Category Archives: race

James and the PAGPSA

29 Thursday Nov 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fear of Flying Solo (Not Literally)

19 Monday Nov 2012

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

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Continental Airlines B737-200 (similar to one I flew on in November ’87, logo included), Providence, RI, 1990, January 2, 2009. (Phillip Capper via Wikipedia). Releases to public domain via cc-Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

This week twenty-five years ago, the pressures of college, “homesickness” and Crush #2 had screwed up the inner movie and music soundtrack (think Enigma’s “I Love You, I’ll Kill You” [1993]) that had been my coping mechanism for the previous half decade. I was in the midst of a psychological breakthrough, but it felt more like a combination of depression and a nervous breakdown at the time. Such were my times as an emotionally tortured seventeen-year-old who should’ve left Mount Vernon a full year earlier (see my post “A One-Year Sooner ‘What If’” from June ’11).

The downward spiral of my first semester at the University of Pittsburgh started with a burglary the third week in October ’87. While I took a bathroom break at my computer lab job in the Cathedral of Learning, someone stole my Calculus textbook. I felt violated, especially since it happened at work. It made me more distrustful of the people I worked with and of Pitt students in general. Of course, I didn’t really even trust myself at the time, and the loss of my textbook didn’t make it any easier. I was out of money to boot, which meant that I wouldn’t be able to replace this loss.

Excerpts of Prince’s Sign ‘O’ the Times (1987) liner notes, November 19, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws – low resolution illustration of text-like writing style for this post.

Crush #2’s response to my letter about her emasculating comments back in the summer made matters worse (see my posts “Origins of the Obsession” from June ’12 and “A Dream That Had to Die” from July ’07). Her letter, dated November 2, was in purple ink, with heart-shapes and circles for dots over “i”s. Reading her letter was like reading the liner notes off of a Prince album in those days. Like the song “I Would Die 4 U,” Crush # 2 had decided to limit her English skills to the ’80s equivalent of text messaging, a real revolution on both their parts. She started, “Thank U 4 your card 2day,” an insult to my intelligence. She wrote indirectly that she did like me at one point in time, but added “but we’re in college now . . . around lots of nu people” She admitted that I was her and her sister’s topic of conversation back in July, but “I needed 2 get over that.” She hinted that I shouldn’t write her again, and that was it. No apologies, no attempt to understand how I felt.

16-ounce “Pounder” can of Busch Beer, November 19, 2012. (http://price2watch.com)

After Crush #2’s wonderful, text-message-like response, I all but stopped going to class. I missed eighteen of twenty-four classes at one stretch between November 3 and Thanksgiving, only showing up for exams or if my black-cloud mood had let up long enough to allow me to function. The weekend before Thanksgiving, I allowed my dorm mates to cheer me up by getting a couple of cases of Busch Beer. These were the pounder type, sixteen-ounce cans of Busch beer. I downed four cans in fifteen minutes, and was drunk within a half hour. I started throwing around the word “bitch” as if it was part of a drinking game. I spent the next day vomiting and trying to regain my balance.

I barely recovered from my bender in time to go home for Thanksgiving that Monday, November 23. I still managed a few firsts, though. That trip back home was my first ever on an airplane. I took a Continental flight from the old and decrepit blue hangar that was Pittsburgh Airport into Newark, with the late Craig “Ironhead” Hayward on the flight sitting in first-class. He was a senior and the starting running back for the Pitt Panthers. Besides being a great player, he was a bit of a party animal and had gotten into fights with Pitt Police. I remember the student newspaper having him in their police blotter, allegedly body-slamming a patron at the O while being arrested for a being a disorderly drunk.

It was the first series of events in which I couldn’t use music, sports or my imagination to escape (see my post “Coping In The Boy @ The Window World” from October ’12). I hadn’t realized that I was attempting to escape myself, not just my immediate past or Mount Vernon. I spent those last weeks of ’87 as if draped in a fog, unable to face the world. I fully understood, though, that I couldn’t drink my way out of my problems. I was obsessed with a woman whom felt sorry for me, had friends at Pitt who weren’t really my friends, and was homesick for 616, a place that was never really mine to call home in the first place.

Male duck swimming solo, Chicago River, Chicago, IL, June 16, 2002. (Donald Earl Collins)

Most of all, after five years of hiding my emotions and opinions, I no longer knew how to be me. Luckily, thinking about Crush #2 as a “triflin’ ass” was, for better and worse, a good start toward recovery for me. And, for that moment in my life, I needed that anger to be a better student, to be a better me. Because as far as I was concerned, I was out in Pittsburgh, alone, facing down my past and present all at once.

Jimme To The Rescue

17 Saturday Nov 2012

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work, Youth

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United States Coast Guard rescue diver jumps from a helicopter (demonstration), 2004 Seafair, Seattle, WA, June 18, 2008. (Brandon Weeks via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via cc-Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Thirty years ago this week was the beginning of my second relationship with my father Jimme, brought on by the desperate need for money and material support as the Hebrew-Israelite world of 616 was swirling down the proverbial toilet. Our “fiscal cliff” was more like Felix Baumgartner jumping off a balloon into Jupiter’s atmosphere without a parachute (see my posts “The Quest For Work, Past and Present” from August ’12 and “Pregnant Pauses” from earlier this month). This was the determined teenager me, one with a smart mouth and a firm adult sense of pragmatism, trumping any shame or embarrassment I would’ve felt even four months earlier. As I’ve written in Boy @ The Window:

“It was time to do something desperate. We needed money just to eat bread and water, and the water was free. We hadn’t done a full clothes wash since the beginning of September. Me and Darren both needed a new pair of sneakers about every other month. The ones I had were forming holes on the sides and bottoms.

So I turned to Jimme. Mom was always complaining that he didn’t pay child support anyway. And I knew where he lived now. It was 153 South Tenth, not far from the East 241st Street station in the Bronx, the end of the line on the Subway’s 2 and 5 lines running from Brooklyn and Manhattan. There were a bunch of watering holes nearby.

Felix Baumgartner of Austria as he jumps out of the capsule during final manned flight, October 14, 2012. (AP Photo via Red Bull Stratos)

I’d actually started going over to Jimme’s in August, a consequence of my first long walks through Mount Vernon and Southern Westchester County. But this was different. I was going to Jimme’s for money and sneakers. I decided to wait for him at the 241st Street stop after school one Friday at the end of October, figuring I’d catch him just before he started his weekly drinking ritual.

Unbelievably, my first idea for tracking Jimme down worked! I caught Jimme coming down the rickety Subway steps, completely shocked by seeing me there.

“Bo’, whacha doin’ here?”

“We need money, and I need some sneakers.”

“Why don’ you aks Maurice for them?”

“’Cause you’re my father and you haven’t been paying any child support. If you had, I wouldn’t be here!”

With that, Jimme laughed and shook his head. Of course he was also mad. I was in the way of him gettin’ his “pep-up,” virtually anything with alcohol in it.

“Bo’, what I’m gonna do wit’ you? You got me,” he said. I negotiated fifty dollars from him. He promised to get me some sneaks.

The following Tuesday, I went over to his place. Not only did I get my sneakers, a pair of size eleven-and-a-half Nike walking sneaks. I got a brown Members Only jacket to boot. I could tell, though, that they once belonged to someone else. Still a bit hung over, Jimme said, “Man, lo’ at all dese suits! You gotta lo’ like a big shot when you work in the city.” The suits were too big and a bit mismatched. I was just relieved that Jimme cared enough about my feet to get me the right size.

241st Street-Wakefield Station entrance, Bronx, NY, January 18, 2010. (DanTD via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via cc-Attribution 3.0 Unported,

Darren would usually come with me on what gradually became our weekly hike from the land of 616 to the near Bronx and the city. Jimme being Jimme, he would grab me by one hand while giving me the money and put his left arm around my shoulder, whispering in my right ear, “Don’ give Darren nothin’,” or “You keep fitty for yo’self an’ give Darren ten.” “You a Collins, don’ be sharin’ nothin’ wit’ them Gills,” he’d often say.

I almost always broke with Jimme around this. Yes, Darren often was a selfish goofball and my 616 family was just a step or two above total chaos. Yet I couldn’t go to eat at a good pizza shop with Jimme and Darren and let them subsist on bread, water and milk. I couldn’t watch them run around in graying underwear and just wash my own clothes. Not as hard as Mom worked, not as long as I lived there. I wanted to help as much as I could and still take care of my needs.

Jimme knew I was helping out at 616 too. So he would say things like “Don’ be givin’ your motha my money. Those ain’t my kids. Dis jus’ for you and Darren.” Or “Don’ give them muddafuccas nothin’,” which would start a brief argument between me and him about the needs of innocent children. Even with that and his drunken ups and downs, Jimme helped save the day for us and me as we plunged into the watery abyss of welfare poverty.”

Post-Mortem Post

12 Monday Nov 2012

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

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The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632) by Rembrandt, November 12, 2012. In public domain.

My idiot ex-stepfather died over the weekend, sometime Saturday evening, November 10. He was three months past his sixty-second birthday. I learned of his death early Sunday morning, as two of my younger siblings (technically half-brothers, I suppose) had posted on Facebook their grief over their father’s death overnight. As I read their posts, I realized that I myself felt no particular emotion over the final physical demise of Maurice Eugene Washington.

For the longest time while I was in my teens and early twenties, the song “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead” from The Wizard of Oz (1939) would come to mind when I thought about how I’d feel if the man collapsed from his own obesity and died. As far as I was concerned, my ex-stepfather could die a horrible death every day for eternity, and it still wouldn’t have been enough. A steamroller crushing him one day, a stabbing the next, getting smashed into by a semi-tractor trailer doing eighty miles an hour the day after that. Thoughts like that in the ’80s and early ’90s were a regular part of my mindset on Maurice Washington, not to mention a part of my dreams once every six weeks.

But, as I learned to forgive him — for my sake, certainly not for his — I found myself still frequently angry, but also feeling sorry for such a lost person. Whether in exacting abuse on me or my mother, eating himself into kidney failure and Type 2 diabetes, having affairs and producing kids out of those affairs, or in his bouncing back and forth between a Christian and a Hebrew-Israelite life, he was in search of love and stability. None of which, though, he could find from within. A life with only kids from at least three women and damaged lives to show for it. Not to mention a two-decades-long physical decline, in which the man lost both of his legs.

The Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz (1939), November 12, 2012. (http://time.com).

They say living your life to the fullest is the best revenge for survivors of abuse like myself. I suppose that’s true. But what they don’t say is that eight years’ of living in fear for yourself and your family leaves scars, physical, emotional, psychological, even spiritual. I’ve spent nearly a quarter-century recovering from those years, making sure to make myself a better person, and hoping that I don’t pass my scars on to my nine-year-old son in the process.

Two of my more popular posts over the past year have been “Ex-Stepfather’s Balance Sheet” (August ’10) and “Whipped and Beaten” (July ’12). I don’t think that this is random. There are millions of us who’ve grown up with physical, sexual and psychological abuse, and most of us have no one to talk to about these hellish experiences. And nearly as often as not, there are folks who will say, “It wasn’t really that bad, right?” Or, in the case of the very first comment I received on my blog back in July ’07, “you should be grateful, he was just trying to make you a man. Obviously he didn’t do enough.”

So, though I’m not gleeful that Maurice Washington is dead, I’m not exactly in mourning either. I had to kill him as an abuser in my heart and mind a long time ago in order to move on. I feel for my younger siblings, but they didn’t really know their father either. I did, mostly for the worse. May he — and a part of me — now rest in peace.

My AED Resignation

09 Friday Nov 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

President Obama vs. Fake Obama Today

06 Tuesday Nov 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cath The Great

05 Monday Nov 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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