Tag Archives: Elitism

The Unbearable Elitism of This World (Especially Academia)

28 Wednesday Aug 2019

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Gated community, Houston, TX area [but virtual gates in education for years], February 13, 2012. (Chelsea Lameira via http://www.houstonagentmagazine.com)

This is my 1,000th blog, folks! It took me 12 years and three months to reach this milestone — yay, me!

But it’s on the exact day/date that I began grad school, specifically, the master’s program in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh, 28 years ago. Although that day and that semester were great times for me, my professional lifecycle has been almost as full of failures and setbacks as it has been one of triumph and overcoming. Unfortunately, the microaggressions of racism, ageism (too young and too old), and elitism have all been a central part of my experiences in academia, in the nonprofit world, in writing books, in freelance writing, and in consulting in the nearly three decades since.

In contrast to 2019, that day in 1991 was the first of many in which I heard from professors and colleagues, “You’re too young to do…” and “What? You’re just 21? You know the average age of a history grad student’s 28, right?” Now, when I say to people that I’m a fledgling writer, they ignore me or say, “but you’re too old to be a writer.”

If it were just Millennials or Baby Boomers discounting me, my successes, and my outlook on the world because of my age, I might have been able to live that down. But throw in the occasional, “Wow! You’re a program officer? I thought you only played basketball!” (this happened to me in one of my nonprofit jobs back in 2003), and, “You know what we call a Black guy with a PhD…,” and the rage that reminds me of everyday racism rises up. James Baldwin said as much as part of a 1961 conversation Nat Hentoff between him, Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, and Alfred Kasin, on “The Negro in American Culture.”  “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time,” Baldwin famously quipped.

But mostly, it has been others’ attempts to demean me by offering ashes as opportunities, whether for publishing a book, finding an agent, getting a consulting gig, or teaching a course. Or, rather, to expect me to perform free labor for a so-called opportunity at some middling job. Only to realize later on that the job was a mirage. And they really expected me to drink sand and glass shards while they mocked me by pouring cold water down their throats!

I had a reminder of the layers of professional elitism and the cruelty that it engenders in April. For nearly two years, I had been in contact with a colleague of mine at Georgetown about the prospect of teaching undergraduate education courses there. Even with my two teaching gigs (which combined make me slightly more than full-time, contingent, but not nearly as tenuous as life had been back in 2010), I still wanted to teach education foundations/policy courses. Because, well, I’m still me, eclectic and still wanting courses that fit my experiences working in multiple worlds.

Out of the blue, Douglas Reed, a professor in a related department, contacted me about the possibility of teaching a summer course. “I now direct a graduate level program that just launched two years ago and have a possible last-minute opening to teach a summer course entitled ‘Social Justice in Education’ to our incoming cohort of MA level students in Educational Transformation. Would you have time to meet over the next week or two to talk about that possibility?,” he emailed.

Now, as someone who has done this with seven universities since 1997, of course I wanted to meet! It’s a grad-level course, combining social justice and education, something that I had taught before, I thought. I hadn’t taught grad students in more than a decade, but at least I already knew how to. I figured that this was a legitimate chance at a third part-time teaching gig.

I was wrong. Instead of the informal meeting/interview process, it seemed more like a one-on-one interrogation. Reed asked questions that would have been easily answered by my cv, by our mutual colleague, by literally anyone in my classrooms that semester. I brought samples from my relevant courses, while Reed never produced a copy of his Social Justice in Education syllabus. When I assumed that I was brought in to teach this course, he mused, “Maybe there might be others involved,” a wishy-washy answer at best.

Five weeks later, after I prompted Reed several times, I got this response:

Our situation has changed a bit since we last spoke. We have extended an offer for a three year position to a candidate and that candidate has accepted our offer and she will also be teaching the course we discussed. We will definitely keep our CV in our files and be sure to reach out if we have any new opportunities.

Un-effing-believable. Unless I consider the truth. I am a 49-year-old Black guy with a salt-and-pepper beard who has never held a tenure-stream position, and one who never attended or has formally taught at an Ivy League school (I did two summers at Princeton, working with high school students, but that doesn’t count in the eyes of the elite gatekeepers). I had the nerve to leave contingent academia behind for nearly a decade, working at nonprofit entities. I made the decision three years ago to no longer pursue publishing scholarly articles, because of, well, the elitism of such publications. And, I eat friend chicken with my bare hands to boot — I’m sure that’s been a dealbreaker some time in the past twenty-something years!

The following is part of what I wrote in response to Reed:

===================================================

Thanks for your email and for letting me know. I am miffed. Not because I was not ultimately offered a teaching opportunity. Rejection is a heavy part of being an adjunct, as one doesn’t have a true home. No, what has left distaste in my proverbial mouth is the reality that this was never an opportunity for a summer teaching position to begin with, and that you were not an honest broker in discussion this teaching opportunity with me.
Let me be more specific. There are several ways in which anyone with no opinion on the matter could see that this was not an honest opportunity.
1. You never sent me a copy of the Syllabus for the Social Justice in Education course, nor did you ever provide a copy, before, during, or after our meeting on Friday, April 5. When I inquired about it on April 5, you seemed hesitant about sharing it with me.
3. You never quite said it, but you sort of implied that there was someone else who was vying for teaching the Social Justice in Education course this summer. When I asked specifically if there was another person you were considering for teaching this course, you implied “maybe” at best. You left the context for our meeting and the purpose of our meeting murky.
7. Specifically, the fact that another person was offered a three-year teaching position (one that included this summer course) in the four weeks between our meeting and yesterday afternoon is proof of 5. Since positions generally do not develop spontaneously, I can only assume that you knew about this possibility at the time you met with me, and chose not to disclose it, either because you did not want me to apply for it or because you simply felt I wasn’t qualified for whatever reason.
All of these add up to a clear example of bad faith on your part. I had to clear my schedule to set up a meet with you on Friday, April 5, in the middle of a four-course semester. I came prepared to talk about a teaching opportunity, while you didn’t even provide a Syllabus for the course you purportedly wanted me to teach. You had me travel across DC to Georgetown for a meeting that was really an interview, and one that could have been conducted by phone or videoconferencing at that. While you may have been meeting with me out of courtesy to X, it was not a courtesy to me, at least not in the ways you handled it.
I learned something from this experience. As an adjunct with a non-linear academic, nonprofit, and writing background, I know full well the snarky elitism of many of my so-called colleagues already. Now I have confirmed that in times of hiring, I have nothing to offer as an itinerant minister of education in the eyes of faculty like you.

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I ended with, “You already hold all cards. There was never a need to hide half the deck.”

Most of the time, I am okay with the idea that I can make the combination of mainstream freelance writing and full-time equivalent teaching work, for me, my wife and son, and for our future. It’s been working for almost a decade, after all. But I know that as I approach the big 5-0, that combination better become semi-successful author and term faculty pretty soon. Because I’m too young and too broke to retire, and too old and too good at what I do to try much of anything else. I have considered janitorial work or the Steve Salaita route, though.

Coming From Where I’m From

30 Monday Jul 2018

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, music, My Father, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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A week and a half ago, I received an email from a reader in response to my latest Al Jazeera piece, “Why I Don’t Understand the Black Affluent Class.” She congratulated me on the article, and agreed with most of my sentiments in the piece. She also revealed that she had spent a decade living in Mount Vernon, NY.

It turned out that this reader lived five blocks from me during my Boy @ The Window years, right off East Lincoln Avenue! Part of my follow-up included, “[m]aybe our paths crossed, maybe they didn’t. But I’m sure my growing up years helped shape some of what went into my Al Jazeera piece from last week.”

I was mildly excited that someone from Mount Vernon had read one of my mainstream articles, and not just the blog. But, even with some shared ideas and a common point of reference, the reader’s response actually reflected some of what I critiqued in the article. She agreed that “Money Earnin’ Mount Vernon” had helped shape my views around the buying in of a relatively materially privileged class into White patriarchial and supremacist ideas like civility and respectability politics. Then she immediately veered toward identifying the great Mount Vernonites — “Denzel Washington, Al B Sure, Heavy D, Sidney Poitier, etc.”

What is it about smaller cities not blessed with the narcissistic largesse of a New York, L.A., or DC that causes people to fall back on the “but we have successful people from here, too” trope? Not only is this not necessary. It points to a sense of competing for attention and importance in a way that can be a bit unseemly, a way of countering a negative narrative from a crowd of self-centered media elites with one that’s just as narcissistic and needy.

The fact is, pick a spot on a map where at least 1,000 people live, and guess what? Someone rich and/or famous either grew up there or lived there for a time. Even if those individuals aren’t nationally known, one can guess that they’re known in that region or state. Dean Martin’s from Steubenville, Ohio. The opera singer Leontyne Price is originally from Laurel, Mississippi. Mr. “The Price Is Right” Bob Barker is from Darrington, Washington. Stand-up comedian Lewis Black’s from Silver Spring (where I’ve lived for nearly 20 years now). I bumped into former NFL player and sports broadcaster Ahmad Rashad at my local pizza shop in 1989. Heck, the Black feminist lesbian poet Audre Lorde worked for years at Mount Vernon Public Library. None of this could possibly change how I saw my original home base, not in 1976, not in 1987, and certainly not in 2018.

It’s not that I didn’t know the Delaney sisters lived off South Columbus Avenue, or that Stephanie Mills had a house somewhere between Mount Vernon High School and the Mount Vernon-Bronxville border. But what did that really mean to my day-to-day when I was going from one end of Mount Vernon to the other for groceries, for piece of mind, and sometimes, to avoid more physical and emotional abuse at home? How did knowing that a classmate was in a scene on the soap opera General Hospital change the fact that I still needed to hunt down my alcoholic father on Friday for enough money to cover the cost of my AP English exam? What did Al B. Sure or Heavy D’s success in the 1980s have to do with my striving for a college education, or my five days of homelessness in 1988? Nothing, of course, absolutely nothing.

It’s good to know that there are notable people, Black, Afro-Caribbean, African, Latino, Nuyorican, Italian, male, female, transgender, gay, lesbian, bisexual, dead, old, young, and alive, from Mount Vernon. But a community doesn’t hang its hat on notable people or the rich and successful. Its lifeblood is the ordinary, of activists, artists, and educators, students and librarians and postal workers, the grandparent here, the friend of the family there, who takes a real interest in your development and success. For that reason, Denzel doesn’t really matter to me. I can’t tell you how I feel about Albert Brown night and day, because I’ve hardly given his music a thought since Quincy Jones’ 1989 album Back on the Block (the song “The Secret Garden” makes me gag). Sidney Poitier living in Mount Vernon for a time? And?

For me, for better and for worse, it was the crossing guard at the corner of Esplanade and East Lincoln when was at William H. Holmes. Or, it was my mom and dad’s friends (drinking buddies, really), Ms. Pomalee, Ida, Callie Mae, Lo, and Arthur. Or, it was my mom’s Mount Vernon Hospital friends, especially Billie. It was my Uncle Sam. It was Ms. Griffin, Mrs. Shannon, Mrs. O’Daniel, Mrs. Bryant, my school teachers before Humanities and Meltzer. Whatever lessons I learned about aspirations, civility, and respectability politics, and the idea that these ideas aren’t all good or set in stone, they helped me in that process. These were the people who mattered to me outside of 616 and off the street of Mount Vernon.

NOT “Only In America”

30 Sunday Apr 2017

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Daily Show with Trevor Noah’s Hasan Minhaj speaking at White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Washington, DC, April 29, 2017. (http://complex.com)

Once again, I made myself into a gullible dupe for the American press. I watched the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last night when I had so many other choices. I could’ve watched the Pittsburgh Penguins dismantle the playoff adverse Washington Capitals 6-2. Or slept through an NBA playoff game or rerun. Or watched the last four episodes of season one of This Is Us, or the season-ender to The Expanse. Instead, I chose to watch those smug, not-so-objective elites with pens, notepads, microphones, cameras, laptops, and press passes gaze longingly at each other. I sat and watched them talk about the freedom of the press as if it was still 1974 and the nation could still believe it was a just one.

The narcissistic navel-gazing continued even as Hasan Minhaj took the stage and began to roast the press for its ineptitude, and 45 for his voluminous idiocies. It was a pretty good roasting, but compared to Stephen Colbert in ’06 and Larry Wilmore last year, Minhaj was underwhelming. Then, Minhaj said something at the end of his speech that momentary kept me from REM sleep.

And it’s the same position a lot of minority kids feel in this country. You know—do I come up here and just try to fit in, and not ruffle any feathers? Or do I say how I really feel?

Because this event is about celebrating the First Amendment and free speech. Free speech is the foundation of an open and liberal democracy. From college campuses to the White House, only in America can a first-generation, Indian-American Muslim kid get on this stage and make fun of the president.

Really? “Only in America?” An Indian American Muslim couldn’t do what Minhaj did in, say, Canada, or in the UK, where Sadiq Khan, a British Pakistani, is London’s mayor, or even, say, in India?  This statement alone answered Minhaj’s question for me. Sir, wasn’t this an attempt to “just try to fit in, and not ruffle any features?” You just told every America elite to the left of the Islamophobic set exactly what they wanted to hear!

There are two other problems with the refrain, “Only in America,” especially in the context of Minhaj and free speech, free expression, and freedom of the press. One is that none of the First Amendment is free. Sure, if one narrowly means free from government coercion and persecution, then what Minhaj highlighted is mostly true. But given the platform Minhaj had last night, his truth was a lie for most of us. Because for most of us, the connections and money isn’t readily available to have such a lofty platform to proclaim America as uniquely free.

“Only in America” also assumes that anyone who couldn’t be Hasan Minhaj is a loser. Millions of Americans of color and tens of millions of poor and low-income Whites, you simply have worked hard enough, been extroverted enough, or told enough off-color jokes. Apparently, that’s what it takes to make “Only in America” true for us all. Despite his calling 45 the “orange man behind the Muslim ban,” in this one fundamental area of belief, Minhaj is no different from 45. For “Only in America” may be the most narcissistic, hypocritical, and fact-denying thing anyone can say about themselves and the US.

The “Are You Sure’s” and Doubting Sylvias

30 Tuesday Dec 2014

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

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The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, by Caravaggio, c. 1601-02, uploaded April 13, 2005. (Dante Alighieri via Wikipedia). In public domain.

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, by Caravaggio, c. 1601-02, uploaded April 13, 2005. (Dante Alighieri via Wikipedia). In public domain.

We all have doubters in our lives. Even if the only doubters turn out to be ourselves. As someone without much of a roadmap for any success, doubt has been a constant companion, one that I often had to ignore to experience any victories in my life. To have those with influence pretend to be on my side but add to those doubts, though. As a twenty-year-old, it was somewhere between bewildering and rage inducing. As a forty-five year-old who regularly advises students, love ones, friends and others about their futures, looking back at those doubters, it’s almost unforgivable the seeds they attempted to plant.

Of all the non-relatives in positions to advise me, few were worse than my high school guidance counselor Sylvia Fasulo. For four years, Fasulo forced me to listen to her “Are you sure…?” questions about difficult classes, the colleges I wanted to attend, the career paths I thought about taking. Her patrician Vassar arrogance toward me as the poor Black kid drove me up a wall every time I walked into her cigarette-filled office.

"Raleigh's First Pipe in England," an illustration in Frederick William Fairholt's Tobacco (1859), June 8, 2014. (Materialscientist via Wikipedia). In public domain.

“Raleigh’s First Pipe in England,” an illustration in Frederick William Fairholt’s Tobacco (1859), June 8, 2014. (Materialscientist via Wikipedia). In public domain.

I hated having Fasulo as my counselor especially once it was time for me to apply for college. She was condescending, demeaning and chain-smoked up my clothes for my troubles. Most of all, I hated having to reveal things about myself to her that I otherwise wouldn’t have shared. Like my family’s financial situation. Fasulo became only the second person I would tell that we were on welfare, that my father and mother had divorced and that he hadn’t made a child support payment since ’78. I had to talk to her about my role in my family as acting first-born child and my responsibilities. It was necessary and humiliating at the same time.

Despite and not because of Fasulo, things worked out for me in the end. Going to Pitt, meeting the people and the professors I’d become friends and colleagues with, was probably one of the best decisions I ever made. Still, I had one parting shot from her in the middle of my junior year at the University of Pittsburgh. It was the holiday season in ’89, and I took time while home in Mount Vernon to visit my favorite teacher, the late Harold Meltzer. I had just missed him, but bumped into Fasulo. It was about as fortuitous as having diarrhea and being nowhere near a toilet with toilet paper.

She asked me where I was in school, and I told her about my considerations for graduate school, law school and the world of work. It was a toss-off sentence, my attempt to end a conversation, not begin one. “Being a lawyer’s hard work,” Fasulo said in response. She then went on to tell me about 70-hour work weeks and billable hours and the bar exam, as if any of this was supposed to be surprising or would somehow scare me. I cut her off, saying “You know, you’re not my counselor anymore, so thanks but no thanks for your advice,” and left her office while she tried to explain her idiotic perspective.

Tiki Barber, the personification of a doubter, at the American Museum of Natural History, October 16, 2008. (Jamie McCarthy/WireImage.com via http://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/).

Tiki Barber, the personification of a doubter, at the American Museum of Natural History, October 16, 2008. (Jamie McCarthy/WireImage.com via http://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/).

A quarter-century later, and though I am more than content with the fact that I opted for a PhD over a JD thirteen out of every fourteen days (people with law degrees do make more money on average), I sometimes question if the PhD in history was worth it. After all, a JD is far more portable. A JD would’ve served me better in my nonprofit and consulting careers than having to explain a doctorate. I wouldn’t want to think that I went in the direction of a graduate program for five and a half years simply because I had a conversation with a racial elitist.

It’s probably more likely that I didn’t go to medical school to earn an MD because my Mom and my idiot late-ex-stepfather both told me I couldn’t be a surgeon because I had “ten thumbs.” By more likely, I mean highly unlikely on both counts. I ultimately did what I wanted to do educationally speaking, despite own my doubts, despite the doubts of those who believed it was their job to advise me. But constantly asking, “Are you sure, Donald…?” isn’t exactly the best way to advise or mentor anyone, especially someone in their teens or a literal twenty-year-old. You lay out options, you ascertain what’s going on in their heart as well as their mind. You introduce them to other people who could provide better advice, based on direct expertise or experiences. Otherwise, you’re a doubter, not an advisor or a mentor.

The ’72 Dolphins and Baby-Boomer Narcissism

01 Saturday Nov 2014

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For as long as I’ve been alive, America has confronted me with its Baby-Boomer narcissism. This idea that the Boomers were the generation that forever changed the country and the world, the folks who’ve shaped our popular culture — and the response of younger generations to it — has been around for more than sixty years. The Beatles, Watergate, Vietnam, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stone, Roe v. Wade, “I Have A Dream” — Boomers have taken credit for it all. It sometimes makes me wanna puke.

Bill and Hillary Clinton (nee Rodham), circa 1971, Yale University, New Haven, CT. (Charles F. Palmer/HuffPost via http://clintonlibrary.gov/photogallery.html?galAlbum=28).

Bill and Hillary Clinton (nee Rodham), circa 1971, Yale University, New Haven, CT. (Charles F. Palmer/HuffPost via http://clintonlibrary.gov/photogallery.html?galAlbum=28).

Along with the arrogance of this constant supposition of their centrality to the sort-of-historical is the obvious factual ignorance that comes with it. It’s as if the ’80s didn’t happen and Generation X wasn’t born and didn’t grow up. Or the ’90s were only about Baby Boomers having kids of their own. Or that Boomers somehow didn’t vote for the likes of Nixon, Reagan, Bush 41 and Bush 43 — seven times in all!

But nothing, absolutely nothing, has demonstrated Baby-Boomer narcissism more than that annual rite of fall that has been the ’72 Miami Dolphins celebrating when every NFL team has lost their first game of a given season. The remaining members of that team get together with the hopes that no other NFL team finishes the season with a perfect record. It’s a sad sight watching elderly men long out of professional football show their glee on TV and in pictures when every team has at least one loss on the season. Every. Single. Year.

Yet it so represents this nation of Baby Boomers that have ruled this roost for so many years. Before most Gen Xers were old enough to vote, much less protest, Baby Boomers had coined us “slackers” and “apathetic” about life and politics. Heck, Baby Boomers took away Gen Xers’ right to drink — but not to die in war — just as the first Gen Xers turned eighteen! And for the past ten years, Boomers have turned their critical eye to Millennials, looking for flaws in their politics, voting patterns and vapid obsession with pop culture. As if Millennials didn’t cut their self-absorbed eyeteeth on a steady diet of Baby-Boomer megalomania.

President Barack Obama honors the Super Bowl VII Champions and their 1972 perfect season, East Room, White House, August 20, 2013. (UPI/Kevin Dietsch). Read more: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2013/08/20/Obama-welcomes-72-Dolphins-to-the-White-House/UPI-27321377029133/#ixzz3HopWhqwX

President Barack Obama honors the Super Bowl VII Champions and their 1972 perfect season, East Room, White House, August 20, 2013. (UPI/Kevin Dietsch).
Read more: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2013/08/20/Obama-welcomes-72-Dolphins-to-the-White-House/UPI-27321377029133/#ixzz3HopWhqwX

So when Mercury Morris or Bob Griese or elder statesman Don Shula have gone on TV year after year after year to gloat about their perfect season, it doesn’t reflect pride in their 17-0 record. It’s a reflection of their desperation, a selfish attempt to hang on to a past that is irrelevant in today’s NFL. And yes, it’s their fault. Kind of like when civil rights Boomers who claim the blood and name of the movement, yet root for younger generations of social justice activists to not do so well as them. All while taking ginormous amounts of credit for every good thing that happened during their watch years and years ago.

Is there something to be done about this? Maybe. We could try to ignore these winners of yesteryear and the annual ESPN champagne cork-popping graphic in honor of the ’72 Dolphins team. Or, better still, we can say, “Enough!” Forty-two years is long enough to celebrate the so-called perfect season. Especially when it was on a fourteen-game schedule.

As for the rest of the elite Baby Boomers, you can continue to self-aggrandize, as if three million protesters and stoners could fully represent the other 76 million Americans born between 1945 and 1961. Just remember. Gen Xers and Millennials will be the near-final arbiters of your history. It will be one in which you were as responsible preemptive war as LBJ and Robert McNamara, as accountable for NSA and a virtual police state as Nixon was for Watergate, as culpable for climate change as Ford and GM. That’s as much your narcissistic legacy as the anti-war movement and free-love.

Billy Joel, "We Didn't Start The Fire" (video screen shot), 1989. (http://denverlibrary.org/).

Billy Joel, “We Didn’t Start The Fire” (video screen shot), 1989. (http://denverlibrary.org/).

Fear and (White) Women’s History Month

06 Thursday Mar 2014

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The Scream (1893) by Edvard Munch, The National Gallery, Oslo, Norway, November 27, 2013. (The Herald via Wikipedia). In public domain (US).

The Scream (1893) by Edvard Munch, The National Gallery, Oslo, Norway, November 27, 2013. (The Herald via Wikipedia). In public domain (US).

I often find it ironic that Women’s History Month follows immediately after Black History Month. In this sequence, both are racialized, as the former tends to represent White women, while the latter represents all Blacks regardless of gender, sexual orientation, or country of origin. Meaning that women of color often have to fight to be recognized during Women’s History Month, that poor women often go unrecognized in both Black and Women’s History months, and that other nuances of demographics and history aren’t thought of at all.

Such is the case with issues of -isms within feminism and Women’s History Month. Particularly when combined with the actualization of fear. In the cases of domestic violence, rape, assault, kidnapping, harassment and other threats against women, it’s certainly understandable that the fear of such things (and the breaking down those threats and fears in dialogue) are a big part of feminism and Women’s History Month more specifically. But when combined with certain -isms — especially racism and elitism — these issues become more about profiling stereotypical threats rather than dealing with real threats against women, especially (but not exclusively) for White women.

Compact Glock 19 in 9x19mm Parabellum, November 4, 2007. (Vladimir Dudak via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC 3.0 & GNU.

Compact Glock 19 in 9x19mm Parabellum, November 4, 2007. (Vladimir Dudak via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC 3.0 & GNU.

It’s something I experience every day. A White woman crossing the street as I approach, on my way home, to my car, to run an errand, or to pick up my son from school. A woman — White or Black — gasping audibly at the sight of me in an elevator, some even not getting on board, as if I had a ski mask over my face and a Glock in my right hand. White female co-workers who, upon seeing me outside the office, would put on a blank face and walk by me while I’m holding open a door, too scared to even say “Hello,” much less a “Thank you.”

It’s the nearly daily reminder that where feminism and Whiteness intertwine, I represent the Black male misogynist. I am dangerous, the guy whom White women and middle class women of color imbue anti-feminist threats and violence. Even when standing still on an elevator, deep in my own thoughts about work, teaching, family and writing.

Martyrdom of Joseph Marchand (1860) by unknown, September 27, 2008. (World Imaging via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC 3.0 and GNU.

Martyrdom of Joseph Marchand (1860) by unknown (or death by 1,000 cuts), September 27, 2008. (World Imaging via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC 3.0 and GNU.

I get it. White women often have to expend micro-energies on microaggressions from men — including Black men — in order to get through the day. For some, it’s probably an exhausting part of their existence. Likely so much so that they forget to turn off their shields even when bumping into a male co-worker or friend.

From my perspective, though, it’s not that simple. It’s not like I look at every White male and female and see another willfully ignorant and entitled racist ready to accuse me of ruining the country or threaten me with bodily harm. I think that in some feminist circles, racial and classist profiling goes on even more so than with most police officers. Fear is an important part of our existence, but it shouldn’t be the centerpiece of how anyone lives their lives, even when it’s justifiable.

In thinking about feminism, Whiteness and Women’s History Month, my two little cents’ worth of thoughts come down to this. I’m tired of being a victim of your fears, which when multiplied over the past 150 years, have often led to misunderstandings, false accusations, arrests, convictions, beatings and deaths. I’m tired of abstract discussions of microaggressions, threats and violence against mostly White women that don’t include the perspectives of women of color. And I’m tired of feminists who refuse to evaluate their own elitism and Whiteness in how they go about their everyday lives.

Amateur Eugenicists: Why Smart Poor Students Have a Hard Time

05 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, My Father, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Scientific racism, using "evidence" to compare the Irish to the African, by H. Strickland Constable, Harper's Weekly, 1899. (JasonAQuest via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Scientific racism, using “evidence” to compare the Irish to the African, by H. Strickland Constable, Harper’s Weekly, 1899. (JasonAQuest via Wikipedia). In public domain.

I do generally loathe reading the comments sections of most news sites (any sites, really), but the one on Robin J. Hayes’ “Why Ivy League Schools Are So Bad at Economic Diversity” in The Atlantic is a real trip. There are dozens of comments in which people are playing amateur eugenicists, as they’ve connected wealth & poverty to intelligence. For these folks, the poor perpetuate themselves because they are stupid, and when they have kids, they’ll be born stupid as well, and therefore, will remain poor. As if structural inequality and structural racism have nothing to do with creating the gaps in wealth and education for millions of Americans.

I’m sure I haven’t seen more Social Darwinist /scientific racist /pro-eugenics comments anywhere, including on neo-Nazi websites. Apparently, the only thing The Atlantic’s commentators read while in college (as this is allegedly the profile of their readers) was Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve (1994), as their arguments came out of studies that are now well over 100 years old. (I defy anyone to say they’ve read all 838 pages, though!) What these people should’ve been reading is Jerome Karabel’s The Chosen (2005) and Nick Lemann’s The Big Test (1999), both of which indicate the Ivy League’s long history of high racial and socioeconomic bias, not just high selectivity.

The Chosen (2005) front cover, March 5, 2014. (Donald Earl Collins).

The Chosen (2005) front cover, March 5, 2014. (Donald Earl Collins).

So I responded, using the lessons I’ve learned from my life and from writing Boy @ The Window, pointing out along the way that “Yale and the others offer what they offer to us po’ folk because they want to appear like they’re doing good, knowing full well that actually working to increase economic diversity is too much for them to fathom.” It elicited this counter-response from someone calling themselves Christy2012:

Pardon me for being so blunt, but you seem to imply that you were somehow obvious Yale material based on your top 2% status. However, you indicated on your blog that you earned a 2.6 GPA at University of Pittsburgh, a much less competitive institution, in your freshman year. Do you suppose you would have attained a higher GPA at Yale? Many rich people get turned down by Yale with even better credentials and Columbia is a fairly elite school itself. That Columbia offered you at chance and that you didn’t exactly hit it out of the park at UPitt is not exactly evidence that the schools are biased against the poor (maybe even the opposite).

Maybe there was (or is) an issue relating to how they consider deadbeat fathers in financial aid and scholarship consideration. It seems you should probably focus on that and that is probably an issue for more middle class applicants too.

It turns out that Christy2012 made these personal swipes from an extremely selective and incorrect reading of my blog because she believes all poor students and students of color really aren’t smart. I/we apparently benefited instead from “affirmative action and/or the pity of bleeding-heart White liberals,” and “not because of our abilities or because of hard work” (my translation of her other comments, by the way). Of course, Christy2012 never revealed anything personal about herself. It’s likely she never attended an elite college and has never met a poor person — especially one of color — that she didn’t feel superiority over.

From The Matrix: A sea of pods in which humans are fusion batteries (the future of the poor, as viewed by The Atlantic's amateur eugenicists), March 5, 2014. (http://www.tony5m17h.net/MatrixNet.gif).

From The Matrix: A sea of pods in which humans are fusion batteries (the future of the poor, as viewed by The Atlantic’s amateur eugenicists), March 5, 2014. (http://www.tony5m17h.net/MatrixNet.gif).

If this set of comments is any indication, it will be hard for Yale or any other school — even if they’re sincere in their efforts at racial and economic diversity — to fulfill them. So many folks even without holding positions of power or serving as gatekeepers decide before looking that poor folks and poor folks who look like me are incapable and unqualified for anything other than a mop, a broom or a jail cell. Is there any wonder that so few of America’s poor and of color have a chance at any higher education of significance, forget about getting into an elite or Ivy League institution?