How I Met My Son

31 Sunday Jul 2016

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

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616 East Lincoln Avenue, 9/11, Abuse, Amadou Diallo, Baggage, Black Masculinity, Burden of Success, Child Abuse, Darren Gill, Domestic Violence, Eri, Family Intervention, Father-Son Relationship, Humanities, Maurice, Maurice Eugene Washington, Misogyny, Mother-Son Relationship, Noah, Parenting, Penguins, Poverty, Self-Reflection, Siblings, Teenager, Yiscoc

Noah’s birthday cake, Cheesecake Factory Original Cheesecake, adorned with candles, July 30, 2016. (Donald Earl Collins).

My son turned thirteen yesterday. That sentence by itself speaks volumes. That I have a son, that he’s reached an age where he’s in the midst of puberty, with a discernible personality, with a set of abilities and potential for developing more talents. Wow! Noah loves art, anime, and apples. He’s a classic contrarian who’s just beginning to realize that he has academic and athletic talents. He’s mostly observant, thoughtful, and independent thinking enough to deal with this crazy world outside our home. That he’s managed to get to this point without me messing him up with my own baggage as his father. To me, that’s not just amazing. That’s a miracle.

As late as the early spring of ’02, a half-year before me and my wife conceived our one and only egg, I had some doubts about ever being a dad. But those small doubts mattered little compared to where I’d been the summer and fall of ’01. I wasn’t dead set against becoming a parent. I just felt that in this dangerous, chaotic, racist, oppressive world, how could I be so selfish as to bring a child into this life?

Daddy Emperor Penguin with baby penguin, accessed July 31, 2016. (National Geographic via http://pinterest.com).

I wasn’t just thinking of Amadou Diallo or the aftermath of 9/11. This wasn’t just about the expense of raising a kid. Mostly, it had to do with growing up as the second of six, but with ALL of the responsibilities of a first-born Gen-Xer watching over four siblings ten to fourteen years younger than me, not to mention my wayward older brother. It was the trauma of living through eight years of abject, unrelenting poverty with an abusive asshole of a bully who frequently threatened my and my Mom’s existence. It was having to swallow shit from all of my legal guardians about my lack of observable Black testosterone coursing through my brain cells. Add going through a magnet program from middle school to high school and going to the University of Pittsburgh to this baggage. What I was by twenty was a hopeful but yet emotionally exhausted human being.

So, I was never someone who had this American evangelical desire to get married or have kids (which is also a passion connected to Whiteness, by the way, to propagate their numbers, but not just). Even when it was obvious that me and my wife were heading toward marriage by 1998, I was more against having kids than in favor of the idea. I was still occasionally sending money to my Mom and my siblings to help them out, and taking trips to 616 to put out figurative fires. I had changed enough diapers, made enough bottles, dressed, lunched, dinnered, and laundered enough for my siblings to say “I’m good” when it came to having my own child.

But when my youngest brother Eri beat me to the punch by siring his own kid with his high school girlfriend at seventeen in the spring of ’01, I lost it. I couldn’t sleep soundly for months. I listened to my Mom complain week after week about him and his post-high school dropout future. My brothers Maurice and Yiscoc weren’t doing much better. My family was a cyclone of a disaster, and nothing I had done to blaze a trail for them since 1982 had done much good.

This was when I decided to do my intervention, to go after both my Mom and my siblings. Not so much out of anger, and yes, I had enough anger to keep my current iPhone powered for three days. No, this was a combination of righteous indignation and, well, love. I did my due diligence to dig into my Mom’s life with a few questions that I already knew the answers to, about when and how it all went so wrong for us all. And then I did the intervention, in January ’02, right after the birth of my only nephew.

Only later did I realize the intervention I did was really for me. Only later did I figure out that the 616 intervention had freed me from my self-imposed burden to help lift my family out of poverty. The constant anguish and exhaustion I felt when dealing with my family went away in the weeks after the intervention, and I was able to get a good night’s sleep for the first time in months, maybe years.

Noah in portrait, May 16, 2016. (Donald Earl Collins)

That’s when I was ready to do my part in the miracle of conception, childbirth, and parenting. Giving myself that permission and then having the recognition of the baggage I carried going in has made fatherhood and parenting much easier (not easy, just much easier) than it would’ve been if I had done like Eri or followed Phil Knight’s “Just Do It” advice.

It’s hard to really be passionate about having a child when nearly all your free time with family between the ages of twelve and thirty-one has been to participate in raising kids. Since my little egg arrived thirteen years ago, though, I’ve reserved my parenting for him. I’m the father penguin in -100°F temps, braving blizzards in eighty-mile-an-hour winds to see my son through. I think it’s paid off so far.

The Mountaintop of Sixth Grade

22 Wednesday Jun 2016

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

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Arrogance, Hubris, Humanities, Intelligence, Narcissism, Public Speaking, Reggie Jackson, Sixth Grade Graduation, Straight-A Student, William H. Holmes Elementary

William H. Holmes Elementary, Mount Vernon, NY, November 23, 2006. Donald Earl Collins

Thirty-five years ago this week, I finished elementary school. Thirty-five years since I first felt that feeling of reaching the mountaintop, as if I’d accomplished something in my life. Three-and-a-half decades since the last time I was unknowingly naive and unnecessarily arrogant.

It was a finish with a flourish, though. Combined with having become a part of a bizarre religion, I had a new point of view on my life by the time graduation day on Friday, June 26 of ’81 rolled around. My family was now two months into our serving Yahweh, and I was six weeks removed from losing my best friend Starling because of this nutty religion. It was a time in which I felt overwhelmed about my present and immediate future. Yet I acted as if I’d published a book that was both a New York Times Bestseller and a Pulitzer Prize winner. I couldn’t have been more pumped up if I’d been on Walter White’s blue crystal meth from Breaking Bad.

The Sun setting behind the Statue of Liberty, New York, July 4, 2003. (http://science.nasa.gov/).

The Sun setting behind the Statue of Liberty (kind of how I saw my life back in 1981), New York, July 4, 2003. (http://science.nasa.gov/).

But I had some basis for seeing myself as great. As far as I was concerned, I was the unofficial valedictorian of my elementary school class at William H. Holmes Elementary, the ’50s structure next to the big Presbyterian church on North Columbus and East Lincoln Avenue. My teachers had chosen me out of all of my classmates to speak at our graduation ceremony. On that last Friday in June ’81, I served as the opening speaker, introducing the city councilman who served as our keynote. I even wrote the short introduction that I delivered on that wonderful day.

I firmly believed no one in the world was smarter than me. In the three years prior to graduation, I had straight A’s. Still, that paled in comparison to my performance my last year of elementary school. I figured out that I earned an A on forty-eight out of fifty-two quizzes and tests in sixth grade. The lowest grade I earned that year was an 88 on a spelling quiz. I’d won a Dental Awareness Month award for Best Poster and came in second in a city-wide writing contest that included essays from high school students. If anyone had known how big my head had grown that year, they would’ve stuck a pin in my temple just to let the air out.

It wouldn’t have been any funnier if I’d pretended I was Mr. October himself, Reggie Jackson, saying his words, “Sometimes I underestimate the magnitude of me.” I wanted so badly to see myself and to be seen by others as special that I forgot about the work it had taken to move my reading and writing skills up eight grade levels in a little more than two and a half years.

Yankees/Oakland A’s/California Angels HOF Reggie Jackson at bat, 1980, accessed June 21, 2016. (AP Photo).

It was a great day, sunny and low-eighties with cumulus clouds and low humidity. But knowing what life at 616, Mount Vernon and Humanities had in store for me over the next eight years, I should’ve smelled the ozone in the air. I should’ve looked more closely at my sky, to see the flocks of seagulls flying away from the shoreline. I should’ve sensed — and did, on a very low-frequency — the hurricane gaining strength in my life. I chose to ignore it, hoping that I could fake my way through it while resting on my laurels.

To think that it would’ve been another nine years before I felt like I could take on the world again. If someone had told me in June ’81 that I’d have to wait until my junior year at the University of Pittsburgh to have a straight-A semester, I would’ve grabbed a gun and shot myself through the temple with a Colt .45. And I would’ve made sure the bullet I used had a hollow tip. If I’d known that I’d have to wait a full decade to be comfortable with myself as myself in all of my goofiness again, I probably would’ve cried on the spot.

All I can hope these days is that my nearly teenage son can strike a balance between being cool and being cool with himself. I don’t want him spending a decade trying to figure himself out all by himself.

Fights and Friendships

05 Thursday May 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As I wrote in the memoir,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On My Own Narcissism

19 Saturday Mar 2016

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

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American Narcissism, Donald Trump, Humanities, Jean W. Twenge, Narcissism, NPD, NPI, Self-Awareness, Ted Bundy, W. Keith Campbell

You are from God, little children, and have overcome them; because greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world.

— 1 John 4:4 (New American Standard Bible)

For those who regularly read my blog, you’ve probably noticed the increased focus over the past year on the issue of American obsession with individualism and its own greatness mythology. At least, the parts of which I’ve roughly translated into a collective American narcissism, or a collective American absorption with itself. It has become the latest idea, my latest potential project, but still too early to tell what, if anything, will come out of this so far. Most Americans remain blissfully unaware of anything that doesn’t involve winners, losers, vicarious living, and America always being seen as #1 at everything (even though in most cases it isn’t).

This post, though, isn’t about how the world’s #1 nation is deeply flawed by a narcissism that runs nearly as deep as the center of a black hole. No, this post is all about me. Really, it’s about the fact that even as I recognize America’s narcissism — both historical and current — that I myself am not inoculated from that narcissism.

Expanding red giant stars will engulf too-close planets before turning into white dwarfs, August 13, 2013. (James Gitlin/STScI AVL via http://www.space.com/).

My first bout with narcissism began at the end of elementary school at William H. Holmes in Mount Vernon, New York. It was the spring of ’81. I’d just finished up three years as a straight-A student, been made into a Hebrew-Israelite, came in second for a city-wide essay contest, and been granted the honor of introducing the keynote speaker at my graduation. Even with fighting my best friend Starling, my family’s slow but steady fall into grinding poverty, and the next six years of Humanities in front of me, who wouldn’t have a head as inflated as the Sun at its red-giant stage?

As I wrote in Boy @ The Window

I firmly believed that no one in the world was smarter than me. It wouldn’t have been any funnier if I’d pretended I was Mr. October himself, Reggie Jackson, saying his words, ‘Sometimes I underestimate the magnitude of me.’

It took a year of relative mediocrity while in seventh-grade Humanities for my march toward narcissistic personality disorder to end at the cliff of disillusionment. I wasn’t the “smartest kid in the whole world.” But as I also discovered in my time in this magnet program, neither were any of my classmates.

Perhaps the biggest lesson here was that I was all of eleven and twelve years old when America’s narcissism with individual achievement had caught me in a tangled web of lies and myths. No success or failure or anything in between occurs in a vacuum. No individual’s success happens purely on her or his own, without support, context, and in many cases, an advantage of one sort or another. It took years to learn this lesson, between Humanities and graduate school, the nonprofit world and academia, to learn to give up on the bullshit that is the American meritocracy.

That’s not to say that one can eliminate selfishness (which isn’t the same as narcissism, by the way), or shouldn’t strive for success or a better life for themselves or their kids or their families. But we should always ask ourselves why, in what context, how should we measure our victories, and even if running over others to achieve those victories is the right way to live? Most Americans don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t verify, and don’t think about their lives in this way, because most of us have been taught by this culture that the empathetic lens is a loser’s way of viewing the world.

My NPI Score, done August 20, 2015. (http://personality-testing.info/tests/NPI.php).

I have taken a read — actually, several in the past year — of Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell’s book The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (2009). Theirs is a good base to begin to view American society as one so obsessed with individualism that it renders us all anywhere between a little narcissistic to borderline Donald Trumps and Ted Bundys. The psychologists and psychiatrists in this niche have a test for narcissistic personality disorder or NPD, the Narcissistic Personality Index. It consists of 40 questions, seeking to determine whether one is low, medium, or high in narcissism within the index.

I took the NPI last August, and scored a 9 out of 40. It meant that I have some narcissistic tendencies, but only scored higher than 35 percent of those who’ve taken the NPI. I wasn’t even close to being an average American narcissist! Not really a surprise, as those seeking to take such an index are likely less narcissistic than their navel-gazing neighbors.

So, I am in this world and mostly of it, if only because it’s hard to divorce one’s existence from the world in which they live. But I am self-aware enough to know my own narcissism, and empathetic enough to see the narcissism in others.

Great. It still means that as a nation, our narcissism goes as far back as the mind can imagine. It still means that in a couple of centuries, historians will lament about the America that was. Those historians will see a country and a people so busy in building themselves up that they stomped on the oppressed and crushed the downtrodden in the process. A US with so many myths and ideals, but so few attempts at making any of them true.

EWF, A Reminder That I Did Have a Childhood

06 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, earth, wind & fire, Eclectic, eclectic music, High Rise Buildings, Mount Vernon New York, music, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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EWF, Funk, Hebrew-Israelite, Humanities, Imagination, Jazz, Maurice Eugene Washington, Maurice Washington, Maurice White, Pop, R&B, Self-Awareness, Self-Discovery

Earth, Wind & Fire’s All ‘N All (1977) album cover, February 6, 2016. (http://www.allmusic.com).

I’m still reeling over Maurice White. Yeah, I still have my Earth, Wind & Fire on my CDs, my iPod, my iPhone, on three laptops and a desktop. Phillip Bailey and White’s brothers-in-arts are still here. Their music will always be with me and with us. But it feels like a little piece of my relative (if not contrived) innocence from my pre-Humanities, pre-Hebrew-Israelite days died with White Wednesday night.

Here’s what I wrote about those days of deliberately-induced blissful naiveté, Earth, Wind & Fire included, in my memoir:

“For me, this boy, this tweener, an active imagination and an even more animated dream life was critical. Living in between the hustle and bustle of “The City,” — Manhattan and the other four boroughs of New York — and the relative quiet of the ritzy suburbs immediately north of it was everything and everyone I knew before the age of twelve. Just three blocks after the elevated 2 Subway line ended at East 241st Street in the Bronx was where “Mount Vernon, New York” began. From the hard concrete sidewalks and green street signs of New York to the crumbling light blue slate and dark blue signs were my only indications that I had truly left the city. This despite the claims of so many I knew that upstate New York began somewhere above 125th or 207th Street in Manhattan. I knew by the time I was twelve that, sleepy bedroom suburb or not, Mount Vernon had more features in common with the Bronx and upper Manhattan than most city folk were willing to recognize.

“My only links to the great metropolis to the south were WNBC-TV (Channel 4), Warner Wolf — with his famous “Let’s go to the video tape line — doing sports on WCBS-TV (Channel 2), and WABC-AM 77 and WBLS-FM 107.5 on the radio. I found the AM station more fun to listen to, but I also liked listening to the sign-off song WBLS played at the end of the evening, Moody’s Mood for Love, with that, ‘There I go, There I go, The-ere I go…’ start. Music had been an important part of my imagination in ’79, with acts like Earth, Wind & Fire, Christopher Cross, Billy Joel and The Commodores. Not to mention Frank Sinatra, Queen, Donna Summer and Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall album. The music also made me feel like I was as much a part of New York as I was a part of Mount Vernon. It left me thinking of the ozone and burnt rubber smell that I noticed as soon as I would walk down into the Subway system in Manhattan. But aside from my occasional slip of the tongue — ‘warda’ for ‘water’ and ‘bawwgt’ for ‘bought’ — I didn’t sound or act much like a New Yawker. Still, I discovered something about New York from afar. I could sneak up to the rooftop of my apartment building, 616 East Lincoln, a five-story complex of three connected brick buildings with Tudor-style facades and a concrete-stone foundation. I’d find the exit to the roof unlocked and see the tops of the Twin Towers floating over some low-lying clouds on an otherwise sunny day. The symbols of the greatest city on Earth seemed to float toward the heavens on those days, and me with them.

“Besides the occasional reminder of life outside of my world, of Mount Vernon, I was the center of my own universe. Mount Vernon was but a stage on which my life played out, a place I hoped would stay this way forever. I was an eleven-year-old who thought that my world was the world. I lived my life like Philip Bailey and Maurice White would’ve wanted me to. I came to see ‘victory in a life [sic] called fantasy’ as my own life, living as if my imagination and dreams could be made into reality. All I had to do was wish it so.”

Because of what I went through during the Boy @ The Window years, I had to learn to get over my idiot ex-stepfather’s abuse to continue listening to Earth, Wind & Fire between ’82 and ’89. The late Maurice Eugene Washington was a fan as well, and I didn’t want us to both like the same music. Who the heck knew what was going on in his head when he heard “Fantasy” or “After The Love Is Gone,” anyway?

All I know is, there won’t be another group like the one Maurice White founded in ’69, the year I was born. All I can do is hold on to my precious Earth, Wind & Fire music, and the imagination that it helped spark. All I can do now is hope that someone can even begin to approach the kind of ethereal and powerfully Black-and-proud mix of music that White, Bailey, et al. were able to construct for nearly a decade. One can fantasize, right?

The Cold Light of Grades

05 Tuesday Jan 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, earth, wind & fire, Eclectic, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Ann Jannetta, Challenge Scholarship, Continental Airlines, Crush #2, Dean's List, Disillusionment, East Asian History, Financial Aid, General Foods, Grades, Grinding, Homesickness, Humanities, Internalized Racism, Masculinity, Mom, Mother-Son Relationship, MVHS, Newark International Airport, Phyllis, Pitt, Racism, Self-Discovery, Sexism, Stereotype Threat, Travel

University of Pittsburgh after a snow storm, Cathedral of Learning, downloaded January 5, 2016. (http://www.everystockphoto.com).

Dateline, Tuesday, January 5, 2016. Exactly twenty-eight years ago on this day and date, I left Mount Vernon and New York for my second semester at the University of Pittsburgh. I sensed, but did not know, that this was a make-or-break time for me as a student and as a person. At least when that day began. I had a 5 pm Continental Airlines flight out of Newark (my last time flying out of there, thank God!), and had plenty of time to kill before catching a cab to East 241st at 2 pm to catch the 2 Subway to 42nd, the Shuttle to Grand Central, and then the Carey Bus to New Jersey.

Then the mailman arrived a bit earlier than I expected, around 12:30 pm. I’d been anticipating and dreading this moment for seventeen days, since Saturday, December 19, the morning of my last final in Pascal.

The day I was scheduled to go back to Pittsburgh was also the day I finally received my grades. I earned an easy A in Astronomy, a B- in Pascal, and a C in Honors Calc. All three of those grades I expected. The C in East Asian History was completely unexpected. My grade point average for the semester gave me a 2.63 to start my postsecondary career. That might’ve been good enough for most folks. But of course not for me. My Challenge Scholarship absolutely depended on me maintaining a minimum 3.0 average at the end of every school year in order for me to stay eligible. That was my wake up call to what I’d allowed Phyllis, and my thoughts of her and me — and of her with me — to do to me. I didn’t even give Mom the chance to see my grades.

Because I was seventeen when my first semester began, my Mom was still the responsible adult and my Mom’s address the primary address for my academic records. This was the first and last time I received my Pitt grades this way.

I was so mad. But I was more disillusioned than angry, especially with myself and my view of the world. I knew I had no margin for error this Winter/Spring semester at Pitt. I needed to raise my overall GPA to a 3.0 or higher in order to keep my academic scholarship for my sophomore year. I could barely afford Pitt as it was, between room and board and books. It wasn’t as if I could depend on Mom and my father to keep sending me money. They had sent a total of $480 my way that first semester. I was still $1,200 behind on my Pitt bill, even with student loans and me working sixteen hours a week.

The days after I got back to my dorm I spent assessing my situation and what to do about it. The first decision I made was to consolidate the funds I managed to secure at the end of December. I had General Foods cover my remaining room and board payments for the school year, increased my Stafford Loan amount for the semester, and marched down to Thackeray Hall. I waited all day to take care of my bills, get my few hundred dollars of leftover cash from all of my aid — all of which I needed for books — and registered for classes. The last part took the most time, and was the hardest to do. The low the second morning of the semester was two below zero, and the high that day was eight above. Fahrenheit, not Celsius. I stood in line outside for over an hour in that weather surrounded by two feet of snow with the occasional winds and snow drifts before getting inside at nine that morning.

But in the moments I had that week, between some quiet time for myself and in discussing my performance with two of my professors (I just couldn’t believe I earned a C in East Asian History!), I realized two or three things. One was that I over-performed, given how depressed I was the last seven weeks of the semester. I missed nearly three out of every four classes in November, and nearly forty percent of my East Asian History class during the entire semester. I went without a textbook for Honors Calc I after someone stole it from my job in the computer labs in the Cathedral of Learning at the end of October. I managed a solid C in the course anyway. It could’ve been much worse.

Two was that my East Asian History professor Ann Jannetta was right. I really was “lucky” to have managed a C in an upper-level history course my first semester of college. I still acted as if I was in Humanities at A.B. Davis Middle School or MVHS, that a C was some indication of low IQ or confirmation that Whites had bigger brains or something. Jannetta was very encouraging. It was the first time any of my professors had made me feel like I belonged in college.

The most important thing I realized, though, was that I couldn’t let anyone or anything get in the way of me bringing my A-game (or A- game, maybe) every semester and in every course. Phyllis didn’t matter. My internalized sexism or what others though of me because of their racism didn’t matter. My idiot classmates or parents didn’t matter. Heck, being hungry, cold, and short on money didn’t matter. All that mattered was my ability to do what I did best back then. Get A’s in bunches when I needed to.

Of course, all these things really did matter. I merely decided to play the game of college that semester with a combination of fear and anger, arrogance and obliviousness. To the tune of a 3.33 and the Dean’s List! Yay me!

But when that semester ended on Saturday, April 30, those demons and distractions resurfaced. Oh, the days before I spent five days homeless and weeks eating tuna fish and pork neck bones!

Aside

What’s Up With These Leftist Labels, Anyway?

05 Wednesday Aug 2015

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

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"I Am 32 Flavors" (1998), Alana Davis, Anti-Stereotype, Class Struggle, Critical Race Theory, Derrick A. Bell, Dick Oestreicher, Evangelical Christianity, Franz Fanon, Graduate School, Humanities, JD, Karl Marx, Labeling, Labels, Leftist, Liberal, Marxist, Neo-Marxist, Pitt, Rosemary Martino, Stereotypes, W. E. B. Du Bois

Asian woman in nude breaking through a bar code, September 2010. (unknown author/woman, http://www.willeyelisten.com).

Over the years, I’ve grown tired of the idea that my social, cultural, economic and political beliefs could be summed up with one or two words. Like “progressive,” “Communist,” “neo-Marxist,” “leftist,” “liberal,” and/or “Marxist.” Why? Because like so many things American (or in this case, Western), ideologues and intellectuals take the easiest path and slap overgeneralized labels on groups of people without thought, without nuance, and certainly without an understanding of both people and history.

I’ve felt this way about these labels at least since my first year of grad school in the University of Pittsburgh’s MA and PhD programs (1991-92), and likely longer than that. But in that program, I was surrounded by professors and colleagues who were various shades of Marxism. At least that’s what they claimed. More to the point, they claimed that “the class struggle” was the defining feature of both human history and US history. “The class struggle” trumped slavery and America’s racial caste system, the near eradication of indigenous cultures in the US and around the world, it trumped the exploitation and exclusion of women in Western civilizations.

I admit it. It really, really, really pissed me off to be earning my MA and beginning my doctoral work around such ignorant thinkers. They would ask me about my Marxism, and I’d say, “I’m not a Marxist. I’m not a neo-Marxist. I’m not even a Groucho Marxist.” My Pitt grad school colleagues would laugh, sometimes a little too forcefully. My professors, for the most part, ignored me, since I was an African American history student who believed that race intertwined with class to be US history’s defining feature. How scandalous!

It wasn’t that I hadn’t read Karl Marx’s and Frederick Engels’ Communist Manifesto (1848). I read it via Rosemary Martino in twelfth grade, though I can’t remember if I read it for AP English or for her Humanities Philosophy class. I’d also read Marx’s much longer Das Kapital (1867), Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), and so many other supposedly Marxist-leaning tombs by the time I’d taken my first full semester of grad-level courses (I took my first grad course my junior year at Pitt).

A basic world political spectrum chart (really, too simple), August 5, 2015. (http://www.endofprejudice.com/).

I just wasn’t that impressed on the Marxism part of things. I mean, I was well acquainted with oppression, exploitation and abuse long before I’d read anything by Marx and Engels, or George Orwell in ninth grade English, for that matter. I had a contrarian Humanities classmate in JD who espoused what I considered even at the time his version of Communist gibberish all through middle school and into our sophomore year at Mount Vernon High School. So how do you label someone a Marxist or Communist who both views it with disdain and didn’t grow up quoting from it? I’d like to know.

This last question, though, is bigger than just my own experience with poverty, race, racism, child abuse, sexual assault, domestic violence, homelessness, cultish religions, and sheer willful ignorance and neglect. Historically, labeling anyone who had radical ideas about the falsities of human civilizations as civilizing the human tendency to spread inequality and oppression to the most vulnerable as Communist is a bit ahistorical, no? So-called leftists or socialists do that with Jesus and Muhammad almost every day. Maybe we should call Karl Marx an original, Asiatic Christian or original Muslim, minus the spiritual component of kneeling before God in prayer.

Portrait of Guy Fawkes (1570-1606), author/date unknown, August 5, 2015. (http://plus.google.com).

For me, growing up in a striving household that ended up in grinding welfare poverty didn’t make me a Communist. I went through several stages of belief, from my Mom and idiot stepfather Maurice hoisting the Hebrew-Israelite thing on me, to evangelical Christianity, to just plain Christianity, to critical race theorist adherent. I never completely gave up on capitalist democracy, because what would’ve been the point of that? By the time my son was born in 2003, I saw myself more in European terms, as either a Social Democrat or a Christian Democrats, believers in compromises and reforms from within that ameliorate the worst forms of racial, gender and other forms of oppression and poverty.

Yet even that is too big a label to hang on me or others, now and across history. What did people call those who wanted to rid the world of poverty and economic oppression prior to 1848? Or prior to the French Revolution, for that matter? Troublemakers? Radicals? Jacobites? Weird? Lunatics? To be honest, any of these terms fit me better than progressive, liberal, leftist or Marxist. Because ultimately, I don’t believe in any single economic or political belief system crafted by Homo sapiens. They’re all subject to corruption, all subject to be bent by those with the most power and resources.

So, who am I, ideologically speaking? To quote Alana Davis, “I am 32 flavors” and dim sum. Go ahead. Try to figure that out and come up with a label that fits!