Pitt Graduation Day, +25 Years, +25 Hard Truths

26 Tuesday Apr 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, earth, wind & fire, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon High School, music, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

≈ Comments Off on Pitt Graduation Day, +25 Years, +25 Hard Truths

Tags

Bitter Truths, Bruce Anthony Jones, Commencement, Daniel P. Resnick, Disillusionment, Graduation, Hard Truths, Joe William Trotter Jr., Lessons Learned, Marc Hopkins, Mary J. Blige, Meritocracy, Michael Jackson, Narcissism, Pitt, Prince, Regis Welch, Self-Discovery, Trust, U2

Peterson Events Center (where they do all the commencements now) University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, circa 2008. (http://www.rosser.com/).

I can’t believed that I’ve lived long enough to make a quarter-century since my end to undergrad at the University of Pittsburgh! It makes me sound old, at least to the twenty-one year-old I used to be. The one who couldn’t decide between a J.D. and an M.A./Ph.D. program. The person who worried that they would have an MA before their driver’s license. The young ‘in who believed that my advanced degree choices would define my career and life more than anything else.

That person was wise beyond his years, and yet stupid at the same time. He believed in the American meritocracy, in the triumph of hard work, talent, and a Christian faith over every obstacle. He believed that any costs incurred on the path to the MA — and later, the PhD — would be covered in the Bank of a Great Career. He believed, most of all, that professors as advisors and mentors would be there to guide his path every step of the way, the trustworthy individuals that most of them had proven themselves to be.

Me & Mark James (Cropped), Pan-African Graduate & Professional Student Association, University of Pittsburgh, February 27, 1993. (Lois Nembhard).

So much of that belief system was poisoned by the e. coli bacteria of academia and by the leaching lead pipes of American -isms. From my trials at Pitt to my tribulations with Joe Trotter, Dan Resnick, and Bruce Anthony Jones. The fact that my entire nineteen years of teaching, consulting, and nonprofit work has been cobbled together out of necessity and constantly changing circumstances, on which ground has rarely been solid. That after eighteen years and six months of payments, and I’m still a decade or so away from paying off student loans I began borrowing seventeen days after graduating from Mount Vernon High School in ’87.

If I had to talk to my twenty-one year-old self now, I’d say, get the MA in history, then get certified to teach at a high school somewhere. Spend the precious moments not in the classroom reaching high school-age students honing your craft as a writer. Jump headlong into putting down in words your experiences growing up, your times as a Hebrew-Israelite and in Humanities. Get that ms turned into a published work. Work hard at understanding the larger issues and contexts that make America the seething contradiction that it has always been, between racism and freedom, individualism and multiculturalism, social control and narcissism. Then, somewhere between the age of twenty-five and thirty, maybe, go back to school and earn that PhD in history, or in education, and take a few social psychology courses focused on personality disorders along the way.

That is the benefit of 20/10 hindsight (I’d say 20/20, but I still see most things at 20/15, and with warp speed at that!), of course. One big barrier I faced twenty-five years ago is a thorough and excoriating understanding of myself and the life I had to live. I remembered so much of my past that I never questioned the things that I’d forgotten. About abuse, physical and sexual. About deprivation, real and imagined. About people, the layers of yellow onions that most sheepishly are.

Unfortunately, I’d learn the most about what I’d forgotten in my forties, well after most people reconnect with the bitterest parts of their past (if any ever dare to). That I know what I know now is in the category of “better late than never.” Some things, though, I needed to know much sooner than 2014 or 2002. Like my discovery of my ambivalence toward academia. Not teaching or publishing per se. But the idea that I could only be taken seriously by publishing scholarly works that mostly would be read by a few dozen colleagues or when I assigned them to my students. I didn’t figure out how to make my ambivalence work for me until I was thirty-seven, and then, with me at mid-career, fighting to move forward.

Chris Farley facing a hard truth, being hit by a 2x4 in Tommy Boy (1995), April 26, 2016. (http://stream1.gifsoup.com/).

Chris Farley facing a hard truth, being hit by a 2×4 in Tommy Boy (1995), April 26, 2016. (http://stream1.gifsoup.com/).

The silver lining is, that if it weren’t for my time at Pitt, I simply wouldn’t be here to write these words at all. The pressures and pollutions of this world would’ve killed me. Or worse still, killed my inspirations and aspirations, rendering my imagination, my sense of what makes a just and wise world, dead. I’d be as bitter as a cup of Italian roast coffee mixed with vinegar and raw horseradish.

I’m sure that even among my more successful colleagues — and even more sure among my less successful ones — their journeys since the halcyon times of undergrad and even graduate school have been bittersweet. That is life. Especially in a nation in which others encourage us to have aspirations beyond the stars, a complete contradiction to that cracked concrete-reinforced reality that is America.

But even if all of the remaining highs in my career and life outnumber the lows by ten-to-one (who knows, right?), two truths are clear. One is that most people who experience any depth of success in their lives tend to remember the lulls and ruts more than their moments at the top of the mountains. Two is that without me having climbed that first mountain, the college degree mountain, I would have a story to tell, but would lack the words to tell it. I would still be living vicariously through the music of others, whether U2, Earth, Wind & Fire, Michael Jackson (RIP), Prince (RIP), or Mary J. Blige. And for me, at least, as genius as they are — alive and dead — I still need to tell my own story.

Prince, circa 2013 concert, April 26, 2016. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images).

Prince (1958-2016), circa 2013 concert, April 26, 2016. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images).

The Long Road Home

19 Tuesday May 2015

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

≈ Comments Off on The Long Road Home

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Merit-hypocrisy in the Air

18 Saturday Apr 2015

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

≈ Comments Off on Merit-hypocrisy in the Air

Tags

"Who-You-Know" World, Academia, Ageism, Bruce Anthony Jones, Daniel P. Resnick, Dick Oestreicher, Envy, Hard Work, Hypocrisy, Jay Wickliff, Jealousy, Jelani Cobb, Joe William Trotter Jr., Ken Williams, Meritocracy, Nepotism, New Voices, New Voices Fellowship Program, Nonprofit World, Presidential Classroom, Racism, Wendy Goldman

Meritocracy cartoon, October 29, 2010 (Josh C. Lyman via http://www.clibsy.com/).

One of the hardest ideals for me to give up on in all of my life has been the idea of meritocracy. Even when I couldn’t spell the word, much less define it or use it in a sentence, I believed in this ideal. It was the driving force behind my educational progression from the middle of fourth grade in January ’79 until I finished my doctorate in May ’97. The meritocratic ideal even guided me in my career, in both academic and in the nonprofit world. Only to realize by the end of ’09 what I suspected, but ignored, for many years. My ideal of a meritocracy is shared by only a precious few, and the rest give lip service to it before wiping it off their mouths, concealing their split lips and forked tongue with nepotism instead.

Being the historian I am — whom people like Jelani Cobb joked about on Twitter as a curse — I am programmed to look back at situations in my own life to look for root causes, to understand what I can do to not repeat my own mistakes, my not-so-well-planned decisions. I’ve thought about my advisor Joe Trotter and my dissertation committee of Trotter, Dan Resnick (husband of education researcher Lauren Resnick) and Bruce Anthony Jones. The biggest mistake I made was in putting this hodgepodge committee of a HNIC advisor, racial determinist and closeted wanderer together to help guide me through my dissertation and then into my first postdoctoral job.

Aaron Eckhart as main character in movie I, Frankenstein (2014), August 12, 2013. (http://sciencefiction.com/).

Of course, I didn’t know enough about these men to describe them this way, certainly not until I’d graduated and couldn’t find full-time work for more than two years. The signs, though, were there. Trotter’s unwillingness to recommend me for any job before my completed first draft of my dissertation was really complete (it took me two weeks to revise my dissertation from first to final draft). Resnick calling my dissertation writing “journalistic” and saying that my nearly 2,000 endnotes and thirty pages of sources was “insufficient.” Bruce pulling back on his schedule with me even before taking the job at University of Missouri at Columbia in July ’96.

None of this had anything to with my work. It was about me, whether I as a twenty-six year-old had suffered enough, had gone through enough humiliation, to earn a simple letter of recommendation for a job. When Trotter finally decided it was time to write me a letter of recommendation, it was December ’96, and the job was University of Nebraska-Omaha, “subject to budget considerations,” meaning that it could (and it did) easily fall through. Resnick flat-out refused to share anything he wanted to write about me, with all his “confidentiality” concerns, while I wrote all my letters for myself for Bruce. It was a disaster, and none of it had anything to do with the quality of my work as a historian, educator, or academic writer.

The work I ended up getting after Carnegie Mellon was the result of my dissertation, my teaching experiences, and my networking. The idea that I’d earned my spot, though, was still lacking in the places in which I worked. Particularly at Presidential Classroom, where I was the token highly-educated Negro on staff, and working at Academy for Educational Development with the New Voices Fellowship Program. In both cases, I had bosses whose racial biases only became clear once I began working with them. The then executive director Jay Wickliff never cared about the quality of my work or my degrees. Wickliff’s only concern was that I should keep my mouth shut when he acted or spoke in a racist manner.

My immediate supervisor Ken, on the other hand, wanted all the credit for work I did under him, except in cases when he deemed my methods “not diplomatic enough.” Even before his bipolar disorder led him to a psychological breakdown, Ken regularly accused me of gunning for his position, sometimes turning red whenever he heard about my latest publication, teaching assignment or conference presentation. I had to fight to keep my job and to move on within AED in those final months of ’03 and early ’04, a fight that had zero to do with merit.

Dixie Biggs, Lip Service teapot, April 19, 2015. (http://pinterest.com).

I say all this because the one thing that every one of these folks had in common is their lip service to the belief that hard work and results are the keys to success and career advancement. Yet for every one of them, the merit that I had earned didn’t matter. My relative youth, my age, my race, my heterosexual orientation, even my achievements, either scared them or gave them reason to have contempt for me.

I say all of this because in the past eleven years, I have been very careful about the company I keep, about the mentors I seek, about the friends I make, personally and professionally. I went from not trusting anyone as a preteen and teenager to trusting a few too many folks in my twenties and early thirties. All because I believed that my hard working nature and talent mattered more than anything else. What has always mattered more is who you know, especially in high places like academia and with large nonprofits and foundations. So, please, please, please be careful about the supposedly great people you meet. Many of them aren’t so great at all.

That’s why the idea that academia is a place full of progressive leftists is ridiculous. Yes, people like Dick Oestreicher, Wendy Goldman, Joe Trotter and so many others wrote and talked about progressive movements and ideals while I was their student. But fundamentally, they could’ve cared less about the actual human beings they worked with and advised, particularly my Black ass. Their ideals stopped the moment they ended their talk at a conference or wrote the last sentence of a particular book. They only cared about people that they could shape and mold into their own image. And that’s not meritocracy. That’s the ultimate form of nepotism.

First Day and Last Day of School This Week

03 Wednesday Sep 2014

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

≈ Comments Off on First Day and Last Day of School This Week

Tags

ABD, Bruce Anthony Jones, Cecil Parker Elementary, CMU, Common Ground (1985), Dan Resnick, Daniel P. Resnick, Dick and Jane, Dissertation, Dissertation Overview Defense, Humanities, Humanities Program, J. Anthony Lukas, Joe Trotter, Kindergarten, Mrs. Shannon, Nathan Hale Elementary, PhD, World Book Encyclopedia

Cecil Parker Elementary School (formerly Nathan Hale ES), Mount Vernon, NY, November 23, 2006. (Donald Earl Collins).

I’ve written about parts of this before, back in my first days of blogging about my life and times as a student. But this week is especially poignant. Yesterday (September 2) marked twenty years since I sat through and passed my PhD dissertation overview defense at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, making me ABD (All But Dissertation, an official PhD candidate). Tomorrow (September 4) will be forty years since my first day of school, attending kindergarten at the Nathan Hale Elementary School (now Cecil Parker ES) in Mount Vernon, New York. It was a school two buildings and an asphalt playground down from our second-floor flat, 425 South Sixth Avenue. In between was nineteen years and 363 days of time as a formal student, going from learning how to read “Dick and Jane went to the store” to writing a “book” about multiculturalism and Black Washington, DC.

I’m sure most of us don’t remember so much of what occurred in between day one and day 7,303 of student-hood. I remember plenty, though. I remember the morning being unusually cold and having to wear a windbreaker or a raincoat (according to a weather website, the high that day was only 69F, and it actually rained at some point during the day). Kindergarten was only a half-day endeavor back then, so I remember getting released to come home for lunch and spending the rest of the day playing with my Tonka toys and watching Sesame Street and The Electric Company.

Second floor of Baker Hall, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, December 2, 2010. (Daderot via Wikimedia). In public domain.

Contrast that with a warm first Friday in September ’94, at a time when I’d met some new first-year PhD students in the History program, Carl, Jeff, Susannah and a few others, who all seemed surprisingly interested in my dissertation work. I think it was just that I was one of their first points of contact, going through something they themselves hoped to do within a few years. Either way, I’d been preparing to defend my eighty-page dissertation overview for the previous six weeks, in between working on a migration studies research project for Joe Trotter and keeping an eye out for dissertation grants that I firmly believed were necessary for me to get out of grad school with my sanity intact.

As I walked up the sloped, dark, factory-mimicking hallway on the second floor of Baker Hall to what would be two hours of interrogation from Trotter, Dan Resnick, Bruce Anthony Jones and Department Chair Steve Schlossman (among others in the conference room that morning) with my “entourage,” I had this two-decade juxtaposition in mind. I actually started thinking about the long path from kindergarten to PhD, and all the bumps, bruises and breaks along the way. About how on a September 2nd morning six years before, I’d been homeless and came within days of dropping out of college. About how none of this would have been possible without my older brother Darren, who taught me how to read on Christmas Day ’74. Or, for that matter, without my third-grade teacher Mrs. Shannon encouraging my Mom to buy the entire set of the ’78 edition of The World Book Encyclopedia, which led to me reading through that set between December ’78 and April ’79.

Even J. Anthony Lukas‘ Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (1985) was in my head as I laid out my papers and dissertation overview as references for my overview defense. I’d only read the book in the previous year. This Pulitzer Prize-winning book for nonfiction lived up to the award it earned Lukas, as he went to excruciating lengths to make the process of desegregation by busing, White fears, and Boston’s racism and racial divide come alive.

Front cover of Common Ground (1985) by J. Anthony Lukas, September 3, 2014. (http://goodreads.com).

In reading about what the White parents did to stop busing in September ’74, it forced up a memory of watching the evening news my first two days of school about Boston’s White community rioting over busing and desegregation. The picket signs, the bottles and rocks. I remembered asking my Mom about it then, but I don’t think she gave me a direct answer. Lukas, though, did, twenty years later.

Finally, I thought about my Humanities classmates as I sat down and had gone through all of the pleasantries with my dissertation committee and other professors and grad students in the room. I thought about how classmates like Josh and Danny ridiculed me as a savant, who told me that history essentially was only trivia, that I couldn’t do anything with it other than “go on Jeopardy.” In some ways, they were right. They just weren’t correct on September 2, ’94.

All of this gave me a place to start. So when Trotter asked me, “What in your life has prepared you for this moment?,” I knew from which parts of my life’s journey to pick. Only to realize that in starting at the beginning, I was nowhere near full circle.

On My Mother’s Side – Meeting The Gill Family

05 Saturday Apr 2014

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

≈ Comments Off on On My Mother’s Side – Meeting The Gill Family

Tags

AERA, Basketball, Bruce Anthony Jones, Continental Airlines, Extended Family, Family, Family Stories, Final Four 1994, Genealogy, Houston Texas, New Orleans, Poverty, Remembrance, Sports, The Gill Family, Third Ward, Travel, Uncle Darryl, Uncle George, Uncle Robert

Continental Airlines ticket stubs/itinerary, Pittsburgh to New Orleans (with Houston layover), April 2-10, 1994. (Donald Earl Collins).

This weekend marks twenty years since visiting my extended family on my mother’s side for the first time. It was Final Four weekend ’94 when I hopped on a Continental Airlines flight from Pittsburgh to Houston. To think that until April 2 ’94, I hadn’t been farther west than Atlanta or been in any other time zone seems far-fetched now that I’ve crisscrossed this country enough times to earn hundreds of thousands of frequent flyer miles. To think that for years I never felt I had a family to talk about at all or that what I did have wasn’t worth talking about. That all changed that weekend.

A conference presentation proposal I put together with Bruce Anthony Jones — my unofficial advisor in the School of Education at Pitt — had successfully made it through the difficult American Educational Research Association’s review process. So me, Bruce, and two other School of Education grad students were headed to the Big Easy to take in the sights and the serious scholarship that would be discussed, ad nauseum, the first full week of April. I managed to get a layover in Houston, all so that I’d have the chance to meet my extended family for the first time. Between the letter I sent to my Uncle Robert and my first adult conversation with a Gill relative other than my mother or Uncle Sam, I hoped that someone would be at the airport in Houston to meet me.

I landed in Houston around 9 am local time. I slept well on the flight, but I had only had about five hours total sleep before arriving in Bush country. I expected a dump of an airport, but the George H.W. Bush Intercontinental Airport (it wasn’t call that at the time I think) was as modern as Pittsburgh’s then two-year-old airport. I got down to baggage claim, and there they were. Uncle George and Uncle Darryl were there, grinning and smiling as if they could see me from a mile away. “I knew it was you, with that Gill nose,” he said as he walked toward me and gave me a big hug.

Historic Third Ward, Houston, Texas, March 2012 (not the part I got to visit). (Nelson Bowman III; http://www.myhbcuinterview.com)

We got in George’s car, stopped by a gas station near downtown Houston first, to get gas and to get me something to eat and drink. Then they immediately went to the Third Ward to hang out with friends and play basketball. They only let me take three shots, and I missed all three, tired as I was. “We need real ballers out here,” my Uncle George said.

My uncles were good, but given the amount of time they spent on the court, they should’ve been. They both played basketball in high school in Bradley, Arkansas. Heck, all of the Gill boys played at least two sports growing up. My Uncle Sam played four — basketball, football, baseball, and track — and all of the others at least played basketball and football. George at thirty-two and Darryl at twenty-eight (neither of them like me calling them “Uncle,” with me being twenty-four at the time) were still in pretty good shape, though Darryl complained about his midsection. They kept asking me, “Are you sure you’re a Gill?,” based on three shots I missed, including two that rimmed out.

Eventually I’d meet my Uncle Robert, his wife and sons, my Uncle Darryl’s girlfriend and eventual wife, and a few of Uncle George’s friends that weekend. Of all of the family meetings that took place, none was more meaningful than me sitting down to dinner that Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon with three of my uncles at one time. They grilled me with more questions than I’d get from my dissertation committee some five months later. “How big sis [my Mom] doin’?” “Do any of the kids play sports?” “What’s it like livin’ in the big city?” Even though my mother had been on welfare for eleven years, and living in poverty for some thirteen — working or not — they still thought that we were doing better than they were living in the middle of Texas. I tried, but failed, to convince them that our poverty was real.

It was a weird conversation, seeing that it was happening in the dining and living rooms of my Uncle Robert’s ranch-style house, a four-bedroom, two-bath home with a carport, backyard and decent front yard in suburban Houston. They owned four cars, and a leaky boat that needed some repairs. Pretty good for a man with a high school diploma and someone who was a shift supervisor for a local trucking company. Uncle Robert was the man, a six-five rail-thin man who looked almost like he could be his brother Sam’s twin instead of his slightly younger brother at forty-four years old. But Uncle Robert and the rest of them all assumed that since my mother hadn’t come running back to Texas or Arkansas for help that things were all right. They weren’t, as they’d learn a year later when the 616 fire left my mother and younger siblings homeless.

My Uncle, Robert Gill, Houston, Texas, received April 3, 1994. (Robert Gill/Donald Earl Collins).

Beyond that, I learned a lot about the family. I confirmed some of the stories that my mother had told me over the years, including the one about my half-Irish, half Choctaw/Black great-great grandmother who was born in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) in 1880. I also learned that my grandmother Beulah was originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma, that I really did have a great-grand aunt in Seattle, apparently New Edition lead singer Johnny Gill’s grandmother or great-grandmother, making all of us related.

That my uncles were and remained close was heartening, and that they managed to get decent and good-paying jobs was encouraging. It also gave me some sense of reassurance, if not pride, in the fact that they had put their lives together in Houston without any real guidance from family. By the time I boarded my flight to New Orleans that Sunday evening, I felt like I knew enough to talk about my family, mother’s and father’s side, for the first time.

What I Didn’t Know (in ’81, in ’97, in ’13)…

18 Saturday May 2013

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

≈ Comments Off on What I Didn’t Know (in ’81, in ’97, in ’13)…

Tags

616 East Lincoln Avenue, Anticipation, Back Stabbers, Bruce Anthony Jones, Child Abuse, CMU, Domestic Violence, Family, Hustling, Joe Trotter, Joe William Trotter Jr., Not Knowing, O'Jays, Pitt, Poverty, Publishing, Success, The Matrix (1999), Welfare Poverty, Wisdom, Writing

Noah with me, January 3, 2004 [he was five months old]. (Angelia N. Levy).

Noah with me, February 28, 2004 [he was seven months old]. (Angelia N. Levy).

What I didn’t know across the past thirty-two years could be another book for me. I assume that would be the case for anyone would could look back across their life and second-guess themselves over that long a period of time. For me, though, the significance of today comes out of my mathematics background. You see, today’s my sixteenth PhD graduation anniversary. Not all that significant, I suppose. Except that I’m as far away from the end of my graduate school days at Carnegie Mellon today as I was from the first days of being a Hebrew-Israelite and watching my family fall into welfare poverty when I graduated in ’97.

100th Commencement Ceremony program, Carnegie Mellon University, May 18, 1997. (Donald Earl Collins).

Two things will hurt your success in this life. One is not acting on the things you know you should or must do. I learned that hard lesson from watching my mother make the decision to not make any decisions until it was too late, all while growing up at 616. Two is the enormous danger of not knowing, and therefore, not being able to act or respond to new or damaging situations as they arise. I’ve learned that lesson pretty well, too. Sometimes the hard way, through really bad experiences or decisions I didn’t play out like a game of eleventh-dimension chess. Sometimes through insight, foresight, even divine inspiration, anticipating what I didn’t know ahead of time.

And even with anticipation, you still might not be able to do anything about what you do and don’t know, simply because you’re not in any position to change things. That was especially true in ’81. I knew that my now deceased idiot ex-stepfather Maurice Washington was no good. But when my Mom decided to end her six months’ separation from him, there was nothing I could really do about it. I knew that with inflation rates of 14.5 percent in ’79 and 11.8 percent in ’80 (thank you, Scholastic Weekly Reader) and my Mom income of roughly $15,000 per year that we had less and less to work with at home. Again, not much I could do about that, either. Even paper boy jobs were drying up by the time I turned twelve!

O’Jays Back Stabbers (1972) album cover, November 10, 2011. (Dan56 via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use as low-resolution illustration of subject matter.

What I didn’t know was how quick and violent the shift into poverty would be. What I didn’t know was that Maurice would use his/our conversion as Hebrew-Israelites as justification for abusing my Mom and me. What I didn’t know was that my Mom would have three more kids by this man between July ’81 and May ’84. What I didn’t know was that I would feel so low about the loss of my best friend and my sense of self that I’d attempt to take my own life on my fourteenth birthday, at the end of ’83.

But when I looked back on this in ’97, I mostly thought about the good things that had occurred in the fifteen years between the domestic violence my Mom endured on Memorial Day ’82 and my doctoral graduation ceremony. My independent conversion to Christianity in ’84. Knocking out a 5 on my AP US History exam without ever cracking open Morison and Commager. Overcoming poverty and my lack of self-esteem to build a life at Pitt and in Pittsburgh between ’88 and ’97.

Still, I’d already been wounded, badly. By the things I knew but did nothing about. By those things I could’ve anticipated but my efforts to counteract were insufficient. By those things I couldn’t have known at all. I knew I’d have problems with my “running interference” advisor Joe Trotter coming down the dissertation stretch. Yet because of departmental politics and my need to be done sooner rather than later, I did nothing about this until I was six chapters into an eight-chapter dissertation. I knew my mentor and committee member Bruce Anthony Jones could sometimes be unreliable. Yet I had no idea that he would completely abandon me and his other doctoral students the moment he signed his name to my and their dissertations.

My dissertation’s signature page, May 18, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins),

Most of all, I never anticipated that my Mom would actually be jealous of me, and would spend a whole week with me at 616 and in Pittsburgh doing and saying things to completely disparage what I’d worked so hard for. For me, for her, for my family. That was hard to get over. There are times I’m not sure if I’m entirely over this yet.

What I’m sure of in ’13, though, is what I do know, don’t know, and can only anticipate with the wisdom of experience and wisdom beyond my experience. I know that I love my wife, that there’s a lot in common between her and Crush #1 (for those of you who’ve read Boy @ The Window so far, the implications should be obvious), real and from my own imagination. I didn’t know that I’d have a kid, a son who at nearly ten is both wonderful and perplexing, and hopefully, off to a much better start in life than I ever got. I suspect that one of my references for jobs and consulting gigs has been undermining my efforts over the past five years, and have thus removed her as a reference.

What I don’t know — but can only hope and work like a dog toward — is whether Boy @ The Window will be a success. I’m not sure if quantifying it would help. I sold a thousand copies of Fear of a “Black” America between August ’04 and January ’07, without the benefit of this blog, Twitter, Facebook or the e-book platforms. How long before I sell my first hundred, thousand, 5,000 or more? I have no idea. But as they say, I “must walk the path, not just know it.”

December Doctoral Decisions

13 Thursday Dec 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

≈ Comments Off on December Doctoral Decisions

Tags

Advisor-Student Relationships, Advisors, Bruce Anthony Jones, Carnegie Mellon University, Doctoral Research, Graduate Fellowships, Graduate School, Joe Trotter, Larry Glasco, Lawrence Glasco, Multiculturalism, PhD programs, Pitt, Politics of Education, Politics of Graduate School, Quantitative Analysis, Quantitative Methods, School of Education, Strategy, Tactics, Tokenism, Transfer, University of Pittsburgh

Saint Wolfgang and The Devil [Faustian Bargain], by Michael Pacher, ca. 1471-1475, Munich, Germany, February 19, 2009. (The Yorck Project via Wikipedia). In public domain.

It was this time twenty years ago that I decided to transfer from the University of Pittsburgh to Carnegie Mellon to complete my PhD in history. It was a solid tactical decision on many levels. The strategy, however, was a bust, although the reasons for this failure wouldn’t become apparent for several years.

I made the decision to leave Pitt based on at least three deficiencies. One, I was a doctoral student who’s dissertation research would be about multiculturalism, education, and a Black urban community (I hadn’t decided on Washington, DC yet). The only person in the history department with expertise in African American history was Larry Glasco, my advisor, and it had become obvious by the beginning of the 1992-93 school year that his interests had shifted to Afro-Caribbean studies, specifically Afro-Cuban history (see my post “Larry Glasco and the Suzy-Q Hypothesis” from August ’11). Larry’s understanding of such things as Black migration studies, Black education and Black intellectual developments pretty much stopped with the year he took his job at Pitt, 1969 (the year I was born).

Two for moving on from Pitt came out of my interactions with other professors and grad students in the department and in the School of Education. It was obvious during the fall of ’92 that most of my professors found me an enigma, from Dick Oestriecher’s “exceptional Black man” allowances in class (see my post “Dairy Queens, Dick Oestriecher and Race” from February ’11) to some colleagues’ comments about how easy I made grad school look (especially since I had time to talk and go up the hill to shoot hoops).

Hammer & Sickle & Pitt Flag [symbolic of Pitt’s history department], December 13, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

I realized that in a department that placed a premium on American working-class studies, on the supremacy of class warfare and neo-Marxism above any other historical field, that my chances for graduating anytime before the year 2000 were slim. And forget about picking up a fellowship or grant to do my dissertation research or finding a job if and when I did graduate! There were still professors at Pitt — like Reid Andrews (now department chair) and the former department chair Richard Smethurst — who didn’t even think I was “grad school material,” and they said as much. I was an anomaly in an anomalous department (see my “Letter of Recommendation (or Wreck-o-mendation)” post from September ’10).

I did consider doing a PhD in education at Pitt, with possibly Bruce Anthony Jones as my advisor, or someone more senior like Bill Thomas. Bruce, though, discouraged me from that idea, as he was only an assistant professor at the time. It was obvious that Bill Thomas was a popular professor, so much in demand that I’d be lucky to meet with him three times in a semester to discuss his work, much less my own.

And I already had that kind of relationship with Larry. My third reason that led to my decision to transfer to Carnegie Mellon involved a very angry Larry at the end of November ’92. You see, one of the requirements for getting to the end of coursework status was the completion of a quantitative methodology course or the completion of a project in which quantitative methods drove said project.

I decided on the latter, but told Larry that between teaching four sections of US Since 1877 with over 100 students and taking three grad seminars with 1,500 pages of reading per week, that I wouldn’t be doing an independent study with him that fall. I said that I’d carve out time “on my own” to get started this fall, but wouldn’t be prepared to complete the quantitative methods project until the spring semester.

Cartoon on data points & regression analysis involving drug trials, December 13, 2012. (http://www.landers.co.uk).

So after I presented some of my early findings regarding 1910 census data and infant mortality rates among Black women in Pittsburgh to Larry’s History of Black Pittsburgh class, we met to discuss how far I’d gotten in my regression analysis. I hadn’t done much with the variables yet, simply because I hadn’t had the time in November to do any off-time work. Larry became furious, said that he was “disappointed in me,” and wondered aloud if I’d make it through this year as a grad student. When I pointed out for a second time that I was doing this work in my spare time — not as an independent study course, not for a grade — he finally remember what we had discussed in August.

Larry did apologize, profusely. But I was pissed. “You’re only advising one active student, and you can’t remember what I’m working on,” I thought. With Joe Trotter at Carnegie Mellon attempting to woo me into their program, with me already taking his grad seminar in African American history, and with the writing on the wall at Pitt (where I’d already earned my B.A. and M.A. in history), I set up a meeting with Joe in mid-December to explore the possibility of transferring.

Although it would’ve been a worse decision to stay at Pitt, leaving for Joe Trotter and Carnegie Mellon was just about the worst decision I’d made as an adult (see my post “The Audacity of Youth, Grad School Style” from August ’11). For it set up so many of my other career decisions and choices I’ve made in the two decades since.

A school of education would’ve made more sense for me and the research I wanted to pursue, after all. But I would’ve had to think beyond Western Pennsylvania, taken a year off, and then pointed at Stanford, Harvard, UPenn or Teachers College as possibly better choices, better situations. Chris Rock is right. “Life is long, when you make the wrong decisions.”

Notes from a Boy @ The Window

~

Tag Archives: Bruce Anthony Jones

Pitt Graduation Day, +25 Years, +25 Hard Truths

Merit-hypocrisy in the Air

First Day and Last Day of School This Week

On My Mother’s Side – Meeting The Gill Family

What I Didn’t Know (in ’81, in ’97, in ’13)…

December Doctoral Decisions