Tag Archives: Internalized Racism

When I Choose The Wrong Book For a Class

09 Saturday Nov 2019

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

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Screen Shot of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007), by Dinaw Mengestu, November 9., 2019. (https://target.com).

Yes, I’m back! After two months of grading, writing, pitching, grading, revising, pitching, and more grading, though I’m not sure I’m ready to be back, but I have things to get down on here anyway.

I have taught eighty undergrad and grad-level classes since 1996, and been a part of more than 90 high school, college, and graduate classes as a guest lecturer, TA, instructor, or professor since 1991. I have definitely made more than my share of mistakes in the classroom. Miscounted the number of students to split into small groups. Occasionally quipped in New Yorker-sarcasm English to my Midwestern or Southern-raised students, not exactly endearing myself to them. I have miscalculated grades, posted an electronic announcement to one class when it was meant for another. But, on historical context, historical content, storytelling, use of materials, the substance and guts of courses, I can honestly say I do not allow myself to make egregious errors.

Now, that does not mean that I haven’t inherited errors from courses that others had taught or haven’t been hamstrung with mediocre materials and textbooks that my previous institutions (and one current one) have said were just fine for my students over the years. This is about my unforced errors.

This semester, in my Washington, DC class (the full title is Washington, DC: Life Inside a Monument, a terrible title, really) at AU, I made one all-time error, one in which I should take 60 percent of the blame. I chose a book for the course based mostly on a couple of recommendations from colleagues, a Washington Post review of the best books on DC and the DMV, and an admittedly quick skimming of the first 15 pages. It was Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, a historical novel about the lonely and isolated experience of one Sepha Stephanos, an Ethiopian immigrant living in Logan Circle, set some 17 years after his escape from the Ethiopian Civil War (roughly 1996 or 1997).

I picked it ultimately because there are precious few books about any aspect the DC immigrant experience, much less one about the history of Black and Brown immigrants in the area. The problem was, I decided to read the book — one month into the semester, that is. Once I dug in, I started having flashbacks of my AP English class with Rosemary Martino, where we spent the better part of three months reading Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Mengestu’s Sepha was not lonely, apathetic, and dyspeptic merely because he was a thirtysomething stranger in the strange land of the US, of DC, of Black DC. I’m more than sure that loneliness and isolation are an inevitable consequence of leaving one’s home country and family behind for another country in another part of the world. But no, most of Sepha’s isolation was self-imposed. For 17 years, this man lived in a predominantly Black part of DC, in the midst of a nascent Ethiopian residential and business community within walking distance of his apartment and corner store, during the heart of the Marion Barry years. Yet he only has two friends, one from Kenya, the other from the DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo). Really?

What was worse was once the White character Judith and her biracial daughter Naomi moved into Logan Square at the height of Sepha’s deepening self-loathing and depression. Judith apparently bought a mansion-turned-broken-down-addict hangout across the street from Sepha, and spent a significant chunk of change fixing it up for upper-middle-class habitability. Sepha becomes enamored with the two of them as they began to frequent his falling-apart store. He becomes sort-of-friends with Judith, and sort-of-a-father-figure to Naomi.

There were at least four times between pages 52 and 120 where I put down the book out of sheer frustration with the plot, the characters, and with Mengestu for writing this non-historical, non-realistic historical novel. Mengestu crafted a main character that had serious internalized racism, and was as anti-Black as a drunk Trump supporter at a tiki-torch rally. How can any reader explain a man who owns a store for the better part of a decade and a half in Black Washington, interacting with Black women of all classes and stripes — some presumably who may have struck up a conversation with him, some presumably with a precocious preteen daughter — and it’s this first White women in the neighborhood that raises your spirits?

Mengestu had Sepha do awkward Data-from-Star-Trek: TNG-type things. Like standing in the middle of the sidewalk a block from his place while watching Judith go into her house. Or over-explaining the shabbiness of his apartment to Judith, who invited herself over to his place. Or weird kisses between Sepha and Judith, not unlike ones involving two tweeners unsure of themselves. The awkwardness ultimately stems from Sepha’s elitism, self-loathing, and internalized racism. Judith is too good for me, was what Sepha thought, just like he thought he was too good for too poor and too Black Logan Circle. That’s why this thirtysomething man was acting like a weird homeless stalker, fully befitting a macabre and existential Dostoyevsky work.

But then came the backlash from the Mengestu-reverse-one-drop-rule approach to pre-gentrification gentrification. Somehow, the Black Washingtonians in Logan Circle became so hostile to the presence of one White woman with a kid that they threw a brick through her window and later set fire to her house. In what scenario in any major city in the US have Black folks ever deliberately attempted to forcibly drive out White folks who happened to move into a predominately Black neighborhood? There isn’t one.

My students, for the most part, though, loved the book. They thought it was “so cool” to get a glimpse of the “real” immigrant experience from an atypical perspective. They really liked the interplay between Sepha, Judith, and Naomi. They mostly wrote papers relating the book to the actual relations between Black Washingtonians in Shaw with the Ethiopia community there. They used Mengestu’s book as evidence that Blacks in Shaw drove Ethiopians out of Shaw and across the border into Silver Spring, Maryland, all because Black Shaw residents blocked renaming the U Street strip “Little Ethiopia” in 2005. All these conclusions, despite two full hours of discussion over two weeks about the books and its historical and local inconsistencies and stereotypes.

I haven’t been this beside myself about having inadvertently reinforced racial and cultural stereotypes since the first time I taught World History under Peter Stearns in 1994. But at least I was a 24-year-old grad student then. Now, I’m thinking that maybe 2.5 hours per week with my mostly affluent and White students is not enough time to counteract the idea that an excursion to Georgetown, Nats Park, or Chinatown is peak DC exploration. I also think that me as the little-old-nobody professor cannot overcome a MacArthur “genius” award-winner author whose book libraries possess in volume and school districts like DCPS and Montgomery County (and apparently) all over the country regularly use.

But if Mengestu is a genius, he is such because he has captured the White gaze. A story about Ethiopian migration to the US and the impact of such on that generation between the late-1970s and the turn of the 21st century. It is tailor-made to pull on the heartstrings of White Baby Boomers and loaded with a sense of exoticism. Mengestu’s DC looks more like where he grew up in real life (Peoria, Illinois and in the Chicagoland area — pretty White-bred communities, really) than any part of the DMV I have experienced since 1992. And no, being a Georgetown University student and earning a bachelor’s degree in the process is nowhere near enough time in DC to realistically depict even a sliver of DC, fiction or nonfiction.

I have learned my lesson. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears will not be a part of any course I teach moving forward. I will continue to pick books as I always have before this one. I will rely on my own counsel, and unlike most of my colleagues, will actually continue to read them before I put them in my syllabi. As for this DC course, I am replacing Mengestu’s book of anti-Blackness and elitism with Camille Acker’s Training School for Negro Girls. If I am going to continue to use historical fiction, it should center Black girls and Black women living in DC/the DMV, and not Mengestu’s kinder, gentler version of Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov in Sepha.

What Trump in 2017 and My Dad in 1984 Have In Common

24 Thursday Aug 2017

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

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Donald Trump greets supporters after a rally, Mobile, Alabama, August 27, 2015. (Mark Wallheiser/Getty via http://www.telegraph.co.uk/).

The first time I ever heard of Donald J. Trump was while working for my father in the fall of 1984. It was in the context of having to work for our money with my dad from August until December that year. Not to mention, Walter Mondale’s sad and forlorn presidential run, Jesse Jackson’s “Hymietown” sound bite, and my Mets making themselves relevant again with Strawberry and Gooden. So many Friday evenings, Saturday and Sunday mornings in that part of the year, me and my brother Darren spent on the 2 Subway going to the Upper West Side to clean co-ops and condos, offices and hallways with so many industrial cleaning and buffing machines. And usually, my father was either drinking, hung over, or jonesin’ for a drink during these nearly weekly weekend job duties for nearly four months.

My father would often name drop as part of his constant yammering about “The City,” and how he was “a big shot doctor an’ lawyer” working carpet cleaning machines on the eighteen floor of a co-op off 68th and Broadway or 77th and Columbus. For two weekends, we worked the Upper East Side off the 86th Street Subway stop. It was during those weekends on the blocks between White Manhattan and Spanish Harlem that I learned who really ran the city.

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

“You know who really run dis city? Milstein,” my father said, as if I had asked him about New York’s movers and shakers. I remained silent as I worked the buffing machine in an office building lobby.

“But dere ‘nother one comin’ up. That Donal’ Trump a good bid-ness man dere! Yep, yep!,” my father continued while waging his right index finger in admiration.

I didn’t think much of the comment at that moment, because it was part of my dad’s typical “Lo’ at dis po’ ass muddafucka! I make fitty million dollas a week!” delusional diatribes. But soon after, I remembered seeing something about Trump and his first wife Ivana in the Daily News. It was probably related to one of his business deals, either for the eventual Trump Tower, the hotel deal near Grand Central, or his fight with Koch over being snubbed out of the work for the new Jacob Javitz Convention Center. I thought nothing of the man beyond the truth for people like me, people who tended to be repulsed by narcissistic self-aggrandizers seeking attention and praise.

But in those Lifestyle of the Rich and Famous times, it was obvious Trump believed in host Robin Leach’s closing words. “champagne wishes and caviar dreams.” The man always talked about making deals, making money, and living as if he were a single man with an insatiable libido and without kids. More than once, in listening to this unseemly rich man, I thought, “Sounds just like Jimme.”

To think that an eventual US president would have the same ways of viewing the world as an inebriated man in his mid-forties is beyond troubling. At the very least, it makes me wonder what kind of drugs 45 has snorted over the years. But it also is proof of the pervasiveness of American narcissism. That a Black man with a seventh-grade education — not to mention, an alcoholic with a $30,000-a-year job — could see himself as a “big shot” in the same way as 45 sees himself as a “successful businessman” with at least four bankruptcies, a $200 million trust fund and a $1-million loan courtesy of his dad to his credit. It points to a society that seethes with an egocentric penchant for money, riches, and power to lord over others. It points to a people who self-loathe so much that jealousy can be normalized, that using precious psychological, emotional, spiritual, and even material resources to one-up themselves over unnamed others whom they see as their lessers is an everyday thing.

Luckily, my father sobered up about whom he had been, his narcissism, the many slights he absorbed as a late-era Black migrant in New York, the many jealousies he harbored, and his own self-hatred. And that was all before he stopped drinking at the end of 1997. That doesn’t mean that my father now qualifies for sainthood. But he is at least in touch with who he is, and the need to be a better person every day.

Losing brain cells, September 27, 2013. (http://www.dailyhealthpost.com).

45, though, hasn’t grown a single self-reflective neuron in the past thirty-three years. Matter of fact, as evidenced with so many verbal explosions over Charlottesville and “Rus-shur,” 45 may have destroyed at least five billion neurons since Ivanka was a toddler. America, to its collective detriment, has a 71-year-old less psychologically able to be president than my father would’ve been during the worst of his alcoholic times. What makes this unsurprising, sad, and anger-inducing, is that the US has had at least a half-dozen other presidents who also shouldn’t have been trusted to sit next to my dad and remain civil at the same “Shamrock Bar” on East 241st Street, where he frequently gave away his paychecks.

So America, 45 is “a shame and a pitiful,” as my father would say. A shame to the US and the world stage, and a pitiful mess for anyone to watch in action.

 

Fun Times With Stepfather Maurice

03 Wednesday Aug 2016

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

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Male lion eating carcass (the equivalent of fun times with Maurice), August 3, 2016. (Aljameen Alston via http://pinterest.com).

Male lion eating carcass (the equivalent of fun times with Maurice), August 3, 2016. (Aljameen Alston via http://pinterest.com).

Today would be my idiot ex-stepfather’s Maurice Eugene Washington’s sixty-sixth birthday. Maurice died almost four years ago, after a twenty-year losing battle with Type-2 diabetes, kidney failure, hypertension, heart disease, limbs lost, and a host of other ailments included. That, after years of abusing his body with food, much more often than he laid a fist or kick on me or my Mom.

Most of the time these days, I feel far more pity for Maurice than anger. Forgiveness does come with the benefit of some empathy. If only because I know that Maurice had less maturity and more confusion in his heart than a sociopathic misogynist in the middle of puberty. Which, in point of fact, would pretty much describe my ex-stepfather from the time his was fifteen until his death in 2012.

So in the spirit of macabre humor, below are some of Maurice’s favorite stock phrases from my being forced to grow up around him between ’81 and ’89. Most of these made it to Boy @ The Window:

“You and your brother [Darren] are gonna be my brown-skinned servants.”

“Take that base outta ya voice, boy, before I cave yo’ chest in!”

Maurice would sometimes sing his threats, bellowing

‘I’m gonna beat yo’ ass, jus’ like a car burns gas,’ adding, ‘And ya KNOW that!’ at the end

It was something he pulled from the disco group known as the The Jammers.

Whenever I reminded him that he wasn’t my father or whenever I told him that I’d never call him “Dad” again, Maurice would yell

Don’t you EVER say that again, muthafucka! I’ll kill you next time!

Sometimes, he’d threatened to kick me out of 616.

That boy’s defiant. I won’t tolerant it in my house!

Once I passed fourteen, I knew this was an idle threat. Boy, he loved calling me “boy” or “it” when I stood my ground. Maurice had colorism issues long before I ever knew what colorism was.

Or, Maurice would get all Hebrew-Israelite on me and quote from Exodus 20.

Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.

Even in the midst of busted lips, bruised ribs, and knots on my forehead, I found that last one absolutely preposterous. We owned nothing. This irrational abusive asshole wasn’t my father, and had beaten up my Mom in front of me. Only a god in cahoots with the devil him or herself — or my idiot ex-stepfather — would think that Exodus 20 applied to my situation with this shell of a human being. Mind you, the fool kept quoting this verse to me as late as the week before he broke up with my Mom in ’89!

There is some humor to glean from these, as much as you can find alcohol content in a fresh slice of bacon. I just hope I never say things even in the same galaxy of stupid, demeaning, or threatening to my own son as this idiot said to me growing up.

Sometimes, though, when my son asks, I tell him what it would be like to have an abusive father in the form of Maurice. Sometimes I’ve even imitated how the fool would’ve sounded, and my son will then start to laugh. Luckily, he sees my stories as stories, not the hellish nightmare that my life had once been.

Where Everything Equals “Radical Islam” Terrorism

14 Tuesday Jun 2016

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

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Mr. Crocker from The Fairly Odd Parents, June 14, 2016. (http://cdn.smosh.com/).

Mr. Crocker from The Fairly Odd Parents, June 14, 2016. (http://cdn.smosh.com/).

The tragic shame of fifty dead and fifty-three wounded because of one Omar Mateen’s anti-Black, anti-Puerto Rican, anti-gay, and anti-Islam hatred. The attack on an LGBT sanctuary in Orlando, Florida will continue to make news as the world learns more about the deceased attacker, his family and friends, as well as about the dozens of living and dead victims of Mateen’s venom.

While there is much to learn about all of this, there is one thing Americans and the world already know. That we as Americans — politicians, media, and ordinary citizens — are incredibly quick at jumping to conclusions before we have any facts at all. Declaring Omar Mateen an example of “radical Islamism” when he barely brushed an arm of anyone even remotely connected to terrorism in the name of Islam? Thanks a lot, Hillary (you’re supposed to be the sensible choice of the two presidential candidates, right?)!

Really, our reaction as a nation is no different from Mr. Crocker’s to unexplainable phenomenon on NickToon’s The Fairly Odd Parents – a play on the words “fairy godparents.” Until my son hit his preteens, I’d been subjected to six years of this ridiculous show about a permanent ten-year-old with fairies granting his every wish, all to his and the world’s detriment. Mr. Crocker, his permanent elementary school teacher, once had fairies when he himself was a kid. Upon suspecting that his charge has fairies of his own, Mr. Crocker became obsessed, building gadgets and devising plans to prove to himself and the world that fairies exist. Or, even more extreme, to steal the ten-year-old’s fairies and use their power to dominate the world.

But instead of yelling “FAIRIES!!! FAIRIES!!! FAIRIES!!!” every time a mass killing occurs in the US, we scream “TERRORISTS!!! TERRORISTS!!! TERRORISTS!!!” To be sure, what Mateen did was an act of terror. In our use of the term, though, Americans always mean terrorists who are of Arab descent, terrorists who claim Islam as their religion. We don’t do this for White “Christians” like Dylann Roof or, going back two decades, Timothy McVeigh. Why is that? Because we Americans are so obsessed with IS (Islamic State), that we never deal with our own -isms. Which ultimately may be why Mateen could take his internalized homophobia, racism, and misogyny and explode it into taking and harming the lives of so many innocents.

Second Semester Crunch Time

21 Thursday Jan 2016

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

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Maybe not a HOF, but a great crunch time catch (literal and figurative) by Terrell Owens, San Francisco 49ers vs. Green Bay Packers, Wildcard Game, Candlestick Park, January 3, 1999. (http://sfgate.com).

Maybe not a HOF, but a great crunch time catch (literal and figurative) by Terrell Owens, San Francisco 49ers vs. Green Bay Packers, Wildcard Game, Candlestick Park, January 3, 1999. (http://sfgate.com).

As this spring semester begins for me at UMUC — a cruel euphemism in January with a windchill around -10°C and a major winter storm approaching the Mid-Atlantic — I’ve reminded myself of the same calendar twenty-eight years ago. As I’ve already noted through my blog and through Boy @ The Window, this was to be a make-or-break semester for me. I had to step up my game at the University of Pittsburgh or go home. And by home, I mean to 616, a place in Mount Vernon, New York that might as well been my burial plot if I had managed to lose my Challenge Scholarship after that Winter Term 1988.

As I wrote in my book

Despite my advisor, I decided to take a full load of classes, balancing two math courses with two history ones, with “rocks for jocks” Geology being the fifth one. The others were Western Civ II, Roman History, Calculus II (the regular one, not Honors), and Logic.

It was to be a sixteen-credit semester. My advisor, a one-time PhD candidate in the History Department at Pitt (talk about life have no coincidences, past, present or future), thought that after my 2.63 first semester, that I had no business making my college schedule more difficult. But after four years of Sylvia Fasulo at Mount Vernon High School, I decided I was through taking advice about taking it easy. I might’ve not known much about my inner self in January ’88, but I knew this much. I was never the guy to take the easy, path-of-least-resistance road in my education. Fact is, I never had the choice of an easy road at any point in my life.

The only obviously easy course of the five I took was Geology 89, and it was only easy because it was a lecture hall course with three multiple choice exams and one textbook. Calc II — with its focus on integrals, volumes, spheres, and other pre-differential calculations — I figured would be easier than Honors Calc I, partly because I excelled on this part of the AP Calculus course the year before (I probably earned my 3 on the AP Calc BC exam on the strength of that work), and partly because this wasn’t an Honors course.

Advanced logic equations, January 20, 2016. (http://www.galilean-library.org).

Advanced logic equations, January 20, 2016. (http://www.galilean-library.org).

Then there was Logic. An ironic choice of a title, since the course didn’t make sense to me from day one. Inductive and deductive reasoning, so the British-born professor told us the first day. With so many symbols and few numbers, how could I consistently deduce an answer to any logic equation? And, what the heck did any of this have to do with being a Computer Science major, anyway?

As for Western Civ II and Roman History, I was surprised how easy I found both courses by the third week, especially after my debacle in East Asian History the month before. But then again, I didn’t miss a single class, I stayed ahead on my readings — and though I knew nearly half of the material going in — and studied as if I’d never been an A student in a history course before.

I had taken the shame of the first semester, the embarrassment of my internalized -isms and imperfections, the anger I directed toward myself, my family, and my idiot dorm mates and let it fuel me. I was on a righteous path of academic vengeance. At least that’s what I thought at the time.

A Planters Peanut Bar, April 25, 2011. (Evan-Amos via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

A Planters Peanut Bar, April 25, 2011. (Evan-Amos via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

That sober, almost single-minded focus got me noticed, even though it was my attempt at trying to lay low. I made quite a few friends that semester, most of whom I still call friend today. All of them anywhere between one and twenty years older than me. Call it a sense of maturity, my angered march toward my future, or the sense that I needed to be around folks whose lives had taken at least half as many twists and turns as my own. Whatever it was, I ended up on a path where having a social life would play as much a role in saving my educational future as showing up to all but four lectures in a sixteen-week semester.

I finished that second semester on the Dean’s List with a 3.33 GPA, and a first-year GPA of 3.02. Two A’s (my history classes), an A- in Geology, a B in Calc II, and a C+ in Logic (I did learn a few things even in that course). By the end of April, I was already thinking about switching majors to History. Of more immediate importance was my saving my scholarship for year number two. Not to mention, having friends of any significance for the first time since elementary school.

====================================================

Affirmative action opponents from Supreme Court Justices Antonio Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Chief Justice John Roberts — as well as Allan Bakke, Jennifer Gratz, Barbara Gruttinger, and Abigail Fisher — all claim that efforts to use the admissions process to bring racial (and gender and socioeconomic) diversity to college campuses is discriminatory. The College Board and ETS cite their statistics to show that the SAT is especially predictive of a student’s performance in the first semester or first year. Anyone working on college retention — especially for underrepresented students — recognizes that nearly half of all students who drop out of college do so after the first two semesters.

Orange Crush can crushed, June 8, 2012. (Susan Murtaugh via Flickr.com).

Orange Crush can crushed, June 8, 2012. (Susan Murtaugh via Flickr.com).

I knew none of this my second semester at Pitt. No one could’ve predicted my first semester’s depression or the single-minded channeling of anger and intellectual resources my second, least of all me. And no, Justice Scalia, college at a school of the stature of the University of Pittsburgh wasn’t too hard for me. It wouldn’t have been too hard for me at any other university for that matter. Life was. And yes, Ms. Gratz and Ms. Fisher, race played a significant role in where I was, where I wanted to be, and how I got there. Just not to your entitled, narcissistic disadvantage.

As for ETS and the College Board, your predictions of my struggles and triumphs based on my 65th percentile 1120 score from October ’86 were more than a bit premature. And not just mine. Fact is, the vast majority of people like me attending predominantly White institutions graduate, whether the campus climate is welcoming or not. However, having a welcoming climate, just as the one I began to discover my second semester, really helps. I guess you couldn’t predict that.

The Cold Light of Grades

05 Tuesday Jan 2016

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

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!

My One Drunk Moment, An Un-Sober Mind

21 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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16-ounce "Pounder" can of Busch Beer, November 19, 2012. (http://price2watch.com)

16-ounce “Pounder” can of Busch Beer, November 19, 2012. (http://price2watch.com)

As the son of an alcoholic father (the latter who’s been on the wagon for more than seventeen years now), I have almost always maintained control over my own alcohol intake. I’m always the designated driver, and rarely will I have three beers in one year, much less in one evening. My favorite drink is cranapple juice mixed with Disaronno, followed by Angry Orchard hard apple cider.

I have also always believed that I should be the same person, sober, buzzed, drunk and otherwise. If I’m generally a feminist on my best behavior in the classroom or at work, then I should be the same way at a dive bar on my second screwdriver. My low tolerance for bullshit — including and especially my own — should always be on display.

Both of these strands of how I’ve lived my life met a weekend of contradictions on this day/date twenty-eight years ago. In the wake of my Phyllis (Crush#2) crash-and-burn obsession and subsequent depression, I began hanging out with dorm mates at Lothrop Hall who were already dropping out of college socially by Week 11 of the Fall ’87 semester. That was a mistake of epic proportions.

Lothrop Hall (we lived on the fourth floor in 1987-88), University of Pittsburgh, June 8, 2008. (TheZachMorrisExperience via Wikipedia). Released to the public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

Lothrop Hall (we lived on the fourth floor in 1987-88), University of Pittsburgh, June 8, 2008. (TheZachMorrisExperience via Wikipedia). Released to the public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

My downward spiral was made worse a week earlier with a burglary on a Monday night at the end of October. While I took a bathroom break at the computer lab, someone stole my Calculus textbook. I felt violated, especially since it happened at work. It made me more distrustful of the people I worked with and of Pitt students in general. And after Phyllis’ wonderful response, I all but stopped going to class. I missed most of my classes the month of November, only showing up for exams or if my mood had let up long enough to allow me to function like normal. The weekend before Thanksgiving, I allowed my dorm mates to cheer me up by getting a couple of cases of Busch Beer. These were the Pounder type, sixteen-ounce cans. After getting Mike to get us the cases, we went back to Aaron’s room and started drinking. I downed four cans in fifteen minutes, and was drunk within a half hour. I started throwing around the word “bitch.” Anytime anyone mentioned Phyllis’ name — or any woman’s name for that matter — one of us said the B-word and we’d guzzle down some beer. I was drunk, but not so drunk I didn’t know what was going on around me. That night, my geeky acquaintances started calling me “Don” and “Don Ho,” since I was the life of that illegal party. I would’ve been better off smoking some cheap herb with Todd and Ollie. I recovered from my bender in time to go home for Thanksgiving, but I was in a fog for the rest of the semester.

This was how the end of my 2.63 first semester at Pitt unfolded. But that was hardly the only thing that came out of last weeks of ’87. For a long time, I was angry with myself. About Phyllis. About allowing Phyllis, my dorm mates — anyone, really — affect my emotions, my thinking, and actions over any significant period of time. So for about three months, I put everyone in my life into two categories. Men were “assholes, women were “bitches,” and I was done with humanity. And all by my eighteenth birthday.

I wasn’t just being sexist. I was being downright antisocial. I had internalized issues, about where I fit in this new world of college. I would never be man enough, Black enough, “White” enough, smart enough, athletic enough, or cool enough. At least that’s what I thought in late-November ’87.

Antisocial bumper sticker, November 21, 2015. (http://www.quotationof.com/).

Antisocial bumper sticker, November 21, 2015. (http://www.quotationof.com/).

I look back at that time and realize how stupid I was twenty-eight years ago. To think that I could go out in the world, attend a four-year institution, and not have my assumptions about the world, about people, and about myself challenged. That’s like going overseas to visit some ruins, but never meeting the people who live there (Or, in this case, like rich White Americans doing Sandals and other brown-skinned service-based vacations).

Phyllis and my dorm mates at Lothrop Hall weren’t even the first step of that process. They were the last step of a process of controlling and protecting myself from my years of living in the shadows in Mount Vernon, New York. The coping strategies I had honed for five years to survive 616 and Humanities and MVHS had barely worked. By the end of my first semester, they were completely useless. I came to realize that a strategy to seal myself up from all criticism and praise, to keep humanity out of my life, was doomed to fail. There was no way to keep the world from forming a first impression of me, no matter how many layers of invisibility I attempted to wear. But there was a way to reshape how I saw myself and the world.