are alive and well, and will be always so. Feel for the living. For theirs is a world of struggle and suffering.

They do not know who they really are. They do not know that their bodies are but machines, and their lives are not real.

In that singular moment, I understood. How could anyone in the living years truly appreciate the privilege of a corporeal existence when that is but only one form of life? If we as humanity could not know ourselves, how could we protect ourselves from ourselves?

I did get a glimpse, just a brief one, of another answer.

“To make our lives matter, fight for a better world. It doesn’t matter if you lose, but it does matter if you give up.”

As soon as that thought materialized, I woke up, sad to find myself in my middle-aged body, reconnected to my one quadrillion cells and Earth’s gravity and pressure.

————————————————————

A collage of Black and Brown people killed by police and White vigilantes, February 2015. (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/ via Gawker.com).

If I could, I’d want to meet all of the recent victims of police brutality and murder and White vigilantism and have a conversation. I would ask each of them only one question. Something like, “What did you want to get out of life?” or “What did you want your life to mean?” Because ultimately, that’s the most important question any of us can ask ourselves while we are alive in this physical world.

The structures that allow law enforcement agencies to assume those with Black and Brown bodies are criminals and undeserving of life pass those assumptions on to their individual police officers. The fourth estate does at least as good a job of passing these assumptions on to millions of ordinary civilians. The result is that thousands of us never got the chance to answer this most important question in our living years. If we cannot agree that this is a shame and a pitiful way to live, than we truly live in a nation in which Black and Brown lives (not to mention, people in poverty and others of different religions and ethnicities) don’t matter. For that — if for no other reason — is why we need Black Lives Matter, and we need Black Lives Matter to matter more, in the here-and-now linear world right now, in 2016.

The Fountain of Middle Age

27 Sunday Dec 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Sports, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Aging, Back To School (1986), Beauty, Demographics, Family, Fountain of Middle Age, Fountains, Friends, Health, Philadelphia, Rodney Dangerfield, Self-Reflection, Youth

Alexander Stirling Calder’s “Swann Memorial Fountain,” Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA, August 18, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

By most measures, today marks my full transition from relative youth to middle age. Although, when I really think about it, didn’t I really hit middle age in December ’07, when I turned thirty-eight? The average life expectancy of an American male is about seventy-seven, right? And for Black males, it’s barely sixty-five. Given my family history, though, I won’t hit middle age for another two years. My maternal grandfather turned ninety-six three months ago, and my paternal grandfather lived until he was ninety-six. Even my father’s still moving along at seventy-five, despite his battle with alcoholism between the ages of twenty and fifty-eight.

I do feel things in my body and mind that until a few years ago were merely minor aches and pains. My right hip is misaligned with my left hip, likely from years of walking at warp speed, lots of basketball, and six years of my running regime. My L-5 vertebrae is a bit compressed, due to years of activity, including many years hunched over a keyboard trying to make myself into a writer, author and educator. My right knee has been a bother since I was twenty-four, but the issue has gotten worse in the past two years (maybe time for some HGH or microfracture surgery?). I now have white-coat syndrome (because most doctors and nurses get on my last nerve), and I’m mildly anemic. No, folks, forty-six isn’t the new thirty-six, even if I can still run forty yards in under five seconds, pop a three over my son’s outstretched hand or leg press 360 pounds.

Me via Photo Booth, December 17, 2015. (Donald Earl Collins).

But I still have good health and a mostly healthy body and mind. Since I turned twenty-seven, my weight has never been higher than 241 pounds (including clothes, wallet, phone, and keys) or lower than 212 (I weight 229 now). I can still memorize when inspired to do so, remember virtually anything important from my life from the age of four to the present, and could still probably win at Jeopardy if I ever got the call.

What’s more impressive, though, is whom remains in my life now that I’m no longer “young” anymore. My friends live all over the map, from the DC area to Pittsburgh to the Bay Area and New York, from Atlanta to Athens and from Seattle to Shanghai. I’ve made peace (mostly) with my family and my past, even if they aren’t always at peace with me. There’s my wife and son, of course, who are mostly likely the reason I’m still “young” relative to my age. Though I remain a Christian, I do not have the blind faith or evangelical -isms of my youth, and I’m at peace with that as well. I’m probably further to the left culturally and politically than I was at sixteen, twenty-six, or thirty-six. Because I’ve learned, sadly, that so much of what I was taught or fed growing up was either incorrect or a complete lie. But even with that sad disillusionment, I’ve come to accept the possibility of change for myself and the Sisyphean task that this nation and world always has been.

Me at 45 and 364.25 days, Pittsburgh, PA, December 26, 2015. (Donald Earl Collins).

Yet even the idea of middle age has changed in the minds of capitalists as the Baby Boomer generation has begun retirement and all of them have received their first AARP cards. Before 2000, the ad folks and entertainment folks had split up adults into the age demographics of 18-34, 35-44, 45-64, and 65 and up. Now, it’s 18-24, 25-54, and 55 and up. This privileges Baby Boomers (as usual) and props up Millennials (folks who used to be Gen Y). My middle age is not the same as Baby Boomers’ middle age. Even in demographic representations, money-grubbing capitalists give us Gen Xers little respect.

Rodney Dangerfield quipped this funny line in Back to School (1986):

Coach Turnbull: What’s a guy your age doing here with these kids?
Thornton (played by Dangerfield): I’m lookin’ for the fountain of middle age.

Maybe when I’m sixty-five (like Rodney Dangerfield was in this film), I’ll be looking for the Fountain of Middle Age, too. But my choice will be to stand in it for the next thirty or forty years!

Hollywood and the Sounds of Empire

21 Monday Dec 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Politics, Pop Culture, race

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Acting, British Accent, British English, Commonwealth English, Cultural Imperialism, Da Vinci's Demons (2013-15), East vs. West, Historical Lies, Hollywood, Imperialism, Leonardo da Vinci, Linguistic Imperialism, Paris Climate Summit, Tom Riley, TV Shows, World History

Da Vinci’s Demons Season 3 Poster, October 2015. (Starz via http://www.ew.com/). Fair use due to direct connection with subject matter and non-commercial use.

I finished catching up on the Starz series Da Vinci’s Demons over the weekend, which included me watching the final episode via Xfinity On Demand last night. I will not provide any spoilers. But, I am at a loss regarding the one constant with most period pieces or fantasy TV series and movies. I simply do not understand the need for a British accent in everything that isn’t American in Hollywood or its near-equivalent. If my understanding of history is correct, Romans didn’t speak in British English with English colloquialisms like “Needs must” or “bollocks.” Alexander the Great was never “knackered” or “gobsmacked.” And Leonardo da Vinci as played by Tom Riley saying “codswallop” or “fortnight” or any of a hundred British sayings with a nasally, pretentious accent is about as accurate as firing a shotgun at a barn’s broadside from 1,000 meters away.

Brit Slang Explained: Translation Chart for a British Slang Bus Blind T-shirt Design, December 21, 2015. (https://anglotees.com.

In general, I love hearing and reading the differences in British and other forms of English when not spoken by Americans. With so many TV series and movies now done with international casts, though, it has turned into a form of cultural imperialism. Especially since I know that until two centuries ago, the average Brit sounded more like the average Canadian or American than like James Bond while attending Oxford. The change in accent was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain’s rise to superpower empire status during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Anyone who wanted to become part of the British gentry class — including newly monied industrialists and merchants — hired speech coaches to train them to speak English in the manner that we hear from most British English speakers in 2015.

Even with the rise of the US as the world’s leading superpower and its gigantic cultural and economic footprint, British English still is the language and sound of empire. At least where Hollywood is concerned. Because British English sounds imperial, high-class, important, urgent, and intelligent, according to the ears of many an English speaker, whether in the UK, the US, or elsewhere in the world. It doesn’t matter if the modern version of f–k didn’t exist until the eighteenth century. It doesn’t matter if some shows like Game of Thrones or movies like Lord of the Rings are complete fantasy and should have no adherence to any particular language or sound. British English is all that and a bag of chips, the cat’s meow, is dope for the English-speaking world.

For me, though, all I’m hearing with shows like Da Vinci’s Demons, Rome, Spartacus and The Borgias (the Showtime version), and with movies like 300 and Gladiator is a narrative framed by imperialism and the triumph of the West. It’s not just the British English accent and the imperialism it represents. It’s also how producers, directors, and actors consistently frame period pieces in the West vs. East, civilization vs. savagery narrative. Be them Ottoman Turks, Germanic barbarians or Persian emperors, they’re all simplistic antagonists for cinematic fodder that reinforces the West as good, godly and victorious. Or, rather, to quote Pittsburgh Steelers’ head coach Mike Tomlin, those without British accents are “the dead Indians” in these modern-day “cowboy” movies.

“Linguistic Imperialism” – what the world might look like if borders were based upon the 10 major languages, May 10, 2014. (The Economist via http://pinterest.com ).

And like Tomlin, in the case of screen entertainment, I’m kind of tired of the same theme running over and over again. Not only is depicting the Ottoman Empire or Achaemenid Persia as evil heathens when compared with Italy in the 1480s or Greece in 480 BCE a historical lie. It also reinforces the idea that when the West wields its power and imperialism, the world is always a better place. If the climate summit in Paris demonstrated anything, it showed how much damage the West has done to the world.

A century or two from now — assuming our globalized world doesn’t fall apart due to wars and climate change — entertainment will likely be highlighted with accents unfamiliar to today’s Western ears. Even if one of entertainment’s primary languages remains English, it will likely have another accent. Ace!

Fisher v. University of Texas: Supreme Court Takes Up Affirmative Action (Again!)

09 Wednesday Dec 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Affirmative Action, Bakke v. University of California at Davis (1978), Delusions of Grandeur, Fisher v. University of Texas (2015; 2012), Gratz v. Bollinger (2003), Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), Justice Antonin Scalia, Justice Clarence Thomas, Narcissism, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Racism, Social Darwinism, Stereotype Threat, Supreme Court, Supreme Court decisions

Abigail Fisher, second from right, listens as her lawyer Bert Rein, center, speaks with reporters, Supreme Court, Washington, DC, December 9, 2015. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP; http://msnbc.com).

I wrote this a bit more than three years ago, when the Supreme Court first heard the case of one Abigail Fisher against the University of Texas admissions policy in October 2012:

Abigail Fisher has joined Allan Bakke, Jennifer Gratz/Patrick Hamacher and Barbara Grutter as part of a list of Whites who have used race as an excuse because they faced a road block for maybe the only time in their lives. The idea that we should have race-neutral college and graduate school admissions policies in a country that’s far from race-neutral shows an enormous sense of unacknowledged entitlement and privilege.

Here’s why. Using myself as an example, I graduated Mount Vernon HS (NY) in 1987, 14th out of 545 students (the top 3% of my class), with a 3.83 GPA on a 4.0 scale, with an 1120 SAT (a 1220 on today’s SAT). I didn’t get into Yale, but was accepted at Columbia and the University of Pittsburgh. Money was an issue, as I ended up going to Pitt because they offered me an academic scholarship, while Columbia offered a private investigator into my father’s finances. Still, my grades would’ve easily knocked Fisher out of contention at UT-Austin, as well as Gratz and Hamacher.

I also think about the two decades I’ve spent teaching high school, college and graduate students. The most consistently obstinate students I’ve taught have been White students who thought they knew more than me. They didn’t get that context always matters when interpreting history, especially something like affirmative action. For those students, for Fisher, et al., and for the Supreme Court, entitlement matters more than context. Facts, circumstances be damned.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

I was wrong about one thing in my earlier post. I based my comparison of my SAT score from 1986 on revisions to the standardized test in the 1990s, not in the 2000s, when they added a third section. Based on that, my educated guess for a score in that period would’ve been between a 1850 and 2000 (between the 60th and 70th percentile).

Today, the Supreme Court heard from Fisher’s and the University of Texas’ lawyers — again, about the efficacy of using race as part of a larger formula for achieving demographic diversity in the state higher education system. During today’s oral arguments, the ever-brilliantly racist Justice Antonin Scalia pressed the University of Texas on why they needed to account for race (and apparently, for class as well) in their admissions plan at all, considering the academic issues many Black student face.

Scalia said, “it does not benefit African-Americans to — to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a less — a slower-track school where they do well.” He added that “most of the black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas. They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they’re — that they’re being pushed ahead in — in classes that are too — too fast for them.”

It is fairly obvious that Scalia and at least three other justices (including his intellectual puppet Justice Clarence Thomas) would do away with affirmative action sooner than Scalia and Thomas could suck down two one-gallon tubs of rocky road ice cream. But the veneer of racism, the assumption that Blacks are “too slow” for elite public universities, the Social Darwinist interpretation of higher education? Or assuming that Blacks who go to lesser known institutions, particularly HBCUs are getting a lesser and slower education as a result? Scalia doesn’t know his history, and doesn’t care to know the history of Blacks in higher education at all.

Given the direction the Supreme Court is leaning, it may take a burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement of the scope of the Civil Rights Movement of fifty years ago to reverse this court’s attempt at a twenty-first century version of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Let’s not forget, though. There are millions of Scalias and Thomases out there who firmly believe that African Americans — even those with excellent grades, high test scores, and lots of passion and intellectual drive — deserve nothing more than a jail cell, a janitor job, or a bullet to the brain.

But what makes their perspective worse is that Scalia, et. al, are cutting off their collective noses to spite the country’s face. It won’t be just high-achieving African American students losing out if the court curtails or renders race-based admissions policies unconstitutional. A decision like that will hurt millions of White students as well. Not just because segregated higher education could eliminate a diversity of ideas and thinking and will poison the wealth of knowledge and efforts toward a better American society through the benefits of the college experience. It will also mean that Whites like Abigail Fisher will no longer have an easy and vulnerable scapegoat for their educational failures. The Abigail Fishers will be experiencing their own form of stereotype threat. Oh, how will they hold on to their narcissism, their intellectual delusions of grandeur then?

My One Drunk Moment, An Un-Sober Mind

21 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Antisocial Behavior, Authentic Blackness, Black Masculinity, Blackness, Busch Beer, Coping Strategies, Crush #2, Disidentification Hypothesis, Drunk, Internalized Racism, Invisibility, Jealousy, Lothrop Hall, Misogyny, MVHS, Phyllis, Pitt, Self-Discovery, Self-Loathing, Self-Reflection, Sexism, Underage Drinking

16-ounce “Pounder” can of Busch Beer, November 19, 2012. (http://price2watch.com)

As the son of an alcoholic father (the latter who’s been on the wagon for more than seventeen years now), I have almost always maintained control over my own alcohol intake. I’m always the designated driver, and rarely will I have three beers in one year, much less in one evening. My favorite drink is cranapple juice mixed with Disaronno, followed by Angry Orchard hard apple cider.

I have also always believed that I should be the same person, sober, buzzed, drunk and otherwise. If I’m generally a feminist on my best behavior in the classroom or at work, then I should be the same way at a dive bar on my second screwdriver. My low tolerance for bullshit — including and especially my own — should always be on display.

Both of these strands of how I’ve lived my life met a weekend of contradictions on this day/date twenty-eight years ago. In the wake of my Phyllis (Crush#2) crash-and-burn obsession and subsequent depression, I began hanging out with dorm mates at Lothrop Hall who were already dropping out of college socially by Week 11 of the Fall ’87 semester. That was a mistake of epic proportions.

Lothrop Hall (we lived on the fourth floor in 1987-88), University of Pittsburgh, June 8, 2008. (TheZachMorrisExperience via Wikipedia). Released to the public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

My downward spiral was made worse a week earlier with a burglary on a Monday night at the end of October. While I took a bathroom break at the computer lab, someone stole my Calculus textbook. I felt violated, especially since it happened at work. It made me more distrustful of the people I worked with and of Pitt students in general. And after Phyllis’ wonderful response, I all but stopped going to class. I missed most of my classes the month of November, only showing up for exams or if my mood had let up long enough to allow me to function like normal. The weekend before Thanksgiving, I allowed my dorm mates to cheer me up by getting a couple of cases of Busch Beer. These were the Pounder type, sixteen-ounce cans. After getting Mike to get us the cases, we went back to Aaron’s room and started drinking. I downed four cans in fifteen minutes, and was drunk within a half hour. I started throwing around the word “bitch.” Anytime anyone mentioned Phyllis’ name — or any woman’s name for that matter — one of us said the B-word and we’d guzzle down some beer. I was drunk, but not so drunk I didn’t know what was going on around me. That night, my geeky acquaintances started calling me “Don” and “Don Ho,” since I was the life of that illegal party. I would’ve been better off smoking some cheap herb with Todd and Ollie. I recovered from my bender in time to go home for Thanksgiving, but I was in a fog for the rest of the semester.

This was how the end of my 2.63 first semester at Pitt unfolded. But that was hardly the only thing that came out of last weeks of ’87. For a long time, I was angry with myself. About Phyllis. About allowing Phyllis, my dorm mates — anyone, really — affect my emotions, my thinking, and actions over any significant period of time. So for about three months, I put everyone in my life into two categories. Men were “assholes, women were “bitches,” and I was done with humanity. And all by my eighteenth birthday.

I wasn’t just being sexist. I was being downright antisocial. I had internalized issues, about where I fit in this new world of college. I would never be man enough, Black enough, “White” enough, smart enough, athletic enough, or cool enough. At least that’s what I thought in late-November ’87.

Antisocial bumper sticker, November 21, 2015. (http://www.quotationof.com/).

I look back at that time and realize how stupid I was twenty-eight years ago. To think that I could go out in the world, attend a four-year institution, and not have my assumptions about the world, about people, and about myself challenged. That’s like going overseas to visit some ruins, but never meeting the people who live there (Or, in this case, like rich White Americans doing Sandals and other brown-skinned service-based vacations).

Phyllis and my dorm mates at Lothrop Hall weren’t even the first step of that process. They were the last step of a process of controlling and protecting myself from my years of living in the shadows in Mount Vernon, New York. The coping strategies I had honed for five years to survive 616 and Humanities and MVHS had barely worked. By the end of my first semester, they were completely useless. I came to realize that a strategy to seal myself up from all criticism and praise, to keep humanity out of my life, was doomed to fail. There was no way to keep the world from forming a first impression of me, no matter how many layers of invisibility I attempted to wear. But there was a way to reshape how I saw myself and the world.

American Racism: “Same As It Ever Was”

14 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, music, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race

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"Once In A Lifetime" (1983), Beatings, Ben Fields, Booker T. Washington, Central Park, Death, Ida B. Wells, Institutional Racism, James Blake, James Frascatore, Morning Oregon, NYPD, Police Brutality, Racial Harassment, Racial Incidents, Racism, Spring Valley High School, Talking Heads, University of Missouri, White Vigilantism, Yale University

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, age 32, photographed by Mary Garrity, c. 1893, cropped and restored, September 8, 2013. (Adam Cuerden via Wikipedia). In public domain.

A young African American woman refuses to leave her seat. Authority figures arrive to demand that she leaves. She refuses again. One authority charged with “upholding the law” then picks the young woman up and drags her from her seat. But this isn’t Spring Valley High School near Columbia, South Carolina. Nor is it 2015. This incident involved the anti-lynching journalist Ida B. Wells, who sat in a first-class ladies car on the segregated Memphis and Charleston Railroad train rolling through Tennessee. It occurred on May 4, 1884. Except it was three White men, who dragged and threw the then not-quite-twenty-two year-old off the train for refusing to give up a seat she paid for.

Just like with the Black teenager whom Ben Fields assaulted in the name of the law, I’m sure one of the things Wells might have thought was, “This is 1884. Why is this still happening?” The circumstances that led to both incidents were obviously different, but the racism that led to these violent responses was not.

With all that has occurred to break the illusion that Americans live in a twenty-first-century, post-racial utopia, Americans still bring up the times in which we live whenever racism rears its ugly head. Whether it’s the NYPD tackling ex-tennis star James Blake in September, the Black teenager at Spring Valley HS in October, or the responses to Black students at the University of Missouri or Yale in the past week, the need for temporal incredulousness is often present in the midst of these racist incidents. “You would think at some point they would get the memo that this isn’t okay, but it seems that there’s no stopping it,” Blake said after the incident with Officer James Frascatore.

At what point or time? As if saying “Why is this happening in 2015?” has anything to do with bringing systemic, institutional, individual, and internalized racism to an end. If there had been truth and reconciliation commissions at the end of Jim Crow in the South in the 1960s and 1970s, maybe then Americans can quote the year as evidence of irrational racial dissonance. If the federal government had provided reparations after Emancipation in 1865 or after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, perhaps then what year this is would matter. Racism and racists have never cared about the year or the supposedly multicultural, progressive times in which Americans lived.

Harris & Ewing photo of Booker T. Washington, circa 1905-1915, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, January 18, 2010. (Cantheasswonder via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Before his death in 1915, Tuskegee Institute founder Booker T. Washington experienced something all too many Americans of color face year after year. Washington delivered two speeches at churches in Manhattan on Sunday, March 19, 1911. That same evening, Washington went to an apartment building on West 63rd Street near Central Park, allegedly to meet up with a friend of his accountant on business. After attempting to find this mystery person at the building twice, Henry Ulrich, a 40-year-old White male, confronted Washington and punched him in the head. A White bystander handed Ulrich a walking stick and together, the two men chased Washington toward Central Park, hitting him with the stick on his head and face at least a dozen times. It wasn’t until Washington fell into the arms of NYPD Officer Chester Hagan, at a southwest entrance to Central Park, that the attack came to an end. After his initial arrest, Washington produced his identification papers. Only then was he released, allowed to press charges against Ulrich, and taken to a hospital to get 16 stitches and recover from his head bashing.

Morning Oregon headline on Booker T. Washington trial, November 7, 1911.

Despite having the support of Andrew Carnegie, former New York City mayor Seth Low and President William Taft, Washington’s assault charge was destined to fail. The New York and national press — yellow journalism at its best in 1911 — tried Washington on their front pages from March 20 on. Laura Alverez did a wonderful job in misrepresenting herself as “Mrs. Ulrich” in defense of her paramour at the trial. Alverez accused Washington of saying, “Hello, Sweetheart” to her — a dog whistle back then for the ultimate taboo of interracial sex — when Washington was outside the apartment building. Two of the three judges voted on Monday, November 6, 1911, to acquit Ulrich of the assault charge, news the national press gleefully reported. Among them was the Morning Oregonian, which had “‘Beating Up’ Darky Brings No Punishment to Man” as part of its headline.

All this took its toll on an already sick 55-year-old Washington, a man already suffering from hypertension and high-blood pressure. The result was a physically and emotionally diminished Washington after 1911. Booker T. Washington died on November 16, 1915. The power Washington had exercised as an advisor to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Taft and as a racial accommodationist (some would say, an apologist) who befriended White philanthropists, it didn’t matter. His poor health may have been the symptom, but racism in all its forms was the ultimate cause.

It does not matter what year it is. Racists don’t care. It doesn’t matter if African Americans and White progressives hold die-ins in Ferguson, Cleveland and New York. Blacks and other people of color don’t have the same right to breathe without a racist’s say-so. It doesn’t matter if respectable Blacks wear nice suits and ties, attend Harvard, establish a university, or serve as President of the United States. Americans of color are all criminals and playthings in the eyes of racists, and the power structures for which they work have been set up to preserve racial inequality for centuries. And it doesn’t matter if liberals Black, White and Brown call for healing. Racists don’t want healing, and calling for it without acknowledging a flesh-eating, bacterial-infested wound like racism doesn’t do Americans any good. Booker T. Washington learned that lesson in 1911, and Ida B. Wells learned it in 1884. Millions of other Americans of color have learned that lesson all too well today.

This Is NOT Sparta!

11 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Sports

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Black Americans, Black Migration, Blind Patriotism, Civil Rights Movement, Civilians, Erasure, Freedom, History Lessons, Honoring, Hyper-Patriotism, Invisibility, Jim Crow, Meaning, Native Americans, Patriotism for Profit, Sacrifice, Service, Slavery, Veterans Day

“If you live in a free country, thank a veteran” poster slogan, November 10, 2015. (http://facebook.com).

Just like with Memorial Day and with Independence Day, I often find myself conflicted about Veterans Day. Not because I think individual members of the military deserve praise or scorn. As usual, the vast majority of Americans think too simplistically about their country, its people, its intentions and history, even its holidays. Too many of us go along to get along. It’s as if we expect the contradictions and tensions that make up our times and days like today to simply melt away in some high-pitched display of blind patriotism. I have not — and likely will never be — that American, pumped up with pride and affection, shouting slogans as gospel truth, thanking every member of the military for every single breath of American air that I breathe. And that is because the narrative for days like today has never worked for me.

In some respects, the blind march of Veterans Day is with Americans every single day. The media covers the military and individual military members as if all of them have spent weeks on the front lines, as if all of them are patriots above reproach. Almost all of us have known someone who’s served, and we know that service for most was never as simple as wrapping the American flag around themselves in defense of American freedoms halfway around the world (or at a base a few miles from home). In recent months, we’ve learned that much of the constant drumbeat of military-fueled patriotism the military itself has bought and paid for, at NFL and college football and baseball games. Reinforcing one of America’s main values — profit.

Army National Guardsmen about to run on field with American flags with the New England Patriots, Super Bowl XLIX, University of Phoenix Stadium, Glendale, AZ, February 1, 2015. (http://latimes.com; Getty Images).

Today is Veterans Day, created seventy-seven years ago in the aftermath of the Great War, the “War to End All Wars,” World War I. It was a terrible war, after all. Ten million soldiers and sailors on all sides died, twenty million found themselves ripped and torn apart, and eight million civilians died. But not for or in the US, where 120,000 soldiers and sailors died, a few hundred thousand were wounded, and few hundred civilians died. The US didn’t enter the war until April 1917, nearly three years into the raging Eurasian conflict. American weapons manufacturers and merchants profited greatly from the war even before the US declared war on Germany, selling arms and food to both sides.

War is never simple. Neither should be what we think of those who served or are serving. Veterans Day is about respecting those who have served or are serving. Like my youngest brother Eri, or my Uncle Felton, or my sister-in-law or my late uncle-in-laws. Thanking or respecting them, though, shouldn’t be tied directly to the idea that I “live in a free country.” I don’t believe that the US is a free country, not for me and for millions of others like me. Nor do I believe that the US military has played a role in preserving my individual freedoms and liberties historically. I am a Black man living in a society built in part on systemic racism, often maintained or reinforced by the US military. Except for some elements of the Union Army during the Civil War, the US military has played a very small role in making sure that I or anyone who looks like me — male, female or transgender — lives in a free country.

Not to mention, the US hasn’t been invaded in over 200 years (I don’t want to hear about Pancho Villa — that wasn’t an invasion). Since when does fighting North Koreans, the Viet Cong, or even Nazis equate to me and others and our “freedoms?” Seriously, every time someone says this, it’s as if you’re attempting to erase long civilian fights for civil rights, for the most basic of freedoms that the US purports to grant to every citizen. Folks who say that we should be grateful to the military for living in a free country completely make invisible Native Americans. The US military was what guaranteed their near annihilation, deculturalization and unyielding poverty, especially from 1865 on.

“This is madness!” with actor Peter Mensah, screen shot from 300 (2007), November 11, 2015. (http://youtube.com).

Yes, some of you will note that I can write my post without fear of retribution from the government. Then I will say in response, “How does serving overseas guarantee my rights?” It doesn’t. A lot went into putting me in a better position in my life. Black migration, the Civil Rights Movement (flaws and all), the sacrifices of Black and White civilian leadership (including their deaths). I am one generation removed from sharecropping and tenant farming in Georgia and Arkansas, one generation removed from the last years of the Jim Crow era. But somehow, the US military is responsible for me living “in a free country.” Sorry, but that’s a narrative I cannot get behind.

So, we should all thank individual veterans for their service. We should honor the dead and the broken among them. For whether they came to serve out of a deep sense of patriotism, because of the draft (prior to 1973), because there weren’t any jobs in their communities, or because they wanted a chance at today’s version of the GI bill, some of them have paid dearly in their service. But since we do not live in a military junta or in a totalitarian society, I dare say that I don’t have to go along with the narrative that without the military, I would be a slave. History contradicts every aspect of this false narrative.

This isn’t Sparta (Sparta wasn’t even Sparta). Nor should the US ever be Sparta.