Corporations, Dogs, and a Possible Civil Rights Future

02 Wednesday Jul 2014

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

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Bill Gates, Citizens United (2010), Citizenship Rights, Civil Rights, Civil Rights Act of 1964, Constitutional Amendment, Corporations, David Koch, Dogs, Hobby Lobby decision (2014), Ingrid Newkirk, Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Samuel Alito, Kamala Harris, Koch Brothers, Malala Yousafzai, Mark Cuban, Melissa Harris-Perry, Michael Bloomberg, Money and Politics, NBC Universal Comcast, Oligarchy, Paul Ryan, Personhood, PETA, Plutocracy, President Lyndon Baines Johnson, Supreme Court, Supreme Court decisions, Walton Family

Matt Wuerker, Corporate Money/Vote Here, January 2010. (Politico.com). Qualifies as fair use — low resolution, related to subject matter of this blog post.

It finally happened. After twenty-two attempts between the 117th and the 118th Congress, and a short ratification process, the US Constitution finally has a Twenty-Eight Amendment. For the first time, more than two million corporations with headquarters within America’s borders have citizenship rights, including the right to vote. Despite widespread opposition from Democrats and independent progressives, thirty-eight states ratified the amendment in record time, 72 days. The Twenty-Sixth Amendment — the one lowering the national voting age from 21 to 18 — had held the previous record of 100 days, as three-fourths of the states had ratified it in 1971.

President Michael Bloomberg signed the bill this morning in a well-attended Rose Garden ceremony. With such luminaries as Mark Cuban, Bill Gates and David Koch present, the President said, “This is a great victory of American democracy, ensuring its preservation for future generations.” House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), also present at the ceremony, said, “The American people finally have a democracy that represents us all, one that will stabilize our government and our economic way of life.”

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, City Hall, January 27, 2005. (http://themoderatevoice.com).

What President Bloomberg and Speaker Ryan didn’t say was that this was the most expensive constitutional amendment campaign in the nation’s history. The Walton family, the Koch Brothers and NBC Universal Comcast-Time-Warner alone spent almost $1 billion in saturating the Internet and airwaves with ads in support of the amendment between mid April and the end of June, according to the Toronto Star. Independent watchdog groups, including the United Nations Department of Political Affairs, put the total amount at $2.2 billion, with much of the money going directly to state legislatures and much-needed infrastructural projects.

“When governments can only operate at the behest of corporations, you no longer have a democracy, you have a plutocracy,” UN spokesperson Malala Yousafzai said at a press conference in New York this afternoon. “Only twenty percent of the US electorate participated in the ratification process,” Yousafzai said, corresponding roughly to the demographics of America’s rich and middle classes.

That this came on the same day as the 60th anniversary of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not lost on America’s public intelligentsia. “This is a shame that the America republic will have to live with for years to come — if there’s an American republic in the future,” Melissa Harris-Perry said in an interview on CBC Radio in Toronto.

This expansion of American democracy comes on the heels of a landmark US Supreme Court decision. Last week, in a 5-4 ruling, the majority decided PETA v. US in favor of the plaintiff, saying that for the first time, “dogs have a constitutional standing on par with persons.” Justice Samuel Alito wrote the court’s majority opinion, and Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a concurring opinion. What made the PETA decision truly historic was that Justice Thomas explained the court’s decision. “We have found, with the help of significant scientific evidence, that dogs are sentient beings, and thus, deserving of the same civil rights that we have all enjoyed in this country for decades. Although dogs today have not been granted the power of the ballot box, they, like my generation of black men and women, have come a long way in their fight for civil rights,” Justice Thomas said.

Co-founder and President of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals Ingrid Newkirk, and David Shankbone’s dog Little Man, New York City, November 1, 2007. (David Shankbone via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC BY-SA 3.0, GFDL.

The PETA decision overturned a lower court ruling, throwing out the case on the grounds that dogs aren’t human beings. PETA fought the lower court’s ruling based on the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (2014) decision, where the Supreme Court had ruled that a corporate, non-living entity had personhood status because it represented people’s interests and values. This earlier ruling provided an opportunity for PETA to bring in scientific evidence that could elevate the status of dogs as a living entity representing people’s interests and values.

“Dogs everywhere will celebrate this victory, along with their caregivers,” Ingrid Newkirk, founder and president of PETA said last week from her home outside Norfolk, Virginia. “It is our hope that these personhood rights will protect dogs from abuse and neglect for now and for the future, giving them the same rights as a living human being,” Newkirk added. It helped that the Leona Helmsley Charitable Trust covered the estimated $20 million in legal fees and scientific studies for the PETA claim.

Former US Solicitor General Kamala Harris, who had presented the government’s case to the Supreme Court last December, said after last week’s decision, “with this court making a dog a person, this court has made a mockery of American jurisprudence for all time. What about the rights of racial minorities to a fair trial, of women to reproductive choice, of ordinary Americans to a living wage?” Harris resigned on Friday, June 28, just hours after the PETA ruling. President Bloomberg declined comment on Harris’ resignation.

Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson expressed the feelings of many Americans in opposition when he said, “The Star-Spangled Banner should be rewritten. It should be, ‘O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave, with corporations’ roaming free, and dogs over descendants of slaves!'”

When In Crime, Blame a Young Black Male

25 Wednesday Jun 2014

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

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Abby Dean, Ashley Tood, Babysitter, Black Criminality, Burglary, Carjacking, Central Park 5, Charles Stuart, Cody Oaks, Ferndale WA, Kidnapping, Mugging, Murder, Racial Hoaxes, Racial Profiling, Racial Stereotypes, Racism, Rape, Susan Smith

Abby Dean screenshot, Ferndale, WA, June 23, 2014. (Fox6News, WITI, Milwaukee, WI).

Yesterday morning, I was stuck watching ABC’s Good Morning America segment “4-Year-Old Leads Police to Prime Suspect in Burglary Case,” with the lead, “Real Life Nancy Drew.” The Whatcom County police (Ferndale, WA) interviewed Abby Dean, a four-year-old girl who witnessed two burglars breaking into and robbing her home. The four-year-old’s babysitter had identified “two armed Black men” — including the next-door neighbor — as the perpetrators of this home invasion. But the brave little Abby Dean apparently went off script and bravely told the truth. “It wasn’t the right skin color,” as one of them had “beach-colored skin. And no one had dark skin,” the toddler said to police. It turned out that the babysitter, the babysitter’s boyfriend and another man had planned the burglary.

Meanwhile, the police handcuffed and questioned Cody Oaks, the next-door neighbor, for hours apparently, and prior to questioning, had a sniper trained on Oaks’ home. “It’s kinda sad ’cause I don’t think she realizes the dangerous position she put me in,” Oaks said.

Cody Oaks, Ferndale, WA, June 23, 2014. (Fox6News, WITI, Milwaukee).

Abby Dean’s no more Nancy Drew than I’m Sherlock Holmes. Truth is, the headline should be “Another Example of Overt Racism By Criminals and Police Foiled by Truthful Toddler.” While Dean deserves media coverage — she’s already done more at four than most people do about crimes in their whole lives — the real story is Cody Oaks. This could’ve very easily turned into a botched investigation, which could’ve led to Oaks’ death or serving serious jail time. For a crime in which he played NO role. All because in the minds of so many Whites, young and Black and male equals a violent criminal. That’s what that racist, seventeen-year-old, criminal mastermind babysitter thought, and apparently, so did the local police.

That this isn’t the story from this story shows how well colorblind racism has worked in the average American’s mind. It is obviously okay for Whites — especially White women — to blame Blacks for crimes they didn’t commit, no matter how outrageous. There’s Charles Stuart in Boston, who killed his pregnant wife, shot himself and then tried to blame a mysterious Black man (the boogie man) for his heinous acts in ’89-’90. There’s Susan Smith, the South Carolina woman who drove her car into a lake and drowned her child in that car in ’94. Only to then blame two young Black men for her insane crime, as these imaginary Black males attempted to carjack her. There’s Ashley Todd, the McCain presidential campaign staff who claimed that a Black guy robbed her and carved a backwards “B” on her left cheek in ’08. Only to learn that she mugged and mutilated herself for attention. Let’s not forget the Central Park 5, with whom the city of New York settled a lawsuit for $40 million over their wrongful arrests and convictions.

And people wonder why many of us continue to carry a public anger.

Tyranny of the Self-Righteous “Liberal”

18 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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ADM, Agribusiness, Amazonian Rain Forest, Archer Daniels Midland, Climate Change, ConAgra, Decriminalization, Drug Policy, Economic Development, Economic Inequality, Environmental Justice, Environmentalism, Food Justice, Food Policy, Global South, Global Warming, GM, GMOs, Gun Control Debate, Gun Safety, Hypocrisy, Monsanto, Pitt, Saving the Planet, Species Diversity, Third World, Veganism, Vegans, White Liberals

Toni Collette as Fiona, “Ms. Granola Suicide,” in movie About A Boy (2002), screen shot, June 18, 2014. (http://hotmovies.com via Universal). Qualifies as fair use – low resolution picture is personification of topic (self-righteous liberal).

More and more, I’ve tired of folks who proclaim that because they’ve finally “seen the light” on a particular niche or chic liberal issue, that their view is not only the right and only one. Anyone who doesn’t fall in line with their perspective is the enemy, a sap in support of the destructive forces of capitalism, a person whose individual actions will destroy the world.

That most — but not all, of course — of these people are White liberals isn’t exactly a surprise. This first occurred to me a quarter-century ago, when, as a Pitt undergrad, students active in environmentalism were going around campus asking us to donate time, money and signatures to stop Brazil from tearing down their Amazonian rain forests. Though I understood that we needed to process as much oxygen as our bodies would allow (and pull as much CO2 out of the atmosphere as possible), I also thought, “where the heck do we get off telling Brazil what to do?”

Brazil was and still is a leader in Global South economic development, with massive inequalities to boot. After two and a half centuries of virtually unchecked economic and industrial growth at the expense of the environment, though, where did we as Americans have the right to tell people in other countries to slow or halt their economic development? After exploiting the riches, resources and peoples of the world, where did these do-gooders get off telling other countries that they ‘d have to find a slower way to deal with poverty, or to not exploit their own resources?

An aerial picture of an area of the Amazon Rainforest, Brazil, September 9, 2009. (Felipe Menegaz via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0/GNU.

I would get into the occasional argument about this very White, very un-liberal liberal way of thinking. One where we’d get to keep our modern development while countries like Brazil were supposed to languish in the Third World box we and Europe built for them. Of course, the do-gooders would argue back at me, telling me that I wanted to destroy the environment and make the air unhealthy for our future kids and grandkids to breathe. As far as they were concerned, keeping the Global South poor and exploitable was our only chance at beating back global warming and species destruction.

It’s not any different today with issues like food justice, gun control and safety, and drug policy (and for some, religion). I have a Facebook friend who has become more belligerent about promoting veganism and condemning us so-called meat-eaters (technically, humans are omnivores) over the past half-decade. The issue for him couldn’t just be about agribusinesses and their gross abuse of the land, of crops and of domesticated animals, their control and degradation of much of the world’s food supply. No, it’s about individuals making choices that empower these massive corporations instead of going to an organic farm or farmers market or choosing to turn away from all animal proteins for the sake of their bodies or to curtail climate change.

I have no problems with vegans or veganism (I’ve tried it myself on occasion) or with fighting Archer Daniels Midland, Monsanto and ConAgra. I do have a problem with the myopic thinking that people like my Facebook friend have in attacking individuals. It’s such a ’70s liberal way of confronting a huge issue. Not to mention a very White and elitist perspective. Fact is, a truly healthy and well-rounded vegan diet is an expensive one, as the federal government doesn’t subsidize vegan products like it does agribusiness. In a nation like the US, with a shrinking middle class and growing inequality, to expect every individual to stop shopping at Walmart and eating Big Macs in exchange for the organic farm and lentils is arrogant and wholly unrealistic.

There’s no way I’d tell my Facebook friend all this. I’d get argued down as if I were attempting to spread a superflu across the planet. And it wouldn’t be a rational argument either. But then again, it’s okay for White liberals to be irrational in their arguments, especially when it’s in defense of the planet!

ConAgra Foods logo, June 18, 2014. (http://innovate.unl.edu/).

There’s also irony around gun control and safety and drug policy. When it’s so-called Black-on-Black crime, or a drive-by in New York or Chicago, those meet White liberal expectations. When it’s Columbine or Newtown or Santa Barbara, involving White-on-White crime, then it becomes time for more mental health screenings and more gun control. When heroin and crack cocaine found their way into poor Black and Latino communities in the ’70s and ’80s, we needed tougher drug laws to lock away “the animals” and “thugs.” Now that crystal meth and heroin have made their ways into White-middle-class suburbia, it’s now time to decriminalize some drug possessions and legalize marijuana. But no contradictions there!

A big part of the problem with everyday White liberalism is the idea that individuals and their individual decisions will add up to a groundswell of societal change. Yet how can you change the world if you’re not willing to sacrifice the structures that exploit others who aren’t White and middle class, who don’t live in America or in some suburban cul-de-sac? But go ahead, keep on keeping on with your non-GMO, organic vegan tuna salads made of soybeans and carrots while yelling at the rest of us impoverished shlubs to get with the program!

Race and The OJ Simpson Effect at 20

12 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Sports, Work, Youth

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1994 NBA Finals, Covenant Church of Pittsburgh, Dialogue on Race, Economic Inequality, Game 5, Houston Rockets, Internalized Racism, Men's Retreat, New York Knicks, Newsweek, Nicole Brown Simpson, O.J. Simpson, OJ Simpson, Pharrell Williams, Race Riots, Racial Stereotypes, Racial Stigma, Racism, Ron Goldman, Time Magazine, Trial, White Bronco

O.J. Simpson on the covers of Newsweek and Time Magazine, (the picture on right altered to make Simpson appear darker and caused an outcry), June 27, 1994. (Theo’s Little Bot via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use due to low resolution of image and relevance to subject matter.

Today’s the twentieth anniversary of the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, still officially-allegedly murdered by the once great NFL Hall of Fame running back O.J. Simpson. In five days, it’ll be twenty years since the bizarre police chase of Simpson in a white Ford Bronco with his friend Al Cowlings on I-405 in the Los Angeles area. In the process, he took all of us — the media, the sports world, and anyone who cared about race and justice — on a ride that folks are still talking about two decades later. It had an impact on me in terms of how I saw Blacks and Whites and race. I shouldn’t have been, but I was mildly surprised that so many would become so emotionally caught up in a double-homicide case involving what at one time was one of the world’s most recognizable faces.

That week twenty years ago was my absolute commitment to two events. The NBA Finals between my New York Knicks and the Houston Rockets. And a church retreat for the male members (nearly 100 of us, almost all Black — talk about irony!) of Covenant Church of Pittsburgh. It was to be a week of watching my Knicks play at home and three days in the mountains of Western Pennsylvania at a retreat lodge, in a spirit of learning how to be godly men and of adult male bonding. The first full day of the retreat was June 17. After a day of workshops, prayer, praise, and singing (at least for me and the rest of the men’s choir), we all piled into the rec room to watch Game 5 of the Final. Only to see an overhead shot of a slow-moving white Bronco being trailed by an escort of L.A.’s finest instead of Patrick Ewing, John Starks, Doc Rivers, Charles Oakley, and the rest of the cast of characters from my favorite team.

Screen shot of NBA on NBA coverage of 1994 NBA Finals, Game 5, MSG, New York at Bronco chase of OJ Simpson, I-405 in L.A., June 1, 1994. (SI photos via Tumblr).

Screen shot of NBA on NBA coverage of 1994 NBA Finals, Game 5, MSG, New York at Bronco chase of OJ Simpson, I-405 in L.A., June 17, 1994. (SI photos via Tumblr).

The Knicks won, which was great, but I barely saw the game. They were up 3-2, but would lose the last two games in the next six days in Houston, turning Choke City into Clutch City overnight. But that wasn’t what I was thinking about when it first happen. I hoped that the police wouldn’t shoot Simpson before he had a chance to go to trial. The L.A. riots were just two years before. I feared that the issue of race would be front and center, with Simpson’s issues with his now dead White ex-wife.

What I saw within ten days of the Bronco chase was an artificially darkened Simpson on the cover of Time. I watched as the media condemned Simpson well before the trial. As Blacks were becoming angrier about the coverage. As Whites grew more confident about Simpson being convicted, losing his fortune and fame, and possibly getting the death penalty (or at least, life imprisonment). It was amazing how quickly folks took sides on the issue. My mother proclaimed that O.J. was innocent long before the prosecution botched the trial. Some of my grad school colleagues — all White, mind you — made all kinds of assumptions about where I stood on O.J. Simpson. They didn’t like the fact that I was willing to wait until the trial to make up my mind.

Many have benefitted from the O.J. Simpson effect over the last twenty years. From lawyers to journalists, TV stations and authors, many have reaped benefits and have built careers from the O.J. Simpson trial and verdict. Greta Van Susteren, Dan Abrams, Nancy Grace, Court TV (now TruTV), the late Johnnie Cochran, Alan Dershowitz, Christopher Darden and Robert Shapiro, among so many others. Even Mark Fuhrman got a book and a radio talk show (at least for a while) out of the trial. One could argue that Kim Kardashian, daughter of Simpson defense “Dream Team” lawyer Robert Kardashian, has benefited, albeit indirectly (it’s not as if her father’s a regular on her family’s reality shows, right?).

Conservative media in general received the greatest indirect residuals of all from the murders, trial, and acquittal involving Simpson. The events between June 12, ’94 and October 3, ’95 helped intensify an atmosphere of conservatism, a sense that our nation was out of control. With the acquittal, it made sense to millions for cable and talk radio to increase its coverage of news, especially news with a more “fair and balanced” slant.

National dialogue on race cartoon, July 21, 2010. (Bob Englehart/Hartford Courant).

Obviously Simpson hasn’t benefited. Our national dialogue on race hasn’t improved, either. Whites still seemingly want Blacks to be stereotypes and to shut up while entertaining them with our lives and our deaths. Some Black elites still make a point of divorcing themselves from other Blacks and from the world that’s race in America, Pharrell Williams most recently so. And with rapidly increasing economic inequality, it’s a wonder that thousands of Whites haven’t come in to Black and Latino neighborhoods to burn down businesses and beat up and lynch those of us unlucky to encounter their mobs, like they typically did this time a century ago.

All because of the multitude of examples of individual Black success, and occasions of Black-on-White (and especially blond)-woman-violence. Things change, but the cancer that is Whiteness and race remain the same, “a shame and a pitiful,” as my father would say.

Killing Joe Trotter

10 Tuesday Jun 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Advisor-Student Relationships, Burnout, Child Abuse, CMU, Dissertation, Dissertation Committee, Dreams, Emotional Baggage, Father Figures, Forgive and Forget, Forgiveness, Graduate School, Guerilla Warfare, Hatred, Imagination, Joe Trotter, Joe William Trotter Jr., Mental Health, Murder, Paternalism, PhD, Psychological Baggage, PTSD, Self-Awareness, Self-Defense, Un-father Figures

Yeah, I did it. I killed the man who kinged himself mentor over me. I took some piano wire, tightened it around my hands while listening to him yammer on an on about “running interference” to protect “my interests.

As the pointy-headed, smoothly bald and mahogany man gazed at my thesis, myopically gazing into nowhere, I pounced. I quickly jumped out of my seat and took Trotter from behind. He clutched at the wire with his elderly left hand as I pulled and tugged, hoping to prolong the bloody agony for as long as I could. Trotter choked for air, then choked for real, as spit, bile, blood and tongue all became his substitute for oxygen. Then, with one bicep curl and pull, I garroted his throat, and watched as his already dead eyes turned lifeless. All as his burgundy blood poured down his white shirt and gray suit. It collected into a small pond, where his pants crotch and his mahogany office chair met. Trotter’s was a chair that was now fully endowed all right. Thanks to my righteous stand.

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

Tired, mentally drained, battery, March 2014. (http://blog.batterysharks.com/).

First, a disclaimer. I am in no way advocating killing Joe Trotter, or any other professor, whether they’re a great advisor or a terrible one (except perhaps in the case of literal self-defense). This was how I imagined what I could do to Trotter in the spring and summer of ’96, as our battles over my dissertation and my future turned from typical to ugly. By mid-July ’96, after his handwritten all-caps comments telling me to disregard my evidence on Black migration to DC during the Great Migration period (1915-30) — or really, the lack of evidence — I was mentally drained. I went back to our first big arguments over my future, the “you’re not ready” meetings from November ’95 and April ’96, and thought about what I could’ve done if I’d stayed in his office five minutes longer. That’s when I imagined killing my advisor for the first time.

By the time Trotter and my dissertation committee had approved my magnum opus, the week before Thanksgiving in ’96, I’d played that scenario in my head at least a dozen times. That’s when I knew I was burned out from the whole process. I may have become Dr. Collins, but I might as well have been my younger and abused self, the one who had to wade through five years of suffering at 616 and in Mount Vernon just to get to college.

Four months ago, I actually dreamed about killing Joe Trotter, exactly as described above, in his office, on a warm spring day like I imagined eighteen years ago. Keep in mind, I don’t think about Trotter much these days, other than when I write a blog post or am in a discussion of worst dissertation advisors ever. So when I woke up from this old-imagination-turned-dream, I had a Boy @ The Window moment and revelation. Did my struggles with Trotter open up old wounds, unearth my deliberately buried past? Did I see my fight with Trotter over my dissertation in the same light as my guerrilla warfare with my abusive and manipulative ex-stepfather?

I obviously brought baggage into my doctoral process that I’d hidden from everyone, including myself, and hadn’t fully resolved. The fact that Trotter was at times tyrannical, deceitful and paternalistic didn’t help matters. In some ways, then, Trotter must’ve morphed into Maurice Washington during the dissertation process, with me only half-realizing it once I was freshly minted.

Emotional and psychological baggage, January 2014. (http://www.projecteve.com/).

I actually went to Trotter’s office a few weeks after I graduated, to apologize for how our relationship devolved, and to grant him my forgiveness as well. Arrogant as my act was, I needed to make the gesture, to at least begin my healing process. I knew Trotter was beyond surprised, but he shook my hand anyway. I also knew, as I walked away from his Baker Hall office, that other than a letter of recommendation, Trotter no longer had anything to offer me. At least, anything that would help me resolve some deep, underlying issues.

It’s safe to say that of all the reasons that led to me writing Boy @ The Window, my problems with Trotter in ’95 and ’96 were near the top of the list. Still, I needed to kill the idea that Trotter was an indispensable part of my present and future, if I were to ever resolve the issues from my growing-up past.

When Those Close Put Up Roadblocks

07 Saturday Jun 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Coming-of-Age, Detours, Dr. Don, Dreams, Faith, Forgive and Forget, Forgiveness, History, Internalized Racism, Jealousy, Memoir, Past, PAT Transit, PhD, PhD process, Pitt, Roadblocks, Self-Discovery, Self-Loathing, Sellout, Writing

Detours vs. roadblocks, June 1, 2012. (http://www.ideaarchitects.org).

This was the best title I could come up with, since it’s about folks in my life with whom I’ve shared some affinity over the years, beyond family, and to a lesser extent, friendships. This isn’t about haters or crabs-in-the-barrel mentality per se. It’s simply the observation that as I pursue dreams and push through goals in life that some whom have the choice between being supportive or actively working against my interests, how more than a few have chosen to do the latter.

That this has occurred in my life mostly as I pursued my doctorate and pressed on as a writer isn’t a coincidence. The things I’ve worked the hardest for in life, the dreams most difficult to achieve, the amount of energy and pressing through needed to overcome my own doubts in the process — all came with an audience of detractors. A bit more than twenty years ago, some of my Pitt friends started falling by the wayside as I pursued my grad degrees, which is normal, but there were some pretty weird conversations I had with them as they did. One insisted on calling me “Dr. Don” about a dozen times during a PAT Transit bus ride one day in September ’92, laughing to the point of hilarity while doing it. I thought that he was going to choke on his own spit all the while, he was laughing so hard. Or that I was going to choke him myself if he said “Dr. Don” one more time!

Screen shot of character played by Samuel L. Jackson in Django Unchained (2012) with “Sellout” addition (not an endorsement, by the way), October 31, 2013. (http://forwardtimesonline.com/2013/).

Another guy — who eventually committed suicide in ’98 — told me straight up that people like me were “sellouts,” that “The Man” wasn’t going to accept people like me or him “no matta how many degrees we get” or don’t get. That was six weeks before my committee approved my dissertation, in October ’96. Luckily, I learned not to bring up my education to folks unless it was for professional purposes or unless someone asked.

That these were Black acquaintances from my days as an undergrad at the University of Pittsburgh was a bit surprising, considering that my tendency is to always encourage folks to pursue their dreams. I’d always assumed the worst of the folks — Black, White, Afro-Caribbean and Latino — that I grew up with in Mount Vernon, New York, precisely because their encouragement literally made me suicidal by the time I turned fourteen. By the late-90s, I realized this was more than a New-York-area-social-etiquette-disorder.

With writing and books over the past decade — especially with Boy @ The Window — I’ve experienced some of those same headwinds from folks who seemed to think they had a better idea for the direction of my life than I. When I first started working on my memoir at the end of ’06, I had a conversation with my Pitt and AED colleague Stacey, whom I’d known for sixteen years. Upon telling her about my project, she said, “You need to wait on that,” that I should “publish a few more books,” be in my fifties, before “writin’ a biography.” So I knew that she wasn’t going to buy a copy when it came out. Oh well!

Last fall, at an African American Alumni Council event at Pitt, it was one of my first opportunities to discuss the now published Boy @ The Window, which was immediately followed by public criticism. Right after I talked about the book, an older alumna walked right up to me, and got within a foot or so of my face — close enough to hug. “You’re too young to have a memoir,” she said with a smile on her face, and then walked away as if her’s was the final say on the topic.

At the least, it showed that most don’t know the difference between a memoir (on one period or aspect of one’s life, often with a look at the world beyond) and an autobiography (the story of my entire life). Boy, understand the genre before criticizing it or my role in it already!

One foot in the grave (apparently), June 7, 2014. (http://www.virginmedia.com/).

And, yes, I know. I see my Facebook friends especially posting other people’s sayings every single day. About letting go, moving on, forgetting the past, pushing past the haters, sitting in a lotus position, meditating and praying, and then drinking a wheat-grass smoothie. I do let go, I do forgive, and I don’t let the naysayers in my life have the final say. But letting go doesn’t mean I don’t get to highlight some truth, point out hypocrisy, and that I should just be quiet for the sake of being quiet.

It hasn’t been lost on me that most of these specific, potentially dream-destroying microaggressions have come from Black folk, male and female, well-off and immersed in poverty. Do I put these people in the same category as White literary agents who’ve said things to me like, “Oh no, not another abuse story!” or “There are too many black coming-of-age stories in the market?” Of course not. Gate keepers practicing ignorance in the midst of structural racism isn’t the same as people who may have internalized racism.

Or in the latter case, it could just be that my pursuit of what I’ve wanted and finally come to know for my life brought attention to dreams deferred, delayed and denied, by others and by their own fears of failure and success. If I’d let this stand in my way, I’d still be living in Mount Vernon, undoubtedly living in grinding poverty, wondering how could I let everything I wanted out of life get away from me.

A Man and a Tank

04 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, Youth

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1989, ABC News, Dissidents, Freedom, Government Crackdown, Injustice, Laurence Glasco, Looney Tunes, Murder, Peter Jennings, Protests, Tank, Tiananmen Square

"Tank Man" temporarily stops the advance of a column of tanks, Tianenmen Square, Beijing, China, June 5, 1989. (Jeff Widener/AP via Wikipedia).

“Tank Man” temporarily stops the advance of a column of tanks, Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China, June 5, 1989. (Jeff Widener/AP via Wikipedia).

[Originally posted June 4, 2009]

Saturday, June 3, 1989, 12:04 pm. Me and my younger siblings were at 616, watching cartoons on ABC. It was a run of old Looney Tunes cartoons, which had Maurice, Yiscoc, Sarai and especially Eri cracking up. It was a great morning, with my mother taking her Saturday classes at Westchester Business Institute, my idiot stepfather out carousing, and my older brother Darren roaming the streets like the goofball he could be. Then the late Peter Jennings broke into our local New York area broadcast to let us know that Chinese tanks were rolling into Tiananmen Square in Beijing, breaking through seven weeks worth of protests over the government’s continuing limits on the civil and political rights of its citizens.

It was after midnight in Beijing, already June 4. For the next forty or forty-five minutes, images kept coming on to our TV from Tiananmen Square as the Chinese military and their tanks toppled barricades, ran over cars and literally chased thousands of protesters out of the square. When I saw the first images of a blood-splattered protester and then of another one crying, I started to cry myself. My siblings looked at me like I was crazy. Then, no more images. Jennings reported that the Chinese government had forced ABC to shut down their satellite communications from within China. My guess was that they did it at gun point.

By the time I switched to another station for my siblings to watch, I found myself wondering why I hadn’t followed the story more closely. I mean, I was actually following it. But I guess I assumed that, like the glasnost and perestroika that had been pushed by Gorbachev since ’86, that the protests would be allowed to continue in Beijing. And like many other naive Americans, we were wrong about that. We hardly knew enough about four millennia of Chinese political history to understand how important an unopposed central authority has been to this culture. If I had applied anything I learned from a semester of East Asian History at all, I wouldn’t have been surprised at all.

With me crying — albeit not audibly — my youngest brother Eri asked me what was wrong and what was going on. I explained to them as best I could that this was a government crackdown on dissidents, that the Chinese government engaged in human rights abuses all the time, and that this crackdown meant many people were dying and going to die. Those few minutes were the most in which Eri and my other siblings had shown any interest in the world outside of Mount Vernon and New York City in all of times I spent with them growing up.

Peter Jennings, ABC World News Tonight anchor, November 1989 (broadcasting fall of Berlin Wall). (screenshot via Youtube).

In the days that followed, the occasional picture or piece of film made it out of China to Hong Kong (still a British territory in ’89) or Japan or South Korea showing images like the man standing in front of a column of tanks, ready to die in the crackdown on him and other protesters. I must admit, it moved me. It was obvious that people would go to jail, likely face torture, that many would die and many more would lick their wounds as the Chinese government would blackout all but the official state news about what really was going on.

Larry Glasco, one of my Pitt history professors, was there for a visit when the crackdown began. He said he saw dead men hanging from lamp posts, bodies of dead and injured in spots, and faced his own crisis in dealing with the military. They confiscated his camera and threatened to hold him in jail in order to make sure he didn’t take his pictures back to the US. From what I remember, he did managed to smuggle some film — not much — out after the crackdown had ended. His wasn’t the only story I would hear during the second half of ’89 about what people witnessed as tourists and researchers in looking at the Tiananmen Square protests. It was the first time I had the chance to see up close what a tyrannical government really looks like when acting to protect itself.

It’s different from police brutality or even a racist mob. For better or worse, we’ve never seen this level of government or military intervention in this country over protesters that those everyday folks in China faced down twenty years ago. Even if we count what Native Americans faced in the late-nineteenth century or the Bonus Army crackdown by General Douglas MacArthur in 1932, that would only get us to a limited sense of what the Tiananmen Square dissidents faced. It made me think about how wrong one of my Humanities classmates was when he argued about the long-term viability of communism because it would reduce economic inequality and give people a greater degree of freedom.

But we were both incorrect. Any economic or political system in which citizens and others must show deference or actually walk in fear of isn’t one that any should follow. I don’t care if the system is communist, capitalist, or socialist, or if the government is a monarchy, a constitutional monarchy, or a representative democracy. If folks living in these systems and under these governments can’t speak their minds or publish their ideas, especially if they contradict whatever the government or system says, the government isn’t a just one. Although governments and systems should fit the cultural and historical context of a given population, it also should remain flexible enough to adjust to the changing needs of a people. That’s what the regime in China failed to understand in ’89 and for years afterward.

I’m hardly advocating the overthrowing of governments or even the imposition of American democracy. If anyone’s bothered to notice, we haven’t exactly been living up to many of our ideals overseas and at home over the last six decades. I’m merely attempting to remember the events of early June ’89 that touched me emotionally, that enabled me to understand that beyond the political and economic theories there’s the reality of the human condition, the need to keep humans who have authority in check. I learned this all too well growing up at 616 and attending Mount Vernon’s public schools. Without those checks and balances, the rights and lives of others face tanks lined up in formation, ready to run them over.