Tag Archives: Diversity

Mrs. Bryant and the Beginning of Donald 1.5

03 Sunday Jun 2018

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

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A bright blue sky, just before the long storm, February 19, 2011. (http://www.photos-public-domain.com). In public domain.

We’ve reached the end of yet another school year, number 32 for me overall, between my twenty-two years between kindergarten and doctorate and my son’s ten years of K-9 (this doesn’t included the 13 years of overlap, in which my primary job has been as an instructor, or my wife’s two years of grad school). The end of sixth grade was not particularly violent. But it was a rough transition to nearly eight years of bumps, bruises, grinding poverty and psychological torture, and a constant struggle for my true self.

The one strong and calming influence in the midst of this gathering storm system was my sixth grade teacher at William H. Holmes ES, Mrs. Della Bryant. She was the fourth of my four Black teachers between first grade and middle school. Mrs. Bryant was as important to me on the cusp of becoming a teenager as Ms. Griffin was to my grounding as a student in first grade, and the crush I had on Mrs. Shannon in third. Because Mrs. Bryant didn’t just aspire for us to do well and get A’s. She wanted us to think big picture, and not just about high school or college. Mrs. Bryant encouraged us to think in larger, worldly terms, to take politics and religion and literature and the stuff of intellectuals seriously.

She indulged us, especially me and my then best friend Starling. So many times that year, Mrs. Bryant allowed us to debate current event topics in class, whether we had sufficient facts or not. The Iran hostage crisis, the 1980 election cycle and why Ronald Reagan would be worse than President Jimmy Carter (no one in our class played devil’s advocate), the legality of Israel unilaterally bombing an Iraqi nuclear weapons centrifuge site.

Those were among the moments I lived for in Mrs. Bryant’s class that school year. I lived for them not just because I liked showing off my knowledge. I already knew I was smart. I spent the following year saying “I am the smartest kid in the whole world!” to myself, and occasionally, to Humanities classmates who made me feel inferior.

No, those debates weren’t about my raw analytic power and great ability to remember. They were about discovering what I thought I knew about a topic, understanding what I didn’t know, and being able to articulate it all without losing my thoughts in the ether. And in all that, I discovered parts of myself. My forthrightness. My New York-style sarcasm. My sense of righteous anger. My ability to summarize a situation in order to derive or intuit possible responses, even solutions.

That was what Mrs. Bryant with her light but steady touch helped me get to in sixth grade. A sense of enlightenment that could survive the false gods of Hebrew-Israelite-ism, the false father of my then idiot stepfather “Judah ben Israel” née Maurice Washington, and the fallacy that I had any control over my world.

But that wasn’t all Mrs. Bryant helped me do that year. She encouraged me to take on other projects, especially contests. Like posters for Dental Health Month, or participating in Election 1980 activities, and journaling and writing down my thoughts about virtually everything. Mrs. Bryant did me the honor of having me introduce our graduation speaker at the end of sixth grade, nearly 37 years ago. It was a two-minute speech, but it was also in front of a couple hundred people. I don’t think I’ve even been as nervous being on radio or television. Most of that stuck with me for years, somehow surviving through years of crumpled neglect.

Mrs. Bryant was the one who shepherded me into the Humanities Program, something that I’d only heard about once before, inadvertently through Brandie Weston (who was a student at Pennington-Grimes) the year before. With my grades and test scores, I probably could’ve made into the Grimes Center a year or two earlier. That is, if my teachers Ms. Pierce and Mrs. O’Daniel had thought of me that way. But in the big scheme, it wasn’t that important. Mrs. Bryant did think of me that way, and went out of her way to say as much. “Mrs. Bryant’s encouragement, her insistence that I was ‘one of the best students’ she ‘ever had,’ made sixth grade a joyful time,” I wrote in my memoir.

Now, despite Mrs. Bryant, I wasn’t prepared for going to school every day with 150 other know-it-all’s, many of whom would never have to worry about Con Edison bills being overdue or having no food to eat for three or four days at time. Or, the constant threat of domestic violence and abuse at home. Heck, between Humanities’ decided demographic affluence and ideological Whiteness, I doubt that most of my eventual classmates worried about anything other than getting A’s until puberty took full hold.

As I wrote in Boy @ The Window, “Mrs. Bryant never warned me that Humanities would be overwhelming because my social skills outside of Holmes were as well developed as a spoiled seven-year old’s.” I simply didn’t handle the transition from a 98-percent-Black elementary school to the mostly White Humanities program very well. Then again, with so much going wrong at home, I didn’t handle much of anything well in the 16 months after sixth grade.

But one thing I carried from my year with Mrs. Bryant was that I could survive and succeed despite it all. To observe and listen, and not just speak off the cuff. To be patient, and keep working. Frankly, it was likely because of teachers like Mrs. Bryant that I discovered my first superpower, my ability to think, remember, and write. And in that discovery, bury the pains of earlier abuses that would’ve surely killed me (or at least, led to a successful suicide) by the time I turned fourteen. Mrs. Bryant, wherever you are, and whatever you’re up to, I say, with love, many, many thanks!

In·ter·sec·tion·al·i·ty

24 Monday Apr 2017

Posted by in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Kimberlè Crenshaw quote, from “Whose Story Is It Anyway?: Feminist and Anti-Racist Appropriations of Anita Hill,” in Toni Morrison’s Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power, 1992, p. 403. (http://azquotes.com).

In truth, I’ve considered the issue of intersectionality as a historian and writer since 1993, when I wrote my quantitative methods requirement-fulfilling paper, “The Dying of Black Women’s Children.” Except that, for me and for most of my colleagues, the term was barely in use. Matter of fact, in five and half years of graduate school and in my first three years after finishing the doctorate, I may have heard the term used only once or twice. It’s not like I didn’t think about the unique issues facing women of color — especially Black women — in the context of US history and African American history. Sometimes as a historian, how leading Black men and White women marginalized African American women in education movements, in the suffrage movement, and in the Civil Rights Movement was all I could think about. In the context of understanding American education and the role of Black women as teachers and education, it made me reconsider the notion of education as a form of social control versus it as a form of social liberation as an and-both, and not an either-or proposition.

But, as with all other issues, I’m not perfect. I remember getting into an argument with an African American women at a joint Carnegie Mellon-University of Pittsburgh conference on diversity in 1992. She was a second-year master’s student in the public policy program at CMU’s Heinz School (now Heinz College) to my second year as a grad student and first as a PhD student. I had talked about my initial research on multiculturalism and Black education, and what that research could mean in terms of diversity in higher education. Over lunch, I barely got three sentences out about the implications before this student pounced on me for not taking a more Afrocentric approach to my research, all but calling me an Uncle Tom. She also pointed out that while I had accounted for race and gender in my work, I hadn’t accounted for them together. I was already used to middle class Black folk who only radicalized at the ripe young age of twenty-two telling me that my research was too conservative and too White. But on the second part, not accounting enough for Black women in my research, I did take to heart.

In 1999, at my “Black Brahmins” presentation on W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, and Alain Locke and their ideas around multiculturalism and connections to Harvard at the Organization of American Historians conference in Toronto, I got a cold shoulder from the panel’s moderator, Stephanie Shaw. She barely said a word to me the entire time, and barely commented on my paper. I figured that Shaw thought I should’ve found a way to make the paper more inclusive of Black women graduates of Harvard and multiculturalism, even though Harvard didn’t allow any women to attend. I could’ve included Black women who attended Radcliffe College around the turn of the twentieth century, but even then, those women did not earn graduate degrees or become proponents of pluralism or what we’d call multiculturalism today. I followed up at OAH in Los Angeles in 2001 with my “Multicultural Sisters” paper, but by then, I no longer had an interest in multiculturalism as a historian.

Times Square intersection time-lapse, August 2014. (http://shutterstock.com).

On this day and date in 2000, though, was the argument I had with a colleague at Presidential Classroom, one that would keep me conscious about intersectionality and womanism from that point on. Sev had been brought on by my racist boss Jay Wickliff to help out with the international recruitment for the weekly civic education programs we had for high school juniors and seniors. Sev was Canadian, had been an intern with the program the summer before, and had recently finished up a master’s in history. She had stopped by my office to ask about some revisions I’d been making to parts of our upcoming summer programs, especially the one on media and democracy, which was a new program for Presidential Classroom. Somehow the conversation swung toward women’s rights and issues that Sev thought were important to women. I kept correcting her, saying that some of these issues were “only important to White women.” She took offense, telling me that I shouldn’t be correcting her, that her master’s made her as much an expert on the topic as me. I remember actually chuckling at that assertion, which miffed Sev even more. The common refrain, “Just because you have a PhD…,” was how she responded.

But I did take a few minutes to break down the differences between second-wave and third-wave feminism (or womanism). I went on about the history of exclusion that Black women in particular had faced from Black men in civil rights movements and White women around suffrage and reproductive rights. I said, “maybe it’s because you’re Canadian, but here in the US, these issues you’re bringing up mostly concern middle class White women.” She didn’t like that at all. Before Sev responded, Wickliff, having overheard our argument, came by and said, “Slavery was a hoax” as a joke. That was the moment I knew my days working for this group of Whiteness folks were numbered.

A few months later, in my new job at AED with New Voices, I picked up and read Kimberlè Crenshaw’s essay “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) for the first time. I knew that I already understood intersectionality for Black women, how misogyny, sexism, and racism constantly confer a double marginalization, discrimination, and violation on Black women. Now, between Crenshaw and my own experiences, I also realized that I could experience intersectionality as a Black man, between White men and White women. Especially middle class ones, where their well-meaning color-blind racism had served to put me in a box as well. It was an and-both box, where I was a historian who didn’t write about intersectionality enough and a professional who had also experienced race and gender-based marginalization, albeit differently from women or color. What I did learn, finally, was that the intersection of race, class, and gender made Times Square look like Walden Pond by comparison.

Everyone Needs A Ferris Bueller

16 Thursday Jun 2016

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

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Mia Sara, Alan Ruck, and Matthew Broderick in Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) screen shot, June 16, 2016. (http://www.playbuzz.com).

Mia Sara, Alan Ruck, and Matthew Broderick in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) screen shot, June 16, 2016. (http://www.playbuzz.com).

This week mark thirty years since the release of the Hollywood hit Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). The movie is mostly known for Matthew Broderick imbuing energy into the title character, taking his best friend Cameron Frye (Alan Ruck played him) and his girlfriend Sloane Peterson (Mia Sara played her) on a joy ride through North Side Chicago while embarrassing his high school principal and avoiding his parents. Going to a Cubs game, insinuating himself into a parade, and otherwise making Chicago pretty lily-White. For most watchers, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was a John Hughes comedy. Period.

Not so for me. At least once I finally watched the film. Like with most movies made between ’81 and ’87, I didn’t see it when it first came out. With my high school classmates only quoting Ben Stein’s character saying “Bueller?” over and over again, or commenting on the ability of anyone to roam the streets of Chicago so easily between roughly 8 am and 6 pm in the middle of the work week, I had no interest in seeing it. I eventually caught bits and pieces of scenes from Ferris Bueller on cable, but by nearly a decade after the movie first came out, I’d seen maybe fifteen minutes of the film.

It took my eventual wife Angelia to get me to see the movie in ’96. By then, I’d seen other Matthew Broderick films, enough where I was willing to give a comedy on White teen Gen Xer angst a chance. For whatever reason, I realized for the first time Ferris Bueller really wasn’t a comedy. It had plenty of funny moments, but at best it was a dramedy. I even remember saying to Angelia after I watched it, “Are you sure this is a comedy?”

The movie’s not-so-hidden theme is friendship. In this case, how one friend in Ferris Bueller goes above and beyond as a high school senior to save his best friend from a quietly tragic future. In Cameron’s case, one in which he wouldn’t be in charge of the shape of his life. It would either be guided by his domineering father (whom we never see in the movie) or by some future domineering wife. Apparently that was the real reason behind all of Ferris Bueller’s days off from school in the final months of his senior year.

Cameron Frye (Alan Ruck) underwater in pool (literal and figurative), Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986), June 16, 2016. (http://www.giphy.com).

Cameron Frye (Alan Ruck) underwater in pool (literal and figurative), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), June 16, 2016. (http://www.giphy.com).

By Bueller and his girlfriend colluding to permit Cameron his first look at a naked female body and performing an intervention through the use of Cameron’s father’s precious classic car, Cameron would somehow recognize the need to break free. That Bueller also got to thumb his nose at authority and hang out with his girlfriend was a bonus, of course. Otherwise, the movie is a zany comedy about playing hooky in the streets of Chicago on the most unlikely of school days in the middle of May.

I certainly didn’t have any Ferris Buellers in my life during my Humanities years. If there were classmates like him, they didn’t shine a light on me. Sure, there was White male angst, Black male angst, teenager angst, middle class angst, and Black and White female angst at Mount Vernon High School. I would assume now that this has been true as long as the concept of teenager and comprehensive high school has existed (about eighty years in all). But to deliberately perform an intervention on behalf of a friend to save them from themselves and their upbringing? I’m sure it happened, just not with me or any of my Humanities classmates.

This realization begs a question. Would a Ferris Bueller have emerged in my life in middle school or in high school if I were from a family of means? All issues aside, the reason why Bueller and Frye were friends probably had as much to do with location as anything else. And with residential segregation also comes income segregation. Money may not have been the reason the two teenagers were friends. Yet with both families firmly in the ranks of the affluent (not one percent, but certainly in the top 10-25 percent), their friendship is more unlikely than a Cubs game and a White ethnic pride parade on the same day. The answer to my question, of course, is no. Diversity without acknowledgement or discussion — whether by race, gender, and/or class — doesn’t exist, leaving the teenage angst that was my experience unresolved until college.

The rainbow flag waving in the wind at San Francisco's Castro District, San Francisco, CA, August 5, 2010. (Benson Kua via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-2.0.

The rainbow flag waving in the wind at San Francisco’s Castro District, San Francisco, CA, August 5, 2010. (Benson Kua via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-2.0.

As for the events in Orlando in the past week, aside from the obvious implications of misogyny, homophobia, racism, and hate/terror, there is another more subtle issue. That people who grow up with angst but minus interventions can easily become disaffected adults. Obviously most of these adults don’t become mass shooters or stalkers who kill. But it does mean that in a society geared toward narcissistic individualism and winning, there are millions out of touch with themselves and lacking empathy (forget about love) for other human beings.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is a sense that we all need one friend to intervene in our lives at least one time or for one day. We need that one day, to draw perspective, or maybe even, to find out that we truly need help and healing. My Ferris Buellers didn’t intervene until college at the University of Pittsburgh. They were gay and straight, Christian and Jewish and atheist, old and young, men and women, and Black, White, Brown, and Yellow. They came into my life later than I wanted, but not too late for me.

Contingent Faculty and the Cold Case of Rollo Turner

02 Thursday Oct 2014

Posted by in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work

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Clarence "Rollo" Turner, in Obituaries section, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 24, 1993. (http://news.google.com).

Clarence “Rollo” Turner, in Obituaries section, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 24, 1993. (http://news.google.com).

Two months ago, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign rescinded a job offer they had made to Steven Salaita (then an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech) for a tenured position in American Indian Studies over a bunch of his allegedly anti-Israel tweets. Between mainstream media and social media, the response against this attack on academic freedom and traditional hiring protocols has been tremendous. Thousands of academicians have signed petitions, penned articles and canceled speeches and events at UIUC over Chancellor Phyllis Wise and the Illinois board of trustees’ decision to take back their offer of employment. While the American Association of University Professors, the American Studies Association, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and so many others have argued that Professor Salaita should be in the classroom teaching his courses this fall, this issue is about more than academic freedom and UIUC following job offer guidelines.

The fact is, non-tenure-stream faculty lack the protections and supportive outrage that academia has poured out for those in tenure-track and tenured positions like Professor Salaita. So many contingent faculty lose their jobs over far less than an impolite tweet or an excited utterance. Yet it doesn’t become a story in The New York Times or a petition letter with over 2,000 signatures. No, most contingent faculty, when they lose their jobs, often do so in obscurity, often over doing their jobs with the idea that they were free to teach as they saw fit.

The sadder fact, though, is that this isn’t a new phenomenon at all. Take the case of Clarence Rollo Turner, who passed away twenty-one years ago last month at the age of 50. He was once a veteran senior lecturer in the Department of Black Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, as well as my one-time professor for his History of Blacks in Sports course during the spring semester of 1990. I took Turner’s course in my junior year for an easy-A in the midst of taking a bunch of upper-level undergraduate (and one graduate) history courses that semester. Turner’s was a fun course, and he was a knowledgeable professor beyond its contents. Who knew that in three and a half years the politics of academia would cut short the life of a pioneer? It points to the reality that with half of all higher education instructors serving as contingent faculty, academic freedom is an oxymoron and job protections have become secondary to academic politics and fundraising efforts.

Rollo Turner’s Contingent Teaching Story:

If you’ve never heard of Rollo Turner, it’s mostly because he didn’t have the opportunity to turn himself into a household name in or out of academia, even in Pittsburgh. And, of course, because most non-tenured and non-tenure-stream faculty are seldom central figures at their universities or in their fields just because they’re very good instructors. Turner, though, was a founding member of the Black Studies Program-turned-department (now of Africana Studies) at the University of Pittsburgh. The university had hired Turner in the wake of a game-changing sit-in of Black undergraduate and graduate students in their takeover of an entire floor of the university’s central computer systems on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday in 1969. It was a protest over the lack of student and faculty diversity at the University of Pittsburgh in general. But it was also a protest to demand a Black Studies program that would represent the research and experiences of Blacks on Blacks on an otherwise lily-White Campus, one engaged exclusively in research that almost always excluded Blacks.

In the process of starting this program, the university hired faculty who had yet to earn their doctorates, in some cases with barely a bachelor’s degree. This was 1969, though, when not having a PhD didn’t automatically disqualify candidates from a full-time academic position. Turner was one of several beneficiaries from this change of climate at the University of Pittsburgh, as he was finishing up a master’s degrees in Sociology at Indiana University when the University of Pittsburgh hired him (Turner, incidentally, had helped lead protests for more Black inclusion and a Black Studies program at Indiana in 1968).

Turner took on a joint appointment with the Department of Sociology and with the new Black Studies Program, teaching courses like the Sociology of the Black Family, Introduction to Black Studies and his History of Blacks in Sports along the way. Although the standard courseload for a full-time faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh was five over two semesters per year, Turner had been on a 2-2 schedule from September 1969 through December 1991. For more than twenty-two years, Turner had only taught four courses per year.

When the then-new department chair Brenda Berrian demanded that Turner take on a third course in January 1992, he refused, citing his twenty-two year history with the Black Studies Department and the last-minute nature of the request as reasons. Berrian then moved to terminate Turner. She and two Pitt police officers arrived in Turner’s classroom on the first Friday of the spring semester and had him removed from his classroom and escorted out of the building. Berrian fired him in the middle of his lecture, in front of a room full of students. This was how The Pitt News first reported the incident, and it was corroborated by everything that Rollo Turner told me a few weeks later.

The Politics of Academia:

But though it was that heavy-handed, it was hardly that simple. Turner had gotten himself caught up in a battle that involved his contingent employment status, degree completion, departmental reputation and petty ideological politics. More than twenty-two years as a non-tenured senior lecturer with only a master’s degree and a few publications that included two book-length bibliographies had caught up with Turner. As a contingent faculty member, even with over two decades put in, Turner lacked the protections afforded tenure-stream and tenured faculty members. Granted, at $37,000 a year and living in Pittsburgh at the time in 1992, Turner was a very well-paid senior lecturer. At least, that’s what many would argue today. This was also Berrian’s position as Turner’s termination turned into a $60,000 lawsuit.

Beyond the issue of compensation, contracts and contingent status was what Berrian and the other tenured faculty of the Department of Black Studies wanted for the department’s future. They wanted to bolster the department’s reputation within and outside the University of Pittsburgh. They wanted to be a full-fledged department in which students could major in Black Studies (students could only earn a minor in the subject until 1993), and perhaps, even offer a master’s degree in the field. Two things stood in the way of this progression. One was the fact that half of the department’s faculty didn’t have doctorates, now a much bigger deal in 1992 than it had ever been in 1969.

Two was that not everyone wanted to go in the ideological direction that Berrian had chosen for the Department of Black Studies. She wanted to move toward an Afrocentric approach in teaching and conducting research, something Turner openly rejected as “nonsense.” The idea of a litmus test for what was and wasn’t authentically “Black” or “African” was too extreme for Turner. As a tenured faculty member, Turner’s objections may well have cost him political clout within the department, but it wouldn’t have cost him his job.

Turner’s Final Months:

Turner sued Berrian and the University of Pittsburgh for wrongful termination – stemming in no small part from a hostile work environment – and breach of contract (his was a three-year contract with a year and a half left on it). The suit dragged on in the Civil Court division of Allegheny County Common Pleas Court well into 1993 as Turner – with two daughters in college and a son in the middle of high school – went over a year and a half without a paycheck. As late as August 1993, the month before he died, Turner told me that things on the lawsuit front had taken a turn for the better. Despite the stress of the situation, he hadn’t let Berrian or the University of Pittsburgh “steal his inner peace,” Turner said.

Yet even with years of Buddhism and meditation under his belt and a lifestyle that included biking through all parts of Pittsburgh, Turner died in late-September 1993. No doubt that between the stress of his lawsuit, the sense of betrayal, and the financial upheaval, it all caught up with him. Rollo Turner may well have become a mentor of mine because of the stand that he took, minus the strength of a union or support from a substantial number of tenured faculty. None of this was possible in the end. Precisely because contingent faculty seldom have rights that tenured faculty and university administrators are bound to respect.

Lessons, If Any:

There are so many lessons to be learned here, lessons that resonate with me more now as an adjunct professor than they did when I was a graduate student or when I worked in the nonprofit world. Contingent faculty shouldn’t rock the boat, take a controversial stance, or involve themselves in hot-button issues within their field or department. Or that anyone serving as non-tenured faculty without a doctorate should endeavor to write their dissertation at break-neck speed. Or really, if given the choice, why would anyone who could possibly do anything else with their lives in academia, especially anything that could provide more security and protection, choose a job as a contingent faculty member, whether in 1992 or 2014?

Mostly, it points to the reality that university leaders tend to see much of the talent in academia – non-tenured faculty among others – as expendable. That, and the fact that this expendability has grown with the rapid increase in contingent faculty (and graduate students, for that matter) teaching courses once reserved for tenure and tenure-stream instructors. Until contingent faculty, graduate student teaching assistants and tenured/tenure-stream professors unionize and take a collective stand on working conditions and job protections, cases like Turner’s will continue to go cold and remain tragic ones, with no end in sight.

On Tolerance and Not Wearing My Kufi Anymore

06 Saturday Sep 2014

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

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Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) quote on superiority and tolerance, September 6, 2014. (http://thousayest.wordpress.com).

Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) quote on superiority and tolerance, September 6, 2014. (http://thousayest.wordpress.com).

Today’s date marks three decades since I decided to stop wearing my kufi in public, my first day of tenth grade at Mount Vernon High School (NY). It also marked my coming-out party (so to speak) as a Christian and a day of defiance toward both my Mom and my idiot stepfather Maurice Washington (now deceased), all of which is well-documented here and in Boy @ The Window.

What I haven’t spent much time or space writing about was how my one-time classmates received me in terms of my kufi or the Hebrew-Israelite religion during the three years between the start of seventh grade in ’81 and the end of ninth grade in June ’84. Sure, I’ve talked about Alex and the “Italian Club,” kufi battles and other incidents involving my classmates in which bullying or attempts at bullying occurred. How much were these incidents about me, about me being poor and Black, about me being weird and Black, about me and my kufi? It wasn’t always clear.

What was clear was that the vast majority of my classmates, though they may have given me weird looks or quietly snickered, said nothing to me one way or the other about my kufi or my religion. But on that first day of tenth grade, the day I stopped wearing my kufi, my classmates were hardly silent at all.

Screen shot 2014-09-06 at 1.14.44 PM

I wondered most of all about my Jewish classmates, at least the ones who actually practiced Judaism. With Josh as the one exception, they to a person never said a word or asked a single question about my religion or my kufi. This despite the fact that fundamentally, I was an Orthodox Jew between ’81 and ’84. I didn’t get an answer while I was in Humanities or at MVHS. Years later, I interviewed one of my former classmates, whose father was a rabbi at one of the largest synagogues in Westchester County. I asked him about the silence. “I thought nothing of it,” he said, as he’d been “taught to respect other people’s beliefs.”

On some level, I could accept this answer at face value. But even at the moment of the interview, I didn’t find this former classmate’s answer enlightened or satisfying at all. His answer on the surface demonstrates the very definition of tolerance. Yet tolerance through silence is the absolute minimal definition of respect for differences. Tolerance is hardly the same as accepting or embracing differences, defined by taking active steps to understand and empathize with different peoples and cultures. Not to mention taking the extra step of working to protect those people and their differences from the intolerant.

Standing ovation, opera house unknown, May 21, 2012.(http://www.thelmagazine.com).

Standing ovation, opera house unknown, May 21, 2012.(http://www.thelmagazine.com).

I knew on some level even in ’84 that many if not most of my Jewish classmates had remained silent because the idea of Blacks as Jews in terms of religion or genetics was barely in their consciousness. It’s still hard for many Jews I’ve known over the years to accept now, even with a population of Ethiopian and other East African Jews living and working in Israel. It’s difficult to embrace the mosaic that is the Jewish diaspora, even with evidence pointing to communities made up of the descendants of some of the so-called Ten Lost Tribes of ancient Israel living in southern Africa and northern India (as documented by the Discovery Channel in documentaries over the past fifteen years). Me as a kufi and yarmulke-wearing Black teenager practicing Judaism had to be weird and beyond the pale for those classmates.

The way the rest of my classmates reacted to the end of my Shalom-Aleichem-days was also an example of minimal tolerance, or really, intolerance. In six years of Humanities, I’d never gotten that many of my classmates to pay attention to me for longer than an answer to a history question unless it was for ridicule or for a presentation or an award. The fact that at least two dozen had something positive to say about my lack of a kufi, or upon further inquiry, my turn to the Christian side, told me all I needed to know about my status with my classmates for the previous three years.

I’m hardly excluding myself from this notion of intolerance. My view of myself as a Christian in those first months after I converted was one that set me apart from Catholics, Baptists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Nation of Islam and Jews alike. I didn’t necessarily think or say things about these different religions or the classmates who practiced them. I just ignored those differences while giving every appearance that my nondenominational view of Christianity, my Bible-quoting and toting self, was the only lens through which anyone should view themselves and the world around them. It would be another year before I recognized my own childishness regarding my views of spirituality, religion and tolerance.

What Can Brown Do For You (Now)?: 60 Years Come & Gone

16 Friday May 2014

Posted by in 1, Academia, Eclectic, Politics, race

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What can brown do for you?, Brown Squadron, Relay for Life, 2007. (http://www.behance.net/).

What can brown do for you?, Brown Squadron, Relay for Life, 2007. (http://www.behance.net/).

Tomorrow marks the 60th anniversary of the great Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision (1954), a Monday that lived in infamy among White supremacists in the South for decades, as the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional basis for Jim Crow segregation by a 9-0 vote. But six decades later, the Brown decision is in a coma and on life support, with a DNR order hanging over it, waiting for a close relative to sign. This after the Supreme Court ruled in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action (2014) last month that states like Michigan can amend their constitutions via majority vote to ban affirmative action. With this 6-2 decision, the Roberts court effectively ended any serious efforts at racial inclusion and diversity in public institutions, especially public K-16 education.

While deliberate exclusion of people of color, women and other minorities from America’s public institutions remains unconstitutional (and illegal, by the way — see the Civil Rights Act of 1964), this last court decision has now made it possible for public institutions to refrain from making any effort to include anyone other than White males in admissions and hiring policies. Yet there has been a long road to travel for us to reach this point, as it has taken lobbyists, law makers and lawyers roughly forty years to wound, disable and incapacitate Brown.

Bill Schuette, (Michigan’s attorney general), with Jennifer Gratz (of Gratz v. Bollinger decision [2003] and the XIV Foundation, outside Supreme Court, Washington, DC October 2013. (Susan Walsh/AP via New York Times).

Bill Schuette, (Michigan’s attorney general), with Jennifer Gratz (of Gratz v. Bollinger decision [2003] and the XIV Foundation), outside Supreme Court, Washington, DC October 2013. (Susan Walsh/AP via New York Times).

If one were old enough to remember the Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg decision (1971) — the one where the Supreme Court upheld widespread busing as a methodology for public school integration — it would have seemed that the matter was settled, at least legally. After all, in the seventeen years between Brown and Swann, the court had consistently ruled in favor of policies that made racial integration the centerpiece of a strategy to bring equal opportunity to America’s public institutions. And especially during President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s administration and with Congress, between the Civil Rights Act (now weeks away from turning fifty), the Voting Rights Act (1965), the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965) and the Higher Education Act (1965), it seemed that segregation was itself about to be dead and buried.

Well, segregation — and the structural and institutional racism that supports it — is alive, as much as the evil undead can be alive and unwell. And the forces and people who never wanted desegregation — or worse, integration — in the first place have worked my entire lifetime for this moment. They simply took the NAACP’s legal strategy to end Plessy with Brown, just so they could strangle it while sleeping, right through the Supreme Court. Including the:

– Milliken v. Bradley decision (1974). Limited desegregation efforts in Detroit to its city limits, making it possible for suburban areas to refuse to partake in school desegregation efforts across the country.

– Bakke v. University of California at Davis decision (1978). Racial quotas for seats at colleges via admission policies found unconstitutional – race can be accounted for as part of admissions decisions, but no actual numbers should be involved.

– Missouri v. Jenkins decision (1995). Forcing the Kansas City school district to spend $200 million per year since 1990 (after 13 years of court battles) for magnet schools and busing was too much (beyond court’s remedial authority) — and forced the lower court to accept a less expensive (and less effective) desegregation plan.

– Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger decisions (2003). The split decisions upheld race as one of a plethora of criteria public higher education institutions like the University of Michigan Law School and the University of Michigan (undergraduate division) could use in their admission process, as racial diversity and equity remained a laudable goal. But the court ruled that ranking race and other factors with a numbers system was the equivalent of a quota system, making this formula — but not the policy — unconstitutional.

Flatlining EKG, March 2010. (http://potashinvestingnews.com/).

Flatlining EKG, March 2010. (http://potashinvestingnews.com/).

Now Brown is truly hanging by a thread, and with it, the ideal of racial equality and equality of opportunity for visible minorities. I don’t want to hear about  the Texas state system’s socioeconomic admissions policies or Richard Kahlenberg’s tired argument about getting at racial diversity through the economic. Most poor students can’t afford even public institutions like the University of Texas at Austin, and Kahlenberg’s center-right argument disguises the issue of racial and economic inequality in K-12 public education.

Let’s face it while we’re still fighting — and yes, we need to keep fighting on this front. On this issue, the folks on the side of colorblind racism and segregation have all but won. Brown may well remain the most important Supreme Court decision in the history of the US. With the Schuette decision, though, we might as well find a priest to administer last rites.

Why Students Need Teachers Who Look Like Them

24 Thursday Oct 2013

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

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Wendy Kopp and Diane Ravitch head-to-head, Aspen Ideas Festival, Aspen, CO, June 28, 2011. (http://www.aspenideas.org/).

Wendy Kopp and Diane Ravitch head-to-head, Aspen Ideas Festival, Aspen, CO, June 28, 2011. (http://www.aspenideas.org/).

Not exactly the most precise title I’ve ever written. But it does get to a sensitive point for many involved in education and so-called  reform. Between Wendy Kopp and Diane Ravitch — especially since the publication of Ravitch’s latest and most comprehensive salvo Reign of Error a couple of months ago — it’s been hard for anyone to get a word on K-12 education into the national dialogue. Kopp’s running around ringing the educational Armageddon bell, while Ravitch has all but revealed the likes of Kopp, Michelle Rhee and Dr. Steve Perry as money-hungry reformers who wouldn’t know reform if it bit them in their derrieres.

The debate over high-stakes testing and anti-union teacher effectiveness models has put aside so many other conversations on improving K-12 education. So many that the average person may think that test scores and teacher training are the only issues on the table for reform, whether from the perspective of false prophets like Kopp or actual experts like Ravitch. For me, the one effort that has been neglected over the past decade and a half has been one to diversify the teaching profession, on the basis of race, gender and even levels of expertise.

It’s taken my son’s five-plus years of education in Montgomery County Public Schools to fully appreciate how unique my own time in an integrated school setting in Mount Vernon, New York truly was. From first through sixth grade, at Nathan Hale and William H. Holmes Elementary Schools, four of my six teachers were African American. But it wasn’t just that they were Black. The one thing that Ms. Griffin, Mrs. Shannon, Mrs. O’Daniel and Mrs. Bryant all had in common was their high expectations of me and my classmates. They were kind, but also no-nonsense teachers. They gave me a hug when I needed one, and a slap on the butt (in O’Daniel’s case, nearly literally) when I needed it.  By the way, they frequently made school fun, too.

No reflection of self in the mirror, October 24, 2013. (http://mailfeed.blogspot.com/).

No reflection of self in the mirror, October 24, 2013. (http://mailfeed.blogspot.com/).

They also dared to venture beyond the state-mandated curriculum to infuse it with materials about everything from Black history to the Maya, from reading our standard textbooks to encouraging us to discuss the Camp David accords (Menachem Begin, Anwar Sadat and President Jimmy Carter) and the Iran hostage crisis. Mostly, I learned more about what I’d face from the world in terms of race, gender and class from these teachers than from all the rest of my teachers combined (other than Harold Meltzer).

I would’ve liked some more male teachers of color, particularly once I became part of Humanities at A.B. Davis Middle School in seventh grade. In fact, between Dr. Larry Spruill and Dr. Hosea Zollicoffer, they were really the only Black male teachers/administrators I saw between end of sixth grade and my junior year at the University of Pittsburgh, a span of almost nine years. As it was, administrators and teachers like my seventh grade math teacher Ms. Simmons, along with Brenda Smith, Spruill and the handful of other I encountered often looked at me as if I was the cursed Son of Ham, or, rather, some weird version of whom they considered Black. At least, respectable and Black. Still, they served as reminders that not all teachers were White and female, if only that. (But, I digress…)

Now, I know what some of you may say. It shouldn’t matter what the race of the teacher or administrator is, as long as they care about the students. That The New Teacher Project (founded by Rhee) and Teach for America (founded by Kopp) provide alternative opportunities for professionals of color to enter the teaching profession. No they don’t. Not really. They provide an elitist version of Peace Corps for impoverished urban and rural school districts for folks who often do not stay in teaching for the long-term (beyond four or five years), only to then move on to graduate school, law school or Wall Street.

Reign of Error (2013) by Diane Ravitch, front cover. (http://bn.com).

Reign of Error (2013) by Diane Ravitch, front cover. (http://bn.com).

My teachers to a person remained teachers until they received promotions, retired or passed away. But they could stay teachers (and later become administrators) because they weren’t trying to reform education. They saw themselves as part of a larger community, helping to nurture children, not just educate them. They had the autonomy and parental support necessary to do so. And they didn’t have an atmosphere where they lived in fear of their jobs in case the students’ SRA scores dropped between 1979 and 1980 or between 1980 and 1981.

Despite my experiences and the experiences of my generation of students, the money grubbers of K-12 education reform will continue to insist that public education is at Def Con 1, and that we should launch our proverbial nukes in a pre-emptive strike to reform it. The sad truth is, in places like Texas and Philly and Chicago, their warheads have already gone off, irradiating school districts, poor students and students of color alike. And all without dealing with issues involving poverty and diversity in the process.