We Called Him Mr. Lewis

03 Monday Dec 2012

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Arne Duncan, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Chemistry, Cigarettes, Disllusionment, ExxonMobil, Family Income, High-Stakes Testing, Humanities, Low-Income Students, Michelle Rhee, New York State Regents Exam, Nicotine, Organic Chemistry, Politics of Education, Poverty, Steve Perry, Students of Color, Teacher Effectiveness, Tenth Grade, US Department of Education, Wendy Kopp

Screenshot from To Sir, with Love (1967), December 3, 2012. (http://movies.tvguide.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws – pic’s low resolution/subject matter for blog.

The dumb technocratic class (Wendy Kopp, Michelle Rhee, Steve Perry, Arne Duncan) and the assholes who fund them (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, ExxonMobil, US Department of Education) continue to pump out the mantra that effective teachers are the single most important variable in student performance, retention and graduation. This despite a half-century’s worth of research showing that family income was the far more important piece of data.

But even if Kopp, Rhee and Perry’s snake oil somehow turned out to be true, the fact is, the high-stakes testing movement and No Child Left Behind (and now Race to the Top) has turned effective teachers into lab leaders teaching to state-wide tests. Our current K-12 regime makes it so that ineffective teachers can be seen as effective because they’re only concerned with higher test scores, not actual learning. And some of them, not even concerned with that.

About this time thirty years ago, I had a group of wholly ineffective teachers in my tenth grade Humanities classes at Mount Vernon High School (see my posts “Half-Baked Z and Christian Zeal” from September ’10 and “This…Is…Jeopardy” from March ’11). Mr. Lewis was but one example of an unimaginative instructor. He was our Level 1 Chemistry teacher. We started his class in a very tense situation. There were fifty-one students in our class to start the year because the school administrators had failed to hire a new Level 0 (the highest level for the highest of the high-performing students) teacher for Chemistry. Our future valedictorian and other Level 0 folks spent a month protesting to the head of the Science Department, Estelle Abel, about the overcrowding and the mixing of the two levels. It took nearly two months before the situation was resolved. By that time, November ’84, none of us wanted Lewis for a teacher.

His was a class that could be fun and entertaining, but not usually educational. Sometimes our chemistry education came with errors and miscalculations. Perhaps his mistakes piled up because it was seventh period and near the end of the school day. Or maybe we were tired and inattentive.

Marlboro cigarette butts, September 19, 2007. (bachmont via Wikipedia/Flickr.com). In public domain.

The truth was that Lewis was a teacher with a serious chemical addiction. His was a chain-smoking world. When he opened up the door to the storage room where the test tubes and Pyrex jars were, stale cigarette smoke entered the room. His teeth were a pasty yellow, and they had a film that seemed to build up on them and in his mouth by the time we had him at the end of the day. On more than one occasion, Lewis would get phlegm caught in his mouth while in the middle of one of his lectures. Then he’d pause as he gulped the phlegm, and then he kept going. It was absolutely disgusting.

One day I met with Mr. Lewis after class to discuss my struggles with the material. He was at the front lab table sitting on a stool. In front of him on the table were fifteen Marlboro cigarettes, all lit and neatly lined up in a row. During our ten minutes together, he smoked one cigarette after another, sucking them down so fast that he had to pause to clear his throat from time to time. By the time I left, he’d gone through twelve out of fifteen, and I smelled like I’d been at one of my father Jimme’s bars. I was more than sure that Lewis’ nicotine dependency was a factor in his inability to teach Chemistry to us well (Cigarettes And Coffee, by Otis Redding).

My grades for the year going into the last weeks of the school year had ranged between an unimpressive 70 and an 87. But with the New York State Regents Exam in Chemistry coming up, Lewis was nonchalant in his attempts to prepare us for the Regents. Lewis went as far as to say, “There’s nothing to worry about” on the subject of organic chemistry. “There will be hardly any organic chemistry on the exam, anyway,” he said. After eight months of listening to his blathering, I thought “That’s it!” The next time I got money from Jimme, I bought the Barron’s Chemistry Regents exam prep book. It was just before Memorial Day, and I had a month before the exam.

Barron’s Regents Exams & Answers Chemistry (2011), December 3, 2012 (http://barnesandnoble.com).

On my Chemistry Regents I scored a 95, the third or fourth highest grade in the school (the highest grades were a 99 and 97 that year). My score raised my final grade in Lewis’ class six points, from a 79 to an 85. My score left me feeling jaded and disillusioned. “Wow,” I thought. “My teachers really don’t know much more than I do!” I knew that a lot of my Level 1 Chemistry classmates didn’t fare so well on the exams, because they believed Lewis when he said that there wouldn’t be much organic chemistry on the exam. By my own count during the exam, between thirty-five and forty of the 100 questions were organic chemistry ones.

It took having Meltzer for AP US History in eleventh grade for me to trust teachers again. I didn’t need anyone to teach tests to me. I needed a teacher who could help me open up a door into myself and into a world I hadn’t explored before. And millions of students — especially of color and from impoverished backgrounds — need teachers free to do that, without the threat of high-stakes tests hanging over them like a boulder.

James and the PAGPSA

29 Thursday Nov 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Activism, Afrocentric, Afrocentricity, Authentic Blackness, Black Action Society, Campus Climate, Carnegie Mellon University, Community, Diversity, Friendships, Graduate School, GSPIA, Isolation, PAGPSA, Pan African Graduate and Professional Student Association, Pitt, Pittsburgh, Politics of Graduate School, Retention, Self-Discovery, University of Pittsburgh

James and the Giant Peach photo art (1996), November 29, 2012. (http://disneymania.com.br).

About this time twenty years ago, perhaps for the first time in my life, I found myself around like-minded individuals, folks who seemed to understand me on an intellectual level. The fact that these were fellow graduate students, all at Pitt and all willing to form an association that would enable us to develop real connections across the campus, was inspiring to me. After four years of off-and-on involvement in the Black Action Society, not to mention my first year in the History grad program, I’d almost given up on the idea that I could form good friendships and acquaintance-ships through any formal gatherings.

But this was especially true regarding my thinking about my fellow Black students and other students of color. For the most part, I’d been around two kinds of students of color during my first five years at the University of Pittsburgh. One group was the semi-nerdy set, folks who cared deeply about their academic performance, but were also late-bloomers socially — people like me in more than a few ways. They tended to care little, though, about campus activism around diversity, retention or campus climate issues.

The other group was the Afrocentric set, people who often reminded me of my one-time Hebrew-Israelite brethren, whose views of Blackness were so limiting that I would’ve been a traitor just for listening to Chicago or Phil Collins. Those folks had virtually taken over the Black Action Society by my senior year. Forget mentioning popular folks, like sorors, frat guys, football, basketball and track guys and gals, or those fully invested in Pitt’s Honors College. I mingled with them all, and found little in common with them, intellectually or economically.

Me with Mark James, PAGPSA meeting, GSPH building, University of Pittsburgh, February 26, 1993 (Lois Nembhard).

That changed a bit my first year of grad school. Often in my walking and running across campus, I’d bump into a Black grad student here or there. At Hillman Library, the Cathedral of Learning, William Pitt Union, the SLIS building or other places. We’d recognize each other, we said hello, we even exchanged our names. Two of them in particular — Ed and Hayley — reached out to me at the end of the Spring ’92 semester, because they wanted to put together an organization that would represent our interests as grad students of color.

In mid-August, the emails began to go back and forth in earnest to establish what we’d end up calling the Pan African Graduate and Professional Student Association (PAGPSA) that fall. Through Jack Daniel’s office (see my post “The Miracle of Dr. Jack Daniel” from May ’11), we obtained the start-up funds necessary to make the new association go.

At our founding meeting that September, there were eight of us, all highly motivated to be as inclusive as possible, all feeling suddenly less isolated than we had felt a week, month or semester earlier. We decided on the “Pan African” part of the association’s name because we wanted to welcome as many graduate students of color as possible, particularly African and Afro-Caribbean students. The terms “Black” and “African American,” we agreed, wouldn’t be inclusive enough.

We also decided that despite the political implications of our new name, that this association would primarily be about bringing students together for social gatherings, for additional information and education beyond their course work and dissertations, but not to be campus activists. So many of the Black, African and Afro-Caribbean grad students at Pitt were in fact working on master’s or other professional degrees, and wouldn’t be on campus long enough to make lasting changes through activism, strictly speaking. Plus, there was the risk that activism would be so all-consuming — especially on issues like campus climate, long-term support for research and retention rates — that folks would fail to complete the work they came to Pitt to do in the first place.

CMU-Pitt mug, from joint PAGPSA/BGSO meeting on diversity and grad school, October 1992, November 29, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

By the time that first meeting broke up, I was content to have met folks like Mark, Hayley, Lois, Errol, Ed, and a couple of others, to find us all on the same page about something as serious as starting a new association of a significant cross-section of Pitt’s graduate students of color. But in the process, I’d made a new friend that fall through our meetings and our joint gatherings with Carnegie Mellon’s Black Graduate Student Organization (BGSO).

James came along and challenged PAGPSA in October and November regarding our campus activism stance, arguing that being a part of any organization of students of color meant being active. Of course the leadership disagreed, but that’s how I met the man. He was a charismatic Black Iowan preacher’s son, and more politically active than anyone I’d known under the age of thirty. James had ideas about everything, from the future of hip-hop to the implications of my research on multiculturalism and Black Washington, DC.

Though he was a GSPIA (Graduate School of Public and International Affairs) master’s student and ultimately finished his degree in ’94, we would remain friends through the rest of the ’90s. Between him and Matt (see my post “My Friend Matt” from September) and PAGPSA, I remained grounded even as I became buried in the minutia of US, African American and educational policy historiography over the next half-decade. Thankfully, I no longer felt like a lone wolf. Thankfully, I knew that I wasn’t alone in a sea of graduate school and faculty White maleness after that fall.

The So-Called Fiscal Cliff = Obama’s Lethal Weapon

14 Wednesday Nov 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Movies, Politics, Pop Culture

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Bush Tax Cuts, Federal Budget Cuts, Fiscal Cliff, Fiscal Curb, Jump Scene, Lawrence O'Donnell, Lethal Weapon (1987), Mel Gibson, Mitt Romney, MSNBC, Popular Culture Cliches, President Barack Obama, The Last Word, Thelma & Louise (1991)

For nearly a week, the news folks have droned on and on about the fiscal curb of expiring Bush 43 tax cuts and sequestering cuts in federal spending that will occur at the end of this year. It’s like everyone’s desperate for real news. And there won’t be any real news, unless President Obama decides to give in on the Bush 43 tax cuts or somehow decides that Romney’s fraudulent math is no longer a sign of lunacy.

The best coverage I’ve read or seen on this has been on Lawrence O’Donnell’s The Last Word on MSNBC, as he recognized early on the difference between higher taxes immediately on January 1, 2013 and gradual but steady cuts for the federal budget over a twelve-month period. Still, O’Donnell’s cliché for the alleged cliff — the final scene of Thelma & Louise (1991), in which the two commit suicide by driving off a cliff into the Grand Canyon — has been so overused that it doesn’t quite get at the mania of both the media and the neocons on this issue of taxes and budget cuts.

Hence the above — albeit low resolution — one-minute clip from Lethal Weapon (1987), where the crazy suicidal character played by Mel Gibson forces a potential suicidal jumper to jump off a building (a better clip is on YouTube – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOP6uMTYaM8). Now I know that Gibson has become a punchline in recent years, an aging and raging racist drunk. But that wasn’t his persona in ’87, and certainly not in this scene, where he forces the equivalent of Boehner, Cantor and McConnell off the ledge. “Do you really wanna jump? Do you?” Mr. O’Donnell, this is the clip you should’ve ran with last week!

My AED Resignation

09 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Politics, race, Work

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Academy for Educational Development, AED, Business Practices, Calling, Careers, Diversity Issues, Grants, Jobs, Lumina Foundation for Education, Nonprofit Organizations, Partnerships for College Access and Success, PCAS, Resignation, Richard Nixon, Shawshank Redemption, Tim Robbins

Richard Nixon delivering the “V” sign outside Army One upon his final departure from the White House, August 9, 1974. (Robert L. Knudsen via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Five years ago today, on the second Friday in November ’07, I handed my resignation notice to my boss Sandy (see my post “Early November” from November ’08). We were at the end of a two-day final Directors Meeting for our Partnerships for College Access and Success grantees. I had decided to step down from my deputy director position with the initiative, and of course, with the Academy for Educational Development (AED). This wasn’t the first time I resigned from a job in order to move on to another job or to a new track in my career. But this was the first time I’d done it without much promise for new work.

I hadn’t even been offered my teaching position with University of Maryland University College at the time I resigned (that wouldn’t happen for another two weeks). Yet I was sure that after seven years at AED and nearly four years with PCAS, that my role as a full-time nonprofit manager with the organization was soon coming to an end. It was obvious that Lumina Foundation for Education was no longer interested in large long-term programmatic work on college access and college success, with changes in leadership and philosophy in the previous year. The additional grant extension that we worked on in ’06 was due to end in March ’08, and with my $70,000+/year salary, I’d find myself without work soon after.

There were other options. Sandy and the AED NY office (with my help in a few cases) had obtained some smaller grants for evaluation work from Citigroup, from Wallace, and from Lumina related to the PCAS work. None of this work was full-time, though, and would likely not be more than half-time work. I would then have to go through months of selling myself to other projects across the organization in order to get close to full-time and maintain my benefits. I’d done this once before, at the end of my time with New Voices, in late ’03 and early ’04. It was a stressful, gut-churning process, one that I didn’t want to repeat.

2007 AED Logo, November 9, 2012. AED no longer exists, releasing logo to public domain.

Plus, I’d learned so much about AED during that process and over those last four years in my deputy director job, most of it not good. Bad business practices, shady accounting practices, poor diversity and promotion practices (see my “AED Update – DOA for 50th Anniversary” from March ’11). I just saw AED as a way-station for people who were truly dedicated to social change, and not a place to build a career.

Still, the work at PCAS wasn’t complete, and would likely not get done (or get done at all deliberate speed – very slowly and gradually) if I just resigned with two weeks or four weeks’ notice. So I proposed the following in my resignation letter and in my conversation with Sandy. I gave three months’ notice, to ensure that I would complete any final reports for Lumina and to ensure my involvement in any potential funding opportunities to continue segments of the initiative. I proposed that I could finish the PCAS and related work as a consultant, making it easier for me to transition out of AED and for Sandy to transition PCAS. I could finish what would end up being a 144-page resource guide and a twenty-six-page scholarly journal article based on the PCAS work.

Sandy accepted my resignation and my proposal, of course. But I don’t think she believed I’d follow through with the resignation, given the amount of time I gave myself before my last day. I don’t think that she believed it until I submitted a copy of my resignation letter to Human Resources on January 9, ’08. She may have figured that my wife would talk me out of leaving.

But Angelia and me had discussed resigning as a calculated risk since the end of ’05. AED had rarely done right by me, right from the day I was first interviewed for a program officer position in November ’00. I was underpaid (given my skills, education and experience), and more important, I found the place an improper fit for the kind of work I wanted to do on education and other social justice issues. We had saved money and I had carefully applied for jobs in anticipation of this decision since the early part of ’06. A bit of good luck made it easier for me to move on, having been offered a part-time faculty position at UMUC right before Thanksgiving ’07.

Tim Robbins in Shawshank Redemption [screen shot] (1994), November 9, 2012. Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws – low resolution & symbolic relevance to post.

The question I’ve been asked the most often in the past four and a half years has been whether I miss working at AED. I sometimes miss the money I made while working there, as it’s easier working one job with a standard schedule than teaching and the feast-and-famine cycles of consulting and contract work.

But I don’t miss the organization, which essentially no longer exists. I really only think about AED when I do work for an organization that reminds me of AED (not good) or when I post about my experiences. Still, I learned a lot about business and greed, administration and ethics, people, social change and fairness in my time there. A mixed blessing, indeed.

President Obama vs. Fake Obama Today

06 Tuesday Nov 2012

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Barack Obama, Conservatives, Election '12, Election 2012, Fake Obama, Liberals, Magic, Magic Negro, Michael Duncan Clarke, Mysticism, Nigger, Obama Derangement Syndrome, President Barack Obama, President Obama, Progressives, Racism, Real Obama, Tea Baggers, Tea Party, The Green Mile, The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000), Will Smith

Eddie Million’s Obama Effigy, Moreno Valley, CA, October 22, 2012. (Moreno Valley Press-Enterprise).

I’ve already voted, a week ago Sunday at my early voting polling place in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland. So Election Day for me today is both a matter of waiting and reflecting on the past four years. What I’ve come to realize is that this election has never been about Mitt Romney, Republicans, the Tea Baggers or even President Barack Obama’s actual record. No, this election has been between the President Obama who has let us down versus the President Obama who has sullied the White House because he’s a nigger in the minds of millions of Americans (I hate that word, but it sums up the sentiments of a third of the electorate very well).

Both views refuse to take what President Obama has and hasn’t been able to do into account, to treat him as we would any other president. For progressives — real liberals, not the people who the media paint as liberal merely because they’re registered Democrats — President Obama has done almost nothing right since his second day in office. For some, because he hasn’t done a complete 180° turnaround on Gitmo, on the War on Terror, on immigration reform and environmental policy, Obama has merely been a continuation of Bush 43. Because Obama’s charismatic intelligence wasn’t able to turn Congress into a rubber stamp, because Obama’s magic didn’t bring real unemployment down to under five percent, progressives are less enthused this time around.

The late Michael Duncan Clarke in The Green Mile (1999), December 1999. (http://movies.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws – related to subject of post.

It’s almost as if many expected the late Michael Duncan Clarke’s character from The Green Mile (1999) or Will Smith’s character Bagger Vance from The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000) to erupt from President Obama. No wonder the disappointment in the first Black president, who only had to face the worst set of economic, financial, social, international and environmental crises any president has ever faced, Lincoln and FDR included.

For Republicans, conservatives and racists, the issue has always been about how to keep this Islamic jihadist, socialist atheist, and communist anti-patriot from destroying the country since his first day in office. Though President Obama received nearly 68 million votes, there’s no way he earned those votes. Somehow, the Black guy either leveraged the White guilt of White liberals, or he used the Chicago machine to electronically stuff ballot boxes by the millions. Plus, of course, we need his college transcripts from Occidental and Columbia, his original birth certificate and his original application for an American passport to prove that he’s a legitimately intelligent American citizen. But somehow, none of this is about race?

Will Smith and Matt Damon in The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000), August 24, 2009. (http://grist.org). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws – subject of post.

For this group, it wouldn’t have mattered if Obama had single-handedly developed perpetual nuclear fusion, warp drive for space ships and a cure for cancer. He’s a Black guy in the White House, and they can’t have this. That’s why from the moment Chief Justice John Roberts swore President Obama into office, Congressional leaders, their filthy-rich supporters and Tea Bagger racists have worked non-stop to make Obama a one-term president. They can only paint President Obama in the worst ways because an honest portrayal of him would leave this group with “he’s Black” as their only reason for opposition.

As the rest of you vote today and/or wait for the results, keep the past four years of Obama Derangement Syndrome across the political spectrum in mind, so that you vote for the real President Obama. Don’t vote for the magic man, and certainly don’t vote for the Magic Negro either.

Cath The Great

05 Monday Nov 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Annual Meeting, Carnegie Mellon, Carnegie Mellon University, Carolina Inn, Catherine A. Lugg, Catherine Lugg, Conference, Conference Presentations, Department of HIstory, Durham North Carolina, Educational Policy, Friendship, Friendships, Graduate School, HES, History of Education Society, Pittsburgh, Politics of Education, Serendipity, Steven Schlossman, University of North Carolina

Catherine A. Lugg, circa 2009, November 5, 2012. (Catherine A. Lugg via Facebook).

I define serendipity as the ability of hard work to create what others would consider good luck, fortuitous chances, random opportunities for success. I’ve managed to do just that over and over again over the course of my life, particularly as a student and occasionally as a writer. But as a human being in search of real, positive, life-changing connections and friendships, serendipity has been very hard to make happen. When it does occur, at least for me, it becomes one of those moments that I seal in my mind, like a note in a time capsule.

The beginning of November ’94 was one of those weeks filled with serendipity. It started with the chair of the History Department at Carnegie Mellon, Steven Schlossman. He had decided that he couldn’t make it to the 1994 History of Education Society annual meeting in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. But because he had already booked a room and a flight, Schlossman apparently figured that he could simply transfer both the airline tickets and room to me instead (back in the pre-9/11 days when you could do such things without creating a potential terror alert). So Schlossman met with me a week before this conference and said that I should go “to represent the department” and because he thought it “a great opportunity” for me.

Carolina Inn at night (its better side), Chapel Hill, NC, 2007, November 5, 2012. (http://booked.com).

I wasn’t so sure, with the HES meeting being held in a mansion-turned-hotel, not quite on the University of North Carolina campus. Once I arrived from Pittsburgh on that first Wednesday in November, though, I felt at least free from the burdens of grad school at Carnegie Mellon. The weather was perfect, in the low eighties, and my World History sections for that Thursday and Friday were being covered by other teaching assistants. So I gave myself a tour of Chapel Hill, all the while wondering why didn’t I apply here for graduate school.

That was only the prelude to the four-day conference that began that Thursday. And since Schlossman had charged me to attend four sessions and to take notes on them on his behalf, I went to as many conference offerings as humanly possible. Back then, I had a much higher tolerance for boring academician-speak. So I was easily able to take detailed notes. I asked questions on topics in which I knew little. I even smiled and introduced myself to the mostly over-fifty White male crowd.

By Saturday, I had one mandatory session to attend. It was something about education in Japan and Germany post-World War II and how Japanese textbook makers left Japanese atrocities during World War II out of the nation’s history textbooks. During the Q & A, I asked what I thought was a pedestrian question, pedestrian because I forgot it five minutes after I asked it. Yet several people afterward told me that I’d asked a great question, as if I had some unique perspective or something. “It’s not even my subject matter,” I thought, adding in my mind that “Maybe some of these folks thought that the Black guy in the room didn’t really know anything.”

History of Education Society 1994 Annual Meeting program, November 3-6 1994, November 5, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

Or, as it turned out, my dedication to Schlossman’s charge made me seem 1,000 times as enthused about the HES meeting as anyone else attending. For two women did in fact notice me during that session. That Saturday evening, during beer, wine and spirits time in a cramped conference/ball room space, after pleasantries with a couple of older professors, I bumped into the two women again. They immediately engaged me in conversation, because they wanted to know how I managed to remain upbeat during such a boring ass conference.

Barbara and Catherine were both grad students in the School of Education at Penn State, as it turned out. Both were also PhD candidates in the midst of doctoral theses, and because of my being only twenty-four, couldn’t believe that I was a PhD candidate also. What I thought was going to be just another one of thirty conversations with older White male professors and kiss-ass grad students turned into a nearly ninety-minute discussion of research, pop culture, the HES conversation, and the ironies of life, and all with a snarkiness that only someone like me (or Rachel Maddow) could fully appreciate.

It might’ve ended there. Except that Barbara and Catherine’s research on federal education policy and achievement gap data for Latinos (especially Mexican immigrants) dovetailed pretty well with my work on multiculturalism and Black education in Washington, DC. Plus, the three of us saw an opportunity to use next year’s HES meeting as an opportunity to expose the hypocrisy of the old boys’ club and their petri-dish sense of educational issues for women, for communities of color, and for immigrants. We titled it, “Educational Historiography and Diverse Populations: Why Research Isn’t ‘Bringing a Pet to Class’.” Somehow the powers who ran HES accepted our proposal, giving us a chance to present at HES in Minneapolis in October ’95.

A skunk (something a teacher shouldn’t bring to class), November 5, 2012. (http://animal.discovery.com).

By that time, though, Barbara couldn’t make it, having recently married and having moved across the pond to the UK. Catherine ended up taking her place, and ended up doing two presentations in less than twenty-four hours. She’s been there for me as a genuine friend in academia and in my aspirations as a writer ever since.

The HES meetings were the start of an eighteen-year friendship with Catherine, one that actually survived despite the tendency of the academic life to kill more friendships than one could ever start. I think we’re friends still because we share a same sense of the world, and both are willing to snark our way through the madness of it all.

Irksome American Conversations on Gender & Race With “Impact”

31 Wednesday Oct 2012

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

"Impact", "Impacted", American Conversations, Bigotry, Cliches, Discourse, Feminism, Interracial Marriage, Interracial Relationships, News Media, Platitudes, Racism, Social Media, Strong Women

Wonder Woman, October 30, 2012. (http://tvequals.com).

I’ve wanted to write about this one for a few months now. Post-Tropical Cyclone Sandy or not, this one is important to me. The fact that so much of our discourse in traditional media, social media and everyday conversation remains so much more about cliché commentary than about any exploration of the meaning behind the words we say.

I’ve already looked at the laziness that a monopolized media has created in the world of journalism (see my recent post “The Make-Believe Media” from earlier this month). But this is about more than the “both sides do it” media world. It’s about the contradictions between the style in which we use our words and the substance within. The reality behind our words, then, becomes buried, and has made us all a little bit more ignorant in the process.

For me, three random examples stand out:

“We Can Do It!” – Rosie the Riveter poster [1942], by J. Howard Miller, October 30, 2012 (Wikipedia). In public domain.

1. “I’m a strong woman” – This could also be “I’m a smart woman,” or “I’m a bitch,” or “I’m a tough woman,” or a hundred other phrases I see every day on Twitter or hear in our public discourse. Even if this is meant to show some sort of feminist solidarity, it seems trite to proclaim strength as part of a conversation about gender (or any other topic, for that matter). I learned my lesson more than thirty years ago, courtesy of Crush #1, at the ripe old age of twelve, to not spend so much of my time telling people how smart I was (see my “Was I Really In Love In 7th Grade?” post from March ’12).

Really, how weird would it sound for me at six-three and 230 pounds to say that “I’m a strong man?” Or in commenting about all the abuse I survived, that “I’m a tough man?” I think that most of us can recognize a strong, tough, intelligent woman without the use of underwhelming language. I think most of us regardless of gender genuinely admire women who are who they are without saying the words all day and every day. To slightly misquote the name of the foundation that Lance Armstrong just stepped down from, just live strong, be strong and stay strong, and tell others females (and occasionally males) to do the same.

2. “Interracial/multiracial marriages are on the rise” = a less racist/post-racial America – Yeah, if there hadn’t been a long history of grossly unequal interracial relationships in this country for the previous two hundred years prior to the late ’80s. This isn’t to say that the average American citizen isn’t less bigoted or racist than they would’ve been thirty years ago. But a sexual or even marital bond doesn’t automatically mean a lack of prejudice. It certainly doesn’t mean a massive empathy for and participation in social justice and other human rights causes. Just like with any relationship or marriage, people from different ethnic backgrounds can also come together for all the wrong reasons, can be abusive, and can even be racist.

Mildred Loving and Richard Loving (famous for landmark Supreme Court Loving v. Virginia (1967) miscegnation case), January 26, 1965. (AP). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws – subject of post and no other photos available.

Making an exception for a few Whites, Blacks, Latinos or Asians as an individual doesn’t mean that one doesn’t generally view Whites as racist, Blacks as intellectually inferior, Latinos as “illegals” or Asians as “model minorities.” The fact that interracial marriages have been on the rise for nearly thirty years merely proves that the taboo against these marriages has broken down, not that the nation isn’t divided around the issue of race.

Manny Pacquiao v. Antonio Margarito (true meaning of the verb “impact”), Arlington, TX, November 13, 2010. (AP via http://9run.ca).

3. The growing use of impact as a verb and an adverb: Whether “impact,” “impacted,” “impacting,” or “impactful,” most of the time, this term is used incorrectly, especially in terms of politics. Take the use of impact during the 2012 Presidential Election cycle. “Nothing has impacted the 2012 race more than Romney’s 47% tape.” Really? Did someone take the recording and literally hit Mitt Romney in the head with it until he was rendered unconscious? If that didn’t occur, then the correct sentence would be “Nothing has had more of an impact on the 2012 race than Romney’s 47% tape.”

It’s as if journalists, reporters, pundits, commentators, intellectuals and scholars have forgotten that there are other, better words in the English language to use than impact. Like “affect,” or “effect,” or “influence,” or “sway,” or “transform,” or “change.” There are NFL color commentators and WWE announcers who use the word impact more correctly than most in the news and social media worlds. But this incorrect overuse is apparently here to stay, affecting and infecting our already ignorant use of language.

All of these uses of language irk me, because if we are to ever have real discussions of serious issues, we need our language to have real substance to it. Not just platitudes and clichés that wouldn’t survive Fashion Avenue if they took the form of a dress.