Degrees of Fakery

17 Tuesday Mar 2015

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

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616 East Lincoln Avenue, Advanced Degrees, Ben Carson, Bill Cosby, Brian Williams, Chevy Citation, CMU, Cynicism, Doctor, Doctorate, Dr. Steve Perry, Expertise, Experts, Fake Degrees, Fakery, Father-Son Relationship, Hard Work, Henry Kissinger, Honorary Degrees, Lawyer, Maurice Eugene Washington, Michelle Malkin, Newt Gingrich, Obsequious, Opinions, PhD, William Kristol

Anne-Marie Johnson in Im Gonna Git You Sucka (1988), March 17, 2015. (http://cdn5.movieclips.com/). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws (low resolution and relevance to subject matter).

All too often, there are Americans high and low who believe they can say, “That’s just your opinion!” to anyone about anything. It doesn’t matter if the person they say this to is an expert in, say, climate change or American history or twentieth-century education policy. Or, for that matter, if the person they question is a total bullshit artist. All opinions are equal, and equally discountable.

But it does matter if the opinion comes from someone rich and famous. or at least, someone Americans see on TV and/or hear on the radio nearly every day, someone they like, someone they could see themselves sharing a laugh or cry with. That’s why opinions like those of Rudy Giuliani, Bill Cosby, Michelle Malkin, even Brian Williams seem to have mattered more over the years than the expert interpretations of many a scholar, scientist or public intellectual.

On the scale of those experts, those in the media likely view me as a middle-of-the-pack expert. I went to graduate school for five and a half years, earning two advanced degrees with a focus on twentieth-century US and African American history, with an even sharper focus on history of American education, African American identity and multiculturalism.

Front and left-side view of Chevrolet Citation II (1980-1985), Clinton, MD, August 28, 2008. (IFCAR via Wikipedia). Released to public domain.

Despite what my Mom, my dad and some of my more cynical former high school classmates may think, earning a PhD in history wasn’t nearly as simple as answering 1,000 Final Jeopardy questions correctly before getting a stamp of approval. Twenty-three masters and doctoral courses, more than forty paper assignments of twenty pages or more, two years as a teaching assistant, one year as an undergraduate student advisor, two summers as a research assistant, and twenty-seven months of single-minded focus researching and writing a 505-page dissertation with more citations than the number of Citations Chevrolet made between 1980 and 1985. Oh, and did I mention, nineteen months of burnout afterward?

Yet, when I take the years I’ve spent researching, writing, learning, teaching, publishing and working in the fields of history and education, and express views based on that, I get told what anyone else on the street could say. “That’s just your opinion!” Unbelievable!

I think, too, about those from a time not too long ago who could’ve and should’ve earned a doctorate, a medical degree, or a JD, yet the structures of socioeconomic privilege, racism and sexism prevent them from earning these most expert of degrees. Yet, at many an HBCU, in many a segregated classroom, in so many barbershops, we still called them “Doc,” a sign of respect, for their abilities, for their experience, for their — dare I say — expertise.

We still do this now, even for people who don’t deserve the nickname “Doc.” My father and my idiot, late ex-stepfather both at one point in their lives or another laid claim to being doctors and/or lawyers. For the first two years I knew my then stepfather Maurice, between ’77 and ’79, he carried a monogramed briefcase, always full of his “important papers,” telling me and anyone else he bumped into on the streets of Mount Vernon, New York that he was a “doctor” or a “lawyer.” When drunk, my father sometimes took it a step further, telling strangers on the Subway that he was a “big-shot doctor an’ a lawyer” on his Friday-evening paydays. Maurice drove a Reliable taxicab during his delusions-of-grandeur years, and my father was janitorial supervisor.

Given the history of education and our society’s denial of quality education to people of color and the poor in the US, though, I didn’t entirely hold it against them then, and I don’t now. What I do have much bigger problems with, though, are the people who should know better, and yet don’t do any better. Just in my lifetime alone, people with Dr. in front of their names without having earned a doctorate or a four-year medical degree. Like “Dr.” Henry Kissinger, “Dr.” Bill Cosby, and of late, “Dr.” Steve Perry (not to be confused with the former lead singer for Journey, I guess). And no, honorary doctorates for giving money to Harvard, Temple, or the University of Massachusetts don’t count! Nor does starting an outline for a dissertation without actually finishing one. Still, they insist on the “Dr.,” even when it’s obvious I could’ve sat on the stoop at 616 East Lincoln Avenue thirty years ago to get the same half-baked opinions from one of my hydro-smoking neighbors.

Stock photo of former NYC mayor Rudolph Giuliani, August 2013. (AP/New York Post).

Then again, numbskulls like William Kristol and Newt Gingrich have earned doctorates from Harvard and Tulane University respectively, and Ben Carson was once one of the most respected pediatric neurosurgeons in the world! Yet, for some dumb reason, our media and most Americans think that their opinions are somehow more valuable, more consumable, than those of people who’ve spent decades understanding education, American culture, racial, gender and socioeconomic inequality, and government corruption. Or maybe, we just like listening to fake opinions from people with fake degrees and/or fake expertise on a subject in which they know nothing. Because nothing is exactly what Americans want to hear.

Bill Cobsy, The Nexus of Father Figure and Power Corruption

20 Thursday Nov 2014

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

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"Pound Cake" speech, Bill Cosby, Conrad Bain, Culture of Poverty, Diff'rent Strokes (1978-86), Education, Father Figures, Hypocrisy, Imperialism, Jell-O, Misogyny, NBC, Racism, Rape, Robert Reed, Sexual Assault, The Brady Bunch (1969-74), The Cosby Show (1984-92), Violence

Jell-O Pudding Pops ad with Bill Cosby, circa 1983, November 20, 2014. (http://pinterest.com).

In the aftermath of my Mom’s second divorce in September ’89, she would sometimes engage me in conversations about manhood and fatherhood. It was as if she didn’t think of me as a man in really any sense at all. This despite years of handling adult responsibilities and running interference between her and my now ex-stepfather Maurice.

George Michael, “Father Figure” video screen shot, 1988. (http://vevo.com).

One Christmas holiday day in ’90, we were sitting in the living room at 616 watching a rerun of The Cosby Show on NBC, then the most popular show on the most popular network in the US. My Mom asked me, “If you could pick your father, you’d want it to be Cosby, right?” I stared blankly at my Mom, wondering where the heck that question came from. I didn’t say anything. But my Mom took that as me thinking, “Yeah, he would’ve been a great father for you.”

At the time, I certainly thought that Bill Cosby would’ve been an entertaining father, if I’d been lucky enough to have a near-billionaire as my dad. What I really wanted was my father, Jimme Collins, to get himself sober, to be lucid enough to talk to now that I was in my twenties. Beyond this, I didn’t give Cosby or my Mom’s question and comments much thought.

Over the years, I’ve watched TV dads come and go, frequently with some tragedy or controversy. Robert Reed of The Brady Bunch (1969-74) fame comes to mind, with his in-the-closet status and his early death from colon cancer and HIV complications. So too does Conrad Bain, because of the backlash Diff’rent Strokes (1978-86) received as a result of its dated way of treating issues such as race and poverty with his character Phillip Drummond as the father to two Black kids, not because of his personal life. But Bill Cosby as Dr. Heathcliff “Cliff” Huxtable, an obstetrician and gynecologist (talk about irony) and father of four daughters and one son, became for many “America’s Dad,” a title that the media has celebrated recently in the wake of The Cosby Show‘s thirtieth anniversary of its first airing earlier this fall. He was supposed to be above reproach.

Bill Cosby in midst of his “Pound Cake” speech (with Rev. Jesse Jackson in background), NAACP 50th Anniversary of Brown decision gala, Washington, DC, May 17, 2004. (http://blackpast.com).

I’ve long been disappointed with Cosby, though. For his culture-of-poverty arguments against welfare mothers, crack babies and pregnant teenagers. For his frequent need to chastise Blacks living in poverty for not knowing “proper moral behavior” (this from a person who purportedly holds a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts). Not to mention his double-standard on monogamy.

Now even the oblivious set has become aware of the growing number of accusations from women who’ve said that Cosby had allegedly committed rape and other forms of sexual assault going back at least thirty-two years. I’ve been aware of these accusations and rumors for nearly twenty years, in the wake of Cosby’s son Ennis’ death in ’97. I hoped that these accusations were false ones at first. Who would want to believe that “America’s Dad,” the Jell-O Pudding and Pudding Pop Man, was also drugging and raping women in his spare time?

I think what we need to recognize the most, maybe even more than systemic racism or our culture of imperialism and violence, is that this society of ours is somewhere between an oligarchy and a plutocracy. Bill Cosby’s stance on race, community and morals has only mattered because of his fame and fortune, not because of his expertise and certainly not because of his professional experience. Bill Cosby’s a comedian, an actor, a philanthropist and a philanderer, and perhaps a rapist as well. Americans all too frequently fall for the facade of father figures and others whom seem to say what we want to hear. When all those with power and money really want to do is to wield that power and money to their own capricious and narcissistic ends.

“I Marched With Dr. Martin Luther King!” – and Other Record Scratchers

28 Wednesday Aug 2013

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

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American Dream, Bill Cosby, Civil Rights Generation, Civil Rights Movement, Disillusionment, Don Lemon, Estelle Abel, March on Washington, Post-Civil Rights Generation, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Tavis Smiley, Tough-Love

Dr. Martin Luther King and Benjamin Spock leading antiwar protest, Chicago, IL, March 25, 1967. (AP via LA Times).

Dr. Martin Luther King and Dr. Benjamin Spock leading antiwar protest, Chicago, IL, March 25, 1967. (AP via LA Times).

I’ve posted about my last official contact at Mount Vernon High School in June ’87 before graduating several times, and documented it well. The brow-beating I took from one Estelle Abel moments after my last day and last class of high school was one of the most puzzling and humiliating moments of a long series of them up to that point in my life. As I’ve written in both Fear of a “Black” America and Boy @ The Window:

I walked down the second floor steps and the first floor halls of the high schools to my locker one more time. While clearing out my locker, Estelle Abel walked by and asked to meet with me. I went over to her office, and for the next fifteen minutes, she attacked me for being a slacker.

“You’ve been a disappointment, young man,” Abel said.

“What?,” I said, completely shocked.

“Your work this year is nothing to be proud of.”

I stood across from the tall, witchy-looking lady, speechless, but telling her “Fuck you” in my head. Abel claimed that I had underachieved throughout my four years as a student, that I should have been ranked in the top ten of my class, and that my performance in AP Physics was beyond abominable. All I could focus on was the amount of anger and emotion she possessed in her voice and eyes. You’d have thought that I’d been expelled from school or had raped her daughter!

“By you not graduating in the top ten of your class, you’ve let everyone down. Your family, your friends and our community,” she said, as if anyone around here really cared about me.

Abel continued. “You could’ve been a shining example of achievement to us,” all but hinting at Sam as the person I should’ve been like.

I guess I did let my Black classmates down. I only ranked second in GPA among Black males and eighth among all African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans in my class. I guess I should’ve been taking out back, blindfolded, with cigarette in mouth, and executed by a firing squad.

Abel finished her soliloquy. “You don’t have any excuses! There is nothing going on at home that could justify your performance!”

“Well, that’s not true…” I interrupted. I felt rage rising up from the pit of my stomach. If she’d been anywhere near my age, I would’ve taken all of the Jimme-ese I knew and laid it all on her stupid ass.

Her face turned stern as she cut me off, determined to make some sort of point, to prove that I was a worthless Black man in her eyes.

“Nothing going on in your life would ever compare to what we went through back in the ’60s . . . I marched with Dr. Martin Luther King!”

My mind clicked off my eardrums at that point. Short of showing her my war wounds and having her meet my family, what could I possibly do or say to that? I left her office feeling like my years at MVHS and in Humanities were just bullshit. Abel’s tirade reminded me of the fact that I simply didn’t fit in anywhere.

What I’ve never discussed in all my posts about Abel and her tough-love speech is how this incident — and others like it — have shaped my thinking about the Civil Rights generation. Those local Urban League or NAACP members who gave talks at MVHS or at Pitt or at Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh who said, “I’ve got mine. Now go and get yours” — a reference to businesses, jobs and higher education, as if we were all well financed enough to achieve their American Dream goals. Those usual suspects on the local or national level who gave the same speech year after year about the one time they shook Dr. King’s hand, or about their personal experience at the March on Washington in ’63. As if their experience would be more inspiring than the fact that folks like Medgar Evers and MLK actually gave their lives for the movement.

So many folks like Abel have used their kernels of experience with the March on Washington or the Civil Rights Movement more broadly as a club to beat over the heads of other African Americans, particularly those of us born after 1965. What they thought of as inspiration felt like damnation to me. The idea that nothing was worse than fighting for civil rights in the ’60s would be humorous to the four million slaves who lived in the South 150 years ago. It’s certainly an insult to so many deeply impoverished Blacks, White and other people of color who would have to stretch themselves like Plastic Man just to touch the first rung of the American middle class ladder.

Would I had been able to attend Pitt without a Challenge Scholarship for high-achieving Blacks in ’87? Probably not. Would I had been a part of a gifted-track program for six years without the NAACP filing a desegregation lawsuit against Mount Vernon public schools in ’76? Of course not. But those small windows of opportunity do not a movement make. Nor should it make me forever grateful to folks who considered me a waste of space to begin with — I wasn’t righteously “Black” enough for them, respectable enough for them, and obviously did not come from a home well-resourced enough for them, either.

So what if Abel or anyone else marched with Dr. King? What have you done with your life and for the lives of other since then besides discouraged where you could have encouraged, disillusioned where you could’ve provided comfort, or acted as if people like me owed you libations and gratitude? Estelle Abel represented for me in ’87 what folks like Bill Cosby, Don Lemon, Tavis Smiley and so many others have done in recent years — condemning those most in need of help and inspiration. They’ve all in their words helped turn the most hopeful and rhetorical part of “the Dream” into a nightmare.

Touré’s Post-Blackness ≈ I’ma Be Me?

01 Monday Oct 2012

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

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"Pound Cake" speech, Acting White, American Identity, Authentic Blackness, Authenticity, Bill Cosby, Black Identity, Blackness, Boy @ The Window, I'ma Be Me (2009), Identity Issues, Intrarace Relations, Litmus Test, Post-Blackness, Post-Civil Rights Generation, Post-Racialism, Race, Racism, Reaching Youth, Self-Discovery, Self-Loathing, Self-Reflection, Touré, Wanda Sykes, Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness (2011)

Illustration of red wolf with dinner after a hunt, by Sandra Koch, September 29, 2012. (http://nc-es.fws.gov). In public domain.

I know, I know. Touré’s Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness (2011) has been out for over a year, and I’ve finally, finally managed to read it in the past couple of weeks. I did not want to like this book. I found — and still find — the title to be pretentious and over the top, a perfect fit for Touré’s Twitter and TV persona. Touré values his ideas like they all are new finds of platinum or a form of safe and sustained nuclear fusion. Sometimes Touré can be cutting-edge, but many times, he goes over the edge (as was the case in August on MSNBC with his “niggerization” of Obama comment).

But in Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness, Touré puts forward a variety of ideas and insights that I’ll be contemplating in my blogo-neighborhood off and on over the next few months. Touré’s is a very good book. It’s one that is both intellectual and yet revealing about the challenges Blacks face inter- and intraracially in the early twenty-first century.

The premise — once I got past the ridiculous term post-Blackness — is that African Americans and America has advanced just far enough in terms of race for all of our old conceptions of Blackness to have now become meaningless. That Blackness is fully infused in American — maybe even world — culture. That there was never one way to be Black in the first place. Touré himself says, “[t]here is no dogmatically narrow, authentic Blackness because the possibilities for Black identity are infinite. To say something or someone is not Black — or is inauthentically Black — is to sell Blackness short. To limit the potential of Blackness. To be a child of a lesser blackness.” (p. 5).

Litmus paper used in litmus tests, September 29, 2012. (http://chemistry.about.com).

Ironically, though, much of Touré’s book picks apart the notion that the US has become post-racial in the past couple of decades, as best exemplified by the election of President Barack Obama in 2008. Of course, Touré uses notions of Blackness and where it has expanded beyond the authenticity litmus test to show that race/racial bias/racism is still alive and well in America. At the same time, Touré shows how post-Blackness has also provided opportunities for millions of Americans White, Black and Brown to reach beyond their own misconceptions of race and themselves, to enrich our lives in politics, scholarship, the arts, not to mention through hip-hop.

One of my main criticisms of Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness is that Touré uses a term like post-Blackness (mind you, I hate terms like post-structuralism, post-modernism, and post-racialism too) and doesn’t try in any way to provide a definition that distinguishes it from post-racial. For the purposes of this post, though, the main issue I have revolves around Touré virtually ignoring poor and struggling African Americans in his post-Blackness tour-de-force.

I get it when Touré says that he “never lived a typical Black experience.” (p. 53). At least, I think I do. That despite Touré middle class upbringing, middle-class neighborhood, private school experience, that his is but one representation of Blackness. And that Touré’s experience is as representative of Blackness as my experience of being a Hebrew-Israelite preteen in a working poor family while enrolled in Humanities in Mount Vernon, New York would’ve been thirty years ago (see my post “A Question of My Blackness, Sexuality and Masculinity” from September ’11). Or, for that matter, Wanda Sykes’ comedy special I’ma Be Me (2009) was for her.

That’s great for us, for anyone with enough intellectual power, outsider status, unusual amounts of wisdom, or just plain middle class standing to get the details of Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness. But when Touré does bring up the twenty-five percent of Blacks who aren’t part of this post-Blackness elite, he talks at them, and not to them. Yes, I completely agree that Blackness isn’t to be defined in terms of poverty, prison, and projects. No, Blackness shouldn’t be defined by how “down” one is with an impoverished community or how “hard” someone is for beating the shit out of another person (see my “Raised on Hip-Hop?” post from April ’10).

Hakeem Olajuwon posting up Patrick Ewing, 1994 NBA Finals, June 1994. (http://rgj.com).

Still, while I stand with almost one hundred percent of what Touré says in Who Afraid of Post-Blackness in ’12, I don’t think that this book would’ve reached me thirty years ago. The way I would’ve seen it in ’82 or even ’87, a middle class Black guy telling me about how my poverty is insignificant to who I was would’ve been excommunicated from my life for eternity. It wouldn’t have helped me at all deal with the pressures I faced socially, academically and in my family (see my “The Silent Treatment” post from June ’10).

Touré wouldn’t have been able to provide for me a roadmap for how to be me and to ignore the crowd of those in my life — White and Black — who regularly told me that I wasn’t authentically Black or that I was “talkin’ White.” If mild-mannered me at twelve wouldn’t have been reached by Touré’s chapter on Black artists taking Blackness and standing it on its head, I imagine that young African Americans growing up in poverty or struggling with identity issues would find Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness about as easy to embrace as Bill Cosby’s criticism of poor Blacks in ’04.

For me as a writer, the question of how to reach beyond the already converted is always an issue. Touré, as good as he is in his book, merely affirms the path I’ve traveled over the past thirty-one years. He doesn’t really reach those whose path of Blackness has barely begun.

Class Silence

20 Monday Sep 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Politics, race

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"Silence Must Be Heard", Affluence, Bill Cosby, Bill Gates, Bill O"Reilly, Class, Enigma, Hard Work, Middle Class, Poverty, Race, Rush Limbaugh, Social Class, Working Class, Working Poor

Mum's the word on class.

One of the things that has driven me nuts over the past three decades is how we in this country walk in silence around issues of wealth and social class. We must never speak of our wealth, or poverty, lest we risk embarrassing ourselves or appearing arrogant. All Americans with an income between $20,000 and $20 million a year are middle class, not upper middle class, not affluent, not rich, just middle class.

Any mention of the top three percent in income (people whose income is more than $250,000 a year) amounts to class warfare, even though they control some 35-40 percent of the nation’s $57 trillion in wealth. No, poverty and affluence are relative, not absolute, and can only be measured subjectively,

Atacama Desert in Chile. Driest desert on Earth and place to stick our heads. (Public Domain)

through one’s own experience. Which is why any mention of our troubles is closer to sacrilege than declaring that there isn’t a God, especially in a nation that prints “In God We Trust” on its money.

There are ways to measure affluence and poverty regardless of cost of living and inflation. And please spare me the comparisons between the poor in the US and the poor in the Global South (Third World to those of you who like making other distinctions between fellow humans that actually dehumanize). I’ve seen too many corrugated roofs in Arkansas and Louisiana (all before Katrina), too many outhouses in rural Arkansas and Mississippi, too many families sleeping in the streets in San Francisco and New York, too many malnourished kids in Oklahoma and in DC to hear that “our poor are the richest poor people in the world” song-and-dance.

It’s simple really. Truly middle class people own a car and a home, or at least, have the option of doing both, with a steady income from a permanent job or from an established niche for work. If folks have one and rent an apartment or home, and aren’t really in a position to buy, they’re right on the borderline of the American middle class, but not quite there.

Of course, this definition does not mean that everything’s all right. Tens of millions of Americans, including yours truly, are struggling to pay car notes, student loans, mortgages and rent — not to mention credit card and other debt — and maintain a middle class or lower middle class lifestyle. Unfortunately, there are millions more who are working toward middle class, but aren’t quite there. They may say they’re middle class, but they’re really working-class or working poor.

Upper middle class or affluent Americans do more than own a house or a car. They own quality homes and quality cars, a Volvo or an Acura, maybe even a Lexus. They take at least one vacation a year with their families or friends, to other parts of the US, and on occasion, international trips. They eat at restaurants with their families at least as often as they eat a home-cooked meal. When shopping for groceries, sales are fine, as long as the sales aren’t on off-brand products like Faygo or Giant, Safeway or Krasdale. They have life insurance on every family member, 529 plans for their kids and contribute at least half as much to their 401K as their employer does in any given year (more than that if self-employed).

I’m certainly not arguing that the lives of the upper middle class or affluent or sub-rich are like being on Real Housewives or Keeping Up With the Kardashians. Yet so many in our public discourse make their lives now and times growing up sound humble, as if they grew up like me or others I’ve known over the past thirty years. People like Bill Cosby, Bill Gates or Bill O’Reilly, Dinesh D’Souza or Rush Limbaugh. It’s well beyond dishonest. It’s disgusting, and it helps to perpetuate the myth that the only reason all of us aren’t affluent is due only to our lack of hard work.

As the richest country on Earth — for the time being, at least — we’ve never reconciled our democratic ideals with our capitalistic obsessions. What helps maintain some sense of order, though, is our silence and quiet, desperate acquiescence to ever-increasing economic divisions in a country full of allegedly middle class people. As a song from Enigma goes, however, we should “question the absurd” here, as “silence must be heard.”