Starting Boy @ The Window, 10 Years Later

09 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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Academy for Educational Development, AED, Friendships, Harold I. Meltzer, Interviews, Lumina Foundation, Memoir, Narcissism, Partnerships for College Access and Success, Sacramento CA, Salutatorian, Sam, Vanity, Vanity Project

Full-length vanity mirror, accessed March 9, 2016. (http://etsy.com).

On this week a decade ago, I began work on Boy @ The Window as a memoir. That sentence sounds so definitive and simple. The fact was, I’d been writing the book in my head for nearly three years, and had been doing interviews and other iterations of what would become Boy @ The Window off and on since the fall of ’89. But the first full week in ’06 marked a clear delineation between all of the hemming and hawing over writing the book and the actual process of interviewing former teachers and classmates. For some, though, I was devoting serious time and resources to what they called a vanity project.

I had already interviewed my late former teacher Harold Meltzer twice in ’02, and had done some reaching out off and on between the spring of ’03 and March ’06. It took a work trip to Indianapolis and then Sacramento for me to actually begin the process for real. The trip was about convincing Lumina Foundation for Education to continue funding the college access and retention initiative I was deputy director of after the end of ’06, as well as for me to take oversight over a grantee’s work in Sacramento. It just so happened that about two weeks before the trip, I learned that one of my former classmates, the salutatorian Sam, lived in Northern California. Despite my qualms, I decided to reach out and see if he’d want to meet up and catch up.

Why qualms? Short of a high school reunion, most folks who were outcasts or (really, in my case) misfits aren’t exactly jumping for joy to see people who helped make them feel that way. Sam for me was someone who made me feel as if I had no business being smart, Black, and male. Whether he meant for me to feel that way or not was irrelevant at the time.

The Sacramento skyline, as seen from The Ziggurat in West Sacramento, California (never looked like this in my 3 visits there), October 16, 2008. (J. Smith via Wikipedia). Released via CC-SA-3.0.

The irony was that by the time I’d last seen Sam — the fourth Friday of June ’89 — I no longer saw him as an arbiter of anything, much less someone to aspire to imitate. I realized from a short three-minute conversation that Sam may have had more identity issues than even I had faced in the previous eight years. That it was also the last time that I’d see nearly all of my classmates (I bumped into Wendy ten minutes earlier on this particular walk) prior to working on Boy @ The Window was also interesting, if not ironic.

That and the large amount of work that a book about myself and the worlds I inhabited — in my own mind, in reality at home, with family, with classmates, and throughout Mount Vernon and New York — was on my mind all week long. This was going to be a daunting task, diving deep into my mindset and my past. Dredging up old feelings and conjuring up old conversations that otherwise would best be forgotten.

And of course, meeting up with folks who were never “friends” or “girlfriends” or even often just friendly to me. There was a reason why I only called them “my classmates” or “acquaintances” when talking with family and my actual friends in the years since high school and Humanities. They had been larger-than-life characters in a very stretched out nightmare of a Harry Potter book.

Even with that, I also knew that I needed to meet up with and interview these folks. If only to provide some catharsis or to put myself in a mindset I had abandoned with the last year of the Reagan era. So when Sam said he was okay with meeting up, I didn’t hesitate, and I didn’t kvetch over it.

We ended up talking for nearly three hours, about much more than Humanities or Mount Vernon High School. It was a pleasant conversation. Mostly because I allowed Sam to do what most people do in those situations. I allowed him the opportunity to spin his story, to put his best foot forward about his experiences and his life in the present. I made a point to only press him with questions on the stuff that was most important to me and to Boy @ The Window. After all, between Meltzer, other interviews I had planned, and my own steel-trap memories, I could note glaring contradictions when it came time to write.

Kim Kardashian, another boring vanity project, March 7, 2016. (http://twitter.com).

Still, Sam didn’t answer a key question, at least not directly for me. After I answered his question, “What do you think I thought of you?,” I asked him if wanted to correct or add anything to my answer. Sam was the only one I interviewed who dodged the question. That deflection to the burdens of Humanities and high school told me everything I needed to know. It told me that in Sam’s mind, I had been irrelevant, that his occasional put-downs were in fact deliberate.

There are some who have read Boy @ The Window since I put it out in 2013 who’ve said that they found the Humanities and high school parts of the memoir “boring.” I concede that point. Even with interviews and with Facebook, some of my classmates remain either an enigma to me, or more often, there wasn’t much exciting about them as people beyond grinding for A’s to begin with. Ten years ago, I was only beginning to learn this truth.

My Inevitable Walkman Era

05 Saturday Mar 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, music, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Black Masculinity, Coping Strategies, Disillusionment, Escape, Escapism, Manhood, Masculinity, Self-Discovery, Sony Walkman, Walking, Walkman

This version was my first Sony Walkman (between May 1987 and June 1988), posted August 28, 2013. (http://ebay.ie).

This week marks three decades since I finally entered the ’80s technologically, buying my first portable radio/cassette player with headphones. It wasn’t the Sony Walkman — I’d get my first one of those a year later. No, it was a Taiwan-made knockoff that I got at Crazy Eddie’s on 46th and Fifth in Manhattan, on sale for $22, that was my jump into the era of the Walkman. After a year and a half of carrying around a plug-in radio, playing with records on cheap $15 turntables (that cost $130 and much more in 2016), contemplating boom boxes, and having no control over what music I listened to outside of laundromat runs and 616, I found a new way to escape.

As I wrote in my memoir, this new toy was

my passport to another world, a world where I could make anything happen and no one could hurt me. Taking the Subway to go to The Wiz or Crazy Eddie’s or Tower Records was as much a part of mine and Darren’s Saturday ritual as our tracking down of Jimme. I no longer had to wait for WPLJ or Z-100 or WBLS to play the music I wanted to hear. I could buy a cassette tape for as little as six dollars. In the month after I’d bought my Walkman I’d gone out and bought more than twenty tapes. Whitney Houston, Simple Minds, Phil Collins, Sting, The Police, Mr. Mister, Mike + The Mechanics, Tears for Fears, even Sade. All were welcome who could contribute to my all-consuming effort at conquering my courses.

I was tough on my first Walkman, though. I must’ve dropped it a dozen times in two months, as it barely made it to Memorial Day ’86. My second one was a $42 Panasonic, which I bought with my Technisort earnings, and it lasted from July 4th until the end of October. I bought a decent Aiwa knockoff of the Sony Walkman in December, and that one made it to April ’87. before I finally found the $60 I needed for my Sony Walkman the month before high school graduation.

In a span of a year, I would accumulate more than seventy tapes, covering everything from pop and hard rock to rap and R&B, new age and jazz. As anyone who knew me in the spring of ’87 could attest, I carried my tapes with me in my book bag to have at the ready, the same way in which I had toted my Bible everywhere when I became a Christian three years earlier.

I walked everywhere in the Upper Bronx and Southern Westchester County for nearly three and a half years before I bought a Walkman of any kind. But in that window between March ’86 and my college move to Pittsburgh seventeen months later, my walks became much more frequently and much more eventful. I was walking to escape, to find mental space away from the gang of under-five-year-olds that ruled the too-small, two-bedroom space of pain in which I had grown up. I walked to figure out who I was and who I wasn’t, to be angry at my family, at the world, and at myself. I walked to find meaning in a chaotic life and world. I walked because I could wear myself out with warp speed, spin moves and high-falsetto highs, with questions and emotions and sometimes even, some answers, before coming back to 616 and grabbing some sleep. I must’ve have gone on 100 or 150 walks of five miles or more in that year and a half before college.

Inception (2010), Paris dream construct screen shot, April 27, 2012. (http://dpmlicious.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of poor resolution of shot, not intended for distribution.

That doesn’t even count my more frequent forays into the city, not to do anything or be anything. I wasn’t working for my father anymore, and after he repeatedly called me a “Faggat” in August ’86 and tried to set me up with a prostitute in December ’86, I hardly went to see him at all until the last few weeks before leaving for Pitt. I didn’t even take Darren down to Midtown Manhattan, the Upper West Side, Harlem or Flatbush with me. That’s what I did with the spare hours I started stealing from my Mom on weekends during that year. I’d go down to the city, maybe buy a few tapes at Tower Records on 66th and Broadway (usually not, since most of my tapes came via Terra Haute, Indiana). Sometimes if I had a few dollars, I’d go to MOMA or Radio City or some other place and go into escape/observation mode there. Mostly, I walked and people watched for an hour or so, and then take the long way home between the 2 train, 241st Street and the heart of Mount Vernon.

All the while, my music was on, often at full blast. It was a coping strategy, a pain and stress reliever, my sword and my shield. It took my Phyllis obsession and my freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh to break the link between music, Walkman, and the need to escape. It took the pain of rejection, removal from an anti-Donald environment, and a bout of homelessness to make music about enjoyment and education. When that happened, sometime in ’88, I knew I couldn’t escape anymore.

Marya’s World

28 Sunday Feb 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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Admiration, African American History, Afrocentricity, Black Washington DC, Catherine Lugg, Community Space, Dissertation, Earl Lewis, Friendship, Joe William Trotter Jr., Leisure, Marya McQuirter, Multiculturalism, Public Historian, Research, Saab 900 GLE, Self-Discovery, Self-Reflection, Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship Program, Temple University, University of Michigan, Veganism

Marya McQuirter, circa 2011. (http://twitter.com).

The most fun part of grad school for me was once I officially began my dissertation research and writing. Especially when I was on the road, or stuck in at the Library of Congress, or meeting folks at conferences or other events. Otherwise, as I’ve written about here many times, it was a single-minded, often solitary pursuit, with known and unknown enemies either trying to put me in a box or rooting for my failure. Really, if a university as a whole could be any less supportive of their students’ success than Carnegie Mellon University, it’s probably a for-profit institution with a nine (9) percent graduation rate.

That’s how my CMU experience had been even before the Spencer Foundation had awarded me my dissertation fellowship in April ’95. But I did take advantage of one generous dispensation by my department chair Steven Schlossman. My becoming ABD within a year of transferring from Pitt to CMU made me eligible for a one-semester sabbatical from teaching to pursue my dissertation research while still on my $4,000-per-semester stipend, starting in January ’95. I made sure to use it, borrowing $4,000 in student loans for that semester as well, so that I could live in DC without living in a box on a corner for a month or two.

That fall, my advisor through one of his colleagues at the University of Michigan had given me the name of a promising doctoral candidate, one who was from DC and also doing her dissertation research on Black DC. I had first called her in October ’94, to learn that her research was on leisure activities and public history in Black Washington, DC in the first half of the twentieth century. It sounded more interesting than my own research on multiculturalism in Black DC, but there were parallels. So many leisure opportunities for Blacks who lived in Uptown communities like U Street and Le Droit Park included public works on Black history, on the connections between Black history and US history. It meant that our projects were actually more connected than not.

Saab 900 GLE, 1st generation (made between 1983 and 1993), UK, May 3, 2012. (SilkTork via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

So once I came down to DC to work like a monk in archives scattered across the area in February ’95, I contacted her. I’d meet her for the first time about three weeks into my eight-week stay in the area, near the end of February. Between my first few days staying with a former high school classmate and meeting a stranger-peer, I had nearly two-and-a-half weeks of eating, sleeping, and drinking dissertation, with a few moments in a shared kitchen listening to older men talk like we were in a barber shop about exploits and life’s lessons.

When we finally met that last Saturday in February, it was a welcome change. It helped that the doctoral candidate had her own car, a used any pretty worn blue-gray, two-door, stick-shift Saab 900 that had seen better days in the 1980s. For her part, despite grad school, the twenty-nine year-old looked younger than my twenty-five years. At five-eight and change, I wouldn’t have to look down at her in order to see the top of her head.

What impressed me the most about Marya, though, was that I could have a conversation with her about my dissertation research without her eyes glazing over, knowing full well that she understood every word coming out of my mouth. Even most of my fellow grad students at CMU and Pitt didn’t really understand my approach to multiculturalism, Black DC and African American history, and education policy. But she got it immediately.

I loved talking to Marya about her research, though. Looking at leisure and the use of space in Black communities for leisure, for everything from reading newspapers and used libraries, to literally how people walked and conversed in public. I found her work, and the way she talked about her work, fascinating. I wondered if I could ever be in love with a topic as much as her. It wasn’t that I didn’t like writing about multiculturalism. I just wasn’t star-crossed over it.

I learned so much not only during my first time hanging out with Marya, but over the next few years. I really didn’t know DC’s neighborhoods and the history of individual neighborhoods until she came along. She introduced me to the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Museum on local Black DC history. She took me to the Washington Historical Society off Dupont Circle, where I found additional materials on Black activities that were educational but outside the formal structure of Howard University and the segregated DC Public Schools.

Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum, SE Washington, DC, February 28, 2016. (http://www.thecapitalnews.com).

She also introduced me to a vegan lifestyle, one that actually seemed sustainable. Matter of fact, when I stayed with Marya for three days in August ’95, I was on a vegan diet. I saw the appeal, but my gastrointestinal tract, well on its way to IBS-land, could only handle but so much in raw fruits and vegetables. Still, Marya introduced me to so many neighborhoods and restaurants, to Ethiopian food in Adams Morgan, to vegan Chinese food in Rockville, to fellow grad students worked on public history dissertations, to young, intellectual DC in general.

Marya also unintentionally helped me see a side of Black thought that I hadn’t seen before. That she survived the Afrocentricity wars at Temple University while earning her master’s there made her tough but also made me weary of discussing my many criticisms of Molefi Asante and his grand entourage of followers. I was so relieved to learn that though she liked some aspects of Afrocentricity, Marya didn’t follow it blindly like so many others I knew in the ’90s. I’d met someone who also marched to the beat of her own drum.

Maybe I would’ve met these folks, made these connections, and gone to these places anyway. Maybe not. But if the former, it would’ve happened much more slowly and cautiously. Marya, for better and for worse, might have been one reason I thought of the DC area as a potential home after more than a decade living and earning degrees in Pittsburgh. Marya McQuirter, though, enriched my life in the years in which I needed it most. I’ve always admired her and her work, and will always see her as a friend.

Black Power Generation

24 Wednesday Feb 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Afrocentricity, Alondra Nelson, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, Authentic Blackness, Authenticity, Black Freedom, Black Panther Party, Black Power, Black Studies, Blackness, Bobby Seale, Community Control, Eldridge Cleaver, Free Breakfast, Harold Cruse, Huey Newton, Kwame Touré, Michael Eric Dyson, Nathan Wright Jr., Peniel Joseph, Policy Brutality, Robin D. G. Kelley, Stokely Carmichael, Whiteness

Black Panther national chairman Bobby Seale, wearing a Colt .45 and defense minister Huey Newton with a bandolier and shotgun, poster, Oakland, CA, 1968. (AP via http://pbs.org).

This year marks a half-century since the official shift of the Civil Rights Era from the traditional Civil Rights leadership of the Black Church toward one of “Black Power.” Between Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Touré’s famous 1966 speech, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale’s founding of the Black Panther Party that October, and riots that began with Watts in L.A. the year before, this was a pivotal year in American and African American history. Of course, as historians and other scholars like Peniel Joseph and Alondra Nelson have illuminated in recent years, while 1966 was a pivotal year, it was not a departure from a long history of the Black freedom struggle, but part a continuity. For Joseph and Nelson (not to mention, Robin D. G. Kelley and Michael Eric Dyson), Black Power was a continuation of radical ideas and actions in order to stand in opposition to American capitalism and racism as an intertwined system of oppression. The roots of which go at least as far back as Black sharecroppers and their union organizing efforts during the Great Depression, if not in fact to the radicalism of Martin Delany of the 1850s.

These wonderful scholars are absolutely right to dump the simplistic narrative of Black Power as a symbol of/departure from the struggle for civil rights or as a philosophy that advocates violence against Whites, especially Whites in law enforcement. They are also more than right to point out how Black Power and the Black Panther Party did way more good on a policy level than most Americans would ever give their leaders credit for. Fred Hampton and Newton and the Free Breakfast for School Children Program that started in Chicago and Oakland between 1969 and 1972. The People’s Free Medical Centers (PFMC), Free Ambulance Service, and other direct community involvement to provide free access to health care and screenings for thousands of impoverished Black families. Free food programs for the destitute.

Angela Davis on Newsweek cover after 1970 arrest, October 26, 1970. (http://pinterest.com). Qualifies as fair use due to adjustments for low resolution.

But more than that. The idea that Black communities could work to provide services and opportunities otherwise denied to them by American society was to be a major takeaway from this era of the overall Black freedom struggle. And of course, the idea that police served as an oppressive occupying force, and that Black citizens had every right to defend themselves against police brutality. Though direct armed struggle with law enforcement was in the Black Panther Party toolbox, the notion of policing the police, community control over schools, a community using its available resources, is still more positive than negative. These remain implementable ideas that have and do provide an outlet to the daily grind of racial discrimination and deep poverty in so many parts of the US.

Culturally, the freedom struggle as expressed through Black Power and the Black Panther Party, particularly by leaders like Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, Amiri Baraka, and Kwame Touré, was one of what we know would call Afrocentricity today. This was/is far more than wearing Afros, daishikis, sea shells and beads (or for that matter, black turtlenecks and tight pants). It would mean advocating for and getting universities (both predominantly White universities and HBCUS) to adopt Black Studies programs. It would mean influencing a whole generation of Black artists (the arts, music, and cinema) to adopt a “I’m Black and proud” stance in their work, from Marvin Gaye and the Lost Poets and Gil Scott Heron, to movies like Shaft and that first mainstream miniseries, Roots.

The Black Power Generation (kind of like Prince and The Revolution that tried to incorporate a mesh of messages between 1979 and 1986), for all of the elements that survived Huey Newton and his purges of the 1970s and early 1980s — not to mention their continuing influence in American pop culture, in Black intellectual thought, and in Black movements in general — was hardly perfect. Some, like the late Kwame Touré, promoted Black Power as a sort of authentic Blackness, a kind in which one had to buy all of the options on the table in order to be authentic. The “Uncle Tom” accusation or its equivalent was thrown at Martin Luther King, Whitney Young, Arthur Ashe, and others whose support of Black Power was less that full-throated. Not to mention, the tensions between leaders within the Black Panther Party and among African American intellectuals who attempted to ride the wave of Black Power, as nearly forgotten Black intellectuals Harold Cruse and Nathan Wright, Jr. noted in the late-1960s.

Gemasolar Thermosolar Plant (solar power concentration, converting solar energy to thermal turbine power generation), Fuentes de Andalucía, Seville province, Spain, June 22, 2014. (Wikipedia via http://vice.com).

That lingering legacy of Black Power is part of its appeal and one of its limits — the ability to redefine ourselves and retell our history in a way that brings nuance and truth. But nuance and truth are not always absolutes. In many respects, Black Power over the generations shares a similarity with Marxist thought and action. Just as Marxism represents a dialectical opposition to capitalist oppression, Black Power has always represented a dialectical resistance to Whiteness and the racist/capitalist oppression that comes with Whiteness. It just doesn’t represent the only form of resistance there is, at least not as Newton, Touré, and others lived their resistance. Black Power is more than resistance, and more than just an amorphous idea standing in opposition to Whiteness. It’s just not the only form of Blackness there is. My own upbringing would be a further testimony to this (to be continued…).

EWF, A Reminder That I Did Have a Childhood

06 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, earth, wind & fire, Eclectic, eclectic music, High Rise Buildings, Mount Vernon New York, music, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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EWF, Funk, Hebrew-Israelite, Humanities, Imagination, Jazz, Maurice Eugene Washington, Maurice Washington, Maurice White, Pop, R&B, Self-Awareness, Self-Discovery

Earth, Wind & Fire’s All ‘N All (1977) album cover, February 6, 2016. (http://www.allmusic.com).

I’m still reeling over Maurice White. Yeah, I still have my Earth, Wind & Fire on my CDs, my iPod, my iPhone, on three laptops and a desktop. Phillip Bailey and White’s brothers-in-arts are still here. Their music will always be with me and with us. But it feels like a little piece of my relative (if not contrived) innocence from my pre-Humanities, pre-Hebrew-Israelite days died with White Wednesday night.

Here’s what I wrote about those days of deliberately-induced blissful naiveté, Earth, Wind & Fire included, in my memoir:

“For me, this boy, this tweener, an active imagination and an even more animated dream life was critical. Living in between the hustle and bustle of “The City,” — Manhattan and the other four boroughs of New York — and the relative quiet of the ritzy suburbs immediately north of it was everything and everyone I knew before the age of twelve. Just three blocks after the elevated 2 Subway line ended at East 241st Street in the Bronx was where “Mount Vernon, New York” began. From the hard concrete sidewalks and green street signs of New York to the crumbling light blue slate and dark blue signs were my only indications that I had truly left the city. This despite the claims of so many I knew that upstate New York began somewhere above 125th or 207th Street in Manhattan. I knew by the time I was twelve that, sleepy bedroom suburb or not, Mount Vernon had more features in common with the Bronx and upper Manhattan than most city folk were willing to recognize.

“My only links to the great metropolis to the south were WNBC-TV (Channel 4), Warner Wolf — with his famous “Let’s go to the video tape line — doing sports on WCBS-TV (Channel 2), and WABC-AM 77 and WBLS-FM 107.5 on the radio. I found the AM station more fun to listen to, but I also liked listening to the sign-off song WBLS played at the end of the evening, Moody’s Mood for Love, with that, ‘There I go, There I go, The-ere I go…’ start. Music had been an important part of my imagination in ’79, with acts like Earth, Wind & Fire, Christopher Cross, Billy Joel and The Commodores. Not to mention Frank Sinatra, Queen, Donna Summer and Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall album. The music also made me feel like I was as much a part of New York as I was a part of Mount Vernon. It left me thinking of the ozone and burnt rubber smell that I noticed as soon as I would walk down into the Subway system in Manhattan. But aside from my occasional slip of the tongue — ‘warda’ for ‘water’ and ‘bawwgt’ for ‘bought’ — I didn’t sound or act much like a New Yawker. Still, I discovered something about New York from afar. I could sneak up to the rooftop of my apartment building, 616 East Lincoln, a five-story complex of three connected brick buildings with Tudor-style facades and a concrete-stone foundation. I’d find the exit to the roof unlocked and see the tops of the Twin Towers floating over some low-lying clouds on an otherwise sunny day. The symbols of the greatest city on Earth seemed to float toward the heavens on those days, and me with them.

“Besides the occasional reminder of life outside of my world, of Mount Vernon, I was the center of my own universe. Mount Vernon was but a stage on which my life played out, a place I hoped would stay this way forever. I was an eleven-year-old who thought that my world was the world. I lived my life like Philip Bailey and Maurice White would’ve wanted me to. I came to see ‘victory in a life [sic] called fantasy’ as my own life, living as if my imagination and dreams could be made into reality. All I had to do was wish it so.”

Because of what I went through during the Boy @ The Window years, I had to learn to get over my idiot ex-stepfather’s abuse to continue listening to Earth, Wind & Fire between ’82 and ’89. The late Maurice Eugene Washington was a fan as well, and I didn’t want us to both like the same music. Who the heck knew what was going on in his head when he heard “Fantasy” or “After The Love Is Gone,” anyway?

All I know is, there won’t be another group like the one Maurice White founded in ’69, the year I was born. All I can do is hold on to my precious Earth, Wind & Fire music, and the imagination that it helped spark. All I can do now is hope that someone can even begin to approach the kind of ethereal and powerfully Black-and-proud mix of music that White, Bailey, et al. were able to construct for nearly a decade. One can fantasize, right?

Second Semester Crunch Time

21 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Academic Preparation, Affirmative Action, Challenge Scholarship, College Board, College Retention, Coursework, ETS, Friendships, Internalized Racism, Internalized Sexism, Perseverance, Pitt, Predictability, Righteous Indignation, SAT, Self-Determination, Self-Discovery, Single-Minded

Maybe not a HOF, but a great crunch time catch (literal and figurative) by Terrell Owens, San Francisco 49ers vs. Green Bay Packers, Wildcard Game, Candlestick Park, January 3, 1999. (http://sfgate.com).

As this spring semester begins for me at UMUC — a cruel euphemism in January with a windchill around -10°C and a major winter storm approaching the Mid-Atlantic — I’ve reminded myself of the same calendar twenty-eight years ago. As I’ve already noted through my blog and through Boy @ The Window, this was to be a make-or-break semester for me. I had to step up my game at the University of Pittsburgh or go home. And by home, I mean to 616, a place in Mount Vernon, New York that might as well been my burial plot if I had managed to lose my Challenge Scholarship after that Winter Term 1988.

As I wrote in my book

Despite my advisor, I decided to take a full load of classes, balancing two math courses with two history ones, with “rocks for jocks” Geology being the fifth one. The others were Western Civ II, Roman History, Calculus II (the regular one, not Honors), and Logic.

It was to be a sixteen-credit semester. My advisor, a one-time PhD candidate in the History Department at Pitt (talk about life have no coincidences, past, present or future), thought that after my 2.63 first semester, that I had no business making my college schedule more difficult. But after four years of Sylvia Fasulo at Mount Vernon High School, I decided I was through taking advice about taking it easy. I might’ve not known much about my inner self in January ’88, but I knew this much. I was never the guy to take the easy, path-of-least-resistance road in my education. Fact is, I never had the choice of an easy road at any point in my life.

The only obviously easy course of the five I took was Geology 89, and it was only easy because it was a lecture hall course with three multiple choice exams and one textbook. Calc II — with its focus on integrals, volumes, spheres, and other pre-differential calculations — I figured would be easier than Honors Calc I, partly because I excelled on this part of the AP Calculus course the year before (I probably earned my 3 on the AP Calc BC exam on the strength of that work), and partly because this wasn’t an Honors course.

Advanced logic equations, January 20, 2016. (http://www.galilean-library.org).

Then there was Logic. An ironic choice of a title, since the course didn’t make sense to me from day one. Inductive and deductive reasoning, so the British-born professor told us the first day. With so many symbols and few numbers, how could I consistently deduce an answer to any logic equation? And, what the heck did any of this have to do with being a Computer Science major, anyway?

As for Western Civ II and Roman History, I was surprised how easy I found both courses by the third week, especially after my debacle in East Asian History the month before. But then again, I didn’t miss a single class, I stayed ahead on my readings — and though I knew nearly half of the material going in — and studied as if I’d never been an A student in a history course before.

I had taken the shame of the first semester, the embarrassment of my internalized -isms and imperfections, the anger I directed toward myself, my family, and my idiot dorm mates and let it fuel me. I was on a righteous path of academic vengeance. At least that’s what I thought at the time.

A Planters Peanut Bar, April 25, 2011. (Evan-Amos via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

That sober, almost single-minded focus got me noticed, even though it was my attempt at trying to lay low. I made quite a few friends that semester, most of whom I still call friend today. All of them anywhere between one and twenty years older than me. Call it a sense of maturity, my angered march toward my future, or the sense that I needed to be around folks whose lives had taken at least half as many twists and turns as my own. Whatever it was, I ended up on a path where having a social life would play as much a role in saving my educational future as showing up to all but four lectures in a sixteen-week semester.

I finished that second semester on the Dean’s List with a 3.33 GPA, and a first-year GPA of 3.02. Two A’s (my history classes), an A- in Geology, a B in Calc II, and a C+ in Logic (I did learn a few things even in that course). By the end of April, I was already thinking about switching majors to History. Of more immediate importance was my saving my scholarship for year number two. Not to mention, having friends of any significance for the first time since elementary school.

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Affirmative action opponents from Supreme Court Justices Antonio Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Chief Justice John Roberts — as well as Allan Bakke, Jennifer Gratz, Barbara Gruttinger, and Abigail Fisher — all claim that efforts to use the admissions process to bring racial (and gender and socioeconomic) diversity to college campuses is discriminatory. The College Board and ETS cite their statistics to show that the SAT is especially predictive of a student’s performance in the first semester or first year. Anyone working on college retention — especially for underrepresented students — recognizes that nearly half of all students who drop out of college do so after the first two semesters.

Orange Crush can crushed, June 8, 2012. (Susan Murtaugh via Flickr.com).

I knew none of this my second semester at Pitt. No one could’ve predicted my first semester’s depression or the single-minded channeling of anger and intellectual resources my second, least of all me. And no, Justice Scalia, college at a school of the stature of the University of Pittsburgh wasn’t too hard for me. It wouldn’t have been too hard for me at any other university for that matter. Life was. And yes, Ms. Gratz and Ms. Fisher, race played a significant role in where I was, where I wanted to be, and how I got there. Just not to your entitled, narcissistic disadvantage.

As for ETS and the College Board, your predictions of my struggles and triumphs based on my 65th percentile 1120 score from October ’86 were more than a bit premature. And not just mine. Fact is, the vast majority of people like me attending predominantly White institutions graduate, whether the campus climate is welcoming or not. However, having a welcoming climate, just as the one I began to discover my second semester, really helps. I guess you couldn’t predict that.

The State of the Union, That’s Not Optimistic

13 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work, Youth

≈ 1 Comment

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2016 SOTU, Accomplishments, American Dream, American ideals, Congress, Denial, Fables, Faith, Falsehoods, Great Men In History, Oligarchy, Optimism, Plutocracy, Pollyanna, President Barack Obama, State of the Union Address, Supreme Court, Vision

President Barack Obama’s final State of the Union speech, The US Capitol, January 12, 2016. (Evan Vucci, Pool/AP, via http://abcnews.com).

President Barack Obama ended his eighth and final State of the Union address in front of Congress and the nation last night with the words, “That’s why I stand here as confident as I have ever been that the state of the union is strong.” The president’s crescendo came after nearly fifteen minutes of describing the America that he sees and believes in. Obama illuminated individual examples of dedication and hard work and courage he has witnessed since he first began running for president in February 2007.

That President Obama chooses to look at his hundreds of — if not several thousand — examples of individual Americans striving for and maybe even achieving some sort of American Dream is admirable. But in light of the remaining 320 million Americans unaccounted for in his speech, the president’s speech isn’t an expression of optimism. President Obama has chosen the path of too many in power, to ignore how deep the wounds and injuries of the nation go, to fight what the US faces in terms of its cavernous and even cancerous problems with beliefs and limited actions. That’s not optimism. That’s both faith — albeit a bit misplaced — and blind devotion to an ideal that this America in 2016 has been moving away from for decades.

There are just a few examples from President Obama’s speech that point to a combination of near-religious faith and ostrich head-in-sand denial. Most notably:

The idea that the US economy has produced a net +14 million jobs since the day President Obama took office. That number is probably correct, but just like with all previous presidents since FDR, this number is hardly the whole story. Fact is, millions of Americans who lost their jobs during the Great Recession have yet to regain employment. Millions more have taken the jobs that the American economy creates the most frequently: low-wage, part-time, seasonal and/or contract work. And for those Americans who have been able to hold on to employment despite the Great Recession, their real wages are just in the last two years beginning to approach 2008 numbers. More importantly, their ability to move to a better or higher paying position has diminished since 2008, which is part of a four-decade-long trend. Yes, Americans should credit the Obama Administration for stanching the bleed from the femoral artery in 2009, 2010, and 2011. But the American economy still needs an arterial graft and a heart transplant.

2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump meeting with New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, Gillette Stadium, Foxboro, MA, October 21, 2012. (Nancy Lane/Boston Herald;http://bostonhearld.com).

President Obama’s claim that Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant, anti-Latino, anti-Muslim, anti-Black, and anti-feminist populism is just “wrong” and “doesn’t represent our American values.” Trump’s campaign certainly doesn’t represent American ideals or visions of a “shining city upon a hill,” to quote the late former President Ronald Reagan from his 1984 campaign. But despite what Obama said last night, Trump and his supporters and potential voters are a strain of American values and politics that has always been, and perhaps always will be. Trump is very much exploiting a clear-eyed vision of America as a White (and male) Christian nation, one with automatic exclusions from the club of those not entitled to the American Dream socioeconomically, culturally, and even spiritually. While President Obama acknowledged this in his speech, he ignored the reality that this strain of -isms in American politics and culture remains powerful and needs to be fought, not just wished away with a more conciliatory vision of America.

The idea that a better statesman, that an all-time great president like FDR or Abraham Lincoln could have bridged the divide in Congress, with the Supreme Court, and in American politics in general. This is patently false and extremely tongue-in-cheek on President Obama’s part. His great-man-in-politics theme has actually grown tired over the course of the past nine years. For as great as both of those presidents were, President Franklin Roosevelt and President Lincoln presided over an America in def-con-one crises, before America was officially a superpower. As terrible as the Great Recession and its after-effects have been, as deplorable as American use of force in the Middle East, East Africa, and South Asia has been, the Civil War, the Great Depression and World War II were foundational periods of change. President Obama might not have been the GPAT (Greatest President of All-Time), but in an era of an oligarchic Congress and a plutocratic Supreme Court, he did as good as job as FDR and President Lincoln would have. It still wasn’t good enough, but not because President Obama wasn’t a great person or very good president. Americans needed someone willing to make radical changes, and not just a centrist committed to a grand vision of bipartisan compromise and slow, incremental changes.

I will definitely miss President Obama as my president when he relinquishes the office on Friday, January 20, 2017 at 12 noon. But I won’t miss his brand of optimism. For optimism that relies on falsehoods about America as a meritocracy, Americans as a tolerant people, and American imperialism as a force for good in the world isn’t optimism. It’s a fable more vast and more deadly than any the Grimm brothers could have written two hundred years ago.