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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Tag Archives: Academic Writing

My Whole Self At 50

27 Friday Dec 2019

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Academic Writing, Achievements, Betrayal, Calling, CMU, Crew, Domestic Violence, DV, Failures, Family, Fears, Love, Misfits, Misogynoir, Ostracism, Patriarchy, Pitt, Purpose, Self-Reflection, Setbacks, Toxic Masculinity, Turning 50, Writing


Selfie of me at 50, December 27, 2019. (Donald Earl Collins)

The title could just as easily be, “Confessions From an Educated Fool.” After all, I am highly educated, and have done more than my share of dumb-ass bullshit over the years to avoid certain truths about myself.

I have no idea what turning 50 really means. For Black men, the average life expectancy of 64.5 years makes me worry about every ache and every anomaly. Based on my family genetics, I have at least 30 years where my age will in no way be reflected in my height, weight, athleticism, sex drive, or other general health issues. My mind should remain sharp until I am in my late-80s or early 90s, if not longer. As of now, I know I am in better overall shape than I was this time 10 years ago, but lack the running stamina I developed during most of my 40s. On the other hand, my knees have been thanking me for the past 17 months since I stopped running 300-plus miles a year.

Depending on how I look at my life, I am a scrambler who has turned an Olympic-size swimming pool full of diarrhea with turd chunks into two kilos of gold. Or, I am a once brilliant and talented young Black man whose temper and impatience fucked up his future. Two things can be true, sometimes equally so, and at the same time. That is, if I don’t account for upbringing, systemic racism, extreme poverty, the violence of misogynoir and toxic masculinity, and a host of other burdens that my differential equation mind could not factor into my life’s calculus. Much less control or counteract with respectability or kindness or the Golden Rules of Christianity.

Some context. When I was 11, I participated in my first writing contest and came in second place among the dozens of K-12 students who submitted to the local newspaper, the Mount Vernon Daily Argus. By then, I had long buried the sexual assault I endured and the subsequent suicide attempt from five years earlier. I graduated 14th in a class of 509 in 1987, only to spend my last days of high school and the year after my enrollment at Pitt treated as if I were an invisible ghost by many of my former classmates. At 25, I earned a Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. But the entire time I was in commune with “my fellow Fellows,” as I used to say, I was ambivalent about my prospects, in and out of academia. At 26, in part because of the Spencer fellowship, I completed my dissertation. Yet my advisor’s petty jealousies and psychological abuse burned me out, just as my dissertation committee’s subsequent abandonment of me once I graduated left me feeling burned.

I was a young prospect with a doctorate from Carnegie Mellon, but with little in financial support or connections to continue to spin shit into gold. After two years, I left the wonderful world of adjunct teaching for a civic education job with the center-right organization Presidential Classroom. My boss was both extremely paranoia about terrorist attacks on DC and openly racist, referring to Asians as “Orientals” and making comments like “Slavery was a hoax.” After seven job interviews for academic positions over three years, Howard University offered me a tenure-stream assistant professorship in June 2000. I said no. At the time, I told my significant other, two months into our marriage, “I do not like working for racists, but at least I know where I stand. With Howard’s constant elitism, I’d likely lose it and pop one of my colleagues in the mouth for saying something elitist and stupid.” I was averaging 100-to-110 hours of work per week and about five hours of broken sleep at night when I made this decision.

Sometimes I think it’s the dumbest adult decision I ever made. Most of time, though, I think about the broom closet that they offered me as an office. I remember the urinals in the Founders Library that dated back to the tenure of Mordecai Johnson (1926-1960). I ruminate on rough attitudes of my one-time colleagues (I eventually taught there as an adjunct in 2007). And through all this, I remind myself that it was okay to say no. Especially to colorism, respectability politics, and a campus that has been in need of a total gutting and a top-down renovation at least since I began visiting in 1993.

My career has been one of wandering by necessity. I have never been a complete fit anywhere. Damn sure not in academia. Definitely not in the nonprofit world. Certainly not in consulting. And not quite as a freelance writer and author. I have had to bend and break so many rules and norms, just to survive, that to mold and shape myself like a shapeshifter would nearly always lead to me feeling at constant war, with myself and my work.

Selfie of me post-workout, December 24, 2019. (Donald Earl Collins).

Especially since so much of this war was over who I am. I am a writer, damn it! I love teaching — most of the time. I like managing projects, and was fairly good at raising money. I am an excellent cook (just ask anyone other than my Mom). I am a pretty good basketball player even now, and could’ve made a D1 college squad back in the day. I once considered stripping to make ends meet after finishing my doctorate (my eventual wife talked me out of it, a lot, while I gunned for a six-pack). But since at least the spring of 1981 (maybe, with Peanuts Land, the spring of 1979), I have been a storytelling, introspective, imagining-of-alternative-worlds-and-lives, mixing-fictional-techniques-with-my-real-life writer. It took me 21 years to admit that I was a writer, another decade to see myself as a writer first and foremost. That no matter the job or my roles in that job, that I was, am, and will always be a writer.

That was what motivated me to write Fear of a “Black” America and Boy @ The Window and then self-publish them, even as the process of researching and writing Boy @ The Window led me to uncover so many uncomfortable truths about me, my family, and the people I grew up around. Including the truth about my greatest failure, my refusal to dig out the splinter in my mind. The dual decision to not see myself as a writer and then to not dedicate myself spirit, soul, and body to my craft and calling until after turning 45. That’s my biggest regret, my daily frustration, my constant companion, buried just a few millimeters between my flesh and my bones.

Even when I finally push through, break through, blow up, and have any modest level of success as an author of x-number of books — and I will, because, me — I will continue to carry this deep well of what coulda and shoulda been. My need to credential myself, to make up for the loss of my childhood to poverty and domestic violence and child abuse, my desire for worth and work, my simple arrogance of youth. It nearly squeezed out the divine voice of purpose in my mind. More than once, it all drove me to the edge of the galaxy, where rage against the world, a lust for lust and self-destruction, and the sheer drop into the abyss of depression all intersect into a nebula of desperate insanity.

This is precisely why it is so important to have a crew, a group of folx who will not jump into the void with you, but instead will support you with critique and encouragement, and yes, love. Of course, I could not have transitioned from the burnout of the nonprofit world and the constant search for money to “change the world” into the constant search for income through freelance writer and teaching social justice through history and education without my wife. After years of watching bosses and co-workers get down on their knees to beg for money while they morphed the grassroots and systemic social justice work they really wanted to do into inchworm-paced “social change” models, I wanted out. I figured, consulting, occasionally teaching, and doing the work I truly wanted to do would be better.

Then, the Great Recession hit, and did a number on my permanent job prospects and consulting work. If someone had told me on verge of my 40th birthday that I would spend the next decade primarily working as contingent faculty at not one but two universities, I would have laughed until I cried. I would’ve also predicted that my wife would’ve handed me divorce papers. I didn’t die from woeful laughter, and my beloved did not demand that I move on.

But we did argue. One of those arguments led me to a “Fuck It” realization at the end of 2014. No one would ever offer me a permanent position at a university as faculty, not without offering me an administrator position first. And since the unofficial rules of the academy have never really applied to me and my writing, I had the right to publish anywhere, on any topic, even if and when other academicians — including some whom I had trained — looked at me like I was some tragic figure.

Along with some counterintuitive thinking about my eclectic writing skills and queer approaches to understanding the application of history and education in mainstream journalism, this new truth has been my resurrection and insurrection as a writer. Between The Guardian and Seven Scribes, The Atlantic, Huffington Post, and The Washington Post, and especially Al Jazeera English, I have come closest to being my truest and whole self outside of marriage, friendship, parenting, and my many moments in prayer.

I owe my wife for allowing me the space necessary to finally access my calling. But I also owe my small inner circle of folx who may not have always understood my journey and the decisions I made that led me to where I am at half-century. They’ve read my horrific drafts, heard my most hare-brained ideas, smiled through my most ludicrous of plans both before and during this bitter slog of a rollercoaster ride. I’m more than sure that some in my circle still don’t understand my end game. Mostly because there is some aspect of my whole self that I haven’t shared with them. Not only my desire as a writer. But my general desire to be excellent at everything, my quest to know everything, and my contradictory default of being scared of nearly everything, especially of whatever good moments I have had. Too many times, I have seen the anvil drop on or near me all too soon after drilling a three.

I think I have one more big run in me left. The proverbial they say that life is a marathon and not a sprint. They are wrong. Life is like a continuous basketball game, where one can be overmatched, but can take timeouts and make a series of 12-0 or 30-13 runs to tie the game or take the lead. I am in the midst of a run right now, as unexpected as living past the age of 30 was for me when I almost jumped off a bridge on my 14th birthday, 36 years ago.

I need the crew I have, and I could use some help from a few more folx who may want to join me on my journey into decade six. I’m gunning for a book contract for my American narcissism and American racism work. I’m looking for some career stability that takes advantage of my work in academia, in nonprofits, and in freelance writing. I’m looking to make sure that my son becomes the whole person he needs to be without spending the next 20 or 30 years kvetching about everything in the universe. I’m looking forward to spending more time traveling outside the US with him, with my wife, with others, and with myself. It’s time. It’s been time for 50 years.

Michael Clayton, My Writing, and 20 Years of Sinai-Wandering

16 Thursday Mar 2017

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Academia, Academic Writing, CMU, Dan Resnick, Falsehoods, Gene Clayton, George Clooney, Lies, Michael Clayton, Michael Clayton (2007), Mythology, Pitt, Politics of Academia, Publish-or-Perish, Richard J. Altenbaugh, Scholarship, Sean Cullen, Unwritten Rules, Writing, Writing Career


George Clooney and Sean Cullen in Michael Clayton (2007), March 15, 2017. (http://bbc.co.uk).

My favorite scene from Michael Clayton (2007) is when the title character’s brother Gene (played by Sean Cullen) confronts Michael (played by George Clooney) about the past seventeen years of his career as a fixer.

You got these cops thinking you’re a lawyer. You got these lawyers thinking you’re a cop. You got everybody fooled, don’t you? Everybody but you. You know exactly what you are.

About a year and a half ago, I figured I could insert the words “writer” and “scholar” in those lines, with twenty years of my career(s) for context, and maybe some of the meaning would be correct. I am a writer’s version of Michael Clayton. I’ve got academicians thinking I’m a unscholarly writer, and journalists and editors who think I’ve only written for scholarly audiences. What a mess!

Last year, after receiving a rejection for a version of my article about American narcissism, American racism, and why real conversations on race (whether through Clinton’s Race Initiative or via Ferguson) are all but impossible, I decided no more. I will not seek to submit another scholarly piece to a peer-reviewed scholarly journal ever again. And if asked, unless it’s something I truly feel passionate about, I will say no.

Do not think of this as sour grapes. I have published two full-length journal articles in my career, not to mention a bunch of the standard book reviews, and an op-ed for Teachers College Record in the past. Technically, I am 3-for-11 in publishing academic articles over the past two decades, not great, but hardly abysmal.

My issue is with the elitism and implicit bias that is rampant in the publish-or-perish world of academia. While some folks could argue it is the same in publishing in general, it really isn’t. The unwritten rules in publishing, if not followed, may well still lead to published articles, even if a person is starving and homeless in between. In academic publishing, not following the rules leads to ostracism, and a career dead before it ever begins.

Keep in mind, no scholarly journal pays authors for their articles. It takes about two years to go from submission to publication in most history and education journals. If twenty people read your article, that’s icing on a protein-powder cake. If you aren’t in the tenure-stream, though, it really doesn’t matter how many articles you publish, because it doesn’t provide job stability or security. As a former nonprofit administrator, it scared most of my supervisors whenever and wherever I published, so no benefits there either. For those in tenure-stream positions, it does matter, no matter how crappy the research or how densely unreadable the writing.

After twenty years in the publishing struggle, it’s time to face the truth. I simply wasn’t good enough to publish in academic journals. I’m not talking about my writing ability or research skills. I’m pointing out my eclectic career path, my lack of tenure at an elite university, with few to vouch for me when I was younger and an up-and-comer. My interdisciplinary research on race, on multiculturalism, on education, meant that I was a misfit from day one. Heck, I know for sure in at least one case, a journal editor held my race and age against me.

Sinai Desert, where Moses, the Israelites (and I) wandered for a generation, Egypt, March 9, 2010. (Tommy from Arad via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-BY-SA 2.0.

I know most of the academic writing rat-race is a system of exploitation based in part on fears of joblessness, loss of prestige, and elitism based on class, race, gender, and whether one teaches at an elite university or at a community college. It is based on an academician’s ability to blame themselves and themselves alone for their failings, and not the oppressive publishing system itself. Kind of like the poor blaming themselves for their poverty. Or Whites and Blacks blaming other Blacks for a degenerative culture instead of looking at systemic racism as the real culprit for racial inequality. Academia is very much in and of this wider world of social injustice and oppression, no matter how university presidents attempt to spin it.

Truly, I find the idea of a cold, objective, dispassionate, dense writing style as more serious and scholarly than any other form to be high-grade bullshit. It’s what folks in academia tell each other. Just like many a journalist and editor is a frustrated writer looking for creative and book manuscript-length outlets, many a writer in academia believes their writing (and as often as not, their research) to be much more than it is.

But the biggest issue for me was my elitist and naive attempt to straddle the fence between academic publishing and writing for wider audiences. This living in two worlds began for me during my heady days, my grad school years at both the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon. Some of my history professors, like Paula Baker, Kate Lynch, and Joe Trotter, all tried with a considerable amount of frustration to get me to write in more scholarly tones. Others seemed to be fine with my writing style. I had a tone that was too “journalistic,” according to my racial paternalistic professor Dan Resnick, who meant it as an insult.

Between 1997 and 2002, I churned out eight full-length pieces (in the 20-35-page-range) on multiculturalism and Black education/history meant for peer-reviewed scholarly journals, four of them between February and December 1997 alone. None of them were ever published. One, an admittedly ambitious state-of-the-subfield piece on multicultural education and its history in American education, elicited a response from the History of Education Quarterly’s editor-in-chief. He was my one-time professor during my first year of graduate school at Pitt, Dick Altenbaugh. Him and his managing editor met with me for nearly an hour and a half in March 1998.

Some of the meeting was about the deficiencies in my article and in my argument. But most of the time was about my writing style, my ambitiousness, and quite frankly, my age and race. I wrote about some of this in Fear of a “Black” America. Apparently, at twenty-eight, I needed to be in my mid-40s to write a grand essay on multicultural education. Allegedly, I needed long-retired (and in one case, dying) White scholars to support my arguments, no matter what evidence I brought to bear. I needed, most of all, to stop being so ambitious about my work, and stick to more objective, run-of-mill, 181-variations-on-a-theme topics in the education field. Like what Karl Marx or John Dewey would have to say about ability grouping.

I gave up on academic publishing in 2002, at least on the topic of Black education/history and multiculturalism. I tried to write articles on everything from social justice movements to the fallacies of the liberal-conservative construct, on education, poverty and mythology of American social mobility, even on intersectionality. Only, I had worked so hard to make myself more of a scholarly writer. So much so that I now had to relearn how to write for more than fifteen people, and really, to write for myself. It took about a year to drop the 40, 50, and 60-word compound sentences, the use of inappropriately complex language, and the mask of dispassionate objectivity in my writing. Ironically, this was also when I published my first scholarly piece, on multicultural conservatism and Derrick Bell’s “Rules of Racial Standing,” in 2003. I also published my first solo op-ed, in the Washington Post, around the same time.

By this time, I saw myself as a recovering academic. I also had some unfinished personal business, around how I got to my mid-thirties, to this place in my life where I had “made it,” sort of, but I hadn’t escaped my past. This was where the story of Boy @ The Window took over, and why I have a memoir and nearly ten years of blog posts.

But because of my nonprofit work on college access and retention, two professors invited me and my team to submit a piece for publication in their journal. It was a four-person piece with me as the primary author (I wrote about 90 percent of it, so there’s that). The original invite was in June 2007, and the article came out in mid-October 2009. I had stopped working for the Academy for Educational Development, and found writing the article like a strait-jacket and a time-gobbler.

Michael Clayton (George Clooney) and a horse, a moment of truth, screen shot and crop, 2007. (http://chud.com).

After Boy @ The Window in 2013, I decided to write articles for a broader audience again. This time, I made the decision to take my memoir-writing experiences and apply them to my writing. I started writing about K-12 and corporate education reform, the problems in higher education, about racism in the Obama era, about poverty and its connections to race, gender, and current issues. And over the past two years, I’ve published more and reached more people than I could ever have done with an award-winning article in the Journal of American History.

So academia, you win. I give up.

The Long Road Home

19 Tuesday May 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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"Thriving as a Freelance Academic", Academia, Academic Writing, Bruce Anthony Jones, Career, Career Decisions, Career Development, Career Options, CMU, Disillusionment, Joe William Trotter Jr., Katie Rose Guest Pryal, Peter Stearns, Politics of Academia, Politics of the Foundation World, Self-Awareness, Self-Determination, Self-Discovery, Social Justice, Teaching and Learning, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Troublemaker, Writing


My stressed-out PhD walk photo, Carnegie Mellon University, May 18, 1997. (Angelia N. Levy).

My stressed-out PhD walk photo, Carnegie Mellon University, May 18, 1997. (Angelia N. Levy).

It’s been eighteen years and nearly a day since I had to shake then Carnegie Mellon Dean Peter Stearns’ hand on stage as part of the PhD portion of the 100th commencement ceremony for graduates, that third sweltering Sunday in May ’97. I’ve talked about the ceremony, my Mom’s jealousy and issues about my degree, Peter Stearns, Joe Trotter, Bruce Anthony Jones, and what happened before and after the degree ceremonies on that fateful day.

But time and enlightenment — especially the latter — has allowed me to take a step back from the events leading to a new wave of disillusionment in my life. If I really think about it, my struggles with where I wanted to go with my career go as far back as ’81, in the months after my first accolades as a writer, to the time when at eleven, I already had an encyclopedic knowledge of history, basic science, and technology. Heck, I already knew some of the historiography around World War II, the Cold War, American slavery and civil rights, long before I ever knew the definition for historiography. Not to mention, I was already living what we now call migration studies, thanks to my Mom and dad.

But my Boy @ The Window years did their damage to me. By the time I turned twenty at the end of the ’80s, I wasn’t fully clear of the array of choices I had for a career or set of careers. I knew I could write, and often write well. Yet I had stopped seeing myself as a writer by the time I went through my summer of abuse in ’82. I knew that I was a historian, because I asked the kinds of questions about history that only trained historians would. Yet I hated the idea that I was supposed to write only one way, using words like synergistic and interstitial (at an esoteric minimum) along the way. I toyed with the idea of going to law school in ’90, even going so far as to take the LSAT, scoring a then-50th percentile 31 on the exam in my one-and-only try.

Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922), The Long Road--Argilla Road, Ipswich, circa 1898, April 28, 2010. (BrooklynMuseumBot via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922), The Long Road–Argilla Road, Ipswich, circa 1898, April 28, 2010. (BrooklynMuseumBot via Wikipedia). In public domain.

I struggled for years with my fundamental question: “Am I an academic historian who’s also a writer? Am I a writer who’s also a historian? Can I be both?” I realized about a decade ago the question was moot. I am both. The real question really has been, will the working world allow me to operate as both without giving me grief and a hard way to go? (By the way, if I ever were to do a second, post-Boy @ The Window memoir, this would be one of that book’s big themes.)

I can safely say as a mildly successful freelance writer that the answer for many in this world of singularities is no. The working world puts up a fight, has and will continue to try to force me and others with multiple talents to choose one path, to do one thing, and one thing only, ideally for all time.

Academicians only think about each other via teaching duties or well-placed articles and books in scholarly journals and scholarly publishing houses. Higher education administrators believe that the only way to understand their work is through the lens of their specific university, as if universities and colleges aren’t similar from a management standpoint. Nonprofit organizations

A male mallard duck, a bird's triple threat (can walk, swim under water and fly), Saint-Eustache, Quebec, Canada, November 19, 2007. (Acarpentier via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

A male mallard duck, a bird’s triple threat (can walk, swim under water and fly), Saint-Eustache, Quebec, Canada, November 19, 2007. (Acarpentier via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

discount teaching and higher education administrator positions because finding money or managing students isn’t exactly the same as managing staff. Foundations who use your salary history instead of your scope of programs developed, people reached, and money raised as a barometer for even granting you an interview. All would prefer that you be quiet about injustices, especially ones in which their institution, organization, or foundation might well be complicit.

For me in the past couple of decades, though, I’ve worked in and with academicians, higher education administrators, nonprofit organizations, and private foundations. I’ve helped raise $3 million over the years, managed as many as twenty-five staff members, organized four-day conferences with a couple hundred attendees, worked with as many as 500 students at any given time, and taught undergraduate and graduate courses. I’ve written scholarly articles, published in scholarly journals, presented at a couple dozen conferences, and consulted for nonprofit organizations and foundations. To think of myself as only one thing is beyond ridiculous given my by-necessity-and-neglect careers so far.

Yesterday, The Chronicle of Higher Education posted the article “Thriving as a Freelance Academic” by Katie Rose Guest Pryal. In it, Pryal interviewed three White women about their experiences freelancing in the academic world. The women interviewed found a singular niche, found steady work through that niche, and otherwise didn’t question the idea of freelancing in a world in which freelancing is a rare career choice.

A square peg hammered into a round hole, May 2014. (http://joshbrahm.com/).

A square peg hammered into a round hole, May 2014. (http://joshbrahm.com/).

All that is fine. Except there was little soul-searching in Pryal’s piece. The women interviewed might as well have decided to go on a global trek or rock climbing, given their lack of ambivalence about academia or deliberate lack of specifics and dryness about the work they actually do. I don’t doubt that one can freelance in academia. I doubt, though, that one can do it without personal relationships with a specific university or alma mater, or with a specific higher education administrator or prominent professor. Why pick on this piece? Because there are far more people like me in and out of academia, who’ve consulted and freelanced and worked and stitched together a career, then there are the people represented in Pryal’s boutique article.

There is a lesson here besides the reality that life is a journey, and to get it right, we need to understand that it can and will be a roller-coaster-ride of a journey. The lesson, for me at least, is that while being true to myself has sometimes had consequences in terms of immediate victories and easy financial gains, it does mean I get to have success, and sometimes, even lasting success.

Bow Down to Isabel Wilkerson

27 Thursday Mar 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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Academic Writing, Black Migration, Book Review, Creative Nonfiction Writing, Great Migration, Isabel Wilkerson, Joe William Trotter Jr., Proletarianization Thesis, The Warmth of Other Suns (2011)


Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, front cover (2011), Random House.

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, front cover (2011), Random House.

I’ve finally read Isabel Wilkerson’s book The Warmth of Other Suns (2011) this month, just as I finished teaching a mini-course in post-1865 African American history. If I ever have the opportunity again to choose my own books for a survey-level course in African American history, this would be one of my cornerstone books. I know I stand at the back of a very long list when I say this, but this is a wonderfully powerful and insightful book, with language and a writing style equally as tender.

This was what I wrote regarding my first impressions on Goodreads.com:

My God – this book is a masterpiece! Wilkerson has done what historians and writers as diverse and groundbreaking as Kenneth Kusmer, David Levering Lewis, Joe William Trotter, Jr., Nicholas Lemann, Thomas Sugrue and James Grossman couldn’t (and in a couple of cases, wouldn’t) do. She put flesh, blood and bones on the Black individuals and families who migrated “up North” and out West throughout the bulk of the twentieth century. She didn’t distract with neo-Marxist, post-modern, post-structural, proletarian, or other overly academic theories for understanding the “hows” and “whys” behind Black migration between 1915 and the 1970s.

Reading Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns (2011) was like reading into my own family’s pasts (my mother and father came to New York City — specifically, the Bronx (Pelham Parkway and Wakefield) — during the 1960s from Arkansas and Georgia/Florida before moving to Mount Vernon). She captured so well the aspirations, the inspirations and the trepidations of the people who migrated, and the things they faced upon arrival. Wilkerson, most of all, grounded herself in the scholarly, but weaved it into a story that was nothing less than literary. If you’re a US or African American historian, a Black Studies, Black Women’s Studies or American Studies scholar, you must incorporate in your curriculum if you haven’t already. If you’re a writer who aspires to tell an important story — one that educates as it entertains — then The Warmth of Other Suns is a great place to start and Wilkerson a great writer to emulate.

Wilkerson called the Great Migration one of the great events of the twentieth century. But it was more than that. It was one of the great events in American history, a silent and gradual revolution on par with westward expansion and more significant than the second wave of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe to the US between 1870 and 1914. I and millions of others like me should know. I wouldn’t be writing at all if I wasn’t a child of two Black migrants who left farms in the South for New York City.

Academia’s Silence Must Be Heard

24 Monday Feb 2014

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

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Academe Magazine, Academic Writing, Banishment, Exile, Fear of a "Black" America, Joshua Rothman, Nicholas Kristof, OAH, Organization of American Historians, Scholar-Activist, Scholarship, Shunning, Silence, Troublemaker


At Eternity's Gate, by Vincent Van Gogh, oil on canvas painting, Kröller-Müller Museum (The Netherlands), May 1890. (Eloquence via Wikipedia). In public domain.

At Eternity’s Gate, by Vincent Van Gogh, oil on canvas painting, Kröller-Müller Museum (The Netherlands), May 1890. (Eloquence via Wikipedia). In public domain.

I’ve learned the hard way how the world of academia treats folks who break its unwritten covenants. The ones that say accept all of our strictures about what to publish, how to write, when to write it, about tenured/tenure-streamed vs. non-tenured, adjuncts and graduate student TAs and unionization, among so many others. Those of us who make trouble, who question the archaic wisdom of those in our world, are often cast out, rendered invisible or otherwise completely forgotten about.

The funny thing about going against the grain of academia — or at least, my fields of US/African American history and American education/ed policy — has been that criticism can serve as a better sign of acceptance than hearing nothing at all. It was like this for me in grad school at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon, and even my first five years after finishing my doctorate. Whenever someone said that my work on multiculturalism and Black history was “interesting,” the flatness with which a professor or grad student said “interesting” was the key for me. If the “interesting” was completely flat, it meant “but I completely disagree with your line of research” or “this thing is too simplistic and boring for me as a scholar to get excited about.” If the “interesting” had a lilt to it or even a slightly raised eyebrow, it meant that one of my colleagues or more senior folk really found my work intriguing.

Actor Arte Johnson as the Nazi German character Wolfgang on NBC's Laugh-In (1968-73), saying "Very interresting..." per usual,  September 4, 2011. (http://photobucket.com)

Actor Arte Johnson as the Nazi German character Wolfgang on NBC’s Laugh-In (1968-73), saying “Very interesting…” per usual, September 4, 2011. (http://photobucket.com)

That term “interesting” was my indication that some people acknowledged and understood the importance of my work, and that some absolutely couldn’t and wouldn’t. But over the past decade, as I’ve complained about the nature of academic writing, about the limits of scholarship and about the changing nature of academia itself (from a hiring perspective), the one thing I’ve noticed the most has been academia’s silence. The collective silence has been deafening, so much so that I finally concluded it meant not only disagreement, but a shunning as well. Like the Amish, only without the Rumspringa.

I had fleeting moments when I noticed the silence, like at my second OAH presentation in Los Angeles in ’01 on Black women intellectuals and multiculturalism. Even though my research was sound, I knew I needed to work on drawing clearer connections between how I’d been defining intellectual and connecting it with notions of cultural pluralism, and thus, multiculturalism. With forty people in the audience, and with thirty-five minutes of Q and A, no one asked me a single question. No one in the audience, it seemed, was interested in multiculturalism or historical contributions to the idea from Anna Julia Cooper, Zora Neale Hurston, Mary Church Terrell or anyone else.

I noticed even more as I submitted my first book Fear of a “Black” America for publication with the university presses prior to ’04. At least with the likes of Praeger and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, I’d frequently get a detailed response, good and bad. But with the university presses, it was deadly silence. I guess me working full-time in the nonprofit world and only teaching ed foundation courses part-time was one of my deficits.

The final set of hints of silence that came my way was in the year after I published Fear of a “Black” America. I decided in ’05 to write an article on the overuse of the term scholar-activist, an article I published in Academe Magazine that fall. Grad students tended to like it, activists outside of academia have cited it hundreds of times, and my immediate circle of friends in academia loved it. But my relevant fields within academia remained silent about it. They were silent about my argument that exercising academic freedom doesn’t automatically make one an activist, and that academic writing, even writings that lean hard to the left, don’t make an academician an activist either.

Dante in Exile (n.d.), painting by anonymous, Archivo Iconografico S.A., Itália, June 3, 2006. (Fernando S. Aldado via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Dante in Exile (n.d.), painting by anonymous author, Archivo Iconografico S.A., Itália, June 3, 2006. (Fernando S. Aldado via Wikipedia). In public domain.

I realize then I had evolved as a writer to the point where I wasn’t just uncomfortable with academic writing, the tenure process and the lack of unionization for adjuncts and grad students — I’d been uncomfortable for years. No, I wanted a teaching, even administrative relationship with higher education for sure, but not one where all of my eggs were in the academic writing basket. Unlike Joshua Rothman’s grand assumption in his “Why Is Academic Writing So Academic?” piece in last week’s New Yorker, that “[p]rofessors live inside that system [of academic writing] and have made peace with it,” I have not and will not make peace with this. Ever.

I think Nicholas Kristof is a hack, and that most of the columnists of The New York Times are hacks as well. But in knowing the sadistic silence of academia as well as I do, I also know that this world of higher education can and does grind many of its participants up, often without making the slightest sound. It’s a wonder that I’m still teaching and writing anything at all.

Writing That Leaves Readers With Headaches

10 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, music, Politics, race

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Academic Writing, Analogies, Audiences, Baratunde, Golf, Jared Diamond, Looking for Leroy (2013), Mark Anthony Neal, Reading Public, Touré, Turgid Writing, Writing Styles


Excedrin Migraine caplets, July 10, 2013. (http://commons.wikimedia.org).

Excedrin Migraine caplets, July 10, 2013. (http://commons.wikimedia.org).

I’m a well-practiced academic writer, and can put together a multitude of erudite compound sentences with the best of them. I can even use words like “fait accompli,” “historiography,” “teleological,” and “anachronistic” practically on demand. But writing for a group of a few hundred academic historians, educationalists or African American studies scholars has become a very limiting chore for me over the years. To the point where I find the style of writing torturous, and reading academic writing about as much fun as having the flu on a hot and humid summer day.

There are times and places where I as a writer who also is an academic historian and educator need to “take out my driver” intellectually and slam home a twenty or twenty-five page article for publication in a scholarly journal. The golfing analogy works because writing for a scholarly audience requires lengthy sentences, tons of citations, a deep knowledge of scholarly literature, a high level of analytical power, and a form of writing that is much more about discipline than creativity. Even print journalists limited to 300 words have more wiggle-room than an academic writer.

In this era of public intellectuals and easier access to the broad American reading public through multimedia and online platforms, however, the academic writer is no longer writing for colleagues with deep knowledge and sufficient patience for the turgid. Yet far too many of my more famous and successful colleagues continue to write as if their books are destined to go straight to university and major city libraries.

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Waterson, on academic writing, July 10, 2013. (http://humorinamerica.wordpress.com).

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Waterson, on academic writing, July 10, 2013. (http://humorinamerica.wordpress.com).

In the past few months, I’ve read Baratunde Thurston’s How To Be Black, Touré’s Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?, Jared Diamond’s Collapse and Mark Anthony Neal’s Looking for Leroy. I can say for certainty that all of these books have good qualities as well as flaws. Baratunde’s is one that’s repetitive and too often going for the easy laugh, though somewhat thought-provoking on the many ways all of us can be “Black.” Touré’s reads like the man himself, a book that takes itself too seriously, that purports to be a higher level of thinking on race when it ultimately gets lost in its own argument. Diamond’s Collapse is a very good introduction to the calamities of human civilizations and world history for nonacademic readers, but also doesn’t provide enough nuance to show variations in patterns of decline or collapse across civilizations.

The one thing the first three books have in common is that their authors attempt to write for an audience beyond comedians, journalists and interdisciplinary academicians. For the most part, all three succeed in making their books legible to an educated reading public. Neal’s Looking for Leroy (2013), though, is pretty unsuccessful in this regard. Neal critiqued the ways in which individuals like Jay Z, Avery Brooks and Luther Vandross have navigated the rocky terrain of public stereotypes toward Black males and how they turned those stereotypes on their head with the way lived their lives and conducted their careers.

Sounds thought-provoking, except for some issues with language and audience. From the Preface on, Neal’s Looking for Leroy read as if he’d only conceived it for an academic audience. Take his chapter on Jay-Z, where Neal wrote

It is in this spirit of these observations that I’d like to suggest that hip-hop cosmopolitanism represents a fertile location to challenge the larger society’s desire to impose constraints on how hip-hop constituencies choose to embody themselves, as well as a site to challenge stridently parochial notions of masculine identity (and gender) in hip-hop, particularly those solely rooted in the local.

Neal followed up this sixty-plus word sentence with his Jay-Z chapter’s thesis, where he posits “that the constraints placed on hip-hop infused identities are analogous to the historical difficulties experienced by those blacks desiring to be read as cosmopolitan — legitimate citizens of the world.”

Mark Anthony Neal, Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (2013) cover, July 10, 2013. (http://nyupress.edu).

Mark Anthony Neal, Looking for Leroy (2013) cover, July 10, 2013. (http://nyupress.edu).

There are important nuggets to be gleaned in this chapter and in Neal’s argument. But even I as an American and African American historian had to find a shovel and dig for it as if I was part of an excavation team in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. That’s a real shame, as Neal has tenure, and this is his fifth book. I’d think someone whose platform for writing is as secure as Neal’s, whose audience includes readers outside of academia could’ve easily written Looking for Leroy to be more inclusive and engaging of them.

I’ve worked very hard over the past thirteen years to break myself of the horrid habit of academic writing when it isn’t necessary, which is most of the time. My goal has always been to engage, educate and even entertain with what I write. I’ve always wanted to be thought-provoking, not headache-inducing.

Too bad many of my more famous colleagues continue down the primrose path of writing for academia with the firm belief that the rest of the reading public must catch up to them. They don’t realize — or maybe even care — that the harder path is to write to include, and not exclude.

Road to My Memoir, Part 2: Multiculturalism

08 Saturday Jun 2013

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Ability Grouping, Academic Historian, Academic Writing, Afrocentricity, Barbara Sizemore, Comparative Slavery, Elaine, Humanities, Jeannie Oakes, Joyce Harrington, Keeping Track (1985), Multicultural Education, Multiculturalism, Pitt, Pittsburgh Public Schools, Sociology, Tracking


When I wrote about this long path to Boy @ The Window last month, I figured that it would take three posts in all to discuss the path. But the road’s shown itself to be longer — and more convoluted — than I anticipated.

So I never did write my book about being on welfare, dehumanization and welfare policy. I found a much more interesting subject to take up the following year, in the summer of ’90. I decided to take the late Barbara Sizemore’s research methods course in Black Studies that fall, to move beyond my history courses, as I’d already taken enough of them to have fulfilled my major.

I wanted to look at the re-segregation of desegregated schools through tracking or ability grouping, specifically in Mount Vernon’s public schools. The book that brought me to this topic was Jeannie Oakes’ masterpiece Keeping Track: How School Structure Inequality (1985). It had begun to turn my mind away from slavery as a long-term history project (perhaps one I would’ve pursued in doing my master’s papers or doctoral research) and toward history of education and racial inequality.

Oakes’ main argument was that school desegregation was a mixed bag of success and failure precisely because of the fact that with tracking by academic “ability,”disadvantaged Black students and advantaged White students would seldom meet in the same classrooms. That made me think of my still recent experiences with the Humanities Program in middle school and high school. After all, a school district that was three-quarters Black, Afro-Caribbean and Hispanic had a magnet program that was about sixty percent White during my six years in Humanities.

I spent that summer — when I wasn’t working — at Mount Vernon Public Library, NYU’s Bobst Library, and New York Public Library giving myself a stronger background on this topic. I met with the former MVHS Humanities coordinator Joyce Flanagan (who had become Harrington by then) about getting more specific demographic data about the program by class year and school (Pennington-Grimes ES, A.B. Davis Middle School and MVHS). Much of the data had already been destroyed, Harrington confided. The data she did give me, while informative, wasn’t enough to do even a watered down version of what Oakes did for Keeping Track (she interviewed 14,000 students and teachers in all).

I ended up doing my research project on Pittsburgh Public Schools and their International Baccalaureate programs at Schenley and Allderdice HS. It was a solid paper, an easy A compared to my comparative slavery paper for Drescher’s graduate course the semester before. But it wasn’t enough for me.

In the course of building up my knowledge on segregation, suburban schools, urban school districts, and community control, I stumbled onto books about multicultural education. I wanted to learn more, so I took a sociology course my final undergraduate semester on the sociology of race and ethnicity (there weren’t any education courses that focused on either race or multiculturalism at Pitt in ’91).

The turning point came with my friend Elaine, who knew of my interest in the topic. She was the one who had informed me of a growing controversy with New York State’s newly proposed history curriculum, one in which the ideas of multicultural education had played a key role. That work the summer before grad school, that work to understand why there was any controversy at all, led me to finding out more about cultural pluralism and its history. This then led to the role of Black intellectuals and educators in applying cultural pluralism, the differences between multiculturalism, multicultural education and Afrocentricity.

I had my dissertation topic in broad strokes before I’d taken any courses as a master’s student (not counting the comparative slavery class). But in the process of moving from re-segregation and Jeannie Oakes to multiculturalism, I’d moved from a wide-eyed student of everything that related to my life at age twenty to an aspiring academician, a historian of educational and cultural ideas.

I’d taken the first steps to bury myself in academic writing and thinking, without fully understanding why I cared about multiculturalism in the first place. It took me a decade to figure out that the lack of understanding of diversity in Humanities was part of what made it a bittersweet experience for me, an experience that drove me toward multiculturalism as a research topic. It took ten years before I realized that my pursuit of multiculturalism in Black Washington, DC was my way of dealing with my own past without any emotion. Multiculturalism took me further away from the writer (and historian) I wanted to be, even as I earned my doctorate on the topic.

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Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

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