Category Archives: Politics

Trip to the ‘Burgh

26 Wednesday Aug 2009

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

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My years as a full-fledged adult now number twenty-two. On this day and date, I left 616, Humanities, MVHS, Mount Vernon public schools, Mount Vernon and NYC behind for the first time. Even though I’d call New York City and Grand Central Station “the third armpit of hell” for the next seven years, I had plenty of times during my undergraduate days in which I missed the sights and smells of New York, the constant buzz. Not to mention quality deli meats, good pizza, Clover Donuts, the noise of Subway cars and Metro-North trains. But from the moment I started getting ready, truly ready to go, I had already left these things behind.

It was the last Wednesday in August when I took my five suitcases, Army bag, and two boxes by cab from 616 to 241st. But not before a long and tearful good-bye with my mother, Eri, Sarai, and Maurice. Yiscoc didn’t wake up to say good-bye until I was practically out the door. My stepfather insisted on giving me an extra fifty dollars for my college journey. I thought for a second about turning it down, and decided against it. “This was the least he owed me,” I thought. I felt bad about leaving, especially for Eri, who was just a little more than three years old. Darren and I took my stuff downstairs to the Reliable Taxi cab at five in the morning, got to the Subway stop and met Jimme there. We quietly rode the train to Penn Station on West 34th, where I’d catch the 7:50 am Amtrak for Pittsburgh. Once it was time to catch the train, Darren and Jimme helped with getting all of my stuff on the train, most of which I half-realized I probably wouldn’t need. We hugged, and Jimme actually teared up. This was the second time in a row I’d seen him sober, and he seemed happy for me.

The train ride to Pittsburgh was much longer than I expected. My assumption was that since Philly and Pittsburgh were in the same state that the ride wouldn’t last more than a couple of hours. What I didn’t know was that once we pulled into the City of Brotherly Love that the engineers would have to uncouple the electric engine and connect a diesel one. What I didn’t know was that the trip across the state of Pennsylvania was a long and windy one, with hills and mountains, small towns and tunnels. What I didn’t know was that there would be a boring recording describing the construction of track through the Allegheny Mountains which led to the creation of Horseshoe Lake. I took two naps, listened to five tapes, and with all of that, still had an hour and a half to spare. I ended up talking with a young Catholic priest during that time about the nuances of Christian faith and how Christians often misapply their faith in secular situations.

We pulled in about thirty minutes late, just before 5 pm. I immediately found a phone book and called for a Yellow Cab. I waited, and waited, and waited, all while about six cabs came up and picked up other passengers from my train. I looked at the downtown skyline and thought, “It doesn’t look like a hick town so far.” Yet the cab drivers sure acted like it was. They refused to make eye contact with me, much less pick me up. After an hour, I called Yellow Cab again, this time threatening them with a lawsuit. “If I don’t see a cab real soon, I’m contacting the NAACP and filing a discrimination lawsuit!,” I yelled to the dispatcher over the phone. Within three minutes I got my taxi. I was already beginning to think that Pittsburgh wasn’t my best choice for pursuing higher education.

My first drive through the heart of Pittsburgh reminded me of what people had been saying for years about New York and how great it was. Once we passed through downtown, which took less time than driving through Mount Vernon, we went through these decidedly working-class neighborhoods and Black communities that looked at least they belonged in South Side Mount Vernon. Then we reached the Oakland section of the ’Burgh. School buildings, college dorms that looked like silos, shops and restaurants abounded. Just before we turned left off of Forbes Avenue, I saw it, the Cathedral of Learning, for the first time. I was starting to feel better about my decision.

The driver turned left again, off Atwood and onto Fifth Avenue, then a right onto Lothrop, where, of course, Lothrop Hall was. It was an eleven-story dirty uranium-brown building, where years of coke soot had built up. There were few students or staff around. I went through security, using my high school ID for the last time, and the guard gave me a temporary dorm pass that I could use until I got my Pitt ID. My dorm room was on the third floor. It overlooked a drab and empty yet clean courtyard. I was lucky, since there was a good chance I might’ve ended up with a roommate. The dorm rooms at Lothrop went to one student apiece. I was so exhausted from all of the emotions and stresses of the day. I grabbed some junk food from the vending machine in the lobby, called my mother to tell her I was fine, somehow found the Mets game on my portable radio, and fell asleep in my twin bed.

Despite all that had happened at 616, in Humanities, MVHS and in Mount Vernon, I was homesick the last third of the semester. Not homesick because I missed having my ex-stepfather say, “take that base out of ya voice before I cave ya chest in.” Not homesick because I missed spending my Friday evenings and Saturdays tracking down Jimme at some dive in the Bronx or in Manhattan. I think that I was homesick because I was still reeling from crush #2, which made me realize that I never really had a home in the first place.

It took me a bit longer — about a year or so — to realize that despite the ‘Burgh’s lack of almost anything I’d normally describe as city or city-suburban life, I could still make the place my home. At the very least, the University of Pittsburgh was relatively more diverse, urban, and exciting than compared to the rest of the area. That was the reason I was there, after all. Still, I gave myself the room necessary to criticize the university and the city when I saw fit. But I also took time to look around, to see that whatever else was or wasn’t going on, I was in charge of my life now, and safe from the slights, hurts and abuses of my past.

Summer Camp

20 Saturday Jun 2009

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, music, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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I’ve had more than a few friends ask me, “Are you sure your doctorate’s not in psychology?” over the years. I usually laughed it off, saying that well-heeled historians are ones that can look at the human condition through a variety of disciplines. But that’s hardly the whole truth. I have a lifetime of experiences that have enabled me to play the role of pop psychologist and psychiatrist, mostly because of Darren and issues related to him.

For example, if this were any summer between ‘77 and ‘83, these would’ve been years I could’ve gone with my older brother to his summer day camps at The Clear View School in Dobbs Ferry, upper Westchester County. For four summers I did go with Darren to his private school for the mentally retarded and developmentally disabled, between ‘77 and ‘80. It was a strange experience, but I learned a lot about diversity, the human psyche, and perceptions of intelligence. I hardly realized how much until much later, in my years in the workforce and in grad school.

The first two summers at Clear View were a blur for me. I remember a few things. Like going to see Star Wars for the first time. Or going swimming, learning how to ride a bike, bowling, and lots of other fun activities. In that sense, Clear View was a fun place to be. I picked up a bunch of things there that I would’ve never learned at 616.

It wasn’t until my third summer there, the summer of ‘79, that I noticed the distinct differences between myself and Darren’s friends and classmates. Not to mention between Darren and them. It came as a bit of a shock to realize that Darren simply didn’t belong at a school for the mentally retarded — he was acting out at times in order to get whatever he wanted. As for me, I seldom had any lengthy conversations with the other kids. Not for lack of trying, though. It was the summer between fourth and fifth grade for me, and I’d already become used to talking politics and pop culture with a few kids my age.

I ended up talking mostly with staff, summer staff or regular staff. It didn’t matter. Even as socially awkward some of the teachers were, it was far better than forcing a conversation with a kid who might’ve had the equivalent abilities of Noah at two and a half or three years old. I had nothing against the kids at Clear View. They obviously suffered from Down’s syndrome, autism, bipolar disorder, severe brain injuries and so on. But at nine years old, I recognized the differences, and they were in stark contrast to anything I’d ever seen from Darren. I knew by the middle of that summer that my older brother wasn’t mentally retarded. I also knew, deep down, that staying at Clear View would do permanent damage to his psyche and destroy his best chances at living a normal life.

A visit to Mrs. Holtslag’s (Darren’s psychiatrist’s) Hastings-on-the-Hudson home in ’79, in which the front sat on a hill, the back on stilts, all overlooking a pale sandy-rock beach and the Hudson River below, was further evidence of both his relative normal-ness and of what bothered me about Clear View. This was my first experience of visiting anyone from an affluent or upper-middle class background, and certainly anyone White. A bunch of kids were there, including Darren. My older brother’s well-practiced autistic behavior — similar to at least three of his friends — was what bothered me about the visit. That, and being in a house I’d only seen before in a Hollywood movie. Wow, I remember thinking. Psychiatrists must make a ton of money.

I learned about other things affluent and White through my summers at Clear View in ‘79 and ‘80. That Darren’s initial diagnosis had changed, from “mildly mentally retarded” to “emotional mentally retarded.” That Clear View’s tuition was $33,000 a year – about $55,000 in today’s dollars. That New York State was paying for all of the tuition. That our group of healthy-eating White counselors thought that a cottage cheese and cucumber sandwich on whole wheat was a normal lunch. And that they were moving in ‘81 to a lush private campus in Briarcliff Manor.

I did get something out of that summer. Another layer of eclectic-ness to add to my already eclectic music tastes. Donna Summer, meet Kool & The Gang. Billy Joel, meet Barbra Streisand. I did get to see Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. But I also saw affluent White parents who’d occasionally visit, sometimes with their “normal” kids in tow. It made me realize that despite all of the hardships of life, many of these mentally retarded and developmental disabled kids had it better financially than anything I would see for more than twenty years. That’s hardly to say that this wasn’t a hardship, either for the parents or the kids in question. It was something I noticed, an ironic twist between the psychology of race and class and the psychiatry involved in working with both.

I provoked my mother into at least thinking about getting Darren out of Clear View after my last summer there in ‘80, six years after my father Jimme had him placed there because of Darren’s shyness. Darren at twelve had been institutionalized long enough to become more comfortable around the mentally retarded than in mainstream settings. He threw a temper-tantrum, kicking and screaming on the floor of our neighborhood laundromat when my mother suggested that she should send him to our local public school. My mother gave up, saying that “Darren only listens to White people,” and Darren stayed at Clear View for another seven years. This was typical Mom, taking the path of least resistance when the best option was often the more difficult one. It’s sad, but I still haven’t given up, on Darren or my mother.

In the Closet, On the Down Low

01 Monday Jun 2009

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

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The rainbow flag waving in the wind at San Francisco's Castro District, San Francisco, CA, August 5, 2010. (Benson Kua via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-2.0.

The rainbow flag waving in the wind at San Francisco’s Castro District, San Francisco, CA, August 5, 2010. (Benson Kua via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-2.0.

It’s Gay Pride Month, or LGBT Month, or GLBT Month, I guess, depending on one’s perspective. I have nothing directly to contribute, being the semi-well-adjusted heterosexual I am. But I do have something to say about what it means to me to have moved from a world where homophobia and heterosexism was a part of everyday speech (and sometimes action) to a place where it’s actually easy for me to embrace others of a different sexual orientation. Of course, I’m not talking about the world at large. I’m talking about 616 and the folks I knew growing up in Mount Vernon.

This isn’t easy for me to discuss. It means revealing more about myself and some painful memories growing up than even I’m used to doing. Still, it’s important for me and for others to understand that uncomfortable as folks may be about the reality that some people aren’t strictly male, female or heterosexual, these so-called others exist, and are a part of our family, among our co-workers, and deserve our acceptance, love, friendship and support. Or at least, our tolerance.

This story starts with an exchange I had with my father Jimme a couple of weeks before the start of my senior year in high school, August ’86. In a summer when my sexuality was no longer a question — at least to me — my father still had his doubts. I’d hardly seen Jimme most of the summer, only coming over occasionally to see how he was doing or to bum a few bucks off of him. I saved enough money from my job to cover the cost of my three AP classes — $159 to cover the $53 fee for each of the three classes. The College Board and MVHS didn’t grant fee waivers for these courses. Even though I had put that money in my mother’s checking account, I knew that with our money issues my savings were gone. So I found Jimme one Saturday morning near the end of August hanging out on the street corner and having drunk his fill.

His mood was especially foul that day, like his body odor. He refused to give me any money. “I don’ give my money to no faggats!” Jimme yelled at me as he came walking down his block toward me. He’d seen me come out of the front yard of the house he lived in. I wasn’t in the mood for his crap. “I’m not a faggot and I’m not gay,” I yelled back. When he got closer, I could see that he’d been out too long already. Jimme’s clothes were a mess, and his face was in a twisted rage. He grabbed me by my arm.

“Did you get yo’ dict wet?,” he asked as usual.

“Even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you,” I said.

“YOU’RE A FAGGAT,” he yelled again.

I was so pissed with him that I said, “Forget it. I don’t want your money. I’ll find a job somewhere.”

That was when the conversation got ugly.

“Ain’t no one gonna giv’ a faggat like you no job.”

“You’re a drunk and you’ve had a job for years.”

“Watch who you talkin’ to bo’. I da boss of the bosses. No one tell me what to do.”

“Why should I? I’m a faggot, right? Faggots don’t have to listen to an alcoholic like you”

“I yo’ father, an’ if you want my money, you do what I say.”

“I don’t have to listen to you or anybody else.”

“Come here bo’!”

At that point, I came over and Jimme grabbed my arm. Then he tried to punch me in the face. I caught his right arm, twisted it away from me and toward him, and then pushed him away. The push sent him to the ground, tipsy as he was.

“I can’ believe you hit yo’ dad”

“I didn’t hit you, I pushed you. Besides, you tried to hit me first. You’re not acting like much of a dad right now, anyway.”

I started to walk away, only to be hit in the head with folded up money, about $200 in all. “Take it all, faggat. I don’ want you aroun’ here no more,” he said.

This time I grabbed him and stuffed half the money in his pocket.

“Don’t you still have to eat, pay rent, get some more to drink?”

I kept all of the rest because I figured I earned it that day. Darren, par for the course, just stood around and watched.

That was a scary conversation and confrontation for me. It meant seeing myself for the first time as someone not only defending myself, but defending unnamed others. I could’ve easily said that I love women, and only women, that there was something wrong with gays and being gay. But I didn’t. I guess because at least gays hadn’t chased me down the street, calling me a “faggat” in the process.

I was also ambivalent, though. My mother, for all of her quietness about my lack of dating and friends in the five years before I went off to college, would make weird statements basically daring me to say that I was gay just so she could somehow un-gay me if I was. For her, the mixed signals she received from me started when I was seven. We had just moved to 616, and after a summer camp at Darren’s Clearview School, we went outside on 616’s grounds for the first time, in August ’77. The kids at 616 and 630 harrassed us, chased us around while throwing rocks at us. Scared, we hid behind the big, wooden, dark brown front door and huddled, hoping that the kids wouldn’t find us.

Instead, a couple of young Black Turks saw us, took us to my mother and stepfather, and declared that they saw us doing “the dukey.” I had no idea what they were talking about. All I knew was that my mother and stepfather proceeded to whip us as if we’d gone to the grocery store and stolen $100 worth of candy and soda. Besides “dukey,” the only other new word I picked up that day was “faggot.” That, and an incident one year earlier, one in which an older boy attempted to force me to suck his penis, was about all I knew about how others were “different” and how others saw difference until high school. Even then, I understood at some level the difference between someone attempting to force you to into a sexual act and someone simply being themselves. It didn’t necessarily make me feel better, though.

There were others who dropped the F-bomb on me over the years. Most of them were Black and Afro-Caribbean guys whom I’d shown up in the classroom or in gym class. All of it made me feel as if there were something wrong with me, like a target had been painted on my forehead that said this fool is so different that we can see in him the worst of our homophobic fears.

Even when I started to date, and even after I started having sex, I would occassionally run into women and men who assumed I was gay. Or at least, “asexual,” “sober,” “boring.” It was partly due to my overintellectualizing sex as a distraction, combined with a well-developed habit of protecting myself emotionally, that led to others making these cosmic-leap assumptions.

By the time I had reached my junior year at Pitt, I knew full well that not only I wasn’t gay, but that I was comfortable being around gays, lesbians, even transgender folk. And that made me uncomfortable. I was also a Christian, and between my mother, televangelists like Frederick K.C. Price, Kenneth Copeland, Jimmy Swaggert, Oral Roberts, as well as some of my friends, I found it difficult to reconcile their interpretations of scripture with my own natural comfortability with people of different sexual orientations. Even in grad school, if someone asked me — I certainly didn’t volunteer this — I’d trip over my own words quoting scripture while saying that it’s none of my business what other people do in their private lives.

It took an interview I did with an office at the University of Maryland in ’98 to finally see what I was doing. They asked me flat out if I had a problem advising LGBT students. I actually didn’t, but I also didn’t want to come off as gay myself. So I kind of tripped all over the place while answering the question. Not only did I not get the job. The phone clicked about five seconds after I gave my answer.

I realized that I was still being heterosexist myself, that I had yet to confront the issues I had around sexuality growing up. I made a few decisions around this issue after that interview. One was to stop spouting out-of-context scriptural rhetoric about homosexuality, and to stop attending churches where gays and lesbian were blamed for high crime rates and poverty, like the church I used to attend in Wilkinsburg back in the ’90s. I realized that there was a higher law, one that says “judge not, lest ye be judged,” and “do unto others…” Beyond that, it’s okay to say “I don’t know” when it comes to Christianity and to say “I’m comfortable” when I’m at work or in conversation with someone who happens to be gay or lesbian.

For those wholly uncomfortable with what they’ve been reading, let me say this. Uncomfortability with someone different is hardly unusual. But your uncomfortability shouldn’t mean that someone else’s human and civil rights should be trampled in the process. On the spiritual front, we aren’t supposed to pass judgment on others because we’re uncomfortable with who they are or even how they live as Christians. What do we know, anyway? Otherwise, we’re no different from the White bigots who rapped themselves around a Confederate flag while killing, maiming and intimidating Blacks and others of color out of their rights. Oh well! I guess I’m out of the closet now myself.

On Catherine Lacey

22 Wednesday Apr 2009

Posted by in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Politics, Work, Youth

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Me with Catherine Lacey at the Spencer Foundation, June 25, 2002. (Angelia N. Levy).

Me with Catherine Lacey at the Spencer Foundation, June 25, 2002. (Angelia N. Levy).

This month marks fourteen years since my plans for earning my doctorate were all but assured by a Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. It was a one-year fellowship, only $15,000, but it meant that I didn’t have to teach for a year, that I didn’t have to do grunt work for my advisor Joe Trotter, and that I wasn’t beholden to the history department at Carnegie Mellon for much of anything. It was a great triumph in my little world of graduate school. But of all the things that resulted from that award, one thing that I didn’t count on was another mentor and friend. Without a doubt, Catherine Lacey has had the longest lasting impact on my career and on my thinking, in and out of academia.

Catherine was the Senior Program Officer and Director of the Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship Program when I applied for it in the fall of ’94. She had taken over the program in ’93, with the apparent charge of making the program more inclusive and more dynamic for its participants. I’m not sure what the foundation’s dissertation fellowship program was like before. All I know is that Catherine’s seven-year-long tenure running it was one in which she practiced compassion, humility, optimism, and quiet leadership. She never sounded like an academician in directing the work, although she was a bit philosophical at times. She never sounded like a bureaucrat or a senior foundation officer who practiced the power of “No,” even though that was certainly a major part of her job. Almost from my first conversation with Catherine, I realized that she was different from anyone I’d met with an academic background or in the foundation world.

Her background was as a Catholic nun who at one point was a Catholic school teacher, at least through the late ’70s, if I remember correctly. At some point she decided to go back to school, to eventually earn a doctorate in education from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Even though she was no longer a practicing nun (whatever I mean by that, I’m not entirely sure), I’m sure that this training and philosophical approach to life and work helped her a lot in her position at the Spencer Foundation. Maybe it was also the fact that she grew up in the Midwest, North or South Dakota I believe. Whatever the case, I think that this combination of experiences made her a more flexible and generous person than most of the foundation program officers and academic bureaucrats I’d met before and have come to know since.

The first time I ever heard from Catherine was right after a two-month research stay in Washington, DC and visit home in Mount Vernon, New York. I’d just come off of weeks in the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Moorland-Spingarn Research collection at Howard University, the Sumner School Archives for DC Public Schools, and several other places doing research on my dissertation topic, multiculturalism in philosophy and practiced among Black Washingtonians. It was the end of March ’95, and it had been five months since I’d submitted my application packet for the Spencer fellowship. When I went to my Carnegie Mellon mailbox in the history department, there it was. A standard #10 envelope with only a one-page letter inside, which I knew because of the envelope’s thinness. I knew it was a rejection letter. Except that it wasn’t, at least not entirely. It had a handwritten note at the bottom of it from Catherine, asking me to give her a call as soon as I received the note.

So I did. Catherine did most of the talking, asking me about my research stay in DC, about my definition of multiculturalism and how it had or hadn’t changed because of my research. Then she talked to me about the selection committee. Apparently out of eight committee members, six voted in favor of awarding me the fellowship, one against, and with one in absentia. The sticking point was how I defined multiculturalism in my research proposal, putting me on the fence between award and no award. Although I would learn later that there were some academic and cultural politics involved in the two non-Yes votes, at the time Catherine told me that she would do everything she could to see if she could still fund my work. “I’m not making any promises,” she said before we got off the phone.

I didn’t know what to make of the call, other than the fact that Catherine cared about funding my work. That it wasn’t everyday that someone with her responsibilities called a student who had technically been rejected was also something I took away from that call. Two weeks passed. On Friday, April 14 of ’95, I got a call at home, right after 9:30 am. I assumed it was my mother or one of my friends. I hadn’t even taken the time to spit and rinse my toothpaste when I answered the phone. After the pleasantries, Catherine excitedly blurted out the good news. And I swallowed my toothpaste in response before asking how and saying thanks.

It turned out that Catherine thought that in addition to the 29 awards that were granted fellowships by the committee, that there were four others (including me) who should also receive the fellowship. Catherine had spent the previous two weeks asking the foundation for additional monies for the other four of us, and found that at least two of the original 29 awardees had accepted other fellowships. As a result, she could then give out four additional fellowships as part of her discretion as the director of the program. I was happy, to say the least about the award. But I was even happier that someone would fight for me and others the way Catherine did.

As a Spencer fellow, I learned a lot from my “fellow Fellows,” as I constantly called our group. That I wasn’t the only one whose advisor was acting as a roadblock toward our degree and career aspirations. That our colleagues on our campuses stared us all down with daggers in their eyes after learning about our awards. That hours upon hours of lonely research and intense writing and editing didn’t make any of our significant others or spouses particularly happy. Still, I learned as much from Catherine as I did from my fellow Fellows. About balance between life and work. About the realization that academia wasn’t our only career option, even as much as we thought it was at the time. That it was all right to feel ambivalent about pursuing an academic career.

This last one was of great importance to me, because my worries about becoming a publish-or-perish professor had always been there. I wanted to do something useful with my degree and life, something to benefit others, something that would allow me to help people who grew up like me, poor, possibly abused, and with the world thinking that I’d sooner go to jail than graduate high school. The one thing that Catherine’s work revealed to me was that it was possible to have a job and career that you could fall in love with, that helps others, and that enabled you to prosper financial. Her job allowed her to do all three, and very well at that.

It was that realization that enabled me to stumble my way into the nonprofit world, doing work on everything from community computer labs and civic education to a social justice fellowship program and education reform work on college access and success. Even after my fellowship ended in June ’96, I kept in contact with Catherine, attended Spencer gatherings and asked for advice. I even took my wife with me on a business trip to Chicago once to, among other things, have her meet Catherine at the Spencer offices in the John Hancock Building. I haven’t had quite the same luck of finding work that is as fulfilling as Catherine’s work was with Spencer. But I haven’t given up trying, and hope that what I have done and am doing does actually help others.

I haven’t talked to Catherine since the end of ’04. Not for lack of trying, though. Catherine decided after two years as a high-level administrator at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education that it was time for her to retire, to move back to the Dakotas, to live in seclusion, I guess. She didn’t particularly like Philly, or the grinding work that is almost pure administration. She missed Spencer, Chicago, and all of the people that she had met over the years. I think that the Bush years and 9/11 depressed her greatly

I miss Catherine. I miss asking her advice on everything from my job to whether I should turn Boy At The Window into a fiction novel instead of keeping it a memoir with narrative nonfiction elements (I know, that’s redundant) or even continue to pursue finding an agent. I miss sending her pictures of Noah or talking to her about her days at Spencer. Most of all, I miss telling her how much her friendship and unofficial mentoring have meant to me over the years. To Catherine, and really, all of my friends, many, many thanks.

Jeremy Spoke In Class Today (updated)

19 Sunday Apr 2009

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, music, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Helena Garrett, right, mother of bombing victim Tevin Garrett, breaks down as she speaks during a ceremony for the 20th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, Oklahoma City National Memorial, April 19, 2015. (Sue Ogrocki/AP via http://sfchronicle.com).

Helena Garrett, right, mother of bombing victim Tevin Garrett, breaks down as she speaks during a ceremony for the 20th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, Oklahoma City National Memorial, April 19, 2015. (Sue Ogrocki/AP via http://sfchronicle.com).

Sometimes as Americans we can be so stupid. It’s been fourteen twenty years since Timothy McVeigh left a Ryder van in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building building in Oklahoma City filled with two and a half tons of ammonium nitrate and fuel to blow a tragic hole into it, leaving 168 women, men and children dead. It’s been ten sixteen years since two White male teens decided to lock and load at their high school in Columbine, Colorado, leaving 12 students and a teacher dead, 25 others wounded, all before killing themselves in a blaze of White male angst glory. Yet we’re still up in arms over any significant legislation to keep assault guns out of the hands of folks who may do their neighbors harm, as if the Second Amendment doesn’t itself provide limitations on the use of firearms in our society.

Right now, without any abatement, some idiotic father or mother is so depressed about their financial situation and the future of their family that they’re willing to go into their garage, pull out the 9mm pistol or .45 caliber rifle and take out their children, their spouse and themselves in a public display of psychotic-ness. It’s happened in recent months in Chicago, in Maryland, in California, in Florida, and in so many other places that the public only barely pays attention to it anymore. Then there are the folks who are literally clinging to their guns — if not their religion — because the nuts on Fox News Channel and on the conservative talk radio shows have stirred them up about President Barack Obama. That the Obama Administration had any plans to take people’s guns away from them is about as ludicrous as blaming the grunge group Pearl Jam for the Columbine massacre in ’99.

Cover art of Pearl Jam's single "Jeremy" (1992), September 25, 2005. (Tempuser123456 via Wikipedia).

Cover art of Pearl Jam’s single “Jeremy” (1992), September 25, 2005. (Tempuser123456 via Wikipedia).

To think that it’s been more than a decade since Columbine and that we as a nation have learned next to nothing from it is just a sad commentary on how fearful we as a nation are. I remember as I packed my bags for my presentation at the Organization for American Historians conference in Toronto how the events of Columbine unfolded. One of the first things that came out of the media was that songs like Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” was to blame for stirring the minds of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold into killing and maiming their unaccepting, cliquish classmates. Except that “Jeremy” killed himself in front of his classmates. He imploded — he didn’t take his rage and angst out on the rest of the world.

Harris and Klebold’s disproportionate response had little to do with Pearl Jam or grunge, and more to do with our culture of fear, as explained by Michael Moore in Bowling for Columbine (2004) through Barry Glassner’s The Culture of Fear (1999). When combined with easy access to guns and other weapons, it’s no wonder why events like Columbine and Oklahoma City, Virginia Tech and more recent ones in Binghamton, New York, Tennessee, Alabama, Pittsburgh, Oakland, Newtown, Connecticut, Aurora, Colorado and so many other places across the country are happening regularly. Kind of like the bombings and shootouts that have taken many a life of American soldiers while keeping Iraq safe for democracy since ’03. In our case, all it took was a severe economic downturn and the election of President Obama to produce disproportionate fear and rage, implosion and explosion, family annihilators and gun-hoarding psychopaths.

I would’ve thought ten years ago that Columbine would take the Brady Bill passed by Clinton and Congress in ’94 a step further, but it didn’t. I would’ve thought that Americans might become more willing to be introspective in considering the reasons for all of our senseless democracy-based violence. But we haven’t been. We haven’t even conducted national townhalls on these issues. We’ve allowed the NRA, gun-makers and others who benefit from the proliferation of assault weapons to dictate how we exercise our Second Amendment rights.

Columbine High School, Littleton, Colorado, April 17, 2008. (Ed Andrieski/AP via http://nytimes.com).

Columbine High School, Littleton, Colorado, April 17, 2008. (Ed Andrieski/AP via http://nytimes.com).

There were the kinds of things I thought about during my five days in Toronto, which seemed as far away from the violence and fear of the US as Rome at the time. I also thought about my experiences in middle school and in high school. I wasn’t bullied, at least in not any physical way. But I felt ostracized at times, and I was certainly made fun of more times than I could count. I didn’t have access to guns, and it never would’ve occurred to me to shoot the folks who were clownin’ me. In later years, in seeing signs of the US melting down economically and culturally, it wouldn’t have been in my thought process to blow up a federal building, threaten the president or another public official, or otherwise arm myself for a coming race war or war against the federal government.

No, what I thought about while in Canada was how peaceful and settled it seemed compared to anywhere I’d been in the US. I didn’t feel my skin color or race the way I usually felt it as an American citizen in America. I loved the multicultural atmosphere and the fact that folks truly embraced it there, and not just by serving hummus and falafel at parties and by taking yoga classes. If I could, I’d move all of us up there to live a less fearful and more accepting lifestyle than the one that we can live here.

Ryder truck that Timothy McVeigh drove caught on camera minutes before explosion, Alfred Murrah Federal Building, Oklahoma City, April 19, 1995. (http://murderpedia.org/).

Ryder truck that Timothy McVeigh drove caught on camera minutes before explosion, Alfred Murrah Federal Building, Oklahoma City, April 19, 1995. (http://murderpedia.org/).

Somehow, some way, we as a country need to find ways to deal with our fear of each other, of failure, of the loss of power and dominance as a nation among nations, as Whites over everyone else. Confronting these fears as part of a public display of transparency and openness will allow for angst without implosion or explosion, and dissent without a turn to ridiculously senseless violence. This is the reason why we have so many dead and wounded every year from gun use (though not usually bombs), in everything from homegrown terrorism to everyday acts of community annihilation. If not, we will continue to serve as a model of first-world dreams and third-world chaos, offering the world not much more than our hypocrisy in the process.

On People and Stress

28 Saturday Feb 2009

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Stress sandwich in the form of a brain, November 16, 2013. (http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/).

Stress sandwich in the form of a brain, November 16, 2013. (http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/).

As February draws to a close, I’m reminded of the fact that, like now, the last days of February in ’89 and ’90 for me represented small yet telling changes in my life. Like buying my first CD player in February ’90. It changed my relationship to music forever, as I never fell behind any trend I wanted to keep up with again. It gave me more opportunities to experiment with and experience jazz, smooth jazz (formerly known as jazz fusion), rap, Latin music, and even grunge. That Aiwa player lasted me through all of grad school, and made it easy to forget that there was ever a time when I didn’t have access to music.

But enough with more pleasant experiences in late February. Overall, the two and a half years between my five days of homelessness at Pitt and a semester of financial woes and the start of grad school were fun times, but were stressful times, with a steep learning curve to boot. Obviously, they weren’t as stressful in most ways as now — but they reflect how my world view began to grow up in the months after recovering from being on the edge of dropping out from Pitt.

By the end of February ’89, I found myself in a bit over my head as a student and worker. It was manageable only because I had already begun the process of leaving all things 616 and Mount Vernon at 616 and in Mount Vernon when I wasn’t home or on one of my weekly phone call listening to my griping mother. Even though I could see that the day was coming when my stepfather would no longer be my stepfather, I had decided to leave that situation be — unless he was attempting to hurt my mother again, of course. It was a pattern that would continue beyond my mother’s second marriage until the summer of ’91, when I had made the switch to Pittsburgh as home. It’s funny to think about now. Having pushed all of my past, my feelings and thoughts about Mount Vernon to the back of my brain stem during those school years. Putting aside what was going on at Pitt during the summers I worked at home.

I did slip up sometimes. I paid a heavy price when I slipped up in Mount Vernon, especially around my mother. I had to explain away my anger, changes in language (it was harder for me to code switch back then), and education whenever I displayed the Pitt version of me. It scared her that I was “puttin’ on airs,” as if I could hide years of accelerated education. It was hard enough hiding my rage against all that had happened at home after ’81.

At Pitt, I acted as if I didn’t have a past before the summer of ’87, so my slip ups were pretty rare. But when I did slip up, it usually involved a woman at some level. The spring of ’89 was no different. I had already set myself up for a rough semester. Sixteen credits of courses in existential philosophy, macroeconomics, Shakespeare, the second half of Biology, and the writing seminar for history majors. The last was a course I’d been advised to wait to take until my senior year. On top of that, I was working for Pitt’s computer labs on a near full-time schedule. From the end of January through the second week in April, I averaged thirty-six hours a week. And all for $4.15 an hour. We were short-staffed, and after a semester of near starvation, I needed the money. That I had a 4 pm to midnight shift at the Cathedral of Learning labs on Mondays and an 8 am Tuesday macroecon lecture on Tuesdays didn’t help — I rarely made it to that class. Other than the occasional outing or movie, I had no social life for most of that jam-packed semester.

It was during my work days that I began working with P. She was a twenty-six-year-old peroxide-blond party girl who’d come back to school and ended up an Information Systems major. Sometimes I ended up paired with her on my Monday evening shifts. I liked talking to her during those shifts to pass the time when I couldn’t concentrate on evolutionary theory in second-semester Bio or didn’t feel like reading more existential philosophy. But I wasn’t interested in her. Despite the fact that she was the first White woman I’d met in Pittsburgh that had anything other than a flat butt and that she’d occasionally said something interesting, P. was out-of-sight and mind when my shift was over.

Three weeks into the semester, the reason we became so short-staffed had thrown a party at his apartment on North Craig in North Oakland. This co-worker had taken a job to work for AT&T somewhere in Virginia, a job that would start at the beginning of March. He wanted to celebrate, so he invited all of us over. I liked the man, so I went. I got there and it was as insane a scene as I’d seen in the dorms my freshman year or with my father at the bars in the city. The place was barely lit. It had this moody dark red glow in his living room, with every other room lit for making out. Booze and boozers were everywhere, and almost everyone was in some phase of inebriation.

I got in, and P. started talking to me all crazy, as if we’d been in conversation about our sexual preferences in the past. I pulled away from her, had conversations with my former computer lab boss and a few co-workers, had a customary drink—my first beer since just before Thanksgiving ’87—and left.

At least I was trying to. As I began putting on my coat and scarf, P. came out and put her arms around my neck and her left leg in between mine, pushing me up against the foyer wall in the process.

“You can’t leave now,” she said, her eyes glazed and bloodshot.

I didn’t say anything, I just tried to get her arms from around me.

“I know you’re attracted to me . . . that you like this White girl,” P. said as she tried to kiss me.

“You’re drunk!,” I said in response as I finally managed to unhook her from my neck and body.

“I might be drunk, but you can still get laid,” she said as I shook my head and left.

I assumed that P. had too much to drink and that what happened at the party was the end of it. It wasn’t, not by a long shot. All through February and early March she worked hard to bait me into conversations that were all about sexual innuendo. During one Saturday project when we were installing new PCs and new software, P. called me a “useless prick.” I responded, “Just because you think you have a nice butt doesn’t mean I’m supposed to be attracted to you!” I pretty much tried to avoid her after that.

That was hard to do, because I worked so many hours that semester, and because our new boss was a high school friend of P. Once I finally cut my hours so I could concentrate on being a student again, at the beginning of April, my boss, who knew what was going on, told me that I had a “bad attitude” and that I needed to settle up with P.

My response was to resign my position before I found myself fired or accused of sexual harassment by the very person who was harassing me. I sent a detailed email at the end of that semester to my boss’ bosses about the incidents with P., about the lack of persons of color on staff, about the state of computing labs at Pitt in general. It made me a bit of a muckraker, but I noticed that there were more students of color on staff when I came back to Pitt that fall.

It didn’t really help my view of White women either. Not that I had formed any real opinion about them. It did make me realize how difficult it would be to be in a mixed relationship, especially in the conservative world of Western Pennsylvania. The race issue and all of the innuendo and stereotypes would likely get in the way, unless both folks in the relationship were far more enlightened than a twenty-six-year-old party girl and a nineteen-year-old discovering himself for the first time. I wasn’t even ready for a relationship with my nerdy yet attractive Black female friends. Anything more complicated, even a one-night stand with a White woman, was the equivalent of achieving peace in the Middle East, that’s how alien it seemed to me at the time.

Still, I was kind of thankful to be done with computing labs and being seen only as a “computer guy.” I had changed my major to history, been journaling on my own for the first time since I was fifteen, began hanging out with a diverse group of friends and acquaintances, and discovered myself as attractive for the first time in years. I left Pitt more content than pissed about what happened that semester. I left that semester knowing that I had the capacity to handle any situation, even the adult ones, as an adult.

On Public Enemy and Eclectic Music

31 Saturday Jan 2009

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

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PE, Fear Of A Black Planet (1990) Album Cover

Tomorrow’s an important milestone in my life. Nineteen years ago, I went to a Public Enemy concert with one of my Pitt friends. It was a Thursday evening engagement at the old Syria Mosque, a weird name for a place that was a entertainment hall, not a place of worship. I believe it was a Masonic temple, one located less than two blocks from Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning on Bigelow Blvd near or on Fifth Avenue. It wasn’t the beginning of my interest in hip-hop, my friendly date for that evening, or maintaining an eclectic sense of thought and style. But it confirmed in many ways how unbounded my mind was, regarding music and so much else.

I’m still amazed at times what I’ve come to like over the past three decades of almost continuous music consumption, as reflected when I allow my iPod to randomly select from some 1,300 songs. My home life at 616 wasn’t much of a guide. My mother liked Al Green, Gladys Knight and the Pips, The Temptations and The Four Tops. My idiot stepfather loved The Ohio Players and The Commodores. My alcoholic father was into anything that he could snap his fingers to off- rhythm, including Motown, and especially James Brown. I guess that makes sense, since Jimme and the Godfather of Soul spoke in the same incomprehensible cadence. For me, it all started with Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Fantasy.” I just happened to catch it on the radio one day, it must have been on WBLS 107.5 FM, sometime in second grade, ’76-’77 for me. I loved the song, I don’t know why, but it was literally the first time I consciously came into contact with music.

Two years later, I had a much easier way of gaining exposure to music without waiting for my mother or stepfather to turn on my mother’s beat-up stereo system from her days with my father. One of the first things Jimme bought me and my brother Darren after we started our occasional weekend times with him was a small transistor radio. It had both FM and AM, which in the days of the late ’70s was a relatively new technology. Both me and my older brother would play around with the radio, but I used it more often. I eventually settled on two stations — WABC 77 AM and WBLS.

Because I had no immediate guide as to what to listen for, my criteria for music was to like whatever sounded good as it bounced around my ears and brain. Frank Sinatra, Billy Joel, Donna Summer, E ,W & F, Christopher Cross, Michael Jackson (the Off the Wall album), Stephanie Mills, Teddy Pendergrass, Marvin Gaye, The Commodores (post-funk — my stepfather made me sick of “Brickhouse“) and so on. I loved how WBLS signed off at the end of the night, with “Moody’s Mood for Love,” a song from the mid-’50, with the “there I go, there I go, there I go” refrain at the beginning of the song. Call me weird, but this is where my eclecticness started.

The summer of ’80, just before my mother and stepfather separated for the first time, we went to a concert in the park, somewhere in the Bronx, most likely Van Cortlandt Park between 242nd and 262nd. It was a rap concert, my first one, and it featured Sugar Hill Gang among others. I kind of liked it, especially since I couldn’t believe how quickly the rappers put words together in combination and in rhythm. It was as silly as it was profound, at least for me at ten. I liked it, but it wasn’t exactly playing on every radio station in New York. Even WBLS almost completely ignored rap in those days. My stepfather bought their album soon after that concert.

For the next year, my musical tastes continued to take shape, including Pink Floyd, Queen, Luther Vandross, REO Speedwagon, Kenny Rogers, Kenny Loggins, Genesis and Phil Collins, along with what I already liked. Then my stepfather came back into our lives with his Hebrew-Israelite religion, disrupting the songs in my head for a few years. My saving grace, in the weirdest of ways, was being in Humanities, the gifted track program in which I was enrolled for six years.

I’ve counted off numerous negatives about this program in this blog over the past nineteen months. One positive, though, at least for me, was the rich mix of pop culture in the classroom. I could vicariously keep up with music through the singing of classmates, the music that some of them would play on their radios, boom boxes, and their first Walkmans. I learned to despise The Who, like The Police, tune out the heavy metal, continue to feel ambivalent about rap, and wish I didn’t have to wait for my classmates or for a trip to a grocery store to keep up with music’s constant evolution. Much of the rest around my explorations of pop music and rock, of silliness and search for spiritual meaning, I’ve described in my previous postings.

Like many folks in the late ’80s and early ’90s, I became caught up in this sense of affirming or reaffirming my sense of Blackness, of understanding my world through the lens of race, of attempting to make sense of Afrocentricity and how I fit or didn’t fit into it. One of my grad school friends tried to define this as a period of renewed Black pride, between roughly ’88 and ’92, with the rise of what he called “Afrocentric rap,” including Arrested Development, Digable Planets, Wu-Tang, and of course, PE. I think that’s a bit too cerebral, and that’s saying a lot. For me, it was a period of experimentation and discovery, between ’87 and ’95, when hip-hop evolved and devolved between socially-conscious messages, materialism, and socially-conscious messages through materialism. That’s what PE represented for me, even before I left for Pitt in ’87.

By the beginning of the new decade, the ’90s, I’d already been reconfiguring my inner and outer musical soundtrack for more than two years. I had already weeded out such wonderful artists and groups such as Thompson Twins, Starship, Glass Tiger (don’t ask), Whitney Houston (can’t listen to anything from her first two albums) and other things that one should only listen to while snorting coke. As soon as I found out that PE was coming to Pittsburgh to play songs from Fear of a Black Planet and from their other albums, I went over to Syria Mosque and snapped up two tickets, presuming I could get one of my friends to come with me to see them perform.

I knew who to ask and why. As much as any person over the years, this friend made me feel all right about my eclectic music tastes, partly because hers were almost as eclectic as my own. Other than my wife, who loves Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry along with Talib Kweli and Blind Willie Johnson (’20s era Blues), I can’t think of another person who’s influenced my musical likings more. I mean, how many Blacks did I know who both liked The Beatles and PE, unless they were artists like Doug E. Fresh or Grandmaster Flash?

It was a great concert, probably the best concert I’ve ever been to (not that I’ve been to all that many over the years). It made me realize that music was truly universal, that there was some merit to any music genre, no matter how silly, serious or scintillating. I felt connected again, in that music was about more than my enduring march of miracles and fantasies, of using it as an escape or as a way to motivate myself academically or otherwise. It was something to enjoy, to read into it as much or as little meaning as I wanted. It was a way to build connections to other people, to form friendships and relationships. And it was a way to map the events that unfolded in my life. That PE concert wasn’t the beginning of my modern eclecticism of music, and it was hardly the end. But it really did help.