Honorary Stupidity

09 Saturday Nov 2013

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

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Brandon Marshall, Bullying, Commodities, Cris Carter, ESPN, Fandom, Harassment, Hazing, Hostile Work Environment, Inhumanity, Jonathan Martin, Mark Schlereth, Miami Dolphins, N-Word, NFL, NFL Network, Ostracism, Racism, Richie Incognito, Ricky Williams, Warren Sapp

MLK’s “Sincere Ignorance and Conscientious Stupidity” saying, November 8, 2013. (http://bitterrealities.wordpress.com ).

There are so many things I could say about Richie Incognito and the vocal group of Miami Dolphins and ex-NFL players who’ve been supporting him versus Jonathan Martin over the past six days. That NFL players are Neanderthals. Or that Black players and ex-players like Cris Carter, Warren Sapp and Ricky Williams need their own education on what is and isn’t racism or harassment. Or that ESPN and the NFL Network have pushed this story without bringing a more critical lens to it.

There are two points that emerged this week, though, that bother me more than anything else. The idea that Incognito is more “Black” than Martin. Because Martin doesn’t sound “Black,” doesn’t act out of willful stupidity like “Black” NFL players, because he’s biracial, because he attended Stanford University, because his parents are Ivy League-educated. Last I checked, on and off the field, Martin’s treated as Black, regardless of his “unique” background. And Incognito’s still a White guy, one that threatened his teammate and his family, calling him the N-word on and off the field. Aside from the fact that the idea of a White guy being an “honorary Black” guy is offensive in general (see Maya Angelou’s idiotic praise of neo-conservative President Bill Clinton as “our first Black President” for Exhibit A) there’s this reality. No matter how “Black” Incognito can allegedly act, it’s an act, one which comes out of his Whiteness, and with it, an ultimate sense of cultural superiority.

Richie Incognito, Miami vs Oakland, Oakland, CA, September 16, 2012. (June Rivera via Flickr.com/Wikipedia). Released to public domain.

The other equally disturbing point is that because the NFL locker room is a unique place of hyper-masculinity, that what goes on there isn’t subject to public scrutiny. If that’s the case, why not go back to the days of alcohol in the locker room, where players could shoot up steroids and amphetamines? Or have strippers and groupies in the locker room as well? The NFL locker room, like other work sites, is not a static place, but an evolving one. If it wasn’t, then seventy to eighty percent of the players in it these days wouldn’t be Black, Latino or Samoan. It’s a stupid argument, one exactly like those made by NYPD and LAPD officers, construction workers and White supremacists.

Luckily, there are players and ex-players like Brandon Marshall and Mark Schlereth whose understanding of and sensitivity toward this issue has been exemplary. They are in the minority among the professional athlete and sports world set so far, unfortunately. Martin’s former teammates have unified in their portrayal of him as a villain and traitor and Incognito as the “real nigga” on the football field and in the locker room.

The reason for this should be obvious, at least for those of us with either uncommon sense or with a social justice core. Humanity apparently has no place in the world of sports, especially in football and even more specifically where Black football players are concerned. For owners, front office managers and fans alike, they are merely commodities. Ones that all often criticized for or envied over their salaries and torn down publicly for their sins and crimes. The players and ex-players see themselves as warriors and gladiators, or, in the case of the media savvy, as cut-throat businessmen. None of this allows for any sympathy or empathy for football players who have been genuinely harassed or abused.

Beef cattle on Eefie Hill. North Atlantic in the background, United Kingdom, August 18, 2005. (John Comloquoy via http://geograph.org.uk). Released to public domain via Creative Commons Share-Alike 2.0.

It has meant that players like Incognito — or in previous generations, Michael Westbrook and Bill Romanowski — have fellow players willing to stand up for their criminal behavior, for in fact creating a hostile work environment. Players who suddenly respond like human beings to a dehumanizing workplace have found and do find themselves shunned by the fraternity. And to quit and air out the dirty laundry? It may well be easier to quit La Cosa Nostra and continue to live than it has been for Martin to quit the Miami Dolphins.

I, for one, don’t expect NFL locker rooms to change as a result of the ongoing investigation of Martin’s harassment allegations, no matter how true they may actually be. But I do suspect that even in the Dolphins’ locker room, there are players who haven’t forgotten their humanity, whose understanding of race and masculinity goes beyond a rap video or the N-word. At the very least, there will be much more to come in the form of dirty laundry, and not just from the Dolphins, either.

My One and Only College Visit Before College

05 Tuesday Nov 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, music, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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"Party All The Time" (1985), Black Males, Class of '87, Class of 1987, Classmates, College Visits, Concordia College, Eddie Murphy, HBCUs, Humanities, Rick James, Self-Discovery, Walks

Concordia College, Bronxville, NY, November 5, 2013. (http://concordia-ny.edu).

One of the many pitfalls of poverty in the midst of striving toward college was that I didn’t do a single formal college visit prior to taking the Amtrak to Pittsburgh in late-August ’87. (Ironic, then, that I’ve been on at least sixty college campuses to teach or lecture, for graduate school, for conferences, talks, interviews and other events in the past quarter-century). The only options for doing any college visits at all while at Mount Vernon High School (NY) were either the schools in the area or to go on the HBCU college visit trips to Howard and Hampton University. I had no interest in applying to an HBCU (which I’ll talk about later), and the prospect of visiting Columbia or NYU never really occurred to me until years later.

But I did have one inadvertent encounter with a college campus prior to arriving at Lothrop Hall on the University of Pittsburgh’s campus in ’87. It was in the fall of ’85. As I wrote in Boy @ The Window:

I discovered something rather interesting about myself toward the end of the year. I understood, maybe for the first time, how much walking and nocturnal self-pleasure had replaced sitting on the radiator at the living room window as my after school and weekend distraction. Walking allowed me to continue to contemplate my future, to make sense of my senseless world. Very early on in my junior year, I went on a Saturday walk straight up Route 22, from East Lincoln and North Columbus. I ended up at Concordia College in Bronxville, a small liberal arts school in the middle of one of the richest towns in America. It was a cloudy and crisp early fall day, those first series of gray days you experience after a long, hot summer. I wore my gray hooded and zippered sweat jacket with my beat-up multi-colored and checkered long-sleeve shirt and some cheap, made-in-Taiwan blue jeans.

Even with that and my tall, Black male self on a mostly White campus, I seemed to blend in. Not a single person looked at me as if I didn’t belong there. Some of the students actually said “Hi” to me, and not that overly enthusiastic greeting, either. I walked across the campus, walked into some of the buildings and walked around some of the empty classrooms. After a bit more wandering around, I ended up at the library. It was surprisingly small, but the books it did have were the kinds I used to like reading. Old and dusty historical texts and subjects of interest only to old writers and historians. I saw students at tables studying or talking softly while studying. Then it dawned on me why the students didn’t automatically assume that I wasn’t a college student. I was dressed like they were, or,I guess, they dressed like me. Sloppy, but not too sloppy. It also dawned on me that you needed a college ID on the campus in case the guards suspected that you weren’t a college student. So I made my way from the campus and trekked back home.

This was my first and only college visit. And though I hadn’t stopped by the admissions office or spoken with a financial aid counselor, my wandering walk gave me much food for thought. The visit reinforced my thinking on what I needed to do in eleventh grade to guarantee both college acceptance and a scholarship. I assumed an academic scholarship, but an athletic one was still in the realm of possibility. I knew, again, that this was my make-or-break year to bring my grades up as far as possible. I had no idea what my class ranking was, but I assumed that I needed to be in the top fifteen or twenty to have my best shot. So I set the largest goal possible – making it to the top ten of my class.

Eddie Murphy (with Rick James), “Party All The Time” (1985) video (screen shot), November 5, 2013. (http://vimeo.com).

In the back of my mind, I knew even then that I didn’t want to attend a school with any of my classmates or with any reminders of Mount Vernon. So many of my Black classmates were already talking about attending HCBUs or New York area school. I knew that despite their relative maturity as eleventh graders, I didn’t want to be in classroom settings with the Rick James “Party All The Time” set or with White and Black classmates who thought of me as a caricature of a human being or Black male.

That walk to Concordia reminded me of a simple fact. That my path to college was my path, not to be determined by anyone else, and certainly not the people I didn’t even trust with a smile.

The Things I Can’t Say

28 Monday Oct 2013

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

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Competition, Happy Birthday, Intervention, Jealousy, Life, Mom, Mother-Son Relationship, Sharing, Silence, Trust

U.S. Route 66 shield, made to the specifications of the 2004 edition of Standard Highway Sign, January 27, 2006. (SPUI via Wikipedia). Released to public domain.

Today was my Mom’s sixty-sixth birthday. I’m just beginning to come to grips with the fact that Mom’s a senior citizen, considering that she was only twenty-two when she had me in ’69. It’s been a roller coaster ride through hell, with many downs and only a handful of ups over those years. The one casualty in those years that we haven’t overcome has been the ability to share everything that has been my life with her, especially in the last decade.

I learned the hard way sixteen years ago that the lack of distance in age between me and Mom resulted in a sort-of competition. It was one of which I hadn’t been aware until ’97. It involved higher education, finding work and finding full-time work. It involved friendships and relationships, God and church, and finding a passion for a calling. Week after week, and year after year, from ’87 to ’02, I talked on the phone or at 616 with my Mom about these situations and issues. Only to find that my triumphs and failures were only a point of comparison for her, and not a conversation involving life and lessons.

When I finally realized this in ’97, and did an intervention involving my family on this and other issues in ’02, it was the third most emotionally painful thing I’d ever been through. I had to decide how I should talk to my Mom moving forward. I made the choice to not share significant parts of my life with Mom. From that point on, I chose to not discuss any victories or struggles in my jobs, in finding work, in consulting or teaching with her. Nor have I talked about my marriage’s ups and occasional downs, my writings, my publications, my projects, my hopes, my dreams, my fears, or my struggles. Mostly, I’ve only talked about my son and his glacial journey toward adulthood, the weather, my siblings, or something in the news that may be funny or relevant.

Ginsu 9-Inch Japanese Stainless Steel Slicer, October 28, 2013. (http://www.amazon.com).

This has been the case since the summer of ’02. Uncomfortable silences and frequent struggles to think about what to actually discuss that could have real meaning, have been what this has meant for the two of us. Given her response to the intervention I conducted in January ’02, I can only imagine what Mom’s response would be to Boy @ The Window. On the one hand, she would act unimpressed, as if I’d written a book about organic chemistry and nanotechnology. On the other hand, my Mom would likely be seething behind her ho-hum mask, ready to rip my throat out for airing family secrets and dirty laundry. (I actually dreamt as much the other night, being at a book talk with Mom coming over the table, slashing at me with a Ginsu knife).

I haven’t been angry with my Mom for years, and I forgave Mom for any mistakes she made regarding me growing up years ago. But I know my Mom well enough to know that our relationship could never be an adult mother-son one, where I get to be an adult and her son at the same time. Part of that means me remaining silent about a significant part of my life, including a memoir in which she’s a main character. It’s too bad, yet it’s also the way it must be. For my emotional sanity, as well as for hers.

Why Students Need Teachers Who Look Like Them

24 Thursday Oct 2013

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

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Black Teachers, Diane Ravitch, Diversity, Education Reform, High-Stakes Testing, Mount Vernon public schools, Nathan Hale Elementary, Reign of Error (2013), Teach for America, Teachers of Color, Teaching, Wendy Kopp, William H. Holmes Elementary

Wendy Kopp and Diane Ravitch head-to-head, Aspen Ideas Festival, Aspen, CO, June 28, 2011. (http://www.aspenideas.org/).

Not exactly the most precise title I’ve ever written. But it does get to a sensitive point for many involved in education and so-called reform. Between Wendy Kopp and Diane Ravitch — especially since the publication of Ravitch’s latest and most comprehensive salvo Reign of Error a couple of months ago — it’s been hard for anyone to get a word on K-12 education into the national dialogue. Kopp’s running around ringing the educational Armageddon bell, while Ravitch has all but revealed the likes of Kopp, Michelle Rhee and Dr. Steve Perry as money-hungry reformers who wouldn’t know reform if it bit them in their derrieres.

The debate over high-stakes testing and anti-union teacher effectiveness models has put aside so many other conversations on improving K-12 education. So many that the average person may think that test scores and teacher training are the only issues on the table for reform, whether from the perspective of false prophets like Kopp or actual experts like Ravitch. For me, the one effort that has been neglected over the past decade and a half has been one to diversify the teaching profession, on the basis of race, gender and even levels of expertise.

It’s taken my son’s five-plus years of education in Montgomery County Public Schools to fully appreciate how unique my own time in an integrated school setting in Mount Vernon, New York truly was. From first through sixth grade, at Nathan Hale and William H. Holmes Elementary Schools, four of my six teachers were African American. But it wasn’t just that they were Black. The one thing that Ms. Griffin, Mrs. Shannon, Mrs. O’Daniel and Mrs. Bryant all had in common was their high expectations of me and my classmates. They were kind, but also no-nonsense teachers. They gave me a hug when I needed one, and a slap on the butt (in O’Daniel’s case, nearly literally) when I needed it. By the way, they frequently made school fun, too.

No reflection of self in the mirror, October 24, 2013. (http://mailfeed.blogspot.com/).

They also dared to venture beyond the state-mandated curriculum to infuse it with materials about everything from Black history to the Maya, from reading our standard textbooks to encouraging us to discuss the Camp David accords (Menachem Begin, Anwar Sadat and President Jimmy Carter) and the Iran hostage crisis. Mostly, I learned more about what I’d face from the world in terms of race, gender and class from these teachers than from all the rest of my teachers combined (other than Harold Meltzer).

I would’ve liked some more male teachers of color, particularly once I became part of Humanities at A.B. Davis Middle School in seventh grade. In fact, between Dr. Larry Spruill and Dr. Hosea Zollicoffer, they were really the only Black male teachers/administrators I saw between end of sixth grade and my junior year at the University of Pittsburgh, a span of almost nine years. As it was, administrators and teachers like my seventh grade math teacher Ms. Simmons, along with Brenda Smith, Spruill and the handful of other I encountered often looked at me as if I was the cursed Son of Ham, or, rather, some weird version of whom they considered Black. At least, respectable and Black. Still, they served as reminders that not all teachers were White and female, if only that. (But, I digress…)

Now, I know what some of you may say. It shouldn’t matter what the race of the teacher or administrator is, as long as they care about the students. That The New Teacher Project (founded by Rhee) and Teach for America (founded by Kopp) provide alternative opportunities for professionals of color to enter the teaching profession. No they don’t. Not really. They provide an elitist version of Peace Corps for impoverished urban and rural school districts for folks who often do not stay in teaching for the long-term (beyond four or five years), only to then move on to graduate school, law school or Wall Street.

Reign of Error (2013) by Diane Ravitch, front cover. (http://bn.com).

My teachers to a person remained teachers until they received promotions, retired or passed away. But they could stay teachers (and later become administrators) because they weren’t trying to reform education. They saw themselves as part of a larger community, helping to nurture children, not just educate them. They had the autonomy and parental support necessary to do so. And they didn’t have an atmosphere where they lived in fear of their jobs in case the students’ SRA scores dropped between 1979 and 1980 or between 1980 and 1981.

Despite my experiences and the experiences of my generation of students, the money grubbers of K-12 education reform will continue to insist that public education is at Def Con 1, and that we should launch our proverbial nukes in a pre-emptive strike to reform it. The sad truth is, in places like Texas and Philly and Chicago, their warheads have already gone off, irradiating school districts, poor students and students of color alike. And all without dealing with issues involving poverty and diversity in the process.

On Regrets and Forgiveness

22 Tuesday Oct 2013

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

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Child Abuse, Domestic Violence, Forgiveness, Indecision, Love, Maurice Eugene Washington, Maurice Washington, Mother-Son Relationship, Regret, Regrets, Second-Guessing, Self-Reflection, Unforgiveness

Emily Flake’s “You only regret the things you don’t do, Johnston,” February 28, 2011. (http://newyorker.com)

One of the things I’ve read and heard from others so far about Boy @ The Window since April has been about catharsis. As in, “this book must’ve been cathartic for you.” I’ve said in response, “Yeah, it sure has.” But that’s not been the whole truth. In more than a few respects, Boy @ The Window has opened up a Pandora’s box of wounds I’d kept locked for years and years.

This might surprise some folks, especially the ones who attended Mount Vernon public schools, Humanities and specifically Mount Vernon High School with me. But there is a dark side to being me. Beneath my well wishes, good graces and generic smile has also been a person with deep regret, repressed anger, smoldering rage over what by far were the worst years of my life. All of which has translated into a person whose worst days since are days of blame — almost always of and for myself. I can forgive almost anyone or anything — my late idiot ex-stepfather, my father Jimme and his years of alcoholism, friends or superiors who’ve attempted to take advantage of me.

The Physics of a Bottomless Pit, February 27, 2013. (MatsuKami of deviantART via http://www.scienceblogs.com).

Yet there’s one person I’ve found very hard to forgive — myself. I hold myself to such high standards that it would be impossible for anyone other than Jesus to meet. And God knows I’m not perfect. But in looking at my past, my growing up years in Boy @ The Window, I’ve found that so much of my life’s force and energy has gone into redeeming myself for having to live through those terrible, terrible years. Even though I’ve been at a place in my life in which I’ve pretty much known myself, my passions, my calling, my abilities and limitations, for the better part of twenty years. Until recently, though, I hadn’t given myself any breaks from my past. Putting it under lock and key obviously didn’t work, and airing it for the world to read — while beneficial — had brought with it a truck-load of emotions that I had yet to work through.

As I wrote at the end of Boy @ The Window:

I can say without a doubt that Humanities did make a difference in my life. I wouldn’t be the person I am today without those six bittersweet and indifferent years. It makes any setback I might suffer today seem small and laughable by comparison. There are things I wish would’ve happened, things that would’ve made it easier to enjoy life and savor glorious moments even now. I wish Humanities had been as serious about developing me as a writer as it was about accelerated math and science classes. I regret not asking Phyllis out for a date. I lament not revealing more about the tragedies of my family life or my keen sense of humor to the few classmates and teachers I had some bond with, however weak. I wish I had trusted my instincts and never worn that kufi to Holmes or Davis. I know I should’ve stayed with football or tried out for basketball. And I wish I had the opportunity as a twelve-year-old to kiss Wendy one time. Admittedly, there’s a part of me that wishes I could kiss her now.

I imagine that if I had done all of these things, I would’ve been even more bruised up (especially in the case of Wendy), but at least I could’ve said I tried. Instead of looking back at my past and picking it apart like a forensic vulture.

But my deepest regret, and one that I hadn’t forgiven myself for, at least until recently, was for not calling the cops on my then stepfather after he beat up Mom on Memorial Day, Monday, May 31, ’82. Between my near-photographic memory and my training as an academic historian, it’s been hard to look at my past without reliving it.

How do you mend a broken heart?, 2005, October 22, 2013. (digitalman via deviantART at http://deviantart.net).

I hadn’t figured out that I hadn’t forgiven myself until a few weeks ago. I realized that I hadn’t let go of the worst of my past. Now, letting go doesn’t mean that you forget your past, bury it or repress it emotionally. For me, it simply means not reliving the moment as if it happened last week instead of thirty-one years ago. To treat the moment as a memory, an important reminder that I am not Superman, that I couldn’t have saved my Mom from domestic violence anymore than I could’ve saved myself from poverty as a twelve-year-old.

You know, when I was younger, I thought that I didn’t have any regrets, any resentment or any dark side from growing up the way I did. We all tend to believe that pushing forward to a brighter future will take care of our past. That’s simply not true. We need to live in the present in order to achieve that brighter future. That means working through our pasts, and then letting it go. I should know.

“I Am Become Columbus, Destroyer of Worlds”

14 Monday Oct 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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American Indians, Christopher Columbus, Columbus Day, Diseases, Enslavement, Exploitation, Genocide, History, Indigenous Groups, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Native Populations, Teaching and Learning

Dióscoro Teófilo Puebla Tolín, First landing of Columbus on the shores of the New World, at San Salvador, West Indies, 1862 (published 1892, Currier& Ives). (Dantadd via Wikipedia). In public domain.

The title kind of says it all, no? On this Columbus Day, 2013, we should all acknowledge this as the beginning of the inadvertent (and frequently deliberate) genocide conducted against the indigenous groups that made up the Western Hemisphere as of October 12, 1492. The day that Christopher Columbus “discovered” America — as if First Nation tribes or Native Americans or American Indians were looking to be discovered — was the first day of more than half a millennium’s worth of physical and psychological assault on the peoples of the Western Hemisphere.

I talk about this in all of my courses — US History, World History (when I get to 1500 CE), and African American History. I describe how this notion of discovery was pretty much invented in the nineteenth century, to create a mythology about the greatness of God-fearing Europeans (and, in the US context, Americans) and their pre-ordained but altruistic triumph over the heathen Indians, those “noble savages.” I go over the fact that the Eurasian diseases that the Spaniards and other Europeans brought with them to the Western Hemisphere wiped out tens of millions of the indigenous between 1492 and 1700. Smallpox, measles, mumps, rubella, bubonic plague, chicken pox all helped reduce a population that experts have estimated to have been between 70 and 100 million at the time of first contact to between seven and 10 million by the end of the seventeenth century.

Drawing accompanying text in Book XII of the 16th-century Florentine Codex (compiled by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, 1540–1585), showing Nahuas of conquest-era Central Mexico suffering from smallpox, September 11, 2009. (Wikipedia). In public domain.

Drawing in Book XII of Florentine Codex (compiled by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, 1540–1585), showing Nahuas of Central Mexico suffering from smallpox, September 11, 2009. (Wikipedia). In public domain.

I talk about Columbus’ second voyage, where he helped establish the first European settlement in what is now Haiti and then in the Dominican Republic, all while searching for gold, enslaving Arawak Indians and engaging in full-fledged battles. Just a year and a half after the first, glorious “discovery!”

The justification, of course, was and often remains that Europeans were civilized Catholic Christians, whereas these half-dressed natives were hedonistic polytheists. Even now, we often get caught up in the human sacrifice rituals of the Maya and Aztecs and somehow use that as justification for exploitation, slavery, and the inadvertent wiping out of whole cultures — worlds, if you will. It’s a justification that should make any believer in a higher power queasy, and any non-believer extremely angry.

I’m disappointed. We still sugarcoat the real meaning of Columbus Day for people of all ages. I began to learn about all of this in fifth grade (thank you, Mrs. O’Daniel), in October ’79. But I didn’t come to know most of the full story until high school. Even then, no one — not Flanagan, Zini or Meltzer — mentioned disease, exploitation, slavery and warfare as the genocidal combination that essentially handed Western Europeans the Western Hemisphere. I guess they either didn’t know or thought that it would be too painful a lesson to teach fourteen-to-eighteen year-olds.

As J. Robert Oppenheimer said in ’65, twenty years after the Manhattan Project’s success in creating the world’s first nuclear bomb, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Well, one doesn’t have to have God-like powers or be a Hindu deity to create large-scale human suffering, as was the case with Columbus. All one really needs is the conviction necessary to treat other humans as if they are only meat with brains and eyes.

God, Graviano and Darwin

10 Thursday Oct 2013

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

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Atheism, Biology, Charles Darwin, Creationism, Evangelical Christianity, Evolution, God, Higher Power, Identity, John Graviano, Politics of Religion, Salvation, Self-Discovery, Self-Reflection, The Universe

Galaxies in clusters/ superclusters of dark matter filaments, as part of Pan-STARRS sky survey, July 17, 2010. (Boylan-Kolchin/The Virgo Consortium/Durham University/PA Wire)

Tens of thousands of galaxies in clusters/superclusters of dark matter filaments, as part of Pan-STARRS sky survey, July 17, 2010. (Boylan-Kolchin/The Virgo Consortium/Durham University/PA Wire)

From Boy @ The Window, circa October ’83:

Bio with Mr. Graviano did provide some answers for me beyond the science. The man was also an assistant coach for MVHS’ basketball team. Although I know he loved basketball, Graviano was a heck of a science teacher. He didn’t do anything particularly exciting. He just made it seem as if we were learning how to tie our shoes when he was teaching us binomial nomenclature or the difference between mitosis and meiosis. Graviano began the year with Charles Darwin’s trip aboard the HMS Beagle to South America and the Galapagos Islands in the 1830s, observing finches and developing his theory of natural selection. We were learning about Darwin and evolution, something I knew flew in the face of my family’s Hebrew-Israelite beliefs. Despite that, what I learned in Biology every day made more sense to me than attempting to interpret the first chapter of Genesis or Balkis Makeda’s dreams warning us against the imperfect science of intellectual types like Darwin. What surprised me more was the fact that no one in our class questioned Graviano or the fact that he was teaching evolution, at least not in the open.

Biology gave me food for thought. I understood the science, the process of natural selection and mutation, the reality that over numerous eons life gradually evolved on earth to include intelligent mammals, primates, and humans. At the same time, we were being taught in temple that God had created or reclaimed (depending on interpretation) the earth in six days or six thousand years. The reclamation interpretation left room for everything that science said had occurred prior to the ascent of modern humans. The creation story obviously didn’t. I was confused, having to reconcile the scientific method with religious beliefs. I solved the problem in my own mind by choosing to stand on the reclamation interpretation of Genesis’ first chapter. But that didn’t completely satisfy me.

It was part of a long but interesting period that led me to become a plain old, nondenominational Christian by April ’84. But at this point in the Boy @ The Window story, I was literally caught between the stupidity of being a Hebrew-Israelite and the idea that there wasn’t a higher power at all.

Yet, despite Graviano’s class, I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that evolution was a random process. To me, that seemed to approach the ridiculous. Biological evolution’s hardly been perfect. But one completely random set of changes built upon another set of completely random changes over three or four billion years likely doesn’t yield life on this planet in its current state. Too many patterns for me reflected in biology, mathematics and — as I’d learn in a couple of years — physics to accept evolution as a completely random process.

Portrait of Charles Darwin, by George Richmond (circa 1838), October 15, 2012. (Jdcollins13 via Wikipedia). In public domain.

That was really my only sticking point. For my ninth and tenth-grade classmates, though, I couldn’t believe their stone-faced silences over the Darwin story. I knew that some of them held beliefs that ran completely counter to the idea of evolution. Some, even, were likely what we now call evangelical, literal-interpretation-of-the-Bible Christians. Yet they were as silent as comatose patients for most of the first marking period. What I learned a little later on in life was that silence was as much a form of protest or disapproval as outright vocal opposition.

As for me, I found the processes of mutation, mitosis and meiosis fascinating. I felt as if I was learning a small but important secret about God and the universe. That both — if one believes in God and has some understanding of the universe — have intellectual and scientific minds. Graviano, through his mechanical teaching style, was at least able to convey that to us, if any of us paid close enough attention.

If Graviano opened my eyes to modern science and the understanding of life on its most basic level, Yom Kippur ’83 opened me up to understanding why I no longer put my trust in Maurice’s God.

I guess if I hadn’t already been in the midst of a spiritual identity crisis, I wouldn’t have used my classes in ninth grade as my way of figuring out how to rebuild my identity, and in the process, figure out what and in whom I wanted to believe. Too bad folks who now run things in this country never took one moment’s time to do the same.