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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Tag Archives: Faith

Being Scared

20 Monday Apr 2020

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

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Being Scared, Belief, Community, COVID-19, Faith, Family, Friends, Hypochondria, novel Coronavirus, Resistance


Me in my makeshift mask (with filter), outside a Safeway, Silver Spring, MD, April 10, 2020. (Donald Earl Collins).

As a person of faith (however one defines it), I believe in believing. I believe in ideas. I believe in a cause much greater than myself, a calling, really. I believe in God (he and she) and the universe. I believe, therefore, I am.

But I have also been scared so many times in my life. Between my sexual assault in 1976 and my full-circle with myself in 1988-89, I was scared of everything. And I mean everything. My senses were sensitive to every sound, every smell, every inflection of hurt. My mind alert at a moment’s notice to abuse and every threat of abuse. My body in knots over the possibility that no one liked me, or worse, that people secretly did but hardly shared it. It’s amazing that I ever got a good night’s sleep before my junior year at the University of Pittsburgh!

Being scared does not negate faith. Not at all. In fact, to embrace faith fully, one has to accept their fears and why those fears exist. One has to soldier on, fear and all, anyway, if one is to surpass their fears and continue to fight, to sweat, to bleed, to think, to scramble their way through life and crises.

Since teaching my last face-to-face class at American on March 4, I have been scared, more scared than I have been since my days of homelessness at the end of the Reagan Years. I have been scared of contracting COVID-19, because I know what severe bronchitis/walking pneumonia feels like. I have been scared of unknowingly passing Coronavirus on to unsuspecting people, to cashiers and store employees, to mail and package deliverers, and to my wife and son. I have been scared of dying. I have been scared of going to a hospital, only to be turned away, or, worse still, to be intubated or ventilated. I have been scared of my wife contracting the virus and watching her try to survive this. I have been scared that my son has so tuned out the pandemic news that he will end up traumatized by the reality of it when he does tune back in.

Being scared has nearly overwhelmed me at times. I caught a mild cold the week of March 16. But I turned it into five days’ of temperature checks, of breathing tests and just-in-case medications. I checked my wife and son’s temperatures at least twice a day. I hardly slept. But then, I jumped rope at a pace only Muhammad Ali himself could’ve kept up with, and realized that it was only a cold.

It wasn’t only a cold, not for a man with mild asthma who has to look out for spring and fall allergy season. Being scared made me almost miss the fact that the winter of 2019-20 was incredibly mild, with no snow accumulation since November in the DMV. Leaves began growing on our bushes at the end of February, on our flowering trees in mid-March, and the flowers by March 30, five weeks ahead of normal. If I didn’t have asthma or allergies, it would’ve have been a beautiful sight.

Being scared left me with my worst asthmatic cough in recovering from a cold while dealing with a really high pollen count in five years. And that scared me, because even without COVID-19 inflaming my lungs, asthmatic coughing fits and alveoli on fire during allergy season is still somewhat debilitating.

Thankfully, I have folx who tell me that I am a hypochondriac these days. Thankfully, I workout regularly, and would’ve noticed fatigue, chills, fevers, and abnormal body aches by now, between the jumping rope, the planks, the plyometrics, and the water rowing. Thankfully, I keep inhalers and a stock of eucalyptus oil in the house, for these just-in-case moments.

Being scared has left me fearful of going outside, at least as long as I see other people out there with me. I have been inside a store only twice since March 31 — I’m used to shopping nearly every day — and do not plan to go back again until April 24. We have enough toilet paper for a couple of weeks, but we are short on paper towels, all-purpose flour, and liquid soap. We’ll manage.

Being scared has pissed me off, because so much of what is happening is all too predictable, even as it is also all too beyond my control. And yes, callous and craven Trump and his cronies have made this pandemic lethally worse. But, for those “but, those emails” folx who believe that Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama would have handled this better, ask yourselves this. Is a better demeanor and a better mobilization of resources the equivalent of stopping a virus in its tracks, sans a vaccine? Sure, maybe 750,000 people wouldn’t be infected and 40,000 people wouldn’t be dead in the US (to date). But there would still be hundreds of thousands infected and thousands dead, because neoliberalism and neoliberals also left the US underprepared for a pandemic.

Being scared in the midst of a crisis while having predicted this while working on my Narcissism, American Style manuscript and then having the audacity to read Sarah Kendzior’s Hidden in Plain Sight actually left me more rattled. But at least I know I’m not crazy for seeing the past-present-future for what it is. This will pass. This pandemic is yet another omen that America the Empire is becoming both weaker and more obviously autocratic at the same time. And while I remain a person of faith, as a wide-awake Black man in a racist-ass US, I also know America all too well.

The State of the Union, That’s Not Optimistic

13 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work, Youth

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Tags

2016 SOTU, Accomplishments, American Dream, American ideals, Congress, Denial, Fables, Faith, Falsehoods, Great Men In History, Oligarchy, Optimism, Plutocracy, Pollyanna, President Barack Obama, State of the Union Address, Supreme Court, Vision


President Barack Obama's final State of the Union speech, The US Capitol, January 12, 2016. (Evan Vucci, Pool/AP, via http://abcnews.com).

President Barack Obama’s final State of the Union speech, The US Capitol, January 12, 2016. (Evan Vucci, Pool/AP, via http://abcnews.com).

President Barack Obama ended his eighth and final State of the Union address in front of Congress and the nation last night with the words, “That’s why I stand here as confident as I have ever been that the state of the union is strong.” The president’s crescendo came after nearly fifteen minutes of describing the America that he sees and believes in. Obama illuminated individual examples of dedication and hard work and courage he has witnessed since he first began running for president in February 2007.

That President Obama chooses to look at his hundreds of — if not several thousand — examples of individual Americans striving for and maybe even achieving some sort of American Dream is admirable. But in light of the remaining 320 million Americans unaccounted for in his speech, the president’s speech isn’t an expression of optimism. President Obama has chosen the path of too many in power, to ignore how deep the wounds and injuries of the nation go, to fight what the US faces in terms of its cavernous and even cancerous problems with beliefs and limited actions. That’s not optimism. That’s both faith — albeit a bit misplaced — and blind devotion to an ideal that this America in 2016 has been moving away from for decades.

There are just a few examples from President Obama’s speech that point to a combination of near-religious faith and ostrich head-in-sand denial. Most notably:

The idea that the US economy has produced a net +14 million jobs since the day President Obama took office. That number is probably correct, but just like with all previous presidents since FDR, this number is hardly the whole story. Fact is, millions of Americans who lost their jobs during the Great Recession have yet to regain employment. Millions more have taken the jobs that the American economy creates the most frequently: low-wage, part-time, seasonal and/or contract work. And for those Americans who have been able to hold on to employment despite the Great Recession, their real wages are just in the last two years beginning to approach 2008 numbers. More importantly, their ability to move to a better or higher paying position has diminished since 2008, which is part of a four-decade-long trend. Yes, Americans should credit the Obama Administration for stanching the bleed from the femoral artery in 2009, 2010, and 2011. But the American economy still needs an arterial graft and a heart transplant.

2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump meeting with New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, Gillette Stadium, Foxboro, MA, October 21, 2012. (Nancy Lane/Boston Herald;http://bostonhearld.com).

2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump meeting with New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, Gillette Stadium, Foxboro, MA, October 21, 2012. (Nancy Lane/Boston Herald;http://bostonhearld.com).

President Obama’s claim that Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant, anti-Latino, anti-Muslim, anti-Black, and anti-feminist populism is just “wrong” and “doesn’t represent our American values.” Trump’s campaign certainly doesn’t represent American ideals or visions of a “shining city upon a hill,” to quote the late former President Ronald Reagan from his 1984 campaign. But despite what Obama said last night, Trump and his supporters and potential voters are a strain of American values and politics that has always been, and perhaps always will be. Trump is very much exploiting a clear-eyed vision of America as a White (and male) Christian nation, one with automatic exclusions from the club of those not entitled to the American Dream socioeconomically, culturally, and even spiritually. While President Obama acknowledged this in his speech, he ignored the reality that this strain of -isms in American politics and culture remains powerful and needs to be fought, not just wished away with a more conciliatory vision of America.

The idea that a better statesman, that an all-time great president like FDR or Abraham Lincoln could have bridged the divide in Congress, with the Supreme Court, and in American politics in general. This is patently false and extremely tongue-in-cheek on President Obama’s part. His great-man-in-politics theme has actually grown tired over the course of the past nine years. For as great as both of those presidents were, President Franklin Roosevelt and President Lincoln presided over an America in def-con-one crises, before America was officially a superpower. As terrible as the Great Recession and its after-effects have been, as deplorable as American use of force in the Middle East, East Africa, and South Asia has been, the Civil War, the Great Depression and World War II were foundational periods of change. President Obama might not have been the GPAT (Greatest President of All-Time), but in an era of an oligarchic Congress and a plutocratic Supreme Court, he did as good as job as FDR and President Lincoln would have. It still wasn’t good enough, but not because President Obama wasn’t a great person or very good president. Americans needed someone willing to make radical changes, and not just a centrist committed to a grand vision of bipartisan compromise and slow, incremental changes.

I will definitely miss President Obama as my president when he relinquishes the office on Friday, January 20, 2017 at 12 noon. But I won’t miss his brand of optimism. For optimism that relies on falsehoods about America as a meritocracy, Americans as a tolerant people, and American imperialism as a force for good in the world isn’t optimism. It’s a fable more vast and more deadly than any the Grimm brothers could have written two hundred years ago.

Before and After Spencer

14 Tuesday Apr 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work, Youth

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Academia, Ambivalence, Barbara B. Lazarus, Catherine Lacey, CMU, Faith, Hypocrisy, Joe William Trotter Jr., John Hinshaw, Multiculturalism, Selection Committee, Self-Discovery, Self-Reflection, Sign from God, Spencer Foundation, Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship Program


Seattle Seahawks' Jerome Kearse making great catch off tipped ball while on the ground on final drive of Super Bowl XLIV, Tucson, AZ, February 2, 2015. (http://reddit.com).

Seattle Seahawks’ Jerome Kearse making great catch off tipped ball while on the ground on final drive of Super Bowl XLIV, Tucson, AZ, February 2, 2015. (http://reddit.com).

This week marks twenty years since the now-retired Catherine Lacey called me up on a Friday morning while I was brushing my teeth to tell me that I’d been selected to be a Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellow for the 1995-96 year.  I’d hoped and prayed for that day for more than twenty months, after my fellowship and teaching plans for the summer of ’93 fell through. But I’ve talked about Catherine Lacey and some of my Spencer experiences already, as well as about the reaction of Joe Trotter and some of my Carnegie Mellon grad school mates to this news.

This post is about the days before I received Lacey’s call, before I knew that I would be on the fast track to a doctorate. Because before I’d been selected for the Spencer Dissertation Fellowship, the selection committee had rejected me, with a 6-1-1 vote (that’s six in favor, one not in favor, and one abstaining). I knew this because Catherine had sent me a rejection letter with a handwritten note at the bottom of it, one that I received after two months away in DC doing my dissertation research. My suspicion was that most of the Fellows had received an 8-0 or 7-1 selection vote.

That was all on March 31, ’95. Catherine’s note, though, was encouraging. She said to “stay tuned,” that she was “looking into other alternatives.” So there was still a chance that I’d get the fellowship. Still, I didn’t want to do what I did two years earlier, when assumptions and hope led me to six weeks of joblessness and an eviction notice.

John Hancock Center, Downtown Chiicago - The Spencer Foundation is on the 39th Floor, April 14, 2015. (http://milenorthhotel.com).

John Hancock Center, Downtown Chiicago – The Spencer Foundation is on the 39th Floor, April 14, 2015. (http://milenorthhotel.com).

So I did what I’ve done best throughout my work experiences. I scrambled to make sure I had work during the summer and upcoming school year. I didn’t want to be stuck borrowing more in student loans or teaching more of Peter Stearns’ version of World History courses — really, World Stereotypes — for entitled CMU freshmen.

I talked with both then associate provost (and also an eventual) mentor) Barbara Lazarus and fellow but further along grad student in John Hinshaw about me taking his job as a part-time assistant to Barbara. John really wanted to finish his dissertation and move on (who could blame him, given that Trotter was his advisor as well), and Barbara would’ve liked me for the job. So I gave them both a tentative yes, knowing that the job was contingent on John’s timetable for leaving it and finding an academic job elsewhere, all while completing his dissertation.

The thought occurred to me, though, that I may need more than a 15-20-hour-per-week job to get through the dissertation stage. Especially if I was to avoid teaching for the mercurial Stearns again. So I scheduled a meeting with Trotter to see if he any research project he needed help with.

We met at 2 pm on Thursday, April 13. Trotter was as excited about us meeting as he had been when I first decided to transfer to Carnegie Mellon to work with him as my advisor two and a half years earlier. He had at least three migration studies projects with which he wanted my labor. All the projects were about extending his grand proletarianization thesis. All would be dreadfully boring drudgery compared to my dissertation, but would keep me in additional pay checks for a year or two. I faked a smile, and tentatively said yes to Trotter as well.

Dikembe Mutumbo putting the wood to the. LA Laker Andrew Bynum, April 14, 2015. (http://fortheloveofgif.tumblr.com).

Dikembe Mutumbo putting the wood to the. LA Laker Andrew Bynum, April 14, 2015. (http://fortheloveofgif.tumblr.com).

Eighteen hours later came Catherine’s call about me being offered the Spencer Fellowship! I took it as a sign from God, that at the very least, I’d finish my dissertation and my doctorate without the need for working on it an extra two or three years. Unfortunately, neither John Hinshaw nor Joe Trotter saw my great fortune the way I did. When John found out, which was a week later, he didn’t talk to me for nearly three years. And from reading my previous blog posts, you all already know how my work with Trotter devolved after the Spencer award announcement.

The one thing that fellowship did for me as a person — and not just as an academician, researcher or education — was to give me the space to question academia and my role in it. Even two decades later, I’m still ambivalent about the academic method of obtaining tenure, of the publish-or-perish paradigm, of the hypocrisy that exists in such a cloistered world. Even as I still hold a job and play a role in this world.

What I’ve come to learn is that hypocrisy is everywhere, in the nonprofit world, in romance, and in academia, too. We could all start with, “Did you hear the one joke about how merit and hard work alone can lead to a prosperous life?” That’s the hypocrisy that I had to learn to see in academia, and began to, thanks to the space that the Spencer Dissertation Fellowship gave me that year. More on that later.

For What It’s Worth, My Life Matters, Our Lives Matter

27 Thursday Nov 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, music, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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"For What It's Worth" (1970), Bob McCullough, Buffalo Springfield, Darren Wilson, Double-Consciousness, Faith, Ferguson, Michael Brown, Police Brutality, Police Harassment, Racism, Rudy Giuliani, Self-Awareness, Self-Worth, Souls of Black Folk (1903), Systemic Racism, W. E. B. Du Bois, White Vigilantism, White Violence


Protestors hold a die-in at 14th and I St NW, Washington, DC, November 25, 2014.  (Andrea McCarren/WUSA via http://www.wusa9.com)

(For What It’s Worth) Protestors hold a die-in at 14th and I St NW, Washington, DC, November 25, 2014. (Andrea McCarren/WUSA via http://www.wusa9.com)

Between Bob McCullough, Darren Wilson, the grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri, the NYPD, Rudy Giuliani, the Cleveland PD, and 100 million other sources, I could easily draw the conclusion that the lives of Americans of color are only worth as much as three cigarillos or a toy gun. Or, with it being 2014, that we’re just characters in a video game in which scared Whites get to kill us for sport or out of spite. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Ferguson PD allows Wilson to mount Michael Brown’s skull above his mantle after he returns from his long-delayed honeymoon, the poor racist!

But my life, your life, all of our lives are worth more than what any racist asshole or system places on us. I had to learn this lesson a long time ago. It’s the lesson that is the raison d’etre for my blog Notes from a Boy @ The Window, not to mention my book Boy @ The Window. There are literally millions of messages we as Americans of color take in over the course of our lives that for so many, our lives don’t matter. Counterintuitively, it means our lives really must matter. Why would anyone or any system expend so much time and effort excluding people on the basis of race and social status in the first place?

Café Crème cigarillos, Denmark, October 21, 2011.  (PeddderH via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

Café Crème cigarillos, Denmark, October 21, 2011. (PeddderH via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

Still, learning that I mattered began at home, in Mount Vernon, New York, from folks who treated me every day as if I mattered not at all. Between my Humanities and Mount Vernon High School experiences and the abuse I suffered at home, I didn’t need the additional dimension of police harassment or White vigilantism to remind me that those of us without standing, who refused to conform to acceptable ways of thinking and speaking, were discardable. Maybe that’s why I turned to nondenominational Christianity in the first place. To realize that despite it all, that I mattered to God, to a universe much bigger and much more mysterious and powerful than the fists of my stepfather or the denigration and ostracism I received at school. It all gave me reasons to live.

So when my first encounters with police harassment and White vigilantism did occur (beginning right after my seventeen birthday), I had faith in God, and with that, faith in myself as a foundation from which to draw strength. Whether at Tower Records or in Pittsburgh or in Los Angeles, and regardless of how scared I might have felt during those moments, I remained outwardly calm. I remained myself.

Yes, I was lucky. Maybe my weirdness, my proper speech, my faith, maybe even God and the universe, kept me from getting beat up or shot on sight by police, security guards or by groups of drunken White guys in pickup trucks. But really, by the time Whites (and some Black cops, to be sure) started profiling me in earnest, I had made the decision that I had worth, that my existence, creativity, analytical ability, critical reasoning, all mattered.

It helped that I had victories in my life, big and small and somewhere in between, to draw on, too. Not just my advanced education or my first publications. By the time I’d hit thirty, I’d learned how to love again, to feel again, to write again, to have fun again, to even feel pain and recover again. All of that made my life much sweeter, filled my world with color and sound and texture, with words and deeds that mattered to me and everyone who’d become important to me.

W.E.B. Du Bois in duality (double-consciousness), original picture circa 1903, November 26, 2014. (http://www.storify.com/ozunamartin).

W.E.B. Du Bois in duality (double-consciousness), original picture circa 1903, November 26, 2014. (http://www.storify.com/ozunamartin).

While there are moments that I can go there, because of the likes of Wilson, McCullough and Giuliani, the fact is, I refuse to allow dumb-assed racists to determine my life’s worth. That those folk who devalue the lives of other folk because of their -isms (racism, misogyny, homophobia, imperialism, capitalism) and ish are in fact making their own lives worth less and worthless.

While W.E.B. Du Bois was right about this “peculiar sensation…this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,” I don’t think I live my life in a constant state of double-consciousness. If I did, I would’ve jumped off that bridge over the Hutchinson River Parkway long before adulthood. No, up or down, I know my life has meaning, my existence is worth more than a 9mm bullet, that every sentient life matters. And like Michelle Alexander’s talk with her son this week, I’ve made sure that my son knows that his life matters, and should matter, to him, his mother, and to me.

“Stupid Atheist” Meets Truly Stupid Christian

06 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Acting, Activism, AP American History, AP US History, Arrogance, Atheism, Atheists, Christianity, Contradictions, Doing, Evangelical Christianity, Faith, Giving, Hope, Hypocrisy, Jay Sekulow, Mary Zini, Masturbation, Pat Robertson, Prayer in Schools, Stupidity, Teenage Angst, Teenagers, Televangelism, Televangelists, Trust, World History


Screenshot from HBO show The Leftovers title sequence, September 5, 2014. ( yU+co via http://news.creativecow.net). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws -- low resolution and relevance to subject matter.

Screenshot from HBO show The Leftovers title sequence, September 5, 2014. ( yU+co via http://news.creativecow.net). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws — low resolution and relevance to subject matter.

I’ve written about Mary Zini and our classroom incidents before, here and in Boy @ The Window. It’s been thirty years since she was my tenth-grade World History teacher. Yet most of what I remember from this class has little to do with Plato, NATO, or anything in between. It’s mostly Zini’s condescending personality, my new Christian arrogance, and that people’s personalities and actions are often walking and talking contradictions.

It was the beginning of October ’84 when we had our first incident. It occurred after what was the first of an endless cycle of fill-in-the-bubble Scan-Tron exams.

Screen shot 2014-10-05 at 5.59.18 PM

Honestly, I had no idea at that moment why I said what I said. I supposed that a summer of Jay Sekulow and the American Center for Law and Justice, all via Pat Robertson and The 700 Club had done the trick in making me a one-time prayer-in-public-schools advocate. I knew that Zini was raised a Catholic, so on some level, didn’t that make me a stupid Christian for calling her a stupid “atheist?”

That incident was also the beginning of seven months of starting to figure out how to be me and be a follower of Christ at the same time. I approached it the same way I approached how to be me in my first few months of seventh grade and Humanities at A.B. Davis Middle School in the fall of ’81. With the naiveté of a child, the hubris of a teenager, and the callousness of a human with alien superpowers.

Jay Sekulow lecturing, Regent University, December 15, 2006. (Juda Engelmayer via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via GFDL.

Jay Sekulow lecturing, Regent University, December 15, 2006. (Juda Engelmayer via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via GFDL.

It was evident in my outward actions. I packed my red-pleather-covered King James Bible every day. For school. For Subway trips down into Midtown Manhattan when me and my older brother Darren worked for our father Jimme. For when we washed clothes every Saturday or Sunday at the laundromat on the Mount Vernon-Pelham border (it’s a yoga studio now). The Bible was my constant companion, my shield protecting me from this mad world of almost bottomless sin.

In the process, I read everything from Genesis to Revelations at least twice. (some books, like the Gospels, as many as four times). I learned a lot from  reading all sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments. That the Israelite God Yahweh was stern and pretty unforgiving. That Jesus was a radical, not just spiritually, but politically as well. And that Paul was not exactly the most enlightened of the apostles when it came to women, children and slaves.

Mostly what I learned was that readings and understanding The Bible wasn’t like living out my beliefs at all. I was still a teenager, a fifteen-year-old living in the midst of welfare poverty, at 616 with an abusive womanizer, a wounded mother and a gaggle of siblings between the ages of eight months and five-and-a-half years. Not to mention my alcoholic cuss-factory of a father that I had to hunt down for money nearly every weekend. What all that meant was feeling lust for a young woman one minute, hate toward my idiot stepfather Maurice the next, and imitating Jimme’s slurred language and mannerisms the minute after that.

This new walk was very confusing, so much so that I often hid my emotions in much the same way I’d already been doing to protect myself from yet another abuse episode with Maurice. My emotions couldn’t stay bottled up, though. I frequently humped my way to sleep once our living room at 616 had become my bedroom during and after the months in which Balkis Makeda had lived with us.

Screen shot 2014-10-05 at 6.06.59 PM

By the spring of ’85, when Zini granted me her full support in getting me into AP US History for eleventh grade (this despite my 84 average in her class at the time), I was flabbergasted. I couldn’t stand being in the same room with Zini much of the time. Yet she did for me what few in my life had done — she opened up a door for me to walk through, albeit a relatively small one.

Hands of God & Adam, fingers about to touch, Sistine Chapel ceiling, Vatican, Michelangelo, 1508-1512 (via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Hands of God & Adam, fingers about to touch, Sistine Chapel ceiling, Vatican, Michelangelo, 1508-1512 (via Wikipedia). In public domain.

What did it all mean? That devoutness is meaningless without action, without giving and receiving, without trust, without taking risks. That even supposed atheists can act and give in ways that should shame many arrogant Christians. That Christianity isn’t a transactional relationship or process, but a journey with many pitfalls and lots of contradictions along the way. That who I/we say God is, well, at best an infinitesimal guess, because God and this universe is so much more that I as a human male living in the context of Western culture can only begin to understand.

Most of all, I had just begun to learn that spiritual liberation wasn’t supposed to be a yoke, but an opening to see the world and myself stripped bare of narrative and pretense. A strict adherence to the principles of Pat Robertson would bring me no closer to enlightenment and no further out of poverty than wishing on a star or avoiding cracks on Mount Vernon’s blue-slate sidewalks. Work, trust, opportunities, and not just Romans 8:28, was the beginning of the key for me.

Aside

Caught Between Rage and a Working Faith

21 Thursday Aug 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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Activism, Anger, Anger Management, Black Reconstruction (1935), Civil Rights, Eric Garner, Faith, Federal Government, Ferguson Missouri, Ferguson PD, God, Institutional Racism, James 2:26, Michael Brown, Murder, NYPD, Officer Darren Wilson, Police, Police Brutality, Prayer, Rage, Science, Social Justice, Structural Racism, Sunil Dutta, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wages of Whiteness, Works


"Officer Go Fuck Yourself" aiming rifle at protestors and journalists, Ferguson, MO, August 19, 2014. (http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/).

“Officer Go Fuck Yourself” aiming rifle at protestors and journalists, Ferguson, MO, August 19, 2014. (http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/).

We can add Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Kindra Chapman, Samuel DuBose, Joyce Curnell, Ralkina Jones, Raynette Turner and Christian Taylor to the list I started the post below with nearly a year ago. You could add Zachary Hammond to it as well, as structural White supremacy kills Whites dead, too (police state). There’s The Guardian‘s “The Counted” webpages on deaths at the hands of law enforcement. There’s also the Killed By Police website and via Facebook, and Fatal Encounters, among others, that track these death back much further (since The Guardian only began their webpages in June 2015).

The post I wrote last year was about what we could do, what I could or can do in light of living in a racist police state, otherwise known as living with the Gestapo. It’s still an open question, especially with reporters shoving microphones in the faces of the aggrieved asking them to forgive police officers who murder five seconds after learning the news. We’re supposed to be nonviolent, to forgive and turn the other cheek. Long before Malcolm X said during a radio interview in Boston in 1964, “In fact, it’s a crime for any Negro leader to teach our people not to do something to protect ourselves in the face of the violence that is inflicted upon us by the white people here in America,” this has been an issue. Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells (before she became Wells-Barnett) Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Nannie Burroughs, Marcus Garvey, among many others, raised this issue of what to do about state-sanctioned racism-based violence and murder years ago. We still don’t have any good answers, but we do have options. (A revolution, though, may well be necessary…)

+===================================================+

After the events of the past month — between Eric Garner and the NYPD, Michael Brown and the Ferguson, Missouri PD — I find myself of two minds. My primal mind says, “Fuck the fucking police!” Resist with rocks, with bricks, with bombs and grenades. Go buy a composite bow with composite arrows. Go buy a rifle with a scope, and take out as many of these motherfuckers as I can. Maybe they’ll think twice about putting someone like me in a choke-hold or shooting us with our hands up if they knew we could organize ourselves into vigilante groups, well armed and well adept at escape and stealth, ready to put the likes of Sunil Dutta out of their racist-ass misery!


– What we should be able to do to any corrupt cop or vigilante killing unarmed people of color…

Eric Garner in midst of dying from choke-hold via NYPD's finest, Daniel Pantaleo and (not pictured)  and Justin Damico, Staten Island, NY, July 17, 2014. (http://www.thegrio.com).

Eric Garner in midst of dying from choke-hold via NYPD’s finest, Daniel Pantaleo and (not pictured) and Justin Damico, Staten Island, NY, July 17, 2014. (http://www.thegrio.com).

The mind I live in and with every day, though, puts the kibosh on such evil yet well deserved plans of action. Because in light of so much police harassment, brutality and state-sanctioned murders, to say that this shouldn’t be a response belies everything all of us know about human nature. Yet my mind says, “No. This isn’t the way to fight. You’re a writer. You’re a teacher. You’re a believer. Use your tools!” So I pray, I always pray, for people to seek and find the light, to forgive and be forgiven, for peace.

But as the New Testament in James says, “Faith without works is dead” (look that one up, evangelical Christians committed to White privilege!). None of us can hope to change our own lives — much less something as intractable as structural and institutional racism — on prayer and faith in God, the federal government and/or science alone. We have to do, too. In my case, writing and teaching is what I do. Posting to my blog about the palpable rage that I know exists within me and many others who have faced brutality because of racism, misogyny, poverty, homophobia, Whiteness and fear. Teaching about “the physical and psychological wages of Whiteness” (thanks, W.E.B. Du Bois via Black Reconstruction [1935]). Being part of the social media crowd demanding humanity and justice for Michael Brown. This is who I am and what I do.

Me the Evil Blogger at home, Silver Spring, MD, August 1, 2010. (Donald Earl Collins).

Me the Evil Blogger at home, Silver Spring, MD, August 1, 2010. (Donald Earl Collins).

Is it enough to assuage my rage, my guilt for not being able to do more? Yes, most of the time. But I have to remind the perfectionist that remains within me, I can’t do much, but I can do something. And, that this isn’t about me, even with as much as I’ve experienced in racial profiling and abuse of power, at home and with police. It’s about all of us. So, if I do buy a composite bow with arrows, I will train to use it well. Just not on other humans, no matter how reprehensible.

When Those Close Put Up Roadblocks

07 Saturday Jun 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Coming-of-Age, Detours, Dr. Don, Dreams, Faith, Forgive and Forget, Forgiveness, History, Internalized Racism, Jealousy, Memoir, Past, PAT Transit, PhD, PhD process, Pitt, Roadblocks, Self-Discovery, Self-Loathing, Sellout, Writing


Detours vs. roadblocks, June 1, 2012. (http://www.ideaarchitects.org).

Detours vs. roadblocks, June 1, 2012. (http://www.ideaarchitects.org).

This was the best title I could come up with, since it’s about folks in my life with whom I’ve shared some affinity over the years, beyond family, and to a lesser extent, friendships. This isn’t about haters or crabs-in-the-barrel mentality per se. It’s simply the observation that as I pursue dreams and push through goals in life that some whom have the choice between being supportive or actively working against my interests, how more than a few have chosen to do the latter.

That this has occurred in my life mostly as I pursued my doctorate and pressed on as a writer isn’t a coincidence. The things I’ve worked the hardest for in life, the dreams most difficult to achieve, the amount of energy and pressing through needed to overcome my own doubts in the process — all came with an audience of detractors. A bit more than twenty years ago, some of my Pitt friends started falling by the wayside as I pursued my grad degrees, which is normal, but there were some pretty weird conversations I had with them as they did. One insisted on calling me “Dr. Don” about a dozen times during a PAT Transit bus ride one day in September ’92, laughing to the point of hilarity while doing it. I thought that he was going to choke on his own spit all the while, he was laughing so hard. Or that I was going to choke him myself if he said “Dr. Don” one more time!

Screen shot of character played by Samuel L. Jackson in Django Unchained (2012) with "Sellout" addition (not an endorsement, by the way), October 31, 2013. (http://forwardtimesonline.com/2013/).

Screen shot of character played by Samuel L. Jackson in Django Unchained (2012) with “Sellout” addition (not an endorsement, by the way), October 31, 2013. (http://forwardtimesonline.com/2013/).

Another guy — who eventually committed suicide in ’98 — told me straight up that people like me were “sellouts,” that “The Man” wasn’t going to accept people like me or him “no matta how many degrees we get” or don’t get. That was six weeks before my committee approved my dissertation, in October ’96. Luckily, I learned not to bring up my education to folks unless it was for professional purposes or unless someone asked.

That these were Black acquaintances from my days as an undergrad at the University of Pittsburgh was a bit surprising, considering that my tendency is to always encourage folks to pursue their dreams. I’d always assumed the worst of the folks — Black, White, Afro-Caribbean and Latino — that I grew up with in Mount Vernon, New York, precisely because their encouragement literally made me suicidal by the time I turned fourteen. By the late-90s, I realized this was more than a New-York-area-social-etiquette-disorder.

With writing and books over the past decade — especially with Boy @ The Window — I’ve experienced some of those same headwinds from folks who seemed to think they had a better idea for the direction of my life than I. When I first started working on my memoir at the end of ’06, I had a conversation with my Pitt and AED colleague Stacey, whom I’d known for sixteen years. Upon telling her about my project, she said, “You need to wait on that,” that I should “publish a few more books,” be in my fifties, before “writin’ a biography.” So I knew that she wasn’t going to buy a copy when it came out. Oh well!

Last fall, at an African American Alumni Council event at Pitt, it was one of my first opportunities to discuss the now published Boy @ The Window, which was immediately followed by public criticism. Right after I talked about the book, an older alumna walked right up to me, and got within a foot or so of my face — close enough to hug. “You’re too young to have a memoir,” she said with a smile on her face, and then walked away as if her’s was the final say on the topic.

At the least, it showed that most don’t know the difference between a memoir (on one period or aspect of one’s life, often with a look at the world beyond) and an autobiography (the story of my entire life). Boy, understand the genre before criticizing it or my role in it already!

One foot in the grave (apparently), June 7, 2014. (http://www.virginmedia.com/).

One foot in the grave (apparently), June 7, 2014. (http://www.virginmedia.com/).

And, yes, I know. I see my Facebook friends especially posting other people’s sayings every single day. About letting go, moving on, forgetting the past, pushing past the haters, sitting in a lotus position, meditating and praying, and then drinking a wheat-grass smoothie. I do let go, I do forgive, and I don’t let the naysayers in my life have the final say. But letting go doesn’t mean I don’t get to highlight some truth, point out hypocrisy, and that I should just be quiet for the sake of being quiet.

It hasn’t been lost on me that most of these specific, potentially dream-destroying microaggressions have come from Black folk, male and female, well-off and immersed in poverty. Do I put these people in the same category as White literary agents who’ve said things to me like, “Oh no, not another abuse story!” or “There are too many black coming-of-age stories in the market?” Of course not. Gate keepers practicing ignorance in the midst of structural racism isn’t the same as people who may have internalized racism.

Or in the latter case, it could just be that my pursuit of what I’ve wanted and finally come to know for my life brought attention to dreams deferred, delayed and denied, by others and by their own fears of failure and success. If I’d let this stand in my way, I’d still be living in Mount Vernon, undoubtedly living in grinding poverty, wondering how could I let everything I wanted out of life get away from me.

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Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

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