Afrocentrists, Evangelicals, Hebrew-Israelites and the False Revolution

28 Monday Mar 2016

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Afrocentric, Afrocentricity, Authentic Blackness, Authority Figures, Black Action Society, Child Abuse, Covenant Church of Pittsburgh, Cross of Gold (1896), Dick Oestriecher, Domestic Violence, Estelle Abel, Evangelical Christianity, Frances Cress Welsing, Frederick K.C. Price, Gospel of Prosperity, Hoteps, Jack Van Impe, Judah ben Israel, Karl Marx, Kenneth Copeland, Kufi, Marxism, Maurice Eugene Washington, Molefi Asante, Neo-Marxists, Ostracism, Prosperity Gospel, Racism, Rapture, Religion, Wendy Goldman, William Jennings Bryan

Kenneth and Gloria Copeland, Believer’s Voice of Victory television broadcast, November 23, 2011. (Carpetsmoker via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

For nearly all of my life folks with even a kernel of authority have tried to convince me that there was one right way to live, one true path to liberation. Mostly religion has been the means through which others have attempted to box me in, although ideologues around Marxism, Afrocentricity, and Capitalism have all been in my figurative kitchen over the years. And like any well-meaning human being, at times I tried real hard to adapt myself to these right ways of thinking, of living out the one correct way to live. Only to fail, or rather, to recognize that none of these ways are the one right way, unless you are a closet right-winger, a conservative (non-ideological) wearing revolution-esque clothing.

My introduction to this madness began with my years as a Hebrew-Israelite, from April ’81 to April ’84 (although I wore my kufi until September ’84). That any parent could suddenly impose a new religion on their kids without explanation is abusive enough. When combined with vague notions about the Lost Tribes of ancient Israel and the wearing of clothes that set us apart culturally while in the middle of puberty, it was a forced societal ostracism. Even still, I tried to live by these strictures. “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.” Eat kosher food, don’t use Ivory soap, shop only at Black or Hebrew-Israelite stores, avoid “unclean issues of blood.” But the physical abuse and poverty that came with being a Hebrew-Israelite in the Judah ben Israel madhouse of contradictions at 616 made me despise anything involving Hebrew-Israelite pretty much for all time.

Molefi Asante speech, Philadelphia, PA, September 13, 2014. (AP photo/file).

Fast-forward a few years to the early 1990s, to the rise of Afrocentricity and the Afrocentric ethos. After three and a half years of being around Hebrew-Israelites, these kente-cloth wearing fools made me weary more times than not of their exclusionary our-way-or-no-way Blackness. Molefi Asante and the late Frances Cress Welsing were just the tip of a much larger iceberg in search of revolutionary “authentic” Blackness. From the Afrocentric undergrads who hijacked the Black Action Society leadership at the University of Pittsburgh in 1991 to folks who picked arguments with me for “sounding White” while I was in grad school, I saw them the same way I saw my now idiot ex-stepfather and the obnoxious Estelle Abel from my high school days. They were well-meaning but stupid. As far as I was concerned, they thought that their words alone would foster a revolution, that being Black meant turning one’s back on the world while also indirectly embracing an ethnocentric capitalism. Or at least, a Black American collective individualism, otherwise known as an “Afrocentric cool.” I could not, I would not, exchange one form of oppressive uplift in Hebrew-Israelites for the shiny fool’s gold that mostly represented the Afrocentrists.

The neo-Marxists I met in Pittsburgh throughout the 1990s were no better. For all their revolutionary rhetoric, theirs was a world of theoretical activism, of scholarly examples of past oppression. Most of them didn’t know poverty and didn’t comprehend oppression beyond their own limited experience. Most of all, they couldn’t find a connection between American racism and class oppression if I gave them an industrial strength magnet. The fact that most of them hadn’t read Franz Fanon, W. E. B. Du Bois, Eric Williams, C. L. R. James, Anna Julia Cooper, Zora Neale Hurston, Derrick Bell, Angela Davis — but could quote Karl Marx the way Hebrew-Israelites could quote the Torah and Afrocentrists could quote Asante and Welsing — I found troubling. That’s putting it nicely. I found it contemptuous that folks who didn’t know my experience or who would all but refuse to read folks who written about experiences like mine would expect my allegiance to an ideology that was never meant for people who look like me.

The evangelical Christian part of my life was literally the last of the major dogmas to go. It was the hardest for me because I literally had given my life to Jesus in the midst of the whole Hebrew-Israelite crisis, Easter Sunday ’84. With my Mom coming down the same path by the late-1980s, it made it easier to not interrogate my Christianity as thoroughly as I would excoriate Afrocentrists and Marxists in graduate classes and in articles and papers a decade later. But even at nineteen, I realized that the Van Impe’s weekly predictions of the Apocalypse were as ridiculous as Welsing’s exulting of the magical properties of melanin. Or, for that matter, a fake Balkis Makeda cautioning against the use of Ivory Soap among her Hebrew-Israelite flock because of a dream she had.

Grant Hamilton cartoon for Judge Magazine on William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech, Democratic National Convention, Chicago, July 9, 1896. (Wikipedia). In public domain.

I went along to get along for years, until the hypocrisy of evangelical Christianity’s Gospel of Prosperity became too much. They took the metaphor of William Jennings Bryan’s cross of gold and actually went literal and nuclear with it. Somehow being Christian now meant blind patriotic allegiance to anything US and fully supporting capitalism, and yet an exclusionary separation between “true” evangelical Christians and the rest of the world. Especially on Rapture Day.

The last time I sat comfortably in a pew was in January ’97, although I’ve been to churches of various denominations dozens of times since. I still believe in Jesus, the life and the death and even the resurrection. But I don’t believe in most who claim to represent him, yet turn around and ignore the vulnerable standing right in front of them, making weak claims around individualism and poverty in the process.

In so many ways, evangelicals, Marxists, Afrocentrists, and Hebrew-Israelites are more alike than different. They all insist on a singular path, a quintessential truth. While some aspects of their thinking are appealing, I find accepting their bullshit in entirety poisonous to my spirit, mind, and gastrointestinal tract. There still may well be a revolution or even a rapture, but it won’t be because of any of these groups.

Get Rich, Or Whine Trying

08 Monday Jul 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Afrocentric, Business Ideas, Communications Business, Get-Rich-Quick Schemes, Half-Baked Ideas, Limo Business, Ponzi Scheme, Poverty, Pyramid Scheme, Sun-Lion Communications, Underemployment, unemployment, Whining

50 Cent, Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ album cover art (2003), June 27, 2007. (Hundredalexander via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use because of picture’s low resolution.

When people grow up impoverished, there’s a strong impulse to come up with all kinds of scenarios for becoming rich. Some of these ideas require hard work, some require the fulfillment of dreams through tapping into one’s individual potential. Many ideas, though, remain half-baked shortcuts, ones that never reach fruition. Ideas like winning the lottery or Powerball, becoming a professional athlete or a singer or a rap artist. Others involve get-rich-quick schemes, ones that often take advantage of desperate wish of those in poverty to no longer be poor.

I’ve had plenty of experience observing examples of this last point. Especially in growing up at 616. My late idiot ex-stepfather Maurice Washington was susceptible to all kinds of ideas for making money, particularly schemes that required others to invest. I guess I can understand. As the fledgling writer and author I am, I can certainly see the appeal of finding shortcuts to, say, selling 100,000 copies of Boy @ The Window in a month. If only I could somehow get Oprah to endorse my book on her website and on the air!

Bernie Madoff (mugshot), the ultimate get-rich-quick scam artist, March 16, 2009. (US Department of Justice via Wikipedia). In public domain.

But I digress, as my scheme at least has a least a puncher’s chance at working (I have written a book, after all). My then stepfather, having held the jobs of Air Force MP, hospital orderly and taxicab driver, spent most of the ’80s trying to find ways to make easy money without putting forth any effort at all. In ’82, his grand scheme was Sun-Lion Corporation, which later turned into Sun-Lion Communications, the latter his attempt to do the equivalent of Bob Johnson’s Black Entertainment Television. My idiot ex-stepfather intended both the overall corporation and the communications arm to have what we would now call an Afrocentric slant. His vision was to be an emphasis on Hebrew-Israelite or similar foods, clothing, and other products and services meant for Black folks in the New York City area.

Maurice did everything he could to get my Mom involved in these schemes. My Mom went so far as to buy a corporation’s license for $2,500 in March ’82 for Sun-Lion. In the meantime, they argued and fought, and my ex-stepfather beat my mother up once in part over her lukewarm support for his grandiose schemes. At one point, they argued because Maurice wanted to raise $100 million in capital to put Sun-Lion Communications together! God, that man was an idiot!

After getting back on his feet after three years and three months of unemployment as a part-time security guard of an empty Vicks building in August ’82, Maurice came up with more schemes. He went to trucking school for four months between October ’86 and February ’87 outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania, but never spent a day as a truck driver. Then Maurice was a car salesman for a few months in ’87, actually making commissions while selling Cadillacs. But of course he couldn’t hold on to a job he was tailor-made for, a gift-of-gab con man!

Finally, in the spring and summer of ’88, Maurice tried to talk his way into the limo business by attempting to get a fellow 616 resident to give him access to a limo or capital. They laughed. My Mom laughed. I laughed. Maurice cried and whined about how no one ever supported his get-rich-quick efforts, not realizing that most of his so-called effort came in the form of getting others to give him something he either already.

“Whine…it’s just not fair!” cartoon, October 1998. (http://allpolitics.com).

When Maurice finally left 616 in June ’89, I thought all those days of ludicrous schemes and bullshit ideas for making lots of money were over. But when you’re poor, you’re vulnerable, and others looking to take advantage sense that vulnerability. In the two periods of my adult life in which I’ve been unemployed or significantly underemployed, people have approached me about selling Amway products. My younger siblings have proven themselves to be susceptible to alleged golden opportunities that were much closer to rust than gold.

This is not a screed in which I’m crapping on pursuing dreams or long shots. What I’m saying, though, is that dreams and long shots need to be tethered to serious plans, hard work, maximized gifts and talents, prayer and even some good luck. Yes, reaching out for help will help, but not in a spirit of draining others in order to help yourself first and only. That’s what my deceased ex-stepfather never learned.

James and the PAGPSA

29 Thursday Nov 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Activism, Afrocentric, Afrocentricity, Authentic Blackness, Black Action Society, Campus Climate, Carnegie Mellon University, Community, Diversity, Friendships, Graduate School, GSPIA, Isolation, PAGPSA, Pan African Graduate and Professional Student Association, Pitt, Pittsburgh, Politics of Graduate School, Retention, Self-Discovery, University of Pittsburgh

James and the Giant Peach photo art (1996), November 29, 2012. (http://disneymania.com.br).

About this time twenty years ago, perhaps for the first time in my life, I found myself around like-minded individuals, folks who seemed to understand me on an intellectual level. The fact that these were fellow graduate students, all at Pitt and all willing to form an association that would enable us to develop real connections across the campus, was inspiring to me. After four years of off-and-on involvement in the Black Action Society, not to mention my first year in the History grad program, I’d almost given up on the idea that I could form good friendships and acquaintance-ships through any formal gatherings.

But this was especially true regarding my thinking about my fellow Black students and other students of color. For the most part, I’d been around two kinds of students of color during my first five years at the University of Pittsburgh. One group was the semi-nerdy set, folks who cared deeply about their academic performance, but were also late-bloomers socially — people like me in more than a few ways. They tended to care little, though, about campus activism around diversity, retention or campus climate issues.

The other group was the Afrocentric set, people who often reminded me of my one-time Hebrew-Israelite brethren, whose views of Blackness were so limiting that I would’ve been a traitor just for listening to Chicago or Phil Collins. Those folks had virtually taken over the Black Action Society by my senior year. Forget mentioning popular folks, like sorors, frat guys, football, basketball and track guys and gals, or those fully invested in Pitt’s Honors College. I mingled with them all, and found little in common with them, intellectually or economically.

Me with Mark James, PAGPSA meeting, GSPH building, University of Pittsburgh, February 26, 1993 (Lois Nembhard).

That changed a bit my first year of grad school. Often in my walking and running across campus, I’d bump into a Black grad student here or there. At Hillman Library, the Cathedral of Learning, William Pitt Union, the SLIS building or other places. We’d recognize each other, we said hello, we even exchanged our names. Two of them in particular — Ed and Hayley — reached out to me at the end of the Spring ’92 semester, because they wanted to put together an organization that would represent our interests as grad students of color.

In mid-August, the emails began to go back and forth in earnest to establish what we’d end up calling the Pan African Graduate and Professional Student Association (PAGPSA) that fall. Through Jack Daniel’s office (see my post “The Miracle of Dr. Jack Daniel” from May ’11), we obtained the start-up funds necessary to make the new association go.

At our founding meeting that September, there were eight of us, all highly motivated to be as inclusive as possible, all feeling suddenly less isolated than we had felt a week, month or semester earlier. We decided on the “Pan African” part of the association’s name because we wanted to welcome as many graduate students of color as possible, particularly African and Afro-Caribbean students. The terms “Black” and “African American,” we agreed, wouldn’t be inclusive enough.

We also decided that despite the political implications of our new name, that this association would primarily be about bringing students together for social gatherings, for additional information and education beyond their course work and dissertations, but not to be campus activists. So many of the Black, African and Afro-Caribbean grad students at Pitt were in fact working on master’s or other professional degrees, and wouldn’t be on campus long enough to make lasting changes through activism, strictly speaking. Plus, there was the risk that activism would be so all-consuming — especially on issues like campus climate, long-term support for research and retention rates — that folks would fail to complete the work they came to Pitt to do in the first place.

CMU-Pitt mug, from joint PAGPSA/BGSO meeting on diversity and grad school, October 1992, November 29, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

By the time that first meeting broke up, I was content to have met folks like Mark, Hayley, Lois, Errol, Ed, and a couple of others, to find us all on the same page about something as serious as starting a new association of a significant cross-section of Pitt’s graduate students of color. But in the process, I’d made a new friend that fall through our meetings and our joint gatherings with Carnegie Mellon’s Black Graduate Student Organization (BGSO).

James came along and challenged PAGPSA in October and November regarding our campus activism stance, arguing that being a part of any organization of students of color meant being active. Of course the leadership disagreed, but that’s how I met the man. He was a charismatic Black Iowan preacher’s son, and more politically active than anyone I’d known under the age of thirty. James had ideas about everything, from the future of hip-hop to the implications of my research on multiculturalism and Black Washington, DC.

Though he was a GSPIA (Graduate School of Public and International Affairs) master’s student and ultimately finished his degree in ’94, we would remain friends through the rest of the ’90s. Between him and Matt (see my post “My Friend Matt” from September) and PAGPSA, I remained grounded even as I became buried in the minutia of US, African American and educational policy historiography over the next half-decade. Thankfully, I no longer felt like a lone wolf. Thankfully, I knew that I wasn’t alone in a sea of graduate school and faculty White maleness after that fall.