This Is NOT Sparta!

11 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Sports

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Black Americans, Black Migration, Blind Patriotism, Civil Rights Movement, Civilians, Erasure, Freedom, History Lessons, Honoring, Hyper-Patriotism, Invisibility, Jim Crow, Meaning, Native Americans, Patriotism for Profit, Sacrifice, Service, Slavery, Veterans Day

“If you live in a free country, thank a veteran” poster slogan, November 10, 2015. (http://facebook.com).

Just like with Memorial Day and with Independence Day, I often find myself conflicted about Veterans Day. Not because I think individual members of the military deserve praise or scorn. As usual, the vast majority of Americans think too simplistically about their country, its people, its intentions and history, even its holidays. Too many of us go along to get along. It’s as if we expect the contradictions and tensions that make up our times and days like today to simply melt away in some high-pitched display of blind patriotism. I have not — and likely will never be — that American, pumped up with pride and affection, shouting slogans as gospel truth, thanking every member of the military for every single breath of American air that I breathe. And that is because the narrative for days like today has never worked for me.

In some respects, the blind march of Veterans Day is with Americans every single day. The media covers the military and individual military members as if all of them have spent weeks on the front lines, as if all of them are patriots above reproach. Almost all of us have known someone who’s served, and we know that service for most was never as simple as wrapping the American flag around themselves in defense of American freedoms halfway around the world (or at a base a few miles from home). In recent months, we’ve learned that much of the constant drumbeat of military-fueled patriotism the military itself has bought and paid for, at NFL and college football and baseball games. Reinforcing one of America’s main values — profit.

Army National Guardsmen about to run on field with American flags with the New England Patriots, Super Bowl XLIX, University of Phoenix Stadium, Glendale, AZ, February 1, 2015. (http://latimes.com; Getty Images).

Today is Veterans Day, created seventy-seven years ago in the aftermath of the Great War, the “War to End All Wars,” World War I. It was a terrible war, after all. Ten million soldiers and sailors on all sides died, twenty million found themselves ripped and torn apart, and eight million civilians died. But not for or in the US, where 120,000 soldiers and sailors died, a few hundred thousand were wounded, and few hundred civilians died. The US didn’t enter the war until April 1917, nearly three years into the raging Eurasian conflict. American weapons manufacturers and merchants profited greatly from the war even before the US declared war on Germany, selling arms and food to both sides.

War is never simple. Neither should be what we think of those who served or are serving. Veterans Day is about respecting those who have served or are serving. Like my youngest brother Eri, or my Uncle Felton, or my sister-in-law or my late uncle-in-laws. Thanking or respecting them, though, shouldn’t be tied directly to the idea that I “live in a free country.” I don’t believe that the US is a free country, not for me and for millions of others like me. Nor do I believe that the US military has played a role in preserving my individual freedoms and liberties historically. I am a Black man living in a society built in part on systemic racism, often maintained or reinforced by the US military. Except for some elements of the Union Army during the Civil War, the US military has played a very small role in making sure that I or anyone who looks like me — male, female or transgender — lives in a free country.

Not to mention, the US hasn’t been invaded in over 200 years (I don’t want to hear about Pancho Villa — that wasn’t an invasion). Since when does fighting North Koreans, the Viet Cong, or even Nazis equate to me and others and our “freedoms?” Seriously, every time someone says this, it’s as if you’re attempting to erase long civilian fights for civil rights, for the most basic of freedoms that the US purports to grant to every citizen. Folks who say that we should be grateful to the military for living in a free country completely make invisible Native Americans. The US military was what guaranteed their near annihilation, deculturalization and unyielding poverty, especially from 1865 on.

“This is madness!” with actor Peter Mensah, screen shot from 300 (2007), November 11, 2015. (http://youtube.com).

Yes, some of you will note that I can write my post without fear of retribution from the government. Then I will say in response, “How does serving overseas guarantee my rights?” It doesn’t. A lot went into putting me in a better position in my life. Black migration, the Civil Rights Movement (flaws and all), the sacrifices of Black and White civilian leadership (including their deaths). I am one generation removed from sharecropping and tenant farming in Georgia and Arkansas, one generation removed from the last years of the Jim Crow era. But somehow, the US military is responsible for me living “in a free country.” Sorry, but that’s a narrative I cannot get behind.

So, we should all thank individual veterans for their service. We should honor the dead and the broken among them. For whether they came to serve out of a deep sense of patriotism, because of the draft (prior to 1973), because there weren’t any jobs in their communities, or because they wanted a chance at today’s version of the GI bill, some of them have paid dearly in their service. But since we do not live in a military junta or in a totalitarian society, I dare say that I don’t have to go along with the narrative that without the military, I would be a slave. History contradicts every aspect of this false narrative.

This isn’t Sparta (Sparta wasn’t even Sparta). Nor should the US ever be Sparta.

What I Didn’t Know Growing Up – It Still Hurts

27 Thursday Feb 2014

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

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Achievements, Ancestors, Arkansas, Basketball, Black History Month, Collins Family, Family, Gill Family, Harrison Georgia, Houston Texas, Ignorance, Jim Crow, Knowledge, Lineage, Mom, Mother, Parenting, Poverty, Segregation, Tenant Farming, Universality, Wisdom

George Bernard Shaw and ignorance, June 2013. (http://www.irelandcalling.ie/).

“My people perish for a lack of knowledge,” it seems, is something that anyone can find in almost any religion’s texts anywhere. Heck, depending on perspective, even atheists in general can agree with this statement (of course, the issue would be what constitutes “knowledge”). I read this verse (it’s in Hosea and Isaiah, and versions of it as well as in Jewish texts and the Qur’an) for the first time when I was fifteen in ’85, less than a year after I converted to Christianity. Boy, I had no idea how little I knew about myself, my family and my history when I first read that verse twenty-nine years ago.

In light of the end of Black History Month, I wouldn’t be me without noting how little any of us know about our families, our lineages and our ancestors. But it’s not just true of the millions of us descended from West and Central Africans kidnapped, bound, abused, raped and nearly worked to death to provide Europeans (and Arabs) wealth and comfort. Most of us don’t even know what we think we know about much more recent history and events than surviving the Middle Passage or overcoming Jim Crow.

A rabbi, a priest and an imam, 2013-2014. (PizzaSpaghetti via http://www.deviantART.com).

For me and my family, I knew so little about us that my Mom could’ve told me that Satan had thrown us out of Hell for being too brown to burn and I would’ve accepted it as an appropriate answer. All I really knew of my mother’s side of my family was that they were from Arkansas, that my Uncle Sam (I chuckled sometimes thinking of the irony) was my Mom’s closest sibling, and that they grew up as dirt poor as anyone could get without living in a thatched root hut on less than $1 a day.

I asked for more during those rare moments when my focus wasn’t on high school, getting into college and getting as far away from 616 and Mount Vernon, New York as possible. I ended up finding out about how my Mom’s mother once beat her with the back of a wooden brush for not being ready on time for church, that there were years where her father made only $200 total from cotton farming, and that she was the oldest of twelve kids. She had done some form of work either taking care of her siblings, cooking, cleaning, washing clothes by hand, and hoeing and picking cotton, since she was five or six. Oh yeah, and she played basketball in high school.

On my father’s side, I knew a bit more, if only because Darren and me went with my father to visit the Collins farm in Harrison, Georgia in August ’75. I was five and a half then, but I do remember the fresh smoked ham and bacon, the smell of my grandfather’s Maxwell House coffee, me being too scared to ride a horse, so they put me on a sow (my brother did ride the horse, though). But what people did, how a Black family owned their own land going back to the turn of the twentieth century, I wouldn’t have known to even ask about at not quite six years old.

What I didn’t know until after high school, college, even after earning a Ph.D. in knowing (that’s what a history degree ultimately is) was so much worse than I imagined. To find out at twenty-three that my Mom was a star basketball player in high school. She played center, and led her team to Arkansas’ segregated state quarterfinals in ’65. My Uncle Sam played four sports in high school (basketball, football, baseball and track and field) and was offered college scholarships, but didn’t have the grades to move forward. I learned a year later that my Uncle Paul followed in their footsteps, and played three years at the University of Houston, left early and played for the Houston Rockets in ’82-’83 (not a good year for them, or for me, for that matter) before blowing out a knee and moving into entertainment work.

My father’s family — at least the women of the family — boasted at least three college degrees. Two of my aunts became school teachers. My uncles started businesses in Atlanta and in parts of rural Georgia, working their way well beyond the farm to the work they wanted to do.

Unidentified tenant farmer, his home, automobile, and family, Lee Wilson & Company, rural Arkansas, 1940s. (http://libinfo.uark.edu/SpecialCollections/)

I learned all of this by the time I turned thirty-two, just a year and a half before my own son was born. How many different decisions I would’ve made about my life if I had known that one half of my family was full of athletes, and the other half was full of business owners, not to mention three aunts with a college education? I would’ve known to try out for any sport in high school — particularly basketball — and to not be afraid to fail. I would’ve known that I was only the first person in my immediate family to take a go at college beyond a certificate in dietary science (my Mom earned that in the summer of ’75), and not the first one on either side as I once thought.

Most of all, I would’ve known that though I was lonely and played the role of a loner my last years growing up, that I wasn’t alone. There were a whole bunch of people in my lineage, some of whom were alive and well, from whom I could’ve drawn strength, found kinship, felt pride and confidence in, where I wouldn’t have seen myself as an abandoned and abused underdog anymore.

If I’d known all this growing up, I wouldn’t have felt and sometimes feel robbed now, by poverty and parenting, abuse and alcoholism. This is why having knowledge to draw from is so important.

The Emotional, The Personal and Black History

01 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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A Lynching in Marion, African American History, Anger, Black History, Black History Month, Carnegie Mellon University, Comparative Slavery, Emotions, Fear, Fogel and Engerman, Grief, Indiana (1995), Irony, Jim Crow, Larry Glasco, Laurence Glasco, Learning, Lynching, Pitt, Racism, Rage, Roots (1977), Sarcasm, Seymore Drescher, Slavery, Students, Sy Drescher, Teaching and Learning, Time on the Cross (1974), UMUC, University of Pittsburgh

Black History Month 2013 electronic poster, February 1, 2013. (http://dclibrary.org).

After all of these years — and thirty-seven years’ worth of Black History Months — I sometimes forget how emotionally charged Black history can be. After all, I’m an academically trained historian, one whose emotional range varies from sarcastic to ironic with most things US, World and African American history. But ever so often, I’m reminded by my students about the sadness and pain involved in learning history. I surprise myself sometimes at how passionate or angry I can become in revisiting a piece of history that I otherwise would show no emotion for on most days.

Black history, though, can bring out both the water works and the daggered eyes. My African American history students at Carnegie Mellon University surprised me one day in October ’96 during a discussion I tried to have about lynching and the KKK. It was based on the Indiana PBS documentary, A Lynching in Marion, Indiana, about the lynching of two Black men and the almost lynching of a young Black male for allegedly killing and robbing a White male and raping a young White female in 1930.

The forty-five minute documentary showed clips of defaced and emasculated Black men hung from trees, beaten beyond recognition and even burned postmortem. It also showed films of KKK rallies in the 1920s and early 1930s Indianapolis and other towns in the state, as well as pictures from the Marion lynching itself. The young Black man in Marion, one James Cameron, was only saved from lynching because a member of White mob actually protected him. It turned out, per usual, that the alleged murder and rape was a false accusation, but Cameron still had to spend four years in jail for a crime he didn’t commit.

Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, lynched in Marion, IN, August 7, 1930. (Lawrence H. Beitler). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws, as It is the only image known to depict this hanging, and is used here to illustrate the event.

Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, lynched in Marion, IN, August 7, 1930. (Lawrence H. Beitler via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws, as It is the only image known to depict this hanging, and is used here to illustrate the event.

My students could barely speak to me or each other after the film, much less be part of a dispassionate discussion of the film. My Black students were tearful and angry, and my White students were pale and scared. I let them express their emotions for about ten minutes, but waited until the next class to draw out a more comprehensive discussion. As this was the first standalone class I’d taught as an adjunct professor, I was a bit unprepared for the how emotional my students became, how personally they took the film and its content.

But I should’ve been better prepared, especially given my own emotions about Black and other histories over the years. I remember the first time I watched Roots, along with millions of other Americans, in February ’77. I cried or was stunned that whole week. Twelve years later, in my undergraduate readings seminar for History majors at Pitt, I found myself angry with my classmates. My eventual first graduate advisor Larry Glasco was leading a discussion on slavery and the Middle Passage. I didn’t know why, but I was angry that whole class. It wasn’t just a knee-jerk anger. It was a low-heat rage, beyond anything my idiotic classmates were saying about slavery in the eventual US not being as brutal as slavery in the Caribbean or Brazil.

The following semester, I took my first graduate course as a Pitt junior, Comparative Slavery with Sy Drescher. We got into a discussion of Fogel and Engerman’s Time on the Cross (1974), a study in which the authors tried to show scientifically that slavery wasn’t as bad for Africans in the US as it was for Africans in the Caribbean and Brazil. Using records from one plantation, Fogel and Engerman tried to show that since few slaves were whipped, that therefore slavery wasn’t brutal for my African ancestors. I was pissed when some of the grad students in my class defended Time on the Cross idea that 1,800 calories a day was sufficient for the average slave. It pissed me off so much that I had to leave the seminar room for five minutes to make sure I didn’t punch someone.

Me really pissed, at CMU PhD graduation, Pittsburgh, PA, May 18, 1997. (Angelia N. Levy).

I see some of this in my UMUC students sometimes. Students who turn every issue in US history into a referendum on race. “Immigrants exploited? Well, not compared to African Americans as sharecroppers!” Or “Jim Crow was really a second slavery,” some of my students have said emphatically, as if Blacks did nothing during Reconstruction or Jim Crow to make their lives better. They feel, and rightfully so for the most part, that Blacks have gotten a raw deal throughout American history, and that it is my job to expose the hypocrisy of racism in every lecture and discussion.

It’s emotional and it’s personal. But it’s also historical, which means not so much putting emotions or personal investment aside as much as it does putting these emotions and personal investments in perspective. I’ve never been dispassionate about history – I’ve just learned how to use my New York-style sarcasm to hide my passion pretty well.

The Life of Mary Louise

28 Sunday Oct 2012

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

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Bradley Arkansas, Depression, Faith, Gill Family, Happiness, Homelessness, Jim Crow, Joblessness, Mary Louise Gill, Mount Vernon Hospital, Resilience, Self-Awareness, Self-Loathing, Self-Reflection, Sixty-Fifth Birthday, Underemployment, unemployment, Welfare

My Mom, Thanksgiving 2006, Mount Vernon, NY. (Donald Earl Collins).

Today, my mother turns sixty-five years old. My mom has now officially hit elderly status, which reads and sounds so weird, considering that she’s only twenty-two years and two months older than me. That Mom’s here at all at sixty-five is really a not-so-minor miracle, considering how hard her life’s been from day one in ’47.

This was what I wrote about my mother’s first thirty-five and a half years of her life, courtesy of Boy @ The Window:

Bradley, Arkansas main road (Route 29) with me and my Uncle Charles in the shadows, June 2, 2001. (Donald Earl Collins).

Mom came from a long line of folk whose lives were hard and impossible ones, where they couldn’t take handouts even if they wanted to. She was born to Samuel and Beulah Gill in October ’47, their first of twelve children and her father’s second overall child of thirteen. The Gills of Bradley, Arkansas were tenant farmers who lived in the Red River valley in the southwest corner of the state and five miles north of the Arkansas-Louisiana border. The town was a one-flashing- yellow-light-four-corner one. Just over five hundred people lived there, with farms, shotgun houses, and ranch-style homes neatly segregated between a few affluent Whites, lots of po’ White trash and the abundantly poor Black side of town. The conditions she grew up in included corrugated tin roofs and outhouses to boot.

Being born into this family in the late-’40s meant that Mom’s life would be a difficult and emotionally tortured one. She started doing household chores when she was five, helping with her siblings when she was six, and graduated to hoeing and picking cotton by the time she was eight. There wasn’t the time, energy, and experience in the household for Mom to receive any affection or nurturing.

My maternal grandfather Sam Gill, Sr. (82 at the time, 93 now), Bradley, AR, June 2, 2001. (Donald Earl Collins).

With all that and her mother’s constant neglect and occasional abuse — she was once beat with the back of a hair brush for not getting ready for church on time — it’s amazing that Mom wanted to get married or have kids. Yet I knew that what little nurturing and affection Mom received came from her great-grandmother, her aunt, and high school basketball. All served that role as Mom grew into an attractive six-foot woman. Her great-grandmother, half-Choctaw and half-Irish and originally from Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), taught Mom to see herself as beautiful despite her dark complexion. Her Texarkana, Texas aunt taught Mom her basic adult survival skills. And high school basketball took her as a senior to the segregated state quarterfinals in ’65, an amazing feat to say the least.

Still, it was a hard life, one that Mom had vowed she’d never live again. That’s why she moved to New York in the first place. I’d heard these stories for years, and like her, I believed that our lives would get better through sheer hard work. Welfare was never to be something we would live with.

After nearly seventeen years in the New York area, never had all but finally arrived. She had spent my whole life up to that point telling us not to take “handouts,” that she’d “never be on welfare.”

By her thirty-fifth birthday at the end of October ’82, my mother no longer had full-time work at Mount Vernon Hospital, with her hours cut and four mouths to feed. That weekend, all we had left to eat in our two-refrigerator kitchen was a box of Duncan Hines’ Devil’s Food cake mix, Pillsbury All-Purpose Flour, and some sugar. That Saturday and Sunday, we truly ate like Torah-era Jews. Mom made us pancakes out of the flour, without baking powder, eggs or milk, and cooked down some sugar in water to make us a crude
glucose syrup.

Between an abusive Maurice for a husband, the loss of an already insufficient income after not joining her union in a strike, and two toddler-age kids (and another one on the way), the period between May ’82 and April ’83 was probably one of the lowest points in her life.

As I’ve realized over the years, though, Mom’s life was always hard. It was simply a matter of degrees, not of distinction or difference. The mistake of marrying Maurice, becoming a scab (see my post “The Quest For Work, Past and Present” from August ’12) and leaving my older brother Darren at The Clearview School for fourteen years has had an impact on all of our lives to this day. Just as much as fourteen years on welfare, the three-year-long loss of our home at 616 in the ’90s (see post “The Fire This Time” from April ’08 for more) and my late sister Sarai’s twenty-seven year-long struggle with sickle-cell anemia. “Wow” is only the beginning of a description of calamity that has been my mother’s life, about as long as the first hundred digits after 3.14.

What’s made the difference? My mother’s belief in God or Jesus? Her general sense of resilience? Her uncanny ability to deny reality and frequent lack of self-reflection? But I’d say that Mom has learned to expect little from this world and, unfortunately, even less for herself. She often expected the worst, and then being surprised at how not-so-bad “the worst” was, could continue to soldier on.

My Mom and my Uncle Sam Gill, Jr., Mount Vernon, NY, November 23, 2006. (Donald Earl Collins).

So I wish my mother a happy sixty-fifth birthday. One in which she can just spend the day at her church in New Rochelle, and then just rest and be. Only one of my siblings lives at 616 these days, and apparently spends more time out and about than he does at home. So, I hope my mother can relax, knowing that she has endured all the evil that this world could throw at her, and despite her view of life, has come out on the other side, badly damaged, but still here.