Category Archives: University of Pittsburgh

What If You’ve Never Really Had a Crew?

01 Friday Feb 2019

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon High School, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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My copy of Tressie McMillan Cottom’s #ThickTheBook, January 12, 2019 (Donald Earl Collins)

Tressie McMillan Cottom’s book Thick: And Other Essays, like so many of the books I’ve chosen to read over the past six years, will stay with me a while. She is brilliant, period. I feel blessed having been on the journey of reading about her experiences, her views of the world, and her Blackness and Black feminism. There are so many nuggets and witticisms in Cottom’s Thick that I should sit down and plan out a way to mine her book for actual gold and platinum. It’s rich and thick like hot chocolate with hits of cinnamon and nutmeg, something to imbibe while taking a bite of a New York-style blondie (which I specialize in cooking-wise) or slice of chocolate torte cake here and there.

But there was one sentence that stood out, before I even began reading the book in earnest. As I randomly flipped through the pages after first getting Thick, this sentence hit me hard, dazing me like the day my one-time stepfather punched me in the jaw for the first time. “Everybody needs a crew,” Cottom wrote to start her “The Price of Fabulousness” essay, adding that she has “many because I am extremely fortunate.” Yeah, no kidding!, I thought immediately after reading that sentence. For a moment, maybe even 0.68 seconds, I was envious. Not like, “Oh my God, the arrogance of this one here!” kind of jealous. Nor was I the “I wish I was her!” green-eyed monster, either. I realized that since the last weeks of sixth grade and the beginning of three and a half years as a Hebrew-Israelite, I hadn’t really had a crew as Cottom defined it at all. That was the spring of 1981, when I was eleven years old, nearly 38 years ago, by the way.

From the day I let my one-time best friend Starling beat me in a fight over my alleged decision to join the Hebrew-Israelite cult and walk into William H. Holmes ES with a white kufi on my head, I had no crew. There’s a reason I consistently refer to my middle school and high school Humanities classmates as either “classmates” or “acquaintances.” They weren’t my friends, some were genuine bullies and assholes to me and to each other, and lacked in most forms of what grown folk would call social graces. They were my academic and (sometimes) athletic competitors, they were friends with each other, but only to a point. But one thing they could never, ever be was my crew or posse or homies or anything close to what Cottom meant. That Wu-Tang Clan-level of professional collaboration and possibly personal friendship didn’t exist in the cauldron that was that magnet program within an even more hostile public school system in Mount Vernon, New York.

College at the University of Pittsburgh was where I’d find friendships again, and maybe at times, the primordial beginnings of a crew. But these proto-crews never quite came together for more than a night on the town here or there. Quite frankly, the other thing my eclectic groups of friends and acquaintances had in common was knowing me. At least, the parts of me I was willing to show folks at the time. I knew most of them weren’t ready for the real me, because I wasn’t ready for the real me. Not at nineteen, twenty, or twenty-one.

Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellows Retreat, Berkeley, CA, February 17, 1996. (Donald Earl Collins)

Graduate school me, though, was more ready. My times at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon earning my doctorate were the closest I got to having a crew. At one point in 1994-95, I probably knew at least half of the Blacks, Africans, Afro-Caribbeans, and Latinxs on Pitt’s campus, and all of the Black diaspora students at CMU (the latter because there were so few of us there). But despite the common interests around campus climate, student and faculty diversity, mistreatment on the basis of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, the fact remained that my crews were eclectic and transitory ones. Masters students would be gone in two or three years. My warp-drive, single-minded race toward the doctorate made certain that any bonds I forged during those years wouldn’t last. There would be no collaborations or calls for career help or advice with these disparate groups. Not even when I lived off the fumes of my last grad school stipend check the summer of 1997.

Working in the nonprofit world and as contingent faculty has often meant being on the inside, but still feeling like an outsider, anyway. Or really, a fraud, because I never fully embraced the norms of nonprofit capitalism or academia as intellectual capitalism and exploitation. I became friends with a fairly eclectic bunch in these spaces, too. But none of them shared my passion for creative nonfiction writing, or have wanted an alignment between career goals and social justice fights, or even, have had a taste for basketball as a spectator or player.

I guess one could say that my wife and son and two of my closest friends are my crew, but that’s not how a crew works. They are family, a very supportive family to be sure, but family is muck thicker than blood or a crew.

So, maybe Cottom is right. I really, really, really need a crew. I’ve made it pretty far in parts of my life without one. I’m not sure how much more Sisyphus I can do on my own, though.

The Sweet Consolation of Suicide

27 Thursday Dec 2018

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, music, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Sweet-and-sour-chicken, 2011. Source: http://www.foodnetwork.com

Well, not exactly sweet to be thinking about what you have thought about and attempted to act out in the past. In the next few hours, I turn 49, which is to say that I begin year fifty on Planet Earth. “Yay me!,” right?

Not so much this time 35 years ago. My suicidal ideations had gone on in December 1983 for nearly three weeks before my fourteenth birthday, in the aftermath of my fourth mugging in four years. That Tuesday, December 27, at 2:30 pm, coming home from C-Town in Pelham, standing on the parapet of that stone bridge overlooking the Hutchinson River Parkway, I had every intention of jumping. I played it out in my head all the different possibilities. At first, it was going to be like the second between taking a deep breath plunging myself underwater and holding my breath while feeling the pressure build up all around my head, eyes, and ears. Except that I imagined a screech, a pop of a hit, and the world turning into stars before I escaped into eternal darkness.

But then, I thought about the plausibility of surviving the 13-foot jump, only to get hit by a car or truck flying down the parkway at 60 or more. Paralyzed, brain-damaged, trapped for days, months, years, decades even, in a body that defied me once again. At this point, my knees were already bent, pretty much ready to push off the stones I stood upon anyway. The possibility of survival and suffering, though, stopped me short of taking that leap. That, and wanting sweet revenge on the stepfather and others who had driven me to this moment.

It’s all in Boy @ The Window. What isn’t in the book is that I couldn’t imagine living past my thirtieth birthday, much less to 49. What isn’t in the book is that I have had other episodes where I either attempted to take my own life via car accident or had suicidal ideations (anywhere between 1982 and 1988, as well as in the late-1990s). This isn’t the same as contemplating my own mortality or considering how much more I may be worth dead than alive (at least I think it isn’t the same, anyway). If someone had put a gun to my head, and asked me why I should keep living, I probably would’ve told them to pull the trigger. I really didn’t have any answers when I got low enough to consider best suicidal practices.

Sure, in the process of working through my own trauma while in progress, I found God, I found Jesus, I read my Bible, I embraced the Holy Spirit. But as the U2 song goes, “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for,” at least not during my Boy @ The Window years, or in the years after my doctorate, or even after a decade in the nonprofit world. Heck, I’m still a work in progress, and not quite sure what’s around the corner for me (although I’m cautiously hopeful, with fingers and toes crossed, and knocking on wood in my mind’s eye as I type this). But a focus on escape isn’t enough. Striving for perfection — including perfect chastity — wasn’t enough. Even writing my fifty-to-100-pages-too-long memoir wasn’t enough.

Two things in the past decade have been enough. One was to admit, and not for the first time, that I controlled nothing, not even my own body, and certainly not all of my thoughts. For a person who’s policed himself as much as I have over the years, this was a hard truth to finally and fully accept, and that was a little more than four years ago. Two was that I needed to let out my thoughts and feelings, no matter how fucked up or how revealing or embarrassing they could be for me. Some of that has worked through this blog and Boy @ The Window. The rest has been as a result of social media, freelance writing, and otherwise remembering that though I may be truly weird, I am also truly human.

Maybe that’s why in the past couple of years I’ve mostly read Black women writers on their trauma and intersectional experiences, between Brittney Cooper, Morgan Jerkins, Roxane Gay, Crystal Fleming, Patricia J. Williams, and a host of others. Maybe that’s why I found more solace in Kiese Laymon’s Heavy than I ever did with any of my history monographs. Maybe this is why I’m convinced that to be a better writer, I had to become an even better reader, and read across genres and disciplines like I never had before. Maybe, too, this is why I as an educator have committed to use a wider variety of materials to reach my students, even if one or two want to only read mainstream history texts and don’t want to engage in “literary analysis.”

I finished Darnell Moore’s No Ashes in the Fire two days ago. Despite his stepping out of narrative to preach “Black radical love” at least three too many times, Moore’s book reminded me of what all the other wonderful books I’ve read in the past three years have told me. Share your truth, so that others may see, hear, or react to it. Tell your story, ‘cuz ain’t no one else gonna tell it for ya. Talk about it, if only to yourself, so that you know you’re not crazy. There’s bravery in putting in words your pain, your joy, your sense of the world and sense of self, your need for a higher power (or lack thereof). There’s courage in pointing to your unique sameness relative to humanity, and your need to crystallize the dominance of systemic racism, heteronormative patriarchy, and narcissistic worshipping of dollars and billionaire elitism that is this warped-assed world.

None of this may convince someone from taking their own life. I don’t pretend that I have any specific answers, because I don’t. But many times, living begins with one question, then another, then another. Living for me is about finding the best questions to answer, to turn the embers of what was once a wall of bullshit into a forest fire of questions, for me and others. This world will never give us the right to question it, which is why we who might want to live another day must wrest that right for ourselves, every single day.

Viewing World AIDS Day From the Cheap Seats

01 Saturday Dec 2018

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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World AIDS Day 2018 logo, November 30, 2018. (http://hiv.gov).

Today and this weekend mark 30 years since the first World AIDS Day. Unlike three decades ago, I seldom give HIV/AIDS any thought at all. Where did it go? Has anyone actually died from AIDS recently? Do people still have to worry about HIV/AIDS? I know the answers are, nowhere, yes, most definitely, and hell yes, dumb ass.

But 30 years ago, I worried about HIV/AIDS the same way I worried about the Soviet nuclear threat, my Mom still living with my idiot stepfather, and dying if I wasn’t part of some evangelical Christian rapture. I pretty much worried about everything back then. In the context of my heterosexuality and mostly burying it for fear of intimacy, pregnancy, and bodily fluids, though, I worried that with my luck, any sex at all would lead to the STD to beat all STDs.

So when my dad went out of his way to get me a prostitute (we didn’t use the term “sex worker” then, I think) for my seventeenth birthday in December 1986, a young woman I knew to have been a fellow Mount Vernon High School student the year before, I didn’t hesitate to say no. I preferred Jimme calling me “faggat” to doing the equivalent of Spike Lee’s character in School Daze, a form of meat-market sex approaching (but not quite) rape.

I knew, down to my bones, despite the ACT UP crowd of relatively well-off gay White male activists on MTV and elsewhere, despite the dome of Black hypermasculine homophobia found in Mount Vernon and in the city, that HIV/AIDS wasn’t a “gay disease.” Basic biology would dictate that viruses don’t make left turns based on sexual orientation, class, gender, or race. So, hell yes, I was scared, for quite some time, from the prospect of living with a disease that has killed more than 35 million people worldwide since 1979.

The dangers of sex work, of casual unprotected sex, and of HIV/AIDS were made clear to me on my trip to Pittsburgh in August 1990 to secure what would be my studio apartment living for the next eight and a half years. It started at the Port Authority Bus Terminal on 41st on Friday night, August 3. It was going to be my second trip ever on Greyhound, catching the 11 pm red-eye, nonstop bus from Manhattan to downtown Pittsburgh. As the 40 of us stood in line to catch the bus, I saw a woman around my age wandering between the men’s room and the waiting areas, talking to different guys, with one or two jumping out of line for a few minutes.

Port Authority Bus Terminal entrance, New York, NY, October 22, 2015. (Ilana Gold/CBS2; https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2015/10/22/port-authority-bus-terminal-plan/).

As she drew closer to my line, I recognized her. She was someone I knew to be the cousin of one of my neighbors on the third floor of 616. By then, I also saw a Black guy in his mid or late-twenties, standing near the men’s room, keeping a close eye on her. It was like the cogs of my mind moved in slow motion as it became clear that this person I knew was a sex worker and the guy was her pimp.

A few minutes later, the pimp bellowed, “Five-O! Five-O!.” The all-too-familiar woman took off. She booked out the terminal doors and toward the streets around Times Square. The Port Authority police and two NYPD cops had grabbed the pimp, put him on the ground, handcuffed him, and took him away.

I was so surprised and sad after that, at least as we boarded the bus and weaved our way through New Jersey. I hadn’t seen this woman since 1986 or 1987, when I was a senior in high school. Over the years, she had come over to her cousin’s place to visit, and maybe to stay (at least temporarily). She had mostly teased me about my “White music,” except for Tears for Fears in the summer of 1985 (their “Shout” had been turned into some hip-hop urban mix on WBLS).

She had asked me on more than one occasion, “Do you like girls?” I mostly ignored her, saw her as just another person at 616 and in Mount Vernon who saw me as something to kick around. I didn’t consider her attractive because of how she talked to me, but looking back, she was. At five-seven or five-nine, she was a yellowish-brown skinned woman, with some freckles, a nice smile, shortish hair, and a nice proportionate shape. She could be witty, in a New Yorker’s sarcastic sort of way. But between Wendy, Phyllis, and my march to college, nothing and no one in Mount Vernon could compete for my attention in that way back then.

A week later, I came back from my Pittsburgh trip, on another Greyhound non-stopper, only to realize at 8:30 on Saturday, August 11 that I needed to take a dump. As I’ve said elsewhere, I tried and failed to take one at Grand Central, as the basement restrooms were full of broken toilets, boarded up stalls, and at least one person with obvious signs of Kaposi’s Sarcoma, a sign of full-blown AIDS. I don’t know how I managed to hold my shit until I made it back to 616.

I learned from my Mom twelve or thirteen years ago that my former neighbor and teaser had died from AIDS-related complications, leaving two children behind. Even though I didn’t know her very well — didn’t want to know her, really — I was still heartbroken for her and her kids. All I could think was, what an awful life, what an awful way to die! Who’s going to raise her kids?

But really, I couldn’t help but go back to that Friday night in August 1990. I observed from up close, what the limited choices in a world of capitalism, patriarchy, misogynoir, and racism left people like this young woman. I observed, from afar, how this world can make something as destructive as HIV/AIDS a movement for gay White males, and a silent way of killing Black women at the same time.

Thanks, Away From Home

27 Tuesday Nov 2018

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

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Thank You — paying it forward, March 3, 2017. (Catlane/iStock; http://digital.vpr.net/)

Yet another Thanksgiving has come and gone. The holiday is problematic for so many reasons, between the erasure, cultural exploitation, and dehumanizing mythology of indigenous Americans and the climate-change-defying national pig-out that begins every late-November Thursday, and continues for weeks afterward, year after year. But the fact that the days off around Thanksgiving gives us worker bees time to spend with family, friends, and those we seriously like and love can’t be ignored.

Sure. At least for those of us who have such people in our lives with whom to share our time off from work, school, and life’s constant treadmill. My American University students reminded me of the allegedly normal ritual of returning home to eat and spend time with family, et al., this past week. Half of them contacted me to let me know they weren’t going to attend the two classes immediately before Thanksgiving, even after learning I wasn’t granting them an excused absence for the holiday week. All so that they could have a few extra days away from the stresses of higher education and the classroom. I envied them, just an iota, if only because they presumably had good reason to spend time with their families and loved ones. I also figured that not everyone in my class was going home to a welcoming environment, or really, going home at all.

“And this time, we didn’t forget the gravy” Looney Tunes “Chow Hound” episode of bullying, greed, and gluttony, originally aired June 16, 1951. (WB; http://tralfaz.blogspot.com/).

That last one was certainly the case for me during my student days. Growing up the way we grew up, in Mount Vernon, at 616, a good Thanksgiving was one where we had a regular meal to eat. Even before the Hebrew-Israelite years of 1981-84, our Thanksgivings weren’t seven-course eat-a-thons. We were lucky if my Uncle Sam came over to eat with us (which after 1978, was pretty rare), and we didn’t spend time around my Mom’s friends once we dived into being Black Jews and fell into grinding welfare poverty.

After I went off to the University of Pittsburgh in August 1987, I only came home to Mount Vernon and 616 one time for Thanksgiving, three months later. My Mom made the biggest Thanksgiving meal I’d seen her make since 1975. I remember mostly the mashed potatoes and gravy. But it wasn’t a family affair, not really. I was home mostly because I had grown used to the well-worn grooves of poverty, abuse, and adult-level responsibilities that had been my life since the fall of 1982. The food, while the first home-cooked meal I’d eaten in three months, was an escape from my normal attempts at escape.

Twelve months later, after six weeks of depression, getting over my Phyllis obsession, a semester of graduate school-like concentration, a summer of unemployment, a week of homelessness, and three months of financial woes and malnourishment, Thanksgiving 1988 had arrived. Between Ron Slater, Beverly, and finally having enough money to not worry about eating or bills for the first time in almost a year, it felt weird, only having gratitude as my companion for a few years.

But life got even weirder for me, as my friend Melissa had invited me to her father’s house for Thanksgiving. This was not a date of any kind, certainly not from my perspective. I think that Melissa sensed how rough my year had been, knew that I wasn’t going home to New York to see family, and did the Christian thing of looking after one’s neighbors. This even though things weren’t exactly great for her and her father at the time. Melissa’s father was an ailing contractor in his early sixties. I really don’t remember much about that Thanksgiving in terms of the food. I think there may have been dinner rolls or candied yams. What I do remember is the two-and-a-half hours I talked with Melissa and her father, about politics, the “Stillers,” Christianity, and Pitt. It was the most thankful holiday I’d ever experienced, and my first Thanksgiving seeing what Thanksgiving was like for family members who enjoyed each other’s company.

It was the first of seven straight Thanksgivings either spent with friends like Melissa, Howard, Kenny, the Gants and their families, or by myself. The “by myself” Thanksgiving was in 1990. It was a cold and rainy day, where I did nothing but watch football, made myself two double cheeseburgers, and found a nearly usable director’s chair outside a vintage furniture gallery in East Liberty. Even then, folks looked out for me. The next day, two of my older Swahili classmates swung by my apartment to bring me Thanksgiving leftovers. They brought me cornbread, dinner rolls, ham, turkey, mashed potatoes, dressing and stuffing, greens, and candied yams with marshmallows. I had tried to say no, but neither of the women would let me. It was really hard for me not to cry while being thankful for such generosity.

It seems like it’s been a lifetime since those naive and cynical days, where I didn’t trust anyone in my life. The bout with homelessness and the financial straits that followed changed my life in ways that I notice even today. Even with the years of working long hours and fighting for my career as a writer and an educator, I realize that I wouldn’t be here doing any of what I’m able to do today without the kindness of strangers and friends, the ability to weigh, sift, and analyze myself and my past or the sense that God had a purpose for me, a reason for living and being. Even after 30 years, I have this and so much else to be thankful for.

The Journey of My Red Towel, 30 Years in the Making

10 Monday Sep 2018

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

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My red beach bath towel (and EKCO knife), still around after three decades, September 9, 2018. (Donald Earl Collins).

There are so many things I could think about regarding my cosmic jump into independent adulthood in the fall of 1988. The five days of homelessness, almost ending college for me right at the start of my sophomore year at the University of Pittsburgh. The nearly three months of financial crises that followed, including six weeks of giving plasma to Sera-Tec for an extra $25 per week (it left a scar in my right elbow-bend vein that most medical professionals interpreted as me having been a drug user — talk about racism and assumptions!). The end of my eating things like tuna fish sandwiches and pork neck bones and rice, and drinking grape Kool-Aid. My changing my major from computer science to history, to my mom’s disapproval.

But another way to look at my journey would be to look at the two items in my life that survived that fall. A red beach bath towel, and an EKCO steak knife. The towel I bought on Labor Day 1988, after my Mets beat the Pirates at Three Rivers Stadium. Darryl Strawberry hit two home runs that game, after a thirty-minute rain delay, in which the upper deck folks dumped beers on some of us (not me, though) in one of the mezzanine sections behind the wall in left center field.

I had walked the four miles or so between where I lived in South Oakland (off Bayard Street and Welsford Avenue) to the stadium, getting rained on along the way. On my way back, I noticed the Downtown Kauffman’s was still open for its Labor Day sale. I went in and walked around for twenty minutes, mostly to longingly look at all the things I couldn’t afford. But I did know to go into the baths section, and saw that the beach towels were on sale for $17.99.

I thought about buying a wash cloth, but after rent and the game, I only had  $50 on me at the time, and no bank account or credit cards. I thought about buying an “in-between wash cloth,” which was what I called hand towels back then (I thought they were bigger towels for people with bigger hands, like me!). It would be a few days before I got my refund money from Pitt, but I knew I was in need of a shower after the homelessness ordeal and the Pirates game.

I bought the towel, and spend the rest of the fall using it for everything. Especially after that second Friday in September, when Pitt, after deducting nearly $900 of my refund for last year’s room and board charges. After accounting for my books, I had $205 left to work with for at least the next two months.

So I budgeted down to the penny. After I cashed my refund at Pittsburgh National Bank, I went downtown to Ralph’s Discount Store, across from Kauffman’s. I bought a Sony Walkman on sale for $55, the most I’d spend on anything other than rent for the next two and a half months. I then caught a bus back to Oakland, and went to the South Oakland Giant Eagle (yes, post-millennials, South Oakland used to have its own Giant Eagle, on Forbes Avenue, where CVS and Jimmy Johns are today). That’s where I bought an orange creamsicle plastic plate, a soup spoon, a dinner fork, and that EKCO steak knife, for something like eight or nine dollars. That would have to do.

Closeup of my red towel, September 9, 2018. (Donald Earl Collins

My red towel did the work of two tea towels, a wash cloth, a hand towel, a half roll of paper towels, and a dozen napkins every week through the end of 1988. I’d shower with it, of course. But I also used a corner of it for washing up. If I made a heavy dinner, like spaghetti and meat sauce (with a pot and iron skillet I saved from my freshman year), I used the towel to dry my pot, pan, dish, and utensils. It was my go-to for everything. I had to wash it every week, because how I was using the towel back then was nothing short of disgusting.

I finally bought two wash cloths and a hand towel in 1989. But the red towel remained my one and only bathing towel. I didn’t buy a second one until the summer of 1994.

After that, my reliance on old reliable declined. Once I moved in with my eventual wife at the end of 1998, my red towel became part of a rotation. It still had enough heft to be reasonably good at drying me off from a shower. It had shrunk a bit from its original 30″ x 54″ size, though. By now, I would have gotten rid of it. But my red towel reminded me so much of what I had overcome. It was my tangible link to an unbelievably shaky past.

My red towel got more use when my son hit school age in 2008. For the next nine years, Noah would use the towel for showers and baths. A “Made in the U.S.A.” towel manufactured during Reagan’s last year in office was still in use in the age of Obama, and my son, born in the early 2000s, was the one using it! Life is funny.

Now sad and worn to the thickness of cheesecloth, part of me knows the red towel is no longer of any use. I mean, I still use the EKCO knife, mostly for cleaning and cutting up chicken. I’m not sure the red towel could dry the baby version of Noah anymore. But it doesn’t matter. Because it was there for me when I needed it the most.

Charlatans United

20 Monday Aug 2018

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

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The Rev. Al Sharpton, et al., at a press conference providing an update regarding the Tawana Brawley rape case, Queens, NY, 1988. (http://www.wbur.org/; AP)

If I have to pick a point in my life where I began to realize how hypocritical humans could be, my second summer after high school would be such a time. The long, hot summer of ’88, of nearly 50 consecutive days of highs in the Triple-H (hot, hazy, and humid) 90s in New York and its immediate suburbs. It was my first summer after starting college at the University of Pittsburgh, and if it weren’t for sheer determination, it would have been my only year at Pitt.

News wise, there were two local events that dominated my summer of unemployment in Mount Vernon and The City. One was the Tawana Brawley story. Between the end of November of the previous year and the end of June, the Rev. Al Sharpton and his entourage used the bully pulpit of the fourth estate to generate outrage and consternation regarding the alleged rape of one Tawana Brawley. A month or so before her sixteenth birthday, good samaritans found Brawley outside an apartment building in which her family had once lived, lying in a garbage bag, covered in dog feces and with racial slurs written on her body. Brawley had been missing for four days.

There wasn’t much agreement on anything else beyond these facts. Brawley claimed that three White men had repeatedly raped and sexually assaulted her, including a local police officer, then later denied being raped, but remained adamant about other forms of sexual assault. At one point, a cop who had recently killed himself was a suspect in the alleged Brawley rape. At another point, Sharpton and company accused the Dutchess County Assistant DA Steven Pagones of being one of Brawley’s three rapist (he later sued Brawley and Sharpton for defamation). Sharpton claimed throughout to believe Brawley, but others in his group later disclosed that the blowhard had his own doubts about Brawley’s story a few weeks after agreeing to represent her in the public eye.

Wappingers Falls is in Dutchess County, just two counties north of Westchester County and Mount Vernon, a hour-and-thirty-minute drive from Manhattan (give or take). After Eleanor Bumpurs and Michael Stewart, I rarely believed authority figures regarding their crime reportage. But by June, I also realized that not everything is a conspiracy, and that even racists can occasionally be on the right side of the law. I learned, above all else, that Sharpton was a charlatan. He used Brawley’s true life story of familial abuse and misogynoir and fear of more abuse to raise his profile on the New York and national stage. Especially in this case, as Brawley’s mother and stepfather took a dim view on Brawley’s time out with boys, a view shared by Whites all too willing to see Black girls and women as over-sexualized playthings.

If Brawley wasn’t raped or sexual assaulted, she was certainly abused physically and psychologically. It was bad enough that her name was out there and known (a violation of her rights as a potential rape survivor), especially since Brawley was still a minor. It was bad enough that there was a significant racial gap, where six out of every seven Whites polled believed she was lying (versus only half of African Americans polled). That Sharpton put Brawley’s name in the public arena for months with additional and unsubstantiated accusations? He took advantage of her for months, adding another layer of abuse to this teenager’s life. It’s practically unforgivable. And no, Sharpton’s work to get Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012 the attention it and he deserved and his self-serving eulogy at Michael Brown’s funeral in 2014 do not make up for his original media sins.

The other charlatan I had to deal with that summer was my idiot stepfather and another one of his get-rich-quick schemes. He had spent nearly all of 1988 unemployed and lying around at 616, between losing his car salesman job and burning out the engine of his green 1976 Cadillac Coupe de Ville. It made my summer at 616 almost unbearable. I hadn’t spent this much time around the asshole since my summer of abuse.

In July and August, Maurice had the wonderful idea of starting his own limo service. One of our neighbors on the second floor had moved from driving a limo to starting his own service over the previous eight years. Maurice wanted in.

As I wrote in Boy @ The Window:

Afterward, Maurice went to his once well-off friend, who had survived a three-year period of very local and very public court battles and prison time over alleged incidents of child abuse and molestation at her daycare in Mount Vernon. The woman and her husband were financially ruined in the process, even though neither of them were directly involved in the incidents that occurred at the daycare. Somehow Maurice managed to get $1,000 out of his friend for his limo idea, likely some of the last money she lent anyone before her death in 1989. It’s more likely that “Hebrew-Israelite” Maurice bought lobster tails and moo shu pork at a Chinese restaurant with the money than attempted in any way to use it as collateral to get the downstairs neighbor to give him a shot at driving a limo.

By this time 30 years ago, I had already had my fill of hucksters between Sharpton and Maurice. Their misogyny, their need to use others, their harebrained ideas for fortune and fame. Maybe that’s why I never bought my stepfather’s act when he was dating my mom as a seven-year-old. Maybe that’s why I never, ever, found 45 appealing from the first time I read about him in the New York Daily News in 1984.

On Wet Rags and Crocodile Tears

30 Saturday Jun 2018

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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The tears of Allison Ettel, a.k.a., #PermitPatty, NBC’s The Today Show (cropped), June 26, 2018. (http://bet.com).

I’ve been thinking about this post for a while, probably for at least two years. But it does help when others closer to the subject write about it as well. Between @ProfessorCrunk Brittney Cooper’s chapter “White-Girl Tears” in her hard-hitting Black feminist primer Eloquent Rage (2018), @blackgirlinmain Shay Stewart Bouley’s recent blog post “Weapon of lass destruction: The tears of a white woman,” and Ruby Hamad’s piece in The Guardian, “How white women use strategic tears to silence women of colour,” what can I really add? (Everyone who believes in feminism and wants to support women of color writers ought to read these essays, by the way). Oh, just the idea that men of color deal with White women’s/girl’s tears as well. And that some of us have been just anti-sexist enough to recognize how our Whiteness and patriarchal-dominated society privileges and legitimizes such tears, often to our detriment.

Over the years, I’ve taken to calling those who cry over the least amount of adversity and stress wet rags, and those instances in which sobbing becomes a central theme “wet-rag episodes.” This started for me in the late-1990s, when my then girlfriend (now wife of eighteen years) would spent upwards of 12 hours of her Saturdays watching Lifetime movies (some of which were originally NBC, ABC, or CBS specials, before the dominant return of reality TV in the double aughts). At first, I did a play on Lifetime‘s slogan back then, “Lifetime: Television for Women,” adding, “not for men” whenever the tag line appeared during commercials.

But Lifetime is an addiction, if you sit there long enough watching the ups and downs of romances, the constant threat of stalkers, date rape, teenage pregnancy, and drugs, and the upbeat endings and vindication at the end of every two-hour movie. What I noticed most of all, though, were the waterworks. Everyone from Lynda Carter to Lindsay Wagner, from Elizabeth Montgomery to Jaclyn Smith could cry at the sound of a book drop!

Cartoon character from Fairly Odd Parents crying an ocean of tears (cropped), June 30, 2018. (http://fairlyoddfanon.wikia.com).

Admittedly, I cry very easily while watching emotional and gut-wrenching scenes. I cried when I saw Viola Davis take on Denzel Washington’s character in Fences (2016) over his years of cheating and his secret family. Especially when Davis blew a snot bubble in the middle of the scene. I was through for the next three minutes!

With Lifetime movies, though, I stopped crying for these White women over the twists and turns in their lives. I watched one scene in one movie where the main character broke out and cried at her dining room table in her laid-out, five-bedroom home when she realized she only had $10,000 left in her bank account. I didn’t just laugh. I howled. As someone for whom poverty and financial struggles have been a constant companion, having that much money in any account at any time has always been a time of celebration. “You shouldn’t laugh. Poverty is relative,” Angelia said while also laughing. “No, it isn’t. She’s a wet rag!” I responded. I’ve spent a good portion of my career proving this point, too.

That scene took me back to so many wet-rag episodes in my life. Like when my high school valedictorian classmate cried angry tears over a 67 on an English essay exam our junior year, losing 25 points because she didn’t underline James Baldwin’s book title Notes from a Native Son in her essay. I didn’t feel sorry for her, Ms. 5.45 GPA, not one bit (it’s all in Boy @ The Window).

Or, during my second year in grad school at Pitt, when a student in one of my US History to 1877 sections tried to proposition me to raise her C- average. When that didn’t work, a fountain of tears poured out. I handed her a tissue, but said, “Your tears in no way are a substitute for studying and working harder in this class.” She didn’t exactly give me 5’s on her evaluations of me in the course at the end of that semester.

Ten years later, I had White women as co-workers and students who could cry about almost anything. My one-time boss Ken blamed me for making a former co-worker cry because I refused to take her “I hope you had a wonderful vacation!” the week after 9/11 in stride. Yeah, sure. It was a week in which I was stuck in Atlanta for four days after a one-day work trip and had to take Greyhound for 15 hours back to DC, not knowing if my older brother was dead or alive. I said as much to my co-worker, and she ran away from me crying.

A student in my History of American Education Reform graduate course cried when I refused to change her grade from an A- to an A. I was in the middle of explaining how she could revise her research paper and still end up with an A. It was just before Thanksgiving, and until that moment, I had thought that this was one of the best courses I’d ever taught, with one of the best group of students I had had in one of my courses. Her sudden sobbing actually pissed me off. I tried not to show it. But I did say, “What are you crying about? There’s nothing about your standing in this course for you to be crying about.” I said it in a tone that I’d only find again once my son became a preteen.

Caitriona Balfe as Claire wailing over the loss of Jamie and the Battle of Culloden, July 9, 2016. (http://www.bookbub.com).

It’s to the point now that I don’t even watch wet-rag shows anymore, at least once the character becomes one. For example, I watched the split first season of Starz’s Outlander with Caitriona Balfe as Claire, and found it mostly enjoyable. Until she began turning on the waterworks in practically every episode. My wife continues to watch, but laughs every time I ask, “What happened on Wet Rag this week?”

I know that White women and White girls, like all human beings, have plenty good reason to cry. Every time I saw video of Kyle Stephens‘ sentencing-phase testimony about what convicted rapist and felon Larry Nassar starting doing to her when she was five years old, I cried for her and with her. Trauma and tragedy are good reasons to cry, wail, sob, and weep. But, so many wet-rag tears are drop-of-the-hat, crocodile tears. About getting caught in lies, about making racist and anti-poverty and anti-women-of-color statements that don’t go over well, about anything that would otherwise paint them as narcissistic and not-so-smart brats.

While I know I don’t have as difficult a row to hoe as so many women of color in the public sphere, one thing I know I’m not allowed to do in a hyper-masculine world of Whiteness and patriarchy is cry. I got hit with the f-bomb so many times growing up, from Black boys, Black men, and Black women, and faced threats of violence as a result. I would’ve been recommended for psychotherapy if I had ever cried over an A-, and been laughed at for complaining about my workplace conditions. Women of color can lose careers over their tears. Black boys and men have lost their freedom and lives over them. One isn’t less damaged over the delegitimization of our tears, but the damage can be differential, depending on gender, class, sexual orientation, and the level of toxic hyper-masculinity surrounding you.

That is why I can’t stand wet rags. Their tears fill the world with concern and fear, and marginalize and dehumanize the rest of us. I have no sympathy for crocodile tears. I don’t know if I’ve ever had sympathy for them.