Tag Archives: Exploitation

Being One of The Expendables

01 Sunday May 2022

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

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Poster art (cropped) and tattoo art for The Expendables (2010), August 2, 2010. (https://blog.spoongraphics.co.uk/tutorials/how-to-create-the-expendables-winged-skull-poster-art)

Even in my relative youth and arrogance, back in the days where I insisted that any authority figure in my life had to refer to me as DOCTOR Collins or DR. Donald Collins, I still saw myself as an underdog. I didn’t necessarily see myself as a working-class stiff (I did sometimes, given my predoctoral background). But I definitely was not part of the elite bunch. Mark, Mike, Jennifer and so many at Carnegie Mellon, and professors like Oestreicher, Andrews, Smethurst, Chase, and Van Hall at Pitt let me know I was better, but not elite, nearly every week for my five-and-a-half years from bachelor’s to PhD. between 1991 and 1997. 

I held out hope back then. Hope that the doctorate was worth the pain, the suffering, the borrowing, the betrayals, and the burnout. Hope that being three or four times as good would be more than good enough. Hope, most of all, that my flair for writing with imagination and purpose would translate into success, prosperity, vindication, even healing and renewal, as I took my degree and my skill sets into the worlds I’ve inhabited now for a quarter-century.

Who was I kidding? I was probably the least well-connected person I knew going into college in 1987. With the partially bombed-out bridge I crossed to earn my doctorate at the end of 1996, I was lucky to have any connections to work with in finding any work at all. I discovered in a matter of weeks in 1997 my connections were enough to get into the door at one institution after another, but not enough to secure full-time work in academia. 

I had felt expendable before. Graduate school and living at 616 with an abusive idiot stepfather and a patriarchal mother each gave me that feeling. The two-and-a-half-year journey to find a full-time job was different, though. It was as if I was too educated for the working world, not just as a Black man, but as a 27-year-old Black man who had worked on some level since the summer of 1984. 

Almost all my academic job interviews were with schools of education or Africana studies departments. Not a single history department would interview me or hire me for a job, not even as an adjunct, until 2008. As I began doing nonprofit job interviews, it was obvious no one accounted for my doctorate as part of the process, or my three years of TAing and standalone teaching experience. I had already become the job equivalent of Michael Clayton, a fixer who wasn’t really a cop or a lawyer, yet had the expert skill sets of both. Only, substitute the words “professor” and “nonprofit administrator” for “cop” and “lawyer” here.

My expendability became even more apparent as I found myself in the big-time nonprofit world working at the now defunct Academy for Educational Development (AED, now FHI 360). It was here I learned the full nature of how much I could be a misfit within an organization. At my second job within the organization, as a senior program officer and deputy director of Partnerships for College Access and Success, my last two years I was in charge of managing the annual $1.3 million-budget for the national initiative. 

And that’s when I learned why we never seemed to have enough money to manage the project or pay me more than $75 or $80K for doing so. The senior members of AED — the CEO, executive vice presidents, and senior vice presidents — skimmed one percent off the top of all grants passing through the organization. Mind you, individual senior officers who oversaw our unit already billed more than some of their hours to a project they never actually managed (the Denise Borders’ and Sandra Lauffers’ of that world). The project was just a carcass, and these stinky-ass vultures often fed off the remains. These senior folk frequently made anywhere from $200K to $400K, and the CEO Steve Moseley made over $700,000. 

To hide this tremendous amount of overhead (about 35 or 40 percent of the total budget), I had to make up three budget spreadsheets. One for the actual cost of salaries, utilities, travel, and the AED Ponzi scheme, another for the private foundation world (where we manipulated the data to get the overhead to be only 15 or 20 percent of the budget). A third spreadsheet was for the annual audit to satisfy USAID and the feds. The last two budgets hid the “rainy day” fund for AED’s 52 senior officers. 

It was just disgusting. I spent so much time meeting with foundation officers, writing grant proposals, fielding offers, and looking for a less stressful job in 2006 and 2007. We would turn down money because it wasn’t enough to satisfy the vultures or to keep everyone employed, like $100,000 from Carnegie Corporation, another $200,000 elsewhere. 

Meanwhile, when I finally did get burned out at the end of 2007 and submitted my resignation, it was just three months ahead of probably being partially laid off anyway. I didn’t have it in me to spend the next three or six months groveling to every vice president or senior vice president in the organization about my work, hoping to pick up enough hours to keep pace with my salary. I certainly didn’t have it in me to explain for the 1,000th time why I didn’t spend two years in Mozambique as part of the Peace Corps digging wells, learning the local Portuguese, or putting up malaria nests. All to show I was one of them, privileged enough to see what lack of socioeconomic and racial privilege looked like in distant parts of the world. I was never one of them, because I lived this contrast every day growing up in and around the Big Apple.

My Black ass was expendable. My doctorate really meant nothing in the face of this work. And, I was approaching 40, meaning that others would assume I was too old to do this work and learn anyway. I was most definitely expendable by February 2008.

But, so was every AED Ponzi schemer by their ludicrously lazy, racist, and elitist standards. Once USAID became aware of the organization’s shenanigans at the end of 2010, they suspended AED’s $600-million worth of contracts, and then canceled them or moved those contracts to other organizations. They killed the beast, finding my former bosses expendable, too.

Today, I work in a world where everyone truly is expendable. It doesn’t matter if it’s American University, University of Maryland Global Campus, or if I freelance with Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, or Salon. Heck, if I don’t insist on it, these spaces and places won’t even get my name right. Forget about paying me a fair wage or having time off. You can bet, though, that the heads of every organization I do work for now has their own golden parachute, their own Ponzi method for maintaining their lavish material narcissism. It is so typically American that I could stand in the Namib desert and smell the shit blowing inland from the Atlantic Ocean.

On the Levi Brothers and Trump-esque People

08 Thursday Jun 2017

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Cleaning, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Movies, My Father, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Upper West Side, Work, Youth

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Darth Sidious, Star Wars VI (The Return of the Jedi) screen shot, 1983/1997. (LusoEditor via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use due to lower resolution and subject matter.

There are a plethora of people to pick from in making comparisons between President 45 and examples of narcissistic evil operating in positions of leadership. Andrew Jackson, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, 45’s hero Vladimir Putin, Jacob Zuma, and Recep Erdoğan all have served as examples in op-eds and other articles over the past couple of years. And these are all potentially good picks. Mercurial, vengeful, and even erratic actions, combined with dehumanizing speeches and screeds, all characterize this cabal of soft despots and fascist dictators, and match 45 well.

But the level of ostentatious stupidity that 45 has exhibited as President and a presidential candidate has made think of people closer to home. After all, 45 has always been a New Yorker, a crass rich White guy who has spent his entire adult life attempting to make himself look even more wealthy and powerful than his relative position in elite circles would’ve otherwise justified. He’s also always seen himself as the most important person in the room, maybe in the world. So much so that he has also seen himself as the smartest person in any context, even as everything 45 has touched has been tarnished or turned to shit by his callous, narcissistic stupidity.

In totality, this could describe any upper-crust New Yorker I encountered growing up looking to own more, buy more, be more than they already were. But in light of all things 45, I am thinking of two folks from my teenage years, the Levi brothers. They owned cleaners in Midtown Manhattan and ran a building-cleaning company, and my father worked for them all through the 1980s. The Levi brothers were two of a kind, some of the most flashy people with wealth that I would ever meet.

As I described them in Boy @ The Window

I can confirm with absolute certainty that the Levi brothers wore not-so-thin gold chains. I can also remember how uneasy my encounters with them made me feel. It wasn’t just the fact that they often questioned my intelligence. For nearly all of the years my father worked for the Levi brothers, they paid him under the table. They enabled his alcoholism, in exchange for $500 a week, for eighteen years. No retirement plan, no raises, no sick or annual leave, no unemployment insurance, in exchange for no child support payments and no tax payments. A Faustian deal if there ever was one.

King of New York (1990) with Christopher Walken screen shot. (http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/).

That my father knew who Paul Milstein was — the late real estate mogul for whom a program within the Columbia Business School is named — is amazing to consider in hindsight. It meant that he was privy to many conversations between the Levi brothers about their master plan for generational wealth. It meant that the Levi brothers believed themselves to be kings, or at least princes, of New York. But only because they cut corners in their shops and business, and looked for ways to literally get rid of their competition. Things that would later lead to alleged criminal activities and the loss of their businesses.

If I could interview them in their mid-1980s milieu now, I would’ve ask them, “Who were you trying to emulate, John Gotti?” But given those Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous times, I suspect the person the Levi brothers were most trying to ape was Donald Trump. Only, 45 came from more money, and wanted to do more than corner the market on cleaners and cleaning contracts for Manhattan high-rises. Beyond the differences in a couple of zeros, the braggadocio, the seeing of people not like them as “others” or “not human,” the need to show the world their wealth, their stunning stupidity in their attempts to monopolize their market. It’s as typical a New York story as I ever got the chance to see. And with 45, I get to see it again, this time on a massive scale, a crash-and-burn that the universe of intelligent beings won’t be able to ignore.

The Student-Athlete System and the Exploitation Lens

01 Friday Apr 2016

Posted by in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, music, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Sports, Work, Youth

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NCAA logo, September 4, 2014. (Getty Images/SportingNews.com).

NCAA logo, September 4, 2014. (Getty Images/SportingNews.com).

In July, US District Judge Claudia Wilken gave final approval to a combined $60 million in settlements of former and current college athletes’ claims against the NCAA and EA Sports. The deal granted as many as 93,000 claims of up to $7,000 for the use of college athletes’ images and likenesses in video games between 2003 and 2014. The groundbreaking decision provides student-athletes payments for the fruits of their labor for the first time. But these combined settlements are separate from the O’Bannon v. NCAA case. This main lawsuit against the NCAA’s use of unpaid college athletes remains in limbo. The NCAA asked for and the courts granted a stay, delaying a process that would make every college athlete eligible for some compensation in exchange for universities using their labor.

Beyond the response that often compares the NCAA student-athlete labor system to slavery, few have discussed the ways in which the NCAA’s defenders construct their arguments for the status quo. In many ways, the NCAA system isn’t much different from sharecropping. It was an agricultural economic system mostly located in the American South that took advantage of impoverished Whites and Blacks between 1870 and 1980. Both provided meager benefits like room, board, and clothing at an exorbitant cost while reaping huge profits from its workers. One system kept sharecroppers deeply in debt while the other has kept college athletes from profiting off of their work. The carrot in sharecropping was access to land to grow cotton and other crops for a profit at the end of a harvest season, minus landownership and all the necessary tools, seeds, and other necessities for producing those crops. The incentive in the NCAA’s system has been a year-to-year scholarship to cover the cost of a four-year degree, with the remote possibility in a handful of sports to earn enough recognition to become a professional athlete. Minus, until last fall, coverage for books, clothing, food outside of sporting events and practices, and the hours necessary to take advantage of an athletic scholarship. Defenders of both systems fought tooth-and-nail to keep sharecroppers and college athletes from organizing themselves into unions.

Unlike in slavery, the majority of sharecroppers were White, although more than a third were African American. All entered into sharecropping under contract, though the poor economic conditions of the South after the Civil War and the terror of White supremacist groups left poor Whites and Blacks few options. Likewise, NCAA’s college athletes also sign contracts and waivers that left them with few options in pursuing their athletic craft or in completing a college degree a year earlier than the average college student. And at least three different ways, the people defending the NCAA’s student-athlete system match sharecropping’s defenders with the language of exploitation. Though neither system is slavery, both are still closely related forms of exploitation, with a brutality that provides few good options for those engaged in doing the actual work.

George Gershwin's Porgy & Bess, with "I Got Plenty O' Nuttin'" (1935), oft sung by Ella Fitzgerald and Louie Armstrong (among others), April 1, 2016. (cropped and combined).

George Gershwin’s Porgy & Bess, with “I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin'” (1935), oft sung by Ella Fitzgerald and Louie Armstrong (among others), April 1, 2016. (cropped and combined).

1. The circular reasoning argument. This one is where defenders use the very label of their system — whether “sharecroppers” or “student-athletes” — to justify the existence and need for their system. Historian Chris Myers Asch documented numerous examples of this in his 2008 book The Senator and the Sharecropper. Asch included in his book a 1936 interview with psychologist John Dollard, one in which Mississippi planter William Alexander Percy said, “To live among a people whom, because of their needs, one must in common decency protect and defend is a sore burden in a world where one’s own troubles are about all any life can shoulder” (p. 70). Especially since many elites like Edward Everett Davis — dean of North Texas Agricultural College (now University of Texas at Arlington) from 1925 to 1946 — saw sharecroppers as “the most serious rural problem in the South.” In his The White Scourge (1940), Davis wrote that sharecroppers were “those biologically impoverished tribes of marginal humanity — black, white, and Mexican — subsisting on cotton” (p. ix).

Compare this line of reasoning with NCAA President Mark Emmert’s on why universities should not pay college athletes. On the 2011 Frontline episode “Money and March Madness,” Emmert said, “fact is, they’re not employees, they’re student-athletes.” In another interview, for the upcoming documentary The Business of Amateurs (release date TBD), Emmert said, “there’s not even a salary to debate. They’re not employees, they’re students.” For Emmert and the portions of the public who support his stance, the label “student-athlete” by itself justifies not paying college athletes, just like the label “sharecropper” did for planters who frequently cheated their workers out of profits. The idea for both has been they are but children that institutions need to care for, albeit under contract.

Black and White sharecroppers in Randolph County, Georgia, 1910. (Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia Collection)

Black and White sharecroppers in Randolph County, Georgia, 1910. (Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia Collection)

2. The low or no profit-margin argument. This has been a popular idea, to claim that despite the wealth generated under sharecropping, landowners made few, if any, profits. As shown by historian Lawrence J. Nelson in his 1999 book King Cotton’s Advocate, Oscar G. Johnston, head of the financial division of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (a New Deal program), wrote in a 1937 memo, “any person familiar with the operation realizes that the sharecropper system is more favorable to the tenant than the cash wage system [paying hourly wages].” According to Johnston, any “criticisms” of sharecropping as an exploitative economic system came “from persons wholly ignorant of the system or the economic situation” (p. 88).

Syracuse University men’s basketball coach Jim Boeheim claimed that there are few to no profits in college athletics in his 2013 New York State Associated Press symposium speech. “I’m not against kids getting money. But the problem is, you give the 12 basketball players $150, now you gotta give the field hockey players. So now you’re talking 150 athletes. One-hundred fifty times $150 times eight. That’s a lot of money,” Boeheim said. In pleading for a stay in the O’Bannon case last year, the NCAA’s lawyers said that it and “many schools and students” would be “irreparably harmed” if the court allowed the injunction to go into effect. Yet the NCAA’s $11-billion contract with CBS and Turner Broadcasting for the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament and $500-million-per-year contract with ESPN for the college football playoffs contradicts the notion of irreparable harm.

3. The fringe-benefits argument. This is the assertion that a person’s status in this system produces material and intangible benefits, even despite the potential pitfalls and vulnerabilities. Asch wrote of another 1936 interview John Dollard conducted, in which one farmer said, “when times are bad he has to take care of the Negroes first, whether they make anything or not.” Another farmer said that sharecroppers only worked about three months out of the year, and used the rest of their time to “fish, fool around, attend revivals, and follow other trivial pursuits” (p. 71). Despite the evidence of poverty for the vast majority, planters consistently painted sharecroppers’ lives as ones with benefits than ones full of rampant exploitation.

Oklahoma football coach Bob Stoops' 17,000 square-foot home on lakefront property, Norman, OK, November 25, 2015. (http://sportshoop.la/).

Oklahoma football coach Bob Stoops’ 17,000 square-foot home on lakefront property, Norman, OK, November 25, 2015. (http://sportshoop.la/).

The common refrain in college athletics is likewise about benefits that outweigh injuries, long-term disabilities, the pressures of athletic and academic performance, and the loss of material benefits. University of Oklahoma head football coach Bob Stoops put it this way in a 2013 Sporting News interview: “I don’t see why people say these guys don’t get paid. It’s simple, they are paid quite often, quite a bit and quite handsomely.” They also “get room and board…the best nutritionist, the best strength coach to develop you, the best tutors to help you academically, and coaches to teach you and help you develop. How much do you think it would cost to hire a personal trainer and tutor for four to five years?,” Stoops said. The athletic scholarship, a non-guaranteed, year-by-year deal, is the only fringe benefit that matters in the case of college athletes.

Like Oscar Johnston’s defense of the sharecropping system in the 1930s, the NCAA’s defense fits the pattern of “it’s a terrible system, but it could be much worse.” During his Real Sports conversation last March, Kansas State University president and NCAA Board of Governors member Kirk Schulz said, “Well, a scholarship at Kansas State, a four-year scholarship, is about $180,000, and our average debt load of all of our students is about $26, $27,000.”

—————————————–

Apparently, the system is fair precisely because naked exploitation is better than the illusion of choices given to the typical college student. These arguments in support of student-athlete system dovetail almost perfectly with the arguments that supported sharecropping as a necessary evil in the 1930s. The justifications are paternalistic and elitist, with a mix of class and racial imagery to boot. To the point where any NCAA executive, college or university coach or athletic director, university president or journalist in support of not paying these athletes should be beyond embarrassed.

Aside

Sure I’ve Raised Money, But…

27 Monday Jul 2015

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

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Man on a hamster wheel gif, like constantly looking for money, July 26, 2015. (http://twitter.com).

Man on a hamster wheel gif, like constantly looking for money, July 26, 2015. (http://twitter.com).

Keep in mind that these are just observations, not me axe-grinding or feeling sorry for myself. My biggest observation is that raising money for others without reaping enough benefit for myself shows that even governmental and nonprofit organizations are just as prone to capitalistic exploitation as Walmart and Apple. And that I am not immune, nor have I ever been immune, to the pride and naiveté of production and exploitation.

Many times during my years in the nonprofit world as a manager or consultant, employers have asked me about my ability to raise money. I’ve done a pretty good job of that over the years. Fifteen minutes of work as an educational “closer” at Presidential Classroom led to a $25,000 grant from State Farm’s civic engagement work (a.k.a. service-learning) in 2000. I worked on a $1 million renewal grant from Lumina Foundation for Education for the college access and success initiative for which I served as deputy director during my last four years at the Academy for Educational Development (AED). I also raised $200,000 from Lumina for data collection for the initiative in 2005.

"I come here looking for money (Got to have it)," lyrics from Pet Shop Boys "What Have I Done To Deserve This" (1988), July 27, 2015. (http://nonprofitquarterly.org/).

“I come here looking for money (Got to have it),” lyrics from Pet Shop Boys “What Have I Done To Deserve This” (1988), July 27, 2015. (http://nonprofitquarterly.org/).

I’ve indirectly raised funds from which I didn’t derive a benefit, either because the amount were too small for AED’s vast overhead and other direct costs (read as paying higher-ups salaries for the privilege of raising money on behalf of the now-defunct organization). Or because others used my curriculum vitae and my work for AED to garner grants that I never worked on. My last year at AED we turned down what would’ve been a $100,000 grant from Carnegie Corporation because it would’ve been too small, especially since we needed to collaborate with a sister organization on K-16 access and success work. We turned down potential smaller grants from other private foundations for similar reasons.

And after nine months of work off-and-on, the wife of a Pulitzer Prize winning-columnist for a Washington newspaper received a $250,000 grant from a corporate foundation in New York, based on my work. Because the AED higher-up in charge of the process worked with her as a personal favor — and didn’t put our proposal and implementation work into a contract — her socialite friend and head of a college fund organization received a grant with no strings attached, for AED or for me. I did get paid for my work, as I did it under the AED banner. But the fruits born from that work went outside the organization, to a person almost as duplicitous as the organization for which I once worked.

But in terms of fundraising, or at least, making money for an organization, absolutely nothing in my work history compares to what I did at nineteen. Yes, nineteen! The summer of ’89, I worked for Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health, out of the Mount Vernon, New York clinic, across the bridge from the Mount Vernon East Metro-North stop. After the previous long summer of unemployment followed by five days of homelessness and two more months of living on financial fumes, I was happy, really happy, to have gained steady employment all through ’89.

So happy that I didn’t notice how productive I was being in the office. I had the rather official title of Summer Intern, and had been told by the Director of Community Mental Health Programs in Bob Beane that he was “counting on me.” I came to the Mount Vernon clinic with Beane’s charge to “get their back-billing in order.” Since 1984, the clinic had regularly had its Medicaid and Medicare billing for psychiatric and psychological services rejected by the state-level health folks in Albany, mostly due to coding errors.

Graphic on DSM editions since 1952 (DSM-V is in its "beta-testing" phase), American Psychiatric Association, 2012. (http://life-surfing.com/).

Graphic on DSM editions since 1952 (DSM-V is in its “beta-testing” phase), American Psychiatric Association, 2012. (http://life-surfing.com/).

Specifically, the clinic staff were putting incorrect codes from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders — in this case, DSM-III and DSM-III-R (with the III-R standing for version number three, revised edition) — on the state billing forms. There were other errors to be sure. Doctor’s names and patients names were often misspelled. Control numbers were incorrect. The proper signature wasn’t obtained. But well over ninety percent of the errors were DSM-III or DSM-III-R codes that staff had entered into a billing form incorrectly.

This was the summer of ’89, so the form itself was printed on a line printer, and the checking of such forms had to be done manually. It would take two or three weeks to hear from Albany about an incorrect code, a month to receive payment. After five years of coding errors, red tape, and the clinic’s administrative staff badly managed by one Valerie Johnstone, my job was to rectify as many of the old billing errors as I could before the summer came to a close.

In eight weeks’ time, despite all the other menial tasks Johnstone would sometimes have me do, as well as having to share the same billing computer with Beverly (who dealt with current billing, and was probably responsible for the majority of my back-billing work), I got through three cabinets’ worth of billing issues. I left at the end of August, I left for the friendly environs of Pittsburgh and Pitt, vaguely aware of how much money I’d made for the Mount Vernon clinic and for the county.

Screen shot of 100 East 1st Street and South 1st Avenue, where I toiled for Westchester County the summer of 1989 (and 1992), April 2012. (http://maps.google.com).

Screen shot of 100 East 1st Street and South 1st Avenue, where I toiled for Westchester County the summer of 1989 (and 1992), April 2012. (http://maps.google.com).

I found out in September that my work had made them $371,000! I was impressed, but then I quickly became depressed. My salary for Westchester County that summer was $5.90 per hour. Over eight weeks, my net income was $1,610. As an intern, I had no fringe benefits, not even a commuter allowance. In terms of ratios, for every dollar I made between June 26th and August 18th, Westchester County and the Mount Vernon clinic made $230.43!

No wonder the staff at the Mount Vernon clinic looked at me with a combination of bemusement and derision! I had shown them up, unknowingly, and allowed myself to be an exploitable resource. And though I had a guaranteed job for the next three years after that summer with Beane and Westchester County, there was no way I could ever make enough income to make up for that kind of profit-generation. So much for the idea of not-for-profit and government enterprises!

“I Am Become Columbus, Destroyer of Worlds”

14 Monday Oct 2013

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Dióscoro Teófilo Puebla Tolín, First landing of Columbus on the shores of the New World, at San Salvador, West Indies, 1862 (published 1892, Currier& Ives). (Dantadd via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Dióscoro Teófilo Puebla Tolín, First landing of Columbus on the shores of the New World, at San Salvador, West Indies, 1862 (published 1892, Currier& Ives). (Dantadd via Wikipedia). In public domain.

The title kind of says it all, no? On this Columbus Day, 2013, we should all acknowledge this as the beginning of the inadvertent (and frequently deliberate) genocide conducted against the indigenous groups that made up the Western Hemisphere as of October 12, 1492. The day that Christopher Columbus “discovered” America — as if First Nation tribes or Native Americans or American Indians were looking to be discovered — was the first day of more than half a millennium’s worth of physical and psychological assault on the peoples of the Western Hemisphere.

I talk about this in all of my courses — US History, World History (when I get to 1500 CE), and African American History. I describe how this notion of discovery was pretty much invented in the nineteenth century, to create a mythology about the greatness of God-fearing Europeans (and, in the US context, Americans) and their pre-ordained but altruistic triumph over the heathen Indians, those “noble savages.” I go over the fact that the Eurasian diseases that the Spaniards and other Europeans brought with them to the Western Hemisphere wiped out tens of millions of the indigenous between 1492 and 1700. Smallpox, measles, mumps, rubella, bubonic plague, chicken pox all helped reduce a population that experts have estimated to have been between 70 and 100 million at the time of first contact to between seven and 10 million by the end of the seventeenth century.

Drawing accompanying text in Book XII of the 16th-century Florentine Codex (compiled by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, 1540–1585), showing Nahuas of conquest-era Central Mexico suffering from smallpox, September 11, 2009. (Wikipedia). In public domain.

Drawing in Book XII of Florentine Codex (compiled by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, 1540–1585), showing Nahuas of Central Mexico suffering from smallpox, September 11, 2009. (Wikipedia). In public domain.

I talk about Columbus’ second voyage, where he helped establish the first European settlement in what is now Haiti and then in the Dominican Republic, all while searching for gold, enslaving Arawak Indians and engaging in full-fledged battles. Just a year and a half after the first, glorious “discovery!”

The justification, of course, was and often remains that Europeans were civilized Catholic Christians, whereas these half-dressed natives were hedonistic polytheists. Even now, we often get caught up in the human sacrifice rituals of the Maya and Aztecs and somehow use that as justification for exploitation, slavery, and the inadvertent wiping out of whole cultures — worlds, if you will. It’s a justification that should make any believer in a higher power queasy, and any non-believer extremely angry.

I’m disappointed. We still sugarcoat the real meaning of Columbus Day for people of all ages. I began to learn about all of this in fifth grade (thank you, Mrs. O’Daniel), in October ’79. But I didn’t come to know most of the full story until high school. Even then, no one — not Flanagan, Zini or Meltzer — mentioned disease, exploitation, slavery and warfare as the genocidal combination that essentially handed Western Europeans the Western Hemisphere. I guess they either didn’t know or thought that it would be too painful a lesson to teach fourteen-to-eighteen year-olds.

As J. Robert Oppenheimer said in ’65, twenty years after the Manhattan Project’s success in creating the world’s first nuclear bomb, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Well, one doesn’t have to have God-like powers or be a Hindu deity to create large-scale human suffering, as was the case with Columbus. All one really needs is the conviction necessary to treat other humans as if they are only meat with brains and eyes.

Know Food, Know The World

04 Saturday Jun 2011

Posted by in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, race, Religion

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Chocolate Cake, Vanilla Icing, 2011. Source: http://www.tastebook.com

I don’t really dedicate much of my blogging to what I do these days, my college teaching work. I guess that I kick up enough dust talking about my Mount Vernon years, my Humanities years, my Carnegie Mellon years, and my former jobs and bosses as it is.

But this is a fairly positive post (mostly, anyway). It about something that I learned recently while teaching one of my World History courses. Something so simple that it’s amazing sometimes how stupid I can be.

I realized one day in discussing the age of exploitation, um, well, exploration that one of the best ways to think about this period — heck, any period in world history, really — begins and ends with one word: food. I’d taught this course a couple of times for University of Maryland University College already. Not to mention having served as a teaching assistant under the great Peter Stearns while a grad student at Carnegie Mellon a decade and a half before (see my “Ego Inflation” post from last month).

German Chocolate Cake, 2011. Source:http://blogs.courier-journal.com. Meet a cake that was never German, but named by an English guy. And, since when do coconuts grow in Europe or the US?

But on that fall evening in ’09, looking at exploration patterns, commerce patterns and the state of the world circa 1600 CE, it hit me how I could just about reorganize every aspect of the way I’d been teaching World History by just looking at how much food has influenced it. Every bite we take, everything we imbibe, has some history attached to it, and with it, stories of bloody conflict, imperial conquest or rare attempts at true humanity and cooperation.

This is about much more than Jared Diamond’s books on the rise and fall of civilizations because of resources and the lack thereof. Commodities like salt, sugar, black pepper and olive oil have all been written about over the past fifteen years. It’s fairly obvious that these spices and other foodstuffs were fundamental in the histories of the Middle East, ancient Greece and Rome, India, Timbuktu and Western Europe over the past 5,000 years.

Still, I’m not really talking about that kind of history, either. It’s more about something as simple as taking a modern dish and using its ingredients to tell a story. Take something like a chocolate cake with vanilla icing. If the ingredients are natural and not ones cooked up at a chemical plant in northern New Jersey, then they’ve come from all over the world. Cocoa, the main ingredient to mix with the flour, is from the cacao plant, which originally from South America, but is primarily produced in sub-Saharan Africa. Sugar’s needed to sweeten it, and though originally from India, has been grown in Florida, Louisiana and in the Caribbean for centuries. One of the main economic drivers for the enslavement of Africans was the European need to rot out their teeth with the stuff.

Vanilla extract or vanilla beans are originally from Mexico and other parts of Central America. But the largest producers of it are Indonesia and especially Madagascar. There’s history in every gram of devil’s food cake with vanilla icing that we eat.

You could do the same thing with a “traditional” Chinese stir-fry. Especially if ingredients like baby corn or

Sweet-and-sour-chicken, 2011. Source: http://www.foodnetwork.com

sweet and sour sauce are added to the mix. That’s because baby corn and tomatoes (the latter the main ingredient in sweet and sour sauce) are both from the Americas, not Asia or Europe. Both arrived in Ming China nearly 500 years ago.

Every dish, whether invented in 2011 CE or 2011 BCE, has a rich story attached to it. From that story, we can all find important patterns in world history, cultural development, domination and destruction within. It may not be the most profound thing I’ve ever stumbled upon. Still, I didn’t get this from Peter Stearns or Jared Diamond. If anything, I might’ve gotten this from Forrest Gump.

Early November

08 Saturday Nov 2008

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

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I don’t usually have much to say about my life during the month of November. It’s usually been a lackluster month, at least until Thanksgiving. But there are a couple of interesting things to note about early November that have occurred in my life in recent years.

Election Day 2000, Tuesday, November 7, was the day of my first interview with my last full-time employer, a nonprofit organization called AED (aka Academy for Educational Development). I wasn’t exactly euphoric about Gore’s prospects at beating W, but I was hopeful. I brought that sense of hope and optimism with me to my first interview. After a year and a half of working with a small civic education organization that didn’t care very much about education, I was ready for something more in line with my interests in helping others and a better fit for my talents as an educator and thinker. I was blown away by the ambiance of the organization. Its expensive artwork, spacious conference center and conference room, its professional, almost corporate style gave me confidence that I would be a better fit with them than with my employer at the time.

If I’d paid closer attention, I would’ve recognized two or three glaring signs that would’ve warned me against taking a job there. One was my eventual immediate supervisor, who seemed extremely nervous around me. At the time, I took it as him being a generally nervous man. Yet given how often he mentioned his two masters degrees during the interview process, I should have acknowledged that gnawing sense that was forming in the back of my mind. That my doctorate intimidated him. That he had serious qualms about hiring a thirty-year-old Black man with a doctorate and with career accomplishments that were nearly on par with his own. I should’ve recognized this, but didn’t.

I should’ve also known based on the number of indirect questions about it that I was overqualified for the position that I would eventually accept. I assumed that a program officer position was the same everywhere, whether working for AED or the Ford Foundation. That’s what happens when most of your job experience has been with government or in academia. My degree and my years of experience put me at a senior program officer position with the organization, but no one in HR bothered to put it in those direct terms. Given the low salaries of a full-time academic position, a job paying $50K seemed great by comparison.

Then there were the little things that I either didn’t ask or didn’t notice. Like the fact that each project within the organization had as part of their charge the heavy responsibility of sustaining itself. Projects came and went regularly at AED because there was little organizational support for sustainability. I never asked about it. Nor did I ask questions about travel expenses. AED didn’t and doesn’t provide corporate cards, and you have to risk your own credit to get one that’s business-related. I asked about benefits, but not about salary increases. I asked about organizational culture, but didn’t pick up on the fact that most staff of color worked in HR, accounting, facilities and contracts.

When I was offered the position on November 17, I probably should’ve said no. I wanted to do something wonderful, something that had symmetry with my educational background, my interests as an aspiring author and writer, something that would leave me inspired everyday. I wanted to have a job and career that was fulfilling. One of my graduate school mentors was a senior program officer and director of the Spencer Foundation’s Dissertation Fellowship Program at the time. I had the image of that kind of work and that kind of career trajectory when I said yes to my first job at AED. Boy was I wrong! Still, given the circumstances of my work prior to AED, I don’t think I had many options other than to say yes. I just should’ve left much sooner.

Tomorrow marks a year since I tendered my resignation letter to my last supervisor at AED. The letter cites all of the issues I sensed during my first interview in 2000. The lack of job and financial security as being part of an initiative whose money was about to run out. The knowledge that I was hired in a position that was beneath my actual level of experience and expertise. The fact that I had frequently used my own credit and money to pay for business-related travel and expenses. Despite all we face financially right now, it was a good decision for the long-term.

There are other November issues to remember related to money and carving out the best possible future, but those will have to wait.