Why Black Men Carry A Public Anger

21 Wednesday Mar 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, High Rise Buildings, Mount Vernon High School, music, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Upper West Side, Youth

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Anger, Barnes & Noble, Bigotry, Black Males, Columbia University, Driving While Black, Fear, George Zimmerman, Lincoln Square, Manhattan, Murder, Racism, Teachers College, Tower Records, Trayvon Martin, Walking While Black, West Side

Harvard University Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. arrested by Cambridge Police, Cambridge, MA, July 22, 2009. (http://assets.nydailynews.com/img/2009/07/22/alg_henry-louis.jpg via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of historical significance of photo and topic and its poor resolution.

I hadn’t planned on posting this piece until June, when it will be twenty-five and fifteen years since my shopping while Black incidents literally a block apart on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. But in light of the Trayvon Martin murder — and that’s what this is, a murder — at the hands of the racist vigilante George Zimmerman more than three weeks ago, it makes sense to do this post now.

Tower Records, 1961 Broadway (NW corner of 66th and Broadway, Lincoln Square), New York City, November 22, 2006. (Stuart Johnson via Flickr.com). In public domain.

Tower Records, Friday afternoon, June 19th, ’87, the day after I graduated from Mount Vernon High School (see more from my “The Day After” post from June ’08). With high school now over, I was in a celebratory mood. I took the 2 train from 241st to 72nd and walked the six short blocks to the great Tower Records on 66th. I had my latest Walkman, my first Sony Walkman, actually, and my book bag with my recent tape investments, including a few I’d bought at Tower Records the previous Friday. Investments like Fleetwood Mac’s Tango In The Night, Genesis’ Invisible Touch, and Glass Tiger (yes, Glass Tiger — absolutely terrible).

I went into the store and began to browse the R&B and Pop/Rock sections for tapes. There I noticed some plastic wrapping on the floor, as if someone had taken a tape out of its case and stolen it. While I thought about the wrapper on the floor, three White security guards came out of nowhere, grabbed me and dragged me to a storage room downstairs.

“We got you for stealing,” one of them said, presumably the store’s head of security.

“You don’t have me for anything. Is this because I’m Black?”

“Well, how do you explain the wrappers we found on the floor and the tapes in your bag?”

“The wrappers were on the floor when I got there and the tapes . . .”

“You’re going to jail, asshole, when we bring the cops in here!”

“First of all, I’m not going anywhere. The tapes are all mine, and some of them I bought in this store last Friday. I have the receipt at home. Don’t you have ways to verify my purchases?”

“We don’t believe you!”

“It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe me. I’m under eighteen. You can’t hold me or turn me over to police without calling my parents. I’m not even from here, I’m from Westchester County, and my receipts are back home there.”

“If we were outside instead of in here, I’d slap you around, wise-ass!”

“Then I guess I’m the lucky one. Why don’t we check the receipts from your cash registers up front for my purchases from last Friday? I know they’ll show that I’m right and you’re wrong!”

The hotheaded White man who did all of the talking got up and made a threatening slap gesture with the back of his left hand before the other ones grabbed him and told him to calm down. They let me go. On my way out, I said, “I hope you learned that not every Black person coming in your store is a thief!” It would be ten years before I went into Tower Records again (of course, Tower Records went out of business in ’06).

That next time was May 12, ’97, and I had just finished a day-long interview for an assistant professor

Barnes & Noble, 1972 Broadway (NE corner of 66th and Broadway), New York City, December 30, 2010, three days before it closed. (Jim In Times Square via Flickr.com). In public domain.

position at Teacher College (Columbia University’s school of education). I had no problems as I browsed Tower Records for about twenty minutes. It was my first time there since the ’87 incident. Then I went across the street to the Barnes & Noble mega-store. From the moment I walked in the door until I left a half-hour later, a Latino security guard tailed me as I perused books in the African American nonfiction, Cultural Studies and Music sections of the store, across three floors. As I walked out, I walked up to the guard and said

“While you were stalking me, you probably let half a dozen White folks slip out of here with books and CDs. Did you learn anything while you were watching me?”

“I was just doing my job,” the dumb-ass security guard said in response.

“Well, if following a Black guy around for thirty minutes is part of your job, you deserve to lose your job,” I said as I walked out, not to return until Christmas ’02.

Over the years, I have been stopped by police in Mount Vernon, Pittsburgh, DC and L.A., followed by police in Maryland, Pittsburgh and L.A., patted down by police at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, and followed by more security guards — including ones guarding those precious gated communities — than I’d ever care to count. My only crime was being a Black male in America’s public sphere.

Trayvon Martin in hoodie, March 19, 2012. (http://media.metronews.topscms.com/). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because photo is an illustration of one of the subjects of this post.

Like so many others, I could’ve easily been Trayvon Martin twenty-five, fifteen and even five years ago. This constant tightrope dance that we must do to make old White ladies and scared White guys and ig’nit Black folks feel comfortable. So that I’m not arrested, or maimed, or killed. So that I can go about the business of being me and making myself and the people in my life better. As Nathan McCall would say, it “makes me wanna holler.”

Short of moving to a nation not built on the imperialism and fear of Black males in particular, all I can do, for better and for worse, is to prepare my son for this very racial America in which we still live. And yes, that makes me angry.

Me at 16 (with torn gray hoodie), Mount Vernon High School ID, Mount Vernon, NY, November 1985, March 21, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

Working At AED: Alternate Sources of Fear

28 Tuesday Jun 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, New York City, race, Work

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Academy for Educational Development, ACLU, AED, Alan Jenkins, Amtrak, Anthony Romero, Bipolar Disorder, Driving Miss Daisy, Fear, Ford Foundation, Funding, Grant Making, Grant-seeking, Grantmaking, Ken Williams, Micromanagement, Micromanaging, New Voices, New Voices Fellowship Program, New York City, Sources of Funding, Supervisors, The Ford Foundation, The Opportunity Agenda, Worry

AED’s DC Office, circa 2008, before the sign came down. Source: http://www.glassdoor.com

It was ten years ago on this date that I began to think seriously about quitting New Voices and AED, the Academy for Educational Development, the subcontractor for USAID and the State Department in trouble these days (see my “USAID suspends District-based nonprofit AED from contracts amid investigation” post from December ’10). In the end, I probably should’ve on this date. I realized that most of the people I worked for and with cared more about money than Wall Street investment bankers, and had an addiction to fear greater than a junkie’s addiction to heroin. And, most sadly, I began to see signs of what my former immediate supervisor would admit two and a half years later, his bipolar disorder.

I’d seen signs of Ken’s mental illness as early as February ’01, but the first time I realized that I worked in an organization that thrived on fear was after me and my wife returned from our honeymoon in Seattle, at the end of May that year. All during the month of June, as I did site visits in Tulsa, Jackson, Mississippi, Fairbanks, Alaska and Durham, North Carolina, and visited my maternal grandparents in Arkansas, all fear was breaking loose in the New Voices offices at AED. Our funder, the Human Rights and International Cooperation unit at the Ford Foundation in New York, had called for a meeting to discuss the progress of the New Voices Fellowship Program to date.

I didn’t think all that much of it at the time, with me doing site visits almost every week and having done presentations for funders and academicians, including the Spencer Foundation, what was now the Gates Foundation, and a few corporate foundations over the previous five years. But as soon as I returned to the office that last Monday in June ’01, I realized that nearly everyone I worked with directly was on pins and needles about our Thursday afternoon meeting on East 43rd Street in Manhattan. Ken was on a higher level of worry than the rest of the staff, but it wasn’t a good worry. He had our program assistant and associate printing new copies of memos and other meeting materials every time he came up with a new sentence, found an error or realized he wanted orange paper for program statistics instead of lavender.

Jessica Tandy as Miss Daisy in Driving Miss Daisy Screen Shot (though Sandra wasn’t as aged, her attitudes definitely were), 1989. Source: http://heraldsun.com.au

What made this even worse was that on Tuesday, Ken’s boss Sandra — whom I regularly called “Driving Miss Daisy” because of her bigoted semi-liberal ways — called an additional meeting to emphasize how crucial this meeting was to the future of New Voices. After ten minutes, Ken, the program assistant and associate all looked like Bush 43 and former Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson did on September 15, ’08, when the US financial markets melted down. When I politely pointed out that “we need to be ready, but not scared” in presenting our results to date to the folks at Ford, another meeting was called.

Except this Wednesday afternoon meeting was just between me and Driving Miss Daisy. She called me out on the carpet for “disrespecting” her. She told me, “if you don’t like it here, you can leave,” and that she’ll be at AED “longer than [me].” It made me feel as if I had to worry about my job for doing my job. Meanwhile, Ken was going over word for word what each of us would have to say the following afternoon in New York, as if one bad choice of words would cost us $2.25 million, money we’d already received from Ford.

After a rough night of sleep before an early Amtrak from DC to New York, I arrived at Penn Station refreshed and glad that I didn’t ride the same train with the rest of the Nervous Nellies. They were already at Houlihan’s, eating an early lunch, with Ken obviously more relaxed from whatever he had to drink by the time I arrived.

The Ford Foundation, 320 East 43rd Street, New York City, November 19, 2007. Source: Stakhanov (permission granted)

The meeting itself was where something kicked in for Ken, what appeared to be a natural high at first. After Sandra and Yvonne (Ken’s actual immediate supervisor, even though Ken never listened to her) did the introductions, Ken took over the two-hour meeting. He talked over me, the program assistant and associate, even the program officers in the spartan meeting room. Ken’s euphoric fear was so strong that he didn’t trust us to speak on behalf of New Voices, meaning that it was a waste of time and money for anyone other than Ken to be there.

Or was is? The imam-suit-wearing program officers from Anthony Romero (who was within a few months had moved on to become the Executive Director of the ACLU) to Alan Jenkins (now co-founder of The Opportunity Agenda), who had sat silently through Ken’s soliloquy, finally spoke in the final fifteen minutes of the meeting. Romero said, “Maybe it’s time for AED to consider looking for alternate sources of funding” for New Voices “over the next couple of years.” That was my take-away from the whole ordeal.

But it wasn’t for Ken. He was on one of his blue-crystal-meth-like highs again, giddy like a kid getting a ten-speed bike for Christmas. Yvonne looked ready to go, while Sandra the wise-one was just happy it was over. I wondered, out loud to the group, if the not-so-veiled hint provided by Romero meant that the unit and foundation’s priorities were changing. I, of course, was accused of worrying too much. Too bad none of the senior staff understood the definition of irony.

A Dream That Had to Die

23 Monday Jul 2007

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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Attraction, Blackness, Crush #2, Depression, Fear, Galleria, Manhood, Obsession, Relationships, White Plains New York

I’m approaching another Boy At The Window related milestone this week, a not-so-fun twenty years since experiencing an obsession-driven heartbreak. This involved another crush, another young woman out of my league, one which left me scarred for a little more than a year.

She was one of those mid- to late-80s cool Black girls, attractive and popular, yet one of the nicest people I’d known during my middle school and high school days. The things I remember about her most are kind of silly and sensuous. I remember her long legs, her long dark hair, her always wearing skirts in public. I remember her lips and bright white smile most of all. She was all of 5’7″, and seemed to be always there to pick up my spirits. I guess that was why I ended up wanting to date her by the middle of my junior year.

But images of the mind, no matter how powerful and complex, can only begin to capture the reality of the person who could be the object of your affection. So it was with shy and pitiful me our senior year and the summer before college. I tried but I could never figure out a way to ask her out, to tell her that I liked her, to tell her that I was terrified of my own emotions about her and about her learning about my family. After a few weeks of stifled attempts at conversation, I accidentally ended up overhearing a bitter conversation about me between my crush and her sister outside of a mall in White Plains. I wasn’t a man, I certainly wasn’t a Black man, so she kept saying to her sister.

I was devastated. I didn’t have the greatest opinion of myself to begin with. I went into my freshman year of college at the University of Pittsburgh more protective of my heart than I’d ever been. Still, with the help of a female friend that I’d made during the summer, I decided to confront my obsession, leading to a letter that brought me more despair and heartache. She had all but destroyed my image of her as someone who could save me from the horrors of my world, someone who I could pour all of my confidence and aspirations into.

I finished that semester with a C+ average, homesick and not sure about people or my future. I completely distrusted anything any woman had to say about me that semester. Most of all, I distrusted myself. How could I allow this “triflin’ ass” — as one of my friends described her — affect my grades, my life like she had? I took all of that anger and focused it on my classes, and pulled my over GPA back up to a B in the process.

You could say that I learned my lesson. But that would be a lie. I had to go through a summer of unemployment and a week of homelessness my sophomore year at Pitt before I learned one of life’s most important lessons. Trust is a decision that we all have to make, even if it does mean heartbreak, because trust — especially in yourself — allows you to see people as they are and as you would hope they could be. Trust means taking risks with your heart, means being honest with yourself about why you may be terrified to date or for someone to know about your dark past. Trust means that people, even people you may know fairly well, may betray you in some way, but trusting anyway, because it’s the only way to live a great life.

I also learned that much of what I thought I saw in my second crush reminded me a lot of my mother. Especially around definitions of manhood and being a Black male. We were supposed to be bold, even arrogant. We were expected to make the first move, in dating or otherwise. We were supposed to break away from our families but be there for them at the same time, to succeed in the world but never forget where we came from. I realized that my mother and my obsession were both wrong, that they didn’t know me, and had no right to lay their expectations on me. I figured out, for the first time in my life, that having a mind as powerful as mine brought with it the responsibility to tame it, especially when it came to figuring out men and women. I needed to trust my instincts, that a bright smile and wonderful lips didn’t equal a sense of seriousness or integrity or actual kindness. I could still dream of a kiss. I just needed to make sure that the rest of the person in that dream was worth kissing.

Still, I have to thank her, my second infatuation. I wouldn’t have known what not to look for in women or in friends without this experience. I learned as much about what attracted me to my first crush as I did about what kept me from going after my second one. The women I’ve dated and the woman I married all benefitted from my period of mindful obsession. My college education, formal and informal, became that much sweeter once I let go and allowed myself the opportunities that only trust in myself could bring.