Tag Archives: Arrogance

The White-Boy Logic of Supernatural

15 Thursday Jul 2021

Posted by in 1, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Movies, Politics, Pop Culture, Religion

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Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki as Dean and Sam Winchester in Supernatural, Season 9, Episode 13 (“The Purge”) screenshot. Originally aired February 4, 2014.

One of the benefits of working from home for years is the ability to take in copious amounts of popular culture in passive and subliminal ways. For more than a decade before the pandemic, my daily schedule included a multitasking routine of writing, teaching, grading, working-out, napping, running errands, and getting my son off to school and my partner off to her job. All the while, I am consuming news and pop culture. BBC World News from 6 or 7 am until I go to the car to drive my spouse to the Metro stop or run errands, sometimes longer. In the Honda Element, listening to my tunes or ESPN 980 (before Dan Synder sold the station two years ago) or WAMU/NPR. And, bouncing from show to show while writing, grading, working out, making lunch, prepping dinner, sometimes taking a brief nap between 1:30 and 2:45 (when my son returned home from school) or between 3:45 and 6 pm (when it was time to pick my significant other up from the Metro). 

Of all the TNT reruns I’d put on in the midday slot over the years, between Bones, Castle, Arrow, and Law & Order, the one that has stuck with me the longest is Supernatural. Its final episode aired at the end of this past year. Perhaps it’s because it’s such a white boy’s show, or because it’s about as American as a show filmed in Vancouver, British Columbia can get. Whatever it was, I went from calling the show “Brooders” and “White Males Brooding” to actually enjoying the series, a not-so-guilty pleasure in between grading, writing, and revising, and yoga poses, planks, pushups, crunches, free weights, and plyometrics.

That doesn’t mean I’ve watched it with an uncritical mind. Just like with what I’ve called “white male angst music” in the 1990s — alt rock and grunge (think Pearl Jam and Live here) — Supernatural is a tour-de-force of whitemansplaining the world. Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki as Dean and Sam Winchester might play classic ‘70s rock in their legendary 1967 black Chevy Impala, but they are all “White, Discussion” and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Under The Bridge” in their attitudes. Seriously, how do two white dudes get away with mass murder while they constantly “save the world” with the “family business” of “hunting and killing monsters”?

The premise of the show, for the generation of folks who haven’t watched the 15 seasons of episodes between 2005 and 2020 (I watched my first episode in 2012, so there’s that), is that the Winchesters have to fight monsters born of supernatural forces while hunting for a yellow-eyed demon who killed their mother, and eventually, their father. In between bouts with demons, angels, archangels, Lucifer, Leviathans, Knights of Hell, Princes of Hell, the King of Hell, and God, er, “Chuck” himself, the Winchesters battled the usual. Ghosts, vampires, werewolves, skinwalkers, jinns, Greco-Roman, Norse, Incan, and Mayan gods, witches, and whatever other supernatural monster one could imagine. Supernatural was at its absolute best when the focus was on the ancient lore around cultural considerations of the metaphysical.  

But the overarching theme of Dean and Sam Winchester “saving the world” is the great white man’s white lie. How does anyone get credit for “saving the world” when they broke the world, the natural order, multiple times. Here’s a short list of the Winchester’s thirst for revenge leading to Armageddon:

– the father John Winchester selling his soul to the “yellow-eyed demon” to save Dean’s life (Season 1)

– Dean selling his soul to the same demon to save Sam’s life (Season 2)

– Sam drinking demon blood to kill a Princess of Hell and Dean torturing damned souls in Hell, breaking the last and the first of 66 seals to unleash Lucifer and the Four Horsemen on the planet (Season 4)

– Dean not allowing Sam to die after finishing the three trials to forever seal up the gates of Hell, and then tricking Sam into allowing a rogue angel possess him for months afterward (Seasons 8 and 9)

– Dean taking on the Mark of Cain, becoming a demon in the process, and Sam freeing Dean from the Mark, unleashing the Darkness (think if so-called dark matter was God’s sister here) and another universe-destroying force (Seasons 9, 10, and 11)

– The Winchesters allowing a nephilim to live and its power to open up a rift between alternative Earths, a rift that threatened both versions of the planet in the process (Seasons 12 and 13)

– Engaging in a all-out war with God, ending only when they resurrect the nephilim Jack from the Empty, as he become the new God, and the old God becomes just Chuck, “just a slob like one of us,” ala 1990s rocker Joan Osborne (Seasons 14 and 15).

Dean and Sam die and go to Hell, Heaven, and Purgatory multiple times in this series. How narcissistic do even white guys — get to be when they assume that they can come back to life over and over again in order to “save” their brother while also saving the world? Especially when they sacrifice other family and friends to keep each other living and hunting monsters? So many die in this show because of their ignorance, so many who didn’t have to. When you take apart the context of their “jobs” as hunters involves hustling pool tables, identity theft and hacking credit cards, stealing cars, and regularly killing people who’ve turned into monsters or in the midst of demon possession. Any two of these gets Black and Brown and Indigenous folks a one-way ticket to prison or a grave, with no chance for resurrection.

It’s hilariously macabre and the height of arrogance of two white guys believing they are doing more good than harm. But isn’t Supernatural really just a parable about how white guys see themselves in the world? Everything is there for the taking, it’s all about us and our lives. Between the drugs, the boozing, the meaningless misogynistic sex, the endless buffet of death by food, Supernatural is the ultimately expression of white male-dominance, or at least, the quest for it, from two average Joes.

Near the end of Season 9, Episode 13 (“The Purge”), Dean and Sam talk, not for the last time, about putting their need to save each other from certain death above the needs and lives of everyone else. Sam has a moment of complete clarity, one that fades away by the end of Season 10 (see the list above). 

You think you’re my savior, my brother, the hero. You swoop in, and even when you mess up, you think what you’re doing is worth it, because you’ve convinced yourself you’re doing more good than bad…but you’re not…What is the upside of me being alive?

Dean’s response:

You kidding me? You and me — fighting the good fight — together.

It never occurred to these characters, and perhaps, even the actors, producers, directors, and writers for Supernatural, that Dean and Sam Winchester are the real monsters here. Two everyday white guys who think that killing monsters and a host of supernatural entities is the solution to everything. Did they even consider that killing monsters might be the reason they need to keep hunting, because they create more each time they kill one? Or that maybe because the US is a place full of kidnapping, rape, enslavement, genocide, and murder, this nation is a natural incubator of supernatural hauntings and possessions, a place where all monsters can thrive? Did they ever see themselves as the humans they never seem to understand in the show? Probably not until the final episode in Season 15, when Dean and Sam finally die — this time for good, and for good. 

I never wanted them to “Carry On Wayward Son,” as Kansas sang it in 1976, as a choir of white girls sang it Season 10, Episode 5. As sad as it was to see the final finale of Dean and Sam Winchester, we need a world without the hundreds of millions of Dean and Sam Winchesters around us, an anti-racist world. A world without these narcissistic and yes, racist and misogynistic and homophobic monsters who see themselves as do-gooders.

On Arrogance and Opinions

18 Saturday May 2019

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

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“No, fear and arrogance, you hayseed.” Kevin Costner and Tim Robbins characters in Bull Durham (1988), screenshot, May 18, 2019. (https://getyarn.io).

I received my latest evaluations from my AU students this spring. Really, I shouldn’t complain. Overall, my scores met or exceeded most metrics in all three of my courses this semester, even as some students thought there was “too much reading” or that I needed to “provide more guidance” on the readings I assigned. As an instructor, I have to sort of compartmentalize or even mentally toss out the personal attacks in such surveys. From students thinking I’m sexist because I used “#TimesUp” to get their attention after saying “Time’s up” multiple times during a small group discussion, to students saying I lack “emotional intelligence” because of email miscommunications (mostly on their part, though I took the blame) over a dramatic event. I’m hardly perfect, have never claimed to be, and expect that in dealing with human beings, especially young adults, that these things and their sometimes petty responses are bound to occur.

But some responses have been consistent across time and institution since my TAing days at the University of Pittsburgh. At some point since Fall 1992, a student or two will decide that I’m “arrogant” and that “[I] only care about [my] opinions,” that somehow, I never gave them room to express their opinions or somehow failed to validate their opinions. I don’t think I’ll ever overcome these critiques, nor should I try, especially after so many years of teaching. As the research has indicated for at least a decade, student evaluations of faculty are not reliable sources of data. Barely four out of 10 students at most colleges and universities will actually take the 10 to 20 minutes to complete one. Most negative evaluations correlate to an actual or an anticipated grade that is lower than what the student wanted for themselves in the course.

But the data for faculty of color, especially women faculty of color, and even more especially for Black women faculty, shows measurable racial and gender biases. Complaints about language, how one dresses, speech patterns, and other ticks and foibles become heightened. And not just among White students. Students of color, and Black students in particular, hold the Black faculty who have served as their instructors to a standard that could only be met by a parent of a newborn baby, something akin to perfection. I have felt this last bit during classes and other times at AU this semester more than others.

Still, on the broader issue of arrogance, I have changed my lecture style, the amount I lecture, the kinds of discussions I have run, the tactics for getting students to bond in the classroom, and (where I could) the types of readings I have assigned, just so students are more comfortable and willing to learn. None of this has mattered for the students who expect me to validate every idea they express in the classroom. None of this matters when I go in front of the classroom and lecture and facilitate discussion to this small but very vocal minority.

I used to think it was my age back in the 1990s. So I tried to be more objective, less animated, and gave up some degree of authority in the classroom. That worked for a couple of semesters at Duquesne College of Education and at GW. Mostly. But, even there, one student who told me day one she “hated history” and two students at GW wrote about my so-called classroom arrogance in their evals.

In teaching undergrads for a couple of semesters at the University of the District of Columbia and at Howard in 2006 and 2007, though, not one student had that issue with me. They didn’t complain when I poked holes in their analysis, or when I asked them to back up their opinions with evidence. It was refreshing, actually, to have students who didn’t assume that their opinions and that my years of interpreting and writing about history were equal in weight. Could it be that the racial dynamics of UDC and Howard made for a different interpretation of my demeanor and conveying of knowledge in the classroom (as one is a predominantly Black institution and the other is a flagship HBCU)? Probably.

Since my second year of teaching at UMUC, though, and with this first year at AU, this allegation of arrogance via my opinions has been constant with my evaluations, no matter how well students did and how positive my evaluations were otherwise. At this point, I have figured out a few tendencies of students who lodge this complaint. They are typically not comfortable with the material or with me as their instructor. I am frequently sarcastic, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, and gesticulate while using some of the skills I picked up from acting-as-public-speaking classes to lecture. In other words, lecturing with skill for me is a performance, one that conveys information, and it must be done with a high degree of confidence and seriousness, balanced with levity. That I have also decided to not treat history in a truly objective manner was deliberate, because history is a living subject, and thus cannot be taught objectively. Fairness and truth are far more important. That doesn’t make me arrogant. That makes me a confident instructor, but one with humanity and empathy.

As for opinions, I have sometimes said to my students, “As the saying goes, opinions are like assholes — nearly everyone has one.” That has usually gotten a few laughs (you gotta read the room before saying something like this — my AU students are too serious on the use of colorful language from what I’ve found so far). But even when I say that “this particular interpretation comes from me,” I am still expressing more than a personal opinion or insight. I am expressing an idea or interpretation based on years of study, observation, reading, and writing, for scholarly and mainstream publications. So when I insist on students backing up their opinions with evidence, or literally have to say, “No, that not correct,” and then explain why it isn’t, this is me doing the job of an instructor with years of knowledge and even expertise on a wide variety of topics, not just some random person on the Red Line train to Shady Grove.

Even with all of these caveats about the differences between opinion and interpretation, about my level of expertise, and about my approach to the classroom, there are some small number of students who will say, “He’s arrogant,” “He doesn’t value my opinion.” Or, as one student emailed me four years ago, “Sir, you are a dickhead.” I realize that these specific comments, like the ones I wrote about for The Washington Post last year about the rejection of Black history and racism as central parts of US history, were about my difference, not my indifference. Being a Black man teaching mostly White students, or teaching Black students who expect me to consistently validate their unsubstantiated opinions, does not have its privileges. Especially on a student evaluation form.

The Mountaintop of Sixth Grade

22 Wednesday Jun 2016

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William H. Holmes Elementary, Mount Vernon, NY, November 23, 2006. Donald Earl Collins

Thirty-five years ago this week, I finished elementary school. Thirty-five years since I first felt that feeling of reaching the mountaintop, as if I’d accomplished something in my life. Three-and-a-half decades since the last time I was unknowingly naive and unnecessarily arrogant.

It was a finish with a flourish, though. Combined with having become a part of a bizarre religion, I had a new point of view on my life by the time graduation day on Friday, June 26 of ’81 rolled around. My family was now two months into our serving Yahweh, and I was six weeks removed from losing my best friend Starling because of this nutty religion. It was a time in which I felt overwhelmed about my present and immediate future. Yet I acted as if I’d published a book that was both a New York Times Bestseller and a Pulitzer Prize winner. I couldn’t have been more pumped up if I’d been on Walter White’s blue crystal meth from Breaking Bad.

The Sun setting behind the Statue of Liberty, New York, July 4, 2003. (http://science.nasa.gov/).

The Sun setting behind the Statue of Liberty (kind of how I saw my life back in 1981), New York, July 4, 2003. (http://science.nasa.gov/).

But I had some basis for seeing myself as great. As far as I was concerned, I was the unofficial valedictorian of my elementary school class at William H. Holmes Elementary, the ’50s structure next to the big Presbyterian church on North Columbus and East Lincoln Avenue. My teachers had chosen me out of all of my classmates to speak at our graduation ceremony. On that last Friday in June ’81, I served as the opening speaker, introducing the city councilman who served as our keynote. I even wrote the short introduction that I delivered on that wonderful day.

I firmly believed no one in the world was smarter than me. In the three years prior to graduation, I had straight A’s. Still, that paled in comparison to my performance my last year of elementary school. I figured out that I earned an A on forty-eight out of fifty-two quizzes and tests in sixth grade. The lowest grade I earned that year was an 88 on a spelling quiz. I’d won a Dental Awareness Month award for Best Poster and came in second in a city-wide writing contest that included essays from high school students. If anyone had known how big my head had grown that year, they would’ve stuck a pin in my temple just to let the air out.

It wouldn’t have been any funnier if I’d pretended I was Mr. October himself, Reggie Jackson, saying his words, “Sometimes I underestimate the magnitude of me.” I wanted so badly to see myself and to be seen by others as special that I forgot about the work it had taken to move my reading and writing skills up eight grade levels in a little more than two and a half years.

Yankees/Oakland A's/California Angels HOF Reggie Jackson at bat, 1980, accessed June 21, 2016. (AP Photo).

Yankees/Oakland A’s/California Angels HOF Reggie Jackson at bat, 1980, accessed June 21, 2016. (AP Photo).

It was a great day, sunny and low-eighties with cumulus clouds and low humidity. But knowing what life at 616, Mount Vernon and Humanities had in store for me over the next eight years, I should’ve smelled the ozone in the air. I should’ve looked more closely at my sky, to see the flocks of seagulls flying away from the shoreline. I should’ve sensed — and did, on a very low-frequency — the hurricane gaining strength in my life. I chose to ignore it, hoping that I could fake my way through it while resting on my laurels.

To think that it would’ve been another nine years before I felt like I could take on the world again. If someone had told me in June ’81 that I’d have to wait until my junior year at the University of Pittsburgh to have a straight-A semester, I would’ve grabbed a gun and shot myself through the temple with a Colt .45. And I would’ve made sure the bullet I used had a hollow tip. If I’d known that I’d have to wait a full decade to be comfortable with myself as myself in all of my goofiness again, I probably would’ve cried on the spot.

All I can hope these days is that my nearly teenage son can strike a balance between being cool and being cool with himself. I don’t want him spending a decade trying to figure himself out all by himself.

Biting Off Too Much, And Almost Choking On It

03 Wednesday Dec 2014

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"Bush Gag" cartoon, Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune, November 5, 2008. (http://dailykos.com). Qualifies as fair use under copyright laws -- low resolution picture.

“Bush Gag” cartoon, Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune, November 5, 2008. (http://dailykos.com). Qualifies as fair use under copyright laws — low resolution picture.

I’m someone who’s in a state of constant learning, constantly wanting to challenge myself and others to be better, to do more and better. I don’t apologize for this. But I do need to acknowledge that too often, I exert so much pressure on myself to excel that I take on a Thanksgiving feast’s worth of challenges. More times than not, I come through on the other side, but frequently in need of the Heimlich maneuver to keep from suffocating on it all.

For those of you who are still in undergrad or have recently finished, or at least, still remember clearly the details of this part of your academic journey, this story is most poignant for you. After years of relying mostly on my great memory and very good writing skills to be the very good student I’d been over the previous decade, I wanted to do better, to not have to scramble in the last three weeks of a sixteen-week semester and look like a dog with a serious constipation problem trying to void, like almost two-thirds of the sickly, underdressed, raccoon-eyed students I’d seen on campus during my first two years at the University of Pittsburgh.

As I wrote at the end of my coming-of-age memoir Boy @ The Window:

I reasoned that I needed to have balance to my semesters so that I wouldn’t spend the last two or three weeks of them playing catch up. Starting with the fall of ’89, I took all my syllabi from all of my classes, grabbed a calendar, and crafted a table where I knew exactly what to read, when to study, and when to begin my research and writing projects for each class I had in a semester. That way, I could know when to slack off or party, when to buckle down and study, and when to just shift into academic cruise control.

Hall-of-Fame QB Warren Moon with Houston Oilers, throwing from within pocket on his 527-yd passing day against the Kansas City Chiefs, December 16, 1990. (http://spokeo.com).

Hall-of-Fame QB Warren Moon with Houston Oilers, throwing from within pocket on his 527-yd passing day against the Kansas City Chiefs, December 16, 1990. (http://spokeo.com).

Those were literally my words and thoughts from a quarter-century ago. I also decided to become more organized because, thinking back, I knew that I couldn’t be a scrambling student in grad school. At least one who could be consistent and successful, who could sit and step up in the pocket and deliver academic darts for touchdowns — to use one of the many football analogies I would’ve said in ’89 (and probably now, too). All I knew was that after the spring semester — with thirty-six-hour workweeks and five courses — that I wanted more time to hang out with friends, to even maybe date.

Only, I was dumb enough to take third-semester calculus a year and a half after my last math course, and I was now a history major taking writing intensive courses. But at the time, I had my very good reasons. I was only one course shy of a minor in mathematics, which I figured would look good on my academic resume when I did apply to grad schools. I wanted to learn the basics about differential equations, because I was just that kind of guy. I wanted, most of all, to challenge myself, because that part of my Humanities indoctrination had stayed with me well beyond my high school graduation.

That course was a struggle, mostly because my attention was split between writing papers and reading thick history texts, constitutional law books and African American literature on the one hand, and math equations on the other. Fourteen months away from derivates and integrals and volumes was too long for me. I couldn’t really adjust to being in a lecture hall with nearly 400 students, being in memorization mode, no longer with much in common with this huge group of STEM-inclined classmates. By the middle of October, I was miserable whenever it was time to march up that hill to Benedum Hall.

A simple first-order linear differential equation (nothing "simple" about it), December 2, 2014. (http://revisionworld.com/).

A simple first-order linear differential equation (nothing “simple” about it), December 2, 2014. (http://revisionworld.com/).

But it did get worse. About a month before the end of that semester, my friend Terri looped me into unwittingly setting up my friend Marc with our mutual friend Michele. And it worked! All too well, as I realized that I had a bit of a crush on Michele myself, but only after they’d started dating. It was a rocky last three weeks of ’89. I managed a 2.98 GPA that terrible semester, including a D+ in multiple integrals and differential equations. I missed a C- in that class by two-tenths of a point. Terrible by my own standards.

Lessons here, if any? Don’t bite off more than you can chew, maybe? I know that three admissions committees used that D+ against me in either rejecting me outright or in not offering me fellowship money to cover tuition when I applied to grad schools a year later. So, one other lesson could be to not take unnecessary risks, to not challenge myself. That would be the wrong lesson, though.

The real lesson would be to know our limitations, that we can’t be all things to ourselves and others and do well at all things all the time, that we have a finite amount of time and choices, in school and in life. With so much going on in my life these days, it’s still a lesson of which I have to keep reminding myself, practically every single day.

“Stupid Atheist” Meets Truly Stupid Christian

06 Monday Oct 2014

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

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Screenshot from HBO show The Leftovers title sequence, September 5, 2014. ( yU+co via http://news.creativecow.net). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws -- low resolution and relevance to subject matter.

Screenshot from HBO show The Leftovers title sequence, September 5, 2014. ( yU+co via http://news.creativecow.net). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws — low resolution and relevance to subject matter.

I’ve written about Mary Zini and our classroom incidents before, here and in Boy @ The Window. It’s been thirty years since she was my tenth-grade World History teacher. Yet most of what I remember from this class has little to do with Plato, NATO, or anything in between. It’s mostly Zini’s condescending personality, my new Christian arrogance, and that people’s personalities and actions are often walking and talking contradictions.

It was the beginning of October ’84 when we had our first incident. It occurred after what was the first of an endless cycle of fill-in-the-bubble Scan-Tron exams.

Screen shot 2014-10-05 at 5.59.18 PM

Honestly, I had no idea at that moment why I said what I said. I supposed that a summer of Jay Sekulow and the American Center for Law and Justice, all via Pat Robertson and The 700 Club had done the trick in making me a one-time prayer-in-public-schools advocate. I knew that Zini was raised a Catholic, so on some level, didn’t that make me a stupid Christian for calling her a stupid “atheist?”

That incident was also the beginning of seven months of starting to figure out how to be me and be a follower of Christ at the same time. I approached it the same way I approached how to be me in my first few months of seventh grade and Humanities at A.B. Davis Middle School in the fall of ’81. With the naiveté of a child, the hubris of a teenager, and the callousness of a human with alien superpowers.

Jay Sekulow lecturing, Regent University, December 15, 2006. (Juda Engelmayer via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via GFDL.

Jay Sekulow lecturing, Regent University, December 15, 2006. (Juda Engelmayer via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via GFDL.

It was evident in my outward actions. I packed my red-pleather-covered King James Bible every day. For school. For Subway trips down into Midtown Manhattan when me and my older brother Darren worked for our father Jimme. For when we washed clothes every Saturday or Sunday at the laundromat on the Mount Vernon-Pelham border (it’s a yoga studio now). The Bible was my constant companion, my shield protecting me from this mad world of almost bottomless sin.

In the process, I read everything from Genesis to Revelations at least twice. (some books, like the Gospels, as many as four times). I learned a lot from  reading all sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments. That the Israelite God Yahweh was stern and pretty unforgiving. That Jesus was a radical, not just spiritually, but politically as well. And that Paul was not exactly the most enlightened of the apostles when it came to women, children and slaves.

Mostly what I learned was that readings and understanding The Bible wasn’t like living out my beliefs at all. I was still a teenager, a fifteen-year-old living in the midst of welfare poverty, at 616 with an abusive womanizer, a wounded mother and a gaggle of siblings between the ages of eight months and five-and-a-half years. Not to mention my alcoholic cuss-factory of a father that I had to hunt down for money nearly every weekend. What all that meant was feeling lust for a young woman one minute, hate toward my idiot stepfather Maurice the next, and imitating Jimme’s slurred language and mannerisms the minute after that.

This new walk was very confusing, so much so that I often hid my emotions in much the same way I’d already been doing to protect myself from yet another abuse episode with Maurice. My emotions couldn’t stay bottled up, though. I frequently humped my way to sleep once our living room at 616 had become my bedroom during and after the months in which Balkis Makeda had lived with us.

Screen shot 2014-10-05 at 6.06.59 PM

By the spring of ’85, when Zini granted me her full support in getting me into AP US History for eleventh grade (this despite my 84 average in her class at the time), I was flabbergasted. I couldn’t stand being in the same room with Zini much of the time. Yet she did for me what few in my life had done — she opened up a door for me to walk through, albeit a relatively small one.

Hands of God & Adam, fingers about to touch, Sistine Chapel ceiling, Vatican, Michelangelo, 1508-1512 (via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Hands of God & Adam, fingers about to touch, Sistine Chapel ceiling, Vatican, Michelangelo, 1508-1512 (via Wikipedia). In public domain.

What did it all mean? That devoutness is meaningless without action, without giving and receiving, without trust, without taking risks. That even supposed atheists can act and give in ways that should shame many arrogant Christians. That Christianity isn’t a transactional relationship or process, but a journey with many pitfalls and lots of contradictions along the way. That who I/we say God is, well, at best an infinitesimal guess, because God and this universe is so much more that I as a human male living in the context of Western culture can only begin to understand.

Most of all, I had just begun to learn that spiritual liberation wasn’t supposed to be a yoke, but an opening to see the world and myself stripped bare of narrative and pretense. A strict adherence to the principles of Pat Robertson would bring me no closer to enlightenment and no further out of poverty than wishing on a star or avoiding cracks on Mount Vernon’s blue-slate sidewalks. Work, trust, opportunities, and not just Romans 8:28, was the beginning of the key for me.

Open Letter: My Knicks Have Sucked For Four Decades

27 Friday Jun 2014

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knicks_suck

We (NY Knicks) Suck (logo off t-shirt), May 26, 2014. (http://nyill.wordpress.com).

I wish that I could be much more positive than this. But to think that the New York Knicks, once one of the NBA’s great franchises, haven’t won a title in forty-one years! They used to be a great franchise because of their two NBA championships (1969-70, 1972-73), or at least, because they regularly competed with the LA Lakers, the Boston Celtics, and the Milwaukee Bucks for a title. The only reason people who follow NBA basketball still see my Knicks as a great franchise is because they’re in New York, or more specifically, Manhattan (since the Nets are in Brooklyn now). But the simple fact is, my Knicks have sucked for forty-one of the forty-four years and six months I’ve been alive.

You can talk about Micheal Ray Richardson, Bernard King, Marc Jackson, and the great Patrick Ewing. You can bring up our ’94 run to the NBA Finals against the Houston Rockets, or our miracle run to the finals in ’99 against the San Antonio Spurs. You can even consider the coaching chops of Hubie Brown (overrated), Rick Pitino (overrated), Pat Riley, Don Nelson, Jeff Van Gundy (unbelievably overrated) and so many has-beens and never-weres over the past four decades. Diehard fan as I’ve been and am, my Knicks, my childhood franchise, has sucked more than the oldest running oil well in Texas. Period.

Even the New York Rangers have won a Stanley Cup since the last time the Knicks have won a title. Matter of fact, the Philadelphia ’76ers, Houston Rockets, Chicago Bulls, Detroit Pistons, San Antonio Spurs, Washington Bullets (now Wizards), Seattle Supersonics (now Oklahoma City Thunder), Portland Trailblazers, Dallas Mavericks, and Miami Heat have all won at least one title since the Knicks with Red Holzman as coach and Walt Frazier, Willis Reed, Dave DeBusschere, et al. as players won their second. The Watergate scandal was still in its infancy, and the last American troops had withdrawn from Vietnam just months before we’d beaten the Lakers (again) in the ’73 NBA Finals.

Indiana Pacers great (and NBA Hall of Famer) Reggie Miller giving Knicks, Spike Lee the choke sign, Game 5, Eastern Conference Finals, Madison Square Garden, New York, screenshot, June 1, 1994. (NBC Sports).

Our best teams were essentially a bunch of bruisers, a team of low-percentage shooters ringed around Patrick Ewing in the ’90s. The Knicks were so anemic offensively that we had to foul and beat up the other team in order to hold them under ninety points if we were going to win consistently. Still, after have a 3-2 lead in the ’94 Finals, we choked at the end of Game Six in Houston, and barely had a chance in Game Seven (thank you, John Starks!). The following year, we made the Indiana Pacers’ Reggie Miller an even bigger star in Game One of the second round (eight points in 8.9 seconds – ridiculous)! Two years later, we brawled our way out of the playoffs in the middle of the first round against the Heat. A good team for its time — yes. A championship-caliber team — absolutely not. We overachieved, riding the rickety knees of Ewing and Starks’ streak shooting.

From the moment Ewing fully ruptured his right Achilles tendon in Game Six of the Eastern Conference Finals in June ’99, we have been in full-on suck mode. A few playoff appearances, a win or two in fifteen years? When we’ve drafted talented players, we didn’t keep them or they end up cutting their careers short with big-time injuries. When we’ve gotten great talent as free agents, our coaches and front office have driven them away, as was most recently the case with Carmelo Anthony. Most of the past forty-one years, though, we’ve drafted like a gambling addict on a binge in Las Vegas. And we’ve picked up free agents the way an ignorant and inebriated gold prospector hunts for fool’s gold.

"Drainage! I drink your milkshake...I drank it up..." scene/ screenshot from There Will Be Blood (2007), with Daniel Day Lewis and Pano Dano. (http://klipd.com/)

“Drainage! I drink your milkshake…I drank it up…” scene/ screenshot from There Will Be Blood (2007), with Daniel Day-Lewis and Pano Dano. (http://klipd.com/)

Reggie Miller was absolutely right in June ’94 when he gave my Knicks and Spike Lee the choke sign. But he should’ve directed the choke sign at ownership, at the front office, and at a presumptive, arrogant fan base. Whether Gulf+Western or James Dolan, or Dave Checketts, Ernie Grunfeld, Isiah Thomas or Donnie Walsh, all have assumed and still assume that because we’re the New York Knickerbockers, that players would want to play for the franchise. We’re New York, we’re a great city, and so the Knicks should always be great. So wrong, so wrong we’ve been!

I will now and always be a Knicks fan. But that doesn’t mean that I have to watch bad basketball year after year after year. And bad drafts, and free agent pickups like J.R. Smith. For the foreseeable future, I’ll watch basketball played by teams who know how to score, pass and/or defend. Teams with front offices smart enough to draft at least two quality players and surround them with a solid supporting cast. Wake me up the day the Knicks can manage to do what the best franchises in the NBA consistently do.

Where Audacity Meets Second-Guessing

25 Saturday May 2013

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

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Second-guessing to the extreme, May 25, 2013. (http://pualingo.com).

Second-guessing to the extreme, May 25, 2013. (http://pualingo.com).

I’m a great second-guesser of myself (and of others). But I’m especially hard on myself in that department. Even when I know that what I’m doing is the right thing, that I’m taking the right path and proper course of action. I remind myself of what to do, what to say, how to say what I need to say, and even then, I wonder often if my move was to bold, my words too direct, my tone too know-it-all-esque.

Still, there are plenty of times as an adult where I’ve decided to not give in to my second-guessing impulses, to remain bold and aggressive despite the potential problems with a plan. Graduate school at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon was probably the longest time as an adult in which I did little second-guessing, at least when I was awake.

Something happened on my marathon march to the doctorate the week before Memorial Day ’93, one where, for once, someone did my second-guessing for me. And no, it wasn’t Joe Trotter or any of the other usual professorial suspects. This one came courtesy of Harold Scott, an acquaintance (and now friend) who was a visiting professor at Pitt’s GSPIA (Graduate School of Public and International Affairs) at the time. I met with him twenty years ago to discuss my transition from the University of Pittsburgh to Carnegie Mellon’s history department, to glean insights from a recent PhD and a man ten years my senior.

I’d met Harold a few times before, mostly in the context of joint Pitt-CMU gatherings related to issues of racial diversity and retention of grad students of color. Aside from discovering that Harold was an anti-affirmative action baby, the only other thing I knew about him was that he was the first African American to earn a doctorate from CMU’s history department.

Dick Cheney as an example of Pollyanna Principle, March 16, 2003. (http://www.veteranstoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/cheney.jpg).

Dick Cheney as an example of Pollyanna Principle, March 16, 2003. (http://www.veteranstoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/cheney.jpg).

So we both asked questions. I learned how Harold suffered at the hands of a mutual leading professor between us and the department, mostly in the form of isolation and arbitrarily bad pay as an instructor once he became ABD. He learned that I had a lot of ambition as a twenty-three year-old doctoral student. My plan at the time was to complete my PhD by the end of ’95, a little more than two and a half years from the date of our ’93 meeting.

Harold laughed, almost hysterically, as I stepped him through all my steps between late-May ’93 and December ’95. He noted that I had at least one year of coursework to complete at CMU before they’d give me their “stamp of approval” to move on to my written and oral comps, much less the dissertation. (Except that I’d already taken my written comps). Most importantly, Harold didn’t understand how I expected to write a doctoral thesis of significant research and girth in little more than a year, assuming that I’d have have to teach at some point, assuming that I had to find literally hundreds of sources.

Then we discussed my dissertation topic specifically. I talked about multiculturalism and multicultural education, about Black Washington, DC and Negro Education Week, about Carter G. Woodson and Alain Locke and W. E. B. Du Bois. I talked about the counter-literature that laid out multiculturalism as either Polyanna or as a mask for Afrocentricity without the Black nationalism that White scholars had ascribed to it.

Somehow in my discussion of the literature, between Arthur Schlesinger and Diane Ravitch, Thomas Sowell and James Banks, and Gary Nash and Cornel West, Harold had but one question. “Are you a ‘racial determinist’?,” he asked. I didn’t know exactly what that term meant, but I already knew what a cultural determinist was. I answered, “Yes and no.” I went on to describe the many situations in which I believed race played a role, if not a dominant role, in American history or culture. That’s not the definition, by the way, as it’s a variant of biological determinism, and very Nazi-like.

That’s when we really began to go back and forth. But I don’t think much of that argument was about racial determinism or where I stood on it at all. I think Harold thought that I was both arrogant and naive. It wouldn’t have been the first time I’ve left that impression, or the last. But yes, at twenty-three, I’d set my sights on a degree, a dissertation and book topic, and a career that I wanted, and had made the decision to not let my over-thinking second-guessing get the better of me. That Harold and others weren’t privy to my process likely made my bold plans and predictions seem ridiculous.

Brett Farve and yet another interception, 2009 NFC Championship Game, January 24, 2010. (Ronald Martinez/http://bleacherreport.com).

Brett Farve and yet another interception, 2009 NFC Championship Game, January 24, 2010. (Ronald Martinez/http://bleacherreport.com).

Yet there was more going on here, much of which wouldn’t become apparent to me until the end of ’95, when I was six chapters into my eight-chapter dissertation. Harold was my warning that the grad school process alone could beat the living hell out of me, that the professors at CMU — White or Black — had an old-fashioned attitude about how long it ought to take someone like me to finish. Harold went through a gauntlet to finish his doctorate in ’90, only to struggle to find work.

In being the second African American to go through the same gauntlet, I eventually realized that my speed and strength of purpose didn’t really matter in the lily-White thinking of the powers that were at CMU. And by the time I started second-guessing my decisions, I practically already had my degree.