Tag Archives: Misogyny

On “Baby, Come To Me” and Its Weird Connections

11 Monday Apr 2022

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The Patti Austin-James Ingram (may he RIP, what a talent!) duet love ballad “Baby, Come To Me” (1982), originally released as a single 40 years ago this month, is probably one of the greatest duet love ballads of all-time. At the least, it is up there with Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, Stephanie Mills and Teddy Pendergrass, and Ashford & Simpson for me. Commercial music these days does not have duets or love ballads like these combos produced back in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. But hey, to quote the great UK artist Howard Jones, “What is love anyway?/Does anybody love anybody anyway?” Apparently, not in most music mass produced since about 2007.

To think that a song the great Quincy Jones produced and the great Rod Temperton wrote, a song in which Michael McDonald sang backup, a song on Patti Austin’s 1981 album Every Home Should Have One, took nearly two years and two singles releases to rank #1 on Billboard’s US pop charts in February 1983. That couldn’t happen in 2022, not unless it came with an accompanying video and Beyoncé and Megan Thee Stallion twerking and doing ligament-popping splits to it.

But how it happened speaks to how weirdly accepting people can be of misogyny and narcissism in the midst of a love song. Austin’s album dropped at the end of September 1981. The single “Baby, Come To Me” didn’t drop until April 1982. That is an amazingly long time to wait to release what is the second-best song on any album (the title song was the first singles release). And there it rose to #73 on the Billboard charts. 

Were it not for ABC’s long-running soap opera General Hospital, most of us not listening to WBLS 107.5 FM in New York might have never heard the song again. The summer and early fall of 1982 was the time of “Luke and Laura” Spencer, a newly married power couple on the soap opera. General Hospital used “Baby, Come To Me” as the intro and outro theme to many of their “Luke and Laura.”

If you think it’s a bit strange for white teenage girls and Boomer stay-at-home moms to fall in love with a clearly R&B duet love ballad meant primarily for a Black audience over the course of several months, then welcome to the 1980s. The Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” used at times on NBC’s Days of Our Lives the following summer of 1983, had the same effect. Keep in mind, the song isn’t about love at all. It’s about stalking, controlling, and obsessing over a woman. Four summer’s later, U2’s “With Or Without You,” about hating the person you love, it had the same gravitational effect, between airplay and soap opera play. There’s also soap opera actors like Jack Wagner with “All I Need” actually writing and singing their own love ballads, or attempting to look the part. The 1980s ended with Richard Marx’s “Right Here Waiting For You,” during the “Danny and Cricket” summer of 1989 on The Young and The Restless.

With “Luke and Laura,” though, it gets stranger. Just two years earlier, Luke inadvertently raped Laura over some assassination attempt gone awry. Other than a note discovered by one of Luke’s nemeses, really, nothing. They marry in the summer of 1981, and are madly in love by 1982. I know marital rape wasn’t considered a crime in California until 1982, and Harlequin romance books abounded back then, but really? No long-term trauma or psychological scars and you married your rapist, too? Even for me (once I learned of “Baby, Come To Me’s” connection in 1985), this was a bridge made of wood and dripping with gasoline during a lightning storm. How demure can any woman be under these circumstances? 

Yet the crossover impact was enough for Austin’s label Warner Bros. to re-release the single in October 1982. It was that popular! It went to #1 on the pop charts in the US that February. The song broke through internationally as well. Here’s the video: https://youtu.be/mHyxPIh3c5w.

As for me, I knew of “Baby, Come To Me” in 1982, but not the story behind it until 1985. By then, you could find the song on nearly any radio station that played 1980s pop music, not to mention R&B stations. I happened to be running to the store for my mom (again) on a cold and rainy afternoon in January 1985. I couldn’t find something she wanted. So I went to put a dime in the payphone next to a corner store to call her for more directions. Except I’d forgotten NYNEX payphones now cost 25¢ to use to make even local calls. “Spending every dime doesn’t work anymore,” I said to myself in the pouring rain. Then I said-sang, “out in any kind of weather, just because…of — my mom!,” and laughed. For me, as far as “Baby, Come To Me,” then I suppose…the music never ends?

Even now, so many years later, every time this song pops up on my iPod, smartphone, or Spotify, I still let “Baby, Come To Me” play, because it still makes me smile. It will never be associated with “Luke and Laura” for me. I almost never watched General Hospital growing up, anyway. Days of Our Lives, Y&R, the all-too-short-lived Santa Barbara, Another World, and The Bold and The Beautiful, but never an ABC soap. I would never sing or play “Baby, Come To Me” in any sexual assault context. That tortuous music needs to end.

My Take: A Tale All Too Familiar

05 Tuesday Apr 2022

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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Hazel-green eyes – maybe hazel-green eyed envy, too? (cropped), April 5, 2022. (Google Images).

“The Slap” at the Oscars has been so much discussed that it seems as if there’s nothing left to say or to write about it. But so many of the columns and comments about Will Smith defending Jada Pinkett Smith’s honor against comedian Chris Rock’s ableist misogyny are also hot takes. For Black folk famous and ordinary, this is a double-dose of deadly, especially in public settings. The white gaze is forever present, especially now with smartphone cameras and recorders everywhere. Black people end up caught between their own fallible humanity and their training to be as respectable as possible during these big moments, precisely because white folks are watching. The result is usually a tangled mess. The vultures will keep circling for meat, fresh and rotten. Such are the ways of a capitalistic, narcissistic, and racist society.

My own story isn’t quite as dramatic as Will, Jada, and Chris’, but it does reflect how narcissism, green-eyed jealousy, hypermasculinity, and other ills can get anyone caught up. A quarter-century ago, I completed my history PhD thesis at Carnegie Mellon University. A few weeks before my two graduation ceremonies, I made the decision to fly my mom in from New York to celebrate with me. She hadn’t been able to attend my bachelor’s or master’s degree ceremonies because my four younger siblings were too young to be left at home. Now, they were all teenagers. 

I had no idea the hell I had set myself up for. That same graduation week was also the same week as my mom’s associate’s degree graduation in White Plains. I flew home to New York to be there for her. Afterward, my mom said, “You know, you were in school so long, you could’ve had another high school diploma.” Then she forced a laugh. “It’s a joke,” she said. What was the joke? My degree, or the amount of time and energy I spent in earning it? “I don’t have to tell you that I’m proud of you. I tell other folks, just not you,” she said the next day. 

It was a figurative slap to the face I can still feel 25 years later. From the moment we left for LaGuardia that Friday to the moment I left her at Pittsburgh International Airport that Sunday afternoon, my event was all about her. That Sunday, she refused to be in a photo with my partner, my partner’s mom, a high school friend, and several other friends. She skipped out on the second ceremony, the one where my department chair and my PhD advisor would speak about my accomplishments, where I would also have time to publicly speak about my experiences and celebrate. I abruptly left the ceremony with my degree in hand.

Then, while waiting outside for the airport bus, my mom gave me a look. She seemed confused and lost, as if she would need help getting to her flight. Unthinkingly, I agreed to help her get to the airport, and ended up missing the second ceremony. With each passing moment on our way to the airport, I grew madder and madder. At the gate, I went off on my mom. “You have ruined every good moment in my adult life!,” I yelled. 

I should have gone to my graduation ceremonies without her. But I wanted my mom’s approval. I wanted her to make her proud. I wanted her to see me as a full-grown man. My mom took advantage of my yearning for the kind of relationship we never had. Transparent, honest, loving, affectionate. None of those were her. 

Her comments all week were signs of her jealousy over my doctorate. I just refused to see it, because she’s my mom. Her actions that weekend were of a narcissist. I didn’t know any mom could be that way. Her statements and actions were as much about questioning my manhood as they were about anything else. Ten years of undergraduate and graduate education instead of working jobs to help her with “the kids”? Using my unconscious reflex to get me to take her to the airport instead of doing it on her own? My mom’s sense of patriarchy and what men ought to do was a big part of my ruined moment, too. My relationship with her has never fully recovered.

This is what the proverbial they miss in everyday public human moments. Jealousy and vanity, like the other five Deadly Sins, are normal human emotions. But living in a hypermasculine, patriarchal, and narcissistic nation allows people to weaponize such emotions, just as Pinkett Smith did at the Oscars, just as she did on Red Table Talk with her husband two years earlier. And Smith took the bait despite knowing there was a possibility that his Oscar win would be the culminating moment of his career. His manhood and his image of his relationship with his partner was on the line. So was his hypermasculine pride. Especially with a comedian like Chris Rock, who has operated in sexism and misogynoir for years, especially toward Pinkett Smith, even with Good Hair to his documentarian credit. The white gaze is withering, and will likely warp the way people see Oscars 2022 for years to come.

I had far fewer white eyeballs on me on my PhD day. But the anger and despair I showed that day stayed with me for years afterward. I have been professor or Dr. for nearly half my life, but I never had my moment to enjoy that moment. For Smith, for his sons and daughter, for the Williams sisters, for everyone who worked on King Richard, that moment was cut far too short, ruined by the societal ills that corrupt us all.

The Black Man-White Woman Matrix

05 Sunday Dec 2021

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Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus in The Matrix (1999) chained up (screen shot), accessed October 14, 2021. (https://racism.org/articles/defining-racism/338-thematrixa).

There have been and will be tons of think pieces about the misogyny, the homophobia, and the transphobia in Dave Chappelle’s The Closer, his latest/last stand-up comedy special for Netflix. Within that maelstrom of using the stage as a 75-minute patriarchal therapy session, I noticed how most of the people whom Chappelle apparently discussed his id issues with were white women, whether straight, lesbian, or transgender, including the late Daphne Dorman. “Maybe he should spend time with transgender Black women. They are among the most marginalized in the US, with deadly results, between suicides & murders,” I tweeted. But Chappelle never would. His hypermasculine defense of transphobes and homophobes like Harry Potter billionaire J. K. Rowling, fellow comedian Kevin Hart, and rapper DaBaby, means seeing the binary and non-binary white women he referenced throughout his latest stand-up concert as a sign of personal progress, or even, as part of a televised revolution.

From a deeply emotional and psychological level, I fail to understand this penchant for Black men like Chappelle to use and idolize white women as if they are the pentacle of all that America ought to be. Hubert Davis and Alfonso Ribeiro have publicly uplifted their marriages to white women as a commentary on racial progress. “I’m very proud to be African-American. But I’m also very proud that my wife is white, and I’m also very proud that my three very beautiful, unbelievable kids are a combination of us,” Davis said during his opening press conference as the first Black men’s head basketball coach at the University of North Carolina. Ribeiro of Fresh Prince fame believes “the Black house” has ostracized him. “I am in a mixed relationship….And it’s not easy to make that choice…I’m never going to be white and I’m never going to be fully supported in the Black house,” he said in an interview with Newsweek in August.

Davis’ and Ribeiro’s are both very strange statements. Somehow they and many other Black men have convinced themselves that marrying white women is a sign of racism’s end. Somehow, this is the televised revolution the US needs. Somehow, marrying white will dismantle the latticework of racism on which this nation is built. But, as sociologist Crystal M. Fleming wrote in her How to be Less Stupid About Race, “we’re not going to end white supremacy by ‘hugging it out.’ And we’re certainly not going to fuck our way out of racial oppression. That’s not how power works.” The US Supreme Court’s 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision that legalized interracial marriage was groundbreaking, but it never was the “promised land” that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. envisioned the night before his death in 1968.

My first time thinking through the social and political implications of Black men and white women together in union or solidarity was in 1990, my third year at the University of Pittsburgh. At the student union one day, I sat down for lunch in between classes to hang out with three of my friends. Two were already in the middle of conversation about a growing visible concern on campus — young Black men dating young white women. The two of them (one man, one woman), were biracial themselves, each the child of a white mother and a Black father. One other Black girlfriend also chimed in. They were decidedly against the idea of interracial dating and marriage. At one point I said, “If they love each other, what does it matter?” My two Black biracial friends both sighed and side-eyed me, and then laughed like I was telling a cruel joke. 

What they understood and I didn’t get in 1990 was that while universal love ultimately conquers all, romantic love and friendships will never negate racism in any of its forms. I also knew about Emmett Till’s lynching for winking or whistling at a white woman. I definitely knew from the movie Birth of a Nation (the original one) the deadly dangers of white women accusing Black men of rape or unwanted flirtations. 

I also knew this from personal experience. The year before, and with the support of my one-time boss, a 26-year-old white woman at my campus computing lab job who was my supervisor’s high school friend accused me of sexual harassment. This after she had groped and squeezed my ass cheeks on two occasions during our shifts. I was 19 years old at the time.

In his Afropessimism, Frank B. Wilderson III wrote, “You marry White. It doesn’t change…What do you do with an unconscious that appears to hate you?” The bigger question is, why would any Black man ever expect to end the latticework of American racism and anti-Blackness through interracial marriage? This is  the typical combination of Black mens’ colorism, hypermasculinity, and seeking the same status as white men through white women. “Those black men who believe deeply in the American dream…a masculine dream of dominance and success at the expense of others, are most likely to express negative feelings about black women and…desire [for] a white woman,” as bell hooks wrote in her Ain’t I A Woman.

Davis, Ribeiro, Chappelle, Wilderson, and many other Black men are too susceptible to the idea of interracial relationships as their revolution, their American Dream. The late critical race theorist Derrick Bell foresaw this in one of his lesser known allegorical essays from Faces at the Bottom of the Well, “The Last Black Hero.” It’s a story about a leading Black revolutionary who fell in love with a white woman. As Bell wrote, many whites in power see Black men with white women “as proof that black men in such relationships were, despite their militant rhetoric, not really dangerous.” For anyone working to dismantle the matrix of American racism, though, this way of Black-man-thinking (and white-woman-thinking) is very dangerous. Especially in the words and deeds of people like Chappelle, Davis, Ribeiro, and Wilderson.

This is why if the revolution does come, not only will it not be televised, it will rely predominantly on Black women binary and non-binary to lead it from imagination to actuality. Like in The Matrix movie series, there are too many Black men and white women who have “the world pulled over their eyes,” a world of white binary hypermasculine and patriarchal racism. Too many Black men — whether they are entertainers in need of long-term therapy like Chappelle or are people who see themselves leading revolutions — are too compromised by their own gendered privilege and social status desires to be the leaders they’ve all been waiting for.

The White-Boy Logic of Supernatural

15 Thursday Jul 2021

Posted by in 1, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Movies, Politics, Pop Culture, Religion

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Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki as Dean and Sam Winchester in Supernatural, Season 9, Episode 13 (“The Purge”) screenshot. Originally aired February 4, 2014.

One of the benefits of working from home for years is the ability to take in copious amounts of popular culture in passive and subliminal ways. For more than a decade before the pandemic, my daily schedule included a multitasking routine of writing, teaching, grading, working-out, napping, running errands, and getting my son off to school and my partner off to her job. All the while, I am consuming news and pop culture. BBC World News from 6 or 7 am until I go to the car to drive my spouse to the Metro stop or run errands, sometimes longer. In the Honda Element, listening to my tunes or ESPN 980 (before Dan Synder sold the station two years ago) or WAMU/NPR. And, bouncing from show to show while writing, grading, working out, making lunch, prepping dinner, sometimes taking a brief nap between 1:30 and 2:45 (when my son returned home from school) or between 3:45 and 6 pm (when it was time to pick my significant other up from the Metro). 

Of all the TNT reruns I’d put on in the midday slot over the years, between Bones, Castle, Arrow, and Law & Order, the one that has stuck with me the longest is Supernatural. Its final episode aired at the end of this past year. Perhaps it’s because it’s such a white boy’s show, or because it’s about as American as a show filmed in Vancouver, British Columbia can get. Whatever it was, I went from calling the show “Brooders” and “White Males Brooding” to actually enjoying the series, a not-so-guilty pleasure in between grading, writing, and revising, and yoga poses, planks, pushups, crunches, free weights, and plyometrics.

That doesn’t mean I’ve watched it with an uncritical mind. Just like with what I’ve called “white male angst music” in the 1990s — alt rock and grunge (think Pearl Jam and Live here) — Supernatural is a tour-de-force of whitemansplaining the world. Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki as Dean and Sam Winchester might play classic ‘70s rock in their legendary 1967 black Chevy Impala, but they are all “White, Discussion” and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Under The Bridge” in their attitudes. Seriously, how do two white dudes get away with mass murder while they constantly “save the world” with the “family business” of “hunting and killing monsters”?

The premise of the show, for the generation of folks who haven’t watched the 15 seasons of episodes between 2005 and 2020 (I watched my first episode in 2012, so there’s that), is that the Winchesters have to fight monsters born of supernatural forces while hunting for a yellow-eyed demon who killed their mother, and eventually, their father. In between bouts with demons, angels, archangels, Lucifer, Leviathans, Knights of Hell, Princes of Hell, the King of Hell, and God, er, “Chuck” himself, the Winchesters battled the usual. Ghosts, vampires, werewolves, skinwalkers, jinns, Greco-Roman, Norse, Incan, and Mayan gods, witches, and whatever other supernatural monster one could imagine. Supernatural was at its absolute best when the focus was on the ancient lore around cultural considerations of the metaphysical.  

But the overarching theme of Dean and Sam Winchester “saving the world” is the great white man’s white lie. How does anyone get credit for “saving the world” when they broke the world, the natural order, multiple times. Here’s a short list of the Winchester’s thirst for revenge leading to Armageddon:

– the father John Winchester selling his soul to the “yellow-eyed demon” to save Dean’s life (Season 1)

– Dean selling his soul to the same demon to save Sam’s life (Season 2)

– Sam drinking demon blood to kill a Princess of Hell and Dean torturing damned souls in Hell, breaking the last and the first of 66 seals to unleash Lucifer and the Four Horsemen on the planet (Season 4)

– Dean not allowing Sam to die after finishing the three trials to forever seal up the gates of Hell, and then tricking Sam into allowing a rogue angel possess him for months afterward (Seasons 8 and 9)

– Dean taking on the Mark of Cain, becoming a demon in the process, and Sam freeing Dean from the Mark, unleashing the Darkness (think if so-called dark matter was God’s sister here) and another universe-destroying force (Seasons 9, 10, and 11)

– The Winchesters allowing a nephilim to live and its power to open up a rift between alternative Earths, a rift that threatened both versions of the planet in the process (Seasons 12 and 13)

– Engaging in a all-out war with God, ending only when they resurrect the nephilim Jack from the Empty, as he become the new God, and the old God becomes just Chuck, “just a slob like one of us,” ala 1990s rocker Joan Osborne (Seasons 14 and 15).

Dean and Sam die and go to Hell, Heaven, and Purgatory multiple times in this series. How narcissistic do even white guys — get to be when they assume that they can come back to life over and over again in order to “save” their brother while also saving the world? Especially when they sacrifice other family and friends to keep each other living and hunting monsters? So many die in this show because of their ignorance, so many who didn’t have to. When you take apart the context of their “jobs” as hunters involves hustling pool tables, identity theft and hacking credit cards, stealing cars, and regularly killing people who’ve turned into monsters or in the midst of demon possession. Any two of these gets Black and Brown and Indigenous folks a one-way ticket to prison or a grave, with no chance for resurrection.

It’s hilariously macabre and the height of arrogance of two white guys believing they are doing more good than harm. But isn’t Supernatural really just a parable about how white guys see themselves in the world? Everything is there for the taking, it’s all about us and our lives. Between the drugs, the boozing, the meaningless misogynistic sex, the endless buffet of death by food, Supernatural is the ultimately expression of white male-dominance, or at least, the quest for it, from two average Joes.

Near the end of Season 9, Episode 13 (“The Purge”), Dean and Sam talk, not for the last time, about putting their need to save each other from certain death above the needs and lives of everyone else. Sam has a moment of complete clarity, one that fades away by the end of Season 10 (see the list above). 

You think you’re my savior, my brother, the hero. You swoop in, and even when you mess up, you think what you’re doing is worth it, because you’ve convinced yourself you’re doing more good than bad…but you’re not…What is the upside of me being alive?

Dean’s response:

You kidding me? You and me — fighting the good fight — together.

It never occurred to these characters, and perhaps, even the actors, producers, directors, and writers for Supernatural, that Dean and Sam Winchester are the real monsters here. Two everyday white guys who think that killing monsters and a host of supernatural entities is the solution to everything. Did they even consider that killing monsters might be the reason they need to keep hunting, because they create more each time they kill one? Or that maybe because the US is a place full of kidnapping, rape, enslavement, genocide, and murder, this nation is a natural incubator of supernatural hauntings and possessions, a place where all monsters can thrive? Did they ever see themselves as the humans they never seem to understand in the show? Probably not until the final episode in Season 15, when Dean and Sam finally die — this time for good, and for good. 

I never wanted them to “Carry On Wayward Son,” as Kansas sang it in 1976, as a choir of white girls sang it Season 10, Episode 5. As sad as it was to see the final finale of Dean and Sam Winchester, we need a world without the hundreds of millions of Dean and Sam Winchesters around us, an anti-racist world. A world without these narcissistic and yes, racist and misogynistic and homophobic monsters who see themselves as do-gooders.

Constantine’s, No Longer Around, Missed Anyway

19 Wednesday Aug 2020

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

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The East Liberty CVS on Penn Avenue (where Constantine’s once stood), August 2017. (Itay Gabay via Google Maps).

“Last call for the alcohol!,” the half-bartender, half-bouncer would yell about 20 minutes before the two o’clock closing of the hole-in-the-wall joint that spend a few too many Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays in between the summer of 1991 and January 1995. It was my time “bein’ around my peeps,” sitting around to nurse two or three drinks, dance, people-watch, and occasionally go back home with a patron. It was my time to not think about what I feared, especially God and graduate school. It was my time to forget that I was the second of six kids who had the triple responsibility of father figure, oldest brother, and caregiver. Mostly, it was just a place to allow my horny and bored-with-the-world ass hang out and not be so intellectual and weird all the time.

Constantine’s was where the East Liberty CVS on Penn Avenue in Pittsburgh now sits. It was less than two blocks from where I lived on Penn Circle South, my first on-my-own flat that I didn’t have to share with no one. I have no idea what was there in that rickety and beaten up old one-floor building before Constantine’s. Maybe it had always been a bar or a club, one that had seen better days in the decade or two before I was born. Maybe it was once a hardware store or a dry cleaners. Who knows?

All I knew was, in the month or two after I moved into my Penn Circle South studio apartment, I stumbled onto the place. It would’ve been October 1990, just cool enough for Pittsburghers to start wearing winter gear, Steelers jerseys, and enough Steelers and Pirates pleather and leather to scare a herd of charging bulls. A group of 20-somethings were packing their way through Constantine’s front door. There was a bouncer, I guess, checking IDs to make sure everyone was over 21. Judging by the way some of the youngest women were made up, though, I didn’t think the bouncer was consistently checking folks.

I didn’t go in that day. Too many bills, not enough money, and too many thoughts about What would Mom think? and What temptations would harm my soul? So I forgot about the place for the remainder of my senior year at Pitt.

It wasn’t until I started having problems with my friend E during my first full summer living in the ‘Burgh in ’91 that I started carving out me-time at Constantine’s. I went in on a sweltering mid-June Wednesday, and as would become ritual over the next 3.5 years, the so-called bouncer didn’t check me for ID. The joint was tacky as hell. The tables and chairs on the left were either plastic or plywood, Kelly green or harsh white.

Ving Rhames in Dave (1993), Screen Shot, August 17, 2020. (https://MovieActors.com).

The barstools on the right were of better quality, up against a bar with a prickly middle-aged-looking Black dude who maintained his fresh Ving Rhames-in-Dave (1993) haircut under any and all circumstances serving drinks. He was so mercurial. He could be, “Wassup man? How you be?” one Saturday, and “We don’t serve your kind!” another. One Friday, I ordered a screwdriver (Vodka and O.J.) without any pushback. The next Friday, he was all like, “Muthafucka, just call it a vodka and orange juice! I don’t mix screwdrivers here!”

There was a well-proportioned Black woman who always, always, always, sat in the middle of seven barstools, just to the right of the cash register. She was maybe about five-two, skin the color of mahogany, her hair in a ’90s-style perm or in ruffles. She either wore skin-tight dresses or jeans with a revealing blouse, never danced, and rarely greeted anyone. I figured she was either the gruff bartender’s girlfriend or that Constantine’s was her favorite watering hole. Whatever. She probably could drink the entire group of men (and sometimes women) who hit on her every night under the table and under the concrete foundation, too.

Much of what remember from my Constantine’s outings were the fights. There were so many fights. Fights between two guys over a woman would break out in the middle of the dance floor one Friday or Saturday after another. I once saw a guy beaten until there was a pool of blood in the center of the floor, with a trail of blood leading into the alleyway that led to the side entrance of my apartment building. It wasn’t unusual for women to throw down either, knocking each other out somewhere between PE’s “Can’t Truss It” and Daddy Freddy’s “We Are The Champions.”

Speaking of the music, it was the early ’90s, so the vibe went from New Jack Swing, Babyface and Tony! Toni! Toné! to Jodeci, MJB, and PE, with bits of Kriss Kross, Tribe Called Quest, Naughty By Nature, TLC, Dre, MC Lyte, and LL Cool J thrown in. But it was reggae — specifically dancehall — and gansta rap that was mostly in our ears at Constantine’s for most of my time attending. Shabba Ranks was so big at Constantine’s. So was Patra and Buju Banton and fake raggamuffin Shaggy. Outside of Pitt, I didn’t know African Caribbeans lived in Pittsburgh until I started sipping drinks at Constantine’s.

I also didn’t really know how to dance until I started hanging out at this smoked-filled and slick-floored destination. I went on the floor maybe once every three trips. Sometimes I was more interested in observing than in participating. Sometimes I was too stressed and horny to do anything else but stare at faces, breasts, hips, and asses for a few hours. But I did dance, at least, as best as I could. I used my halfway decent post-up moves from the basketball court as the basis for decent footwork. But, as I began realizing that some of the women wanted to grind, I learned how to do that too.

I had some awkward moments. Like the time my Swahili instructor and I found ourselves at Constantine’s one really warm Wednesday night in the fall of ’91. He had a woman on each arm. All three of them were from Tanzania, not the typical group of Constantine attendees. We greeted each other, and proceeded to ignore each other the rest of the night. Class the next afternoon was pretty much about my and his after-hours habits.

Sometimes I almost got into it with a guy here or a woman there because I looked at them the wrong way, said the wrong thing, sounded too educated or “White,” or because someone’s conversation with me ran on too long. In 1992, one woman laughed at me and kicked me in my rear on my way out the door after I revealed that I was “also working on my master’s” — she obviously didn’t believe me. Until she saw me on campus a week later. After that, I lied, and told folks who asked that I was a “part-time college student.”

I was too young, stressed about grad school and life, and excited and aroused to be scared. I should’ve been. On two occasions, someone threw a large liquor bottle in my direction when I was on my way out of Constantine’s. One other time, I swear, a bullet whizzed past me and into the window of a parked car.

The last time I went to Constantine’s was the beginning of February ’95. I kid you not, they were running the place with a portable electric generator plugged into an outdoor outlet — someone hadn’t paid their Duquesne Light bill. It kept the lights even dimmer than normal. There was no heat. This is a bar in Pittsburgh, before climate change made American winters into the wet season in Guyana. It was 15 degrees Fahrenheit that day, and it felt like it at Constantine’s that night, even with nearly 30 dumbasses like me in the bar that night. I left after 45 minutes.

Three days later, I was in Washington, DC, working on my dissertation project. When I returned at the end of March, Constantine’s was gone, bulldozed to make way for East Liberty’s first CVS.

Truly, if my field had been sociology, cultural anthropology, or social psychology, creative nonfiction writing, my times at Constantine’s would’ve made a great project, with me as subject, too. The misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, and hypermasculinity on display, side-by-side with intersectionality, feminism, sexuality, all in the midst of the beginning of this neighborhood’s gradual shift toward gentrification. It was, well, fascinating. Thankful, though, to not feel that awkward at this stage of life.

Fandom and the False Belief in Transcendence

31 Friday Jan 2020

Posted by in 1, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Sports

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Trinity jumping across the street clip (GIF), The Matrix (1999), January 31, 2020. (https://gfycat.com/; https://youtube.com).

I don’t know who needs to read this, but no matter how talented someone is, no matter how often someone had triumphed in their field, no matter how popular they are, and no matter their level of celebrity status, that person is not necessarily transcendent. Many of these folk are assholes. Yet we Americans use the term so often that all one would have to do to transcend in this country is film themselves with an iPhone 11 in slofie mode while jumping from one building to another in The Matrix series (either as Carrie-Anne Moss’ Trinity or Keanu Reeves’ Neo) to sell themselves as such. Or, to just not talk about the realities of the ugly and oppressive world in which we all inhabit while selling sneakers and entertaining millions.

So, let me be clear. The death of former NBA player Kobe Bryant, his 13-year-old daughter Gianna Bryant, John and Keri and their teenage daughter Alyssa Altobelli, Sarah and her 13-year-old daughter Payton Chester, Christina Mauser, and the pilot Ara Zobayan is nothing short of painfully tragic. Kobe Bryant, of course, played for the Los Angeles Lakers for 20 years. He won five NBA Championships and two Olympic gold medals as part of the USA Basketball team, was an 18-time NBA All-Star, and at the time he retired in 2016, was the league’s third all-time leading scorer, at 33,643 total points. LeBron James only passed Bryant on the all-time scoring list the night before the tragic accident. At 41 years old, Bryant was only into his fourth year of post-NBA life, supporting the WNBA, investing himself in girl’s basketball, winning an Oscar for a five-minute short. This polyglot, this nerd whom experts often mention in the same breath with Michael Jordan and LeBron and other all-time greats, is truly one of the greatest professional basketball players in the history of the sport, full stop.

But, does that make Kobe Bryant “transcendent beyond his sport,” as I have heard the commentators say this week, and have read the sports and culture columnists tweet and write this week? No, absolutely not. We each all have the responsibility to put our lives and our times into perspective, to take a panoramic look at the world in which we inhabit and to dig deep into the soil and rock of that world for meaning. If not, we risk idolizing the first person who comes along to rock our world, and in the process, becoming as short-sighted and as narcissistic as the celebrities, entertainers, artists, athletes, and politicians we worship.

And that has sadly been the case with Bryant. The news and sports media has been paving over the potholes and sinkholes in Bryant’s life faster than The New York Times newspaper plant in College Point, Queens can ink and fold a million hard copies. Bryant’s semi-admitted raping of a 19-year-old in September 2004 (the “incident” was in 2003) has suddenly become a full-throated mea culpa that apparently was unprecedented in the annals of American sport and celebrity. Not one that the rape survivor or any other person who has ever experience rape or sexual violence (yours truly included) should acknowledge, or believe that it would ever make up for the rape, but hey, what do I know?

But my case against transcendence hardly begins or ends with Bryant as a one-time alleged rapist. As great a basketball player as he was, for the bulk of his career, Bryant was a selfish ball hog. By comparison, Bryant made AI’s (Allen Iverson) one-on-five scoring attempts and successes look like Iverson had no choice because he was on the court by himself a lot of those times (which for half of Iverson’s career, was pretty close to the truth). Bryant’s last game in the NBA was one where he scored 60 while taking 50 shots, and he in fact owns the most field goals attempts in any single game of any player this side of Wilt Chamberlain! If this were Rucker Park and not the NBA, maybe transcendence would apply in terms of athletic ability. But as someone who saw how MJ could regularly get 30 while taking only 13 shots (and making 15 free throws) in the second half of his career, great, but not transcendent, from even within the sport of basketball.

Speaking of, the transcendence case really breaks down in terms of cultural influence outside of basketball. Some argue that Bryant was an ambassador of the game and made it international. Really? Two words in response. Dream Team! And, two more words. Michael Jordan! Without the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, and with MJ and Magic and Larry and Patrick and Hakeem, et al. among 11 future Hall-of-Famers, Bryant’s overseas efforts would’ve been like selling the current brand of NFL football to the world (no one likes weak tea made from sewage water, by the way). Also, if one wants to know two more names from different sports who have MJ-esque transcendence or higher, try Tiger and Serena (I don’t even need to use their last names)!

How big was Jordan, and how big does Jordan remain? His Air Jordans are still among the leading earners for Nike in 2019, 16 years after MJ retired, and nearly 36 years after Nike started making them. Air Jordans went well with hip-hop gear and in rap lyrics and videos — for decades. MJ’s shaved head and goat-tee became fashion trends (one could argue the same for Bryant’s messy Afro look, I suppose) that remain with us to this day. But so does MJ’s reluctance to speak out against racism, homophobia, sexism and misogyny, something that Bryant inherited and adopted in shaping his public persona as well.

And it’s this last piece that truly makes the case that the late Bryant was not and could not be transcendent. LeBron James, for all his greatness, has also put his weight and words into Black Lives Matter, mass incarceration, police brutality, and calling out White supremacists. Certainly athletes from the recent past, from Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe to Jim Brown and Althea Gibson, and of course, Jackie Robinson, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, fought oppression with the very lives they lived and the barriers they dismantled. All of them had flaws, but none of them had PR machines in their prime to cover up their mistakes and probable crimes, either. Heck, even O.J. Simpson for better and certainly for worse in transcendent in this social justice and injustice sense.

Now, could Bryant have “transcended basketball” if he had live to, say, 60, 70, or even 80 years old? Maybe. But probably not. His image mattered too much to him. The world outside of basketball and family, not so much. And that’s okay. That doesn’t make his death and the deaths of the other eight — especially the three teenagers — on that helicopter any less tragic. This doesn’t make the pain or sadness any fan feels for him and his family any less real. But maybe, just maybe, those who are just fans and members of the media should check themselves before putting Bryant on a pedestal or altar. As tragic a death as it is, death is part of life, after all, and Bryant had as full a 41 years as anyone could expect. Just not a transcendent 41 years.

My Alex and America’s 45, Bullies with Fan Boys on the March

05 Monday Aug 2019

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

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45’s fans at campaign rally, Greenville, North Carolina, July 17, 2019. (Carolyn Kaster/AP; https:/usatoday.com).

At least one person will undoubtedly find my latest post unfair and offensive this time around. My Humanities classmate Alex, whom I interviewed as part of my book Boy @ The Window, will likely not be too happy with me this week. So Alex, if you do find yourself feeling this is unfair and my post offensive, I apologize in advance.

But either way, that’s okay, because the comparison between the person he once was and the person who is 45, America’s usurper-in-chief, is apt. Not because Alex was ever a malignant narcissist in need of constant adulation from his entourage. But because even small-d demagoguery around putting down so-called others out of insecurity, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, religion, a sense of superiority, and/or willful ignorance will still lead to violence and bullying. On a societal level, that is mass violence, that is fascism within a democracy, and nation-state sanctioned. No matter what the College Board and ETS says.

The thing I didn’t really allow myself to understand, even after I interviewed Alex in 2007, even after writing my first eight drafts of Boy @ The Window regarding Alex and the “Italian Club,” was this. That people like having leaders, folks they can relate to, even as preteens. In our times, that means someone who’s cool, or at least, pulls off the cool aesthetic well. Alex did. Whether you liked him or despised him at A. B. Davis Middle School in Humanities in seventh or eighth grade, Alex had a certain prepubescent charm. He was playful, goofy, corny, and fully engaged in pop culture as an up-with-everything 12 and 13-year-old.

And that attracted a specific group of folks into Alex’s solar system. Some of them knew him from their mutual time together at Columbus ES, but several in his entourage were from other schools prior to Davis. All of them were disaffected boys in some way or another, mostly Italian (or at least in one case, half-Italian), but almost to a person, not comfortable with the multicultural pressure cooker of relative uncoolness that was our magnet middle school program.

Alex led his “Italian Club” in acting out. Like a wolf pack, they looked for prey in the classroom to pick on, to call the wittiest names, to occasionally get physical with. Many times, they messed around with corny lines for girls like Sandra and Marianna. But I ended up on their radar early on. Between my kufi, my big but slow-talking mouth, and my fight with Brandie, I was ripe for Alex and his band of predators.

On November 2, 1981, the bullying started in earnest, as Alex and his band jumped me after school in the area near the side door exit from Davis. About a third of my classmates watched as the “Italian Club” knocked me to the ground, punched and kicked me until I began to cry. Alex himself never put his hands on me, but watched with glee as his fanboys did the dirty work.

But that wasn’t all. I had to endure seven months of being “dumb,” “stupid,” and a “monkey” from Alex’s band of brothers. It was topped off by a month of “Captain Zimbabwe” chants in May and June 1982, typically in Mrs. Sesay’s homeroom, but after counter-protests from other classmates, it moved to Ms. Fleming’s Italian class.

Eighth grade was nowhere near as bad, partly because I grew four inches over the summer, and partly because they likely sensed my rage from my summer of abuse with my idiot stepfather. Still, this didn’t stop Alex from messing with me or other vulnerable classmates that year or in ninth grade. I remember him greeting Josh a couple of times with the refrain from The Beatles “Hey Jude,” except it was, “Na, Na, Na, Na-Na-Na-Na, Na-Na-Na-Na, Hey Jew.” I remember him and his entourage calling my other classmates “monkey.” He once went after our class’ eventual valedictorian, “she’s a brainiac, a brainiac,” adapting a song from the Flashdance soundtrack.

This was the Alex I knew between the ages of 12 and 15. Comparing him to a 73-year-old who has the impulse control of a nine-year-old hopped up on crystal meth is somewhat unfair, as Alex isn’t that teenager anymore. Still, what 45 has done on a far larger stage than Davis’ Humanities program is essentially the same thing. Except that there are millions of folks — especially White men — attracted to his intersectional message of “this is our [read, ‘A White Man’s’] country.” And anyone not for White men first, second, and always needs to get out, or at least, get out of the way.

There’s a video clip making its social media rounds via Bloomberg editor Tim O’Brien from 45’s rally in Panama City, Florida on May 9. In it, you have 45 and many in his audience laughing at the idea of shooting “illegals” coming in from Mexico as a solution for stemming the tide of “invasion” from Central America.

This is hardly the only blunt signal 45 has sent to his anti-Black, anti-Muslim, and anti-Latinx fanboys and footsoldiers-for-the-patriarchy (thank you for the truth, Mona Eltahawy) fangirls over the years that their intersectional -isms are justified. But it is one direct example that those who really believe a race war is coming can use to take up arms and shoot to kill Black and Brown folks for existing in the US. That’s what Patrick Crusius and Connor Betts did this weekend in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio to their dozens of dead and injured victims. That’s what 45’s entourage has been doing with increasing frequency over the past decade. This is what demagogue bullies do. They build a following. They jizz their racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and homophobia all over their followers. Those most predisposed to lap up such vitriol and act on it then do the not-so-subtle calls for violent action and take it out on truly random marginalized people.

For a variety of reasons, not the least of which, attending a majority-Black-and-Brown high school and perhaps recognizing his own racism and misogyny, Alex wasn’t the same Billy Idol-worshipper I’d known in eighth grade. By our senior year, he even seemed like-able, and spend way more time with a group of Black and Latino friends than he did with his one-time entourage. I assumed he matured. Good for him. Really.

But it’s way too late for 45 to grow out of his -isms. It’s way too late for millions in his entourage to grow out of their violent fantasies for mastery over vulnerable others. We have to disarm them, with the repeal of the 2nd Amendment. We have to disarm them, by calling them out for the bullies and intersectional terrorists they are. We have to, if we’re going to survive them.