Category Archives: Christianity

ICE is America’s Gestapo, the White House the Waffen SS

18 Monday Jun 2018

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

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Two pictures: ICE raid to arrest foreign nationals. February 6, 2017, (Charles Reed/ICE; http://amsterdamnews.com); Gestapo in midst of a raid, circa 1939-40. (http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com). Both in public domain.

I may have developed my sense of thinking on the issue of inclusion and migration from the ostracism I experienced via the cool class of Black classmates from Mount Vernon High School. Maybe. Maybe not. But, it was on this date 31 years ago that the Class of 1987 graduated. And, within minutes of us tossing our mortar-board caps in the air, people who were the “cool ones” in the graduating class began ignoring my greetings and staring through me like I was invisible whenever and wherever I saw them. A silent treatment that I went through for two summers with this group.

This is not unlike the way the media and this 45 presidency deals with most marginalized Americans and the daily indignities and atrocities from which they suffer. Especially those who migrate without papers and those would-be-migrants and asylum-seekers. The amping up of a policy that separates parents from children at the US-Mexico border is nothing short of kidnapping and taking hostages. However, the policy isn’t entirely new, and the media coverage of it until a week and a half ago was scant. President 45 and his minions had truly believed that they could keep something like this under wraps, because undocumented migrants and asylum-seekers have no representatives, no voice, and no support among many Americans.

The cries of outrage across this country have proven them partly wrong. Still, the “cooler” — really, crueler — class of Americans, White, White privilege, White patriarchy, Whiteness-is-always-right-thinking Americans (which unfortunately also includes Americans of color) remain all for body snatching. They have either been silent or have made some lame-ass excuses for fuckery worthy only of superficially-cool high school graduates.

I’m reminded of the first time I saw America’s cruelty in kidnapping kids and tearing apart families. For me, it started with Roots in 1977. I watched through Kunta Kinte’s  capture and Middle Passage across the Atlantic, his arrival in colonial Virginia, and later, the selling off of his daughter Kizzy to a slave owner who raped and impregnated her with Chicken George. Kizzy (played by Leslie Uggams) never saw her father alive again (she’s somehow able to visit her father’s grave, though), and her mother Bell is sold off to some Deep South plantation.

Leslie Uggams as Kizzy Kente in Roots (screen shot), 1977. (http://roots.wikia.com).

At seven, I cried at least three times watching this. At ten, when I saw all of this a second time, I cried and got angry. Especially at Sandy Duncan’s character, Missy Anne. Because Kizzy had the audacity to have a boyfriend and attempted to help him escape, Missy Anne shunned Kizzy and put up no protest as her father sold off her childhood playmate. And I learned that this is how nice people do people like me, especially the times when we need their help the most.

Later, I learned about the Fugitive Slave Laws. I learned how Congress, starting in 1793, passed a series of laws making it possible for every White American to act as a secret police. Whites were on the lookout for runaway African slaves in places as far-flung as Charleston, South Carolina, Bangor, Maine, Buffalo, New York, and, by the 1850s, Arizona Territory and California. The assumption of African enslavement was so pervasive that thousands of free and freed Blacks could end up being sold and re-sold into slavery, merely because some random White person wanted to make an extra $10 in the 1830s (12 Years a Slave comes to mind here).

Later, I’d learn about the Trail of Tears, Indian Removal, and the long, bitter march of indigenous peoples onto reservations between the late-1820s and 1890. A population of perhaps three million Native Americans reduced to 250,000 by the time of the 1900 Census. All federal policies as the US Army executed them. All so that mining interests could get to gold and coal, all so that railroads could be built. In the process of assimilating “the savages,” the federal government also snatched thousands of Native American children from their tribes and families and put them in boarding schools. With White families all too willing to teach them to forget about their long and proud histories, languages, and peoples.

But before learning all this, I also learned through my mom’s years on welfare just how easy it could be for a government and willing neighbors to have children and parents separated. More than once, a social worker swung by in the years between 1983 and 1990 to inspect my younger siblings, to make sure there wasn’t a man in the house, to ensure that my family’s deep poverty was real. More than once, a neighbor would threaten to call Social Services on my mom (and at least once, on me when I was a teenager) because my four younger sibling kept up too much noise. The policies that now comprise what some experts call “Jane Crow,” of separating allegedly neglectful and abusing parents (mostly Black women) in the name of protecting children, were very much alive and well during my teenage and early adulthood years. Because of course, poverty in America to the point of needing a few dollars and some Food Stamps is illegal.

Signs and protesters at “Families Belong Together March,” Los Angeles, June 14, 2018. (Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images).

With all this history of breaking up families to control African slaves, free Blacks, Native Americans, and poor people, why would the sudden ramping up of separating children from their parents at the US-Mexico border surprise anyone? It doesn’t surprise me. ICE has been brazen in their modern-day execution of its Fugitive-Slave-Act-esque charge to “round up all the illegals.” The White House has 45 and an army of minions who spend every waking moment of every day figuring out ways to quash dissent and foment support for policies that would make the US a Whites-only country.

But for all this to work, there have to be millions of Americans willing to help them. And there are. Some out of pure ignorance, some out of willful ignorance and denial, and some because they are racist sociopaths. All, though, are fully steeped in the idea that America would be better off if Whites remain the majority, if White men and White women sire most of America’s kids, and if all the Black and Brown people submit to their rule and oppression with bright smiles.

People, America isn’t becoming a fascist state. For so many of us, America has always hung in the balance between freedom and fascism. Fascism for Americans of color, and freedom for good, Christian-as-racism White folks. This. Is. America.

Mrs. Bryant and the Beginning of Donald 1.5

03 Sunday Jun 2018

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A bright blue sky, just before the long storm, February 19, 2011. (http://www.photos-public-domain.com). In public domain.

We’ve reached the end of yet another school year, number 32 for me overall, between my twenty-two years between kindergarten and doctorate and my son’s ten years of K-9 (this doesn’t included the 13 years of overlap, in which my primary job has been as an instructor, or my wife’s two years of grad school). The end of sixth grade was not particularly violent. But it was a rough transition to nearly eight years of bumps, bruises, grinding poverty and psychological torture, and a constant struggle for my true self.

The one strong and calming influence in the midst of this gathering storm system was my sixth grade teacher at William H. Holmes ES, Mrs. Della Bryant. She was the fourth of my four Black teachers between first grade and middle school. Mrs. Bryant was as important to me on the cusp of becoming a teenager as Ms. Griffin was to my grounding as a student in first grade, and the crush I had on Mrs. Shannon in third. Because Mrs. Bryant didn’t just aspire for us to do well and get A’s. She wanted us to think big picture, and not just about high school or college. Mrs. Bryant encouraged us to think in larger, worldly terms, to take politics and religion and literature and the stuff of intellectuals seriously.

She indulged us, especially me and my then best friend Starling. So many times that year, Mrs. Bryant allowed us to debate current event topics in class, whether we had sufficient facts or not. The Iran hostage crisis, the 1980 election cycle and why Ronald Reagan would be worse than President Jimmy Carter (no one in our class played devil’s advocate), the legality of Israel unilaterally bombing an Iraqi nuclear weapons centrifuge site.

Those were among the moments I lived for in Mrs. Bryant’s class that school year. I lived for them not just because I liked showing off my knowledge. I already knew I was smart. I spent the following year saying “I am the smartest kid in the whole world!” to myself, and occasionally, to Humanities classmates who made me feel inferior.

No, those debates weren’t about my raw analytic power and great ability to remember. They were about discovering what I thought I knew about a topic, understanding what I didn’t know, and being able to articulate it all without losing my thoughts in the ether. And in all that, I discovered parts of myself. My forthrightness. My New York-style sarcasm. My sense of righteous anger. My ability to summarize a situation in order to derive or intuit possible responses, even solutions.

That was what Mrs. Bryant with her light but steady touch helped me get to in sixth grade. A sense of enlightenment that could survive the false gods of Hebrew-Israelite-ism, the false father of my then idiot stepfather “Judah ben Israel” née Maurice Washington, and the fallacy that I had any control over my world.

But that wasn’t all Mrs. Bryant helped me do that year. She encouraged me to take on other projects, especially contests. Like posters for Dental Health Month, or participating in Election 1980 activities, and journaling and writing down my thoughts about virtually everything. Mrs. Bryant did me the honor of having me introduce our graduation speaker at the end of sixth grade, nearly 37 years ago. It was a two-minute speech, but it was also in front of a couple hundred people. I don’t think I’ve even been as nervous being on radio or television. Most of that stuck with me for years, somehow surviving through years of crumpled neglect.

Mrs. Bryant was the one who shepherded me into the Humanities Program, something that I’d only heard about once before, inadvertently through Brandie Weston (who was a student at Pennington-Grimes) the year before. With my grades and test scores, I probably could’ve made into the Grimes Center a year or two earlier. That is, if my teachers Ms. Pierce and Mrs. O’Daniel had thought of me that way. But in the big scheme, it wasn’t that important. Mrs. Bryant did think of me that way, and went out of her way to say as much. “Mrs. Bryant’s encouragement, her insistence that I was ‘one of the best students’ she ‘ever had,’ made sixth grade a joyful time,” I wrote in my memoir.

Now, despite Mrs. Bryant, I wasn’t prepared for going to school every day with 150 other know-it-all’s, many of whom would never have to worry about Con Edison bills being overdue or having no food to eat for three or four days at time. Or, the constant threat of domestic violence and abuse at home. Heck, between Humanities’ decided demographic affluence and ideological Whiteness, I doubt that most of my eventual classmates worried about anything other than getting A’s until puberty took full hold.

As I wrote in Boy @ The Window, “Mrs. Bryant never warned me that Humanities would be overwhelming because my social skills outside of Holmes were as well developed as a spoiled seven-year old’s.” I simply didn’t handle the transition from a 98-percent-Black elementary school to the mostly White Humanities program very well. Then again, with so much going wrong at home, I didn’t handle much of anything well in the 16 months after sixth grade.

But one thing I carried from my year with Mrs. Bryant was that I could survive and succeed despite it all. To observe and listen, and not just speak off the cuff. To be patient, and keep working. Frankly, it was likely because of teachers like Mrs. Bryant that I discovered my first superpower, my ability to think, remember, and write. And in that discovery, bury the pains of earlier abuses that would’ve surely killed me (or at least, led to a successful suicide) by the time I turned fourteen. Mrs. Bryant, wherever you are, and whatever you’re up to, I say, with love, many, many thanks!

Rich, Lorde, and What I Care/Don’t Care About

20 Tuesday Mar 2018

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Audre Lorde, Meridel Lesueur, and Adrienne Rich after leading a writing workshop, Austin, TX, 1980. (K. Kendall/Flickr, July 15, 2007). Released to the public domain via CC-SA-2.0.

Among the literary arts, poetry is somewhere between okay and blech for me. At least most of the time. That doesn’t mean I hate all poetry or all poets. I fully appreciate the rhyme and meter (and lack thereof) of so many, from James Weldon Johnson and Archibald MacLeish to Phillis Wheatley and Langston Hughes. I love the emotional layering in the choice of the words, and in more modern times, the delivering of such words, with The Last Poets, with Gil Scott-Heron, and of course, Maya Angelou. Rap legends like Tupac, Nas, Eminem, Public Enemy have lyrics that are essentially spoken-word poetry put to bass, beats, and music loops. Heck, I’ve even enjoyed W. E. B. DuBois’ forays in the art in my scholarly research (when I more regularly did it) over the years.

But as a writer of prose (and often, long-winded prose), I also find the form of poetry ill-fitting. For me, it’s like being a home-run hitter in baseball playing hard-court tennis. It’s not that I can’t hit a baseline winner or an ace. But for every one of those, I could easily hit four tennis balls in a row out of the court, and literally onto the roof of a house half a block away. I prefer the ability to lay out my thoughts and explain them in full sentences, without worrying over every single word and the rhythm that a sequence of carefully chosen words may or may not bring.

I barely read any poetry during my Humanities years, unless my English classes forced me to. Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, John Keats, Alexander Pope, all for 10th grade English, and with the exception of Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock,” not particularly entertaining. I was convinced after high school in ’87 that I’d never read poetry again.

What brought on a new interest in poetry came from my sophomore year at Pitt. I had to take a General Writing class in Fall 1988. I had to because if I wanted to take upper-level History classes as a History major, this general education requirement needed to be knocked off.  But I had an enthusiastic graduate student as my instructor. When I say enthusiastic, I mean someone who knew their students wouldn’t be, but whose passion for teaching and literature of all kinds made the class and the readings more interesting. She told me early on, after reading one of my first essays, that I should’ve been able to pass out of General Writing through the diagnostic tests Pitt gave my freshman year. “I wasn’t exactly awake when I took it last year,” I said in response.

Ways of Reading anthology book (2nd edition), used in 1988. (http://ebay.ca).

When we got to the poetry portion of the course, I thought at first I was going to die from boredom. But our instructor didn’t assign us the usual suspects. The main poet we read that week was Adrienne Rich. She was someone I’d heard of growing up, but that was about it. Until the assignment of reading both Rich’s poetry and her essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” that is.

There were three things I’d never considered before reading Rich. One was the idea that writing was both art and craft, and that most writing was editing and re-envisioning one’s work. Two was the notion of transforming and being transformed through the writing process, and all as a proxy for a meaningful life. Three was the positioning of poets and other writers in literature, the privileging of men over women, of White males over feminists, of White heterosexual feminists over lesbian feminists, and especially Black lesbian feminists.

That last one about power, privilege, and positioning, it really grabbed me. So much so that I read more Rich that October weekend, in between pangs of hunger from lack of money and my Saturday evening shift at the Cathedral of Learning computer lab.

And the more I read of Rich, the more I decided to read about one of Rich’s contemporaries. I moved on to Audre Lorde the following week. She wasn’t among the long list of readings we had for General Writing, but she should’ve been. I couldn’t believe that someone who lived only miles away from my growing up experience in Mount Vernon and in New York could yet have such a vastly different experience with the city and the area.

I picked up Sister Outsider (1984) for the first time near the end of that fall semester. Lorde’s collection of essays about civil rights, about Black feminism (or womanism), about what we now call intersectionality, opened my eyes to how even Rich’s brand of feminism could be problematic. But more than that. Lorde, along with Rich, helped me realize, and not for the first time, that I didn’t care if the person I read or learned from was straight or gay, male or female (or later on, transgender), Black, Brown, or White. This despite what the Hebrew-Israelites and the evangelicals tried to teach me. They just had to be excellent in their work.

Excerpt of Audre Lorde’s Power (1978) (screenshot). (http://poetryfoundation.org).

Sister Outsider also opened up my eyes to the possibility that even my poetry-loathing ass could appreciate a true master at work in the art. So early on the following semester, I read Lorde’s poetry for the first time, likely some poems from her Coal (1976). Lorde talking about her upbringing, her relationship with her mother, and her issues with her own skin color, resonated with me.

But that was it with poetry for me until I borrowed my friend E’s recording of The Lost Poets 1971 album, and then read Angelou’s poetry, both in the summer of ’91. By then, I knew that while I’d never be a full-fledged fan of it, I could still appreciate the work, the art, and the layering of ideologies, emotions, and ideas contained in the best of poetry.

Is “Never” the Best Time for a Critique?

03 Saturday Mar 2018

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Rev. Billy Graham, 2003. (David Hume/Getty Images). Cropped slightly; qualifies as fair use due to cropping and subject matter.

I’ve been watching the variety of responses to the death of the late great Billy Graham over the past seven or ten days. Most people have been in mourning, which was something to expect. Many, like UPenn religious studies professor Anthea Butler, have reminded the world of the White nationalist, segregationist, and sexist views Graham either represented or excused during his six-decade-long run on the national stage.

And like mechanical clockwork, those who have Victorian and transactional notions of Christianity have defended, deflected, and denied on Graham’s behalf. It’s led to this series of questions for me When can we critique the legacy of a famous person? While they’re alive? “No siree! That would be disrespectful.” If they claim to be serving God, “That would be blasphemous!” When they die? “Now’s not the time — can’t you see they’re family’s in morning? The Bible says, ‘Judge not, lest thou be judged’.”

Translation: apparently, we’re never supposed to question what some famous person has done. Especially if they have the word “reverend” or “pastor” as part of their official title. It’s a thought process that imbues power to religious leaders, so much so that we might as well make them god-like, since our job is merely to obey and stay quiet.

But as I’ve learned over the past three-and-a-half decades, religious leaders are fallible. They aren’t sacrosanct. And while seminaries or other religious institutions have ordained them, that doesn’t mean that every vision they’ve ever had came straight from God. Meaning that we can question. Meaning that we can critique. Meaning that we can provide evidence that humanizes whom others would consider a pedestal perfect being. For those whom aren’t Christian, it certainly means they can judge Graham, too.

To err is human, no? Which means we shouldn’t have any sacred cows. Graham might’ve saved millions of souls for eternal life. But that shouldn’t automatically exempt him from a critique of his unwillingness to help those same souls while they were still here on Earth.

 

My Mom’s Milestone

30 Monday Oct 2017

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Orange roses in a garden, February 2014. (https://hdwallsource.com/).

This past weekend, Mom turned seventy years old. 70! Wow! I sent her a plant with orange blossom roses, a vase and a candle setting, which arrived on time for her birthday on Saturday. We had a good phone conversation about the gift and about her day. When I turned the conversation to what she planned to do for her big day, she said she might “go to the Red Lobster at Cross County [Mall].” That was disappointing, but also somewhat expected. After a lifetime of drama, abuse, and pain, maybe a relatively peaceful weekend of phone calls, well wishes, and a table for one at Red Lobster is really all Mom can aspire to seven decades in.

I’ve thought a lot about Mom the last few days. Especially in light of my mother-in-law’s last two years of dementia and decline. Mom’s been a hard worker in her life, but not a strategic one. Mom dedicated a good portion of her life to relationships with men, to two abysmal marriages, and to the basic provisions for raising six kids. None of which she did with inspiration and passion, for none of this was what she dreamed for herself. Mom, when focused, could and did learn, but she’s not a particularly curious person, or a person devoted to learning new things. Mom was also one of the most vain persons I knew growing up. Despite $16,600/year for eight in most of the ’80s, would preen and primp for going on The Avenue (South Side Mount Vernon’s shopping district, Fourth Avenue) like it was an evening gala at the Met.

The good news and bad news about only being a bit more than 22 years younger than my Mom is that I have observed her growth and lack thereof for so many years. Some people say that to have a younger mother is to have someone who grows up with you while you’re growing up. No, not really. I was Mom’s second kid. My brother Darren came two years and eighteen days before me. Between my alcoholic, losing-one-good-job-after-another, seventh-grade-education dad and a full-time job at Mount Vernon Hospital, where was the time for Mom to grow as a young adult?

At the same time, I know this. At twenty, I had barely begun to know myself as a history student, writer, and human being. I had tons of thoughts, but often couldn’t find a way to articulate them fully. At 22, I was better at all these things, but not so much better that I could determine how I would raise one child, much less two. And before my wife of now more than seventeen years, I never saw myself getting married. Heck, I didn’t start regularly having sex until I was twenty-one!

Mom made a lot of decisions in her younger years by letting men and friends and circumstances — and really, fear — decide for her. Then, she played increasingly bad hands, each more laughable as they were more oppressive to all of us. Domestic violence, child abuse, grinding poverty, being Hebrew-Israelites. These barely scratch the surface of the emotional, psychological, and even spiritual torture Mom endured until she was 42.

Mom with my son Noah at 616, August 4, 2014. (Donald Earl Collins).

But you know something? I endured all of this as well. Because, when you are a keenly aware son of a Black woman going through all this, and you decide that you must help, that you must act, you take on the same burdens and the same pains. Being keenly aware isn’t the same thing as knowing what I signed up for, though. Certainly not at twelve, not at twenty, not even at 32. I only knew that I had taken on too much growing up after my son was born fourteen years ago.

Someone on my Twitter feed said recently that he couldn’t believe the cats who would get on Twitter to criticize their moms. I’m not arguing that grown-ass men should criticize their mothers on Twitter. Nor should that put them on pedestals. If we are doing too much of either of those, we’re not seeing our mothers as real human beings, ordinary and flawed like most others. Except that they carried us in their wombs, birthed us, and even under circumstances as crushing as mine, attempted to raise and nurture.

My relationship with Mom will always be complicated by the fact that I know more than most people ought to know about their mothers. Mom couldn’t hide, Mom couldn’t protect, even on the many occasions she did try. Since I couldn’t hide or protect, I just went out and did all I could to help her help herself. Only that by the time we’d driven off my idiot stepfather in ’89, the damage, the depression, the PTSD, was already fully manifest. The fire at 616 and having the burden of my younger siblings made it worse.

Now that Mom is a septuagenarian, it would be interesting to know how she looks back at her life, to see how she sees her years spent on Earth. I wonder because for so many years, the only thing Mom desired was for “the Rapture to come and take her up.” I wonder because nearly all of her southern Black migrant friends from her first decade in the Bronx and in Mount Vernon are dead. I wonder because I’m not sure how it is that she’s managed to make it to 70 under the constant strain that has been most of her life.

I have no idea if Mom has ever read or will ever read my blog. I know others around her have. If she is reading, I want her to know that I do love her, and want for her seventies to be her best decade ever. I want her to want to learn, to finally find herself, to take up projects, to travel and explore a bit, even if it’s only Manhattan. I want her to find some meaning in life, even if it’s only the size of a speck.

A Brief History of My “Virginity”

01 Friday Sep 2017

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Nigerian-American actor Yvonne Orji, who plays Molly on the HBO series Insecure (2016-), August 15, 2017. (http://www.sowetanlive.co.za/).

Yvonne Orji, one of the lead actors from the HBO series Insecure, has revealed the fact that she is a thirty-three year-old virgin in recent weeks. But Orji has in fact spoken about her virginity several times over the past year, something I was surprised to learn (that she had spoken so much about it, not the fact of it). Some folks on social media have applauded Orji’s stance on her sexuality, while others like womanist Obaa Boni derided Orji’s adherence to her virginity as “patriarchal.”

Screen shot of @obaa_boni tweets re: Yvonne Orji’s virginity, August 23, 2017. (Donald Earl Collins via http://twitter.com).

Let me first say that there’s nothing wrong with virginity, celibacy, or promiscuity. So as long as it’s transparent, healthy, and done with a full understanding of why one has moved in a certain direction sexually. The problem is, people often do the wrong things for the right reasons and the wrong things for the wrong reasons. Especially in a world where gratuitous sensuality is everywhere, fake-sex-porn is ubiquitous, and social norms remain hostile and puritanical. This is especially so in the US, where the distance between healthy sexuality and where many Americans are with their sexuality is about the same as between a racism-less society and the virulent racism that is truly all-American.

I was once Yvonne Orji, believing that maintaining my virginity kept me in a state of purity, if not in a physical sense, then certainly in a spiritual one. There were several reasons beyond “being pure in God’s eyes,” or saving myself for the right person, though, that I emphasized my virginity.

Screen shot of Cuba Gooding, Jr. as Tré in Boyz n the Hood (1991). (http://mentalfloss.com).

My top two reasons were practical ones. As the second of six kids growing up at 616 in Mount Vernon (my Mom remarried and had my younger brothers and sister between the time I was nine-and-a-half and fourteen-and-a-half years old), I didn’t want to become a father, especially a teenage father. Like Tré from Boyz n the Hood (1991), I didn’t want to be stereotypically Black and male, to make a baby when I had no means to take care of it, to impregnate another person when I wasn’t sure if I’d make it to thirty. Also, STDs scared the crap out of me, especially AIDS. I was smart enough even at fifteen to know that AIDS wasn’t a “gay disease,” that it could infect anyone, especially anyone without protection.

But the fact was, I had lost pieces of my virginity long before I tried to find a state of purity. I had already been sexually molested before I hit my seventh birthday. Any number of teenage girls at 616 had attempted to come on to me before I had started my first day of high school. Heck, my father had hired a prostitute to get rid of my penetrative virginity the month of my seventeenth birthday!

Beyond that, masturbation from the time I was thirteen, porn mags between birthdays seventeen and nineteen, the occasional date at Pitt, where kisses, petting, and touching was involved. I had pretty much lost my sexual virginity by the time I was nineteen, and yet I didn’t really know how to be me sexually at all. So when I finally did start hooking up with folks for purely sexual purposes, it was an emotionally messy dance, between religious guilt, occasional actual pleasure, and lots of frustration in between. It wasn’t until I was twenty-four where I felt fully comfortable with myself sexually, and even then, I had another decade of pseudo-evangelical, patriarchal, and puritanical bullshit to get over.

Which is why I rarely gave anyone any advice about what to do or how to be on the sexual side of relationships before my mid-thirties, especially when asked. Have sex at fifteen with a partner of the same age whom cares about and respects you? Sounds fine. Stay celibate for ten years? Okay. Have fuck buddies for a couple of years? Sure! Remain a virgin like former NBA player A. C. Green until you turn thirty-eight? Whatevs!

Former NBA Ironman A.C. Green, Time Warner Cable Media Upfront Event, “Summertime is Cable Time,” Hollywood, CA, May 3, 2011. (Toby Canham/Getty Images; http://zimbio.com).

My Black masculinity shouldn’t have been defined by evangelical White Christian notions of virgin purity, any more than it should’ve been by how frequently I penetrated a woman. My relationship with God should’ve never been about some fucked up notion of sexual purity. It is way too easy to let Western culture screw each of us up, with the result that it will take way too many years to find our sexual equilibrium. For so many, that day of balance between sexual freedom and mature responsibility will never come.

Just realize that being a virgin doesn’t make one special, and having a regular rotation of trusted sexual partners doesn’t make one a slut or a stud. As a culture, we are both obese and anorexic when it comes to sexuality and sexual activity. We imagine it too much, do it too little, and often do it incorrectly and for the wrong reasons. No wonder America is such an angry place, with so many believing in an angry God!

Moving On, Thirty Years Later

26 Saturday Aug 2017

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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A Boeing 767 Delta flight at takeoff, JFK Airport, Jamaica, Queens, NY, circa 2011. (http://panynj.gov).

I am now three full decades removed from Moving Day 1987, the final Wednesday in August, when I moved for my freshman year of college to Pittsburgh. I was leaving Mount Vernon and 616, but neither would begin to leave me, at least for another year or so.

It was a day of days. But really, it wasn’t the hardest leaving day I faced. In the summers I’d come home to work and watch after my younger siblings, the end of those Augusts were tearful ones. I played music for me and my siblings to sing to before I left at the end of the summer of ’88. I added an extra week to my stay in 1990, just so I could spend extra time with Maurice, Yiscoc, Sarai, and Eri, teaching them how to ride a bike and how to tie their shoes, and missed a week’s worth of classes at Pitt to start the fall. Even in ’92, when I came back to 616 to work for two months that summer at Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health because I couldn’t find a teaching gig at Pitt, I stayed an extra week. That was my life outside of college, grad school, and Pittsburgh for a good decade after my first trip to Pittsburgh. It got easier to leave as my life became about working, teaching, dating, and writing, but leaving was always hard.

My hardest leaving day was in late-August 1989. After a full summer of work, between two jobs, the end of my Mom’s marriage (finally!), my older brother Darren moving out, and my schedule of activities with the younger Gang of Four, I saw going back to the University of Pittsburgh for my third year as a vacation. But it wasn’t going to be one for Mom. She would be completely on her own with my younger siblings for the first time once I left. And I knew the thought of being with them without any help, or least, without any enemies at 616 to war against (like my idiot ex-stepfather Maurice) terrified her.

Screen shot of 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Mount Vernon, NY, June 2016. (http://maps.google.com)

I stayed an extra five days before leaving on August 30, because Mom still had two weekends of summer courses left to finish at Westchester Business institute. Mom made the decision to not finish up her business law and accounting classes that session the Saturday before I left. She said to me, “Go on to Pittsburgh, Donald. I’ll be all right.” It didn’t make sense to me. She had an A in the business law class, and likely could’ve talked with her instructor about taking an incomplete and then the final exam once my siblings started school after Labor Day. I said as much, but Mom, per usual, didn’t listen to me. She ended up with a D in the business law course, and an F, of course, in the accounting class. Mom wouldn’t return to Westchester Business Institute to finish up her associate’s degree until January 1996.

I felt guilty at the time that I put my own education over my Mom’s. I felt guilty that I couldn’t help out more. Mostly, I felt guilty that despite what I saw back then as “my responsibilities to the family,” I wanted to leave, and part of me wanted to stay gone. I didn’t want to come home for Christmas, my birthday, and New Year’s every single holiday season. I didn’t want to spend my summers living at 616 while working in Mount Vernon or White Plains. And though I wanted to help the Gang of Four out as much as I could, I would’ve preferred bringing them to Pittsburgh, and not going back to Mount Vernon over and over again.

Looking back, though, I realized the truth. Mom really didn’t enjoy school. Mom decided to go to Westchester Business Institute because I was in college. And as a professor who has taught hundreds of adult learners (students twenty-five and sometimes much older), I know that earning a degree with your kids can be a great motivator for enrolling in higher ed. It just can’t be the only motivator. At some point, it has to be about more than a friendly familial competition or even about using the degree to earn a few extra dollars. It has to be about improving yourself and the people around you. Mom wasn’t ready to juggle that burden, and likely had gone through too much that summer to spend another fifteen months in school while also watching after my younger siblings.

Boy, it was hard to leave that last Wednesday in August ’89. I was nervous for Mom, sad for my siblings, and maybe even a little angry with Mom and God about the impossible choice I thought I had made at the time. But I reminded myself that I wouldn’t be any good to anyone if I couldn’t finish my degree and use it to help others. I reminded myself that I was still only nineteen years old, that, my outward maturity and 616 aside, I still had a lot to learn about life.