My Christianity at 30

08 Tuesday Apr 2014

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

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Action, Activism, Atheism, Atheists, Christianity, Critical Thinking, Easter Sunday, Evangelical Christianity, Evangelicals, Faith, Frederick K.C. Price, Gospel of Prosperity, Hypocrisy, Renewal, Revelation, Salvation, Social Control, Social Justice, Spirituality, Wisdom

The full prayer kneel, April 8, 2014. (Donald Earl Collins).

No, today’s not my thirtieth birthday — I’m still forty-four and twenty months away from entering middle age. But, it has been thirty years since I converted to Christianity, two weeks before Easter Sunday ’84, sometime between 8:55 and 9 am. You could say — and many would — that this marks three full decades since my spiritual rebirth, a milestone as significant as my birthday on the final Saturday of the ’60s at Mount Vernon Hospital.

In many ways, it was a renewal, a reboot, a beginning of sorts. To claim control over my life and my destiny, at least, as much control as I could muster. In the past thirty years, the issues of control and perfection, faith, knowledge and wisdom, and the expectations I have of myself, my God and those who either don’t see God as real or as real to me have remained constants in my life.

Perhaps this has been because of how I became a Christian in the first place, a bit more than three months after an aborted suicide attempt on my fourteenth birthday. With my abusive stepfather Maurice and his insistence that we were Hebrew-Israelites, I couldn’t be open about my conversion or the thought and faith process that led me to Christianity. At least, I didn’t feel strong enough back then to be open about it. I remained a clandestine Christian for five months before I stood up to the idiot after my first day of tenth grade — my first time not wearing my kufi since sixth grade — and dared him to kill me. He didn’t, and it was my first full victory against my stepfather.

As for my classmates, the splits between the denominational Christian, agnostic, atheist and Nation of Islam sets were ones I’d become aware of long before my conversion. And, by tenth grade, it was obvious that many of my immediate Humanities classmates were about as accepting of the spiritual as Bill Maher and the late Christopher Hitchens. Maybe not openly so, but the barrier of intolerance and disdain was there.

Break the chains, April 8, 2014. (http://www.flrministry.com).

Over the years, my walk with Jesus’ life, death and resurrection has grown more complicated, with euphoric highs, quiet lows, and periods of almost evangelical revival along the way. Still, I remain faithful, even as I remain disillusioned, about my life, humanity, the universe and the afterlife. I still pray, and believe that God listens to my prayers, but understand that prayer without action is tantamount to talking to myself. “Faith without works is dead,” is what the good book actually says. Unfortunately, there are way too many alleged Christians in exalted places and in positions of power who practice neither faith nor the works of Jesus. All they do is talk about their Christianity while acting like pagan Roman emperors.

I no longer welcome debate about what and in whom I believe. I find those who smirk and call my walk the equivalent of someone with a mental illness or an imaginary friend about as bigoted as a Christian who believes that all atheists are the sons and daughters of Satan. There’s a certain hubris in claiming the nonexistence of the spiritual because the people whom are representatives of the religious are themselves flawed and full of crap. Then, I guess, there’s a certain hypocrisy in the universe, in evolution, in all life, and I don’t think any of us have enough knowledge to be that cynical and nihilistic.

I no longer regularly attend church. I’ve been to at least a dozen churches in the DC area over the past decade and a half, and combined, I’ve gotten less out of all of those services than in one service I attended at my mother-in-law’s church in Pittsburgh last September. Heck, I’ve found more wisdom and compassion and realness in some of the courses I’ve taught than at most of these churches. Church is a place for fellowship with other Christians, but I have a hard time with my own contradictions, much less those of others.

Bertrand Russell wisdom quote, April 8, 2014. (http://izquotes.com).

For my son Noah’s sake, though, I want to find a place or two where we can feel comfortable exposing him to Christianity. Places where the hypocrisy quotient isn’t so high, and with the understanding that this is a long spiritual walk, not a magical carpet ride of infinite miracles and treasure chests full of gold. I’m tired of the megachurches, the Gospel of Prosperity, the overly emotional, the attempts to strangle human behaviors, and the endless predictions of apocalypse based on homophobia, misogyny, Whiteness, and a terrible understanding of history.

But I do have a one-on-one spiritual walk that’s mine, that no one — atheist or evangelical — can take away from me. It’s a walk that has taken me far from the despair and abuse of my youth, warts and all.

On My Mother’s Side – Meeting The Gill Family

05 Saturday Apr 2014

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

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AERA, Basketball, Bruce Anthony Jones, Continental Airlines, Extended Family, Family, Family Stories, Final Four 1994, Genealogy, Houston Texas, New Orleans, Poverty, Remembrance, Sports, The Gill Family, Third Ward, Travel, Uncle Darryl, Uncle George, Uncle Robert

Continental Airlines ticket stubs/itinerary, Pittsburgh to New Orleans (with Houston layover), April 2-10, 1994. (Donald Earl Collins).

This weekend marks twenty years since visiting my extended family on my mother’s side for the first time. It was Final Four weekend ’94 when I hopped on a Continental Airlines flight from Pittsburgh to Houston. To think that until April 2 ’94, I hadn’t been farther west than Atlanta or been in any other time zone seems far-fetched now that I’ve crisscrossed this country enough times to earn hundreds of thousands of frequent flyer miles. To think that for years I never felt I had a family to talk about at all or that what I did have wasn’t worth talking about. That all changed that weekend.

A conference presentation proposal I put together with Bruce Anthony Jones — my unofficial advisor in the School of Education at Pitt — had successfully made it through the difficult American Educational Research Association’s review process. So me, Bruce, and two other School of Education grad students were headed to the Big Easy to take in the sights and the serious scholarship that would be discussed, ad nauseum, the first full week of April. I managed to get a layover in Houston, all so that I’d have the chance to meet my extended family for the first time. Between the letter I sent to my Uncle Robert and my first adult conversation with a Gill relative other than my mother or Uncle Sam, I hoped that someone would be at the airport in Houston to meet me.

I landed in Houston around 9 am local time. I slept well on the flight, but I had only had about five hours total sleep before arriving in Bush country. I expected a dump of an airport, but the George H.W. Bush Intercontinental Airport (it wasn’t call that at the time I think) was as modern as Pittsburgh’s then two-year-old airport. I got down to baggage claim, and there they were. Uncle George and Uncle Darryl were there, grinning and smiling as if they could see me from a mile away. “I knew it was you, with that Gill nose,” he said as he walked toward me and gave me a big hug.

Historic Third Ward, Houston, Texas, March 2012 (not the part I got to visit). (Nelson Bowman III; http://www.myhbcuinterview.com)

We got in George’s car, stopped by a gas station near downtown Houston first, to get gas and to get me something to eat and drink. Then they immediately went to the Third Ward to hang out with friends and play basketball. They only let me take three shots, and I missed all three, tired as I was. “We need real ballers out here,” my Uncle George said.

My uncles were good, but given the amount of time they spent on the court, they should’ve been. They both played basketball in high school in Bradley, Arkansas. Heck, all of the Gill boys played at least two sports growing up. My Uncle Sam played four — basketball, football, baseball, and track — and all of the others at least played basketball and football. George at thirty-two and Darryl at twenty-eight (neither of them liked me calling them “Uncle,” with me being twenty-four at the time) were still in pretty good shape, though Darryl complained about his midsection. They kept asking me, “Are you sure you’re a Gill?,” based on three shots I missed, including two that rimmed out.

Eventually I’d meet my Uncle Robert, his wife and sons, my Uncle Darryl’s girlfriend and eventual wife, and a few of Uncle George’s friends that weekend. Of all of the family meetings that took place, none was more meaningful than me sitting down to dinner that Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon with three of my uncles at one time. They grilled me with more questions than I’d get from my dissertation committee some five months later. “How big sis [my Mom] doin’?” “Do any of the kids play sports?” “What’s it like livin’ in the big city?” Even though my mother had been on welfare for eleven years, and living in poverty for some thirteen — working or not — they still thought that we were doing better than they were living in the middle of Texas. I tried, but failed, to convince them that our poverty was real.

It was a weird conversation, seeing that it was happening in the dining and living rooms of my Uncle Robert’s ranch-style house, a four-bedroom, two-bath home with a carport, backyard and decent front yard in suburban Houston. They owned four cars, and a leaky boat that needed some repairs. Pretty good for a man with a high school diploma and someone who was a shift supervisor for a local trucking company. Uncle Robert was the man, a six-five rail-thin man who looked almost like he could be his brother Sam’s twin instead of his slightly younger brother at forty-four years old. But Uncle Robert and the rest of them all assumed that since my mother hadn’t come running back to Texas or Arkansas for help that things were all right. They weren’t, as they’d learn a year later when the 616 fire left my mother and younger siblings homeless.

My Uncle, Robert Gill, Houston, Texas, received April 3, 1994. (Robert Gill/Donald Earl Collins).

Beyond that, I learned a lot about the family. I confirmed some of the stories that my mother had told me over the years, including the one about my half-Irish, half Choctaw/Black great-great grandmother who was born in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) in 1880. I also learned that my grandmother Beulah was originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma, that I really did have a great-grand aunt in Seattle, apparently New Edition lead singer Johnny Gill’s grandmother or great-grandmother, making all of us related.

That my uncles were and remained close was heartening, and that they managed to get decent and good-paying jobs was encouraging. It also gave me some sense of reassurance, if not pride, in the fact that they had put their lives together in Houston without any real guidance from family. By the time I boarded my flight to New Orleans that Sunday evening, I felt like I knew enough to talk about my family, mother’s and father’s side, for the first time.

My First Mugging

03 Thursday Apr 2014

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

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616 East Lincoln Avenue, Black Boys, Brotherhood, Bullying, Darren, Manhood, Mother-Son Relationship, Muggers, Mugging, Pearsall Drive, Poverty, Projects, Robbery, Street Smarts, Thugs, Vernon Woods, Wannabe

New York mugging, Granger (1857), April 3, 2014. (http://chroniclevitae.com).

This is another story not in Boy @ The Window, though it could’ve been. It was thirty-five years ago this week that a group of my preteen neighbors from the Pearsall Drive projects (now the Vernon Woods co-op community) jumped me on my way home from the store, beat me up and stole a grand total of four dollars. It seems like such a small thing now, getting mugged for the first time, a block from 616 East Lincoln, our apartment building on the eastern edge of Mount Vernon, New York. Still, I learned a few things on that first Saturday in April ’79 about myself, my older brother, my mother and humans in general, things that haven’t changed in the three and a half decades since.

That particular day was definitely a crisp early spring one, windy, partly sunny and cloudy, just warm enough not to need a winter coat. I’d barely been out the house at all since attempting to run away from home some four months earlier. In the months in between, I’d been engrossed in reading everything I could, especially World Book Encyclopedia, not to mention what I hadn’t already read in Charles Schulz’ Peanuts series.

I hadn’t been out the apartment to do much of anything other than go to school or to the store. So little was my time outside that when I had to do a full food shop, I’d forgotten a few basic rules about protecting myself. Like making sure that a group of nine-to-fourteen-year-olds weren’t following us home from the local grocery store. And making sure to take the most direct route home when I could, or a circuitous route home when necessary. Going west on the north side of East Lincoln, making a left on Station Place, then a left on Lafayette Avenue, then a final left on Bradley, walking four short blocks that would’ve left us in front of 616.

134 Pearsall Drive (now part of the Vernon Woods co-op complex), April 3, 2014. (http://trulia.com)

On this day, the circuitous route would’ve been better. But that would’ve meant me being better, too. I was already not feeling well when I left with Darren for the grocery store. I had a stomach ache, and the diarrhea that came with it. So my best bet was to go to the store at 671 East Lincoln with Darren, cross over to the south side of East Lincoln, and walk as quickly as we could back to 616.

Only, the half-dozen boys trailing me and Darren back home had crossed with us, and immediately tried to surround us near East Lincoln and Pearsall. Darren, to his credit, ran off for home, leaving me alone and holding two paper bags of groceries. Somewhere between “nigga” and “muthafucka” and “giv’ me the money,” I struggled and ran away with the groceries, where after a minute or two, I ended up in the bottom floor of one of the project buildings.

I was jumped again, punched in the face and the mouth until one of the wannabe thugs had busted my lip and left me bleeding down the side of my face. I somehow crapped on myself during the run, but hadn’t noticed because I was too busy trying to not get mugged. After they took the four dollars’ worth of change I had in my right pant pocket, another wannabe said, “Oh shit, the punk dukeyed on hisself!” They laughed and left me there, in this abandoned, junky apartment, garbage and groceries and two ripped grocery bags all over the room, bloodied and soiled.

I picked up all I could from what remained of the groceries and began the long one-block walk home. By the time I walked through the front door, there was my Mom, angry with me about the groceries. “What I’m gonna do with this!” she said. It was afterward that she noticed my condition. “You let them kids scare the shit out of you!,” she gasped with what seemed like a bit of laughter in her voice. I said, very angrily, “I told you before I left that I had diarrhea!,” then went into the bathroom and cried.

Oscar de la Hoya’s face after his beat-down via Manny Pacquiao, December 6, 2008. (AP via http://boxingscene.com).

My Mom came in later to help me wash myself down. In the meantime, I had a bruised left cheek, a busted lip, feces all over my lower body, and soreness all over my ribs and stomach. It took about twenty minutes in all, but by the time I was done and washed, I went into mine and Darren’s bedroom and fell asleep.

It was April 7, ’79, and I already knew that I couldn’t count on my older brother to help whenever there would be a crisis. I knew that my Mom cared about me, but apparently not enough to keep me protected. I knew that the assholes that lived around me wouldn’t have minded it if I’d been run over by a Mack truck, as long as they could get a dollar out of me. I knew, most of all, that I needed to look out for myself as much as I could, since there weren’t any cousins or other family around to look out for me.

So when at the end of ’83, the city had sold the projects at Pearsall Drive to a real estate developer, though I was sad for a few individuals, I wasn’t sad in general. Those wannabes had helped make one relatively small aspect of my life — going to the store, going outside and going to Wilson’s Woods — miserable. And with so much misery in my life already, I was glad to see many of those kids move away.

Bow Down to Isabel Wilkerson

27 Thursday Mar 2014

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

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Academic Writing, Black Migration, Book Review, Creative Nonfiction Writing, Great Migration, Isabel Wilkerson, Joe William Trotter Jr., Proletarianization Thesis, The Warmth of Other Suns (2011)

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, front cover (2011), Random House.

I’ve finally read Isabel Wilkerson’s book The Warmth of Other Suns (2011) this month, just as I finished teaching a mini-course in post-1865 African American history. If I ever have the opportunity again to choose my own books for a survey-level course in African American history, this would be one of my cornerstone books. I know I stand at the back of a very long list when I say this, but this is a wonderfully powerful and insightful book, with language and a writing style equally as tender.

This was what I wrote regarding my first impressions on Goodreads.com:

My God – this book is a masterpiece! Wilkerson has done what historians and writers as diverse and groundbreaking as Kenneth Kusmer, David Levering Lewis, Joe William Trotter, Jr., Nicholas Lemann, Thomas Sugrue and James Grossman couldn’t (and in a couple of cases, wouldn’t) do. She put flesh, blood and bones on the Black individuals and families who migrated “up North” and out West throughout the bulk of the twentieth century. She didn’t distract with neo-Marxist, post-modern, post-structural, proletarian, or other overly academic theories for understanding the “hows” and “whys” behind Black migration between 1915 and the 1970s.

Reading Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns (2011) was like reading into my own family’s pasts (my mother and father came to New York City — specifically, the Bronx (Pelham Parkway and Wakefield) — during the 1960s from Arkansas and Georgia/Florida before moving to Mount Vernon). She captured so well the aspirations, the inspirations and the trepidations of the people who migrated, and the things they faced upon arrival. Wilkerson, most of all, grounded herself in the scholarly, but weaved it into a story that was nothing less than literary. If you’re a US or African American historian, a Black Studies, Black Women’s Studies or American Studies scholar, you must incorporate in your curriculum if you haven’t already. If you’re a writer who aspires to tell an important story — one that educates as it entertains — then The Warmth of Other Suns is a great place to start and Wilkerson a great writer to emulate.

Wilkerson called the Great Migration one of the great events of the twentieth century. But it was more than that. It was one of the great events in American history, a silent and gradual revolution on par with westward expansion and more significant than the second wave of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe to the US between 1870 and 1914. I and millions of others like me should know. I wouldn’t be writing at all if I wasn’t a child of two Black migrants who left farms in the South for New York City.

The Hillary Question

20 Thursday Mar 2014

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

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2016 Election, Barbara Jordan, Benazir Bhutto, Clintonites, Femininity, Feminism, Golda Meir, Hillary Clinton, Hillary-ites, Liberal Politics, Political Experience, Presidency, President, President Bill Clinton, Progressive Politics, Shirley Chisholm, Social Justice, Triangulation

Hillary Rodham Clinton, official (67th) Secretary of State portrait, January 27, 2009. (Gage via Wikipedia, US Dept of State). In public domain.

As it is Women’s History Month, it would be a real shame to let it go by without comment on the second attempt to crown former First Lady, US Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the next President of the United States. Only, this attempt at coronation has been underway literally since the week after President Barack Obama’s reelection in November ’12.

We have at least sixteen months before the campaigning for the ’16 election cycle heats up to luke-warm seriousness, and yet the Hillary-ites (my name for her branch of the Clintonites) have been out in force proclaiming Clinton to be the most qualified, the most deserving, with the most diverse set of experiences necessary to be the forty-fifth POTUS. And, by the way, she’s a woman, her supporters seem to emphasize at every turn, as if her gender alone makes her deserving of the office.

If it comes down to it in thirty-two months, I will hold my nose while voting for Hillary Clinton over her potential GOP opponent (as it’s as likely as a man-made black hole that the Republicans would put up a progressive the equivalent of a Teddy Roosevelt). But I cannot in good conscience support any effort to have her become the next president. It’s not about gender for me. Despite the Zionism she represented, I admired Golda Meir, not to mention, Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Jordan, Benazir Bhutto and Indira Gandhi. Really, my issue with Hillary Clinton comes down to what two other people represent — the late Margaret Thatcher, and Mrs. Clinton’s husband, President Bill Clinton, our forty-second president.

My issues in detail:

1. Hillary Clinton’s election is a victory for American women. This bothers me more than any other argument. It’s similar to the argument for Obama that came out of the ’08 election — that this would be a victory for Blacks and forward-thinking Americans — especially for supporters who had no idea about his agenda. In Obama’s case, his agenda was a difficult one to know or articulate — he’d only been on the national stage for four years, and his excellent memoir Dreams from My Father (1995, 2004) didn’t often match his policy-specific proclamations (that is, on the infrequent occasions in which he made them).

Lilly Ledbetter discusses why Barack Obama (who would sign the equal pay act that is in her name) is the best candidate for working families, Pittsburgh, PA, October 9, 2008. (Blargh29 via Wikipedia). Released to public domain.

In Hillary Clinton’s case, we have a record of her statements and policy prescriptions, going back to the mid-1990s. Despite the wishes of many Hillary-supporting feminists, Mrs. Clinton’s record on issues as far-ranging as reproductive rights, equal pay, women serving in the military, really, any progressive issues that affected women, has been inconsistent. Since the universal health care debacle she experienced in ’94, Clinton has spoken little in public about these issues. She proposed few bills related to women’s rights while serving one and a third terms (eight years) in the Senate, and wasn’t exactly front and center on issues like repealing DADT or DOMA or the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of ’09 during her time campaigning or during her years as Secretary of State.

Maybe there’s a really good argument to be made for supporting Hillary Clinton, but seeing her as a vanguard of feminism or progressive social justice shouldn’t be one of them. It seems that her supporters may be confusing femininity with feminism.

2. Hillary has lots of political experience for the office of President. Sure, she has experience, but I wouldn’t go so far to argue that Hillary Clinton’s experience is above and beyond anyone else’s. Despite her work on the universal healthcare bill in ’94, we shouldn’t count her time as First Lady. It’s not an elected or appointed office, which was one reason why Mrs. Clinton found herself in an antagonistic relationship with Congress and the American public.

So, that leaves her time in the Senate (which I commented on in 1.) and her time as Secretary of State. In the former position, there’s still the fact that she voted for action in Iraq in ’02. In the latter position, there’s the theme of inaction in terms of Iran, the Arab Spring, and yes, despite the right-wing hyperbole, Benghazi. It seems that John Kerry as Secretary of State has found himself doing a lot more in one year than Mrs. Clinton did in four. I’m not sure that Hillary Clinton’s experience is one that should be used as justification for a four-year-long victory lap conducted on her behalf by her supporters.

Logo of Hillary Rodham Clinton presidential campaign, December 13, 2008. (718 Bot via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws — low resolution/critical commentary re: Hillary Clinton’s possible 2016 Presidential run, a subject of public interest.

3. Hillary Clinton has a unique set of experiences that make her preeminently qualified to be President. No. Not buying this argument. Without a gun to my head, I can think of people whose combination of direct political experiences and diverse set of life experiences would be good potential candidates for President, even in ’16. Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Patty Murray, and Tammy Baldwin, and that’s just the Vice President and the US Senate. That Hillary Clinton learned how to be President by osmosis from being married to Bill isn’t comforting at all. If she follows POTUS 42’s strategy of testing-the-wind-with-right-index-finger triangulation, we will all suffer for it. Plus, by this definition, shouldn’t Michelle Obama run for President in ’16 also?

Would Hillary Clinton be a terrible choice? No. But she would be an uninspiring one, one whose organizational and management skills would be in question from day one, precisely because of the political and other experiential baggage she’s carried for more than twenty years. The office of President is already one that’s been bought and paid for in recent decades. The coronation of Hillary Clinton, if successful, will continue this trend, and to the detriment of every ordinary American, male, female and transgender.

Carnegie Mellon Stamp of Approval

17 Monday Mar 2014

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

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Advice, Barbara Lazarus, Book Reviews, CMU, Coursework, Doctoral Completion, Graduate School, Hazing, Joe William Trotter Jr., John Modell, Oral Comprehensive Exams, PhD, Pitt, Politics of Academia, Prayer, Stamp of Approval, Steve Schlossman, Sycophants, Torture

Approved rubbed stamp in green, March 17, 2014. (http://depositphotos.com).

Two decades ago on this date, I took my oral PhD comprehensive exam. It was on a cloudy Thursday, a day after a late afternoon shower had left a rainbow over the otherwise dreary campus. Like the day after that rainbow, the exam was anticlimactic, more indicative of what I’d learned in two years as a grad student at Pitt than in my two semesters at Carnegie Mellon.

Getting to this exam was sheer torture. Not because I didn’t understand historiography, or hadn’t read at least 230 books and countless articles since my first day of grad school. No, it was torturous because the powers that were had insisted to make my schedule more like the one of a first-semester grad student the previous fall.

I ended up with two courses that I didn’t want and didn’t need, especially since the History Department at CMU had told me that they had accepted all of my master’s and PhD credits from the University of Pittsburgh. Though I had taken four grad seminars in US history (not to mention CMU Professor Joe Trotter’s grad seminar in African American history the year before), I was taking a first-year student’s grad seminar in US history – again! I also had to take comparative working-class history seminar with a combination of anti-race Marxists and brown-nosing sycophants more interested in an A than in actual evidence-based historical interpretation.

Prostate exam from Family Guy (1999-2003, 2005-present) screen shot, July 17, 2013. (http://chattanoogaradiotv.com).

That, and being broke for most of the ’93-’94 school year — I took what amounted to a $2,000 stipend cut in my transfer from Pitt to CMU — made me pretty cranky my first six months at the home of elitist lily-Whiteness. There were days in those courses where I wanted to literally strangle some of my fellow grad students for being so dense (in the case of first-years) or for being so obviously fake in their praise of a given professor’s argument (in the case of two sycophants in particular). Only the late Barbara Lazarus and Trotter kept me grounded enough so that I didn’t spend every moment of Fall ’93 making voodoo dolls out of Steve Schlossman and John Modell for putting me through the hazing process.

Somewhere around the beginning of November ’93 — after some much-needed time in prayer — I began to realize a few things. One, that I’d already done so much reading on topics like immigration, industrialization, slavery and the connections between race and class (and race, class and gender). So much so that unless it was an author of major interest, I could skim or skip the reading, or even find a few book reviews and compare them to my extensive library of notes on the other authors in a given subfield or field.

Two, that my time outside of class was still my time. I knew that I wanted to do multiculturalism as a dissertation topic, and that I wanted to do it in the context of Black Washington, DC. So I began ordering microfilm of Black weekly newspapers like the Washington Tribune and Washington Bee (going back as far as 1915) to look at as much material as possible. It calmed me to know that I was working on my dissertation topic nearly a year before Trotter and my committee would official approve it.

Three, I knew by January ’94 that Schlossman, et al. had agreed that the Spring ’94 semester would be my last one in coursework. I still had to take Modell’s goofy Historical Methodologies course, but having to do things like my oral comprehensives made going to class just bearable enough.

Acting a part quotes from actors, March 17, 2014. (http://thepeopleproject.com/actors/quotes).

Finally, I took out a loan. I’d only taken out one student loan since finishing undergrad in ’91, but it was obvious I couldn’t live off of a $7,500-per-year stipend. Really, no one could, not without rooming with another student or having a spouse with a real income. The money came in at the beginning of March, making my march to become ABD that year that much easier.

By the time I walked into the second-floor conference room in Baker Hall to take my orals, I knew there wasn’t a question about what I knew and how well I knew it. It was about whether I could show the folks at CMU that I could play along with them in their version of grad school, which wasn’t any different from any other history doctoral program’s version. And I did play along, for two hours, more than long enough to move on to the dissertation proposal round.

When I said years later to my friend Laurell that Humanities and Mount Vernon High School had prepared me more for grad school than it did for undergrad at Pitt, this was what I meant!

Woman In Love

15 Saturday Mar 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, music, Pop Culture, Youth

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"I'm Every Woman" (1979), "Sweet Love" (1986), "Woman In Love" (1980), Anita Baker, Barbra Streisand, Bipolar Disorder, Celine Dion, Chaka Khan, Crushes, Drugs, Empathy, Endorphins, Euphoria, Love, Male-Female Relationships, Phyllis, Romance, Understanding Women, Wendy, Woman

Cover art of “Woman In Love” (1980) single by Barbra Streisand, August 9, 2006. (JeanMarcDekesel via Wikipedia, http://www.discogs.com/viewimages?what=R&obid=539484). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws (low resolution and subject matter).

I actually like a couple of Barbra Streisand songs, both from ’80, and both from her collaboration with The Bee Gees (specifically, Barry Gibb). One is “Guilty,” the other “Woman In Love.” And yes, this is but one sign of how weird I am. But for the past thirty-four years, these songs have been part of my mental and actual music rotation, allowing me to ponder the mysteries of the opposite sex in the process.

For those moments, I’ve sometimes found myself wondering, has any woman ever felt that way about me? “I am a woman in love/And I’d do anything/To get you into my world/And hold you within.” I honesty have no idea, but the possibility of stirring passion in someone other than myself has fascinated me since the days of my Wendy crush in March ’82.

So, every time I’ve had a crush or love of major note, Streisand’s “Woman In Love” has given me to ability to think about what it would be like to be a woman. Young. In love. With all of the hopes and hurts, battles and betrayals. In ’85 with Phyllis, in ’91, in ’95 with my eventual wife, even after marriage. Somehow, the overwrought and — dare I say, Jewish — angst with which Streisand sang the song resonated with me and has stayed with me after all these years.

Cover art for Anita Baker’s Rapture (1986) CD, April 25, 2006. (Faustlin via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use (low resolution).

It wasn’t just Streisand that’s given me this feeling over the years. Anita Baker’s “Sweet Love,” and “Body and Soul,” Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman” (still like this version better than Whitney’s, may she rest in peace) and “Through The Fire,” even some stuff from Celine Dion. Their music has gotten me about as close as could get to understanding what it must feel like to be a woman, at least in a generic sense. My wife, though, could probably testify to a lot more moments.

Of course, I can’t actually be a “woman in love,” no matter how much experience, imagination and empathy I can muster. Passing a kidney stone for nineteen hours in ’02 may approximate what my wife went through in giving birth to our son in ’03. But I didn’t have to carry that kidney stone around for nine months while it made noticeable changes to my body, my diet and my psyche. And having a child that you’ve fallen in love with before their birth often make the process worth it. I couldn’t get my doctors to let me see my kidney stone, much less keep it!

“It’s a right I defend/Over and over again,” Streisand sings in “Woman In Love.” As a boy and man who’s been “in love” at least four times in forty-four years, I feel that I can relate — a lot, if not in total. Taken to it’s most illogical extent, though, would mean obsession, possibly even stalker-like tendencies, especially if someone else doesn’t feel anything near the same way. But, when you’re in the middle of it, you might as well be on coke, Oxycontin and weed all at once, and with some latent form of bipolar disorder to boot. And the hangover from being in love requires much more than a Bloody Mary to get over.