On Mother’s Day and Areas of Gray, Revisited

08 Sunday May 2022

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Patriotism, Politics, race, Religion, Youth

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616 East Lincoln Avenue, Abuse, Death, Disappointment, Intervention, Mother's Day, Mother-Son Relationship, Nurturing, Trauma, White Evangelicalism

My Mother’s Associate’s Degree Photo, Westchester Business Institute, May 12, 1997.

I originally wrote this blog 11 years ago this week, on the edge of my wife’s master’s graduation ceremony at American University. Little has changed since 2011. Except my younger siblings are all approaching or over 40. Our son is officially a young adult, applying to colleges after a gap year, and we have a dog. My mom has leaned so hard into white-bred evangelicalism, making herself a MAGA and a not-so-closeted Trump supporter in the process. As I have said in recent months, I can no longer execute the ritual of calling her once every four to six weeks. My spirit and mind can no longer take the gaslighting that comes with these phone conversations. I haven’t talked to her since the start of 2022. I am in year 53, but my mom still talks to me like I am 17, and a naïve teenager at that.

Here’s a reminder to everyone who is spending this weekend and will spend time tomorrow celebrating their mother’s unconditional affection and love that this kind of mother — despite whatever Hallmark and Lifetime attempts to communicate — is not a universal mom. Just like the universal use of “women” without a qualifier all too often equals white women, becoming a mom assumes everyone has loving, nurturing moms. And this is simply not true. There is so much gray between the Hallmark-card-mom and Mommie Dearest.

“I took care of my kids! I put food on the table, put a roof over y’all’s heads, put clothes on yo’ back! I did the best that I could, and none of y’all can tell me different…” That’s what my mother yelled to us the day before Sarai’s funeral last July. It was an excited utterance, after she had spent five days in a trance, unable to do as much as eat a piece of toast. We were in the living room of our place at 616, me, Mom, Maurice, Yiscoc and Eri, being yelled at over a lifetime of disappointment and frustration. Ours and hers.

Folks have been posting all week on Facebook and Twitter about their wonderful, loving and supportive mothers, practically requiring people like me to do the same. As if all mothers all alike. As if all mothers are either the best or the worse. As if a good mother should be put on a pedestal like a trophy or gold medal, and a bad mother to not be mentioned at all. After all, most of us prefer not to hear bad news.

My mother was neither the best nor the worst mother in the world. She ultimately was and remains a contradiction of advice and action. She told us growing up never to depend on the government for handouts, but ended up on welfare from ’83 to ’99. She’d advise us to go to school and college, yet did almost nothing to help any of us get there. She’d complain about us not getting along as a family. Then call my younger siblings “Judah babies” and tell me that I was just like my alcoholic dad.

I’d dealt with all of this, all of the awful decisions and refusals to make any decisions about family, her life, her marriage to Maurice, the abuse that I had to put up with. The intervention I did for my younger siblings, for me and for Mom back in January ’02 had in most respects put the issue of my mother’s mistakes to bed for the family. Or so I thought.

All of that came back to me as I listened to my mother yell at us from seemingly out of nowhere that terribly hot and sticky Friday, the sixteenth of July last summer. I stood, then sat, on the new yet cheap beige couch in the living room, sweating next to a barely working window fan. I watched Mom’s contorted face spew its sharpen words, like arrows raining down on us. I could only think, Not good enough, Mom! Your best wasn’t good enough. I didn’t say it. Because I’d already said it back in ’02.

Her best hadn’t been good enough that week. Neither Sarai nor Mom had taken out life insurance, so it was either “ask Donald” or pass-the-hat time. Mom’s best hadn’t put food on the table one out of every three days between the end of ’81 and the middle of ’86. Her best left us behind in rent for nearly three years, had lost her a job with Mount Vernon Hospital, had led us to welfare. Doing the best that she could had made us Hebrew-Israelites and left us with an abusive, cheating Maurice/Judah as the alleged man of the house for most of the ’80s.

Most importantly, Mom’s fatal flaw as a mother was her lack of love and support for us as we moved from baby to toddler, toddler to little kid, kid to preteen, teenager to adulthood. We were all one group of burdens dumped onto her by a God that used us as a test of her as a mother and person. Mom said as much, multiple times, over the ’80s and ’90s.

I know that some of you will find this post offensive simply because I’m talking about my mother, the woman who gave birth to me. That’s just too bad. There’s a lot of gray between a great mother and a horrible one. My mother made a lifetime’s worth of bad decisions and path-of-least-resistance non-decisions that scarred me and my other siblings for life.

I love my mother for all the good that she did and all the good that she did teach me growing up. But that doesn’t me I should gloss over her record as a mother, provider and worker, especially during my growing up years. It means that there’s a lot I don’t like about my mother, who she was and is, and things she didn’t do well or didn’t do at all. It means that she has a limited sense of the responsibility she had when giving birth to me and to my five other siblings.

It also means that Mother’ Day for me remains very complicated. I’ve been buying my mother cards since ’84, and will continue to do so. And every year, finding the right card is hard, like looking for a good shoe for my nearly flat, quadruple-wide, size-fourteen feet. Still, I do the very best I can, because after all, she’s still my mother, and I love her with all of my heart.

In the years since, I have resolved some long buried issues, with neglect, sexual assault, and ass-whuppin’ abuse, long before life at 616, the Hebrew-Israelite years, and my mom’s gradual adoption of whiteness-dipped evangelicalism. Today will be my 39th year wishing my mom a good day on Mother’s Day with a card. But as much as I want to, I cannot celebrate this day with her, even as I celebrate my partner’s nearly 19 years of motherhood. With each passing year, it becomes more painful and sad for me. Maybe today’s the day I stop calling my mom on Mother’s Day, too. Mind you, it’s not out of anger or spite, or even a refusal to accept reality. At this stage of my life, I simply need to protect my heart. I am already disappointed, and from my mom’s perspective, a disappointment.

How Does Self-Determination Work in a Place Determined to Kill Me?

27 Monday Dec 2021

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

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Abuse, Faith, Fake People, Fake Unity, Imani, Kujichagulia, Kwanzaa, Maulana Karenga, Nia, Poverty, Self-Determination, Suicide, Ujima, Umoja, Unity

Kujichagulia, the Second Day of Kwanzaa, the principle of self-determination (cropped), December 27, 2021. (Caroline Moman via Pinterest).

Today is my 52nd birthday. My born day always coincides with the early Capricorn season, winter breaks, and falls two days after the celebration of Jesus’ birthday (which is NOT December 25th, no matter what dumb white people and unthinking Christians think). My birthday sometimes falls in the middle of Hanukkah (I think it did one time during the Hebrew-Israelite years, but I’d have to look that one up). My date of birth is also always on the second day of Kwanzaa, known as Kujichagulia, Swahili roughly meaning “self-determination.”

On this last one, I must confess. I learned a bit about Kwanzaa growing up, but it was in my Black Studies courses I learned about Maulana Karenga and his Afrocentric visions and philosophy. Kwanzaa was among the creations of Karenga and other like-minded brothas and sistas from the more radical part of the Movement. That was more than 30 years ago. I am not a Kwanzaa celebrant. But I fully believe in all its principles. Mostly because I would not be here at 52 if I didn’t.

Kujichagulia was a principle I understood long before I took my first Swahili class in Fall 1990. I had to. Between poverty, physical abuse, suicidal ideations, and the occasional bouts with bullying and ostracism, not taking some charge over my life would’ve ended it. Seriously. But too much self-determination without others’ help or guidance (Ujima or Nia) between twelve and a half and my 14th birthday left me one leap off a bridge away from death. Somehow, I managed not to take my own life that day, or in the 38 years since.

Self-determination has been very good to me, despite the bruises and busted up body parts I picked up early on. I determined I should cut my own path, to the chagrin of my teachers and a good portion of my middle school and high school classmates, not to mention my guidance counselor. I learned how to cook like my mom despite her not wanting to teach me how to cook, a week or so after my youngest brother came into the world. The same thing goes with shooting a J, dribbling left and right handed, writing, jumping rope, loving and forgiving others, moving on (eventually) from those who have hurt me, and a million other things I cannot name because Kujichagulia has been my everything since 1982. I am so fully into Kujichagulia that I’ve made my own birthday cakes and desserts most years since my 15th birthday in 1984. This year, I made myself German Chocolate cupcakes!

But Umoja is just as important. Unity as a principle has been as hard for me as Kujichagulia has been easy. Most people in my life have given me little reason to trust them in their truth, in their half-hearted offers of help, in their words consistently not matching their deeds or follow-through. I live by the words, “do unto others as you would have others do unto you,” but so many have failed to live up to those words, my family members included. Even when I ask for help, what I often get back is silence, or few offers in kind, and usually no equivalent measure in deed. Maybe it’s because I never joined a frat, never found a permanent church home, was never particularly “cool,” or have worked in affluent spaces around folks who would never get my one-generation-removed-from-sharecropping-but-lived-with-welfare-poverty-for five-years self. What makes me truly sad is the Black folks who should get me, but choose not to.

But none of this is really about me. It’s about people who want unity without self-determination or purpose or faith. Umoja cannot work without Kujichagulia, Nia, and Imani. We live in an especially narcissistic age, on top of the half-millennium of narcissism that systemic racism, nationalism, and capitalism has wrought. I am not trying to be popular. I am trying desperately to be me, the best version of me I can be.

I have a couple of more mountains to climb. One is to finally publish a book in a more traditional way, so that all the work isn’t on me (alternatively, I were to self-publish, maybe raise $20,000 or $25,000 through GoFundMe — probably not). I suspect this goal is not the mountain I have built it up to be. The other is to get out of the adjuncting ratrace. If that means leaving academia again, or leaving the US and living overseas, or even giving up on writing for a time. Whatever is next, I hope that Kujichagulia is the principle guiding me to these places and spaces, and not fake Umoja. There’s already been too much of that in my life.

Another Year of Not Seeing Family

20 Monday Dec 2021

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

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Anti-Vaxxers, COVID-19, Dysfunction, Family, Home, Hypermasculity, Jealousy, Misogynoir, Mixed Feelings, Patriarchy, Vanity

The Welsh word *hiraeth*, not easy to say, but easy to understand, December 19, 2021. (Reddit.com)

I wish I could say I am fine with going into my eighth year since my last visit with my mother and sibs in Mount Vernon, New York. I am and I ain’t. The one thing this pandemic has exposed is how little things have changed with my folks back in the New York area, and how little and how much I have changed living away from them and New York in the past couple of decades.

I had originally planned to visit my mom in March 2020 during my “Spring” Break week from teaching at American University and University of Maryland Global Campus. But we know what began to occur in the US due to bad policies combined with brutal narcissism, racism, and capitalism. COVID-19 Alpha slammed into the Big Apple like one of those ginormous worms from Dune, and ate into it faster than a supernova. My mom was sick by mid-April, as was my younger brother Maurice. If you ask her, my mom would say her “tests came back inconclusive,” but given the accuracy of her tests and the reality of her symptoms, she had COVID Alpha. My youngest brother contracted the virus a month later. I do not know for certain if I would have contracted COVID-19 if I had gone through with my plans in March 2020, but had I done so, I very likely could have infected my wife and then 16-year-old son, unacceptable by my standards then and today.

Then they started doing the unthinkably ignorant. They started having gatherings sans masks and vaccinations. My mom had my siblings and niece and nephew over for Thanksgiving 2020, and babysat the young’uns all during this shitstorm. My mom’s apartment is barely 800 square feet. Ten people gathered in the living room/kitchenette area of her place, nine not masked at all. My older brother Darren wore a KN-95, “except when [he] was eating and drinking,” he said. I all but facepalmed my forehead into mashed potatoes.

When the vaccines finally came on line for emergency use last December and the beginning of 2021, I assumed my mom would reluctantly but definitely get hers. After all, she worked for Mount Vernon Hospital and Westchester County Medical Center for a combined 27 or 28 years. Boy was I wrong! We last discussed it in May. “I don’t know what’s in it,” she said. “I wanna wait and see how it affects people,” she also said. Keep in mind, the younger brother between Maurice and the youngest one (convoluted, I know, but the 40-year-old doesn’t want me to mention him on my blog anymore) and his wife caught COVID-19 Delta earlier that month. They went out to eat at a restaurant, unvaccinated. “Probably got it off a fork or something,” my mom said.

After I explained the facts, that at that point, a billion people had been partially or fully vaxxed, she gave her usual defensive response. “I know the facts, Donald. You think I’m stupid?” Even now, though I may think, No mom, but you are acting as stupid as stupid can be, I don’t say it. It’s all part of her vanity, her anger and misunderstanding of me. At this point in her life, I couldn’t convince my mom that water is wet and the sky is blue, not even if I quoted Jesus himself. So I conceded. Do what you want. But it’ll be a long, long time before I come visit again. Don’t expect a lot of phone calls or letters or cards moving forward, either. For me, this was and remains about self-preservation, body, mind, and spirit, and not about anger or spite.

I last checked on my mom and brothers during Thanksgiving last month. I didn’t even bother to ask my mom about her vaccination status or her health. I knew she wouldn’t tell me the truth about her decisions, anyway. But my brother Maurice. Yep. He too refused to vaccinate. “I don’t know what’s in that stuff!,” he raised his voice while lilting on “stuff.” He was out of work, too, because New York State’s not allowing unvaccinated people to work for them.

He said one other thing that made me truly sad. I asked about what being unvaccinated has done with his social life. “I can’t be around these…’modern women’,” Maurice said with a pause and the feel of air quotes around the term. Somehow, a woman who doesn’t need a man to “take care of them” is “modern,” and made Maurice feel obsolete. All I could think was, Wow! Mom’s misogynoir and patriarchy really rubbed off on you. You, and all of us at some point.

Nick Nolte’s character about ready to kill James Coburn’s (screen shot, cropped), *Affliction* (1997), December 20, 2021. (http://www.camera-roll.com/raging-bulls-affliction/)

There’s this not-so-famous 1997 movie Affliction, starring the late James Coburn, Nick Nolte, and Willem Dafoe. The cycles of physical and psychological abuse, the obvious misogyny and hypermasculinity, the mental breakdown, the need for distance from family, are all part of this movie. Nolte’s character eventually kills his father (Coburn), and eventually loses his grip with reality. His withdrawn and recluse brother (Dafoe), a writer and English professor, wrote down his brother’s story for posterity. This as Nolte’s character disappears to Canada, where someone eventually finds a cadaver matching his physical features.

I wonder if I am Willem Dafoe’s character. Probably not. At least, I don’t think my partner since 1995 and my 18-year-old see me that way. But I do feel the lurch to stay away from people, especially my immediate family outside of Silver Spring, Maryland. It’s not like I don’t want to see them. But they have never ever seen me, not even during all the years I stared them in the face.

While My PhD’s Getting Cold…

21 Sunday Nov 2021

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

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Bruce Anthony Jones, Career Paths, CMU, Dan Resnick, Failure, Joe William Trotter Jr., Lessons Learned, Petty Jealousy, Pitt, Self-Loathing, Self-Reflection, Success, Writing

Cold, lumpy grits, September 26, 2013. (HuffPost via Flickr: Marshall Astor – Food Fetishist).

I have been Dr. Donald Earl Collins for almost half my life. (It will be exactly half my life on October 11 or October 12 of next year, a couple of months before my 53rd birthday.) Only a small handful of things have brought me more pain, failure, and momentary triumphs than earning the PhD during the 1996-97 school year. But while writing is a profession that pays, I am still paying off the debt I generated earning this degree, literally and figuratively. This debt is something I will not pass on. I hope my life has more meaning than earning this degree ever took away.

Friday morning, November 22, 1996, I checked my email just after getting out of bed. Since the beginning of that August, after banging out a full second draft of my dissertation, I knew. Since the end of that July, really, after spending eight hours combing every iteration of every chapter of my doctoral thesis for comments from my advisor I missed, I knew. Since my advisor’s one-page response three weeks later to my six-page memo detailing every change, revision, dressed-up lie, obfuscated statistic, and glossed-over fact, I knew. Really, it was moot on October 23, when my other two committee members both approved it and knew, too.

That Friday morning before Thanksgiving 1996, Professor Joe William Trotter, Jr. sent me a rare email, officially signing off on me becoming Dr. Collins with the words, “It is done.” It was anticlimactic, but it was also freeing at the same time. Yay, me, right?

Not so much. I was a month away from possibly leaving my PhD work behind. That was how much Trotter and the whole process of petty jealous and verbal abuse and threats had taken their toll. To know that my advisor did not support any endeavors to give my career a boost, including the Spencer Fellowship that I won despite his lukewarm letter on my behalf. To feel so betrayed that I felt solace dreaming of wrapping piano wire around his throat from behind and pulling until I spilled his blood and death occurred. It should have been a sign for moving on to something less soul-destroying. But I prayed. I persevered. I finished what I started.

And I lost the thread for why I started in the first place. I went to graduate school to become a writer with enough knowledge and authority in my expertise to not be challenged in whatever writing project I decided to take on post-PhD. Boy was I a naive, dumb-ass 21-year-old! I ruined my writing for more than a decade as a result of this path. It took me until my blog and Boy @ The Window to find my voice again, my true, authentic, uncopyable voice. By then, I was already fortysomething (or, really between 39 and 44 years old at this point). My doctoral degree was already more than a decade old.

If I could do it all over again, would I choose to relive what I have truly reviled as much as I have relished? No, no, no. You don’t need to have a PhD to be an excellent writer. You certainly do not need one to write in relative obscurity. I learned that from Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Martino in AP English in 1987. No. I probably would have earned a PhD in social psychology instead, with stints of working as a K-12 teacher and a freelance writer or journalist in between. That path would have been more fun — if not just as morbid — at least.

I can think of what pursuing a more direct path to writing and working would have done. It would’ve saved me from four years of Trotter as my advisor, from “poverty wages,” never-to-be-counted-on Bruce Anthony Jones, and from abusive theoretical Marxists like Dick Oestreicher and Wendy Goldman. It would have saved me from myself and my self-doubt and constant need to prove myself to others to the exclusion of everything else in my life.

My mom does get a few things right about me. After I finished my master’s in 1992, she said one day, “Why you always gotta ‘I’ll show you’?” I wasn’t trying to “I’ll show you,” especially to the white gatekeepers aligned like a fraternity or a gang with baseball balls eager to jump me in (or out) of academia. Still, I do not like being told “No.” Especially by mediocre people with half-baked ideas motivated by their own racism and ageism.

This will not be a self-loathing celebration, though. I have figured it out, myself included. I know what I want to write, and why. I have succeeded more than I have failed on this front since turning 45. I may never make up for those years in the wilderness, between academia and the nonprofit world, chasing dollars and chasing the approval of white gazers and HNIC (Head N-word In Charge) types. But I am still here. I am much closer to the life I’ve always wanted than I am to the life I have gradually been putting behind me since 2008.

Assassin’s Creed is the Story of Modern Racism

18 Monday Oct 2021

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

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Assassin's Creed, Consumerism, Islamophobia, Origins of Modern Racism, Racism

Assassin’s Creed movie poster (cropped with lower resolution, per fair use laws), October 18, 2021. (https://www.deviantart.com/harzi17/art/Assassin-s-Creed-Movie-Poster-625133669)

Where does modern-day racism come from? There’s a recent movie that inadvertently attempts to answer this question, Assassin’s Creed (2016). The film did not do particularly well in theaters, making only $54.6 million in the US, and just under $241 million worldwide. Perhaps the rise of Donald Trump as president made its themes hit too close to home for too many moviegoers. But somehow, the movie’s director Justin Kurzel and its writers unknowingly shot a one-hour-and-fifty-minute crash-course in racism since 1492.

The Knights Templar versus the Assassin’s Brotherhood, a fight between shared bloodlines, Roman Catholicism, and Islam, that is what the game Assassin’s Creed is about. The movie, though, is about much more. It centers the technological science-fiction wonder known as the Animus, a machine that can tap into one’s DNA and find memories passed down generations ago. The Templars use the Animus to find the Apple, the mythical codex that would theoretically allow them to eliminate free will and the ability of people like the members of The Brotherhood to resist their reign. Except that real life has already surpassed art. In 2013, scientists had already discovered that mice and humans can both store memories in a few lines of code within DNA strands across generations. The scientific term for this is transgenerational epigenetic inheritance.

There is no real-life version of the Animus yet. But it would figure that the Templars would use such a thing for their dystopian ends. The work of the Abstergo Foundation Rehabilitation Center, a subsidiary of The Templars’ corporation Abstergo Industries, fakes lead character Callum Lynch’s (Michael Fassbender) death and kidnaps him, then uses him to go back to 1492 Andalucia to find the Apple. Once Callum goes through this neurological and psychological “regression” to 1492, he embodies his assassin ancestor Aguilar de Nerha. Aguilar was the last ancient known to have possessed the Apple.

The year 1492 is important, and not just because of Christopher Columbus. It’s the year Spain unified under the joint rule of Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Castile, as their forces drove the last Moor ruler out of Granada. That victory ended more than 750 years of Arab Muslim and Moorish rule on the Iberian Peninsula, the Reconquista, as Spanish historians have called it. Later that year, Isabella and Ferdinand expelled all remaining Jews who refused to convert to Catholicism. Spanish Muslims faced persecution from 1492 on, and eventually faced Inquisición and expulsion, too. Between 1609 and 1614, Spain forced as many as 300,000 Muslims of Arab, Moorish, and Spanish descent out of the country.

There are at least three sources from which modern-day racism springs. All are in the mix in Assassin’s Creed. The Arab world and the Trans-Saharan Trade, which included enslaved Africans in exchange for goods and knowledge, some of whom ended up in Arabesque Spain. The Iberian world of what would become Spain and Portugal, with a combination of anti-Arab and anti-Moor nationalism, racism, and Islamophobia on regular display. And, the English, the founders of Jamestown, British plantation slavery in North America and the Caribbean, and heavy contributors to the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The Templars’ headquarters, by the way, are in London.

Alan Rikkin (Jeremy Irons), the CEO of Abstergo and the embodiment of modern racism, not-so-secretly plans to use the Apple to end free will. In a conversation with Ellen Kaye (Charlotte Rampling) the chairwomen of Abstergo’s board of directors, Alan Rikkin discusses the final demise of human freedom. “The threat remains while free will exists. For centuries we’ve tried, with religion, with politics, and now consumerism, to eliminate dissent. Isn’t it time we gave science a try?”

Notice how father Rikkin does not mention “systemic racism” or “capitalism,” both central in The Templars’ quest to control people over the past 500 years. This oppression disproportionately impacts the Global South, the Black, the Brown, the Indigenous, and non-Christian Europeans. It is reasonable to conclude that these religious beliefs and their thinly veiled racist beliefs are essentially the same.

One cannot help but notice these racism-based intersections. Especially when nearly every character of color in the film is part of The Brotherhood, and nearly every white character part of The Templars. The late Michael K. Williams plays the only African character in Assassin’s Creed, and he immediately brings to light the oppressive mix of religious bigotry and racism. “They call me Moussa. But my name is Baptiste. I’m dead 200 years now. Voodoo poisoner. I’m harmless,” Moussa says while stretching out his words with hand gestures, in introducing himself to Cal. Moussa confirms he and Cal and the other Assassins are prisoners, that the Templars stripped him of his past even as he reclaimed his ancestor’s name, and signaled that they will need to fight their oppressors (any of this sound familiar historically)?

Another example comes from Dr. Sofia Rikkin (Marion Cotillard), Alan Rikkin’s daughter and the head of the Animus project. “You are living proof of the connection between violence and genetics,” Sofia says to Cal when discussing the murder that led to his faked death and capture. That’s as eugenics as eugenics can get, the story of modern racism, slavery, colonization, and exploitation of people in a nutshell. This is how the social construct of racism becomes biological determinism, somehow superseding the truth that we are all related genetically.

There are people who would rather drink ground glass than admit how the US has its own special blend of white supremacist racism, one it has exported to the rest of the world. The whataboutisms set has zero interest in an actual answer to the question of racism’s origins. They are only interested in deflecting from their own complicity in white supremacist racism. Assassin’s Creed reveals as much as it deflects on how systemic racism has managed to thrive, through religion, capitalism, imperialism, and the elitist narcissism all of these -isms engender. Every American teacher of world history or European history should use Assassin’s Creed in this manner, providing entertainment with subliminal critical race theory hidden well enough for most white supremacists to not notice. I think.

More Confessions From an Educated Fool

03 Tuesday Aug 2021

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

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Calling, Careers, Educated Fool, Failure, Foolery, Gift, Jobs, Journeys, Writing

Me and my receding hairline, May 22, 2020 (Donald Earl Collins)

This is the first of a series of essays and posts that I am doing this month about my journey as a writer, an educator, and a fool over the past four decades, simultaneously between Medium and my blog. I hope to educate, to entertain, to make people laugh and cry laughing, but (hopefully) not to feel too sorry for me. I am who I am, a work still in progress, even as my knees and my neck ache, even as my mind and spirit are exhausted. Still, I want to fly. “Ain’t that crazy?,” to quote music artist Seal, this as his song “Crazy” turns 30 this week.

—

Serving as a contingent faculty member at two different universities with few benefits, few avenues for promotion, and having lived through one obsequious toad for a supervisor after another year after year? This was not how I imagined my life would end up by the time I reached middle age. I didn’t even think I’d make it to 30 when I was a fourteen-year-old, so there’s that. But when I was 11 in 1981, I did discover my first true calling. I wanted to be a writer, what kind of a writer, I wasn’t sure. But after two years of reading World Book Encyclopedia and more than 40 college-level or higher books on World War II — mostly by British authors — I was ready to write something. That spring, I wrote a 500-word essay as part of a city-wide writing contest in Mount Vernon, New York, back in the days when this New York City suburb had its own separate newspaper, the Mount Vernon Daily Argus. I don’t remember what they asked us K-12 students to write about, probably something civic-minded and somewhat trite. But I finished second overall out of hundreds of entries. The first-place winner was a high school junior. I won something, on my first try, too. Yay, me!

I got a note in the Daily Argus, along with an invitation to an awards ceremony at A. B. Davis Middle School that June, where a photographer took my picture and a representative from the newspaper handed me a $15 check. Technically, this was the first time someone paid me for my writing. This wouldn’t happen again until I was a doctoral student at the University of Pittsburgh. Between that and me introducing the keynote speaker for our graduating class of sixth-graders earlier that morning — the eventual Mount Vernon mayor Ernest Davis — I was truly inspired. I thought, for the first time in my life, This is MY gift! I want to write! I want to be a writer!

I went for it a week after graduation. I decided that I would write a book about the latest in American military hardware and how this would create the most efficient killing machine “in the history of mankind.” I wrote about the prototypes of the B1 and B2 bomber and bomber-fighter planes. I wrote about the prototype of the original M1 Abrams tank, which had recently come into service. I even jotted down paragraphs on ICBMs (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles) MX and MX2s and SLBMs (Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missiles), the Trident-class missiles and the Ohio-class submarines being built to house them. Unbelievably, I wrote a letter to the Pentagon to get pictures of these machines of destruction, and they obliged me with more than a dozen color photos a month later. I was sure that at least two pictures were classified.

By the time my mom had birthed my then youngest sibling Yiscoc (this is a form of Hebrew for Isaac), and my next youngest brother Maurice had turned two, both at the end of July, I had written 48 pages of what was to be a nearly 100-page book. It wasn’t a children’s book. I wrote about the modern United States military and its ability to wage a traditional war and a tactical nuclear war, and what that meant for the rest of the world. And then I hit a wall, and fell into a sinkhole somewhere in Florida. I couldn’t reconcile my fascination with these weapons and the tens of millions of people who could be killed by such weapons. My 11-year-old mind could not grapple with the real-life consequences of such expensive and deadly military hardware. And as a still immature preteen, I didn’t want to consider the vaporizing and pulverizing ugly side of military weaponry. After more than a week of trying to move into another section of this book, I stopped at 52 hand-written pages. It was mid-August, and middle school and all the hell that would come with it was just three weeks away.

Did I mention that as I wrote my first book in the summer of 1981, my stepfather had converted me and my siblings and my mother to Judaism, making us Hebrew-Israelites, without asking me or my 13-year-old older brother Darren for our opinion? Or that I was a month away from social suicide in the classroom, in the magnet program I would be a part of for the next six years, all because I had to wear a kufi outside our two-bedroom apartment? Or that the Carter-Reagan years and two more kids had left my mom broke, and us without food in the house on the regular? All of this was in process even as I was writing my summer away. It would be one of the only times in my life where being blissfully ignorant of the future while pursuing my gift as a writer with all of my heart and mind was such luxurious joy. Where time itself was as abundant as all the atoms in the universe.

I lost my way after that. The growing-up years had already been brutal, between a sexual assault I endured at six and a half, a suicide attempt, and years of therapy my mom administered with homophobia and a belt. With us sinking into welfare poverty, no food at home a third of the time, and my bullying, constant threatening no-good stepfather, my childhood love for reading and writing would take a beating. And still, when I emerged from the eight years of constant abuse to see my true face in my mind’s mirror, I still saw a writer. And then I lost my way, again. This time, to academia, to career-chasing, to chasing dollars, to the responsibilities of living an adult life.

My story is one of constantly denying who I am as a writer, and paying for it with blood, tears, and a damaged spirit, every single time. It doesn’t matter if I am a particularly good writer or a mediocre and overwrought one. After all, there are horrible writers who’ve published best-selling books, and great writers who’ve died before their work was ever read by more than a handful of family members or friends.

No, my story is about how the pursuit of all America pretends to offer can really fuck up one’s priorities. My story is about the spiral of falling in and falling out of love with life and the pursuit of making one’s life better, the illusion of choices, and the hypocrisy of the US, embedded in all of its institutions. My story is about the elliptical ebbs and flows of life, about my journeys as a writer, and how much of an educated fool I have been in these journeys. I promise laughter, sadness, and anger, and joy and victories, too.

The White-Boy Logic of Supernatural

15 Thursday Jul 2021

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Movies, Politics, Pop Culture, Religion

≈ 1 Comment

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"White Discussion", "Carry On Wayward Son", "Under The Bridge", Arrogance, Daily Routines, Dean Winchester, Grunge, Jared Padalecki, Jensen Ackles, Kansas, Live, Misogyny, Monsters, Narcissism, Racism, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sam Winchester, Saving the World, Supernatural, TV Shows, White Male Angst, White Savior Complex, Whitemansplaining

Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki as Dean and Sam Winchester in Supernatural, Season 9, Episode 13 (“The Purge”) screenshot. Originally aired February 4, 2014.

One of the benefits of working from home for years is the ability to take in copious amounts of popular culture in passive and subliminal ways. For more than a decade before the pandemic, my daily schedule included a multitasking routine of writing, teaching, grading, working-out, napping, running errands, and getting my son off to school and my partner off to her job. All the while, I am consuming news and pop culture. BBC World News from 6 or 7 am until I go to the car to drive my spouse to the Metro stop or run errands, sometimes longer. In the Honda Element, listening to my tunes or ESPN 980 (before Dan Synder sold the station two years ago) or WAMU/NPR. And, bouncing from show to show while writing, grading, working out, making lunch, prepping dinner, sometimes taking a brief nap between 1:30 and 2:45 (when my son returned home from school) or between 3:45 and 6 pm (when it was time to pick my significant other up from the Metro).

Of all the TNT reruns I’d put on in the midday slot over the years, between Bones, Castle, Arrow, and Law & Order, the one that has stuck with me the longest is Supernatural. Its final episode aired at the end of this past year. Perhaps it’s because it’s such a white boy’s show, or because it’s about as American as a show filmed in Vancouver, British Columbia can get. Whatever it was, I went from calling the show “Brooders” and “White Males Brooding” to actually enjoying the series, a not-so-guilty pleasure in between grading, writing, and revising, and yoga poses, planks, pushups, crunches, free weights, and plyometrics.

That doesn’t mean I’ve watched it with an uncritical mind. Just like with what I’ve called “white male angst music” in the 1990s — alt rock and grunge (think Pearl Jam and Live here) — Supernatural is a tour-de-force of whitemansplaining the world. Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki as Dean and Sam Winchester might play classic ‘70s rock in their legendary 1967 black Chevy Impala, but they are all “White, Discussion” and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Under The Bridge” in their attitudes. Seriously, how do two white dudes get away with mass murder while they constantly “save the world” with the “family business” of “hunting and killing monsters”?

The premise of the show, for the generation of folks who haven’t watched the 15 seasons of episodes between 2005 and 2020 (I watched my first episode in 2012, so there’s that), is that the Winchesters have to fight monsters born of supernatural forces while hunting for a yellow-eyed demon who killed their mother, and eventually, their father. In between bouts with demons, angels, archangels, Lucifer, Leviathans, Knights of Hell, Princes of Hell, the King of Hell, and God, er, “Chuck” himself, the Winchesters battled the usual. Ghosts, vampires, werewolves, skinwalkers, jinns, Greco-Roman, Norse, Incan, and Mayan gods, witches, and whatever other supernatural monster one could imagine. Supernatural was at its absolute best when the focus was on the ancient lore around cultural considerations of the metaphysical.

But the overarching theme of Dean and Sam Winchester “saving the world” is the great white man’s white lie. How does anyone get credit for “saving the world” when they broke the world, the natural order, multiple times. Here’s a short list of the Winchester’s thirst for revenge leading to Armageddon:

– the father John Winchester selling his soul to the “yellow-eyed demon” to save Dean’s life (Season 1)

– Dean selling his soul to the same demon to save Sam’s life (Season 2)

– Sam drinking demon blood to kill a Princess of Hell and Dean torturing damned souls in Hell, breaking the last and the first of 66 seals to unleash Lucifer and the Four Horsemen on the planet (Season 4)

– Dean not allowing Sam to die after finishing the three trials to forever seal up the gates of Hell, and then tricking Sam into allowing a rogue angel possess him for months afterward (Seasons 8 and 9)

– Dean taking on the Mark of Cain, becoming a demon in the process, and Sam freeing Dean from the Mark, unleashing the Darkness (think if so-called dark matter was God’s sister here) and another universe-destroying force (Seasons 9, 10, and 11)

– The Winchesters allowing a nephilim to live and its power to open up a rift between alternative Earths, a rift that threatened both versions of the planet in the process (Seasons 12 and 13)

– Engaging in a all-out war with God, ending only when they resurrect the nephilim Jack from the Empty, as he become the new God, and the old God becomes just Chuck, “just a slob like one of us,” ala 1990s rocker Joan Osborne (Seasons 14 and 15).

Dean and Sam die and go to Hell, Heaven, and Purgatory multiple times in this series. How narcissistic do even white guys — get to be when they assume that they can come back to life over and over again in order to “save” their brother while also saving the world? Especially when they sacrifice other family and friends to keep each other living and hunting monsters? So many die in this show because of their ignorance, so many who didn’t have to. When you take apart the context of their “jobs” as hunters involves hustling pool tables, identity theft and hacking credit cards, stealing cars, and regularly killing people who’ve turned into monsters or in the midst of demon possession. Any two of these gets Black and Brown and Indigenous folks a one-way ticket to prison or a grave, with no chance for resurrection.

It’s hilariously macabre and the height of arrogance of two white guys believing they are doing more good than harm. But isn’t Supernatural really just a parable about how white guys see themselves in the world? Everything is there for the taking, it’s all about us and our lives. Between the drugs, the boozing, the meaningless misogynistic sex, the endless buffet of death by food, Supernatural is the ultimately expression of white male-dominance, or at least, the quest for it, from two average Joes.

Near the end of Season 9, Episode 13 (“The Purge”), Dean and Sam talk, not for the last time, about putting their need to save each other from certain death above the needs and lives of everyone else. Sam has a moment of complete clarity, one that fades away by the end of Season 10 (see the list above).

You think you’re my savior, my brother, the hero. You swoop in, and even when you mess up, you think what you’re doing is worth it, because you’ve convinced yourself you’re doing more good than bad…but you’re not…What is the upside of me being alive?

Dean’s response:

You kidding me? You and me — fighting the good fight — together.

It never occurred to these characters, and perhaps, even the actors, producers, directors, and writers for Supernatural, that Dean and Sam Winchester are the real monsters here. Two everyday white guys who think that killing monsters and a host of supernatural entities is the solution to everything. Did they even consider that killing monsters might be the reason they need to keep hunting, because they create more each time they kill one? Or that maybe because the US is a place full of kidnapping, rape, enslavement, genocide, and murder, this nation is a natural incubator of supernatural hauntings and possessions, a place where all monsters can thrive? Did they ever see themselves as the humans they never seem to understand in the show? Probably not until the final episode in Season 15, when Dean and Sam finally die — this time for good, and for good.

I never wanted them to “Carry On Wayward Son,” as Kansas sang it in 1976, as a choir of white girls sang it Season 10, Episode 5. As sad as it was to see the final finale of Dean and Sam Winchester, we need a world without the hundreds of millions of Dean and Sam Winchesters around us, an anti-racist world. A world without these narcissistic and yes, racist and misogynistic and homophobic monsters who see themselves as do-gooders.