Category Archives: Work

The Sacrifice of the Lambdas

28 Wednesday Jul 2021

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Cleaning, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work

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Lambs from living to skewered (cropped and collaged), July 27, 2021. (Donald Earl Collins, via https://www.mygreekdish.com/recipe/greek-lamb-souvlaki-recipe-skewers-with-pita-bread/ and © Alison Toon/Adobe stock)

Most people I’ve met and known over the past 30 years have no clue as to what it is to teach high school, college, master’s and doctoral students. None. They think we who are serious educators just wing it and lecture to death, with no preparation at all. They have no inkling of what it takes to research topics, write articles for different audiences, to work on a book-length manuscript, or to publish one. Nor do they understand the job market — any job market, not just in higher education — or the psychological and emotional burden of holding students’ trust, or the constancy of systemic elitism, racism, sexism, in these elite white and elite Black spaces. 

I know my mom and dad never have. “You might as well have another high school diploma,” my mom said of my 10-year pursuit of my bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD, on the week of my doctoral graduation at Carnegie Mellon University. It was the day after she had finished her associate’s, a ten-year trek on her part.

My dad during one drunken stupor accused me of lying about having earned my master’s in barely two semesters. “Anybody coulda gone somewhere and made up a fake one,” he said in 1992 during my summer visit to New York, when I showed him my actual degree from the University of Pittsburgh. A few weeks later, after talking with his two white bosses, the Levi brothers, my now hungover dad admitted, “they say you can get a master’s in a year.” I said in response, “Really? I had no idea!”

But that’s only the beginning of the sacrifices people like me with advanced degrees and training make in earning these degrees and pursuing careers related to them. I know people whose first jobs were in weird and not-quite-ideal places. University of Maine at Machias. Austin College in North Texas. North Dakota State University. Washington State University. University of Maryland Eastern Shore. Sam Houston State University. University of Mary Washington. Northern Illinois. Illinois State.

Now, before anyone says, “Why, these seem like good places to work,” my response is, “Sure, if you are white!” Yes, I said it. If you are Black, Brown, Indigenous, man, woman, or transgender, most of these are between weird and horrible places to work. The communities around many of these campuses could be or would have once been sundown towns. Or, one could be a place where they tried to lynch someone like me 10 or 20 years earlier. The only people on many of these campuses who know your needs for culture and community play Division I sports or are the other three or four colleagues who aren’t white. To go through two, even three jobs to land at a place that provides one a tenure-line or tenured position — this is a massive sacrifice.

It means living a sort-of half-life, of only focusing on your professional development, or of partners putting their lives on hold so that you can build your career. And all while dealing with an everyday deluge of direct racism, isolation, marginalization, and erasure on the job. If one is lucky, you find community off campus in some of these places. In more white-bred (or more accurately, white-corn-fed) communities, that deluge can turn into a tsunami, and might force you to stay at home and away from these racist and misogynistic and homophobic Children-of-the-Corn-types as much as humanly possible.

There are those like me who never fully believed in making these kinds of sacrifices in order to publish a scholarly article or book, just so that we could get the plum job at a major university. But that choice means sacrifices, too. Like leaving your research and writing behind for a steadier and better-paying gig. But, at least in my case, I couldn’t ask my partner to drop her own aspirations while I took a job in the middle of Nowheresville (Colgate University, Slippery Rock, and Northern Illinois all come to mind here). 

So my first post-PhD job search between 1997 and December 2000 was an urban, mostly East Coast one. I turned down as many job interviews as I took on. I ended up in the nonprofit world in the DC area, though, and the abject racism I faced there was still not as bad as the elitism I dealt with during a job interview I had at Howard University. I said no to the only tenure-track job I was ever offered, with few regrets. But it still meant that I would lack the job stability necessary to build my writing career and to keep a steady paycheck. Not all sacrifices turn out the way any of us expect. 

My parents and other people born before 1955 have had the tendency to say to me in one version or another, “See, that’s why all that book learnin’ aint all that good for you. Better to do work with your hands. That’s how you become a man.” It wouldn’t have mattered if I’d become an award-winning author and full professor, or a senior program officer at the Ford Foundation. As far as they have always been concerned, I was sacrificing my mind to “useless facts.” If I had become divorced or homeless because of my path, on the other hand, they would’ve said, “I told you so.”

For the rest of folks in my life, mine is a “lazy” life, where my liberal butt “gets paid a lot of money to sit around and indoctrinate students.” All built on the fact that I and other faculty only teach for a few hours a week, instead of working from 8:30 to 5 like real Americans. They have no idea that I’ve given up ten years worth of weekends and holidays to prepare for my classes, review papers, grade assignments, to write a piece, to work on a manuscript or a new project, just in the past 13 years alone. Or, to meet with students struggling in the classroom or in life in general. The emotional toll of learning about some student or colleague’s trauma or abuse is incalculable. But, yeah, I’m “lazy” when I take a nap in the middle of the day, because it’s the only way I can get to seven hours of sleep in a 24-hour period five days out of seven.

They have never experienced what it is like to have the same qualifications and make some of the same sacrifices as my more successful colleagues, and not get a specific job or a particular grant. Just recently, I learned that I will not get interviewed for a term faculty position in my department at American University. The job is the same job as the one I have worked at AU for the past three years, but as contingent faculty. Patting me on my head to tell me that I’ve made “valuable contributions to the university,” to students, and to the department does not make up for my sacrifices as a writer, as an educator, and as a historian.

And I still have it much easier than my less lucky colleagues, who may be working at three or even five universities to generate a full-time-equivalent income. Or those who have had nervous breakdowns from the brutal conditions of working for abusive institutions within the nested doll of this matrix of elitism, racism, misogynoir, and other -isms and -phobias that is the United States. Or those who are burned out husks of the educators and writers they used to be. Or still, others who’ve died because of their sacrifice. 

Not all sacrifices are worth it. Then again, assuming my mind and spirit remain intact, I might be able to drill NBA-range 3s and run faster than most of my students until my 75th birthday.

The Unbearable Whiteness of White Proximity Fuses, Part II

03 Saturday Jul 2021

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Front cover of my copy of Rebecca Carroll’s Surviving the White Gaze, July 3, 2021. (Donald Earl Collins)

The other and more direct parallel with Carroll’s journal in Surviving the White Gaze that comes to mind was someone I worked and went to school with at the University of Pittsburgh. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call her Heather, because I can no longer recall her name. She was a Black/biracial young woman from Erie, Pennsylvania, adopted by a white couple as a baby. I met her my third year at Pitt in 1989, when she was a freshman. We worked together for a while on a psychological epidemiology project that the great Juan Mezzich ran, as part of a larger project to revise the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (turning the then-DSM-IIIR into the DSM-IV) and the International Classification of Diseases (turning the ICD-9 into the ICD-10). Aside from the fact that I thought Heather was cute, the first thing I noticed about her was her hair. It had been straightened, permed, and blown out beyond all recognition of a curl. Even at 19, I knew immediately that she was biracial, and didn’t have a Black woman who knew how to do her hair in her life.

I didn’t say a word. It wouldn’t have mattered if I did. Heather was very much standoff-ish, to me and the couple of other Black and Brown students who staffed up the project. She got along extremely well with the White students and staff, though. She rarely said hello when I saw her outside of Western Psych, on or off campus. Honestly, I felt sorry for her.

In the summer of 1991, when I became a full-time staff member on another of Mezzich’s projects, I worked with Heather for a few weeks. This was when I learned more about her upbringing and extremely limited exposure to Black folk. The questions she would ask about what I listened to on my Walkman, songs by Anita Baker, PE, Earth, Wind & Fire, even Phil Collins. She was maybe two years younger than me, and only knew ‘70s and ‘80s rock. Wow.

But, one day, Heather or another staff member had asked me a question — I don’t remember who asked, or what the question was. It one with a historical component, which I answered in typical granular exactitude, because, me. “Are you autistic or something?,” Heather immediately blurted out, as if I had some disease she had yet to see first-hand. “If by autistic, you mean the Rain Man movie? No, I just have a very good memory,” I answered back, rhetorically, with irritation and a bit of side eye. “Oh, I didn’t mean to offend you,” Heather continued, and then she went on for several minutes about why she thought I was autistic. 

I was gobsmacked by Heather’s entitled ignorance and by the racist and ableist implications of her questions and response. Seriously? I’ve been living on my own, mostly successfully navigating the world since I was 17, adulting since I was 12, and somehow I’m Dustin Hoffman with the most serious form of this neuro-social illness, all because my memory is stronger than a bank vault made of titanium and cobalt? And all this because I’m probably the first Black guy you’ve met with a bachelor’s degree from anywhere other than podunk Western Pennsylvania? All this and more ran like a chyron in my brain as I listened to Heather, now sensing my ire, stumbling over her words to make herself sound like she knew what she was talking about.

There were more than a few places in Carroll’s book where I saw the girl and the young woman that I saw in Heather, taking all of her assumptions about Blackness, about Black people, about whiteness and race, and applying them, often in damaging ways. I was absolutely disgusted at what Carroll and Tess did to her one-time English professor and advisor at the University of New Hampshire. I literally stopped reading Surviving the White Gaze for a week afterward. How could you?!?, I thought. Even with zero exposure to Black men, you had to know you put this man’s job in jeopardy over a minor utterance. You had to know that Tess’ vitriol toward him was about him not finding her intellectually interesting, or worse still, rebuffing potential flirtations. As a professor teaching mostly white students off and on for nearly three decades, I know this part all too well.

Carroll gradually embraced and uncovered her Blackness, over time, through years of alcoholism and eating disorders and fresh traumas from folks White and Black in her life. Her experience, though, is all too uniquely common from where I sit. There is the all too common story of someone the product of a Black-White relationship stumbling through life to discover their true selves and their Blackness, a story that is sadly still so easy to sell to a white-dominated book publishing industry and to a white-reading audience. But even for this sub-genre, Carroll’s willingness to reveal more than she conceals is really necessary, even as it feeds the beast, because she is still a work-in-progress at 52. 

There is also the all-too-common assumption that Black folk who aren’t raised by white parents or the product of a biracial pairing somehow don’t have any identity issues at all. Seriously? Anyone ever read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye? We live in a white-dominant society, with white supremacy and white-ways as its main, everyday features. While most Black folk know and love their Blackness, it does not mean there isn’t a struggle to secure our identities as Black folk. Proximity to white people, class privilege, gender, age, and more play a role into the growing-pains-trajectory of how each of us gets to be comfortable in our own skin (or not). 

As for Wendy and Heather, it’s difficult to say where they are on their own trajectories. I haven’t spoken to either of them in years, decades in Heather’s case. But last time I saw Heather, it was May 1995 at a Pharmor store in the East Liberty section of Pittsburgh. I had just received my Spencer Fellowship award to write my dissertation. Heather was different, too. Her hair had gloss and curls, and her clothes fit better. We ended up talking for a few minutes, with me wishing her well. In thinking about this moment, I’ve wondered if Heather ever fully embraced her Blackness. In my imaginations, I think of her as having done so.

BA Collins, 30 Years Ago

27 Tuesday Apr 2021

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Pitt logo, the one closest to what was on their brochures in April 1986, April 12, 2016. (http://pitt.edu).

As I have said in a couple of places this week, this time three decades ago I completed my bachelor’s degree at the University of Pittsburgh. My major was History, with minors in Mathematics (courtesy of my 1.5 years working toward a Comp Sci degree) and Black Studies (before the powers that were changed the name of the degree to Africana Studies). Yay me!

My degree is nine years older than my marriage, between five and 10 years older than most of my students. Goofy semi-asexual me was more than 12 years away from becoming a father. It seems surreal to look back at myself from 30 years ago. Especially when there had been so many years before Saturday, April 27, 1991 when I didn’t think I’d make it to 30.

If I could somehow get a message to my 21-year-old self, and only one message, what would it be? Trust God? Write as if your life depends on it, because it will, and sooner than you think? Take time off after finishing the master’s next year? Move back to NY, so that you can please your Mom? Don’t try to date E, it will go badly?

No, no, no. None of those will do. Find your true self. Find your core beliefs. Admit your loves, your disdains, your anxieties, and your fears. You do that, you will be the writer and the person you always wanted to be. That’s what my dreams and my multiple muses have been saying for years. I’ve heard them, but only in bits and pieces, since I was in my teens.

Well, better lately than never, and better late than Laettner, as I say.

Playing “Cooties” For a Year

26 Friday Mar 2021

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Screen shot of Milton Bradley game Cootie, March 26, 2021 (https://amazon.com)

Between 1975 and 1978, I learned to play three games with my child-aged neighbors around the 400 block of South Sixth, my babysitter Ida’s building and adjacent junkyard at 240 East Third, and during our first year at 616. The most obvious one was Hide-and-Seek. I was never good at it, except when just playing with my older brother Darren. Usually I was among the first to be found. Because others were more creative or athletic about hiding spaces — as in climbing trees or hiding in nearly-empty yet dangerous dumpsters — I didn’t find too many kids, either.

There was also You’re It, or Tag, and the folks at 616 were especially rough with their tags. The kids around there each thought it was their duty to “it” you with the heavy slap on skin of someone who seemed to want a fight. Of course, they sometimes did. The first time me and Darren went outside to play, they chased us around 616 and 630, pelting us with rocks every chance they could. That some of them thought this was play is so telling of the roughness of all our lives. With neighbors like these…

There was a less popular version of You’re It and Tag. I mostly played that during my extended stays with Ida at 240 between 1975 and 1977. It was Cooties. This one could be mean in its own way. The kids would gather around and yell “Cooties!” when they touched you with their germ-infested hands. Some of us were designated vaccines, so that when we touched someone with cooties, they’d yell, “I got my cooties’ shot!”

We hid even harder for Cooties than we did for Hide-and-Seek. We’d be all over the junkyard, hiding in and around gigantic pieces of metal with rough edges, sometimes cutting up a hand or a leg on a piece of jagged rusted iron, steel, or aluminum. We’d hide behind 240 in the woods in between it and the junkyard, subjecting ourselves to smells of puddles of piss, broken beer and soda bottles (Pepsi and Coke wouldn’t start producing plastic soda bottles until 1977) and sharp glass that could come up through our thin-soled sneakers. Yeah, playing Cooties at 240 could sometimes lead to us actually getting the real-life cooties. Such were the dangers of poverty and environmental racism.

This week a year ago is when I began playing our real-life version of our global game of Cooties. Except this is not a game or a drill. Like so many, we did not have everything we needed to protect ourselves during our ventures into the world. March 23, 2020 was the first time I wore material over my mouth and nose. I say “material” because all we could order initially were pieces of cloth that we could fold over. I placed a coffee filter in between my two folds to create a makeshift face mask. It was red. I looked ridiculous.

I ran an errand that weekend to a mom-and-pop store I’d bought good cheap meat from since 1999. I was one of maybe four people with any type of face covering at all. Otherwise, it was a normal errand. Except for the elderly couple I saw walking in after I had cleared the front and was walking toward our car. The White man who trailed the White woman was struggling to walk, which is normal for someone in their mid-80s or 90s. The White woman was struggling to breathe. She was flush, looked congested, and looked ready to collapse at any moment. I haven’t been back to that store since. I heard it was under new ownership a few months ago.

Seeing that White woman, likely with the flu or with COVID-19 or even both, it changed my approach to the pandemic. I went from Let’s be careful out there but let’s not get paranoid to Let’s set the board to Def Con 3 — it’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you! My shopping habits changed. I used to hit up to five stores in one outing to put $150 or $200 of groceries and stuff we needed in carts, bring in my reusable bags, talk to shelvers and cashiers, bump into neighbors and colleagues, and make a go of it. Or, when cash was less fluid, I’d shop for small sets of items at a couple of stores.

Either way, I spent three, four, five days a week in warehouses and supermarkets shopping. The last time I was in a grocery store was December 5, in Pittsburgh, buying just enough food to take back to our hotel room while visiting Pittsburgh after my mom-in-law died. Locally in the DMV, I have not shopped for anything other than Disaronno or Absolut Citron (which I’ve hardly touched) since October 15. Why? Because I don’t want anyone touching me with their cooties.

Per Crystal Fleming (yes, #CiteBlackWomen) and Twitter, I started cleaning groceries after shopping at Safeway and Trader Joe’s last April 10 and last April 24. Even at that early stage, as I saw people refusing to wear masks as mandated by Maryland, my aversion to cooties got worse. By then we had secured ten medical masks, and we were looking for medical grade gloves. We had just switched to using Dawn for our dish washing in the summer of 2019, so we were good there. But Lysol, Clorox, Microban, Windex, and all the stuff we needed to keep the house smelling like an antiseptic surgery bay, was long gone from most stores. Every human I saw was a walking meat bag of COVID-19 cooties.

We received our first pack of gloves at the end of April. We hardly used them. I went to a Latinx store in my community for toilet paper on May 1, and picked up groceries in a Safeway parking lot on May 30. After that, I visited a medical supply store for more masks and face shields on June 30, shopped with all that equipment at Giant on July 15, Trader Joe’s on August 17, and Whole Foods on September 15. This past year is the most time I spent indoors since the World Book Encyclopedia-discovery years of 1978 and 1979. Get thee hence, Cooties!

I already had a healthy disdain for humanity before the pandemic, one where I could fake my way through life with superficial interactions and a thin veneer of trust. Now it feels strange to even sit in the car and drive a mile to the nearest USPS mailbox, just to send off a payment. Now it is beyond weird being outside — I cannot believe I used to run or shoot hoops nearly every week for the previous 20 years. Now if I can find any reasonable workaround, I will pay double for something I know I can go get at a store, but don’t wanna leave the house, because people are cooties and cooties are people.

Lucky for me, I am in the queue for a cootie shot, and soon.

Michael Clayton vs. Jerome Kersey

14 Sunday Mar 2021

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Then Blazer Jerome Kersey slashing his way to a lay-up past Laker Magic Johnson and Byron Scott, n.d., but likely pre-1991-92 season. (Mike Powell, Getty Images; https://www.blazersedge.com/2015/2/18/8066753/jerome-kersey-dead-portland-trail-blazers-legend)

A few years ago, I declared myself the writer equivalent of the fictional character Michael Clayton, whom George Clooney played in a movie of the same name in 2007. Like Clayton, who straddled the worlds of police officers, attorneys, and fixers, I found myself a misfit between academia and writing, journalism and writing, and professional writing. Despite whatever successes I have had in recent years (if one can call them that), I do not think this equation has changed. I still often find myself pounding on the walls of stone temples, a world of white folks who would just as soon spit on me and my manuscripts as they would ignore my queries. Such is the world in which I inhabit as one of the Black folx.

But I am not just Michael Clayton. I am also like the late Jerome Kersey (1962-2015) (may his body rest in peace while his spirit takes a moment to read me out — hopefully). At least as a writer. The six-seven small forward who came from a one-time Division II school and played the bulk of his career with the Portland Trail Blazers was one of the best slashers and one of the better defenders in the NBA in the late-1980s and in the 1990s. Kersey was especially adept at weak-side defense and playing passing lanes, great at finishing off of full-court fast breaks, and could beat defenders off of give-and-gos in the half-court set with ease. His J (if one could call it that) was serviceable at best. Anything outside 12-15 feet was a risky proposition, especially in close playoff games. But if you needed a weak-side rebound and put-away dunk, Kersey was the man.

In his prime, he was a necessary asset as part of the Blazers’ runs to the NBA Finals in 1990 and 1992, part of Clyde “The Glide” Drexler’s underrated band of brothers who entertained us. At least until they ran into teams that liked beating up on their opponents, like the Detroit Pistons in 1990 and MJ and the Chicago Bulls in 1992. When Drexler left in a mid-season trade to the Houston Rockets in 1995, obviously hungry for a ring, I knew Kersey’s days as a Blazer were numbered. They still had the great Cliff Robinson, so they would be a playoff team for years to come, but not a championship team.

I think I write the same way Kersey approached basketball. I am not someone who can take on a team one-on-three or one-on-five. I am a good passer, but the Chris Webber no-looks or LBJ pocket passes, okay, but nothing to wax braggadocious about, either. But if I get one step past a defender, good luck in keeping me from making a lay-up. Also, don’t leave me wide-open from three. I’ll make at least one for every three I take on my best days. I will fight for rebounds while taking elbows to my cheeks and jaw and eye socket, while knocking knees and shins, and will fall to the ground to get the ball.

That’s how I write. I am straightforward in my approach, hoping that my wit, my goofiness, and my knowledge bleed through. But I am also counterintuitive, and will take big ideas and try to break them down in ways no one else I know in the writing world is doing (that’s how I’ve managed to publish the pieces I have over the past six years, hitting the occasional 3). I write like I defend, as if my life depends on it, precisely because it does.

And yes, this leaves me vulnerable. In today’s NBA, even in Kersey’s NBA, one cannot just put their head down to the floor and drive to the basket without looking cross-court for an open teammate. Or, in case a defender plants themselves firmly to the wood, waiting to take an offensive foul or to block your shot. That’s where Kersey’s slash-to-the-hoop game often worked against him, especially once the injuries piled up, as his first step became slower.

So, I might not have the slow yet deliberate pick-apart-a-defense moves of an all-time great like Walt “Clyde” Frazier, or can staccato through defenses like the Celtics’ Jaylen Brown, Kawhi Leonard, or current Blazer Damian Lillard, the equivalent of the way poetry slammer and author Bassey Ikpi writes. Nor do I have the quantum-level precision of pouring in points, beating defenses off the dribble, or making turn-around jumpers like Bernard King once did and MJ did with cold-blooded lethality, the way Colson Whitehead and Kiese Laymon weigh every single word, every phrase, every sentence, and every paragraph. Nor do I have the ability to flash killer smiles while also killing you with my post-up game, the way Magic Johnson once did and future WNBA hall-of-famer Candice Parker still does, which is how I see Roxane Gay, Tressie McMillan Cottom, and Walter Mosley (most of the time) as writers.

Kersey had a 17-year NBA career, won a title with the San Antonio Spurs in 1999 (against my Knicks), and is in the top-3 or top-5 in most team statistics all-time as a result of his 11 years in Portland with the Blazers. Maybe I am not a hall-of-fame writer. But my writer game as Jerome Kersey might make me a long-hauler in this calling. Even if agents and editors, journalists and academicians still only see me as Michael Clayton.

Poverty Wages

20 Saturday Feb 2021

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“How We Slice the Pie in the USA” editorial cartoon (cropped), September 19, 2011 (David Horsey/Hearst Newspapers; https://catherineandojaswi.weebly.com/document-ten.html)

It’s hard for me to believe sometimes how blissfully ignorant I used to be about the fourscore-and-three-layers’ worth of elitist bullshit there are to the nature of academic — and American — life. Even in the months after reading Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well, even after reading Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, I still believed that my talent and my production alone would win the day over having the right connections in my circle. What a dumb-ass chump I was, in 1993, and as recently as 2013.

But at least in 1993, my 23-year-old behind could be excused for simply not knowing enough about the world that I inhabited. I was a quick study, academically, but not so quick socially, only four-and-a-half-years removed from homelessness and not trusting humans at all. My tutor, my unofficial advisor about the professional worlds that would take up the next 28 years of my life, was one Bruce Anthony Jones. I have talked about Bruce in the past, about how he quietly dumped me and all of his Pitt grad students upon leaving for University of Missouri-Columbia in 1996. That’s near the end of this story, though, not it’s beginning.

It was the year after I did an independent study on the literature of multicultural education in the US, Canada, and the UK with him as a master’s student. I was working with Bruce again, this time to learn more about curricula decision-making and cultural bias among the multicultural education and Afrocentricity set. He knew this was likely my last semester at the University of Pittsburgh. I had tired of White professors and their withering White gaze, and of Larry not quite keeping up with my work, even though he was my history advisor.

So it was in late February 1993 that he invited me out to dinner to discuss my next moves. We ate at some high-end Chinese restaurant in downtown Pittsburgh on or off Grant Street. It was just a few blocks from where Bruce lived, his mini-penthouse on one-and-a-half floors (the 11th and 12th) in The Pennsylvanian, situated on a hill overlooking downtown. It was once the station building for all passenger trains in and out of Pittsburgh, having been converted into a luxury apartment building the year I arrived for undergrad at Pitt, in 1987.

As someone whose moments of interaction with affluence and luxury were few, the dinner meeting and discussion was dizzying. We had a five-course meal, sat and talked for two hours about grad school, the dissertation process, finding work in higher education, the crock of the tenure clock and tenure process, and so much more. Bruce really helped me demystify the cloistered world of academia that night.

But, between the end of that dinner, the walk over to Bruce’s penthouse apartment, and the conversation we had about his work, the high wore off. When we got to talking about salaries, he began to bitch and moan about his own lot as an assistant professor in the School of Education at Pitt. “Well, how much are you making as an assistant professor?,” I asked rather courageously (this isn’t something grad students were supposed to ask, my mutuals had told me, but you don’t get anywhere by not asking questions). “Forty-five thousand. But them’s poverty wages,” Bruce said matter-of-factly, his “Lon-Guy-Land” (Long Island, New York) accent kicking in more fully as he spoke.

In the back of my mind, I’m thinking, Arrogant asshole, the most I’ve ever made in a year is $11,000, and you talkin’ poverty wages to me? I’ve grown up without food, without any amenities beyond the basics, and you live in a 1.5-floor penthouse? Really? I don’t know how well I hid my envy and my rage after hearing Bruce’s complaints about his salary. I let him continue his monologue.

It turned out that Bruce’s time at Teachers College was about more than earning his doctorate. It was also an opportunity for him to earn money, really good money, through his connections at Teachers College and at Columbia University as a whole. Including one with Charles V. Hamilton, the co-author of Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (originally written with one Kwame Ture, née Stokely Carmichael in 1967).

The Pennsylvanian, near downtown Pittsburgh, PA, circa 2012.

I cannot recall if Hamilton was on his dissertation committee or not, but no matter. Apparently connections with Hamilton and others had helped Bruce find work as an education consultant with the Ford Foundation, among several other private foundations. In the two years leading to his PhD and the year before landing his Pitt faculty position, this was his other professional life. “I make double as a consultant than I do as a professor (really “professa,” the way it rolled off Bruce’s Long Island tongue), and for half the work,” I remember Bruce saying.

“What would I have to do to get into that kind of work?,” I asked once I got over the shock of calculating that Bruce was pulling in between $130,000 and $150,000 a year while living in a 1,500-square-foot penthouse that cost $1,350 per month. Bruce should’ve said, “With help from people like me, lifting as we climb.” But instead, he made it sound like he just lucked out, somehow, like he just happened to be walking down a random hallway when leading Black scholars at Teachers College and Columbia offered lucrative consulting gigs on a Friday at the end of a school year.

A bit more than four years later, the summer of 1997, I found myself without work post-PhD. Teachers College had just rejected me for an assistant professorship in social foundations of education. I was literally a month or two away from being completely out of funds. I could pay my rent, but that was about all I could do until I found more work. I hated to do this, but I ended up contacting Bruce for help, either in finding work or in lending me money until I could pay him back.

Bruce returned my call, and was very stern on the phone with me. “I usually don’t lend students money,” he said, as if I was just some random person who reached out to him out of nowhere. But he offered to write me a check for $100. “Now I expect you to pay me back,” Bruce said, as if he was being magnanimous. That was when I finally, really, truly understood. My time with Bruce was about making him feel like a powerful person in academia. It was never about mentoring or helping me at all.

Between 1997 and 2000, I continued writing my own letters of recommendation with Bruce’s name on them, a practice we had developed while I was still a grad student. Only, I also used one of Bruce’s old signatures and some University of Missouri-Columbia letterhead to make his letters written by me on my behalf look more authentic. After I turned down a job at Howard in June 2000, I wrote Bruce a check for $100 and wondered, Should I include interest in the total, and if so, how much? That was the last time I used Bruce’s letter, the last time I contacted him.

In the years since, I’ve worked jobs that paid $70,000 and $80,000 a year, charged as much as $550-per-day as a consultant, and turned down jobs paying $100K in areas that were too expensive for that salary (like the Bay Area, for example). I’ve also had a couple of years where I’ve barely earned $20,000 as an adjunct (those were years I also consulted, so). I know damn fucking well what a real poverty wage looks like. The closest Bruce has been to socioeconomic poverty was probably the night he sat across from me at dinner all those years ago. Intellectual, social, and spiritual poverty have been Bruce’s close companions, I’d bet, for many years. For such are the wages of narcissism.

The Things I’d Like to Give for the Holidays, But Can’t

27 Sunday Dec 2020

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

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My copies of Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House (2019) and Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (2020), December 26, 2020. (Donald Earl Collins).

The holiday season is a time for giving unto others (apparently unlike the other 11 to eleven-and-a-half months out of the year, when it is your right under capitalism to give to yourself every single day). Except when your own life has shown time and time again that gift-giving without resources is hard. It has meant going years without receiving a gift, without your parents or guardian even buying any of us a card. It is doubly difficult when your birthday is in the middle of the holiday season, two days after Christmas, the second day of Kwanzaa, and at least one year where lunar calendar for Chanukah and my born date aligned.

But, as an adult, I made the most of trying to give to family and sometimes friends. I started buying my mother birthday and Christmas cards when I was 14. I began to buy my siblings cards and presents in 1989, just as I was turning 20. Over the years, I have bought video game systems and clothes, replaced TVs, given money, special-ordered flowers, taken my younger siblings to movies, Toys “R” Us, and other comical holiday ventures for a young man without a car.

Starting in the late 1990s, I began to switch to books as gifts. I figured that to really help my family and to get through to my sibs, books were key. They had been for me, and I assumed that it would be the same for them. I was so wrong! If the books got read by them at all, they generally didn’t say, or they said that they didn’t like them. When I finally got around to buying books for my Mom, she’d say, “What I need this for? I know all about racism already. I done lived it.” I guess my thirty-something years, and not my expertise on the topic, should have been sufficient for me, too.

As with all issues related to my Mount Vernon family, this giving issue became tortuous. It is hard buying gifts for people who only talk to you when they have to or when they want something from me. As adults, I have gotten to know very few of their likes, dislikes, and habits and wants and needs. Also, I found myself in the boom-and-bust cycles of teaching and consulting during the Great Recession years (especially between 2010 and 2015). So, I either sent holiday cards with gift cards or just cards.

But then it dawned on me right about my 45th birthday that none of my younger sibs had ever sent me anything. Yes, I know that gifting need not be transactional or reciprocal. Still, I had struggled every year to remember birthdays, special occasions, and Christmases to send them something from the heart. They never saw me as someone to give unto, as if my degrees and relative career stability made me not need and not want, materially, emotionally, or otherwise.

So in 2015, I stopped with the giving. Except for my older brother Darren and my Mom. And even then I mostly send cards and the occasional gift card. The latter gets reactions like, “What I’m gonna do with this?” It was my Mom’s gut punch to the cliché, “it’s the thought that counts.”

One thing I’d like to do again with family in New York is to send books that I’d think they’d enjoy, books that I found entertaining and educational, books that set my mind and spirit in order. Especially in this year of pandemic-driven isolation and putting my and my family’s safety over travel, my recent excursion to Pittsburgh to help make funeral arrangements for my mother-in-law excepted.

The last two books I have completed in recent weeks stand out because of the things I observed and experienced growing up and growing into grown-ass adulthood, between Mount Vernon, New York, Pittsburgh, and my first three years in DC and Silver Spring, Maryland. The two books happen to be Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House and Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Lives of Church Ladies. Both books are by Black women who grew up in the Deep South but sojourned their way to cold Northern cities like New York and Pittsburgh, just like my Mom. And with those physical and spiritual journeys, family and the connections with family were big themes for them both. Or, really, the fault lines and the disconnection that can and does happen over time. Being unmoored, an outsider to one’s own family, Broom and Philyaw cover so well in their books.

Yes, I know that Broom’s National Book Award winner is both genealogy and memoir at the same time, carefully not revealing certain things about herself until her Acknowledgments. Yes, I know Philyaw’s NBA finalist is a collection of short stories connected by the theme of The Church and hypocrisy, fictionalized but with elements of the author’s life that she unveils anyway. The two books are quite different in their approaches to history and family, but they both address history and family anyway.

And it is how they handle family and family secrets that propelled me through both books. Broom is extremely circumspect about what and whom she does put in The Yellow House, explaining why and her conflict about doing so throughout (she makes me look like a gossip by comparison in Boy @ The Window). “Why do I sometimes feel that I do not have the right to the story of the city I come from? Why, when I want to get down to it, just say the damned thing, do the thoughts pool and ring out in a loop in my head a childish chorus of ‘Oh, oh, oh, don’t tell on your place.’ Telling on. Like giving it all away. Giving what away?,” Broom writes on page 329.

I completely understand, between the Mount Vernonites who have declared my growing-up experiences invalid because I was “weird” and family members who have all but stopped talking to me because I unearthed something they didn’t like about themselves. That, and Broom’s use of “The Water” to demarcate the East New Orleans of her, her family’s, and her ancestors’ lives and the East New Orleans after Katrina in 2005. It was the fire of 1995 that was the break between the chaos of 616 and the life of uncomfortable distance between me and family for me. Broom being unmoored caused her to eventually seek deeper bonds. I tried too many times to count, and failed. But then again, family ain’t just blood, and it’s way deeper than the roots of any marriage.

Philyaw’s collection conjured memories of my Black evangelical Christianity years (and so did Broom’s chapters about her feeling the spirit, speaking in other tongues, and passing out in self-induced trances that lasted for hours, but I digress) and my unfortunate Hebrew-Israelite years. Years where Black patriarchy and toxic hypermasculinity ruled the roost. Some of these men practically dripped pre-cum while preaching the promise of Jesus and Yahweh in those days of temple and Covenant Church of Pittsburgh. Philyaw gets at this in so many ways. For so many of her readers, the stories “Peach Cobbler” and “When Eddie Levert Comes” were their favorites. The amount of behind-the-scenes cheating and familial conflict is enough for anyone on the fence to declare themselves an atheist.

For my money, though, “Jael” is the story that will stay with me. I knew at least one, maybe two Jaels while growing up in the New York City area. One of them tried to molest me when I was 12. I somehow knew — despite forgetting about the particulars of my previous sexual assault until this time six years ago — that telling my Mom, my idiot stepfather Maurice, or my father about this was out of the question. But she was a Jael, alright, another traumatized kid, like me, yet willing to prey on others as a coping strategy.

Even though I wasn’t a Jael, my Mom prayed over me like I could be one, in order “to make a man out of you,” as she used to say. That she could actually say the words, “Or you could be a rapist” to me the same month I’d end up homeless at Pitt for five days was so telling. It told me that my Mom didn’t know me very well after all. Philyaw has me considering the possibility that with family, anyone could be a Jael, even the folks responsible for raising us.

Here’s what I know, though. No matter how I’d couch it, most of my family wouldn’t read a single word from The Yellow House or The Secret Lives of Church Ladies. Queerness, hypocrisy, intersectionality, symbolism, stories that parallel their own? I might as well be sending my Mom a stereotypical Hollywood version of a voodoo doll with pins for her to push in it. For my younger siblings, a steaming hot plate of fried beef liver and kidneys smothered in onions and gravy over rice would be more appealing. So this post will have to do. A gift, I suppose.