Americans, Frequently Polite, But Almost Never Nice

04 Tuesday Jul 2017

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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4th of July, American Culture, American Narcissism, American Politics, Callousness, Damsel-in-Distress, Economic Inequality, Empty Gestures, Joe Trotter, Military, Misogyny, Nice, Obligatory, Polite, Racism, Sexism, Social Justice

Shaking Hands clipart, July 4, 2017. (http://hiveminer.com).

On this July 4th, I want to challenge the idea that Americans consider themselves a good-natured, warm-hearted, giving people. Or a wonderfully nice people, in other words. This, like so many other accepted clichés about American society, is nearly complete bullshit. Sure, many Americans are polite, or at least try to be. My former dissertation advisor Joe Trotter was very polite. Many of his colleagues and students said as much. But, as my couple dozen blog posts about Trotter can attest, he was hardly a nice person, or warm-hearted, or giving, or caring. Heck, at times, especially in my final year as a student and PhD candidate, Trotter wasn’t even professional or polite.

Polite is when a person doesn’t comment on one’s sudden fall into poverty or homelessness. Polite is holding open a door for someone loaded down with bags of groceries. Polite is an important person availing themselves to meeting with another important person for networking purposes. None of these things are nice, indicative of a good nature, a warm heart, or a giving person. Because, being polite is an obligation, and in American customs and laws, even obligatory. Four cars stopping at all four all-way stop signs at an intersection and going in the order of which one stopped the soonest is both polite and a traffic law. One may smile at another driver as one passes through the intersection, but this is a polite nicety, and not really a sign of a nice American at all.

Here’s where the difference between American politeness and truly being nice hits a brick wall. Our culture, our politics, our religious beliefs, our proclaiming of every holiday as a celebration of military personnel allegedly “fighting for our freedom.” They reflect this obligatory American politeness. As a nation, Americans claim to want to do something about poverty, and want to wish away racism, sexism, and homophobia. Yet in how Americans vote and in the music Americans listen to, there is almost nothing nice about Americans in action.

Nice, France is a city on the French Riviera (and not an American practice), September 21, 2011. (Tobi 87 via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

This is not just about 45 and the GOP majorities in Congress. In locale after locale, actions like acquitting police officers for murdering Black men and women, reducing the number of abortion clinics, and cutting taxes so the poor and homeless don’t have enough food, shows how un-nice the American people are. American un-niceness exists in the policies drawn up or enacted by those for whom millions voted, from repealing Obamacare to the Muslim Ban. These policies may reflect an American politeness, but they also reflect a cruelty that has all too often been a part of American culture.

As someone who once considered himself “a nice guy,” I recognize that the correct term was always polite. For being “a nice guy” merely meant not revealing my true thoughts toward and about women, all while being polite enough to hold a door open or to try to help a damsel-in-distress. What I was being was a sexist asshole, having not yet challenged my assumptions about women and about myself and my views about women and the rampant sexism and misogyny in American culture.

There are far too many Americans who think that their Christian politeness is so much more than obligatory and vapid gestures that mean little-to-nothing in reality. For this July 4th, the idea of honoring the military with absolutist statements about freedom as so automatic that it sickens me. Especially considering the number of active duty service people and veterans suffering from PTSD, addiction, or whom commit domestic violence. Americans don’t act nice around these ugly issues. Americans don’t volunteer, don’t call 911, and don’t pressure city councils, county commissioners, and state legislatures enough to deal with these issues holistically. It would be nice if more Americans did.

Americans ought to ban being polite. Polite perpetuates racism and economic inequalities. But being nice means doing something about it, protesting, volunteering, speaking truth to power, using America’s alleged freedoms to confront folks in one’s life about their comfortability with various forms of oppression. How nice would that be!

On Kicking My Damsel-in-Distress Syndrome

07 Saturday Mar 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, Religion, Youth

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"Ballerina Wendy", Atlas, Burdens, Child Abuse, Chivalry, Crush #1, Damsel-in-Distress, Damsel-in-Distress Syndrome, Domestic Violence, Father-Son Relationship, Feminism, Love, Misogyny, Misty Copeland, Mother-Son Relationship, Pitt, Resentment, Sexism, Wendy, Womanism

Chivalry with a suit blazer, March 7, 2015. (http://genius.com)/

This week marked thirty-three years since the fight that led to a crush that led to me falling in love for the first time, via a ballerina in training. The three-month period between March and June ’82 shaped how I dealt with teenage girls and women between the time I turned twelve and my mid-thirties. The crush on “Ballerina Wendy” and its mutation because of my stepfather’s knocking out of my Mom in front of me helped shaped my feminism, my womanism and my sexist damsel-in-distress syndrome.

Wonder Woman, October 30, 2012. (http://tvequals.com).

It was the beginning of my damsel-in-distress syndrome. Though it was triggered by the Memorial Day incident, my damsel-in-distress syndrome had been latent for years. I was in fact a mama’s boy, tempered by living at 616 and in Mount Vernon. I’d always been enamored by strong, athletic women (or at least, actresses with that role), going back to Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman. Yet I’d also been surrounded by sexism and misogyny, from my father calling my Mom a “Black bit'” since I was four to my stepfather’s constant quoting of the Torah to justify his laying of violent hands and feet on my Mom.

What I did in response was to help my Mom in every way I could, and in ways I never should’ve. Calling up Con Ed and Ma Bell to pay the electric and telephone bills. Listening to years of conversations about her failed marriages, about my father’s alcoholic failings, about her bills, about the burdens we as her children had put on her. Washing clothes for the house every weekend from October ’82 through August ’87 and anytime I was home for the summer and for the holidays once I went off to college. Going to the store as many as five times in a single afternoon and evening because my Mom forgot that she needed diapers or cigarettes. Hunting my father down for money even on weekends I didn’t want to be bothered because we were out of food for my younger siblings. Taking a fist-filled beating here or there from my stepfather to take the pressure off of my Mom. Promising my Mom that after I finished my degree, I’d come back to New York to work and help her out financially.

Atlas supports the terrestrial globe on a building in Collins Street, Melbourne, Australia, October 9, 2006. (Biatch via Wikipedia). Released to the public domain.

On that last promise especially, I reneged. I changed my major from computer science to history, and decided to stay at Pitt, to go to graduate school, to earn a PhD, to start writing, both in the academic world and a bit as a freelancer, to teach for a living. It was the basis, I think, for her falling out with me in ’97, and why our relationship remains limited.

My Mom was hardly the only woman in my life in which I wanted to assist. Some of my Pitt friends can certainly attest to this fact, that sometimes I was there to help too often. To the point where once I realized I was overburdened or when that other person had become too reliant on me, it pretty much killed that friendship. Either way, I was angry, and sometimes felt used, while some of my Pitt friends were either confused or angry themselves.

I’ve had to learn over the years to say no, even to my wife, when I realized that one too many logs on the fire will actually put that fire out. It started with everything high-tech. Every computer glitch, every printer error, every Internet issue, and I was there like Clark Kent, ready to help. But by the time I hit thirty-five, I was just too tired and felt too burdened to be that on all the time. I finally stopped helping my wife with her tech issues. I stopped offering to help, and have only interjected when the issue actually affects all of our equipment.

The irony is, my wife is a stronger person than my Mom, stronger in many ways than how I perceived Wendy as a person so many years ago. It’s not as if my wife doesn’t need or appreciate the help. But, as I’ve learned over the years, too, sometimes, help is just emotional support, a hug or a joke. Or, when I’m ready to, simply listening without feeling the need to use a quadratic equation to solve the problem.

American Ballet Theater soloist Misty Copeland in a promotional photo via her Under Armour ad deal, January 30, 2014. (Under Arnour via Huffington Post).

American Ballet Theater soloist Misty Copeland in a promotional photo (cropped) via her Under Armour ad deal, January 30, 2014. (Under Arnour via Huffington Post).

Damsel-in-distress syndrome, as chivalrous as it is, can also be extremely sexist, for both women and men and girls and boys. It means constantly attempting to help people who may or may not want your help, especially in cases where it is clear that they may need help. It means taking on emotional and psychological burdens that otherwise should only belong to the person you’re trying to support. It means, sadly, providing advice and knowing answers and solutions that may not be answers or solutions at all.

The Memorial Day ’82 incident with my mother changed what was an otherwise innocent crush and love into something contradictory even as it became more meaningful. It made me appreciate women who could and can kick some ass, whose strength would be obvious to all. And it made me think women who weren’t like that — women like my Mom — needed constant help from people like me. Wendy defended herself thirty-three years ago. My Mom tried and couldn’t. Life and strength for us, male and female and transgender, though, has never been that simple. And though I have saved quite a few damsels in distress over the years, it isn’t my eternal burden to carry.

On Women and Wired Weirdness

05 Saturday Mar 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Marriage, music, Youth

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"Cherish The Day", 616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, A.B. Davis Middle School, Brandie Weston, Crush #1, Damsel-in-Distress, Domestic Violence, Feminism, Fights, Humanities, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, Mrs. Sesay, Puberty, Relationships, Sade, Sexism, Womanism

[Why Sade? Closest I could find to my dream-life muse, and most appropriate video I could find]

Getting a bit long in the tooth to be rattling off about Crush #1 again, right? After all, yesterday was the twenty-ninth anniversary of the fight that led to a crush that led to some sort of falling in love for the first time. The three-month period between March 4 and May 30 of ’82 shaped the ways I saw girls and women from the age of twelve until my early thirties. The crush on Crush #1 and its inevitable side-tracking as my then stepfather knocked my mother unconscious in front of me helped shaped my feminism, my womanism and my sexism.

In all of that, I’ve learned that I was wired for this weirdness. Because as a person of deep thought, a boy surrounded by sexism and misogyny, and a lonely and semi-ostracized preteen, the sum was much greater than these contradictory parts.

To think that this all pretty much started because I picked a fight with Crush #1 at the end of class in seventh grade. Almost all of my extracurricular incidents that year began or ended in our homeroom with our homeroom/English teacher Mrs. Sesay. I know that she’s a principal somewhere these days, but back then, her lack of behavioral leadership skills in the classroom led to more verbal abuse and fighting than a group of gifted-track kids should’ve stood for. Anyway, the incident began because Crush #1 asked a question about a subject that Mrs. Sesay had spent the entire week going over, a concept that Sesay would test us on that Friday. I laughed out loud — thinking that I was only snickering — after Crush #1 asked that question.

Thinking nothing of it, I began to pack up after the 2:15 pm bell rang. Crush #1 came up to me and pushed me from behind.

“You’re an ugly, arrogant asshole!” she said with the distaste of a ballerina being asked for money by a junkie.

I called her “stupid” and then said something else stupid. “You’re an idiot!,” Crush #1 yelled as she threw two punches into my chest and a third at my jaw.

The fight lasted about fifteen or twenty seconds, but after landing a punch on her left boob and nipple, I stopped fighting, already descending into the land of the idiot romantic. All while Crush #1 kept hitting me, then being pulled away from me by a couple of her friends. One of them, the recently deceased Brandie Weston, called me a “pervert” as they exited the classroom.

I know that I wasn’t the first boy in history to start a fight with a girl who I’d come to like or love, but I do think that boys who do that have a lot of weird in them. Mind you, I hadn’t quite hit puberty yet, so my testosterone levels weren’t high enough yet to be the cause of my brain malfunction. No, my very sexism and her fierce sense of tomboyish feminism was why I liked her in the first place, and drank deep from that well for the next three months.

The Memorial Day ’82 incident with my mother changed what was an otherwise innocent crush and love into something weirder and more meaningful. I think that’s why it has so clearly affected how I’ve seen girls and women over the years. Crush #1 defended herself, my mother tried and couldn’t. Crush #1 was cranky and usually personable, my mother polite and as close-minded as a clam in deep water. Crush #1 would be fine whether she knew I liked her or not, my mother a damsel-in-distress that needed someone with sense and care to help her.

The weeks following that Memorial Day I made a decision to put my mother first. The side effect of that decision was that I’d spend the next fifteen years or so using Crush #1 as my template — and my mother as the anti-template — for understanding women, for befriending, dating or not dating women, for women I’d put on a pedestal from afar and for women I’d merely sleep with. In the end, I’d resent myself and my mother for that decision. And another six years trying to understand why.

Thinking about it now, it still amazes me how much of what occurred between ’82 and ’96 was part of an unconscious decision process. But since the end of ’89, I’ve gotten a reminder about once every six weeks. Crush #1 has been a part my dreams and nightmares, a muse that would surface some of my wiser thoughts. She’s a reminder that the twelve-year-old in me isn’t dead, just dormant.

The muse reminds me of how little I do know about women and romance, even after eleven years of marriage and more than two decades of various relationships overall. And that the struggle between the various strands of feminist, womanist and sexist thought in me remains just that.

Sexism – It’s Complicated

03 Thursday Mar 2011

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

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Academy for Educational Development, AED, Chick, Contradictions, Damsel-in-Distress, Feminism, Girl, New Voices, New Voices Fellowship Program, Objectification, Objectify, Sexism, Terminology, Woman, Womanism, Women, Youth

Sexism Hurt Everyone, March 2, 2011. Source: http://dribbleglass.com

I started writing this in response to the contradictions anyone can find in looking at Women’s History Month. Particularly the distance between feminist/womanist rhetoric about girls and women loving themselves for who they are and not how they look. Versus the everyday barrage of images about beauty and achieving it for others’ pleasure, if not for one’s own. Then I realized that this is an issue for women and men, boys and girls, regardless and because of race and socioeconomics. Then I thought that beauty isn’t the only insecurity folks who are blessed or gifted become neurotic about over time.

It just proves that most of us, even the most well-rounded, well-meaning and well-adjusted of us, can’t help but be somewhat sexist. And that there are many of us who represent walking contradictions of feminism and sexism who call others on their -ism “isht” but refuse to recognize it in ourselves.

Sexism is complicated by the fact that it often is more than just the mere objectification of women. After all, men can be eye-candy as well, and using the term women in the universal, at least in the Western world, equates almost exclusively to White women. I haven’t even begun to describe the exclusion of the transgender community from this conversation, as well as how embedded middle class and affluent values are in our understanding feminism (but not womanism) in our Women’s History discourse.

Such was the case for me nine years ago at my job as assistant director of the New Voices Fellowship Program at the Academy for Educational Development (AED). (It’s the organization that finds itself under suspension from government grants because of serious financial malfeasance since the beginning of last December — see my blog post from December 2010). We were prepping binders and other materials for a New Voices selection panel meeting when a staff member engaged me in a conversation about how I moved from dating to marriage. It was a question that required me to discuss my progression to serious relationships.

Though I didn’t want to go into major details about my personal life, I did want to give the young man an answer that made sense. So I started with how I saw women when I was about twenty-two or twenty-three (the younger man’s age at the time, by the way), and worked my way forward. I noted how I often interchanged the terms “woman,” “girl” and “chick” when I was younger, but had pretty much grown out of objectifying women in that manner by the time I’d started dating my future wife a few years later.

A female co-worker walked into the conference room while I was in mid-sentence, and the only thing she heard was “chick.” She demanded a retraction on the spot, which I summarily refused. “I’m not going to change a story by using a different term when I know I used that term ten years ago,” I said. I added that the conversation wasn’t really her business, especially since she walked into the middle of it without

Sexism, March 2, 2011. Source: http://swpeng.com

knowing the context of it.

She reported my allegedly sexist misdeed to my immediate supervisor, who didn’t know how to respond, so he did nothing. That, at least to me, was actually more sexist than anything I may have said and regardless how anyone could’ve interpreted it. That my co-worker never followed up to discuss why I happened to be using the term “chick” seemed to me a sign that even she knew she overreacted to something that was never an issue to begin with.

A few months later, the young woman had resigned, leaving to work on her master’s at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. She told me, in the way of sage advice, that I “needed to open up more and be honest” with younger staff. I just looked at her and wished her well. How can anyone be honest about anything if the first thing we say to each other is to change our stories about our experiences because the words we use can be interpreted as sexist (or racist, or fatist or any other -ist or -ism)? It seemed to me that if anyone had any serious problems negotiating feminism and sexism, it was my former staff member, not me.

Not that I didn’t realize I had some issues regarding my feminism/womanism versus my own sexism. Most of them have come from what I haven’t said, what I have and haven’t done regarding White women and women of color over the years. As I’ll discuss in my next blog, I’ve had three decades’ worth of damsel-in-distress neurosis (I have no idea what the DSM-IV code is for that).