Tag Archives: Colorism

The Unbearable Whiteness of White Proximity Fuses, Part II

03 Saturday Jul 2021

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

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Front cover of my copy of Rebecca Carroll’s Surviving the White Gaze, July 3, 2021. (Donald Earl Collins)

The other and more direct parallel with Carroll’s journal in Surviving the White Gaze that comes to mind was someone I worked and went to school with at the University of Pittsburgh. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call her Heather, because I can no longer recall her name. She was a Black/biracial young woman from Erie, Pennsylvania, adopted by a white couple as a baby. I met her my third year at Pitt in 1989, when she was a freshman. We worked together for a while on a psychological epidemiology project that the great Juan Mezzich ran, as part of a larger project to revise the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (turning the then-DSM-IIIR into the DSM-IV) and the International Classification of Diseases (turning the ICD-9 into the ICD-10). Aside from the fact that I thought Heather was cute, the first thing I noticed about her was her hair. It had been straightened, permed, and blown out beyond all recognition of a curl. Even at 19, I knew immediately that she was biracial, and didn’t have a Black woman who knew how to do her hair in her life.

I didn’t say a word. It wouldn’t have mattered if I did. Heather was very much standoff-ish, to me and the couple of other Black and Brown students who staffed up the project. She got along extremely well with the White students and staff, though. She rarely said hello when I saw her outside of Western Psych, on or off campus. Honestly, I felt sorry for her.

In the summer of 1991, when I became a full-time staff member on another of Mezzich’s projects, I worked with Heather for a few weeks. This was when I learned more about her upbringing and extremely limited exposure to Black folk. The questions she would ask about what I listened to on my Walkman, songs by Anita Baker, PE, Earth, Wind & Fire, even Phil Collins. She was maybe two years younger than me, and only knew ‘70s and ‘80s rock. Wow.

But, one day, Heather or another staff member had asked me a question — I don’t remember who asked, or what the question was. It one with a historical component, which I answered in typical granular exactitude, because, me. “Are you autistic or something?,” Heather immediately blurted out, as if I had some disease she had yet to see first-hand. “If by autistic, you mean the Rain Man movie? No, I just have a very good memory,” I answered back, rhetorically, with irritation and a bit of side eye. “Oh, I didn’t mean to offend you,” Heather continued, and then she went on for several minutes about why she thought I was autistic. 

I was gobsmacked by Heather’s entitled ignorance and by the racist and ableist implications of her questions and response. Seriously? I’ve been living on my own, mostly successfully navigating the world since I was 17, adulting since I was 12, and somehow I’m Dustin Hoffman with the most serious form of this neuro-social illness, all because my memory is stronger than a bank vault made of titanium and cobalt? And all this because I’m probably the first Black guy you’ve met with a bachelor’s degree from anywhere other than podunk Western Pennsylvania? All this and more ran like a chyron in my brain as I listened to Heather, now sensing my ire, stumbling over her words to make herself sound like she knew what she was talking about.

There were more than a few places in Carroll’s book where I saw the girl and the young woman that I saw in Heather, taking all of her assumptions about Blackness, about Black people, about whiteness and race, and applying them, often in damaging ways. I was absolutely disgusted at what Carroll and Tess did to her one-time English professor and advisor at the University of New Hampshire. I literally stopped reading Surviving the White Gaze for a week afterward. How could you?!?, I thought. Even with zero exposure to Black men, you had to know you put this man’s job in jeopardy over a minor utterance. You had to know that Tess’ vitriol toward him was about him not finding her intellectually interesting, or worse still, rebuffing potential flirtations. As a professor teaching mostly white students off and on for nearly three decades, I know this part all too well.

Carroll gradually embraced and uncovered her Blackness, over time, through years of alcoholism and eating disorders and fresh traumas from folks White and Black in her life. Her experience, though, is all too uniquely common from where I sit. There is the all too common story of someone the product of a Black-White relationship stumbling through life to discover their true selves and their Blackness, a story that is sadly still so easy to sell to a white-dominated book publishing industry and to a white-reading audience. But even for this sub-genre, Carroll’s willingness to reveal more than she conceals is really necessary, even as it feeds the beast, because she is still a work-in-progress at 52. 

There is also the all-too-common assumption that Black folk who aren’t raised by white parents or the product of a biracial pairing somehow don’t have any identity issues at all. Seriously? Anyone ever read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye? We live in a white-dominant society, with white supremacy and white-ways as its main, everyday features. While most Black folk know and love their Blackness, it does not mean there isn’t a struggle to secure our identities as Black folk. Proximity to white people, class privilege, gender, age, and more play a role into the growing-pains-trajectory of how each of us gets to be comfortable in our own skin (or not). 

As for Wendy and Heather, it’s difficult to say where they are on their own trajectories. I haven’t spoken to either of them in years, decades in Heather’s case. But last time I saw Heather, it was May 1995 at a Pharmor store in the East Liberty section of Pittsburgh. I had just received my Spencer Fellowship award to write my dissertation. Heather was different, too. Her hair had gloss and curls, and her clothes fit better. We ended up talking for a few minutes, with me wishing her well. In thinking about this moment, I’ve wondered if Heather ever fully embraced her Blackness. In my imaginations, I think of her as having done so.

Ugly

12 Sunday Jan 2020

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

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Me in April 1975, Sears Picture Studio, Mount Vernon, NY. (Cropped/Donald Earl Collins).

Another title for this could be “Ugly Donald,” an homage toward Ugly Betty. But one word should cover it!

All this talk over the past few weeks about who is and who isn’t “ugly,” or “fat,” or just “too dark” take me back to how I felt about myself for most of the 1980s, and sometimes even as I gotten older over the 30 years since the Reagan decade. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve been in a camp of vipers like this since my preteen and early puberty years, where I definitely had my own excited utterances toward Black boys and girls in particular (also, the occasionally flat-butt White girl and bed-headed White boy, but I digress). So I never understood the need for deliberate meanness toward people over something that they would have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to fix for a group of misogynoirist assholes who aren’t worth a nanosecond of thought.

Whether Lizzo, Blue Ivy Carter, Bria Myles, Ari Lennox, or Teyana Taylor, these mofos who made fun of their looks, or called them a “rottweiler/German shepherd mix” (sic), or told them to workout to lose weight are such boring-ass losers. These women are beautiful. Black women are beautiful. Full stop. You got time to waste running down an active entertainer over your bullshit? Your ugliness is the kind that takes years of therapy, prayer, active listening, and educational reprogramming (i.e., reading lots of books on Blackness, Black feminisms, and intersectionality) to overcome, if you overcome it at all.

I have a bit of experience with ugly over the years. Usually from family and classmates throwing it in my direction. “Whatcha makin’ that ugly face for?,” my mom would say to me many, many times growing up. “You ugly, faggot!,” I remember hearing from folx in around the 616 and 630 apartment buildings on East Lincoln in Mount Vernon from the time I was nine. “Ain’t no one gonna eva wanna be with your ugly ass!,” an older girl who once attempted to molest me said to me when I was 12. I was ugly, alright. I felt ugly, living with poverty and abuse and anti-Black ugliness in the many places I went in Mount Vernon. It was probably why I felt more comfortable around my father, especially when in the Bronx or down in Manhattan doing work. The anonymity of the city meant that for hours or even days at a time, the centrality of my ugliness could disappear.

I felt so ugly inside and out that I wanted to take my own life at 14. I was so ugly that it scared me to look at myself in the mirror for more than a few seconds, mostly to make sure toothpaste or dried drool or eye crust was off my face. I kept my face as blank as I could, like Jamal Wallace (played by Rob Brown) in Finding Forrester, just so I wouldn’t have to endure more put-downs about my tall, lanky ass and my ugly features on top of that.

Me at Prom Dinner, White Plains, NY, May 21, 1987. (Suzanne Johnson neè De Feo).

But the worst of all this was my senior year at Mount Vernon High School. My final days took an ugly turn the moment my classmates learned I was ranked 14th out of 545 students (509 of us eventually graduated in June 1987). I’ve written ad nauseam about how my White Humanities classmates responded to my ranking, as if I threatened their worldview of them being more intelligent than the Black folx they went to school with every day. Months before my soon-to-be former Black classmates began to stare through me like I was a ghost, they began to clown me. I’d blow by them in the hallways, and they’d bust out laughing. They’d comment on my ugly, brittle hair, talking about how my “hair could break picks.” They’d talk about my “cheap clothes from Taiwan” — which they were from, by the way (how did they know that?). Or, they’d simply shake their heads, as if my existence was a “shaking my head” moment on par with Raven-Symoné declaring herself “not Black.”

Clyde was among that group of Black guys and gals who made a point of telling me I was ugly throughout my senior year. He did it so many times that somewhere around February of that school year, I lost track of the number. “You ugly. There ain’t nothin’ in the world that’s gonna fix that,” Clyde said to me once. Most days, I ignored it, because what would have been the point? We were graduating, and my plans for college were bigger than any insult any asshole could muster. But, one day before winter break, Clyde just said, “You ugly, Donald. You ugly.” It took every bit of the low energy I had to not cry, and not pick up a desk and tear his fucking head off with it, like the chair revenge scene in Moonlight.

It took getting away and going to college for me to stop seeing myself and my own unique blend of Blackness as not ugly, even handsome. A bout of homelessness here and months of struggling to pay rent and eat there will begin to harden you against the bullshit of muthafuckas who would prefer to tear you down rather than build something for themselves or others. As Flavor Flav from PE would say, “Motherfuck them any damn way!”

After those days of sleeping on concrete slabs or eating tuna fish out of a can until I could eat it anymore, it didn’t matter how the Clydes, Gordons, and Tomikas saw me. I saw myself clearly, for the very first time. And I clearly saw my naysayers, too, as the short-in-body and in mind, coloristic, Blackness-but-only-so-much, racist, sexist, and homophobic pieces of shit for whom they were. Why should it have ever mattered what they thought of me?

One Saturday in early February 1989 in the shared bathroom in the Fu rowhouse on Welsford Avenue in South Oakland, I looked at myself in the mirror. I had just finished washing up. I was six-two, maybe 175 pounds, and six weeks past my 19th birthday, with barely enough facial hair to clog up my right nostril. I must’ve stood there staring at every angle of my face for two or three minutes. Then I chuckled. “You’re an okay-looking guy. You’re not Billy Dee or Denzel, but you’re not bad-looking at all.” Nor am I Idris Elba. But being me since has almost always been okay enough. The truth is, it always should been, for any of us.

How Did I Know I Was Heterosexual?

09 Saturday Mar 2019

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, music, My Father, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Upper East Side, Upper West Side, Work, Youth

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Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know” 45 single sleeve, circa 1986. (https://medium.com)

This is more than just whether I knew I liked teenage girls and women by the time I was my son’s current age of fifteen, though. Between humping older women’s legs when I was three or four years old (too much information, I suppose), me and Diana slobbering on each other in first grade, and my crush on Ms. Shannon in third grade, that would be enough for most kids to know their orientation. But because I wasn’t “hard” like the boys I lived around at 616 and 630 East Lincoln and the young Turks who lived in public housing on Pearsall Drive, I was often the neighborhood “pussy” or “faggot.” I was mugged four times between April 1979 and the end of 1983. I spent more than one weekend dodging a hail of pebbles and rocks that the neighborhood kids pelted me with. That, and the then buried sexual assault I endured when I was six left me questioning my own sexuality, and with that, my place in the world in terms of friendships and relationships.

The whole Hebrew-Israelite thing, and the additional layers of abuse, hypermasculinity, and misogyny that came with it didn’t help my evolution one bit. One would think that a months-long crush on — really, love for — Wendy in the spring of 1982 would once and for all settle this issue. It didn’t. It didn’t because even I recognized that my love for Wendy was for the version of her who took up space in my imagination. She had become ethereal, and was detached from the flesh-and-blood human being with whom I shared little more than the confines of the classroom in the years between 1981 and 1987. I found her attractive, but had already judged myself unworthy.

Puberty, rebellion, and my switch to Christianity in 1984, and the contradictions that came with this switch over the next year, would tell me more about who I was. This was the beginning of my years of relative asexuality, at least as I presented myself in public. Since I dedicated my life to Jesus, every potential carnal thought I had or action I could take was met with self-doubt and loathing. Mostly, though, I feared for my newborn soul. I feared that somehow, I would go back to being suicidal, Hebrew-Israelite-and-going-to-Hell Donald, the one that got clowned and stoned before reaching six-foot-one.

One of my many attempts at being chaste between September 1984 and May 1985 involved toting my Bible everywhere and breaking it out to read during every idle moment. At school, which got me in trouble with my 10th grade history teacher, Ms. Zini. At home, when I wasn’t distracted by music, my younger siblings, or our fucked up living arrangement with one Balkis Makeda. As sanctimonious as it was, I was really trying to learn, to receive revelation, to understand how this 66-book, 1300-page document could transform me and my mini-apocalyptic world.

I also rode the buses and subways around the city with my red-covered Bible in hand. On many Fridays and Saturdays, whether working for my dad or hunting him down for money, or just because I needed to get away, I’d take the 2 from East 241st in the Bronx to 72nd in Manhattan, or further down, to Times Square, or sometimes, all the way out to Flatbush in Brooklyn.

No matter where I or we (when my older brother Darren would tag along) went, the most interesting part of these outings usually were the people who would be in the cars with me/us. Drunkards who reminded me of Jimme. Older Jamaican women on their way to do domestic work. Middle-aged, haggard-looking White guys who dressed twenty years too young for their faces.

Screenshot from “I Wonder If I Take You Home” video, Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam (1984/85). (https://imgue.com).

Frequently, Nuyorican or Dominican girls and young women would board somewhere between 180th and East Tremont and 149th and Grand Concourse (though because of the ethnic tensions I didn’t understand at the time, certainly not at the same time). I would look up from reading II Chronicles or Esther or Ephesians, and before I could comprehend the people my eyes took in, my dick responded. At 15, I already knew that even a mildly warm breeze was enough for me to get a hard on. I didn’t know that four or six young Latinas on a train wearing bright, tight clothes, makeup, lipstick, and perfume, and heels that would accentuate their breasts, hips, and round butts would completely counter my asexual front. Luckily for me, the Bible-toting phase of my life was during wintertime, and I could cover up my woody with my jacket.

Of course, it felt sinful, and I felt ashamed, that a second and a half of staring up from my Bible would lead to carnal stirrings. But it also gave me a sense of who I was and wasn’t attracted to, really and truly. When White girls with their voluminous ’80s hair got on the train, I hardly noticed. They were trying too hard, and their flat butts did nothing for me. When single Black women in their twenties and thirties would board, I noticed, too. I didn’t have what I would learn later to be colorism issues.

Of course, I learned that I was heterosexual, which I knew would please my Mom to no end. Which actually pissed me off. So, if I had discovered I was gay, she wouldn’t accept me? Wow!, I thought one April Saturday on way back to East 241st. At that point, my evangelical zeal for setting myself apart from the rest of world with my Bible as a baseball bat had waned. I was nowhere near ready to be involved in any kind of relationship that would lead to sex. But, I was ready to drop the idea that my eternal life completely depended on me ignoring both women and my attraction to women. I would remain publicly asexual for a few more years and endure f-bombs from my dad. Truly, it took until I was twenty to understand that whatever my orientation, no one has the right to tell me that my sexuality was anathema to my Christianity.

Fun Times With Stepfather Maurice

03 Wednesday Aug 2016

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

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Male lion eating carcass (the equivalent of fun times with Maurice), August 3, 2016. (Aljameen Alston via http://pinterest.com).

Male lion eating carcass (the equivalent of fun times with Maurice), August 3, 2016. (Aljameen Alston via http://pinterest.com).

Today would be my idiot ex-stepfather’s Maurice Eugene Washington’s sixty-sixth birthday. Maurice died almost four years ago, after a twenty-year losing battle with Type-2 diabetes, kidney failure, hypertension, heart disease, limbs lost, and a host of other ailments included. That, after years of abusing his body with food, much more often than he laid a fist or kick on me or my Mom.

Most of the time these days, I feel far more pity for Maurice than anger. Forgiveness does come with the benefit of some empathy. If only because I know that Maurice had less maturity and more confusion in his heart than a sociopathic misogynist in the middle of puberty. Which, in point of fact, would pretty much describe my ex-stepfather from the time his was fifteen until his death in 2012.

So in the spirit of macabre humor, below are some of Maurice’s favorite stock phrases from my being forced to grow up around him between ’81 and ’89. Most of these made it to Boy @ The Window:

“You and your brother [Darren] are gonna be my brown-skinned servants.”

“Take that base outta ya voice, boy, before I cave yo’ chest in!”

Maurice would sometimes sing his threats, bellowing

‘I’m gonna beat yo’ ass, jus’ like a car burns gas,’ adding, ‘And ya KNOW that!’ at the end

It was something he pulled from the disco group known as the The Jammers.

Whenever I reminded him that he wasn’t my father or whenever I told him that I’d never call him “Dad” again, Maurice would yell

Don’t you EVER say that again, muthafucka! I’ll kill you next time!

Sometimes, he’d threatened to kick me out of 616.

That boy’s defiant. I won’t tolerant it in my house!

Once I passed fourteen, I knew this was an idle threat. Boy, he loved calling me “boy” or “it” when I stood my ground. Maurice had colorism issues long before I ever knew what colorism was.

Or, Maurice would get all Hebrew-Israelite on me and quote from Exodus 20.

Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.

Even in the midst of busted lips, bruised ribs, and knots on my forehead, I found that last one absolutely preposterous. We owned nothing. This irrational abusive asshole wasn’t my father, and had beaten up my Mom in front of me. Only a god in cahoots with the devil him or herself — or my idiot ex-stepfather — would think that Exodus 20 applied to my situation with this shell of a human being. Mind you, the fool kept quoting this verse to me as late as the week before he broke up with my Mom in ’89!

There is some humor to glean from these, as much as you can find alcohol content in a fresh slice of bacon. I just hope I never say things even in the same galaxy of stupid, demeaning, or threatening to my own son as this idiot said to me growing up.

Sometimes, though, when my son asks, I tell him what it would be like to have an abusive father in the form of Maurice. Sometimes I’ve even imitated how the fool would’ve sounded, and my son will then start to laugh. Luckily, he sees my stories as stories, not the hellish nightmare that my life had once been.

Boy @ The Window Origins: Meltzer Conversations

14 Saturday Mar 2015

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

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X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) scene, where Wolverine frees mutants kept as experiments by Colonel William Stryker , March 13, 2015. (http://cdn.collider.com/).

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) scene, where Wolverine frees mutants kept as experiments by Colonel William Stryker , March 13, 2015. (http://cdn.collider.com/).

Of all the tangents I took related to writing Boy @ The Window, the most direct path that got me to write a memoir about the most painful period in my life was through several conversations with my dear teacher, friend and mentor in the late Harold Meltzer. I’ve discussed bits and pieces of some of those conversations here and in longer form in Boy @ The Window. It’s still worth rehashing some of those conversations, at least in terms of what was and wasn’t good advice, as well as in explaining how some of the main themes of the memoir developed over time.

As I wrote in Boy @ The Window, though my “first interview with him was in August ’02,” the first time “we discussed the possibility of me doing Boy @ The Window went back to February ’95.” Meltzer had been retired from teaching about a year and a half, while I was beginning the heavy lifting phase of my doctoral thesis, “living in DC for a couple of months while hitting the archives and libraries up for dusty information. In need of a writing break, I gave him a call on one cold and boring Saturday afternoon.”

It was in response to a letter he sent congratulating me. I’d recently published an op-ed in my hometown and county newspaper, “Solving African American Identity Crisis.” I was writing about issues like using the n-word, hypermasculinity, and internalized racism in the short and, for me at least, dummied down piece. Somehow our discussion of that piece led to a discussion of my classmate Sam. Did I really want to spend an hour and a half talking with Meltzer about Sam and some of my other Humanities classmates and their possible identity issues, considering some of my own serious growing pains — the Hebrew-Israelite years, my suicide attempt, my Black masculinity and manhood issues? Absolutely not!

But I learned quite a bit about how I might want to approach writing Boy @ The Window through that phone call. Not because Meltzer had given me any sage advice, which he didn’t, or because he revealed things to me that I shouldn’t have come to learn during our conversation, which he definitely did.

Benetton ad, 1980s, January 2013. (http://fashionfollower.com/).

Benetton ad, 1980s, January 2013. (http://fashionfollower.com/).

No, it was the idea that a lot of the things that I had pursued as a historian and researcher were things that came out of my experiences growing up. Multiculturalism as a historical phenomenon (at least if one linked it to cultural pluralism)? Can anyone say Humanities Program, or, what I used to call “Benetton Group” when we were at A.B. Davis Middle School? Writing about African American identity issues? Obviously related to living in Mount Vernon, the land where any hint of weakness translated into me being called a “faggot” or a “pussy.”

And what about any scholarly concerns with racial and socioeconomic inequality and Black migration? Anyone ever meet my Mom and my father Jimme, 1960s-era migrants from Arkansas and Georgia/Florida respectively? An examination of the Black Washingtonian elite and their looking down upon ordinary Blacks because of their own colorism or the latter’s lack of education? Come on down, Estelle Abel and any number of well-established Black Mount Vernon-ites who never gave me the time of day! As much as academia had been an escape for me, into a world of rationalism and logic, a place of dispassionate scholarship, it was all personal for me, without realizing it until that phone conversation with Meltzer.

Fast-forward to November ’02, the last interview I did with Meltzer before his death two months later. We spent the last couple of hours on that brisk fall Thursday discussing the book idea that would become Boy @ The Window. Meltzer thought that it should be a work of fiction, “based on the real flesh and blood folks in my life, but with different names of course to protect me from any potential lawsuits. He did make me rethink the project from a simple research study of my high school years into narrative nonfiction or a memoir.” 

Screen shot of fictional character Harper Stewart's bestselling novel nfinished Business, from The Best Man (1999), March 14, 2015. (hitchdied via http://s785.photobucket.com/).

Screen shot of fictional character Harper Stewart’s bestselling novel Unfinished Business, from The Best Man (1999), March 14, 2015. (hitchdied via http://s785.photobucket.com/).

Was Meltzer correct? Should I have done a Harper Stewart — played by actor Taye Diggs in The Best Man (1999)? Should I have fictionalized all of my experiences and those of my family, teachers, administrators and classmates? I’m not sure if it would’ve made a difference. Stories of fiction tend to have a tight symmetry to them. Or, the theme of “what goes around comes around” is usually a big one in any novel. You can’t leave too many loose threads or unresolved issues, even if the novel is part of a series. For my purposes, since my life remains a work in progress, a story of relative — not obvious or absolute — success, telling it as fiction would hardly ring true to me, much less to any group of readers.

Whatever else anyone wants to say about the late Harold Meltzer, the dude got me to think about difficult things until I was no longer comfortable in leaving my uncomfortable experiences and assumptions unchallenged. The very definition of a mentor, the very purpose of Boy @ The Window.

Colorism and the Enduring Power of School Daze

11 Monday Mar 2013

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, My Father, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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School Daze (1988) movie poster, September 17, 2012. (QuasyBoy via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws, as depicts subject of blog, is scaled-down and is of low-resolution.

School Daze (1988) movie poster, September 17, 2012. (QuasyBoy via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws, as depicts subject of blog, is scaled-down and is of low-resolution.

One of the few films I saw soon after it came out in theaters during my Boy @ The Window years was School Daze. It was in fact on this date twenty-five years ago that I went to the old theater in Pittsburgh that once was on Forbes Avenue near the Oakland Primanti Bros. sandwich place to see the film. It gave me some serious food for thought that Spring Break Friday evening, so much so that the lessons of School Daze have stayed with me to this day. Considering that I turned down a date with an upperclassman not interested in seeing the film in the process, School Daze was more than worth it.

The biggest lesson for me was on colorism. Not the macabre hazing of Q-dog frat boys and the cliquish AKA and Delta soros. Not the lack of care for the academic or the step-show battles. Not the hedonist behavior of Black middle class Gen Xers hell-bent on doing everything other than graduating from college. I already knew students like this at Pitt. Really, I already knew former classmates from Mount Vernon High School who attended HBCU’s like Howard, Morehouse, Hampton and Spelman, the kind of people who’d be perfect candidates for this Spike Lee joint. That they would psychologically and physically abuse each other in bed and on campus didn’t surprise me in the least.

"Good and Bad Hair" scene, School Daze (1988), March 10, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins via YouTube). Qualifies as fair use (see previous picture).

“Good and Bad Hair” scene, School Daze (1988), March 10, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins via YouTube). Qualifies as fair use (see previous picture).

No, it was the issue of being color-struck that was truly eye-opening for me. For I think I always knew on a semi-conscious level that colorism was alive and well among Black folks I’d come to know in Mount Vernon and in my first year at Pitt. It was frequently subtle, but also occasionally out in the open. With terms like “café au lait,” “redbone,” “mocha,” “caramel,” light-skinned,” “high yeller,” “dark-skinned,” “tar baby,” “chocolate-brown,” “good hair,” “nappy head,” “paper-bag brown,” and “light, bright and almost White,” among others. With obvious preferences among my male and female counterparts for young Black women and (sometimes) young Black men who passed the brown-paper-bag rule. (For those unfamiliar, if a Black male or female’s skin color was lighter than a brown paper bag, they were light enough to be attractive and acceptable by others. In terms of beauty, sometimes in pledging to a sorority or fraternity, often in terms of being part of a popular and better connected circle of Black folk.)

I certainly saw it with my father Jimme, who threw around the word “redbone” in my last year of high school as if the only young women in my NYC-area universe were light, bright and almost White. But I also saw it in the cliquishness and popularity of some of my classmates and other MVHS attendees and alumni. The most prominent of them at the time was Albert Brown, aka, Al B. Sure. Despite the uni-brow and limited talent, he went a long way in terms of popularity with his Class of ’86 and in the years immediately after high school. But there were others, classmates with bit-role appearances on ABC’s All My Children, folks whose entire circle of so-called close friends met some internalized color line.

It’s safe to say that by the time I left the theater — about 9 pm that Friday — I was actually angry. I wanted to take Giancarlo Esposito behind a building and beat him into another world. But more than that, it put some of the issues I had with high school and my first year at the University of Pittsburgh in perspective. Obvious and subtle forms of bigotry, individual racism and institutional/structural racism are all things I expected to face. This internalized bigotry on the basis of skin color, though, explained some of the shunning that I’d faced in my last couple of years of high school (see my post “The Silent Treatment” from June ’11) especially.

Hazing scene from School Daze (1988), March 10, 2013. (http://tumbler.com). Qualifies as fair use (see previous picture).

Hazing scene from School Daze (1988), March 10, 2013. (http://tumbler.com). Qualifies as fair use (see previous picture).

Yeah, I was weird because I was in a weird place in terms of domestic violence, child abuse and welfare poverty in those years. I didn’t help matters by being down with Tears for Fears and Sting and Mr. Mister and by often walking at Warp Factor Three or higher to cover the twenty-acre school between classes. But being poor and looking poor and a darker shade of brown was the first thing the Rick James-Eddie Murphy “Party All The Time” set saw, even before I turned into a blur walking past them every day.

A few years after School Daze, I went to David Lawrence Hall to watch the Pitt Film Club’s showing of Mo’ Better Blues (1990) with Denzel Washington and Wesley Snipes. A decidedly light-skinned underclassman (who was in my easy-A Intro to Black Studies course – I was a senior at Pitt by this time) – let’s call her ‘R’ – saw me and decided to sit with me to watch the film. Every time Wesley Snipes was on the screen, she commented on how dark he was. Making me uncomfortable, to say the least.

I finally asked, “Well, what about me?,” given her obvious distaste for Snipes. “Oh, you’re fine. Wesley’s just too dark,” R responded. I did a double-take, realizing that her perspective on skin color was just too odd for words. A quarter-century later, and my guess is that there are Black folks (and Whites who love “dark”-skinned Blacks) who still need to “WAAAAKKKKKE UUUUUUPPPPPPP!”