Kufi Battles

15 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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"The Man In Black", A.B. Davis Middle School, Abuse, Bigotry, Bullying, Esau and Jacob, Fights, Geometry, Intimidation, Intolerance, Italian Club, Kufi, Lost (2004-10), Louis Cuglietto, Masculinity, Multicultural Education, Puberty, Rage, Tackles, The Matrix Revolutions (2003)

Slow-motion punch frame from Matrix Revolutions (2003), February 15, 2013. (http://theathleticnerd.com/).

Slow-motion punch frame from The Matrix Revolutions (2003), February 15, 2013. (http://theathleticnerd.com/).

My days as a kufi-wearing Hebrew-Israelite at school is one of those things I don’t spend much time on this blog talking about. Mostly because it involved defending myself to protect a piece of clothing and a religion in which I never fully believed, especially after early ’83. Plus, it involved fairly rare attempts in which dumb asses attempted to bully me. Compared to my now deceased idiot ex-stepfather’s abuse, no kid or wannabe thug after the summer of ’82 really stood a chance.

There were three incidents in eighth and ninth grade in which a kid got into a scuffled with me over my kufi, for whatever reason they’d invented in their head. The first was in February ’83, as one Black kid — probably about fifteen — snatched my kufi from my head and started to run up the basement hallway with it at Davis Middle School. The incident occurred as I, A and another member of A’s “Italian Club” entourage were in the middle of an errand for a teacher. I immediately ran the boy down, knocked him to the floor, dusted off my kufi, and put it back on my head. The boy got up and threatened to beat me up. It was at this point that A intervened, saying that he would “have to take us all on” if he wanted to fight me. A’s moment of support notwithstanding, I would’ve beaten the kid in the face as many times as it would’ve taken to get my kufi back.

Pittsburgh Steelers’ James Harrison sacks Baltimore Ravens QB Joe Flacco, AFC Division Round, January 15, 2011. (http://espn.go.com).

The second incident occurred a month later, prior to the opening morning bell at Davis. Out of the blue, “Little J” picked a fight with me, calling me a “dickweed” and a “shithead” for no reason at all. I hardly knew the Jewish kid, who immediately came at me to push, shove, throw punches, and grab at my kufi. It really was crazy for Little J to think that he had a shot at doing any damage. I was already five-eight. He was lucky if he was four-eleven and one hundred pounds after a potato latkes breakfast.

This wasn’t a fight. It was a pushing and shoving match, with me doing all of the pushing and shoving and Little J landing in bushes or on his ass. For seven minutes, he kept running at me, trying to throw a punch or kick me. I caught or blocked his attempts, grabbed him, and shoved him into the bushes near the boys’ entrance to Davis. By the sixth time, Little J was crying and his cheeks were fire truck-red, I was laughing and shaking my head, and the other Black boys at Davis were asking me what was going on. When I told them, they started laughing as well.

Beyond him grabbing at me and my kufi, I never knew what Little J wanting to fight me was all about. My guess then was that Little J was playing the role of Esau (the hairy brother of Jacob from the Bible, Torah and Qur’an) and didn’t like the fact that I claimed to be a descendant of the father of ancient Israel and his people.

The Man In Black (presumably Esau; played by Titus Welliver) with Jacob (Mark Pellegrino), from TV series Lost (2009-10), February 15, 2013. (http://magiclamp.org).

Incident Three occurred on my second day at Mount Vernon High School. After a day of assignments and learning the names of our new teachers, I went to Louis Cuglietto’s eighth-period Geometry class. It was on the first floor of the school, just to the right of the front entrance and the cafeteria. As I milled around the classroom looking to take my seat, my Latino classmate “N” came out of nowhere and snatched my kufi off my head.

“Give it back now!,” I yelled.

“Make me!,” N responded with a bit of sarcasm.

Just as he was about to throw it to another classmate. I grabbed N and knocked him to the floor. There we were, on the floor by the dark green chalkboard, me on top of N, who was struggling to hold on to my kufi. I lay on top of him, punched him in the face a couple of times, and took my kufi back from him just before Cuglietto came into the room. By this time everyone in our class had formed a circle to watch the spectacle. I don’t remember all of what Cuglietto said, but he did ask, “Do you want to get suspended?” After we dusted ourselves off, we went to our desks and got back to work.

For me, the incident marked a transition point in my life at school. This would be the last fight I’d have in school. Some people continued to try to verbally intimidate me. But they left it at that, probably because my height and my face said “Don’t mess with me” before I’d say anything.

The more immediate result was that I began to question more consciously my motives for defending myself as a Hebrew-Israelite. “Why do I care if N snatches my kufi from me?,” I said to myself on the way home from school that day. It wasn’t as if I truly believed in any of the teachings anymore. I definitely didn’t want anyone messing with me at home or in school. At the same time, I didn’t want to use up energy defending something in which I didn’t believe.

Meeting Joe Trotter

10 Thursday May 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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African American History, Afrocentricity, Black History in Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon University, HBCUs, Horace Mann Bond, Intercultural Education, Joe Trotter, Joe William Trotter Jr., Julian Bond, Lincoln University, Molefi Asante, Multicultural Education, Multiculturalism, Pitt, Road Trip, Self-Discovery, Trust, University of Pittsburgh, V. P. Franklin, Vincent P. Franklin

Conference agenda, 15th Annual Conference on Black History in Pennsylvania, Lincoln University (May 8/9 1992), May 10, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

This time two decades ago, I was driving my way home from a conference at Lincoln University in southeastern Pennsylvania. It was a week of more firsts that had become a small sample of a year of many firsts for me since getting into graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh in April ’91. It was my first road trip anywhere, and the first time I’d been in a car since earning my driver’s license in January ’92 (see my post “Taking the Long Road: Driver’s Delight” from January ’12). It was part of my first visit to NYC, Mount Vernon, and 616 since finishing my master’s degree.

That’s where my road trip began, Mount Vernon, as I’d wind my way to Yonkers, the Bronx, the GW Bridge, New Jersey and Philly (where I got lost twice) before ending up on the bucolic HBCU campus. I was at Lincoln University to present at my first academic conference, the 15th Annual Conference on Black History in Pennsylvania. The theme for that year’s conference was “Empowerment: Perspectives on African-American History in Pennsylvania. Somehow, the conference organizers approved me to present my paper comparing elements of intercultural education, multicultural education and Afrocentric education in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia during the 1930s and early 1990s.

Lincoln University entrance and alumni arch, dedicated in 1921, May 10, 2012. (http://lincoln.edu).

If the road trip and the presentation were the only things important about this conference, that would’ve been plenty for me in May ’92. But there was so much more to this first conference for me than driving a Ford Escort in North Philly or getting on stage for the first time since sixth grade (see my post “Peaking As A Sixth Grader” from June ’11). It was my first time around a large number of Black academicians and activists. I met Julian Bond for the first time (his father, Horace Mann Bond, by the way, had served as president of Lincoln University from 1945 to 1957). Folks from the African American studies department at Temple University attempted to recruit me for their doctoral program. Knowing that Molefi Asante was there, I respectfully declined.

Above all else, I came away with two valuable experiences that would have an effect on me for years to come. One was being in the audience for a presentation from V.P. (or Vincent P.) Franklin, whose work on Black education in Philadelphia in the 1920s and 1930s I already knew. His was an extemporaneous presentation that lasted for well over twenty minutes. It was full of quotes, links between different historians’ research, and stories. It was extremely entertaining, delivered in an engrossing public speaking style, though not like some Southern Baptist preacher, either.

I was blown away by Franklin’s presentation. Especially in comparison to the one that I’d deliver some

Conference agenda (inside pages), 15th Annual Conference on Black History in Pennsylvania, Lincoln University (1992), May 10, 2012 (Donald Earl Collins).

twenty hours later. Mine was a well-studied delivery of ten pages of excerpts from my original paper. It was okay, not exactly a winner compared to anything that I’ve done in the two decades since. For it was with Franklin’s presentation and style from the day before that stuck with me. I decided immediately after my lackluster performance to always present my work extemporaneously, to work on my public speaking skills, to understand that presenting one’s work was a very different task than simply reading from it.

The second takeaway was in meeting my eventual dissertation advisor, Joe William Trotter, Jr. I met him after the first set of presentations on Friday morning, and ended up sitting with him for part of the Friday luncheon. I learned a few things in that first meeting. Up until that day, the only Black historians I knew in the Pittsburgh area were at Pitt or somehow affiliated with Pitt, including my then advisor Larry Glasco. The fact that Joe was across the way at Carnegie Mellon meant that there was at least the hope of gaining a different perspective on African American history than the stiff responses to Whites misconstruing the Black experience.

What made this first meeting even more intriguing was that Joe was in the process of putting together a graduate seminar for the Fall ’92 semester in African American history. It would be the first time that one had been taught at Carnegie Mellon. No such course existed at Pitt, either, at least as a graduate seminar. It meant that I could expect to get something out of my second year of graduate school (and first year as a PhD student) after all. “Where do I sign up?,” I asked after hearing what seemed like wonderful news at the time.

I returned to 616 twenty years ago on this date recharged and ready for another year of intellectual growth. But I should’ve also returned with far more insight into the politics of race, academia, trust, and academic competition than I actually had. The dynamics within the conference were extremely subtle, like an ultrasonic pulse undetected by most human hearing, but there driving the subconscious crazy anyway.

I didn’t see Joe’s invite to his classroom as a competition for me initially because I was obviously all-too-desperate to move on from Pitt, but not desperate enough to join Asante’s Temple of Afrocentricity (see my post “Writer’s Start” from August ’10 for more). Joe got me, all right. I just didn’t know it yet.

When Being An American Equals Never Having to Say Sorry

08 Friday Jul 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Politics, race, Religion

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"Another E", A Curriculum of Inclusion, Academia, Afrocentricity, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Asa Hilliard III, Blackness, Commissioner's Task Force on Minorities: Equity and Excellence, Cultural Pluralism, Culture Wars, Davis Middle School, Diane Ravitch, Diversity, Ethnic Studies, Ethnicity, Humanities, Humanities Program, K-12 Curriculum, K-12 Educaiton, Leonard Jeffries, Mount Vernon High School, Multicultural Education, Multiculturalism, New York State Department of Education, Race, University of Pittsburgh, Whiteness, Writing

New York State Social Studies Review and Development Committee Report, June 1991 (Picture/Donald Earl Collins). One of several reports produced for the New York State Education Department and Commissioner, as part of the Commissioner's Task Force on Minorities: Equity and Excellence

Twenty years ago this week, I began writing an academic piece that would lead to my dissertation topic, doctorate and first book Fear of a “Black” America (2004). It was a topic that I’d fall in and then out of love with. Ironically, I pursued this topic because of my academic experiences in Humanities at Davis Middle and Mount Vernon High School. The topic was multiculturalism, and more specifically, multicultural education, and how to achieve this kind of curriculum reform in K-12 education. Just writing these words makes me feel both young and naive at the same time.

This whole quest started with a girl. Actually, with the young woman “Another E” (see “The Power of Another E” from April ’09 and “Beyond the Asexual Me” from last month”). She wanted to put an article together for publication, in response to what was then a major controversy involving research into the revision of New York State’s social studies and other curricula. The New York State Department of Education had given a committee the task of figuring out how to make the state’s K-12 curriculum more inclusive and representative of the state’s tremendous racial, ethnic and other forms of diversity.

By the end of September ’91, it would produce A Curriculum of Inclusion: Report of the Commissioner’s Task Force on Minorities: Equity and Excellence. But that deliverable was far from my mind when, tired from my weeks of near starvation post-graduation that April (see “Sometimes Starvation” from May ’11), I reluctantly said okay to working on this article.

Leonard Jeffries, Newark Public Library, February 1, 2007. (http://npl.org)

Now here I was, minus the young woman in whom I no longer had an interest, now working on a piece that had become more academic than either of us had originally intended. By the time I’d written my first words on multiculturalism, I’d already learned the names Leonard Jeffries, Asa Hilliard III and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. I’d read articles from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal about Jeffries’ name-calling, Schlesinger’s incredulousness about calling slaves “enslaved persons,” and about the committee in general getting along like hyenas tearing at a dead wildebeest.

If I’d been just a tad bit smarter, I would’ve done an investigative piece and called and emailed the people on this task force. I would’ve asked them to divulge to me what they would eventually tell the world about their dislike of each other and of anything “multicultural,” which was in quotes for them. For Schlesinger, multicultural was the equivalent of bad ethnic studies or a kind of Afrocentrism that blamed Whites for all that has ailed America and the world for the past 500 years. For Jeffries, it was a racist attempt at appeasing Blacks and other groups of color while maintaining the main theme of Whites on top.

Although this is an oversimplification, it’s not by much. There really wasn’t anyone from the task force, the

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., CUNY, circa 2006, months before his death on February 28, 2007. (http://www.nytimes.com)

NYS Department of Education, or anyone who spoke on the Himalayas-out-of-a-termite-mound controversy over a more inclusive K-12 curriculum without taking one of those two views. That’s what interested me the most. Schlesinger, and eventually, folks like Diane Ravitch, Mario Cuomo and others completely against revision that even approached cultural pluralism, versus Jeffries, Hilliard and others arguing beyond what they called a White multiculturalism.

I didn’t have the capacity at that stage of my life to see myself as a writer or a journalist in any way. Just two years removed from the end of my mother’s marriage to my now idiot ex-stepfather, I only saw the piece that I’d turn into a Master’s research paper, doctoral thesis and first book as an academic exercise, one where I found the philosophical middle. I hadn’t a clue as to how to make myself part of the Ground Zero issue of the first seven years of the ’90s, the Culture Wars.

But I did have one experience that provided unique insight into multiculturalism and the arguments made by scholars and pols on all sides. Six years in Humanities in Mount Vernon, New York’s public schools. A place where cultural diversity and how to deal with it within the curriculum was the elephant in the classroom. Some teachers and classes addressed it, and many didn’t, to the detriment of what was a solid program, not to mention me and the others who were my classmates.

Either way, I saw more issues of diversity crop up where a multiculturalist approach would’ve been helpful all during my time in Humanities, including with my kufi and my Hebrew-Israelite years. It was a missed opportunity, one that I unconsciously wanted to address with my research of and writing on multiculturalism.