Walking the Obama Criticism Tightrope

01 Saturday Jun 2013

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

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Blind Faith, Blind Support, Centrists, Eunuchs, Forbidden City, Liberals, Michelle Obama, Obama, Obama Administration, Personality, Policy, Praise, President Barack Obama, President Obama, Rabid Right, Tightrope, White House, White Progressives

Philippe Petit in midst of his high-wire crossing between the Twin Towers, New York City, August 7, 1974. (http://www.talktalk.co.uk).

These are the times in which we live. Where a critique of a phrase, speech, demeanor or policy can leave someone like me on the outs with White progressives or blindly devoted Obama supporters. Or a comment that could be used to paint me as an Uncle Tom and a Black socialist revolutionary at the same time. It’s crazy these days whenever the subject of President Barack Obama, (or Michelle Obama, or the Obama Administration) comes up.

I’ve probably done about thirty blog posts and nearly 1,000 tweets related to the politics and policies of President Obama and his administration over the past five and a half years. Most of them have been positive, or at least hopeful. I genuinely like the man, his wife and his kids, at least from afar, in part as a result of reading his books. My distaste for his centrist political decision-making, for policies that have left the nation stagnant economically, educationally, socially and geopolitically are all well documented here and on Twitter as well.

Yet it’s hard for most people I’ve encountered to separate how they feel about the man and his family and what they think about his presidency and politics. I’ve found myself having to defend my writings about Obama against a tide of rabid far-right Americans. They’re mostly White and male, and mostly making arguments that approach the ravings of psychotic serial killers. Theirs is an imagined President Obama, one who conspired with his mother for the presidency from the womb. One whose policies range from socialist and Kenyan one minute to fascist and Islamic the next. They absolutely refuse to admit they’re ape-shit over this Black guy as POTUS, his Black wife as First Lady, and his Black children living in the White House.

I’m used to the ravings of this lunatic fringe, though. They are a familiar enough sort. The academic version of these folks were the ones who insisted that I was a plagiarist because of the quality of my writing. So when I get their often idiotic ramblings and significantly misspelled, often grammatically incorrect responses, I laugh nervously, knowing that you don’t have to be literate to be dangerous.

Maria Spelterini crossing Niagara Falls on tightrope with feet in peach baskets, July 4, 1876. (George E. Curtis [1830-1910] via Wikipedia). In public domain.

But I also have to deal with two other camps on Obama, one steeped in policy criticism, the other in ecclesiastical praise and worship. Progressives, mostly White (though hardly as exclusive as the rabid right), have been on a rampage about President Obama’s use of executive privilege since day three of his presidency. To be sure, I’ve made many of the same criticisms about the use of drone strikes and the murdering of American citizens (not to mention Pakistani and Yemeni innocents) abroad, about the continued use of Gitmo to hold dozens of folk who have been proven to not be terrorists. Not to mention the Obama Administration’s ineffective use of political capital on the economy, K-12 and higher education, and even healthcare.

Still, my not-as-left-as-me comrades tend to act as if they were clairvoyant about the missteps that the Obama Administration would take and make back in ’08 and early ’09, even though they voted and actively supported his election in the first place.

Yet there’s no group more annoying than Obama’s blind supporters. They are Black and White, but both tend to be elites who think that they’re liberals but are really Clinton-esque centrists. They seem to praise President Obama’s every word, every step and every decision. When there’s a clear-cut issue on which to criticize his administration — such as the huge increase in drone strikes and the sequester agreement of ’11 — they remain as silent as church mice. It’s as if Obama’s White House is the Forbidden City and his army of supporters the eunuchs who run the place, never telling the emperor what he actually needs to hear.

So with any criticism of President Obama or even Michelle Obama comes the insinuation that how dare I beat up on the nation’s first Black president. “He’s doing all that he can, but Congress and the GOP stand in his way,” they often say. Or “leave Michelle alone,” some say, noting her active (yet completely ineffective) efforts to tackle childhood obesity as an example of her grace.

Forbidden City tour, with actors playing emperors, eunuchs and concubines, June 1, 2013. (http://www.newmantours.com).

My last set of comments on Obama came on Twitter a couple of weeks ago, noting their “hard truths” speeches about the plight of African Americans in today’s America, calling for Black graduates of Bowie State University and Morehouse College to take up the mantle of personal responsibility. I said it was the wrong speech for the wrong audience at the wrong time. Except that their audience was really their White supporters watching on TV, not the Black students who already knew too well that mantle.

My tweets brought representatives from all sides out to praise or blast my comments. I was an Uncle Tom one minute, absolutely right the next, and then a socialist making excuses for Black pathologies a minute later. I think the next time I do a post on Obama, I’m riding a unicycle!

Where Audacity Meets Second-Guessing

25 Saturday May 2013

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

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"A Substance of Things Hoped For", Ambition, Arrogance, Audacity, Boldness, CMU, Courage, Dissertation, Doctoral Thesis, Doubt, Fear, Harold Scott, Multicultural Education, Multiculturalism, Peter Stearns, PhD, Pitt, Racial Determinism, Second-Guessing

Second-guessing to the extreme, May 25, 2013. (http://pualingo.com).

I’m a great second-guesser of myself (and of others). But I’m especially hard on myself in that department. Even when I know that what I’m doing is the right thing, that I’m taking the right path and proper course of action. I remind myself of what to do, what to say, how to say what I need to say, and even then, I wonder often if my move was to bold, my words too direct, my tone too know-it-all-esque.

Still, there are plenty of times as an adult where I’ve decided to not give in to my second-guessing impulses, to remain bold and aggressive despite the potential problems with a plan. Graduate school at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon was probably the longest time as an adult in which I did little second-guessing, at least when I was awake.

Something happened on my marathon march to the doctorate the week before Memorial Day ’93, one where, for once, someone did my second-guessing for me. And no, it wasn’t Joe Trotter or any of the other usual professorial suspects. This one came courtesy of Harold Scott, an acquaintance (and now friend) who was a visiting professor at Pitt’s GSPIA (Graduate School of Public and International Affairs) at the time. I met with him twenty years ago to discuss my transition from the University of Pittsburgh to Carnegie Mellon’s history department, to glean insights from a recent PhD and a man ten years my senior.

I’d met Harold a few times before, mostly in the context of joint Pitt-CMU gatherings related to issues of racial diversity and retention of grad students of color. Aside from discovering that Harold was an anti-affirmative action baby, the only other thing I knew about him was that he was the first African American to earn a doctorate from CMU’s history department.

Dick Cheney as an example of Pollyanna Principle, March 16, 2003. (http://www.veteranstoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/cheney.jpg).

So we both asked questions. I learned how Harold suffered at the hands of a mutual leading professor between us and the department, mostly in the form of isolation and arbitrarily bad pay as an instructor once he became ABD. He learned that I had a lot of ambition as a twenty-three year-old doctoral student. My plan at the time was to complete my PhD by the end of ’95, a little more than two and a half years from the date of our ’93 meeting.

Harold laughed, almost hysterically, as I stepped him through all my steps between late-May ’93 and December ’95. He noted that I had at least one year of coursework to complete at CMU before they’d give me their “stamp of approval” to move on to my written and oral comps, much less the dissertation. (Except that I’d already taken my written comps). Most importantly, Harold didn’t understand how I expected to write a doctoral thesis of significant research and girth in little more than a year, assuming that I’d have have to teach at some point, assuming that I had to find literally hundreds of sources.

Then we discussed my dissertation topic specifically. I talked about multiculturalism and multicultural education, about Black Washington, DC and Negro Education Week, about Carter G. Woodson and Alain Locke and W. E. B. Du Bois. I talked about the counter-literature that laid out multiculturalism as either Polyanna or as a mask for Afrocentricity without the Black nationalism that White scholars had ascribed to it.

Somehow in my discussion of the literature, between Arthur Schlesinger and Diane Ravitch, Thomas Sowell and James Banks, and Gary Nash and Cornel West, Harold had but one question. “Are you a ‘racial determinist’?,” he asked. I didn’t know exactly what that term meant, but I already knew what a cultural determinist was. I answered, “Yes and no.” I went on to describe the many situations in which I believed race played a role, if not a dominant role, in American history or culture. That’s not the definition, by the way, as it’s a variant of biological determinism, and very Nazi-like.

That’s when we really began to go back and forth. But I don’t think much of that argument was about racial determinism or where I stood on it at all. I think Harold thought that I was both arrogant and naive. It wouldn’t have been the first time I’ve left that impression, or the last. But yes, at twenty-three, I’d set my sights on a degree, a dissertation and book topic, and a career that I wanted, and had made the decision to not let my over-thinking second-guessing get the better of me. That Harold and others weren’t privy to my process likely made my bold plans and predictions seem ridiculous.

Brett Farve and yet another interception, 2009 NFC Championship Game, January 24, 2010. (Ronald Martinez/http://bleacherreport.com).

Yet there was more going on here, much of which wouldn’t become apparent to me until the end of ’95, when I was six chapters into my eight-chapter dissertation. Harold was my warning that the grad school process alone could beat the living hell out of me, that the professors at CMU — White or Black — had an old-fashioned attitude about how long it ought to take someone like me to finish. Harold went through a gauntlet to finish his doctorate in ’90, only to struggle to find work.

In being the second African American to go through the same gauntlet, I eventually realized that my speed and strength of purpose didn’t really matter in the lily-White thinking of the powers that were at CMU. And by the time I started second-guessing my decisions, I practically already had my degree.

What I Didn’t Know (in ’81, in ’97, in ’13)…

18 Saturday May 2013

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

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616 East Lincoln Avenue, Anticipation, Back Stabbers, Bruce Anthony Jones, Child Abuse, CMU, Domestic Violence, Family, Hustling, Joe Trotter, Joe William Trotter Jr., Not Knowing, O'Jays, Pitt, Poverty, Publishing, Success, The Matrix (1999), Welfare Poverty, Wisdom, Writing

Noah with me, January 3, 2004 [he was five months old]. (Angelia N. Levy).

Noah with me, February 28, 2004 [he was seven months old]. (Angelia N. Levy).

What I didn’t know across the past thirty-two years could be another book for me. I assume that would be the case for anyone would could look back across their life and second-guess themselves over that long a period of time. For me, though, the significance of today comes out of my mathematics background. You see, today’s my sixteenth PhD graduation anniversary. Not all that significant, I suppose. Except that I’m as far away from the end of my graduate school days at Carnegie Mellon today as I was from the first days of being a Hebrew-Israelite and watching my family fall into welfare poverty when I graduated in ’97.

100th Commencement Ceremony program, Carnegie Mellon University, May 18, 1997. (Donald Earl Collins).

Two things will hurt your success in this life. One is not acting on the things you know you should or must do. I learned that hard lesson from watching my mother make the decision to not make any decisions until it was too late, all while growing up at 616. Two is the enormous danger of not knowing, and therefore, not being able to act or respond to new or damaging situations as they arise. I’ve learned that lesson pretty well, too. Sometimes the hard way, through really bad experiences or decisions I didn’t play out like a game of eleventh-dimension chess. Sometimes through insight, foresight, even divine inspiration, anticipating what I didn’t know ahead of time.

And even with anticipation, you still might not be able to do anything about what you do and don’t know, simply because you’re not in any position to change things. That was especially true in ’81. I knew that my now deceased idiot ex-stepfather Maurice Washington was no good. But when my Mom decided to end her six months’ separation from him, there was nothing I could really do about it. I knew that with inflation rates of 14.5 percent in ’79 and 11.8 percent in ’80 (thank you, Scholastic Weekly Reader) and my Mom income of roughly $15,000 per year that we had less and less to work with at home. Again, not much I could do about that, either. Even paper boy jobs were drying up by the time I turned twelve!

O’Jays Back Stabbers (1972) album cover, November 10, 2011. (Dan56 via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use as low-resolution illustration of subject matter.

What I didn’t know was how quick and violent the shift into poverty would be. What I didn’t know was that Maurice would use his/our conversion as Hebrew-Israelites as justification for abusing my Mom and me. What I didn’t know was that my Mom would have three more kids by this man between July ’81 and May ’84. What I didn’t know was that I would feel so low about the loss of my best friend and my sense of self that I’d attempt to take my own life on my fourteenth birthday, at the end of ’83.

But when I looked back on this in ’97, I mostly thought about the good things that had occurred in the fifteen years between the domestic violence my Mom endured on Memorial Day ’82 and my doctoral graduation ceremony. My independent conversion to Christianity in ’84. Knocking out a 5 on my AP US History exam without ever cracking open Morison and Commager. Overcoming poverty and my lack of self-esteem to build a life at Pitt and in Pittsburgh between ’88 and ’97.

Still, I’d already been wounded, badly. By the things I knew but did nothing about. By those things I could’ve anticipated but my efforts to counteract were insufficient. By those things I couldn’t have known at all. I knew I’d have problems with my “running interference” advisor Joe Trotter coming down the dissertation stretch. Yet because of departmental politics and my need to be done sooner rather than later, I did nothing about this until I was six chapters into an eight-chapter dissertation. I knew my mentor and committee member Bruce Anthony Jones could sometimes be unreliable. Yet I had no idea that he would completely abandon me and his other doctoral students the moment he signed his name to my and their dissertations.

My dissertation’s signature page, May 18, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins),

Most of all, I never anticipated that my Mom would actually be jealous of me, and would spend a whole week with me at 616 and in Pittsburgh doing and saying things to completely disparage what I’d worked so hard for. For me, for her, for my family. That was hard to get over. There are times I’m not sure if I’m entirely over this yet.

What I’m sure of in ’13, though, is what I do know, don’t know, and can only anticipate with the wisdom of experience and wisdom beyond my experience. I know that I love my wife, that there’s a lot in common between her and Crush #1 (for those of you who’ve read Boy @ The Window so far, the implications should be obvious), real and from my own imagination. I didn’t know that I’d have a kid, a son who at nearly ten is both wonderful and perplexing, and hopefully, off to a much better start in life than I ever got. I suspect that one of my references for jobs and consulting gigs has been undermining my efforts over the past five years, and have thus removed her as a reference.

What I don’t know — but can only hope and work like a dog toward — is whether Boy @ The Window will be a success. I’m not sure if quantifying it would help. I sold a thousand copies of Fear of a “Black” America between August ’04 and January ’07, without the benefit of this blog, Twitter, Facebook or the e-book platforms. How long before I sell my first hundred, thousand, 5,000 or more? I have no idea. But as they say, I “must walk the path, not just know it.”

Afrocentricity and the Writing Bug

15 Wednesday May 2013

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

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Africana Studies, Afrocentric Education, Afrocentric Idea (1987), Afrocentricity, Authentic Blackness, Authenticity, Black Action Society, Black Issues in Higher Education, Black Studies, Blackness, Cool, Coolness, Litmus Test, Marc Hopkins, Maulana Karenga, Molefi Asante, Pitt, Temple University, Writing, Writing Bug

A ladybug, often a symbol for the writing “bug,” May 15, 2013. (http://flickr.com). In public domain.

This time two decades ago, I was already a bit desperate for work. In transferring from Pitt to Carnegie Mellon, I’d left myself without any financial coverage for the summer of ’93 (see my post “The Arrogance of Youth, Grad School Style” from June ’12). I had applied for several fellowships, summer teaching gigs, even some nonprofit work. But as of the middle of that May, nothing had come through. I’d already spent $200 on a root canal that occurred on the same day as my written PhD comps at CMU (see my post “Facing the Tooth” from May ’12).

Even before my comps and my surprise root canal, I had talked with my friend Marc about writing a joint article about the false litmus test of Blackness that Afrocentricity had come to represent in our minds. Between Molefi Asante’s students at Temple — not to mention the overtly Afrocentric turn of both the Black Action Society and the Black Studies department (which had changed its name to Africana Studies) in the previous eighteen months — both of us felt we needed to provide an alternate perspective.

On that third Saturday in May (and the day after my comps and root canal surgery), we worked for five hours in putting together what amounted to a 1,200-word opinion piece against the belief system and authenticity test that Afrocentricity (and Afrocentric education) had become. By some folks’ definition, we realized that jazz, Miles Davis and John Coltrane would fail the authentically Black test of a Molefi Asante’s wonderful Afrocentric Idea (1987) and of Maulana Karenga as well.

Frances Cress Welsing’s The Isis Papers (1991), [about as authentic as auto-tunes], May 15, 2015. (http://amazon.com).

Now I’m pretty sure why Marc had problems with Afrocentricity. As a Christian and a jazz aficionado, Marc likely saw Afrocentricity as something somewhere between a misguided way of thinking about Blackness and complete and utter bull crap. His goal was to “add to the debate” and “educate” those who weren’t Asante or Karenga apostles and disciples. A laudable — if somewhat naive about the politics of academia and race — goal.

As for me, beyond the academic superficiality of having a litmus test on what is and isn’t Black, I had at least two unconscious reasons for writing my first crossover piece. One had to do with my sense that too many young folks were all too interested in doing the cool thing and not the right thing. Afrocentricity was cool, just like all rap and hip-hop was cool, just like giving libations to ancestors was cool.

Being cool had always meant following a crowd and seldom saying anything that would dig more than a nanometer beyond the surface. Or saying a critical thing about the cool thing that everyone in the same crowd otherwise takes in without a critical thought. I went to a high school full of people like that, and loathed being around people like that when I’d been a part of the Black Action Society at Pitt.

Unconscious reason number two had something to do with my Hebrew-Israelite days. Again, I gave this zero direct thought during my grad school days. But the given the trauma I’d suffered through during my three years of kufi-dom, it had to affect my thinking about Afrocentricity. The Black folk I knew who were part of the Hebrew-Israelite religion were much more obvious about what they did and didn’t consider Black or kosher. Yet, it was so obvious that they constantly contradicted themselves, in terms of food or music, how they treated their wives or children. Most important for me, though, was the fact that they tried to live separate and apart from other Blacks, yet seemed no more different beyond the kufis, veils and kosher meats from other Blacks (or Jews, for that matter).

I saw Afrocentricity as bullshit, and still see the fact that so many folks who get caught up in this sense of authenticity around Blackness as folks falling for bullshit. If I hadn’t lived as a Hebrew-Israelite between the ages of eleven and fifteen, perhaps I wouldn’t see Afrocentricity this way. If I hadn’t been around the “Party All The Time” folks in high school and the “Black Panther Party” posers at Pitt, maybe Afrocentricity would’ve been more appealing to me.

Letters to the Editor, Black Issues in Higher Education, September 9, 1993. (Donald Earl Collins).

But at twenty-three years old, I was already tired of the pursuit of coolness and authenticity. That hasn’t changed in the past two decades. I’m sure the letters that called Marc and I “Uncle Toms” after our piece was published in Black Issues in Higher Education were from folks who thought we weren’t cool, and thought they had the answers to life itself.

I wonder how those folks back then would see the academics who believe that hip-hop can explain everything in the social sciences and humanities who are prominent today. Perhaps some of these people today were the Afrocentric followers of twenty years ago. Perhaps not. All I know is, I haven’t stopped writing since that cloudy day in mid-May.

Update on Carnegie Mellon & the “Pope Girl”

11 Saturday May 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, Youth

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CMU, CMU Alumni, Freedom of Expression, King Solomon, Pope Girl, President Jared Cohon, Public Nudity, School of Arts

CMU President Jared Cohon’s decision on “Pope Girl”-Gate, May 10, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins).

Outgoing Carnegie Mellon President Jared Cohon sent out a message to CMU alumni/community yesterday afternoon revealing his rather middle-of-the-road, Solomon-esque decision on the anti-pope nudity incident at the Carnival last month. His good yet easily predictable decision: the “Pope Girl” and her male accomplice will face misdemeanor indecent exposure charges from the Allegheny County courts for exposing cross-shaped pubic hairs in their public-mockery-of-Carnival campus march on April 18. But they will face no further disciplinary action from CMU, as what they did fell well within their rights of freedom of expression.

I’m sure the majority of my fellow yet rather conservative CMU alums will take some affront to this decision, but too bad for them. If you can’t hand out condoms while mocking the pope and buggy races with your butt and vagina hairs exposed as an undergrad, then when, pray tell, do you ever plan to break free?

I’m sure this was a difficult decision for President Cohon. He’s got one foot off the campus toward retirement while making a decision that could cost CMU some donors. But as Cohon approaches his last weeks on the job, he’s also likely gained a few new donors for the university, at least of the current generation of CMU students. I will never likely be one of them.

Still, I do look forward to future CMU controversies over students and their freedom of speech and expression. It’s a welcome change from discussions of the silent Republican majority, robotics and military contracts, and alumni who were my age before I was born in ’69.

It’s funny though. Today marks nineteen years since I finished all of my coursework for my CMU History PhD. I thought that was exciting stuff then. Some things are changing for the better.

The Road to My Memoir, Part 1: Welfare

07 Tuesday May 2013

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

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Academic Writing, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, AFDC, Case Managers, Case Workers, Criminalization, Discrimination, Emotional Detachment, Irony, Journaling, Journals, Kaaryn Gustafson, Personal Vignettes, Pitt, Public Housing, Racial Stereotypes, Racial Stigmas, Research, Rhonda Y. Williams, Scholarship, Welfare, Writing, Writing Process

Adrian LeBlanc’s Random Family (2002) and Rhonda Y. Williams’ The Politics of Public Housing (2005), May 7, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins).

This isn’t a straight-forward post or series of posts. I didn’t come to Boy @ The Window quickly or easily. I didn’t intend it to be a memoir, even though I’d left myself bread crumbs to turn it into a memoir years ago.

The first time I’d thought about writing a book related to my experiences was at the beginning of my junior year of college, in September and October ’89. Not even three months after my idiot stepfather had left 616 for good, and I was thinking about writing up something about the experience? A bit ambitious I was!

What I did do, though, was somehow find my old scraps of journals about what happened to me when I was twelve before I came back to Pittsburgh and Pitt for the school year. I wrote up additional experiences, about running away from 616 in August ’85, about my Mom’s experience at the feet and fists of my now ex-stepfather, about my time on a drafty Pitt stairwell the year before.

That was painful to write about, so soon after finally being rid of Maurice, too soon, really, for me to fully process it without re-living the experience. So I wrote or rewrote four of these experiences in all, and put them away in one of my Pitt notebooks.

But there was one other experience I wanted to write about, to move from a personal story to one of academic scholarship. It was the experience of my being on welfare from ’83 to ’87, covering on-the-ground perspectives from people like me and my Mom, as well as those of case workers. I thought that it would fill a void in both media coverage and in historical scholarship about the topic of welfare, particularly how it became a racial stereotype and slur.

I thought that by juxtaposing (and that’s the word I used for this back in ’89) the plight of welfare recipients and case workers, that I could show some sense of irony. That so many of the case workers and managers were only a paycheck or two away from being on welfare — and that some of them had been on welfare themselves, at least based on my limited experience — would make for an interesting story. What I hoped to show, ultimately, was the inhumanity of the welfare system itself, pitting people from similar socioeconomic backgrounds against each other because of the mix of welfare as racial and as a form of the undeserving getting their government handouts, of crumbs from America’s table being turned into a political football.

I didn’t say this exactly when I had a conversation about this topic with my former TA Paul Riggs in October ’89. The ideas and many of the sentiments, particularly about “juxtaposing,” “irony,” and “inhumanity,” though, were all part of the conversation. Riggs told me I needed to slow down, that even if I somehow were able to make this topic historical, that I’d need to much more reading on the topic, to divorce myself from my emotions around this topic.

In some ways, my late-twenties mentor was right. It’s hard to do scholarly work on a topic in which you are heavily emotionally invested. The topic wasn’t historical, given that I had just lived it and my Mom and younger siblings were still living it. And I was nineteen after all, and after seven years of seldom writing for any purpose outside of the classroom except letters to former high school classmates and college friends, a book would’ve been a daunting, almost immeasurable task.

That started me on the path to learn how to write like an academic historian, instead of writing out of emotion and irony. One that would delay my writing on anything like Boy @ The Window for the better part of a decade, even as the academic process enabled me to do the interviews and research necessary to put the memoir together.

Luckily, there are three authors whose work over the past decade has covered this topic of welfare, racial stereotypes, inhumanity, criminality and irony. Mostly in ways I would’ve covered it had I had the words and research skills to do this work twenty-four years ago. Adrian LeBlanc‘s Random Family (2002), though a sensational accounting of a Latino family in the Bronx between ’88 and ’01, does provide a glimpse (still MacArthur “genius” Award winner). Rhonda Y. Williams‘ The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles Against Urban Inequality (2005) is her excellent collection of research and personal vignettes about public housing, welfare, Black women and empowerment despite the odds covering the period between the 1940s and the early 1980s (with a bit on the early 1990s). All just before crack cocaine, TANF and the gentrification of previously off-limit poor neighborhoods in a city like Baltimore became bigger themes.

And now there’s Kaaryn Gustafson‘s Cheating Welfare: Public Assistance and the Criminalization of Poverty (2012). She covers in so many ways what I’d once hoped to capture in emotion and storytelling about the stain of welfare as illustrated in policies and politics. Kaaryn’s (I know her from my New Voices days) written a great book, one that I wished I could’ve read or written when I was nineteen.

Kaaryn Gustafson’s Cheating Welfare (2012), May 7, 2013. (http://nyupress.org).

That wasn’t my path, though I had interests that would include welfare. No, my path was about race, diversity, education and self-discovery, not just about my Mom and family.

Carnegie Mellon and the “Pope Girl”

03 Friday May 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, Religion, Youth

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Alumni, Anti-Gravity Downhill Derby, Birth of a Nation (1915), Bishop David Zubik, Buggy Races, Carnival, Catholic Church, Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh, Jared Cohon, Parody, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Pope, Pope Girl, School of Art, Spring Carnival, Spring Carnival 2013, WPXI

Pope Girl, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, April 18, 2013. (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review).

A couple of days ago, outgoing Carnegie Mellon University President Jared Cohon responded to criticism from the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh regarding an incident during the Spring Carnival 2013 festivities in mid-April. Known primarily for buggy cart races on campus/near Schenley Park, the Spring Carnival has also been a time for alumni to gather in force on the sanitarium of a campus, to relive whatever wonderful memories they have of attending CMU (by comparison, I’ve never attended, not even when I was a graduate student at CMU).

This year, though, the fourth annual spoofing of Carnival and the cart races by CMU’s School of Art — known as the Anti-Gravity Downhill Derby — involved a student dressed as the pope from the waist up. The get-up included a facsimile of the pontiff’s hat and crimson gown. From the waist down, the young woman wore nothing. Except for her vagina hair, cut in the shape of the cross. If this wasn’t bad enough, she and her compadres marched in the parade and handed out condoms during the event.

Now folks like Bishop David Zubik — and likely some deep-pocket conservative (and maybe even Catholic) alumni — want to see the CMU student the local media has called the “Pope Girl” punished. Hence, President Cohon’s emailed statement to the CMU alumni community on Wednesday:

Email message from CMU President Cohon to alumni, May 1, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins).

I don’t find what this CMU student did “highly offensive” or even mildly offensive at all. Maybe it’s because I’d been to gay and lesbian pride parades at NYU back in the ’90s, where women and men dressed as the pope. Where women put black tape in the shape of a cross across their breasts while holding signs that said, “F— the Catholic Church.” Maybe I’m not offended because CMU’s the same university that didn’t close on the Martin Luther King holiday back in the ’90s, yet somehow thought it okay for students to show Birth of a Nation (1915) on that day.

CMU student dressed as pope (cropped, pre-parade), April 18, 2013. (http://bit.ly/109fnni for full pic).

I’m sure that exposing one’s pubic hair and butt cheeks in public violates some standards, either public nudity or lewdness in general. But beyond this, if there’s to be any punishment, it would be beyond unfair. After all, the Pope Girl is an adult, and has First Amendment rights to free speech, free expression and in this case, freedom of religion (specifically, the right to mock the pope). Yes, five centuries ago, she would’ve been declared a heretic, tortured and burned at the stake. But then again, so would’ve the 6,000 or so Catholic priests and their superiors who were involved in child molestation and rape over the years.

Face it. CMU’s only responding now because money may be involved, as in the loss of financial support from donors and potential donors. Morality, religion and decency aren’t exactly the central tenets of a university that’s dying to be seen on the same level of elite as MIT or Stanford. Still, this is the most exciting end to the Spring Carnival that I or anyone else has likely ever heard of or seen.