Category Archives: Work

Signs of Elitism

17 Monday Jan 2022

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Upper East Side, Upper West Side, Work, Youth

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Front cover, Joel Stein’s In Defense of Elitism (2019, cropped), January 16, 2022. (https://amazon.com).

I have spent four-fifths of my life in elite spaces among affluent whites, middle class Blacks, and Americans elites in general. I have so little in common with them aside from eating, drinking, breathing, and having a sex drive. So little that I sometimes think that God made a mistake and missed my exact time and place for my existence by 20 or 30 years, meaning 1949 or 1994 would have been better years for my birth. 

But it’s not when I was born so much as the lack of material resources with which I lived growing up in the most resourced area in the US. And that has brought consequences for me since the year I began puberty. The years in Humanities in middle school and in high school in Mount Vernon, New York. Hearing about everyone’s summers those first days of school between seventh and 12th grade, for example. Black and Black Caribbean classmates regaling us with their summers spent down South, in Jamaica or Barbados or  Trinidad and Tobago visiting close relatives. Or, their trips around the US, from the Grand Canyon to cities I wouldn’t travel to until I was 24 or 35. Or my white peers spending their Junes, Julys, and Augusts in France, the UK, Japan, Germany, Italy, Greece, Egypt, or Israel. I lied about going to Tel Aviv my first year.

I rarely left Mount Vernon and New York City those years. Albany was the furthest I’d been away from home, on a school trip in October 1985. My walks occasionally took me across the New York-Connecticut border (in 1986 and in 1987), but that was somewhat accidental.

In grad school, especially once I transferred to Carnegie Mellon to complete my PhD, these awkward communications involving my lack of socioeconomic privilege and my white classmates’ rose-colored worldviews continued. In my final semester of grad courses in Spring 1994, I took Comparative Urban History with Katherine Lynch. One week, we were in a discussion of Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, about the correlation between suburbanization and the expansion of the white middle class. Jennifer, one of my classmates, contributed her not-so-insightful analysis of what this correlation meant, about how “most Americans benefited” from the growth of suburbs between 1945 and 1980. 

I was not happy with her elitist worldview. I already knew that she was 23 or 24, married, and from suburban Philly (think a place like Cherry Hill, New Jersey). I also knew that Jackson’s point correlated well with White Flight from increasingly Black and Brown cities like Philly, New York, Boston, DC, Detroit, and Chicago. Being in my third year of grad school overall and surrounded in this course by first-years, I had one advantage. I was almost as well read on topics of inequality as most of my professors. 

So I said to Jennifer and the rest of the class, “Well, if by ‘most Americans benefited,’ you mean white Americans, then yes, suburbanization was a good thing. But cities’ tax bases didn’t benefit, and neither did the African Americans who moved into cities that whites flew out of. Redlining and restrictive covenants made it harder for middle-class Blacks to ‘benefit’ from suburbanization. And last I checked, poor people live in suburbs, too.” That last past was a direct reference to my growing up with poverty in Mount Vernon, and the scores of poor Black and Latinx and Black Caribbean folk I knew in Mount Vernon and throughout the New York area, suburban and urban. 

During the class break, Jennifer came up to me as I was standing outside the seminar talking with my other white classmates congratulating me for my eye-opening perspective on how to break down Jackson’s book. She brought all five-foot-three of her frame to bear, almost as if she had attempted to stand on a soap box (even with one, at six-three, I would’ve had to bend down to see her ire). She had tears in her eyes and one running down each cheek. “I can’t help how I grew up. I am not a racist,” she said, and then walked away in a huff. “I guess I struck a nerve,” I said in response to one of my other peers.

I really didn’t give a rat’s ass about her crying. None of it was going to make the lives of Blacks and Latinx people with poverty in Camden or Philly or even Cherry Hill any better. White women’s tears and crying foul when challenged for their elitism had already hardened me against placating them. My experiences matter, damn it!, was what I thought after that exchange.

Even outside academia, the elitism wafted like millions of gallons of human shit at a sewage treatment plant. Between Presidential Classroom and AED, I spent much of my nonprofit years (meaning, a good portion of my thirties) proving to others that despite my background, I could do work on behalf of others. My bosses held it against me that my parents weren’t GS-12 or higher federal employees, or diplomats, or advisors, or members of country clubs. Or, especially in AED’s case, that neither I nor my parents ever served in the Peace Corps or traveled overseas. I practically had to do somersaults and cartwheels to do my work between 1999 and 2008, but could not maintain social connections, because my doctorate from Carnegie Mellon would never be good enough.

Maybe I’ll discuss Black middle class folk and their rites of privilege and passage, especially fraternities and other organizations. But I’ve already written quite extensively about why I’ll never fit it with such groups. And at 52, I’m not entirely sure I want to. I guess after a lifetime of my peers ignoring me or erasing me or acting as if only their socioeconomic and racial privileges matter in explaining how the world works, I simply don’t care anymore.

My mom grew up as part of a sharecropping family in southwestern, Red River Arkansas. She’s the oldest of 12 children. She worked mostly in the kitchen of Mount Vernon Hospital or in the billing department of Westchester County Medical Center in Valhalla as a paraprofessional for 34 years, with a 16-year period on welfare in between. My dad worked as a janitor or a supervisor of janitors and building cleaners all his time in New York and in Jacksonville. He grew up as a tenant farmer (before his family bought out their land) in rural south-central Georgia. He barely finished seventh grade. His two sisters were the first in the family to go to college, and both spent years teaching during segregated times. Despite it all, I am proud of their work. No pedigree is fine with me.

The Scourge of Scholarship & Scallops

01 Saturday Jan 2022

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Pan-seared scallops with bacon cream sauce, February 10, 2015 (cropped, December 31, 2021). (https://www.cakenknife.com/pan-seared-scallops-bacon-cream-sauce/).

I am not much of a scholar. No, really, I’m not. At least not in the extremely narrow way those who taught me to do historical research defined scholarship. For me, uncovering deliberately hidden truths or coming to new ideas, realizations, and leap-in-logic epiphanies was always about more than just “evidence.” It was about the nexus between human history and human behavior, the ability to use the past to understand the present and possibly the future. And through all that, to predict, to prevent, to propose remedies or possibilities for being, and being better, as a person, as people, as entire societies.

But all through graduate school in the 1990s, especially during my Carnegie Mellon years, all I was supposed to learn was about the greatness of “scholarship.” The way my dissertation advisor Joe Trotter would say “scholarship,” it reminded me of how my now recovering-alcoholic father would say “pep-up” when he wanted a drink. Trotter said “scholarship” with the zeal and relish of a person ready to eat at their favorite down-home restaurant or fish shack. 

For years even after finishing my doctorate, I could still hear Trotter’s “scholarship” and think of scallops, the ugliest and fishiest tasting of mollusks, in my opinion. I imagined them raw, then either sautéed or seared in butter, as this is the only way to eat the nasty things. Just like with academic scholarship. None of this removed their fishiness or the loads of carcinogens lurking in their lumps of meat.

For years, I have watched former and current colleagues, former and current students, and big-fish academicians I have only seen from my cold and cheap seats in the Kuiper Belt promote scholarship as a great and mystical process. “This is groundbreaking scholarship” is a common phrase in my academic world. “The genius of” so-and-so’s “scholarship” can also be read and heard, in book reviews, in scholarly journals, at academic conferences. I could be jealous, but I’d eat a can of unseasoned and undressed tuna again before eating up these scallop-y descriptions of scholarship.

For those who really don’t know, “scholarship” is really a combination of three things. 

1. Research, which in my field usually involves archival materials, like a letter Martha Washington might have written about making “her” Rum Punch, or a diary left behind by a granddaughter of an enslaved African woman, providing details not normally found in historical literature. For me, it’s interdisciplinary. Interviewing people about their experiences, asking common questions along the way for comparative purposes. It could also mean looking at census records, running microfiche machines for 100-year-old op-eds about “Saturday Night and the Negro.” But it is ALL research, and you don’t even need a high school diploma to be this nosy. I knew this already, but was reminded of this by a former student, an archivist who recently completed his bachelor’s.

2. Training and Methodology helps folks shape the research they do into what we call scholarship. It is very hard to do historical research on any given topic without “going to the archives.” That’s where researchers can commune with the primary sources, where they can most readily find the first-hand and “objective evidence” they need. But, if dead folks didn’t write anything down, then proximate evidence, like census records, can tell us about a people who didn’t leave written records, or because of oppressors, might have seen their records destroyed. Ethnographies, all the rage in my profession in the 1990s, are a sociologist’s and an anthropologist’s tool. So is mere observation or years spent reading others’ research. This is how I and so many others know lazy-ass Martha Washington ain’t never mixed no drinks in her Mount Vernon mansion. Not when she had trusted enslaved Africans as cooks and mixologists doing all the work.

3. Experience works on multiple levels, and is often the way others who like what they’re reading reach the conclusion that so-and-so’s “scholarship” is “genius.” There’s the experience of interpretation and being able to take new information and meld it with everything one already knows about a specific person, a group of people, a given topic, event, question, and/or social problem. There’s the experience of being a human being, and how those experiences have shaped you and how you process information, including the small and big epiphanies gleaned from one’s research. There’s also the experience of being oppressed or benefiting from oppression, which utterly colors whatever “objectivity” one may believe they have. In the case of oppressors and their beneficiaries, those experiences often dilute one’s ability to take quantum and cosmic leaps in logic to cover up the ginormous holes in their research, training, and methodology.

So when like-minded people get together to discuss what is and is not “scholarship,” 3. outweighs 1. and 2., just like Jupiter outweighs the other seven planets in our solar system — combined. It is a toxic, cannibalizing system, made more potent by the riches and miseries of capitalism, where research grants, book deals, and media appearances, and lecture circuit checks are on the line. 

When people ask for “evidence,” whether at this year’s American Historical Association conference or on Twitter, they are saying, “My experiences in life and in my field are privileged and limited, so I have decided your experiences in life and in my field do not matter.” When people refuse to accept your findings, it is often their myopia and their sense of narcissism and entitlement at work, and not flaws within the research you did. Especially when one’s research is about oppression, oppressors, how to fight oppression, and what happens when a people succeed in that fight.

This is why I chafed at Trotter’s salivations over scholarship some 26 years ago. This is why I find much about the idea of scholarship offensive today. Oh, I think doing one’s own research in a field of expertise or even to acquire expertise is fundamentally important. I just don’t think genius and scholarship are in any way related. Not without the experiences of life, the understanding of one’s positionality in privilege, not only to do research, but one’s unique life experience through which to process it. This is why I can never be a scholar. I refuse to be part of a club that has to sear and sauté its poisonous, fishy-ass scallops and declare themselves all “geniuses” for doing so. 

One might say that there’s something fishy going on here in the academic world. Scholarship is like scallops in that way. Do not leave it at room temperature for too long. Just like the academic “geniuses” who refuse to shower while writing their latest unreadable tome.

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

27 Monday Dec 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While My PhD’s Getting Cold…

21 Sunday Nov 2021

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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.

From Heat Checks to Hail Marys

13 Monday Sep 2021

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Heat Check, Hail Mary, between Steph Curry and Aaron Rodgers (cropped and spliced), September 13, 2021.

This is my final (maybe?) essay in my series More Confessions From an Educated Fool. I do need help, to keep me from self-publishing a third book, to make the leap into writing beyond the freelancing. I ask, but I don’t think I ask correctly. Or, maybe people just don’t like me. Anyway, the essay is less than 1,000 words. Please read.

Make no mistake. This post is a plea for help to reach the next stage as a writer, to get a book out into the world with some measure of success. I’d prefer not to go the route of the self-published manuscript this time, where the book has no chance to reach more than a few hundred people or maybe a couple thousand people. For those who are better positioned as writers, I’m not asking for your first-born child. However, if you have enjoyed my stories, my blog, or my published work over the years, maybe, put in a word with an agent if you have one? Or, maybe, if I ask you to read a chapter of my latest ms, that you read it and give me feedback? Or, maybe even, just the least bit of encouragement to hang in there?

My latest manuscript is titled Narcissism, American Style: Essays on Racism, Narcissism, and How to Get to a Post-Western World. (I do have an alternative title, Sage’s Gold.) It was originally supposed to be a series of essays on America’s narcissism, its origins, permutations, and the damage it has done and will do to the world if left unchecked. After I had published a piece in The Atlantic on the hidden psychological costs of college education for first-gen students five years ago, I did a heat check, put together an initial proposal and a cover letter, and sent out my idea to agents. Two immediately responded, but said no (or didn’t respond) after I sent them my initial drafts. Oh well!

Then, I started writing out the essays, all to figure out what direction this book should take. I had two epiphanies along the way. One, I needed to make my mostly US-focused book one that challenged the West, and that meant testing out parts of essays as articles. Two, I needed to figure out where this world is headed as long as the US and the West remain steadfast in leading and exploiting resources and lives.

That’s where all my articles with Al Jazeera come in. After years of mostly writing articles on education and Black and US identity, I mostly dropped looking at K-16 education reform and debates in 2017. Al Jazeera gradually gave me the platform to write about my topic for an international audience. And despite Al Jazeera’s flaws, it was an opportunity I needed.

But after a while, having figured out how to turn longer essays into digestible article- and op-ed-length chunks, the obvious question to me was, Who’s gonna offer me a contract for a collection of essays that were mostly published as articles internationally — especially in these elite New York streets? That was in the fall of 2018. It occurred to me that I could take another approach, to embed these essays as conversations about a post-Western and post-US world. That made me think of Derrick Bell and his best-selling allegories, published as the nonfiction books And We Are Not Saved and Faces at the Bottom of the Well. Bell demonstrated the necessity of critical race theory to describe the permanence of racism within the American matrix in both books. I needed to do something similar, an ms where systems of racist and class-based oppression had been destroyed as part of the climate-change apocalypse, but the narcissism of our current age lingered on in this new world order.

In early 2017, I had written a post where I envisioned a descendant of mine in Olivia, and what her post-Western and post-US world might look like. I sensed this could be useful in furthering my book idea. I began writing up allegories based on my vision of Olivia in 2018, and worked them out for most of 2019. I wasn’t sure I could completely mesh these allegories with the fuller version of my published pieces, or with those essays I hadn’t published. This was why I asked friends, colleagues, frenemies even, to take a look at earlier drafts. My PhD-ed colleagues mostly didn’t get it. My writer buddies told me they liked it, with two telling me “less is more.” Or, they were like, “Can you even sell this in today’s market?”

Then I fully committed. After separating the nonfiction essays from the allegories about Olivia’s world to rework them as standalones, I sensed in my bones that they needed each other. I spent much of 2020 writing and rewriting to bring the two halves together, but cutting and rewriting anything that didn’t fit. Once I got sections to the point of “this works,” I began contacting publishers, agents, and colleagues again. Some obviously liked what they read, but because Narcissism, American Style was now both nonfiction essays and speculative allegorical fiction, they didn’t “know how to sell this book.” It didn’t matter that I identified Bell, Patricia J. Williams, Kiese Laymon, Octavia Butler, and Erica Armstrong Dunbar (among others) who had successfully done what I am doing now in varying degrees with their books.

This is where I stand right now, about to make another run at finding a publisher this fall. I need any and all help I can get. I have previously reached out to folks who have agreed to read and critique, and then, nothing. Sometimes, I find myself trusting no one. The pandemic has made this mistrust worse. If people can’t consistently keep a mask on, how can I put faith in anyone to read my manuscript with care and honesty, assuming they actually read it at all? It would be one thing if I didn’t think my work was good enough. But even the most self-disparaging of writers knows when they’ve written something publishable, if not for themselves, then for the world. This is my Hail Mary. I pray someone will see or sense it, and respond.

The Three Stooges of My Paths

03 Friday Sep 2021

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This is the fourth post in my series arc of More Confessions From an Educated Fool. This one deals with the “cares of this world,” and how I got caught in a web of them, over and over again, like I was prey for a spider to bite and suck the life out of me.

So, a university president, a corporate senior vice president, and nonprofit senior program officer are all sitting at a bar off East 59th Street, after a long decision-day Thursday. Gus, their bartender, asks in his Hollywood-exaggerated New Yorker accent, “Hey jerks, what is it that youse do for a living, anyway?

Damon, the university president says, “I kneel and grovel for money.”

Steve, the senior program officer says, “I do cartwheels, somersaults, and floor exercises for money.”

After a brief pause, Alan, the senior VP says, “I use ads spots to hold up people for money,” while gesturing with his right hand in his blazer pocket. “Now give me your wallets!,” he says. The other two stooges laugh without restraint.

Gus pulls out his Saturday night special, and points it at the senior VP. “You mean like this?”

The senior VP says, without batting an eyelash or turning away, “I work for a trillion-dollar company. We get a billion people to sign their lives away every day. Hell yeah, it’s like this!”

The other stooges and Gus laugh. Damon pounds the table with his fist so hard he knocks over his drink.

After putting away his gun, Gus says, “What’ll it be? This one’s on me!”

Without taking a beat, all three gents say, “A vodka tonic.”

I have walked three paths in my career. Academia, the nonprofit world, and writing and publishing (and self-publishing) articles and books. Academia will claim that it isn’t a capitalist endeavor. The nonprofit world will say it claims 501(c)(3) tax status because they are changing the world by doing good works. The corporate world deflects while fully engaged in public displays of affection with capitalism, lips and tongues and spit included. “That’s just the way it is,” they sigh before another round of groping.

All of them are liars, I have found with 30 years (mostly) in and (sometimes) out of academia, 11 years working and consulting with nonprofits, and 20 years of off-and-on work in publishing articles and beating my brains into mush in book publishing. But if they are all liars, the lies are for people who are looking to do good in the world, for disdainful people, but people not so cynical that they have given up their core principles and universal moral values. They are for people like me.

That’s what capitalists do. They take advantage of people and rob them of their wealth, of their minds and bodies and souls. They like to do this at gunpoint, but they love to do it with slogans and pitches. “Connecting People, Creating Change” was the mantra of one Academy for Educational Development (AED), a nonprofit I worked with for nearly eight years. I used to joke that their real slogan was “Corrupting People, Creating Chaos.” The sad part was how correct I was in my assessment. This was even before I took on budgetary duties for a multimillion-dollar grant on a K-16 education project, where I learned AED had us mid- and senior-level program officer types to keep three separate budgets: one for the government, one for funders and potential funders (to hide our overhead), and the real one for AED’s nabobs. That last one included a one-percent vig on all grants that any of us brought in, a “rainy day fund” meant only for AED’s most senior staff.

It turned AED into a $600-million-a-year Ponzi scheme, and included millions in bribes to corrupt Afghans as part of the cost of “Connecting People, Creating Change” in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The truth was, the 501(c)(3) status was only to get away with making a profit off government and private foundation funding without having to pay a cent in corporate income taxes. I knew this was the reality of this world in 1999, when I made the switch to full-time nonprofit work with Presidential Classroom, when my former APUSH teacher Harold Meltzer laughed at the idea of nonprofits in the US’ capitalist regime. I had ideals about doing good outside of higher education, but I was never naive about their larger money-making agenda.

Publishers, agents, and editors would have me believe that the only criteria for publishing my stuff is if my fastball, curveball, and slider/sinker combination is good enough for dissemination. But first always comes the disclaimer: “if you have a work that doesn’t easily fit into a formulaic category, or if you are Black and over 40, or if you don’t account for the feelings of fragile white readers, we can’t make money, so we can’t publish you.” However, “we will publish schlock, how-to guides, and very famous people with ghostwriters, because that’s easy work for quick bucks.” They are the most honest liars, mostly because they don’t give a shit about the greater good. I can work with this.

But what I can no longer stomach is academia’s hypocrisy. This time 30 years ago was my first week as an MA student in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. Eric, a fourth-year grad student and PhD candidate in the program, a man who once saw himself as my mentor (I never saw him that way), explained the nature of academia this way. “The academy is a medieval institution, whose ways are founded on the idea of the guild.” In my head, I’m thinking, This is utter bullshit. The European university began its missions during the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries to be sure. But they needed funds to run then, and they damn sure do now. This analysis from an avowed 40-something Marxist let me know just how much he didn’t get about the academic world.

The only thing medieval about academia in my three decades of learning, teaching, and experiencing it is its ideals. In reality, academia is a money-making machine for its boards, for its athletics programs, and for the “hot stuff,” scientific and technological research. It serves at the will of deep pocketed robber barons, professional athletic corporations, and at the behest of corrupt governments and the military-industrial complex. That anyone comes out of a college or graduate or professional school with their sense of morality and social justice intact is no small miracle. That anyone these days earns their degrees with low debt or no debt at all is either part of the super-rich class or has performed a feat John the Baptist would be proud of. And in that latter-day case, they probably are completely fine with the system the way it is, supporting the bloated salaries of upper university managers everywhere.

The story about the three stooges of my career should end with them all stumbling drunk out of the bar, only to be robbed by some random guy wearing a ski mask. After all, that is what they deserve. What I deserve, well, that’s a bit more complicated. Loving money has a way of making the mediocre hireable, popular, and powerful, while marginalizing everything and everyone else. I spent so many years chasing promotions for funds to help pay down student loan debt and to provide for our son the life I never had growing up with poverty (and then welfare poverty in my teens). The strategy didn’t work.

I had to accept that I am not built to be a capitalist cog or hamster. I had to accept that I as a person ask questions, and make good trouble doing so. I am at my best as a writer and thinker. I am at my best when I question the worlds I have inhabited, not when I am just going along to get along in them.

When Their Lies Become The Truth

16 Monday Aug 2021

Posted by in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, music, New York City, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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Michael Jackson in the middle of his first public moonwalk while singing “Billie Jean” (cropped screen shot), Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever, May 16, 1983. (NBC/Starvista; https://www.smoothradio.com/artists/michael-jackson/first-moonwalk-motown-video-1983/)

This is the third of my multi-part series on my paths as a writer. This piece is one that I’ve work on for nearly a year. Mostly because of the issue to out or not out the guy who plagiarized me in 2002. Partly because I do not really want the kind of attention this post could bring. But the more uncomfortable and painful a writing becomes all the more reason to share it with readers.

There is an ugly truth that inhabits every arena of work. Racist, misogynistic, and elitist politics make all workplaces toxic, some dangerously and lethally so. The never-ending palace intrigue, the perpetual ambitious drive and thirst for clout, the absolute must of self-promotion. All of it makes the idea of “just here to do a job” laughable.

With this toxicity comes the need to lay claim to words and works that are not one’s own. In academia, it means stealing ideas, references to primary resources, even actual words from the work of lesser known academicians. All for the lofty prize of permanent tenure and plum professorships at elite universities. All while destroying careers and breaking people.

I was a victim of such a theft. The plagiarist was one Dr. Jonathan Zimmerman, today a decently prominent full professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, with a career that was undoubtedly helped along by a book about the so-called culture wars. It nearly broke me as a writer. It took nearly 15 years for me to fully recover. In some ways, I am still recovering.

My story is a case study of how easily White mediocrity can trump Black excellence unless or until the latter forces acknowledgment out of the world. But it is also my tale of an aspiring academician snuffed out in his younger years, a wonder-man who had yet to decide the kind of thinker, writer, educator, and gift-user he wanted to be.

I was only partly aware of the possibility of being plagiarized in the 1990s. Oh, I was paranoid enough. As a Black doctoral candidate at lily-White Carnegie Mellon University, I worried about losing my own work and not finishing. By the summer of 1996, I was mailing out seven 3.5-inch, not-so-floppy-disks-at-a-time to my trusted circle, because I had little trust for folks in my academic world, including my dissertation advisor. But I had no idea that I should have extended my lack of trust to trained academicians who were so devoid of ideas and so bereft of imagination that they would steal from little-old me.

My off-and-on dealings with Zimmerman was where I learned eggs should never mix with stones. In 1994, Zimmerman was an assistant professor in the subfield of social and historical foundations of education at West Chester University. I and a couple of other Black doctoral students (the latter two from the University of Pittsburgh School of Education) had promised to present our work at a conference Zimmerman had organized, but reneged at the last minute. The two thirtysomething Black students felt leery about the invitation. “This is very disappointing…I wish you’d let us know sooner…I was so looking forward to reading your work,” Zimmerman said haltingly over the phone with a tone that combined reassurance with condescension when I informed him of our cancellation. Zimmerman had me agree to send him a copy of my dissertation, “A Substance of Things Hoped For”: Multiculturalism, Desegregation, and Identity in African-American Washington, D.C., 1930–1960, once I finished it.

I bumped into Dr. Zimmerman twice at scholarly conferences after that, in 1996 and 1997. He sought me out about my dissertation, for what purpose, I wasn’t sure. I was too worn out after finishing my degree to find out. The next and last time I saw Zimmerman was at the end of April 1999. New York University invited me to their campus for a job interview in the school of education. It was for a social foundations in education opening. I learned that Zimmerman was on the search committee. He had moved on from his previous job, and was now a tenured associate professor.

I gave a seventy-five-minute job talk about my dissertation research and soon-to-be book topic, titled “Fear of a ‘Black’ America: Multiculturalism and Black Education in Washington, DC.” During the talk and Q-and-A session that followed, I noticed Zimmerman had brought with him a paperback copy of my doctoral thesis to the talk. He must have ordered a copy from ProQuest, the main depository for dissertations in the US.

“Can you tell me more about why Black parents didn’t want Little Black Sambo taught in DC Public Schools?,” Zimmerman asked. “Why do you keep using ‘multiculturalism’ to describe what happened in the past — isn’t this anachronistic?,” he inquired with a bit of disdain. “Do you have a publisher lined up for your manuscript?,” I remember him probing, as if that was really his damn business.

It should have been obvious, but at the time, I honestly wasn’t sure why Zimmerman asked me so many questions. Between a two-year-long search for full-time work, of living off fumes from the one $1,850-class I taught at Duquesne University every semester, of burnout and rage from completing my degree, my head wasn’t right. I also wanted to move on from Pittsburgh. “I’d just about have to wait for Joe or Larry [my former dissertation and graduate advisors] to die before I’d get a job that pays around here,” I said to my significant other numerous times.

I didn’t get the NYU job. Six weeks after that interview, I ended up with a job in civic education in suburban DC, working with high-potential high school juniors and seniors. Soon after, I landed a literary agent with my book proposal for Fear of a “Black” America.

Three years and two jobs later, I heard from Zimmerman again, indirectly. I had stumbled into an opportunity while already working as a nonprofit administrator for the New Voices National Fellowship Program to teach a graduate course in social foundations of education at George Washington University. In looking for books suitable for the class, I discovered Zimmerman had published Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools, his book on a century of America’s culture wars as embodied in history textbooks. I decided to buy it in case any of my students wanted to research this topic.

In those pages, Zimmerman carefully avoided referring to the book Little Black Sambo. Instead, he used the term “Sambo” in reference to mainline history textbooks from the 1940s and 1950s. But in one paragraph, Zimmerman’s skill in textual microsurgery broke down like an old and rusted-out car. Where Zimmerman had written, “[e]ven champions of so-called intergroup education in the 1950s turned a blind eye — or a disdainful frown — on black text protests,” I had written, “the Washington Post [in September 1947] published an editorial on the Little Black Sambo controversy that accused the [NAACP-DC] Branch and the…black Washington community of overreacting.”

Where he had wrapped his quote with “opined the Washington Post, denouncing blacks’ ‘humorless touchiness’ about the term ‘Sambo’ in textbooks,” I had the fuller quote, as “the Post could not ‘believe that the humorless touchiness reflected in these protests represents the attitude of Negroes in general.’” And where Zimmerman cited the original sources as the Washington Post from September 30, 1947 and some reference to papers from the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, I also had those same references, plus additional references to the Washingtoniana Division of DC Public Library.

If this theft of ideas and research was pure coincidence, then so is the existence of systemic racism in the US. Zimmerman had access to my doctoral thesis for at least three years before the publication of his book. The likelihood that Zimmerman independently went through the same files at Moorland-Spingarn to address the specific issue of “Sambo” references in textbooks during the 1950s when the controversy over the children’s book Little Black Sambo occurred in 1947 is infinitesimally low (he doesn’t refer to Moorland-Spingarn as a place he visited to conduct research in Whose America?).

The specific Washington Post quote could be coincidental, but not when combined with the Moorland-Spingarn citation. Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, one couldn’t just do a Google search for a then-55-year-old article. One either had to dig it out from among the thousands of files in archives like Moorland-Spingarn at Howard University, where I spent nearly two weeks in March 1995 uncovering information about issues like the 1947 Little Black Sambo controversy. Or, a researcher would have had to go through reels of newspaper microfilm at libraries looking for clues and key words, like I did for another two weeks at the Washingtoniana Division of DC Public Library’s main branch, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, in February 1995. My doctoral thesis was never cited as a source in these sections, either.

A couple of weeks later, I found Dr. Zimmerman’s NYU email address. I wrote to him about his erasure of my years of sweat, tears, and even blood (in the case of paper cuts) in gathering the information that had gone into my dissertation. “I don’t know who you are,” was his one-sentence response, as was and remains the typical retort from those who are caught using another’s words, work, and ideas as their own. “Fuck it,” I said to myself after that exchange. I definitely should have found a lawyer back then.

I received a note a few days after I discovered Zimmerman’s thievery from my one-time agent Claudia Menza about the acquisition editors at Random House. They had come close to accepting my book, but ultimately rejected Fear of a “Black” America for publication. It was a gut punch while walking carelessly through Central Park on a cloudless early fall day. The kind of punch that leaves one falling on their ass while exchanging pain for air, trying one’s hardest not to cry or scream for fear of embarrassment. I eventually self-published my book in 2004, a shell of the dream I originally held for this manuscript.

I hated academia and academicians. I hated myself for the desperate academic/nonacademic/non-writing writer-who-also-wanted-to-write-more it turned me into. I hated that I had earned a PhD, only to find myself working as a nonprofit administrator where the only thing people cared about was bringing in more multimillion-dollar grants. Most of all, I hated that I had never thought enough of the possibility that others would find ingenious and craven ways to steal from me, and that I couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

Fast-forward more than a decade later to 2018. I am no longer working as a nonprofit administrator chasing dollars for watered-down education and social justice efforts. I am teaching full-time as contingent faculty between two universities. My writings are now meant for the world, and not for academia. After reading a story about how a plagiarist had copied and pasted huge portions of the author Leta Hong Fincher’s words from Leftover Women, it dredged up my experiences with Dr. Zimmerman.

This is how the big dogs do it. They steal your ideas, your ideals and your soul, really. They do it while simultaneously erasing you from the public record. They violently make you into the intellectual undead, a ghost that exists, but cannot haunt. Like with Napoleon allegedly blasting away at the Sphinx’s nose for fear that the truth of ancient Egypt as a Black civilization would drown the myth of white Egypt. The big dogs make you feel the theft, the death, and the erasure, right down to them blowing your bits of graphite, wood pulp, and synthetic rubber off of history’s pages.

“And mother always told me be careful of who you love/And be careful of what you do ’cause the lie becomes the truth.” These are the last two lines of the second stanza in Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” That Michael Jackson — the Black genius that he was — also was a pedophile who preyed on star-struck children and their naive parents. He lied by omission and commission, for nearly half his life. The topic of multiculturalism, and being able to profit from it, no longer matters to me. But having people like Zimmerman out there profiting from their theft and their lies does.