A Narcissist’s Dream

14 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

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Beauty, Bigotry, Christopher Lasch, Donald Trump, Drumpf, John Oliver, Kim K., Kim Kardashian, Last Week Tonight, Mob, Mob Violence, Narcissism, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, NPD, Obsessive Individualism, Racism, Rev. Al Sharpton, Self-Love

Spinning coin (can’t make heads or tails of it), March 12, 2016. (http://bestanimations.com).

We’re a nation of narcissists, this is true. Christopher Lasch wrote as much in his bestseller The Culture of Narcissism in 1979. But he was only examining American culture between the end of World War II and the 1970s, the “Me Decade.” Lasch wasn’t looking at obsessive individualism as a unique and historical American trait, one with roots as far back as Jamestown and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1860). He was looking at how the American obsession with self had evolved into “self-love” and a constant need for either attention or navel-gazing, as evidenced by the rise of pop psychology in the 1960s and 1970s.

Too bad Lasch isn’t around in 2016 to see how far down the rabbit hole America has gone. Between Kim Kardashian-West (at least for the moment) and 2016 GOP presidential candidate Donald J. Trump, it is obvious that we have a national crisis of narcissism on our hands. The two of them are the same side of a two-headed coin. One has traded on their family and beauty in exchange for millions of fans and tens of millions of dollars. The other has built an empire based on his father’s fortune and his brand of self-love. Both have taken advantage of White privilege and class privilege to drive their constant need for fame and attention. And since game knows game, they have both earned themselves an audience of millions who themselves are obsessed with themselves. Or at least, with seeing themselves as successful by living vicariously through the likes of Kim K and The Donald.

The New Material Girl

Kardashian “broke the Internet” again this past week, this time with a tweet that included a “naked” picture of her posing in front of a full-length mirror. I say “naked” only because she redacted her breast and privates, so that while she was naked when taking the picture, it’s not really a naked picture. Obviously Kardashian can do whatever she wants. Anyone with an objective eye can see that Kardashian has as much beauty as genetics and plastic surgery can muster. Anyone who objects to her taking photos of herself in the nude on moralistic grounds is either a prude or a hypocrite, given the number of people who pay attention to her and her brand.

Donald Trump posing with Kim Kardashian at Celebrity Apprentice event, New York, 2010. (Mathew Imaging/WireImage via http://eonline.com).

Kardashian is a narcissist, and those millions of folks who follow her on Twitter, watch her shows on E!, buy her products and/or jack off to her are narcissists as well. Not because she has maintained a slamming body despite pregnancy, reaching her mid-thirties, or her five-three frame. Kardashian is a narcissist because she embodies most of the clinical symptoms it. According to The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-V), narcissistic personality disorder (under the code 301.81) is “a persistent manner of grandiosity, a continuous desire for admiration, along with a lack of empathy.” In order to determine if a patient may have narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), a psychiatrist must determine if that patient meets at least any five (5) of the nine (9) standards below:

1. A grandiose logic of self-importance (✓)
2. A fixation with fantasies of unlimited success, control, brilliance, beauty, or idyllic love (definitely ✓)
3. A credence that he or she is extraordinary and exceptional and can only be understood by, or should connect with, other extraordinary or important people or institutions (see her collection of friends, lovers: ✓)
4. A desire for unwarranted admiration (✓)
5. A sense of entitlement (✓)
6. Interpersonally oppressive behavior
7. No form of empathy
8. Resentment of others or a conviction that others are resentful of him or her
9. A display of egotistical and conceited behaviors or attitudes (✓)
(American Psychiatric Association, 2013).

It would be hard to know for sure where Kardashian would stand on 6., 7., and 8. without some serious time on a couch or knowing her beyond her public displays of all things herself. Still, it was easy enough to get to six standards without the need for a PhD in psychology or a psychiatric license.

What is worrisome about both Kardashian and Trump, though, is their endless legions of fans and supporters. Kardashian has been peddling herself as Whiteness personified, an entitled upper-class Beverly Hills daughter of O.J. Simpson friend and defense lawyer Robert Kardashian (of Armenian descent) and Kris Houghton-Kardashian-Jenner. Despite the ethnic contradictions, Kardashian’s success has been based in the idea of the glamorous life, the ability to be ostentatious, to rub shoulders, elbows, and other anatomical parts with the rich and famous and the up-and-comers. Between the sex tape with Ray J. that made its way to the Internet and the start of Keeping Up With The Kardashians (both in 2007), her brand of narcissistic Whiteness has been on display now for a full decade. There’s no way that someone whose only job prior to reality TV was as a stylist would be doing this well without the blind support of millions of Americans who have the narcissism, but lack the funds to fuel it.

Damien Meets The Donald

The same is true of GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump. He would not be in the position to run against either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders were it not for his four decades in the public eye. Between his casinos, his business ventures (which include numerous failures and five Chapter 11 filings), his immense number of interviews, his three marriages and extramarital affairs, and his NBC TV show The Apprentice (2003-15), Trump’s name is legend. At least for 1990s rap artists and generations of Whites who have bought his books on entrepreneurship in the millions.

Trump, or to go back to the original (thank you, John Oliver), Drumpf, would fulfill all nine standards for narcissistic personality disorder. His constant expressions of misogyny, his equating of Mexicans with rape and criminality, his belief that all protesters need to “get a job,” his insistence that the world is divided between winners and “losers.” All while Trump believes that his very name equals success, no matter the amount of evidence that contradicts his inverted reality. On the 40-point-scale of the Narcissistic Personality Index, Drumpf would likely score between a 38 and a 40, a perfect or near-perfect score. A score, by the way, that no one other than a narcissist would be proud of.

Damien TV series poster, A&E, accessed March 13, 2016. (http://imdb.com).

Drumpf, though, is a snake-oil salesman who benefited from his father’s slum-lording ways, inheriting a company in 1971 and part of Fred Trump’s $200 million upon the latter’s death in 1999. If Bill Gates isn’t a self-made billionaire, then Drumpf was born two marathons ahead of Gates in the human race for wealth. Yet Trump has presented himself for years as the epitome of Horatio Alger, and to the detriment of millions of Whites who actually believe that Trump’s life is a rags-to-riches story. The bankruptcies don’t matter. The failures of Trump Shuttle, Trump University, Trump Entertainment Resorts, none of that has mattered. All that matters, apparently, is that Trump is a billionaire (no one really knows how much he’s worth; could be anywhere between $250 million and $3.9 billion), and that he promises to “Make America Great Again.”

Unlike Kardahshian, Trump openly attacks anyone who contradicts his narcissistic image of himself and his world. He has for years. The so-called Central Park Five wrongly convicted in the 1989 wilding gang rape case — Yusef Salaam Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, and Korey Wise — can attest to the impact of Trump’s money, one-page ad calling for the death penalty, and narcissism on their lives. Even after the courts overturned their convictions in 2002 and they finally settled their lawsuits against the city for $41 million in 2014, Trump still blamed the five for a crime that they obviously did not commit. “Speak to the detectives on the case and try listening to the facts. These young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels,” Trump wrote in an op-ed for the New York Daily News in June 2014. Apparently, a narcissist who always sees people of color in the worst possible light can never be wrong.

Even with his so-called friends, Trump’s narcissism is beyond the pale. When supposed friend Rev. Al Sharpton disagreed with Trump’s law-and-order stance on Ferguson in 2014, Trump responded with a personal attack during an interview with Fox News. actually addressed their relationship during a Fox News hit last December. “Al’s a con man. He knows it. I know it. Don King knows it, his friend, who I go to with fights with — with Al. And they all know it,” Trump said. He added, Sharpton’s a “professional con man” who has “gotten away with murder.”

We Are The #1s

Should we ever wonder why Trump’s rallies are a who’s who of White supremacy and privilege attracting every form of bigotry, like a nuclear missile fully fueled and ready for launch? Should anyone be surprised that whenever Drumpf blows his dog whistles to his mobs about immigration, the US-Mexico border, yells at a protester, “get them outta here” like a drunk-ass White supremacist, calls President Barack Obama “a disaster,” his audience responds with angry delight? This isn’t just racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, or misogyny at work. No, this is also a collective obsession with the self, a self that yearns to be like Drumpf in interviews, and on stage at rallies, and in proclaiming the self to be richer, greater, more successful, and more right than every other self.

Donald Trump greets supporters after a rally, Mobile, Alabama, August 27, 2015. (Mark Wallheiser/Getty via http://www.telegraph.co.uk/).

It isn’t the fault of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision (2010) that Trump is on a glide path toward the GOP nomination this summer. Nor is it the fault of Obama, or Black Lives Matter, or even The Donald himself. No, it is the fault of millions of narcissistic Americans whose billionaire and celebrity worship has trumped all sense of reality.

As psychology professors Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell noted in their recent book The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (2009), millions of Americans live in the “land of grandiose fantasy,” with potentially disastrous results (pp. 3-4), like the rise of Trump. Given that March Madness 2016 begins in earnest this week, would anyone really notice if Trump decided to make Kim K. his vice-presidential running mate? She turns thirty-five this October, after all.

Aside

“White Privilege,” “Privileged Whites,” and Other Clarifications

01 Saturday Aug 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, New York City, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

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American Exceptionalism, Bigotry, Black Reconstruction (1935), Central Park, Colorblindness, Egalitarianism, Homelessness, Privileged Whites, Psychological Wages, Public Wages, Race, Racism, Socioeconomic Status, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wages of Whiteness, White Privilege, Whiteness

"White Privilege-Amex," April 2014. (http://theblacksphere.net/).

“White Privilege-Amex,” in black and white, April 2014. (http://theblacksphere.net/).

It is hard to discuss race. It is definitely so in the US, where virtually everyone believes that their individual good intentions mean more than systemic oppression and ugly truths. And it is really hard on people of color when they/we discuss race with most Whites and some people of color (e.g., Black conservatives, the elite of color, those with internalized racism issues), as their belief in American exceptionalism and individualism is so strong that any evidence to the contrary must be wrong. Especially if the person providing the evidence is Black, Latino, Native American or Asian, and even more so if they are women of color.

One thing that’s been on my mind lately is the lazy use of terms by the media around race. And their laziness is our collective and individual laziness as well. So much so that most Americans use the terms for discussing race about the same way most Americans eat — they say “gimme lots of fat” while refusing the vegetables and healthy, but “put everything on it” at the same time.

Mr. Moneybags of Monopoly (1934) fame, July 31, 2015. (http://streetsmartbrazil.com/).

For example, most Whites see the terms White privilege and privileged Whites and assume they mean the same thing. They don’t and can’t. White privilege refers to both systemic and individual racial discrimination and disparities that almost no one White would ever have to deal with in most circumstances. It has little to do with socioeconomic standing, level of education, social networks, or any other variable to which most Americans who play devil’s advocate often refer. Privileged Whites, though, refers to the fact that this socioeconomic group is either upper middle class or wealthy, often with high education levels. The latter can also refer to White privilege, but then again, that’s already assumed in America’s racial construction of itself.

Anyone who is White and poor and also assumes that White privilege (or, to use W.E.B. Du Bois’ term, Whiteness) is ascribing to them a socioeconomic status that they do not possess, that’s just incorrect. As Du Bois wrote in Black Reconstruction (1935), even the poorest Whites received societal compensation, at least in part, through a “public and psychological wage.” In Jim Crow times, it was one in which poor Whites “were given public deference…were admitted freely…to public functions and public parks.” At the same time, the “police were drawn from their ranks and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with leniency” (pp. 700-01). Come to think of it, much of this still applies in 2015, even though the Civil Rights Movement dismantled Jim Crow, no?

But it’s not just terms like White privilege and privileged Whites that throws off all but a small minority of Americans. Most use terms like race, racism and bigotry interchangeably, as if they work at an Apple factory in the Longhua Subdivision of Shenzhen, in Guangdong Province, China (it’s outside Hong Kong) making iPhones and iPads. Race is a construct and not a biological fact in the case of Homo sapiens, since humans are all part of one species, albeit with some rather interesting surface variations. Racism is the result of a construct to justify social and economic advantages in the US and all over the globe, as well as the systemic construction and maintenance of such advantages. Bigotry, though, is something we as individuals all possess, regardless of race, gender, ideology, religion, atheism, or any other variable. There’s more, but I’ve already written a post about this.

A clip from The Colbert Report in a segment about the end of stop and frisk in New York City, August 2013. (http://globalgrind.com via http://billmoyers.com).

And there’s this whole notion of color blindness, the idea that millions of Americans who see everything in color can claim that they’re colorblind to race. “I don’t care if you’re white, black, red, green or purple. It doesn’t matter to me,” most Americans often say. There’s two problems with this statement and these phrases. One is that unless someone is actually, physically and neurologically colorblind, what one is doing is choosing to ignore differences, which is completely different from tolerating, accepting or embracing difference. One might as well say that they don’t see the homeless in the middle of Central Park in New York, that’s how ridiculous — maybe even tone-deaf and callous — this idea is.

Two is that there aren’t any green, purple, blue or other weird hues of humanity anywhere on this planet. Heck, technically, Whites are pink, Blacks are varying shades of brown, Native Americans have reddish undertones (and then only some), and so on. The point is, this idea of color blindness to race is straight horse manure, allowing many Americans to feel good about their views on race, racism and bigotry without any serious thought about their country or the people in it at all.

And that is why conversations on race in the US remain a pipe dream for some, and raise the fear of the specter of Judgment Day for others.

Amateur Eugenicists: Why Smart Poor Students Have a Hard Time

05 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, My Father, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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"Why Ivy League Schools Are So Bad at Economic Diversity", Bigotry, Christy2012, Elitism, Eugenics, Jerome Karabel, Meritocracy, Poverty and Intelligence, Race and Intelligence, Racial Determinism, Racism, Robin J. Hayes, Scientific Racism, Social Darwinism, The Atlantic, The Chosen (2005), Yale

Scientific racism, using “evidence” to compare the Irish to the African, by H. Strickland Constable, Harper’s Weekly, 1899. (JasonAQuest via Wikipedia). In public domain.

I do generally loathe reading the comments sections of most news sites (any sites, really), but the one on Robin J. Hayes’ “Why Ivy League Schools Are So Bad at Economic Diversity” in The Atlantic is a real trip. There are dozens of comments in which people are playing amateur eugenicists, as they’ve connected wealth & poverty to intelligence. For these folks, the poor perpetuate themselves because they are stupid, and when they have kids, they’ll be born stupid as well, and therefore, will remain poor. As if structural inequality and structural racism have nothing to do with creating the gaps in wealth and education for millions of Americans.

I’m sure I haven’t seen more Social Darwinist /scientific racist /pro-eugenics comments anywhere, including on neo-Nazi websites. Apparently, the only thing The Atlantic’s commentators read while in college (as this is allegedly the profile of their readers) was Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve (1994), as their arguments came out of studies that are now well over 100 years old. (I defy anyone to say they’ve read all 838 pages, though!) What these people should’ve been reading is Jerome Karabel’s The Chosen (2005) and Nick Lemann’s The Big Test (1999), both of which indicate the Ivy League’s long history of high racial and socioeconomic bias, not just high selectivity.

The Chosen (2005) front cover, March 5, 2014. (Donald Earl Collins).

So I responded, using the lessons I’ve learned from my life and from writing Boy @ The Window, pointing out along the way that “Yale and the others offer what they offer to us po’ folk because they want to appear like they’re doing good, knowing full well that actually working to increase economic diversity is too much for them to fathom.” It elicited this counter-response from someone calling themselves Christy2012:

Pardon me for being so blunt, but you seem to imply that you were somehow obvious Yale material based on your top 2% status. However, you indicated on your blog that you earned a 2.6 GPA at University of Pittsburgh, a much less competitive institution, in your freshman year. Do you suppose you would have attained a higher GPA at Yale? Many rich people get turned down by Yale with even better credentials and Columbia is a fairly elite school itself. That Columbia offered you at chance and that you didn’t exactly hit it out of the park at UPitt is not exactly evidence that the schools are biased against the poor (maybe even the opposite).

Maybe there was (or is) an issue relating to how they consider deadbeat fathers in financial aid and scholarship consideration. It seems you should probably focus on that and that is probably an issue for more middle class applicants too.

It turns out that Christy2012 made these personal swipes from an extremely selective and incorrect reading of my blog because she believes all poor students and students of color really aren’t smart. I/we apparently benefited instead from “affirmative action and/or the pity of bleeding-heart White liberals,” and “not because of our abilities or because of hard work” (my translation of her other comments, by the way). Of course, Christy2012 never revealed anything personal about herself. It’s likely she never attended an elite college and has never met a poor person — especially one of color — that she didn’t feel superiority over.

From The Matrix: A sea of pods in which humans are fusion batteries (the future of the poor, as viewed by The Atlantic’s amateur eugenicists), March 5, 2014. (http://www.tony5m17h.net/MatrixNet.gif).

If this set of comments is any indication, it will be hard for Yale or any other school — even if they’re sincere in their efforts at racial and economic diversity — to fulfill them. So many folks even without holding positions of power or serving as gatekeepers decide before looking that poor folks and poor folks who look like me are incapable and unqualified for anything other than a mop, a broom or a jail cell. Is there any wonder that so few of America’s poor and of color have a chance at any higher education of significance, forget about getting into an elite or Ivy League institution?

Racism Doesn’t Care What Year It Is

09 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Movies, music, Politics, Pop Culture, Youth

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"And The Beat Goes On" (1979), "I Have A Dream" speech, "We Shall Overcome", Bigotry, Civil Rights Act, Individual Racism, Institutional Racism, Internet, James Byrd, Jonathan Ferrell, Laws, Marissa Alexander, MOVE, Oppression, Philadelphia PD, Racism, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Social Justice, Social Media, Sophia Stewart, Structural Racism, Technology, Television, The Matrix (1999), The Whispers, Trayvon Martin, Voting Rights Act, Wachowski Siblings, Yusef Hawkins

Joel Ward in celebration with Washington Capitals teammates after scoring game/series winning goal in Round 1 of Stanley Cup Playoffs against Boston Bruins (all while fans chanted racial slurs), April 26, 2012. (http://www.flightunit.com/).

One of the many throwaway sentences I’ve heard and read for almost all of my life has increasingly driven me more nuts over the years. In response to a racist statement or incident, an interviewee on the air or someone writing a column will say, “It’s 1984!” or “This is 2006!,” with “and we’re still putting up with this?” or “and we’re still dealing with” racism or bigotry to finish the thought. It’s the one phrase you can expect anyone White, Black, Latino, Asian and/or American Indian to use when interviewed or with access to a public platform. As if the year in which racial injustice and bigotry manifests itself actually matters!

Seriously, did people think that marches, speeches and laws alone would end up killing the complex and morphing structure of American racism that’s existed for more than three centuries? Did we really think that singing “We Shall Overcome” and quoting Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech would allow individual Whiteness and hatred to melt away? Was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 somehow supposed to end all race-based discrimination, even when fully enforced (of course, the federal government has never fully enforced these laws)?

Picture of Michael Griffith, killed by car after group of Whites in Howard Beach, Queens attempted to beat him and his friends with baseball bats on December 20, 1986. (Denis Hamill; http://nydailynews.com).

Yes, we live in an ultra-modern age, where my generation and my son’s generation know more about the world, the universe and life than my mother and grandfather’s generations. But having more knowledge often means that we as humans tend to be more destructive toward each other before becoming wise enough to end that specific pattern of destruction. Or, as has often been the case in human history, until a new group comes along and topples one structure of oppression before implementing a new and sometimes kinder and gentler one.

To think about it another way, just because we’re technologically advanced and more scientifically driven doesn’t mean that humans in general — and Americans specifically — will act rationally and change their behaviors. Especially if it involves giving up an advantage — real or perceived — in the process.

Even though we invented the atomic bomb in 1945, it didn’t stop us from using it against the Japanese or racist White rednecks from beating to death Black veterans of World War II. Though we had television sets in nearly every American home in the 1960s, it didn’t stop Bull Conner from unleashing dogs and turning fire hoses on Black kids in Birmingham, Alabama, Medgar Evers from getting shot in Mississippi or Selma, Alabama marchers from getting beat up. And though we were poised to land on the Moon in July ’69, it didn’t mean that James Earl Ray wouldn’t take a moment to blow away Dr. King fifteen months earlier.

The first oracle from The Matrix (1999, 2003), played by the late Gloria Foster, February 9, 2014. (http://matrix.wikia.com).

In my own lifetime, there’s been more of this lag between knowledge, self-interest and racism. From Yusef Hawkins in Bensonhurst in ’89 to James Byrd being beaten, chained and dragged behind a pickup truck in Jasper, Texas in ’98. From the Philly PD’s bombing of MOVE and the community around it in ’85 to Hurricane Katrina in ’05. Not to mention individual incidents and distinctions, like Trayvon Martin, Marissa Alexander and Jonathan Ferrell. As the ’70s hit by The Whispers goes, “And The Beat Goes On.” We have the Internet, social media, the ability to mobilize outrage and righteous indignation into demonstrations for human rights and social justice. But the human capacity to build oppressive institutions remains, as well as our capacity to hate.

But, to quote The Oracle from The Matrix trilogy (1999-2003), not to mention Buddha, “Everything that has a beginning has an End,” right? Of course, that quote might well have been inspired by a story written by Sophia Stewart in ’81, whom the Wachowski siblings apparently plagiarized in making their multi-billion dollar films. Again, why does the year racism manifests itself matter?

When Work Really Is Too Much

27 Monday Jan 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Bigotry, Burnout, CIS, Computer and Information Systems, Hard Work, Hard Work Mythology, Jay Wickliff, Long Hours, Pitt, Presidential Classroom, Racism, Sexual Harassment, Sleep Deprivation, Workplace Harassment

From “How to Do More Work in Less Time” article, Forbes Magazine, February 28, 2012. (Deborah L. Jacobs/http://forbes.com).

I’ve been working for a paycheck in some capacity since September ’84, when me and my brother Darren began working with our father Jimme down in Upper West/East Side and Midtown Manhattan. Back then, we cleaned the floors of corporate offices, the carpets of condos and co-ops, and endured Jimme’s alcoholic ups and downs. There was one lesson, though, that stuck with me in the year or so that we worked for our father, one that extended the lesson we observed from our Mom before we fell into welfare in April ’83. That we wouldn’t get far without hard work or without having work, and that if we wanted to avoid the work of a low-paying, back-breaking job like buffing and waxing floors, we also needed to work smart, to use our brains and our muscles

Since then, the longest I’ve been without a job has been ten months, between August ’86 and June ’87. I worked all the way through undergrad at Pitt and was a grad assistant and teaching assistant throughout grad school (with the exception of my time as a Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellow in ’95-’96, and even then, I worked on two of Joe Trotter’s research projects). I’ve faced periods of unemployment and longer periods where I’ve cobbled together part-time and full-time work, as well as held stable full-time work in the nonprofit and higher education worlds.

Working long hours, January 23, 2014. (Mark Holder/http://www.findersandsellers.com).

In all that time, I’ve only held two jobs where I’d been overwhelmed with work. Not the actual act of performing the duties of these jobs, mind you. The number of hours in which I had to show up for work was what eventually made these jobs overwhelming. My first time experiencing full-time work outside of a summer job was in the middle of my Winter/Spring ’89 semester. I worked for Pitt’s Computer and Information Systems’ (CIS) computer labs back then. I had requested more hours, and had gone from twelve to twenty to thirty-six between the beginning of January and the second-half of February, covering for folks who had moved on to real full-time work after graduating.

This was a seven-week period in which I averaged 36 hours per week while taking sixteen credits — five classes — and all while facing sexual harassment from my co-worker Pam, harassment tacitly sanctioned by our boss and her friend Cindy. Despite it all and my $4.15/hour salary, I focused on the work, the need for extra cash, and my friends, and came out the other side, and hoped to avoid a situation like that again.

I stumbled my way into a worse situation in my first full-time work after earning my doctorate, with the now out-of-business Presidential Classroom. My official title was Director of Curriculum, but that was my main job for only nine months out of the year. Because Presidential Classroom had dedicated itself to edu-tainment with a full-time staff of only a dozen, this meant that all full-time staff were also part of what we called Program. Fifteen weeks during the winter, early spring and summer, one group of 300-400 high school juniors and seniors from across the country (and Puerto Rico and outside the US/commonwealth) after another would spend a week in DC learning about “how government and politics work on Capitol Hill.” Or, as our brochures would say, “Not your typical week in Washington.”

One version of Presidential Classroom logo, January 27, 2014. (http://congressionalaward.org).

I worked on-site at the Georgetown University Conference Center (where Marriott had a hotel, primarily for families visiting their hospitalized loved ones at Georgetown University Hospital) for seven of those weeks. I supervised interns, so-called faculty (some of whom were government employees who seemed more interested in chasing skirts than in sharing their experiences) and worked with other staff while watching over these groups of students roaming all over DC and Northern Virginia week after week.

One week in February ’00, I counted up, and found that I’d worked 120 hours in all. This included a 21-hour-day, in which I’d caught a boy in a girls’ hotel room, and then proceeded to contact his parents and expel him from the program. Between that and the bigoted staff I worked with — including my boss, the ED, who once told the joke that “slavery was a hoax” — I knew that putting in 100+ hours per week and sleeping in lumpy beds for $35,000 a year wasn’t worth it. By the last week of June ’00, I was severely sleep-deprived and ready to run my co-workers through with a long spear.

The lesson here was that we all need work, and we all need to work hard in order to guarantee success. But working hard also requires hard thinking and decision-making. It required me to say “No” to things that I had said “Yes” to when I was younger and more desperate for any job. What’s the damnable misery of it, though, is knowing that there are millions of people stuck in jobs that require so much more of them than they should be willing to give.

No job should require the kind of hours I put in combined with harassment and bigotry unless the salary is in the six-figure range, and even then, it’s not worth it. It won’t be worth the loss of self-esteem, the sleep deprivation, the sudden weight gain, the irritability and the temptation to turn to forms of self-medication. It wasn’t worth it for me in ’89 or in ’00, as I’m sure it isn’t for those of you in jobs like this now.

Bearing False Witness At Work – It Can Hurt

16 Saturday Nov 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Academy for Educational Development, AED, Bigotry, Bipolar Disorder, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, False Accusations, Hostile Workplace, Juan Mezzich, Ken, New Voices, New Voices Fellowship Program, Paranoia, Racism, Sexual Harassment, Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health, Western Psych, Western Psychiatric Institute & Clinic

Hannah Arendt on false witnesses, November 16, 2013. (http://izquotes.com/).

I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention the fact that this week ten years ago, I endured what was the beginning of a three-month period of a hostile work environment (one that was already not-so-optimal to begin with). It was brought on by my then immediate supervisor’s paranoia and jealousy, and intensified by his then undisclosed bipolar disorder. I’ve written about my three years of hell with Ken before on this blog, most notably in “The Messiah Complex At Work, Part 1” from a couple of years ago.

What I haven’t really discussed at all was how I felt about all of this as I went through it. As a man, as a Black man, as a person who believed in social justice, including in a workplace in which we funded social justice projects. I’d only been accused of sexual harassment one other time, by a boss whose best friend had been harassing me at work for the better part of two months, in the early part of ’89. Now, fourteen years later, here was Ken, at an HR meeting he set up, accusing me of saying things that I never said, of thoughts that I never had.

I was already used to being guilty before being innocent. With police. In a public setting, like a supermarket or bookstore. But not at work, and for the most part, not while I was at Pitt or Carnegie Mellon. Why? Because I tended to be at my most guarded while at work back then. In fact, during an exit interview the year before, a former program assistant at New Voices said that I needed to be “more open” at work if a team like ours was ever to reach its full potential. She may have been right. If only I had bosses who were more open, more relaxed, less accusatory, and in Ken’s case, on his meds.

Archie Bunker from All In The Family (1971-78) screen shot, June 2013. (http://www.chicagonow.com/).

There are few things worse in one’s job or career than reckless false accusations. Even if proven completely untrue, there are some who’ll choose to look at those accused with less trust and more suspicion. And Ken, for all of his bluster about social justice, had proven himself to be as much of a bigot as former executive director at Presidential Classroom, an openly admitted bigot. He could’ve accused me of insubordination, of wanting his job, of not doing my job well enough. Instead, Ken relied on the whole hyper-sexualized Black male motif, as if my testosterone was dripping right out of my penis, like some animal in heat.

Of course, some of you will say, “He had untreated bipolar disorder. He didn’t know what he was doing. Cut him some slack.” No, I can’t and I won’t. As I’ve noted in another post regarding Ken’s condition, bipolar disorder doesn’t equal insanity or irrational behavior necessarily. I worked for Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health between ’89 and ’92, and for Western Psychiatric Institute & Clinic at Pitt between ’89 and ’91. I became pretty good at understanding the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders. I did learn a thing or two from having Dr. Juan Mezzich as a boss while I worked at Western Psych between my junior year and first year of grad school at Pitt.

Kingda Ka, the world’s tallest roller coaster, Six Flags Great Adventure, Jackson, NJ (Exit 7A, NJ Turnpike), September 23, 2006. (Dusso Janladde via Wikipedia). Released to public domain.

One of the things I learned was that bipolar disorder generally exaggerates existing thoughts and behaviors. The psychosis can often be exasperated by stressful situations. For those with the illness, the highs are way too high, the lows so low that suicidal thoughts can become prevalent. If one tends to be paranoid, the paranoia becomes heightened, as was the case with Ken. Still, even with bipolar disorder, he was acting on his bigoted and paranoia template, there long before bipolar disorder manifested itself in him as an adult.

I understood all of this, even as I went through months of accusations and arbitrary changes to my work schedule. But that didn’t mean that there wasn’t a part of me that felt rage, wanted revenge, wanted to take the physically and emotional stunted twerp and stuff him in a garbage can. Or that I didn’t come to work at AED every day between November ’03 and February ’04 with thought that I should just quit, turn around, go home, watch my newborn son Noah and figure out my next step. Most of all, there were times I wanted to choke Ken until he told the truth, that he was a jealous-hearted bastard who lied about me to HR in order to put me in my place as a Black guy working under a White guy.

But I didn’t. I didn’t because I knew that I was right. I knew, somehow, that things would work out in my favor. I knew that God and the universe would vindicate me. If my life is proof of anything, it’s proof that my truth wins out in the end. Those thoughts dictated my actions and counteracted any feelings of rage or violence I had during those cloudy days. To Jonathan Martin and so many others out there, I think I know how you feel right now. Please hang in there, and hang on to the truth.

The Things Dumb Racists Say

27 Saturday Jul 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

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Anthea Butler, Bigotry, Ignorance, Professor Anthea Butler, Racism, Religious Studies, The American President (1995), Trolls, Tumblr, Twitter, UPenn, Willful Ignorance, Zimmerman Trial, Zimmerman Verdict

John Bauer’s illustration from Walter Stenström’s The boy and the trolls or The Adventure, in childrens’ anthology Among Pixies and Trolls (1915), November 1, 2005. (Thuresson via Wikipedia). In public domain.

I loved, I loved, I loved reading and hearing what Anthea Butler had to say in the wake of the Zimmerman not-guilty verdict from two weeks ago (via her piece “The Zimmerman Verdict: America’s Racist God” and MSNBC). I love the courage and strength she’s shown over the past two weeks in standing up to the trolls in social media who’ve literally called her everything except a child of God in expressing the very racism they’ve attempted to deny.

If I’ve been reminded of nothing else in the past fortnight, it’s the fact that the US has a significant reading and writing crisis. In looking at Butler’s The Things People Say Tumblr page, it’s never been clearer to me that the average American can’t write a single sentence without a significant misspelling or grammatical error, and that angry people expressing their bigotry are even more prone to screw up the English language in any form.

UPenn Professor Anthea Butler, circa 2011. (http://www.sas.upenn.edu/religious_studies/faculty/butler).

Yet the most ignorant thing I’ve seen beyond the indirect threats, the nasty racist name-calling and the demeaning of academia for making Butler one of their “affirmative action” hires is the sheer ignorance about religion, Christianity and the ways in which this group of (mostly) White trolls has use both to justify their vitriol and racism. On one level, it’s pretty simple. How dare this [pick any expletive and add either the N-word or the C-word] say anything to point out how some Whites use Christianity and God to support their racist world views, right?

But this simplicity belies a greater truth. That not one of Butler’s post-Zimmerman trolls understood their own religion and the walk of Christianity. They haven’t a clue as to the sheer work it would take to earn any doctorate, much less one in religious studies. These folks have no idea that a PhD in religious studies doesn’t require becoming a priest or a pastor, or sounding all high-brow and polite in the face of injustice. (Heck, I’ve met religious studies professors who are agnostic or atheists!).

They are ignorant, and willfully so. My guess is, they are a small sample size of maybe 100 million Americans — mostly, but hardly exclusively White — who wallow in ignorance thinking that this will shield them from the inexorable march toward a majority of color country that the US will be well before mid-twenty-first century. The fact is, Butler’s trolls are so scared of change that they are threatened by a seventeen-year-old wearing a hoodie with cellphone, Skittles and iced tea in hand. As well as by a University of Pennsylvania professor who they see as unqualified (a bit of a contradiction to be threatened by someone they see as insignificant, but that’s racism for ya!).

I might have worded it a bit differently, though (but then again, I’m a different writer, no?). As a Christian for more than twenty-nine years, I don’t see my God as one who represents racist Whites. After all, we are commanded to “treat our neighbors as we would treat ourselves.”

Evelyn de Morgan’s The Worship of Mammon (1909), September 7, 2006. (Shell Kinney via Wikipedia). In public domain.

But since Butler’s trolls obviously do think that they worship God, let me at least say this. If you believe in corporate capitalism and the corrections of the market, then your god is money, and the love of/lust for it. If you believe in the criminality of Blacks and Black male bodies, then your god is White. If you believe it’s okay to voice your displeasure by calling Butler a “n—-r c–t,” then your god is one that subjugates women, especially Black women. These beliefs do not and cannot represent my beliefs in God, in the life of Jesus, heck, in life of anyone who has ever spoken on behalf of social justice and human rights in history.

To misquote The American President (1995):

“Professor Anthea Butler has done nothing to you, trolls….You want a character debate? You better stick with me, ‘cuz Professor Anthea Butler is way out of your league.”

Notes from a Boy @ The Window

~

Tag Archives: Bigotry

A Narcissist’s Dream

“White Privilege,” “Privileged Whites,” and Other Clarifications

When Work Really Is Too Much

Bearing False Witness At Work – It Can Hurt

The Things Dumb Racists Say