Category Archives: University of Pittsburgh

What Bull Durham and I Have in Common

18 Wednesday May 2022

Posted by in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, Sports, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,


“Well, 247 home runs in the minor-leagues would be a…kind of dubious honor.”

Bull Durham, 1988.

Today marks two occasions, both of them a bit bittersweet. One, I marched and picked up my doctorate on this date, a quarter-century ago. A whole 25 years since my PhD ceremony, and my professional life has been a roller-coaster of betrayals, slights, and occasional triumphs since. I have written about all of them ad nauseum over the past 25 years, too. Learning people like my advisor and my mom were jealous of me was so discouraging that if it weren’t for writing, I might not be here at all to muse about anything.

But this May 18, in the year 2022, I have achieved a milestone I didn’t think possible, not even five years ago. Today, I begin teaching my second summer session course, US History from 1865 to the Present, at University of Maryland Global Campus. This is the 100th course I have taught or guest lectured as a regular since 1991. One hundred courses, enough to earn 2.5 bachelor’s degrees. “Yay, me!”, right?

This is a truly half-full, half-empty post, and so is how I feel about today. As Crash Davis would say, “Well, 100 undergraduate and graduate courses taught in academia’s minor-leagues is a kind of dubious honor.” It wouldn’t make news in The Chronicle of Higher Education or Inside Higher Ed, forget about The Sporting News! 

I mean, a full 58 of my courses have been taught at a University of Maryland campus that mostly offers online courses. American University, my primary teaching place for the past four years, laughs every time our adjuncts’ union brings up our want for a new contract to correct our paltry salaries (their latest offer barely enough for Chipotle dinner for four per course). I haven’t taught a course affiliated with graduate-level work since my Teaching Black Studies class at Howard University in 2007, and that was marginally so. I made more money managing my former bosses at the defunct Academy for Educational Development for eight years ($620,000) than I ever have in my 20+ years as a TA, instructor, or professor ($360,000). So yes, hitting my 100th course feels dubious.

News flash: it’s still an achievement, too. That means I’ve taught between 2,450 and 2,600 students off and (since 2007, mostly) on over the past three decades. At least a dozen of my students have gone to earn doctorates, at least another 200 have their master’s and JDs. I’ve written dozens of letters and provide references for scores of former students. I’ve had some amazing revelations and epiphanies while teaching, including on many of the topics I write about for income and publication now. And, though almost exclusively in the lowly position of “ad-junk,” have taught at Pitt, CMU, Duquesne College of Education, GW School of Education and Human Development, University of the District of Columbia, Howard University, and my two current campuses. I’ve also taught for two summers at Princeton, worked with students in civic education, and designed curricula and materials for various education organizations over the years. 

I’ve hit home runs, and against quality pitching, too. I’ve also hit threes out of double-teams, caught touchdowns while splitting double-coverages, and made blinding saves off of slapshots. In teaching as much as I have, I’ve had to. One TA in 100 courses, (and the one I did have should have never been trusted with grading responsibilities), one office (American) and two cubicles (Pitt and CMU, and I was a grad student then) in all my years in the classroom. I’ve taught students as young as 12 and as old as 80, too. Short of a mass shooter, I have pretty much seen it all as a postsecondary educator (though I’ve had armed cops as students in the classroom, too).

Really, I hope to remain an educator for the rest of my days, even as I hope that I’m not teaching eight, nine, and 10 classes per year for the next 20 or 30 years, either. For all the joys of light bulbs going off and seeing stereotypes shattered, there’s also the student sitting with their arms folded, refusing to listen, to me or their classmates, blaming me for everything wrong in the world. Crash Davis retired after breaking his record and became a coach in the minor leagues. That’s not so much a retirement as it is a significant role change. Maybe I can achieve the same, and soon.

Being One of The Expendables

01 Sunday May 2022

Posted by in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,


Poster art (cropped) and tattoo art for The Expendables (2010), August 2, 2010. (https://blog.spoongraphics.co.uk/tutorials/how-to-create-the-expendables-winged-skull-poster-art)

Even in my relative youth and arrogance, back in the days where I insisted that any authority figure in my life had to refer to me as DOCTOR Collins or DR. Donald Collins, I still saw myself as an underdog. I didn’t necessarily see myself as a working-class stiff (I did sometimes, given my predoctoral background). But I definitely was not part of the elite bunch. Mark, Mike, Jennifer and so many at Carnegie Mellon, and professors like Oestreicher, Andrews, Smethurst, Chase, and Van Hall at Pitt let me know I was better, but not elite, nearly every week for my five-and-a-half years from bachelor’s to PhD. between 1991 and 1997. 

I held out hope back then. Hope that the doctorate was worth the pain, the suffering, the borrowing, the betrayals, and the burnout. Hope that being three or four times as good would be more than good enough. Hope, most of all, that my flair for writing with imagination and purpose would translate into success, prosperity, vindication, even healing and renewal, as I took my degree and my skill sets into the worlds I’ve inhabited now for a quarter-century.

Who was I kidding? I was probably the least well-connected person I knew going into college in 1987. With the partially bombed-out bridge I crossed to earn my doctorate at the end of 1996, I was lucky to have any connections to work with in finding any work at all. I discovered in a matter of weeks in 1997 my connections were enough to get into the door at one institution after another, but not enough to secure full-time work in academia. 

I had felt expendable before. Graduate school and living at 616 with an abusive idiot stepfather and a patriarchal mother each gave me that feeling. The two-and-a-half-year journey to find a full-time job was different, though. It was as if I was too educated for the working world, not just as a Black man, but as a 27-year-old Black man who had worked on some level since the summer of 1984. 

Almost all my academic job interviews were with schools of education or Africana studies departments. Not a single history department would interview me or hire me for a job, not even as an adjunct, until 2008. As I began doing nonprofit job interviews, it was obvious no one accounted for my doctorate as part of the process, or my three years of TAing and standalone teaching experience. I had already become the job equivalent of Michael Clayton, a fixer who wasn’t really a cop or a lawyer, yet had the expert skill sets of both. Only, substitute the words “professor” and “nonprofit administrator” for “cop” and “lawyer” here.

My expendability became even more apparent as I found myself in the big-time nonprofit world working at the now defunct Academy for Educational Development (AED, now FHI 360). It was here I learned the full nature of how much I could be a misfit within an organization. At my second job within the organization, as a senior program officer and deputy director of Partnerships for College Access and Success, my last two years I was in charge of managing the annual $1.3 million-budget for the national initiative. 

And that’s when I learned why we never seemed to have enough money to manage the project or pay me more than $75 or $80K for doing so. The senior members of AED — the CEO, executive vice presidents, and senior vice presidents — skimmed one percent off the top of all grants passing through the organization. Mind you, individual senior officers who oversaw our unit already billed more than some of their hours to a project they never actually managed (the Denise Borders’ and Sandra Lauffers’ of that world). The project was just a carcass, and these stinky-ass vultures often fed off the remains. These senior folk frequently made anywhere from $200K to $400K, and the CEO Steve Moseley made over $700,000. 

To hide this tremendous amount of overhead (about 35 or 40 percent of the total budget), I had to make up three budget spreadsheets. One for the actual cost of salaries, utilities, travel, and the AED Ponzi scheme, another for the private foundation world (where we manipulated the data to get the overhead to be only 15 or 20 percent of the budget). A third spreadsheet was for the annual audit to satisfy USAID and the feds. The last two budgets hid the “rainy day” fund for AED’s 52 senior officers. 

It was just disgusting. I spent so much time meeting with foundation officers, writing grant proposals, fielding offers, and looking for a less stressful job in 2006 and 2007. We would turn down money because it wasn’t enough to satisfy the vultures or to keep everyone employed, like $100,000 from Carnegie Corporation, another $200,000 elsewhere. 

Meanwhile, when I finally did get burned out at the end of 2007 and submitted my resignation, it was just three months ahead of probably being partially laid off anyway. I didn’t have it in me to spend the next three or six months groveling to every vice president or senior vice president in the organization about my work, hoping to pick up enough hours to keep pace with my salary. I certainly didn’t have it in me to explain for the 1,000th time why I didn’t spend two years in Mozambique as part of the Peace Corps digging wells, learning the local Portuguese, or putting up malaria nests. All to show I was one of them, privileged enough to see what lack of socioeconomic and racial privilege looked like in distant parts of the world. I was never one of them, because I lived this contrast every day growing up in and around the Big Apple.

My Black ass was expendable. My doctorate really meant nothing in the face of this work. And, I was approaching 40, meaning that others would assume I was too old to do this work and learn anyway. I was most definitely expendable by February 2008.

But, so was every AED Ponzi schemer by their ludicrously lazy, racist, and elitist standards. Once USAID became aware of the organization’s shenanigans at the end of 2010, they suspended AED’s $600-million worth of contracts, and then canceled them or moved those contracts to other organizations. They killed the beast, finding my former bosses expendable, too.

Today, I work in a world where everyone truly is expendable. It doesn’t matter if it’s American University, University of Maryland Global Campus, or if I freelance with Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, or Salon. Heck, if I don’t insist on it, these spaces and places won’t even get my name right. Forget about paying me a fair wage or having time off. You can bet, though, that the heads of every organization I do work for now has their own golden parachute, their own Ponzi method for maintaining their lavish material narcissism. It is so typically American that I could stand in the Namib desert and smell the shit blowing inland from the Atlantic Ocean.

The Black Man-White Woman Matrix

05 Sunday Dec 2021

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Marriage, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,


Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus in The Matrix (1999) chained up (screen shot), accessed October 14, 2021. (https://racism.org/articles/defining-racism/338-thematrixa).

There have been and will be tons of think pieces about the misogyny, the homophobia, and the transphobia in Dave Chappelle’s The Closer, his latest/last stand-up comedy special for Netflix. Within that maelstrom of using the stage as a 75-minute patriarchal therapy session, I noticed how most of the people whom Chappelle apparently discussed his id issues with were white women, whether straight, lesbian, or transgender, including the late Daphne Dorman. “Maybe he should spend time with transgender Black women. They are among the most marginalized in the US, with deadly results, between suicides & murders,” I tweeted. But Chappelle never would. His hypermasculine defense of transphobes and homophobes like Harry Potter billionaire J. K. Rowling, fellow comedian Kevin Hart, and rapper DaBaby, means seeing the binary and non-binary white women he referenced throughout his latest stand-up concert as a sign of personal progress, or even, as part of a televised revolution.

From a deeply emotional and psychological level, I fail to understand this penchant for Black men like Chappelle to use and idolize white women as if they are the pentacle of all that America ought to be. Hubert Davis and Alfonso Ribeiro have publicly uplifted their marriages to white women as a commentary on racial progress. “I’m very proud to be African-American. But I’m also very proud that my wife is white, and I’m also very proud that my three very beautiful, unbelievable kids are a combination of us,” Davis said during his opening press conference as the first Black men’s head basketball coach at the University of North Carolina. Ribeiro of Fresh Prince fame believes “the Black house” has ostracized him. “I am in a mixed relationship….And it’s not easy to make that choice…I’m never going to be white and I’m never going to be fully supported in the Black house,” he said in an interview with Newsweek in August.

Davis’ and Ribeiro’s are both very strange statements. Somehow they and many other Black men have convinced themselves that marrying white women is a sign of racism’s end. Somehow, this is the televised revolution the US needs. Somehow, marrying white will dismantle the latticework of racism on which this nation is built. But, as sociologist Crystal M. Fleming wrote in her How to be Less Stupid About Race, “we’re not going to end white supremacy by ‘hugging it out.’ And we’re certainly not going to fuck our way out of racial oppression. That’s not how power works.” The US Supreme Court’s 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision that legalized interracial marriage was groundbreaking, but it never was the “promised land” that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. envisioned the night before his death in 1968.

My first time thinking through the social and political implications of Black men and white women together in union or solidarity was in 1990, my third year at the University of Pittsburgh. At the student union one day, I sat down for lunch in between classes to hang out with three of my friends. Two were already in the middle of conversation about a growing visible concern on campus — young Black men dating young white women. The two of them (one man, one woman), were biracial themselves, each the child of a white mother and a Black father. One other Black girlfriend also chimed in. They were decidedly against the idea of interracial dating and marriage. At one point I said, “If they love each other, what does it matter?” My two Black biracial friends both sighed and side-eyed me, and then laughed like I was telling a cruel joke. 

What they understood and I didn’t get in 1990 was that while universal love ultimately conquers all, romantic love and friendships will never negate racism in any of its forms. I also knew about Emmett Till’s lynching for winking or whistling at a white woman. I definitely knew from the movie Birth of a Nation (the original one) the deadly dangers of white women accusing Black men of rape or unwanted flirtations. 

I also knew this from personal experience. The year before, and with the support of my one-time boss, a 26-year-old white woman at my campus computing lab job who was my supervisor’s high school friend accused me of sexual harassment. This after she had groped and squeezed my ass cheeks on two occasions during our shifts. I was 19 years old at the time.

In his Afropessimism, Frank B. Wilderson III wrote, “You marry White. It doesn’t change…What do you do with an unconscious that appears to hate you?” The bigger question is, why would any Black man ever expect to end the latticework of American racism and anti-Blackness through interracial marriage? This is  the typical combination of Black mens’ colorism, hypermasculinity, and seeking the same status as white men through white women. “Those black men who believe deeply in the American dream…a masculine dream of dominance and success at the expense of others, are most likely to express negative feelings about black women and…desire [for] a white woman,” as bell hooks wrote in her Ain’t I A Woman.

Davis, Ribeiro, Chappelle, Wilderson, and many other Black men are too susceptible to the idea of interracial relationships as their revolution, their American Dream. The late critical race theorist Derrick Bell foresaw this in one of his lesser known allegorical essays from Faces at the Bottom of the Well, “The Last Black Hero.” It’s a story about a leading Black revolutionary who fell in love with a white woman. As Bell wrote, many whites in power see Black men with white women “as proof that black men in such relationships were, despite their militant rhetoric, not really dangerous.” For anyone working to dismantle the matrix of American racism, though, this way of Black-man-thinking (and white-woman-thinking) is very dangerous. Especially in the words and deeds of people like Chappelle, Davis, Ribeiro, and Wilderson.

This is why if the revolution does come, not only will it not be televised, it will rely predominantly on Black women binary and non-binary to lead it from imagination to actuality. Like in The Matrix movie series, there are too many Black men and white women who have “the world pulled over their eyes,” a world of white binary hypermasculine and patriarchal racism. Too many Black men — whether they are entertainers in need of long-term therapy like Chappelle or are people who see themselves leading revolutions — are too compromised by their own gendered privilege and social status desires to be the leaders they’ve all been waiting for.

While My PhD’s Getting Cold…

21 Sunday Nov 2021

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,


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.

I’ve Been An Educator for 30 Years

05 Friday Nov 2021

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , ,


Me with my old Duquesne University ID, where I taught in 1998 and 1999, May 2017. (Donald Earl Collins)

It’s a bittersweet anniversary for me. Thirty years since the first time I was in a classroom as an instructor. Thirty years of providing professional development advice (because I assisted with undergraduate advising of history majors in 1991 also). Thirty years of traveling this path, whether in higher education, the nonprofit world, or as a consultant. Thirty years of being seen as “less than,” of exploitation, of disappointment, of disrespect, regardless of my degree status or age or how I dressed. Thirty years of the occasional thanks or pat on the back for a job well done. Thirty years. Maybe too long for a person who should have always put being a writer first.

It was the first Thursday in November 1991 when my advisor Larry (Laurence Glasco) had me run his brand-new course for one evening, History of Black Pittsburgh. It was one of my elective courses toward my MA in History degree, an easy-A in the midst of two core courses, third-semester Swahili, and a primary research paper project on the intercultural education movement. I had fully-charged Energizer bunny energy back then.

Larry’s History of Black Pittsburgh was an evening block course, which at the University of Pittsburgh meant that it met from 5:45 to 8:10 pm. The class met in one of the auditorium-style rooms in David G. Lawrence Hall. The object that evening was for the class to watch and then discuss/critique the documentary “Wylie Avenue Days.” It was a film about the cultural heyday of the Lower and Upper Hill District, Black “Picksburgh’s” mecca from the 1920s until urban renewal wiped out the Lower Hill to build a sports arena in 1958. The film, though, continued through the 1960s, when somehow, the remnants of the Lower Hill did not explode in uprising and riot after MLK’s assassination, but marched in massive protest instead.

I was terrified of the idea of being in front of any classroom in 1991. But with 15 of the 35 students in the course over the age of 35 — and some old enough to have met and have known the people who were in the film — my stomach did flips in the days before I had to run the class. Larry sensed this, I think, which was why he gave me this assignment to begin with. “You’ll do fine, Donald” was the only thing Larry said to me about guest lecturing that day.

Looking back, it was a pretty easy assignment. The documentary took up an hour by itself, and with a ten-minute break, all I really had to do was facilitate discussion for an hour. No big deal.

But it was a big deal. With about 20 traditional college-aged students (mostly Black, with a few brave white Yinzers), the older students would dominate the conversation about “Wylie Avenue Days,” about meeting jazz artist Billy Eckstine or swooning over Lena Horne, about how the clubs were “integrated” every Saturday night between “6 pm and 6 am.” They also discussed the need for community reliance and self-sufficiency, because shopping for clothes “dahntahn” at Horne’s, while not Jim Crow illegal, certainly could get Black Picksburghers in trouble.

We also had retired Pittsburgh Courier correspondent Frank Bolden in the classroom that night. Larry had Bolden as a guest speaker earlier in the course. Bolden would show up on occasion and just hang out and add a story here or there to provide a living perspective on something that would otherwise only be a footnote in a newspaper article or a book. Bolden was in his eighties by this time, so he had a lifetime of stories.

With so many older students and guests in the audience, I barely had to ask any questions at all. My main challenge was to find a way to get the younger students involved, but after a couple of quick comments, I realized that it was better for them to listen and learn than for me to run a more typical and less free-flowing discussion.

The older students were extremely respectful. They kept calling me “Mr. Collins” or “Professor,” even though Larry and I had told them I was just a first-year grad student. “Don’t pay that no never mind,” one of the other students said. “You up there, you a professor.” And then they kept talking about the good-old days, the sense of community on the Lower Hill, and then, the end of it all because of urban renewal and eminent domain.

The class went over by ten minutes, and the younger students began to leave. But a core group of about 10 of the students and Bolden stayed until after 8:30. The last of us didn’t leave until after 9. “Larry, I have to admit, this was fun,” I remember me saying afterward, before catching a bus back to East Liberty and home.

I have TAed for or taught 95 standalone classes in the 30 years since, helped run a national social justice and leadership development project and a national education reform project, and have directly and indirectly worked with thousands of high school, undergraduate, and graduate students since. There have been more good days than difficult ones, and more than a few great discussions and wonderful times with the 2,500 students I have taught directly. 

I must thank Larry for the opportunity, and for allowing me to use his class and classroom as a way to break out of my shell, to get over my social anxiety and other insecurities about being in front of fickle crowds. And yes, students, especially the younger ones, are a fickle bunch, more jaded these days than in the 1990s. I wonder why…

Will I do this thing called teaching another 30 years, just like Larry is still doing? I do not know. If I am doing this into my eighties, I would have to be able to teach the courses I want to teach, not the courses I am assigned or the courses that I’ve designed but are picked apart by the affluent and white who may be a little uncomfortable with my critiques of the rich and powerful, of the capitalistic and the racist. Especially as I have added American narcissism to these critiques. Ha! Here’s 30 years!

Eric The Red

27 Monday Sep 2021

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,


Bryan Cranston as Walter White (“bald” edition) in AMC’s Breaking Bad (screen shot, cropped), August 2011.

All these years with this blog and I’ve never written about the first of the people who came into my life and decided that I needed their tutelage about grad school and life in general. Because of people like him, despite their helpfulness, I always have found myself leery about people telling me that they will “mentor me” or about calling myself a mentor of any kind. It should be the type of process that happens organically, based on mutual respect and trust, and not just because one person is a generation or more older than the other person.

The first person to volunteer themselves as a mentor during my first year as a graduate school in the University of Pittsburgh’s History department was Eric, who was 42 or 43 to my 21 year-old self in September 1991. A year and a half earlier, Eric was the teaching assistant for my upper-level American Working-Class History course with Dick Oestreicher. We had exactly two interactions that semester. One was when Eric had scored my midterm exam short essays an 89. I asked him, “So, what’s the difference between an 89 and a 90 on this exam, anyway?” His mouth fell open, because he didn’t have an answer. He changed my grade to a 90 on the spot. Two was at a going-away party for my TA from my Western Civ II course my first year at Pitt, Paul Riggs. Paul was headed to Edinburgh, Scotland on fellowship to explore the height, weight, and diet differences among 18th and early 19th century European men in connection to a larger econometrics dissertation. (I still don’t quite know what Paul’s dissertation was about, beyond half-starve British and French soldiers hoping to grow to five-three before dying from bayonets or typhoid during the Napoleonic Wars.)

It just happened that when administrators assigned me a cubby hole for a desk my first year in grad-school-land, that it was in the same part of the department as Eric’s cubicle. His spot included a window that looked out from the third floor of Forbes Quadrangle (now Wesley Posvar Hall) to the open space below, as well as to Hillman Library, David Lawrence Hall, and if you tilted your head to the right, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and the lower floor of the Cathedral of Learning. It was a prime spot, and Eric never hesitated to let me or anyone else know that he had earned it.

Eric had, in fact, earned it. He became a grad student in the department at the same time Pitt had awarded me an academic scholarship to attend as an undergrad, in 1987. He bragged about the fact that he had gone from having “only an Associate’s Degree to ABD in just three years.” Pitt had also rewarded Eric an Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Fellowship in 1990, making it seem he was on “cruise control” for finishing his doctorate in a couple of years.

What I’d learn about Eric over the next two years was that he was also a very active Marxist, a card-carrying member of the Community Party USA (or, maybe, if I’m remembering it wrong, the Socialist Party USA), and a trained actor who had made documentaries and written for news rags about union-busting, union-organizing, and class struggle since the mid-1970s. This would appeal to the powers that were in the department (including Oestreicher, his dissertation advisor), a place that privileged Marxist and neo-Marxist thought above all else. 

The acting and other public-facing work made Eric a stand-out pontificator, but was also where his open declaration of his “mentoring” of me irritated me a helluva lot. Many times during our two years together in the same department, Eric would interrupt me in the middle of a conversation with a peer, or when reading a book before class, or when I was prepping to TA, or otherwise just working away on a research project. It was usually with articles on a topic different from my research on multiculturalism or with an issue he wanted to debate me on. Sometimes, these interruptions and distractions I welcomed, maybe even, needed. But so many times, not so much.

Eric accused me on several occasions of having “a chip on [my] shoulder.” Maybe I did have one, mostly about the erasure of anything on American race and racism by the Marxist set in the department. Eric, though, was the proverbial pot-meet-kettle type. His chip made mine look like a speck. Looking back, Eric reminds me a bit of Bryan Cranston’s Walter White from Breaking Bad. Both he and the fictionalized White could not see how their sense of white male privilege shaped their worldview and their interactions with people. In my case, Eric assumed that I sometimes asked him a question or sought his advice as a sign that I needed mentoring, when in my mind, I was just asking a question or seeking an opinion from whomever was around at 9 pm on a Thursday night. 

But nothing piqued Eric’s interest in me more than his attempts to make me into a Marxist. “Racism is a byproduct of dialectic materialism” or “capitalism,” Eric would sometimes say (or at least, as much as I can remember him saying). This line of whitemansplaining I had heard in less sophisticated circles years ago. I never told Eric about all my arguments over the years with my Humanities classmate JD, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered if I had. Eric was deep into his cups of Marxist wisdom, deep enough to ignore my counterarguments. “You cannot understand inequality in America without also accounting for racism,” I often said. I did enjoy these debates, at least at first. By my second semester, and especially by my second year, I was weary. 

I didn’t see Eric much the second half of the 1992-93 school year (this as I prepared to transfer from Pitt to Carnegie Mellon to battle with privileged-white-privileged, ass-kissing center-right fake Marxists). I guess that was when he finally sat down to write his dissertation, though it would be a number of years before Eric would complete it to his doctoral thesis committee’s satisfaction. 

I wouldn’t have learned about the good qualities of Rolling Rock or explored hard apple cider without his encouragement. But, as intriguing as these arguments with Eric could sometimes be, I longed for being understood, for people who took the centrality of racism to everything that is the US and the West seriously. It would be a long time before I’d find people like me in this life.

Agents and Not Agents, The Hard Way

10 Tuesday Aug 2021

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, music, New York City, Patriotism, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,


Agents from The Matrix (1999) screenshot (cropped), August 8, 2021. (https://matrix.fandom.com)

This is the second of several posts I’ve put together about my journeys as a writer. Please laugh when and where appropriate.

“You always gotta do things the hard way, don’t you?” my one-time professor Barbara Sizemore said with some sighed frustration. It was in response to me telling her I had decided to stay at Pitt, to pursue my history doctorate at the University of Pittsburgh and possibly transfer to Carnegie Mellon to complete it. It was April 1992. We were standing in the main corridor of the third floor of Wesley Posvar Hall (née Forbes Quadrangle), I was on my way back to my grad student cubicle in the History Department. Sizemore was heading back to her office in the adjacent Africana Studies Department. If I had known this would be my last conversation with the prickly educator, her of squinty eyes and well-manicured afro, before she return to Chicago, took a position at DePaul, and passed away in 2004, I would have done more than given Sizemore a blank stare. As the tall, lanky, and sarcastic 23-year-old I was, I probably would’ve said, “Why yes, professor, I really do!”

I knew what Sizemore was really saying. It was about attending a lily-white university, where there were only four tenured Black professors out of 800 total faculty. My advisor Joe William Trotter, Jr. was one of them. Sizemore assumed that going to Ohio State or Temple to earn a doctorate in Black studies would have been my best move. But even though Sizemore was incorrect about my education decision, she was definitely correct about me taking “always doing things the hard way” paths toward so many of my goals.

Claudia Menza became my first (and so far, only) literary agent in July 1999. The idea of finding a literary agent to help me publish my first book was something I had played with as an idea for nearly a year. At least once I had begun to emerge from my state of rage, depression, and sheer burnout from my years finishing my doctorate at Carnegie Mellon and having Professor “running interference” Trotter as my advisor. I made the decision to turn my doctoral thesis into a book that would straddle the fence between the scholarly and the general. I wanted to publish what would become Fear of a “Black” America for a larger audience, to include both the academic and the personal in the same book. No one told me this was impossible. No one said this was the harder road for a first-time book author. I owned books by scholars that had mainstream imprints and labels. And many, if not most of them, had an agent helping them.

Soon after I finally found my full-time gig with the nonprofit Presidential Classroom in the DMV, I went ahead, did some research in those big, thick books on books and lit agents at Pitt’s Hillman Library, and wrote pitch letters to seven of them. Three weeks later, Menza wrote me back offering to represent me.

She started querying publishing house editors in October 2000, just as I was leaving Presidential Classroom for a higher paying nonprofit job working in social justice in DC. I was so busy with work and my New York family and with married life that I took my eye off the process. One year went by, with a few rejection letters here and there. Then 9/11 happened. I met up with Menza in New York six weeks later. I was already there to do a site visit with a social justice fellow. That’s when I learned Menza at this stage of her time as an agent predominantly represented fiction and poetry. Still, she had some high-powered authors under her belt. I remained confident in her and the mysterious process of finding an editor willing to publish me, in between bites of delicious pasta at a wonderful Italian bistro in the Village.

Two more years went by after that. I received rejections from Basic Books, Random House, Palgrave, Oxford University Press, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, among others. Some stood out because the acquiring editors met to debate the merits for my book before ultimately rejecting it. Some stood out for being two-sentence rejections. I remember Menza saying, “I don’t understand why they don’t want your book.” That was at the end of 2002. By then, even though I remained outwardly confident, I had given up on finding a mainstream commercial publisher. “Maybe I need to go learn how to write again,” I said to my partner more than once. This, just after she became pregnant with our first and only egg.

With the ugly transition between jobs within my nonprofit organization and the birth of and caring for our one and only son, I knew I didn’t have it in me to continue the process of pitch-and-reject with Menza. I was also thinking about writing a memoir, something that could explain how I got to be me. I wrote Menza in March 2004, formally cutting ties with her as my agent. “I wish it had all worked out,” she wrote back.

That July, with some encouragement from my new boss and from my significant other, I decided to look at Fear of a “Black” America one last time, but this time, to self-publish. I went and found a house that did its own reviews of manuscripts and provided adequate enough copyediting to make sure I didn’t embarrass myself. Sometime in that process, Barbara Sizemore died. I read about her death in a nicely done obituary DePaul University put out (The Washington Post obit, not so nice about her years as DC Public Schools chancellor). I imagined Sizemore looking down at me that July and August, shaking her head.

The book came out at the end of August. Somehow, despite myself, I sold over a thousand copies in 16 months, did radio and newspaper interviews and talks and signings all over the DMV. I was happy and a bit bitter, like a cup of black coffee not sugary enough for my taste buds. This book could’ve been so much more, I thought so many times in 2004 and 2005.

But none of this is Menza’s fault, or Trotter’s, or even my fault, not in any direct sense. The world of book writing is more mysterious than the cloistered world of academia, and much more mercurial, too. It’s a popularity contest cloaked in American -isms, especially individualism and elitism (which of course contains racism and misogyny, too). It puts all the effort and blame on you and me. In my case, for not having a job in academia that lined up with my expertise in writing Fear of a “Black” America. For not having a degree from an Ivy League institution, or for not having enough successful writer contacts in my genre(s) or in general. For not living in New York as a writer. Maybe even for not being light enough or good-looking enough.

And, even in the four-and-a-half years of having an agent, for not paying close enough attention to how the industry had become a set of six monopolies. All with independent presses being squeezed, to sell out, to fold, to become niches for a small group of aspiring authors. It went from being an industry where you could pitch your books directly to publishers with or without an agent to “Get outta here!” unless you do have an agent. So many agents would prefer DIY schlock or books that easily fit the tastes of elite or hokey white readers than to ever read a query from me. I’m too eclectic, too determined to write for Black folk and beat up on white ways of thinking. I received more than 130 rejections from agents for my memoir Boy @ The Window, between 2007 and 2011, including one that read, “Alas, another book on childhood abuse!”

So, is it really me making it more difficult, because I like to “do things the hard way?” Is it because I have frequently put the need to pay bills and eat over pursuing my art and craft first? Is it because my writing sucks and agents see that immediately? Is it because I don’t know what I’m doing, or because of all of the above? Well, fam, what I do know is that I need help. I don’t quite know what I need to know to navigate this strange world of finding representation. I don’t quite know what I need to know to make publishing with a reputable press work without representation. Kenny Loggins says “when you can’t give love, you give out advice.” Advice with love is preferable, and usually, specific to where I am.