Tag Archives: Identity

Easter Seder 1995

08 Wednesday Apr 2015

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Matzo and a cup of wine in a Kiddush cup for first evening of Passover, April 7, 2015. (http://www.timeanddate.com).

Matzo and a cup of wine in a Kiddush cup for first evening of Passover, April 7, 2015. (http://www.timeanddate.com).

Like most of my posts, this is a story of irony, sarcasm and identity. It may be a bit out of time, since the first night of Passover and Easter already occurred last weekend. But it’s still Passover week for those who do more than eat matzos and chicken liver paste with a glass of Manischewitz on the first night.

In all, I have been present, prayed, dined, wined and whined at four Passover Seders. Three of them were during the Hebrew-Israelite years, 1982, 1983, and 1984. All of them involved a roasted leg of lamb, bitter herbs, and chewing down raw horseradish while chugging super-sweet wine to chase away the five-alarm-fire in my mouth, throat and stomach. Endless praises to Yahweh, too many exhortations of Moses, and awkward snorts toward being strangers among strangers in a strange and oppressive land. That was my Passover experience in a lifetime and timeline determined by my Mom and idiot stepfather Maurice, before I turned to Christianity, before I gave up on the idea that I could be from one of the Ten Lost Tribes of ancient Israel.

My fourth Seder, though, came eleven years later, in mid-April 1995. I’d been a Christian for as long as I hadn’t commemorated Passover as part of my religious birthright. I wasn’t sure about the idea of attending this celebration, as it wasn’t even at sundown on that year’s first day of Passover, Saturday, April 15. My friend Carl and his/our respective Carnegie Mellon history grad school mates Alan, Jeff, and Susannah were holding their little Seder on Easter Sunday, April 16, as the first two rented a house together in the Point Breeze (really, the White end of Homewood-Brushton, which asked for a race-based divorce in 1961) neighborhood of Pittsburgh.

Picture of the Henry Clay Frick Mansion, or "Clayton", located at 7200 Penn Avenue, Point Breeze, Pittsburgh, PA, March 21, 2010. (Lee Paxton via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

Picture of the Henry Clay Frick Mansion, or “Clayton”, located at 7200 Penn Avenue, Point Breeze, Pittsburgh, PA, March 21, 2010. (Lee Paxton via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

They had invited me a week earlier, a few days before my Spencer Foundation Fellowship application went from no-go to a go. I thought about saying no, but generally, I didn’t do anything on Easter Sundays, anyway. Even as a member of Covenant Church of Pittsburgh, the one Sunday I didn’t attend church was Easter Sunday. It the holiest of days, like Passover, and for so many people, the only day all year they attended church. For so many, it was show-off-my-new-spring-clothes day, not Jesus’ Resurrection Day. I didn’t like the overcrowded-ness that came with an Easter Sunday or Christmas service. It smacked of hypocrisy, my own included.

So I decided for one Sunday to attend a Seder prepared by folks who’d only known themselves as Jews both ethnically and religion-wise their whole lives. Except the stern, orthodox, full of bitterness and tears, joy and triumph that were the Seders of my Hebrew-Israelite days was a lighthearted affair. It was as unorthodox a Seder as could’ve expected, with lots of conversation about grad school, about my dissertation fellowship, about life and sports and music in general. No raw horseradish, but lots of chicken liver paste. No Manischewitz, but some Mogen David, along with more traditional red and white wines, and an empty seat for Elijah.

Manischewitz wine, in bottle and a wine glass, September 11, 2012. (http://tabletmag.com/).

Manischewitz wine, in bottle and a wine glass, September 11, 2012. (http://tabletmag.com/).

Carl and Alan, of course, expressed surprise when I did ask questions or make comments. Like about the kosher-ness of eating mashed-up chicken livers, or the differences in taste between the traditional Pesach beverages, or how peanut butter and jelly went well with matzo crackers. Alan, about to be a one-year-and-done CMU history doctoral student, did ask me, “Where did you learn about Passover?” I said, “This is my fourth Seder.”

I knew better than to fully unlock everything I knew about Pesach, Judaism, Jewish history, the Ten Lost Tribes, being a Hebrew-Israelite, and the racial privileging that I had observed growing up in Mount Vernon between “real” Jews and us “weird” (read “not White”) Jews. For a few hours, though, I had to confront a part of my past that I’d all but locked away by the beginning of ’90. Not just locked away. I’d taken everything from between April 13, ’81 and July 23, ’89, wrapped it in Saran Wrap, put that in a Ziploc bag, thrown it in a safe, locked it, and then built a force field to keep out intruders.

I was relieved when I finally left Carl and Alan’s Easter Sunday/Passover Seder and walked back to my apartment in East Liberty. I wasn’t ready yet to take a look back at what I lived through during the Reagan Years. I was all about moving forward, and the previous days and weeks of dissertation research followed by a major-league dissertation fellowship made me feel like the completely different person that I believed I actually was. At least ninety-five percent of the time.

God, Graviano and Darwin

10 Thursday Oct 2013

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Galaxies in clusters/ superclusters of dark matter filaments, as part of Pan-STARRS sky survey, July 17, 2010. (Boylan-Kolchin/The Virgo Consortium/Durham University/PA Wire)

Tens of thousands of galaxies in clusters/superclusters of dark matter filaments, as part of Pan-STARRS sky survey, July 17, 2010. (Boylan-Kolchin/The Virgo Consortium/Durham University/PA Wire)

From Boy @ The Window, circa October ’83:

Bio with Mr. Graviano did provide some answers for me beyond the science. The man was also an assistant coach for MVHS’ basketball team. Although I know he loved basketball, Graviano was a heck of a science teacher. He didn’t do anything particularly exciting. He just made it seem as if we were learning how to tie our shoes when he was teaching us binomial nomenclature or the difference between mitosis and meiosis. Graviano began the year with Charles Darwin’s trip aboard the HMS Beagle to South America and the Galapagos Islands in the 1830s, observing finches and developing his theory of natural selection. We were learning about Darwin and evolution, something I knew flew in the face of my family’s Hebrew-Israelite beliefs. Despite that, what I learned in Biology every day made more sense to me than attempting to interpret the first chapter of Genesis or Balkis Makeda’s dreams warning us against the imperfect science of intellectual types like Darwin. What surprised me more was the fact that no one in our class questioned Graviano or the fact that he was teaching evolution, at least not in the open.

Biology gave me food for thought. I understood the science, the process of natural selection and mutation, the reality that over numerous eons life gradually evolved on earth to include intelligent mammals, primates, and humans. At the same time, we were being taught in temple that God had created or reclaimed (depending on interpretation) the earth in six days or six thousand years. The reclamation interpretation left room for everything that science said had occurred prior to the ascent of modern humans. The creation story obviously didn’t. I was confused, having to reconcile the scientific method with religious beliefs. I solved the problem in my own mind by choosing to stand on the reclamation interpretation of Genesis’ first chapter. But that didn’t completely satisfy me.

It was part of a long but interesting period that led me to become a plain old, nondenominational Christian by April ’84. But at this point in the Boy @ The Window story, I was literally caught between the stupidity of being a Hebrew-Israelite and the idea that there wasn’t a higher power at all.

Yet, despite Graviano’s class, I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that evolution was a random process. To me, that seemed to approach the ridiculous. Biological evolution’s hardly been perfect. But one completely random set of changes built upon another set of completely random changes over three or four billion years likely doesn’t yield life on this planet in its current state. Too many patterns for me reflected in biology, mathematics and — as I’d learn in a couple of years — physics to accept evolution as a completely random process.

Portrait of Charles Darwin, by George Richmond (circa 1838), October 15, 2012. (Jdcollins13 via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Portrait of Charles Darwin, by George Richmond (circa 1838), October 15, 2012. (Jdcollins13 via Wikipedia). In public domain.

That was really my only sticking point. For my ninth and tenth-grade classmates, though, I couldn’t believe their stone-faced silences over the Darwin story. I knew that some of them held beliefs that ran completely counter to the idea of evolution. Some, even, were likely what we now call evangelical, literal-interpretation-of-the-Bible Christians. Yet they were as silent as comatose patients for most of the first marking period. What I learned a little later on in life was that silence was as much a form of protest or disapproval as outright vocal opposition.

As for me, I found the processes of mutation, mitosis and meiosis fascinating. I felt as if I was learning a small but important secret about God and the universe. That both — if one believes in God and has some understanding of the universe — have intellectual and scientific minds. Graviano, through his mechanical teaching style, was at least able to convey that to us, if any of us paid close enough attention.

If Graviano opened my eyes to modern science and the understanding of life on its most basic level, Yom Kippur ’83 opened me up to understanding why I no longer put my trust in Maurice’s God.

I guess if I hadn’t already been in the midst of a spiritual identity crisis, I wouldn’t have used my classes in ninth grade as my way of figuring out how to rebuild my identity, and in the process, figure out what and in whom I wanted to believe. Too bad folks who now run things in this country never took one moment’s time to do the same.

Salutatorian Story

07 Wednesday Mar 2012

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Caravaggio’s Narcissus (1594-96) – talk about someone with interpersonal issues – May 15, 2011. (Masur via Wikipedia). In public domain.

As I began to work on Boy @ The Window six years ago, I realized that my story would be far from complete without the words and thoughts of my former classmates, teachers, and family members in my head. Thoughts about themselves. Thoughts about Humanities. Thoughts about me. Thoughts about our world and our times. After all, I hadn’t thought about most of these folks in nearly two decades.

I had already started with my late, wonderful teacher and mentor, Harold Meltzer several years earlier. My first interview with him was in August ’02, but the first time we discussed the possibility of me doing Boy @ The Window goes back to February ’95. I was working on my doctoral thesis, living in DC for a couple of months while hitting the archives and libraries up for dusty information. In need of a writing break, I gave him a call on one cold and boring Saturday afternoon.

Meltzer answered with his usual “H. MMMMMMM. here?,” the M’s strung together like a long string of pearls bouncing slightly as you’d lay them gently on a table. When I said who it was, he said, “DONNIE!! Why, it’s so good of you to call!” in his halting suburban New York accent. Little did I know that this was the start of a three-hour-long conversation.

We spent a lot of time talking about the salutatorian of my class, the Class of ’87. To me, he — let’s call him ‘S’ — was always an enigma. I genuinely felt both in awe of and disheartened by his presence in my life during the Humanities years. I thought it was amazing that he was able to do as much as he did. The high school band. The mock trial team. The school newspaper. Our yearbook. An appearance on Phil Donahue! At least he wasn’t a star basketball player too, especially in Mount Vernon.

I felt the side effects of S’s success. Teachers telling me that I should be more like S, as if I was S’s younger, underachieving brother. I saw how S occasionally cashed in on his built-up academic capital to give himself more time to work on assignments no one else got a second of overtime to do. I don’t think I ever wanted to be S or become close friends with him, though. Something about his need to be well-liked by our peers and teachers bothered me.

I said as much during a three-hour meeting we had during my first work-related trip to Sacramento during the second week of March ’06. When S asked what I thought of him, I said, “I thought that you were…obsequious, ingratiating…no, that’s too strong…I sensed that you needed to be liked by our classmates and teachers.” I don’t know exactly what S thought about my description of him, but then again, he did ask.

Mitt Romney’s proof positive that short of himself, calling someone obsequious is a strong statement. Romney at CPAC 2011, Washington, DC, February 11, 2011. (Gage Skidmore via Wikipedia). In public domain.

S asked during our first meeting and interview in March ’06, “What do you think I thought of you?”

“For the most part, as far as you were concerned, I didn’t exist . . . I mean, I was there, of course, but I wasn’t in any of your circles, so I didn’t really exist for you as a real person,” I said in response.

I based that answer on S’s rare attempts to make conversations with me, ones that were mostly of the shaking-his-head-in-confusion ones. He didn’t get my attraction to the pop/rock band Mr. Mister, an ’80s prelude to Creed, I guess. “They can’t sing,” S said to me in Warns’ English class once as a reference to Mr. Mister’s #1 hit “Broken Wings.” The incident on the school bus on our Albany/FDR trip was another example (see my “An a-ha Moment” post from October ’10).

Meltzer never made me feel like a was a freak. Nor did he ever engage in comparing me to S. But he obviously was concerned about him, and had been so even when we were in eleventh grade. As for me, he said, for probably the one-hundredth time, “I never worried about you, Donnie.”

At the time of my ’95 conversation with Meltzer, I’d recently published an op-ed in my hometown and county newspaper, “Solving African American Identity Crisis,” Somehow our discussion of that piece led to a discussion of S. Meltzer told me that S “had a really hard time at Harvard” and that he’d “graduated with Gentleman’s Ceeeeeeeee’s,” the C’s rolling off his tongue in the process.

Meltzer asked if I knew what S’s problem was when I brought up the whole June ’89 conversation I had with S, the one that showed me his obvious confusion about himself (see my “Strange Days” post from June ’09). After an unusually long pause on the phone — it was long even by Meltzer’s own standards — he said, “You’re exactly right.” We spent the rest of our S discussion talking about him in high school and his need to be liked as a significant part of his identity issue.

I thought of all this as me and S ended our meeting that cloudy Northern California day six years ago. As I explained my plans to track down Crush #1 as part of what would become Boy @ The Window, S warned that she “has some interpersonal issues.” As if she were somehow off her medication when she visited S in ’04. I said, “Don’t we all?” in response. Neither of us had any room to talk about anyone else’s issues.

Humanities Origins: Goofball

05 Thursday May 2011

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This week marks thirty years since I learned that my sixth grade teacher Mrs. Della Bryant had recommended me and two other classmates into Mount Vernon public schools’ Humanities Program. It was a great achievement, but it felt bittersweet at the same time. For it came a week after the end of my friendship to Starling, and three weeks into the bizarre-ness of being a Hebrew-Israelite. It was the beginning of six long years of learning life’s lessons the hard way, like a soft-shelled crab in the middle of a hailstorm.

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Mrs. Bryant had pushed for my acceptance into Mount Vernon’s Humanities Program at the beginning of May. Between my SRA scores (Reading, 12th grade level; Math, 11th grade level), three years as a straight-A student and her recommendation, it was pretty much a slam dunk. This meant that I could spend as much as the next six years taking accelerated courses with the brightest students in Mount Vernon. When Mrs. Bryant told me about her recommendation, I bounced the seven blocks home to tell Mom about the opportunity. Mom asked, “Are you sure about this?,” as if I was planning to become a Catholic priest. I responded with an emphatic, sportscaster Marv Albert-esque “Yes!”

Of all the things that I was first asked to do after Mrs. Bryant told me that I was in, I had to pick a language of study — for the next four years! I didn’t think much past the next couple of weeks, except when waxing philosophic, so four years might as well have been forty. I opted for Italian over Spanish and French, mostly because of my love for spaghetti and pizza and Italian cheeses, a desire to visit Little Italy, and because the other six Holmes School classmates who had been accepted into Humanities chose the other languages.

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But with the loss of Starling as my best friend, it was hard to celebrate without feeling lost and loss. I hoped that, at the least, that I could connect with the other kids that would make up Humanities at A.B. Davis Middle School in seventh grade. I hoped that I would do as well as I’d done between fourth and sixth grade, that I could prove myself as among the smartest — if not the smartest — kid in the program. Most of all, I hoped that I’d be challenged in ways that fourth, fifth and sixth grade hadn’t.

A.B. Davis Middle School, Humanities Wing, November 21, 2006. Donald Earl Collins.

As it turned out, I was challenged. Thoroughly. My future and now former classmates challenged all of my assumptions about people and life, about how the world works, about relationships, tolerance and acceptance. I faced challenges that I couldn’t have possibly anticipated three decades ago.

I attended William H. Holmes Elementary, a school that was 99.8 Black and Latino, with high number of kids from poor and low-income backgrounds. I assumed that with a greater degree of intelligence came a greater degree of acceptance, but I hadn’t learned anything about eugenics or Nazism as an intellectual practice yet. (Not that Humanities was an incubator of Nazism, but it shows how poor my assumptions were.) I was arguably the highest performing student in my class, but that’s like saying that I’d won a hot-dog eating contest against a two-year-old.

But that was all to come with the transition to middle school, the economic collapse of my family and the puberty process. In the moment of origin in May ’81, I was on an academic high that I wouldn’t achieve again until my junior year at the University of Pittsburgh. I was a newborn baby, beautiful yet naive, not yet ready for the torture of the growing pains that would follow.

High Falsetto Highs and Lows

25 Monday Apr 2011

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I know that I’m weird, a freak, and if I were a quarter-century younger, a bit geekish. Well, maybe a geek in a tall man’s body with fourteen percent body fat. Music is one of those things that separates me as weird. Not just because of what I listen to from moment to moment. Smooth jazz to R&B to hip-hop soul to ’80s pop to ’90 White male angst grunge to rap to divas like Mariah Carey and Celine Dion. Few people I know — much less males, much, much less Black males — have any appreciation for eclectic musical tastes. But they’ve had almost no tolerance for my high-falsetto singing voice over the years.

Puberty was the reason I discovered it all. My closest friends and wife don’t believe me when I tell them that I used to be able to hold a tune. That in sixth, seventh and eight grade, I sang with my elementary school and middle school chorus. I was a baritone, and a decent one at that. But the voice changes of puberty cracked my voice and sent it into high falsetto in ’83, ’84 and into ’85, whenever I did try to sing.

So I went with it. Once I reconnected with music outside of school in the ’80s, I sang mostly in that ear-splitting, shaky and unevenly high tone and pitch to everything I liked. And that made me stand out, mostly as the weird guy with the Walkman that my fellow Black males made fun of for not being cool. Did I care? Sure, in an obvious, I-know-I-don’t-fit-in kind of way. But, did I care? For the most part, no. I knew enough to not walk down certain streets in Mount Vernon and certain part of the high school singing in that voice, walking to the beat of my own internal music box.

That voice was my release. As awful as I sounded in it, as imperfect and grating my tone, as much of a strain as I put on my cords, it was one of a handful of ways for me to experience happiness, joy, laughter. Other emotions besides rage, fear and anger. That’s what singing Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time,” Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature,” and a-ha’s “Take On Me” well outside my normal vocal range did for me. It gave me a high without the benefit of pot, and a low without the benefit of friends.

Singing in high falsetto still brings a natural high. Except now, I laugh at myself while doing it, and I don’t care about the people who think I’m a freak because I sound like a buffoon. Damn right.

Cream on the Brain

12 Sunday Dec 2010

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A Brain Floating in the Heavy Cream of Obsession with Academic Excellence, December 13, 2010. Donald Earl Collins

A quarter-century ago, education scholar and Ford Foundation education program director Jeanne Oakes published Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality. Oakes’ groundbreaking, definitive work on the educational inequalities created or reinforced by ability grouping has led a whole generation of scholars to examine the viability of tracking in K-12 education. In a 2005 edition of her book, Oakes wrote that “through tracking, schools continue to replicate existing inequality along lines of race and social class and contribute to the intergenerational transmission of social and economic inequality.”

I picked up Oakes’ Keeping Track for the first time in ’90. By then, I already knew from experience how true her words and research were. Six years in Mount Vernon, New York’s public schools via the Humanities Program had taught me all I’d need to know about the tensions between creating a class of students whose level of academic performance was par excellence while simultaneously addressing segregation and diversity in the school district. The magnet program and the district failed at one and succeeded at the other, which in turn reinforced its failure.

I worked on a paper some twenty years ago for the late Barbara Sizemore, my professor at the University of Pittsburgh my senior year (and a former superintendent of DC Public Schools) looking at how magnet school programs actually created resegregation in individual schools and Pittsburgh Public Schools because of the exclusivity that comes with tracking or ability grouping. It was an easy paper for me to do, guided in no small part by my experiences in Humanities at Davis Middle and Mount Vernon High School. Easy, but not easy to get a handle on beyond the obvious demographics of race, class and test scores.

I managed to wiggle myself into the culture wars of the early ’90s and the debate around multiculturalism and K-12 education soon after that paper. It seems obvious now that the unacknowledged diversity of Humanities was what enabled me to take sides in favor of multiculturalism. That led to my dissertation looking at the historical development of multiculturalism among Blacks in Washington, DC (“A Substance of Things Hoped For,” Carnegie Mellon University, 1997 for those who want more information), and eventually, my first book, Fear of a “Black” America from six years ago.

But it took my memoir Boy @ The Window to bring me back to square one. I realized about a year ago that I’d done nearly thirty interviews of former classmates, teachers and administrators for the manuscript. There was much more material to mine beyond their impressions of me and how to shape their descriptions of themselves — and my memories of them — into characters for Boy @ The Window. I decided to work on an academic piece that looked at the benefits and pitfalls of high-stakes schooling — not just testing — in the form of a history lesson via magnet schools, specifically my Humanities experience.

After a quick rejection, I redoubled my efforts a few months ago. I decided to look at the education psychology and sociology literature, as well as Oakes again, to see how these interviews and my experiences could be useful in our testing-obsessed times. I finally realized what had troubled me about Humanities for the past three decades. It was the reality that all involved with Humanities had taken on the e pluribus unum identity of an academic superstar (much more than just a nerd, by the way). Beyond Black or White, and ignoring the realities of poverty in our district and (at least for me) in our program, Humanities was all about sharpening our academic personas above all else.

This fueled the major success of Humanities during its existence between ’76 and ’93, which in turn would define its failures. In successfully nurturing the idea of academic excellence as identity, as evidenced by so many of us attending and graduating from college, this magnet program failed in its other major educational functions. It failed to embrace diversity, to help its students understand the diversity that was Humanities, to nurture creativity and imagination beyond A’s and college acceptances. It failed to develop the whole student, which aside from its charge to help desegregate Mount Vernon public schools, was its original mission.

Humanities failed because its teachers, administrators (including the former superintendent of schools) and many of the most vocal parents (mostly affluent and White) refused to deal with diversity seriously. Academic excellence without significant parental engagement or the humility necessary to discuss issues of race, gender, class, sexual orientation led to a severe overemphasis on calling us the “creme de la creme.” All of this would have a negative impact on our development as students, and as emerging adults.

I don’t think that it’s asking too much of parents, administrators and teachers to work together in both striving for academic excellence while building programs that embrace difference and nurture creativity and imagination, and not just an addiction to A’s. Or is it?

Strange Days

24 Wednesday Jun 2009

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Cover for the album Strange Days by The Doors, September 1967, scanned June 27, 2008. (Father McKenzie via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use because of low resolution of scanned album cover.

Being on campus at Princeton teaching for a few weeks and working with college-ready high school students sometimes takes me back into my past. It’s funny really, realizing that the “best and the brightest” were hardly the best and weren’t quite so bright, even at the time I went to school with them. That’s not to say that the students I’ve had or have now at Princeton or the classmates I graduated with didn’t or don’t have loads of potential. They did and do. It’s more about what can happen when teachers, administrators and parents fill our heads full with delusions of grandeur, with ideas of intellectual greatness based on signs of academic excellence. It’s what can happen when students spend more time trying to keep up with the image of high academic achievement that others have created for them rather than finding their own path, one that allows them to be themselves and to tap into their potential.

I know, I know, some students strive and thrive even with the pressures from their parents, the doting of teachers, and the turning-the-other-way of administrators. I could also be accused of playa hatin’, I suppose. After all, I was far from popular in my glory days of high school, and only found myself in the last two and a half years of college. But that’s just it. Even I had to come to grips with my family’s expectations — especially the lack of them — in high school and college. I needed to find myself in order to be all that I could be in college and in grad school. I needed to make a clean break from the doubters in my life — including of course, my teachers and administrators.

That’s the unfortunate truth I faced in my last two years at Mount Vernon High School. Especially when the class rankings came out a month into our senior year. Out of 545 potential graduates, I was ranked fourteenth. I was a little disappointed because I didn’t crack the top ten, mostly because I knew I needed scholarship money and a good financial aid package to help pay for college, wherever I went. I had already learned that my performance wasn’t good enough for my teachers in eleventh grade. They kept reminding me that I was doing nothing in comparison to the salutatorian in our class, an involved-in-everything Black male. I guess I could’ve argued that they should’ve been comparing me to our Class of ’87 valedictorian, but my teachers saw the second in our class as a much more well-rounded student. At the very least, I knew from the comparisons that the person I was supposed to be more like had a charming way with our teachers.

I saw this particular classmate as more of an enigma than many of the other ones I had done time with in Humanities. I genuinely felt both in awe of and disheartened by his presence in my life during the Humanities years. I thought it was amazing that he was able to do as much as he did. The high school band. The mock trial team. The school newspaper. Our yearbook. An appearance on Phil Donahue! At least he wasn’t a star basketball player too, especially in Mount Vernon.

Yet I saw the results of all of that involvement on his part, and not just in terms of how teachers saw me. As far as teachers were concerned, it was as if I was this classmate’s younger, underachieving brother. But I also saw how the young man occasionally worked his reputation to his advantage, cashing in on his built-up academic capital to give himself more time to work on assignments no one else got a second of overtime to do. I don’t think I ever wanted to be him or become close friends with him, though. Something about his need to be well-liked by our peers and teachers bothered me. So I was happy in more ways than one to see our salutatorian gallop into the sunset with his diploma, a law firm job in Manhattan, and his ticket to Harvard punched some twenty-two years ago.

Ralph Fiennes and Angela Bassett in Strange Days (1995), screen shot, November 12, 2009. (http://ugo.com via Fox Entertainment). Qualifies as fair use because of low resolution of screen shot, not meant for redistribution.

Something strange happened in the days after the final fight between my mother and ex-stepfather in June ’89 (see my “The Miracle of Divorce” post from earlier this month). It was a week after idiot Maurice had moved out for the last time. Me and my older brother Darren were on our way to my father Jimme’s for money and because Darren was in the process of moving out of 616 — God knows he needed to. Along the way, we bumped into Crush #1, which is a story unto itself, a good one that is. Ten minutes later we bumped into salutatorian off The Avenue and West First, still trekking toward Jimme’s. This surprise meeting trumped my Crush #1 conversation and made a lasting impression on my understanding of myself as a Black male. So much so that I had a long conversation with my late teacher Harold Meltzer about it years later.

When I bumped into the man en route to Jimme’s with Darren, he’d just gotten off work at his summer law firm job in the city, his third summer working there. He was wearing a hideous green-and-white-checkered dress shirt with dark green suspenders and even darker green slacks. Why hideous? Because on a hot and hazy day in late-June ’89, a day in which batting an eyelash required some degree of sweat, the guy was dressed like it was the middle of March. The color scheme didn’t blend at all with his dark chocolate skin, and his face was both greasy and sweaty from a long, hard day. But the biggest shock was his hair. It was conked — or fried as some folks say — ala Miles Davis or Malcolm Little before he became Malcolm X. This was the first thing I noticed, even before the Green Giant getup. Since I was already in a pissy mood, one only mildly moderated by my Crush #1 sighting and conversation, I didn’t outwardly react to it.

I realized as I stood there with Darren talking to my former classmate what had bothered me about him

Jolly Green Giant statue in Blue Earth, Minnesota, May 20, 2006. (Jonathunder via Wikipedia). Released into public domain via CC and & GFDL.

during all of our years together in Humanities. I had called him an “Oreo Cookie “—Black on the outside, White in the middle — in my head and under my breath on a few occasions during our Humanities years. Yet this sighting and conversation let me know that I was wrong. Sadly, I realized that our salutatorian didn’t have any identity at all. He made himself into whomever others wanted him to be. To his family, he was the mild-mannered and religiously faithful kid who just happened to be smart. To our teachers, he was super-intelligent, an overstretched overachiever whom teachers gave the benefit of the doubt if his assignment was late and he needed an extra day. To many of us, he was the polar opposite of our eventual valedictorian, a talented competitor who was far more worthy of our school’s number one status. I’m sure to a fair number of his Harvard classmates saw him as a marvel, either not “Black” enough or too much of a “credit to his race.”

The person I saw that day wasn’t the confident, take-on-the-world with a-smile-on-his-face person I’d seen in action for six years in Humanities. He was confident enough to attempt to act that way toward me, though. I got the story about how life at Harvard was good, that he was succeeding academically and that he’d found a way to fit in with his mostly White, six-figure and two-comma classmates. He also still intended to go to law school. And though his job at the law firm was difficult, he said that he enjoyed that also. My former classmate must’ve thought that he was talking to the uncultured twelve-year-old I once had been. His utter lack of details about classes, people, majors or professors let me know right away that life for his at America’s preeminent university was somewhere between rocky and a living hell.

My conversation with the person folks thought I should be much more like was a major revelation. It explained why it took until I was a sophomore in college to find my footing. We all had significant identity issues, exaggerated by our competitive conditioning as Humanities students. These weren’t typical teenage struggles over being cool or not. Especially when being cool meant being “Black” or “Italian” or “anti-intellectual” or a “brainiac,” not just “cool” in general. You could say that our grades and ranks—or shunning them as the case might’ve been—were as much a part of our individual identities as being affluent or Jewish or Black. Our salutatorian may well have been an extreme example of this, but he was hardly alone. Everyone in Humanities, even the “cool” cliques within had their share of identity issues to reconcile or struggle with.

My own identity issues were many and varied. In my case, though, I’d been working on reconciling mine since the middle of seventh grade. I realized that the battle I’d been waging for so long came out of my identity crisis, one that started as a spiritual disconnect between being a Hebrew-Israelite and watching my stepfather break every rule in the Talmud while attempting to break me and my mother. That battle didn’t even begin to subside until I decided to embrace myself for who I was, good, bad and ugly. Once I took that proactive step, shooting for the best person I could be and small miracles like real friendships were only a matter of time. It’s a lesson that I hope the high-potential students I’ve taught the past couple of years learn, and learn well.