Chronicle of Higher Education – Shame On You!

03 Thursday May 2012

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

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Academia, Arrogance, Black Studies, Brainstorm section, Conversations on Education Reform, Conversations on Race, Doctoral Research, Education Reform, Gender, Higher Education, Ignorance, Journalism, Naomi Schaefer Riley, Northwestern University, Offensive, Publicity, Race, Readership, Snarky, Social Media, Social Media Presence, The Chronicle of Higher Education

Naomi Schaefer Riley, Chronicle of Higher Education blogger, September 25, 2011. (http://c-span.org). In public domain.

On April 30, Naomi Schaefer Riley, a blogger for The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Brainstorm digital platform, wrote the disrespectful and snarky/offensive post “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations.”

It was disrespectful, snarky and offensive because Riley used the post to go after Northwestern University graduate students who had literally just finished their doctoral theses. Not to mention the fact that Riley hadn’t actually read the dissertations she discussed in her post. For example, Riley called Ruth Hayes and her dissertation “‘So I Could Be Easeful’: Black Women’s Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth” on the carpet. All because Hayes wrote that she “noticed that nonwhite women’s experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature, which led me to look into historical black midwifery” in her abstract. “How could we overlook the nonwhite experience in ‘natural birth literature,’ whatever the heck that is?,” was Riley’s disrespectful and idiotic response. Riley based her response on a title and one sentence from a dissertation.

Riley wrote about two other dissertations, one about the origins of the subprime lending crisis for Blacks — going back to policies enacted by the federal government in the 1960s — the other about the history of Black Republicanism. She not only concluded based solely on the titles and a couple of statements that this was “a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap.” Riley also decided the fate of Black Studies as a discipline, saying that these three doctoral thesis made the “case for eliminating the discipline,” at least in her snarky and offended mind.

If this was Riley’s one and only post, I’d simply accuse her of being an ill-informed ex-Wall Street Journal journalist who obviously has a limited understanding of the history of research in the humanities and social sciences fields of academia. One of marginalization and exclusion of the experiences of all Americans who aren’t White, male, rich and powerful. One in which remains the automatic assumption in many circles that any research done by Blacks on race, women on sexism, and gays and lesbians on homophobia is less valuable or unscholarly. I’ve known more than my share of colleagues who have experienced disdain, even occasional ostracism, because of their work, in the so-called liberal environment that is academia.

Riley, however, has posted multiple times about Blacks in academia blaming all of their ills on the “white man,” as she would put it. She’s complained about the validity of women’s studies and about the usefulness of so-called liberal research in her posts as well. It proves that Riley has as much understanding about research and academia as I do about embroidery. And I’ve at least had a couple of embroidery classes.

But Riley, for all of her snarky arrogance and willful ignorance — the very thing that defines her posts — isn’t the most significant culprit on this. The Chronicle of Higher Education is ultimately to blame. After years of writing the same turgid stories over and over again about the “two-body problem,” faculty compensation and university endowments, The Chronicle in the past year or so has attempted a turn toward the provocative. Instead of real attempts to reach out to educators, education reformers and other practitioners who aren’t tenured/tenure-track faculty and graduate students aspiring to such, they have settled on bringing in a group of bloggers whose sole job is to stir the pot.

There are big issues in higher education begging for coverage. The issue of the effectiveness of online higher education. The corruption that runs rampant at for-profit institutions and the public institutions that adopt for-profit practices. The over-reliance on data sets to determine higher education (as well as K-12) policies. The dominance of private foundations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in determining how twenty-first century education reform will look — to the detriment of perhaps millions of children and college students.

No, these articles and discussions are rare in the world of The Chronicle. Instead, they had the wonderful idea of letting tenured faculty and inane journalists blog on issues that could possibly cause controversy, stir up discussions, even lead to an uptick in viewers of the Chronicle.com website. But The Chronicle isn’t Charlie Sheen or Kim Kardashian, where any publicity is good publicity. Especially when a journalist in the case of Riley didn’t do their due diligence before foaming at the mouth.

The most offensive thing about all of this is that The Chronicle, as the arrogant institution they are, will continue to allow the likes of Riley a platform, under the cloak of journalistic freedom. That is a shame, and a pitiful one at that.

Prom-Ethos

02 Wednesday May 2012

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

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Cliques, College Planning, Crush #2, Dating, Ethics, Ethos, Humanities, Humanities Program, Manhood, MVHS, New York Giants, New York Mets, Prom, Prometheus, Relationships, Senior Prom, Senioritis

Jon Cryer and Molly Ringwald as Duckie and Andie in Pretty In Pink (1986), May 2, 2012. (http://bing.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of low resolution.

I can’t believe that it’s been a quarter-century since I made the decision to go to my senior prom and to ask someone to go with me in the process. The fact that both happened should say that the things my classmates thought about me at the time were simply untrue, which also showed how little they thought of me to begin with. The fact that I stumbled my way to the prom, though, would say even more about the six years’ worth of isolation that I’d experienced between 616 and Humanities than anything else.

My senior year at Mount Vernon High School was hardly easy, between college preparations, senioritis, three AP courses (English, Calculus and Physics, no less), my classmates in constant conflict (see my post “The Audacity of Low Expectations/Jealousy” from September ’11), and my ever-growing list of adult responsibilities at 616. Not to mention checking out the months of October ’86 and January ’87 to watch my Mets and Giants win a World Series and a Super Bowl.

With all of that going on, I made a couple of decisions. One was to escape from MVHS as frequently as possible, which meant spending more time in the library or on the Subway or at 241st’s magazine shop, where I could find every conceivable porn magazine at the time. The second was that I wasn’t going to my senior prom. I couldn’t be so bothered as to get caught up in senior-year drama birthed from of six or more years of stress and trauma.

Several things changed my attitude, at least around the prom. With the end of my half-year of Philosophy and Humanities Music meant some more free time to turn around my grades (I had a 1.95 GPA during my second marking period) and to think about the immediate future of college. Most importantly, I realized that there were a few people around me who cared, if only in a feeling-sorry-for-me way. By the beginning of February, I decided to go to my prom, even if it meant going by myself, and to do what I could to salvage the school year, if only by a little bit.

But in making that first decision, I put off looking for a date in a serious way for the prom until I knew for

Prometheus Bound (1996), by Scott Eaton, March 3, 2010. (Scott Eaton via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-Attribution 2.5 Generic license.

sure if Crush #2 had one. Through idle chatter with her and some of her friends one day in the hallway
outside of the Music Department, I knew she had a date, with whom I was never able to find out. I learned all of this by the middle of April. I wasn’t shocked by any stretch. I just felt like a dumb and bumpy toad wishing and hoping for something to happen instead of making something happen.

Another classmate (one whom I’ll call “H” for the purposes of this post) was my next and best potential prom date. In H’s case, I assumed that she was dating someone, likely a former upperclassman now in college, so my hopes weren’t high to begin with. Plus it would’ve been a friendly date, no out-of-whack emotions to hide or control, no expectations beyond a friendly hug. Other young women who were in their various cliques and relationships had their prom dates lined up months ago, whether they seriously liked the person or not.

I didn’t want this to be a big deal. I just wanted to go so that when I got older I wouldn’t regret not going. So I decided to ask “J,” if only because she was a friendly acquaintance whom I thought would help make the evening fun. J agreed to go to the prom with me, which was nice, if only because it might my decision to go a less stressful one.

Even in the midst of suddenly finding the emotional strength of a typical seventeen-year-old to take this step, I made several incorrect assumptions and errors in tripping my way into something as cliquish and social as a prom. Among others:

Ethos (2011) movie poster, cropped and altered, May 2, 2012. (http://www.amazon.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of low resolution and alterations.

1. My main reason for going to my prom was because I didn’t want to look back at my time in school later on and regret not going. I don’t regret going. But, in the end, it probably would’ve better for me to have hung out with folks at a Mets game or gone to a Broadway play, if only because the food may have been better.

2. Once I made the decision to go, I simply should’ve asked Crush #2 if she had a date or not for the prom. Period. Even if she had said “No,” it would’ve given me more time to ask other folks, or even to decide to go by myself.

3. I knew on some level as soon as I asked J that despite our agreement that this was a friendly date, that at least for her, it was more than that. A more mature person — me after ’90, for example — would’ve been vocal enough to let J know that I saw her as a friend, nothing more, and that I had other interests at the time (of course, it’s hard for forty-two year-olds to be that brutally honest, but a more honest approach would’ve been better).

My lack of same-age social activities over the previous six years left me only semi-prepared for all of the emotional and psychological torture that I’d be in for not only for the prom, but also for the summer to come. My social ethos was only beginning to evolve.

The Women In My Brain

28 Saturday Apr 2012

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

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Battlestar Galactica, Brain, Brain Wiring, Crush #1, Images, Inception, Love, Marriage, Mind's Eye, Muse, My Mother, My Wife, Neurons, Self-Discovery, Self-Reflection, The Cell, Wedding Anniversary, Women, Wonder Woman

Angelia & me on honeymoon, Seattle's Space Needle, May 20, 2001. (Donald Earl Collins)

Today’s my twelfth wedding anniversary. It means that I already have one woman in my brain almost all of the time, mostly around the mundane tasks of running a place of residence, other domestic duties, and watching over/nurturing the midsized human that is our eight-year-old.

Gaius Baltar & Caprica Six, Battlestar Galactica image (2004), June 25, 2009. (http://25fps.cz). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws due to low resolution of picture.

But the reality is, there have always been women in my brain, with images that inspire, voices that encourage, and actions that embolden. This post isn’t about undressing a woman in my mind’s eye every six seconds. Nor is it about putting women on some pedestal so that I can mentally kneel and worship in an empty space. Trust me, I’ve done both and more over the years. No, this is about who gets into my head and how they stay there.

Of course, no one has had more air time on my mind’s screen over the past forty-two years and change than my mother. She did give birth to me, after all, and for better and worse, helped me make it to my preteen years before things in our lives fell apart at 616. For years, I’ve lived with the lessons learned at my mother’s hip, lessons about race, trust, religion and relationships. Many of which I’ve had to revise in order to make better choices in my own life. Still, I can hear my mother’s voice, bad jokes and all, in the things I do with my son, in the mistakes I hope to avoid as a writer and as an educator, in the bills that constantly have to be paid.

I hear my wife’s voice every time I go the grocery store. Or when I’m dealing with my son. Or when I think about our travels over the years. Literal and figurative. I think about all of things we’ve made happen, and all of the things that are still works-in-progress for us, as individuals and as a family. I hear her doubt, her most critical of voices, her scalpel sense of editing in what I write, in how I speak and in the diplomacy I show the folks in my life who otherwise don’t deserve it. Though our marriage is as complicated as astrophysics shows the universe to be when accounting for dark matter, my wife’s voice bounces around my 100 trillion nerve ending almost as much as my own.

Then there’s Crush #1. She’s more insidious than my mother or my wife. The tenacious ballerina of a

Inception (2010), Paris dream construct screen shot, April 27, 2012. (http://dpmlicious.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of poor resolution of shot, not intended for distribution.

tomboy who one represented my personification of Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman often will show up when I least expect. Often enough in my dreams, and usually when I’m writing in my head. I hear her giggles and see her smiles under the strangest of circumstances. A pirouette here, a punch to the jaw there, an encouraging word and a thoughtful look will surprise me in my dreams as much as it would’ve in real life thirty years ago.

Are these women anything like the folks I’ve known and learned to know again over the past three decades? Yes and no. They likely represent the many sides of me as much as they each represent themselves. Loving or not, caring or not, forever elusive, and yet always there for me to grasp, love and even despise. They all represent the best and worst in me, the best and worst I’ve seen, endured and overcome in this life. Hard, tough, blood-from-a-turnip love. Unrequited, one-sided love. And deep, conditional, familiar love. They’re all there. They seem to always be there.

Jennifer Lopez in dream sequence in The Cell (2000), April 27, 2012. (http://media.avclub.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of screen shot's low resolution.

God, my own thoughts — however deep or shallow — the billions of images of sports and men and women in my head from every walk of life and every song made in the past four centuries also remain constant in my brain. But mother, wife and first love can’t be shut off or out either. I could use some endorphins for the headache I have now.

How Our Politicians See Us

18 Wednesday Apr 2012

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

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American People, Antichrist, Apocalypse, Batteries, Carnegie Mellon University, Mitt Romney, Oligarchy, Politicians, President Barack Obama, President Obama, Slaughterhouse, The Matrix, University of Pittsburgh

Uruguay slaughterhouse with hanging cow carcasses, April 2, 2012. (http://www.meattradenewsdaily.co.uk).

A slightly left-of-center friend of mine from my grad school days at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon has gone off the rails in the past couple of years. At least once a week, he posts on Facebook and The Washington Post his views of the “nice guy…to have at a barbecue,” the “dangerous man” he consistently describes President Barack Obama to be.

Every parsed word, every decision, every breath President Obama takes my friend construes as evidence of the president’s link to the Antichrist and the Apocalypse. My friend has become an unlikely crackpot, willing to see everything President Obama does in the most negative light. To the point where he doesn’t give the president credit for decisions in which few could find fault.

But there’s one thing in which my friend from the ’90s is certain and correct. That if we the people only hold the conservative, reactionary and fascist oligarchs — the GOP and their neocon supporters — accountable, the centrist, not-so-progressive and Wall-Street-beholden oligarchs — the Democratic Party — will be able to get away with demolishing what remains of a sense of progression and fairness in American culture and politics. The two-party system has been broken for a while, rusted out from citizen apathy, a military-industrial complex, and the corruption of money, power and religious absolutism mixed with our nation’s other -isms.

It does beg the question, how do our politicians see us? I already discussed this in my post from last August, “When Politicians Say, ‘The American People…'” But I think moving pictures and good old-fashioned pixels might tell us more about the likes of Mitt Romney and the Koch brothers think of us on a collective scale, courtesy of The Matrix and the meatpacking industry.

Ultimately, we are packets of employment and consumerism, meant to be exploited to the fullest extent that capitalism and our politicians will allow. And if we don’t hold those who may well have our best interests at heart accountable, like President Obama, they too could easily fall prey to those who only see us as carcasses, cash cows or batteries to power their oligarchic lives. Even if my grad school days’ friend is a crackpot.

Walking In New Orleans

12 Thursday Apr 2012

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

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1994, Absolut Vodka, AERA, American Educational Research Association, Armstrong Park, Bruce Anthony Jones, Career Development, Citron Lemonade, Conference Presentation, Identity Issues, In The Closet, New Orleans, Pralines, Presentation, Travel, Trips, Tulane

My AERA 1994 annual meeting program for New Orleans, April 11, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

Only in the past two decades have I done any travel worth mentioning (see “My First Vacation, Valedictorian Included” post from March ’12). When I have traveled, it’s mostly been for work or for career.

Some of my most significant career-related trips have been as a result of presentations at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) annual meetings, which will be in Vancouver, British Columbia (I won’t be in attendance this year — too expensive, and other reasons beyond that). It is just about the largest gathering of academic professionals that I know of in the US/Canada, with 15,000-20,000 attendees and presenters.

Over the years, I’ve attended six AERA conferences, and presented at three (in ’94, ’96 and ’07). The first one, though, was the most memorable, for a variety of reasons. For one, I actually spent my first two days of this nine-day trip in Houston, as I managed to arrange a layover before heading out to New Orleans to visit the Gill side of my lineage for the first time (see my “We Are Family” post from April ’09). That was strange, mostly in a good way, as I could see my mother reflected in the eyes and accents of my uncles and cousins.

Holiday Inn, French Quarter, New Orleans, 2012. (Google Maps), where folks stayed for AERA 1994.

But New Orleans was a unique experience beyond my two days with my extended family in Houston. The night I arrived, there were five homicides, including at least two in the French Quarter. About an hour after I check in at the rundown Holiday Inn in which I roomed with my professor Bruce Anthony Jones, another professor, and a doctoral student from Pitt’s School of Education, we went for a walk on Bourbon Street. It was a nice, warm and breezy night for the walk, at least until I saw two people doing ballistic vomiting on a corner about two blocks from our hotel.

The next day, that Monday afternoon, was our presentation on multicultural education. We went and met up with another Pitt education doctoral student at some restaurant a couple of blocks away for lunch, all dressed up and ramped up for our presentations. It was sunny and warm at midday, the perfect day to eat outdoors. When we ordered, I hadn’t really noticed the fact that all of the drinks on the menu were alcoholic ones. I asked Bruce about the Citron Lemonade, and he said, “That’s a good choice.” Despite years around my alcohol dad, I didn’t know that the Citron part was Absolut Vodka with a lemon twist.

Apparently, neither did my fellow grad students. I was on my second one when I felt a serious buzz, before I

1-liter bottle of Absolut Citron Vodka, April 11, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

slowed down to savor the taste of lemons, sugar and vodka on my tongue. The other two students seemed similarly relaxed. I said to Bruce, “[y]ou didn’t tell me that this drink had vodka in it!” Bruce said to all of us in response, “but you’re all relaxed now, right?,” in reference to our presentation. His comment reminded me to look at my watch, which showed that our presentation was in fifteen minutes. We hurried to pay our bill, walked quickly to the Marriott, and did what turned out to be a solid presentation.

The business part of the week was over, but the rest of the week in New Orleans became a learning experience. I did an informational interview with two professors from Illinois State University, who told me to finish my doctorate at Carnegie Mellon. Barbara (one of the two Pitt doctoral students) and me checked out the blues and jazz bars in the Quarter, and went to Armstrong Park for an Afrocentric event that Saturday. I took the trolley out of downtown to the Tulane district and then back to experience more of the city. And I bought pralines on behalf of Kate Lynch, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, who apparently loved the stuff.

But the most disturbing part of the trip occurred between that Friday morning and Sunday morning. The other Pitt grad student had been acting a bit strange during the week, spending less time at AERA, sleeping in late at our hotel, and showing no interest in hanging out with the rest of us. Then, he just disappeared. He packed up and left without a note and without paying his share of the hotel bill. We didn’t know until the following Tuesday that he had spent the weekend in Biloxi, Mississippi, allegedly hanging out on the beach.

I said to Bruce, “[m]aybe there was just too much testosterone in the room for him.” Bruce didn’t say anything, as he looked completely confused. I knew that at least one of the professors with whom we roomed was gay, and that Bruce was in the closet as well. I assumed, correctly as it turned out, that my grad student roommate bugged out because he needed a release from the tension he felt being around these professors. Me being heterosexual and spending the week at AERA and on the town, I didn’t notice that my fellow grad student was gay until after he’d disappeared himself.

It was a sad way to end such a wonderfully strange trip. New Orleans was a great city with a diverse culture and history, and despite Katrina and the city’s Whitening, maybe it still is. I just have no desire to return, as once was enough for me, good and bad.

Anatomy of An Abuser, Hebrew-Israelite Style

07 Saturday Apr 2012

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

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Benson & Hedges Menthol, Blackness, Child Abuse, Emotional Abuse, Isshin-ryu Karate, Manhood, Psychological Abuse, Religion, The Jammers, Verbal Abuse

Abomination as played by Tim Roth, The Incredible Hulk (2008) screen shot, April 6, 2012. (http://www.comics2film.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws, as the image is only used once and is rendered in low resolution to avoid piracy.

This month marks thirty years since my idiot stepfather Maurice Washington first attempted to make me a man, a Black man, a Hebrew-Israelite man, all at the same time, through karate and physical abuse. But there were any number of signs that his conversion to this strange mix of Afrocentricity and Judaism wasn’t genuine, and that his re-entry into our lives as husband and father in April ’81 was teetering on the edge of disaster only twelve months later. At least for me, my older brother Darren, Maurice’s two young boys, and for my mother. Certainly not for him.

As early as September ’81, my chronically unemployed stepfather had started acting strange, expecting us to run errands for him without question or comment. Armed with the conviction that comes with a recent religious conversion (who during the early-80s was “Judah ben Israel;” see my “The Tyranny of Salvation” post from April ’11), Maurice began to demand that we call him “Dad.” We were required to wear our kufis whenever we left 616, which identified us immediately as our stepfather’s kids to our idiot 616 and 630 East Lincoln neighbors.

Maurice also made it mandatory for us to pray aloud every night, giving us a four-page, single-spaced document full of “Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe…” lines to recite as part of our daily Black Jewish ritual. The first time we went through it, in both Hebrew and English, it took well over an hour. If we started to nod off, Maurice would slap us upside the head, or actually give us one of his “whuppins.”

His language was also changing, becoming coarser and more threatening as ’81 turned into ’82. For just asking, “Why?” or “What?,” my stepfather would often say, “Take that base outta ya voice, boy, before I cave yo’ chest in!” Maurice would sometimes sing his threats, bellowing “I’m gonna beat yo’ ass, jus’ like a car burns gas,” adding, “And you know that!” at the end. That last part was something he pulled from a song by a disco group called The Jammers. His language was worse now than it had been before he had separated from Mom eighteen months earlier. I found myself scratching my head, and not just because it itched.

By April, Maurice had become a hanger-on at a newly opened Karate studio down the street from 616, next

Benson & Hedges Menthol, hard green pack, April 6, 2012. (http://cigarettespedia.com).

door to the old dry cleaner business on East Lincoln Avenue. He made me come to the studio because he wanted to show me “how to be a man.” But when I saw him on my almost daily runs to the grocery store, he mostly hung out with young Turks and wannabe thugs from the Pearsall Drive projects across the street. Maurice smoked up a storm of Benson & Hedges Menthol while talking about women, being a Hebrew-Israelite, and about me as his kid, at least when I happened to walk by.

My stepfather made it known that he thought of me as soft, a boy who spent too much time in books and not enough time on New York’s mean streets. These despite the fact that we lived in Mount Vernon, a quietly violent city whose meanest streets were on the South Side, the part of town that bordered the Bronx. Not that 616 and the Pearsall Drive projects (consisting of six five-story buildings) down the street didn’t qualify as “mean.” They were tough by North Side standards, but at least people didn’t go into parks with baseball bats attempting to head hunt (see my “A Baseball Bat and a Father’s Absence” post from July ’11).

Maurice had tried to teach me and my older brother Darren Isshin-ryu Karate two years earlier. Despite myself, I did pick up a few moves. Now he decided that I would learn how to fight no matter the consequences. It was all about breaking bones and inflicting maximum pain. When I told Maurice that I didn’t want to learn, he said “You will learn because I’m your father” as he started to throw hard punches into my midsection.

Squidward losing to Seabear, SpongeBob camping episode, 2011, April 6, 2012. (Nickelodeon). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws due to picture's low resolution.

After I yelled “You’re not my father!,” he drop-kicked me to the floor. Maurice, all six-foot-one and 270 pounds of him, then pulled me up by my arms, slammed me back-first into a mirrored wall, and punched me several times in the head, chest, and stomach until several of the men in the studio surrounded him. My stepfather, completely exasperated and winded, yelled “Don’t you EVER say that again, muthafucka! I’ll kill you next time!” I ran for home with a knot on my forehead that didn’t go down for almost a week.

I was slowly learning a very valuable lesson (see my “Never As Good As The First Time” post from April ’11). I didn’t have control over anything in my life, even my emotions. I also learned to not trust Black men, especially fast talkers who thought with their fists and penises like dumb ass Maurice. It took several years for me to unlearn part of that second lesson, no thanks to him.

The Value of An American (Black) Life

04 Wednesday Apr 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

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American Life, Final Toxicology Report, George Zimmerman, Life and Death, N-Word, Race, Rick Santorum, Sanford Florida, Trayvon Martin, Value of Human Life, Whitney Houston

Flag and flag pole from US Marine Corps War Memorial, Arlington, VA, March 31, 2006. (Christopher Hollis via Wikipedia). In public domain via Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license.

I learned years ago that many in this great country in which I’m a citizen didn’t value my life relative to other citizens. It wasn’t just my right to live that has occasionally come into question. It was my right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” including in K-12 education, higher education, the world of work, where I should live, how I should speak, what I should wear, and whether I should have any success or joy in my life. To have to fight for the most basic and assumed of rights in the richest and most powerful nation on Earth is exhausting, disheartening and maddening.

But enough about my own experience at forty-two years and three months. Recent events involving Whitney Houston, Trayvon Martin and Rick Santorum also illustrate the lack of value some Americans place on other Americans’ lives. We know now after the release of Houston’s final autopsy and toxicology report that in her final days cocaine, alcohol and over-the-counter medications fueled her bloodstream, and years of heart disease combined to an overdose, accidental drowning and death in February. We all know how sad and tragic Whitney’s end was, and the outpouring of support and condolences from all over the world for her and her family.

At the same time, this shows the lack of value Whitney placed on her own life, at least in her final days and moments. More importantly, the death of this once great diva also showed how little the folks around Houston valued her life, and how she lived her life, over her final years and days. I’m not just talking about Whitney’s drug use, alcohol abuse or even taking care of her body and heart. Really, it’s about being a true friend, a person willing to sacrifice a friendship in order to save a friend, to help a friend find herself (or himself, as the case may be). The fact that Whitney is dead is evidence that there weren’t many folks looking out for her best interests in her life, including her.

The Trayvon Martin case is more evidence that some American lives are worth more than others. After more than three weeks of media coverage, we’ve confirmed that, if nothing else. First in line is the great George Zimmerman, the man of the people — at least some of them. He cared another about the life that he took to call Martin among the “assholes [who] always get away” and a “fucking coon.” Second was the Sanford PD, who closed their investigation within hours of beginning it, and took three days to notify Martin’s parents that their seventeen-year-old son was dead. This despite the fact the parents had filed a missing persons report with this same police department. Third in line is the city of Sanford itself, as well as Florida justice in general. It’s been five weeks, and Zimmerman still has yet to be arrested, much less charged or indicted, much less a trial. I guess, in the end, that Zimmerman’s life is worth more than Martin’s to some Americans.

Then there are the words of Rick “Sanitarium” Santorum, a GOP presidential candidate caught frothing out of his butthole for a mouth last Friday. During a speech in Wisconsin, Santorum said “nig-,” then stopped himself, stumbled and started again with “America…” in making a completely different point. Santorum rarely, if ever, describes President Barack Obama as “President Barack Obama.” Him and his opponents have all but allowed constituents to attend their rallies with guns and a bulls-eye with the President’s picture on it. Yet, these pro-lifers supposedly value life. It’s just that they care only for some Americans’ lives, and not others.

The only time we as Americans seem to value the lives of “other” Americans is usually when those others are in uniform, overseas in a theater of action projecting American power. Only then, American lives are far more valuable than the lives of Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis, and myriad other humans we’ve slaughtered in the hundreds of thousands over the past sixty-two years. But, at least one American life is more valuable than a hundred non-American humans, right?

Today marks forty-four years since James Earl Ray cold-bloodedly murdered Martin Luther King, Jr. while he stood on a balcony of a Memphis motel. He thought that the lives of poor, misguided and racist White Americans was far more valuable than the life of one of the greatest Americans there ever was or will be. Despite forty-four years of using King’s words as fuel for rhetoric and action on civil rights and human justice, we still haven’t solved the problem of the relative value of an American life, especially when it’s a Black one.