Fights and Friendships

05 Thursday May 2016

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

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"Friends" (1984), "Scream" (1995), 616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Child Abuse, Ego Inflation, Friendships, Hip-Hop, Hubris, Humanities, Intolerance, Janet Jackson, Michael Jackson, Rap, Salvation, Shunning, Starling Churn, Teenage Angst, Whodini, William H. Holmes Elementary

My friendship with my one-time best friend Starling ended on this week thirty-five years ago. It was a friendship that “began with a fight and ended with a fight,” as I wrote in Boy @ The Window. The second fight had as much to do with inflated preteen egos as it did with intolerance and ignorance. But that couldn’t be helped, given the way we were, the way our families had been back in the first days of the Reagan Years.

We’d been friends since the last third of fourth grade at William H. Holmes Elementary Most of our conversations the first year or so of our friendship had been about music, politics, history, and other things related to school or pop culture. By the time we reached Mrs. Bryant and sixth grade, a good portion of our conversations turned to Christianity. I guess that this was inevitable. Starling was the “son of a preacher man,” a Southern Baptist pastor. Starling wanted to see me become an official child of God and brother in Christ. My search was one of truth and God, and if Jesus was the one who could get me there then so be it. I didn’t feel the same sense of urgency for water immersion and John 3:16 as Starling did for me.

Back area behind William H. Holmes ES (where my two fights with Starling occurred), Mount Vernon, NY, November 22, 2006 (Donald Earl Collins).

The return of my prodigal stepfather Maurice Washington/Judah ben Israel and his bringing the whole Hebrew-Israelite thing to 616 put a temporary end to my Christian enlightenment in April ’81. Him and my Mom had been separated for about six months. During that time, my idiot stepfather had discovered the ways of Yahweh and Torah and alleged that he was a changed man. So we all had to change, to stop eating pork and bloody meats, to start wearing kufis, and to somehow see this fool as our dad.

Starling stopped speaking to me immediately and entirely when I showed up on a mid-April Monday with a white kufi on my head. on the last Friday in March. Our friendship was suddenly over. This was what our second fight was about, our friendship, my bizarre religion and my acceptance of it. At least it was for me.

As I wrote in the memoir,

I guess that Starling at twelve was definitely his father’s son. I could certainly understand Starling’s perspective on this. I’d betrayed him when I came to school and professed that I was a Hebrew-Israelite. Starling had been talking to me for months about becoming a Christian, a Baptist, and now here I was embracing Afrocentric Judaism, similar in many ways to the Nation of Islam and its variants in terms of its racial politics. The practitioners I’d been around tended to see Black Christians as “weak,” out of touch with “their heritage,” and as “worshiping the wrong God.” Starling couldn’t accept this. We ended up in our second and final fight. I was fighting for our friendship, literally. Starling beat me to end it.

I felt betrayed myself. Starling had turned his back on me at a time in which I needed his input the most. I still cared about the same things, thought about the same issues, and wanted someone whom I could banter with about music and politics and religion. But given Starling’s background, even back then I realized that he thought that I was well on my way to hell. Starling and I saw ourselves as adults in many ways, so he assumed that I had made a free-will adult decision for becoming a Hebrew-Israelite when I walked into Mrs. Bryant’s class with a kufi on my head. He had no idea how much I was struggling with my mother and stepfather’s decision to make our family a Hebrew-Israelite one.

Screen Shot from Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson’s “Scream” (1995) video, May 5, 2016. (http://www.vidivodo.com).

So I projected the outward appearance of supreme confidence and faith in Jehovah and this slant on the ten Lost Tribes of Israel, to protect myself from being hurt and to see if this whole Hebrew-Israelite thing really was for me. Not a good move going into middle school and the Humanities Program later that year. I had no idea how much worse my life was about to become in the two years between the end of my friendship with Starling and my family’s fall into welfare poverty, bumps, bruises, babies and concussions along the way.

It wasn’t until the end of eighth grade that Starling and I began exchanging “Hi’s” again. Even then, this was often forced. The only conversation I had with Starling after our fight was at the end of ninth grade, with him letting me know that he was moving with his family down South. Starling Churn left with his family for Wilmington, North Carolina in the summer of ’84, still believing I was well on my way to eternal damnation.

That friendship’s rise and fall has helped me understand who friends really are. Ultimately a friend is someone who isn’t a relative but you gravitate toward and have shared interests with, a person who has sympathy and empathy for you and your life. A person who isn’t afraid to tell you when you’re fucking up and who doesn’t shun you when you lose your way. That’s a real friend. I’ve had and still have, thankfully, a core group of ride-and-thrive friends who fit (or at least come close to it) this definition.

Starling and I couldn’t. We were tweeners, after all, and pseudo-intellectual ones with inflated egos from straight-As at that. And in a country that barely tolerates anything other than blind, unthinking Christianity and a false sense of patriotism, maintaining a friendship in the midst of a major religious shift — even a childhood one — was and is nearly impossible.

Ego Inflation

18 Wednesday May 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, race

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A Room With A View, Academia, Academic Politics, Carnegie Mellon University, College of Humanities & Social Sciences, Denholm Elliott, Dune, Ego Inflation, Egocentrism, Elite Institution, Elitist Institutions, George Mason University, Grade Inflation, Jace Nance, Mercurial, Napoleonic Complex, Nefud, Peter N. Stearns, Peter Stearns, PhD Graduation, Provost, Race, World History, World Stereotypes

My PhD Graduation, Thackeray Club, Pittsburgh, PA, May 18, 1997. Angelia N. Levy

May 18th. Another year, fourteen years now, in fact. I’ve been Dr. Collins to my students and the world of academia officially for that long. I’ve learned a lot of lessons about the values and limits of having a doctorate in history over the course of the past decade and a half. One of them is how easily egos are inflated by it. And everything else gets inflated in the process of having an ego that could challenge the Himalayas for supremacy.

One of the more stunning and thoughtful moments I had during the graduation ceremony at Carnegie Mellon on that hot and sticky Sunday in ’97 — besides the dreadful realization that my own mother was jealous of me — was shaking Peter Stearns‘ hand on stage. The Napoleonic red-and-white-haired Stearns — currently the university provost at George Mason — was the Dean of Humanities & Social Sciences at

Provost Peter N. Stearns, George Mason University, 2008. Source: http://provost.gmu.edu.

Carnegie Mellon at the time. Having to touch his rough yet clammy right hand as they read off the names of the doctorates that afternoon brought back quite a few not-so-pleasant memories of why I found Carnegie Mellon a terrible elitist (as opposed to elite) school to attend for four years.

I’d most recently co-presented with Stearns on how to successfully finish a doctorate that March, which wasn’t so unpleasant. Except for the fact that most of his presentation was off-the-cuff ego-stroking. Except that the lessons learned from writing a dissertation in six weeks in ’64 were mostly irrelevant to the students in front of us that day. Except that I already knew that Stearns was equally polite and dismissive of my presentation by proxy.

Too bad hand sanitizers — or as my son Noah calls them, hanitizers — were in their infancy in ’97. For as I shook Stearns’ hand, the memory that crept to the fore was my other experience working with the man, when I was a teaching assistant for two sections of his world-famous World Stereotypes, oops, World History course in the fall of ’94. He spent lecture after lecture entertaining mostly White college freshman with dirty jokes about beer and sex in covering World History Plato-to-NATO style. I spent most of my teaching time attempting to refocus my group of students away from stereotyping South Asian women as “demur” and Arab men as horn dogs.

Then the end of that semester came, and I turned in all of my grades. I had a few students with D’s and F’s because they had failed their exams, or hadn’t shown up for class really, or both. One of those students was a White male freshman who’d only been to class twice, had failed one exam and barely passed his final. I received an email from Stearns two days before the end of the semester ordering me to change the student’s grade from an F to a C. The reason: “[h]e’s a good kid…he showed up for a couple of my sections…” [emphasis added]. I send an email back that basically read, “So?” Stearns repeated his order to change the grade, in person, which meant that I needed to change the grades of five other students so that their grades weren’t worse than the student that Stearns had coddled.

It was the one and only time I found myself inflating grades. That exchange confirmed so much that I heard and suspected about the father of college-level World History. Stearns was mercurial, egotistical and played favorites, who somehow were usually White and often male. I knew of at least one former grad student who’d all but been blackballed from finding academic jobs because of him. I also knew that he arbitrarily provided vastly different pay levels to grad students and instructors when he was the history department chair.

Denholm Elliott in A Room With A View, 1985. Source: http://content8.flixster.com/photo/13/52/75/13527526_gal.jpg

When my future wife first saw Stearns in ’96 at some history department conference in which my then advisor Joe Trotter forced me to do a presentation, she said that the five-foot-four man looked like the late British actor Denholm Elliott, especially from the movie A Room With A View (1985). That’s really an insult to Elliott. A better comparison would be between the actor who played the emperor in the Star Wars prequel trilogy. Or, more specifically, like the late actor Jack Nance’s character Nefud from Dune (1984). Very mean of me, I suppose, not to mention, a digression.

As I began to walk off the stage after shaking Stearns’ hand, I felt agitated, and thought of all that I’d gone through with him and with Carnegie Mellon in general. Ultimately, like the characters I mentioned above, Stearns was and remains an imperialist, building an academic empire in his image and crushing all opposition (real and imagined) along the way. His legacy will be the multiplication of inflated student egos who believe they understand the world but instead really only understand how to see the world in their own egocentric ways.