Tag Archives: Laurence Glasco

Academia’s Racist Expectations

13 Thursday Oct 2016

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

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The long wall that separates Morningside Park (and Harlem) from Columbia University, New York, circa 2008. (http://Biking-in-Manhattan.com).

The long wall that separates Morningside Park (and Harlem) from Columbia University, New York, circa 2008. (http://Biking-in-Manhattan.com).

I found myself back again. After reading Marybeth Gasman’s follow-up Washington Post article on her findings about academia’s hostility toward faculty diversity and the low expectations of the mostly White and male search committees in hiring faculty of color, I remembered. Seymour Drescher, George Reid Andrews, Van Beck Hall, Richard Smethurst, Dick Oestreicher, Larry Glasco, Paula Baker, Joe Trotter, John Modell, Steve Schlossman, Wendy Goldman, Kate Lynch, Dan Resnick, Bruce Anthony Jones, and Peter Stearns. Everyone on this list was either my advisor, a professor for a graduate course I took while in the history departments at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon, on my dissertation committee, the department chair, or someone I TA’d for between January 1990 (when I was a junior at Pitt) and May 1997. And nearly all of them either had super-high expectations of me — really, weight-of-the-world expectations — or expected me to choke on my own vomit intellectually while in grad school.

It wasn’t as if I hadn’t seen this before. With select folk while in Humanities in middle school or in high school, like Doris Mann in seventh and eighth grade art, Sylvia Fasulo as my guidance counselor while at Mount Vernon High School, and most notably, with David Wolf in AP Physics my senior year (more on him soon). At Pitt, I had an elderly White professor in a constitutional law class who regularly expressed his displeasure over affirmative action in his lectures and gave all four Black students in the course a C+ on every assignment. But generally, if faculty did have low expectations of me because of their racism, it was more of a feeling, a sense that creeped up on me but couldn’t quite grasp, and not obvious because of their statements and actions.

Headwinds, July 2011. (http://forbes.com).

Headwinds, July 2011. (http://forbes.com).

Until I decided to go for an MA in history in 1990. Everything from discouraging statements to half-baked letters of recommendation brought headwinds meant to slam me up against rocky shoals. Professors like Smethurst or Hall who assumed I didn’t work hard enough because I took time to recharge and hang out with friends. A couple like Oestreicher and Resnick who believed that I actually plagiarized material because the quality of my writing was higher than they had seen from a grad student in years. Some like Andrews, who couldn’t believe I was well into my dissertation, much less having made it into another PhD program at all. That doesn’t even count the assumptions about my basketball prowess, or about what I did in my spare time. Nor does it include the overlooking of alternative perspectives on Marxism, on Whiteness, on multiculturalism, on American poverty, on religion, on a host of historical issues I brought to one seminar after another. Because in my spare time, I read more than what was on a syllabus, and given my upbringing, I had already lived a good portion of what the privileged class had only studied.

Add to this the expectations from Baker and Glasco, or Trotter and Jones. All had high expectations of me. So high, in fact, that their expectations were about more than me. It was about what I should or could represent, a graduate student of color who could compete successfully with the so-called geniuses in the field. With Trotter as my dissertation advisor, of course, it became a balancing act between his paranoia born out of his own experiences with graduate school, the job market, and academic racism, and working with me to make me a better scholar. We never had a conversation about why Trotter was the way he was with me, but as I have noted here over the years, Head Negro In Charge syndrome (HNIC) was certainly part of this equation. It’s one thing to meet one’s own high expectations. It’s another when folks who are pulling for you expect you to outperform yourself because of race.

There were so many expectations of me because of my race and relatively young age that I rebelled, mostly unconsciously, my last two years of graduate school at Carnegie Mellon. I wasn’t sure I wanted a professorship of any kind by 1996. But I was so close to being done with the dissertation, with Trotter, and with my mixed-signals dissertation committee. So I finished, and put myself into a job market, hoping that it wasn’t going to be so bad to look for tenure-track positions.

I was wrong, of course. Search committees couldn’t even meet the minimal expectation of at least evaluating my applications based on my qualifications. I interviewed for seven academic jobs between 1997 and 2000 before my first full-time professorship offer from Howard University. In at least three cases — including Tufts and NYU — the search committee chair’s friend was the person whom ended up with the job. With Teacher’s College, who knows? Slippery Rock canceled their search altogether. I didn’t even care to find out what happened with UNC-Charlotte or Colgate. I can say with absolute certainty, based on yawns, stupid questions, racist comments, and strange looks, that racism played a role in the Slippery Rock cancelation, and in my interviews at NYU and Colgate. Those people simply did not want me there, period.

Israeli armored car patrolling barrier wall between it and Palestinian West Bank, June 17, 2016. (http://presstv.ir).

Israeli armored car patrolling barrier wall between it and Palestinian West Bank, June 17, 2016. (http://presstv.ir).

In all, I have applied for 350 academic positions over the past two decades (keep in mind, I applied for 250 of these between 1997 and 2001, and hardly any during my nonprofit work years between 2001 and 2011). Other than adjunct or term faculty work — sometimes, even well-paying positions — going for academic jobs has confirmed my worst expectations of an institution that prides itself on the myths of meritocracy, scholarship, and objectivity. If I had to do it all over again, I would have not pushed myself through two revisions of my dissertation to get this degree. It wasn’t worth the $24,000 in student loans, the thousands of hours of reading boring ass dense writers, all the stupid hypotheses and theories, and the half-assed people I sat in front of in classrooms who claimed the title professor.

That’s how I feel sometimes. But I’ve also had a full slate of courses at my current gig for the past eight years, worked with thousands of high school, undergraduate, and graduate students since 1996, written dozens of recommendation letters, and worked myself into a writer who has dropped nearly all the trappings of academe. Had I not faced the racist failings of academia head-on, I might have bought into this world’s hypocrisies and reproduced them for my students over the years. In this, at least, I can be thankful for academia’s low expectations of me.

A Man and a Tank

04 Wednesday Jun 2014

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"Tank Man" temporarily stops the advance of a column of tanks, Tianenmen Square, Beijing, China, June 5, 1989. (Jeff Widener/AP via Wikipedia).

“Tank Man” temporarily stops the advance of a column of tanks, Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China, June 5, 1989. (Jeff Widener/AP via Wikipedia).

[Originally posted June 4, 2009]

Saturday, June 3, 1989, 12:04 pm. Me and my younger siblings were at 616, watching cartoons on ABC. It was a run of old Looney Tunes cartoons, which had Maurice, Yiscoc, Sarai and especially Eri cracking up. It was a great morning, with my mother taking her Saturday classes at Westchester Business Institute, my idiot stepfather out carousing, and my older brother Darren roaming the streets like the goofball he could be. Then the late Peter Jennings broke into our local New York area broadcast to let us know that Chinese tanks were rolling into Tiananmen Square in Beijing, breaking through seven weeks worth of protests over the government’s continuing limits on the civil and political rights of its citizens.

It was after midnight in Beijing, already June 4. For the next forty or forty-five minutes, images kept coming on to our TV from Tiananmen Square as the Chinese military and their tanks toppled barricades, ran over cars and literally chased thousands of protesters out of the square. When I saw the first images of a blood-splattered protester and then of another one crying, I started to cry myself. My siblings looked at me like I was crazy. Then, no more images. Jennings reported that the Chinese government had forced ABC to shut down their satellite communications from within China. My guess was that they did it at gun point.

By the time I switched to another station for my siblings to watch, I found myself wondering why I hadn’t followed the story more closely. I mean, I was actually following it. But I guess I assumed that, like the glasnost and perestroika that had been pushed by Gorbachev since ’86, that the protests would be allowed to continue in Beijing. And like many other naive Americans, we were wrong about that. We hardly knew enough about four millennia of Chinese political history to understand how important an unopposed central authority has been to this culture. If I had applied anything I learned from a semester of East Asian History at all, I wouldn’t have been surprised at all.

With me crying — albeit not audibly — my youngest brother Eri asked me what was wrong and what was going on. I explained to them as best I could that this was a government crackdown on dissidents, that the Chinese government engaged in human rights abuses all the time, and that this crackdown meant many people were dying and going to die. Those few minutes were the most in which Eri and my other siblings had shown any interest in the world outside of Mount Vernon and New York City in all of times I spent with them growing up.

Peter Jennings, ABC World News Tonight anchor, November 1989 (broadcasting fall of Berlin Wall). (screenshot via Youtube).

Peter Jennings, ABC World News Tonight anchor, November 1989 (broadcasting fall of Berlin Wall). (screenshot via Youtube).

In the days that followed, the occasional picture or piece of film made it out of China to Hong Kong (still a British territory in ’89) or Japan or South Korea showing images like the man standing in front of a column of tanks, ready to die in the crackdown on him and other protesters. I must admit, it moved me. It was obvious that people would go to jail, likely face torture, that many would die and many more would lick their wounds as the Chinese government would blackout all but the official state news about what really was going on.

Larry Glasco, one of my Pitt history professors, was there for a visit when the crackdown began. He said he saw dead men hanging from lamp posts, bodies of dead and injured in spots, and faced his own crisis in dealing with the military. They confiscated his camera and threatened to hold him in jail in order to make sure he didn’t take his pictures back to the US. From what I remember, he did managed to smuggle some film — not much — out after the crackdown had ended. His wasn’t the only story I would hear during the second half of ’89 about what people witnessed as tourists and researchers in looking at the Tiananmen Square protests. It was the first time I had the chance to see up close what a tyrannical government really looks like when acting to protect itself.

It’s different from police brutality or even a racist mob. For better or worse, we’ve never seen this level of government or military intervention in this country over protesters that those everyday folks in China faced down twenty years ago. Even if we count what Native Americans faced in the late-nineteenth century or the Bonus Army crackdown by General Douglas MacArthur in 1932, that would only get us to a limited sense of what the Tiananmen Square dissidents faced. It made me think about how wrong one of my Humanities classmates was when he argued about the long-term viability of communism because it would reduce economic inequality and give people a greater degree of freedom.

But we were both incorrect. Any economic or political system in which citizens and others must show deference or actually walk in fear of isn’t one that any should follow. I don’t care if the system is communist, capitalist, or socialist, or if the government is a monarchy, a constitutional monarchy, or a representative democracy. If folks living in these systems and under these governments can’t speak their minds or publish their ideas, especially if they contradict whatever the government or system says, the government isn’t a just one. Although governments and systems should fit the cultural and historical context of a given population, it also should remain flexible enough to adjust to the changing needs of a people. That’s what the regime in China failed to understand in ’89 and for years afterward.

I’m hardly advocating the overthrowing of governments or even the imposition of American democracy. If anyone’s bothered to notice, we haven’t exactly been living up to many of our ideals overseas and at home over the last six decades. I’m merely attempting to remember the events of early June ’89 that touched me emotionally, that enabled me to understand that beyond the political and economic theories there’s the reality of the human condition, the need to keep humans who have authority in check. I learned this all too well growing up at 616 and attending Mount Vernon’s public schools. Without those checks and balances, the rights and lives of others face tanks lined up in formation, ready to run them over.

In Denigration of the Black and Accomplished

20 Monday Jan 2014

Posted by in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work

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Screenshot of Richard Sherman post-game interview with Erin Andrews, NFC Championship Game, Seattle, WA, January 19, 2014. (http://msn.foxsports.com).

Screenshot of Richard Sherman post-game interview with Erin Andrews, NFC Championship Game, Seattle, WA, January 19, 2014. (http://msn.foxsports.com).

I plan half of my blog posts in advance. At the beginning of every year, I make up a list of topics that I intend to cover, listed by month, and then go through that list. For the other half, I take advantage of relevant news stories or sudden life experiences that also seem relevant. Screen shot 2014-01-20 at 9.25.25 AM

Today’s post is a combination of planning and the impromptu. I’d already planned to write about the tightrope of being Black and accomplished — actually, more like the noose of it. But thanks to @profragsdale’s tweet, aka, Rhonda Ragsdale, an Associate Professor of History at Lone Star College-North Harris (Houston, Texas) and a PhD candidate at Rice University, I started on this topic a day early. Her tweet was the kick-off to eight hours of tweets about the cold and often cold-shoulder reception women — and Black male and LGBT — faculty and grad students receive when bringing up, discussing or even promoting themselves and their accomplishments.

Only to see more of these tweets and thoughts confirmed in another arena. The response of the racist, George-Zimmerman-set to Richard Sherman’s post-game interview with Erin Andrews on FOX within a couple of moments after he made the play to seal the game for his Seattle Seahawks to go play in Super Bowl XLVIII. You, Black man, can’t have a flash of anger and moment of passion on TV after playing in the NFC Championship Game, for then your accomplishments will be used against you. (Sarcasm aside, Sherman’s taunting will likely result in a fine, but that’s the NFL).

Single Drum Rollers with Rock Crushing Drum crushing soil and rocks (similar to how Whiteness can crush Black accomplishments), January 20, 2014. (http://bomag.com).

Single Drum Rollers with Rock Crushing Drum crushing soil and rocks (similar to how Whiteness can crush Black accomplishments), January 20, 2014. (http://bomag.com).

My post is much, much closer to home. I had the blessing and the curse of having two Black males as my official advisors while in grad school at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon, Larry Glasco for two years at Pitt, and Joe Trotter for four years at CMU. My gripes and complaints about their neglect, selective attentions to my development, and, in Trotter’s case, harassment and psychological torture I’ve already documented well here. What I haven’t discussed is that they were part of a cycle of academic abuse that they passed down to my generation of grad students, and likely some of my colleagues are passing on to their grad students as I write today.

My best example of how denigration in academia works was a conversation I had with Dick Oestreicher, a Pitt professor for my grad seminar in American Working-Class History in Fall ’92. I was in Trotter’s African American History seminar at CMU at the same time. Oestreicher asked me what else I was taking that semester, I guess because I’d proven resistant to the idea that social class had primacy over all forms of inequality, even in the US (a neo-Marxist to the core, I guessed).

When I told him I was in Trotter’s seminar, Oestreicher said, “Oh, I’ve heard of him,” with the disdain a fashion designer usually reserved for suits off Sears’ rack. You’ve “heard of him?” Really? Trotter, an award-winner scholar and author with a groundbreaking book on Black migration, urbanization and class formation in Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-1945 (1985; 2007), and you’ve heard of him? A colleague only three blocks and one bridge away, and you’ve heard of him? Even now, the only word I have to that is, “Wow!”

If Oestreicher was the only one to do that, and only to Trotter, then my observations here would be suspect. But I witnessed this same kind of thing from other White history professors at Pitt and CMU toward Trotter and Glasco during my grad school years. Heck, one of the reasons I left for CMU in the first place was because I knew several of the most powerful professors in the Pitt history department didn’t respect Glasco’s work, and by extension, my own progress and work.

Foot On My Neck & Head, symbolic of my years as a Hebrew-Israelite (also of grad school), April 18, 2011. (Donald Earl Collins).

Foot On My Neck & Head, symbolic of my years as a Hebrew-Israelite (also of grad school), April 18, 2011. (Donald Earl Collins).

Maybe that was part of the reason why Trotter would constantly “run interference” on my behalf, to protect my “interests” during my four years there. Because, despite all the long hours, the sweat, tears and blood, there were folks at CMU who just saw him as a mere Black man, not a colleague or scholar every bit their equal. Given the books, the articles, the grants and so many other accomplishments, Trotter was easily the most productive professor in the department.

None of this justified how Trotter treated me when I was his student. I was semi-aware of the racial politics of accomplishment denial that folks around us practiced. I often chalked it up to jealousy or stress, thinking that the quality of my work or — to use Trotter’s terminology — my scholarship would show the academic world my worth. What White disdain toward Glasco and Trotter — and Trotter’s harassment of me — taught me, though, is that I’d have to be White in order for my accomplishments to seriously matter in academia, and I wasn’t planning on being White in my lifetime. And, that intellectual Whiteness can be nurtured and grown into Black professors.

In the years since finishing my own PhD, I’ve faced my own dilemmas around my achievements. I’ve at times attempted to fit in by downplaying my publications, by not bringing up my degrees, by not talking about my fellowship awards. What have I learned? To deny myself of my own accomplishments is like making a fine wine but not even daring to take a sip. White accomplishment deniers be damned.

“The Dying of Black Women’s Children”

27 Wednesday Mar 2013

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, music, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Infant mortality rates by country (2004), March 27, 2013. (http://www.mchb.hrsa.gov/). In public domain.

Infant mortality rates by country (2004), March 27, 2013. (http://www.mchb.hrsa.gov/). In public domain.

That was the title of a research paper I wrote for an independent study course I did with my former Pitt advisor Larry Glasco. It was a paper I wrote during my last semester at the University of Pittsburgh, undergrad and grad school. It was the last paper I would write for any professor at Pitt. But it was a paper that would address a bunch of common themes about me as a historian and scholar knowingly, and a writer unknowingly.

I began this paper without a course and on my own time in the Fall ’92 semester (see my post “December Doctoral Decisions” from last year). I had to fulfill a quantitative methods requirement in order to take my PhD comprehensive examinations at the end of my coursework, which at my pace would’ve meant taking them in the fall of ’93 at Pitt. Why they never included a qualitative methods requirement, I’ll never know. Of course, this digital humanities movement of quantifying the heretofore unquantifiable was but an embryo in the early ’90s.

With my language requirement taken care of the year before, I had no choice but to build on my existing statistical knowledge. Luckily, I’d inadvertently minored in mathematics and had been a computer science major before switching to history. I’d already decided on the topic of comparing infant/child mortality rates among White and Black Pittsburghers between 1900 and 1920, coinciding with the Great Migration period for Blacks. This meant census data from 1900, 1910 and 1920. This meant public health records from the same twenty-year stretch. It meant looking at neighborhoods like the Lower Hill District and Bloomfield, the occupations of the men and (in the case of Blacks) women living in these communities.

And it meant that I had to learn how to use SPSS, the most powerful number-crunching statistical software package on the planet. At least as far as I was concerned. It took me from September ’92 until the end of January ’93 to get comfortable enough with SPSS to plot and correlate different points of data. By then, I could generate reports and make sense of them. I knew that race, poverty/neighborhood and occupation (in that order) correlated best to the 2.5 to 1 ratio between infant/child mortality (death between child birth and the age of five) rates for Black families versus White families.

I used Lotus 1-2-3 to construct the tables, charts and graphs for my statistical correlations and data. Why Lotus 1-2-3? Their charts and graphs looked like “arts and crafts,” to steal a phrase from David Letterman. SPSS’s visuals were boring. Between the numbers crunching, the translation of correlation data into Lotus, and the actual writing of this paper, I completed my work for this independent study and quantitative methods requirement at the end of February ’93.

By then, I had two issues. One, I didn’t know what to title my paper. Most of my titles were inspired by cultural references from music, sports, TV shows, catch commercial jingles. I’d titled one paper “‘Sittin’ On The Dock of The Bay’,” an homage to Otis Redding and in reference to the topic of Black migrants finding permanent economic degradation after leaving the Jim Crow South for places like New York, Chicago and L.A. Another one, which I’d presented at several conferences, was “‘The Evidence of Things Not Seen’,” a prelude to my “‘A Substance of Things Hoped For'” dissertation (thanks to Hebrews 11:1 and James Baldwin).

Pitt Honors Convocation program, (March 1, 1994), March 27, 2013. [Ironic, given that I received this honor when I was at CMU]. (Donald Earl Collins).

Pitt Honors Convocation program, (March 1, 1994), March 27, 2013. [Ironic, given that I received this honor when I was at CMU]. (Donald Earl Collins).

I solved this title problem while simultaneously dealing with the second issue, which was that I knew I was about to transfer to Carnegie Mellon to complete the doctorate. Joe Trotter had invited me to attend the job talks of a young professor who had recently earned tenure at the University of Chicago, I believe. I remember her being fairly attractive and found her work interesting, if not fascinating. While we walked up and down the factory floor, um, second-floor corridors of Baker Hall, I walked by a flyer for an upcoming talk on “The Dying of Young Women’s Children.” I decided that this would be the scaffolding for my paper’s title, right then and there. Only, I’d change “Young” to “Black” and give a footnote of credit to the flyer title.

I submitted my paper to Larry for my independent study, which I was now taking purely as pass/fail (or satisfactory/unsatisfactory), and not for a specific grade. After Larry learned of my departure, he never gave me feedback on the paper. As the end of the semester approached — and I became short on cash — I submitted the paper to the Women’s Studies Program’s Student Research (undergraduate and graduate) contest.

Pitt's Women's Studies Program Annual Prize for Student Research on Women and Gender, June 1993, March 27, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins).

Pitt’s Women’s Studies Program Annual Prize for Student Research on Women and Gender, June 1993, March 27, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins).

Two months later, in June ’93, I learned that I’d finished second in the graduate student category, and earned a check for $75, a week’s worth of groceries! My friend Matt, upon learning of my good fortune, said, “You won that prize because of that title,” adding that I “stole it” from a flyer.

Matt was right, of course. But I also learned something important through “The Dying of Black Women’s Children.” That all writers borrow from others’ words and ideas, and then make them their own.

Transfer Anniversary

21 Thursday Mar 2013

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

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Viewing Pitt's Cathedral of Learning from Carnegie Mellon's mall (with Hamerschlag Hall in foreground), March 29, 2003. (http://post-gazette.com)

Viewing Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning from Carnegie Mellon’s mall (with Hamerschlag Hall in foreground), March 29, 2003. (http://post-gazette.com)

March ’93 was an interesting month for me, to say the least. Just about the biggest thing happening for me that month was my transfer from Pitt to Carnegie Mellon (or CMU) to finish my doctorate. After nearly two years of grad school in the History Department, I knew I needed to leave. Especially with Larry Glasco as my well-meaning but sometimes absentee advisor and with a bunch of professors who never hid their disdain for me as a masters and then a doctoral student. I’d also been at Pitt for six years between undergrad and grad school, most of those focused on history, Black Studies, or education foundations and policy as areas of research.

I knew that Carnegie Mellon wasn’t an ideal situation. I was sure that had I desired, I could’ve applied to and been accepted by doctoral programs as far and wide as NYU, University of Maryland, University of Michigan and other places. All were places where history didn’t simply consist of working-class historians who believed in the supremacy of class and neo-Marxism above all else – race and racism be damned! What I didn’t know, though, was whether those departments would accept my doctoral credits, cutting my coursework time in half. What I couldn’t be sure about was whether I’d be able to move toward PhD comprehensives and my dissertation proposal within a year of enrollment.

See, these were the things that Joe Trotter, my eventual advisor and John Modell, the graduate coordinator for the department, had promised me as part of my deal for transferring across the bridge to CMU. Those promises, along with the idea of working with an enthusiastic professor whose research didn’t seem out-of-date in a department that seemed to fast-track its students toward doctoral completion. That really appealed to me at the time.

Pitt and Carnegie Mellon (with Forbes Quad & Baker Hall included) as seen from Schenley Park, Pittsburgh, PA, March 21, 2013. (http://milliverstravels.com).

Pitt and Carnegie Mellon (with Forbes Quad & Baker Hall included) as seen from Schenley Park, Pittsburgh, PA, March 21, 2013. (http://milliverstravels.com).

When I finally broke it to Larry at the beginning of March that I’d made this decision, he didn’t exactly try to convince me to stay. I think he knew why. An audit of the program in ’98 confirmed officially what I had learned anecdotally over my six years at Pitt. That there were students in the program who’d been ABD (All But Dissertation) since Nixon and Watergate. That fully half of my cohort from ’91 hadn’t even completed their master’s degrees, and only three of us (counting myself) out of twenty-one would ever go on to complete our doctorates. That no Pitt History grad student had obtained substantial research funding from outside the university since my Mom potty-trained me back in ’72-’73. And that politically, the powers that used to be in the department didn’t take my or Larry’s work with me seriously. Even if Larry didn’t see that, I sure did.

Off then, I went. Into the unknown known of CMU, conservative, elite and elitist, not sure if I’d ever be comfortable on the lily-White and honorary-White-as-Asian campus. Still, I reminded myself that Pitt was really only a couple of blocks away at the closest point between the two campuses, that I still had lots of friends and acquaintances there. I also knew, though, that my relationship with Trotter as my advisor would be crucial to my successful navigation of this drab and stuffy world. Too bad I wasn’t clairvoyant!

The Emotional, The Personal and Black History

01 Friday Feb 2013

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

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

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).

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.