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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Tag Archives: Mythology

Michael Clayton, My Writing, and 20 Years of Sinai-Wandering

16 Thursday Mar 2017

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Academia, Academic Writing, CMU, Dan Resnick, Falsehoods, Gene Clayton, George Clooney, Lies, Michael Clayton, Michael Clayton (2007), Mythology, Pitt, Politics of Academia, Publish-or-Perish, Richard J. Altenbaugh, Scholarship, Sean Cullen, Unwritten Rules, Writing, Writing Career


George Clooney and Sean Cullen in Michael Clayton (2007), March 15, 2017. (http://bbc.co.uk).

My favorite scene from Michael Clayton (2007) is when the title character’s brother Gene (played by Sean Cullen) confronts Michael (played by George Clooney) about the past seventeen years of his career as a fixer.

You got these cops thinking you’re a lawyer. You got these lawyers thinking you’re a cop. You got everybody fooled, don’t you? Everybody but you. You know exactly what you are.

About a year and a half ago, I figured I could insert the words “writer” and “scholar” in those lines, with twenty years of my career(s) for context, and maybe some of the meaning would be correct. I am a writer’s version of Michael Clayton. I’ve got academicians thinking I’m a unscholarly writer, and journalists and editors who think I’ve only written for scholarly audiences. What a mess!

Last year, after receiving a rejection for a version of my article about American narcissism, American racism, and why real conversations on race (whether through Clinton’s Race Initiative or via Ferguson) are all but impossible, I decided no more. I will not seek to submit another scholarly piece to a peer-reviewed scholarly journal ever again. And if asked, unless it’s something I truly feel passionate about, I will say no.

Do not think of this as sour grapes. I have published two full-length journal articles in my career, not to mention a bunch of the standard book reviews, and an op-ed for Teachers College Record in the past. Technically, I am 3-for-11 in publishing academic articles over the past two decades, not great, but hardly abysmal.

My issue is with the elitism and implicit bias that is rampant in the publish-or-perish world of academia. While some folks could argue it is the same in publishing in general, it really isn’t. The unwritten rules in publishing, if not followed, may well still lead to published articles, even if a person is starving and homeless in between. In academic publishing, not following the rules leads to ostracism, and a career dead before it ever begins.

Keep in mind, no scholarly journal pays authors for their articles. It takes about two years to go from submission to publication in most history and education journals. If twenty people read your article, that’s icing on a protein-powder cake. If you aren’t in the tenure-stream, though, it really doesn’t matter how many articles you publish, because it doesn’t provide job stability or security. As a former nonprofit administrator, it scared most of my supervisors whenever and wherever I published, so no benefits there either. For those in tenure-stream positions, it does matter, no matter how crappy the research or how densely unreadable the writing.

After twenty years in the publishing struggle, it’s time to face the truth. I simply wasn’t good enough to publish in academic journals. I’m not talking about my writing ability or research skills. I’m pointing out my eclectic career path, my lack of tenure at an elite university, with few to vouch for me when I was younger and an up-and-comer. My interdisciplinary research on race, on multiculturalism, on education, meant that I was a misfit from day one. Heck, I know for sure in at least one case, a journal editor held my race and age against me.

Sinai Desert, where Moses, the Israelites (and I) wandered for a generation, Egypt, March 9, 2010. (Tommy from Arad via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-BY-SA 2.0.

I know most of the academic writing rat-race is a system of exploitation based in part on fears of joblessness, loss of prestige, and elitism based on class, race, gender, and whether one teaches at an elite university or at a community college. It is based on an academician’s ability to blame themselves and themselves alone for their failings, and not the oppressive publishing system itself. Kind of like the poor blaming themselves for their poverty. Or Whites and Blacks blaming other Blacks for a degenerative culture instead of looking at systemic racism as the real culprit for racial inequality. Academia is very much in and of this wider world of social injustice and oppression, no matter how university presidents attempt to spin it.

Truly, I find the idea of a cold, objective, dispassionate, dense writing style as more serious and scholarly than any other form to be high-grade bullshit. It’s what folks in academia tell each other. Just like many a journalist and editor is a frustrated writer looking for creative and book manuscript-length outlets, many a writer in academia believes their writing (and as often as not, their research) to be much more than it is.

But the biggest issue for me was my elitist and naive attempt to straddle the fence between academic publishing and writing for wider audiences. This living in two worlds began for me during my heady days, my grad school years at both the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon. Some of my history professors, like Paula Baker, Kate Lynch, and Joe Trotter, all tried with a considerable amount of frustration to get me to write in more scholarly tones. Others seemed to be fine with my writing style. I had a tone that was too “journalistic,” according to my racial paternalistic professor Dan Resnick, who meant it as an insult.

Between 1997 and 2002, I churned out eight full-length pieces (in the 20-35-page-range) on multiculturalism and Black education/history meant for peer-reviewed scholarly journals, four of them between February and December 1997 alone. None of them were ever published. One, an admittedly ambitious state-of-the-subfield piece on multicultural education and its history in American education, elicited a response from the History of Education Quarterly’s editor-in-chief. He was my one-time professor during my first year of graduate school at Pitt, Dick Altenbaugh. Him and his managing editor met with me for nearly an hour and a half in March 1998.

Some of the meeting was about the deficiencies in my article and in my argument. But most of the time was about my writing style, my ambitiousness, and quite frankly, my age and race. I wrote about some of this in Fear of a “Black” America. Apparently, at twenty-eight, I needed to be in my mid-40s to write a grand essay on multicultural education. Allegedly, I needed long-retired (and in one case, dying) White scholars to support my arguments, no matter what evidence I brought to bear. I needed, most of all, to stop being so ambitious about my work, and stick to more objective, run-of-mill, 181-variations-on-a-theme topics in the education field. Like what Karl Marx or John Dewey would have to say about ability grouping.

I gave up on academic publishing in 2002, at least on the topic of Black education/history and multiculturalism. I tried to write articles on everything from social justice movements to the fallacies of the liberal-conservative construct, on education, poverty and mythology of American social mobility, even on intersectionality. Only, I had worked so hard to make myself more of a scholarly writer. So much so that I now had to relearn how to write for more than fifteen people, and really, to write for myself. It took about a year to drop the 40, 50, and 60-word compound sentences, the use of inappropriately complex language, and the mask of dispassionate objectivity in my writing. Ironically, this was also when I published my first scholarly piece, on multicultural conservatism and Derrick Bell’s “Rules of Racial Standing,” in 2003. I also published my first solo op-ed, in the Washington Post, around the same time.

By this time, I saw myself as a recovering academic. I also had some unfinished personal business, around how I got to my mid-thirties, to this place in my life where I had “made it,” sort of, but I hadn’t escaped my past. This was where the story of Boy @ The Window took over, and why I have a memoir and nearly ten years of blog posts.

But because of my nonprofit work on college access and retention, two professors invited me and my team to submit a piece for publication in their journal. It was a four-person piece with me as the primary author (I wrote about 90 percent of it, so there’s that). The original invite was in June 2007, and the article came out in mid-October 2009. I had stopped working for the Academy for Educational Development, and found writing the article like a strait-jacket and a time-gobbler.

Michael Clayton (George Clooney) and a horse, a moment of truth, screen shot and crop, 2007. (http://chud.com).

After Boy @ The Window in 2013, I decided to write articles for a broader audience again. This time, I made the decision to take my memoir-writing experiences and apply them to my writing. I started writing about K-12 and corporate education reform, the problems in higher education, about racism in the Obama era, about poverty and its connections to race, gender, and current issues. And over the past two years, I’ve published more and reached more people than I could ever have done with an award-winning article in the Journal of American History.

So academia, you win. I give up.

Christmas is Carnage!

25 Sunday Dec 2016

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

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Abundance Fables, Babe (1995), Capitalism, Carnage, Christmas, Excess, Family, Family Dysfunction, Faux Moralisms, History, It's A Wonderful Life (1946), Jesus, Mythology, Origins, Romans, Suicide


 

A white duck? goose?, December 25, 2016. (http://pinterest.com).

A white duck? goose?, December 25, 2016. (http://pinterest.com).

One of the funniest lines in Babe (1995) comes from Ferdinand the duck (who kind of looks like a goose) yelling just before Christmas Day, “Christmas means carnage!,” as he hoped to avoid A. Hoggett’s chopping block for making duck a l’orange. But really, that’s what this holiday has felt like for me for years.

Saying “Jesus is the reason for the season” doesn’t quite help, because that’s only partly true. All the actual evidence points to Jesus’ birthday being either in April or August, not the Winter solstice. The combination of a celebration of Jesus’ birth with either the Saturnalia festivals or the “birthday of the unconquered sun” (sol invictus) commemorations via Constantine and other Roman emperors (take your pick), led to Christmas becoming a December 25th tradition in Europe, the Middle East, and Northern/East Africa. And all of this became formalized by the end of the fourth century CE. So while I believe in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, and what Jesus stood for while walking among humans, I don’t see Christmas as a strictly religious, spiritual, or Christian holiday.

The Queen's Christmas tree, Windsor Castle (steel engraving), published in The Illustrated London News, 1848, in "Godey's Lady's Book," December 1850 . (Wetman via Wikipedia). In public domain.

The Queen’s Christmas tree, Windsor Castle (steel engraving), published in The Illustrated London News, 1848, in Godey’s Lady’s Book, December 1850. (Wetman via Wikipedia). In public domain.

That’s because of how the holiday came to dominate much of the world. The myth-making in the UK and the US between 1820 and 1870 helped turn an inconsistently celebrated holiday for Jesus’ birth, community, family, and some gift-giving into capitalism at its best and worst. That the Christmas tree didn’t become a common part of the holiday until Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert began taking an annual picture of themselves around a tree in 1850 was a function of German influences and British imperialism, not just the beauty of a decorated tree. Christmas cards didn’t become normalized until a German immigrant to the US thought he could make a fortune selling cards for people to mail each other, in the 1860s and 1870s. Congress didn’t make Christmas a federal holiday until 1870, and did so in an attempt to reunite the country around the common idea of Christmas as a form of family healing. Enacted five years after the Civil War and the loss of 620,000 lives, the Christmas holiday was one thing that formerly slave-owning Southerners and anti-slavery/anti-Black Northerners could agree on.

The British and later American influences on the world — military, geopolitical, economic, and popular culture — made the holiday into the trillion-dollar business that is today. You do not have to be Christian, Muslim, or even Jewish to celebrate the holiday, because while Jesus is important to tens of millions, it is not the unifying theme, and hasn’t been for decades. Commercials and other ads, endless rounds of shopping for the latest in high-tech electronics, the near-global slaughtering of spruce and fir trees, turkeys, chickens, sheep, goats, geese, and yes, ducks. That has been the main theme of Christmas for most, It’s A Wonderful Life’s (1946) annual re-broadcast on NBC notwithstanding.

The bridge scene in It's A Wonderful Life, where James Stewart's character's was contemplating suicide, 1946. (http://salon.com).

The bridge scene in It’s A Wonderful Life, where James Stewart’s character’s was contemplating suicide, 1946. (http://salon.com).

I am not bah-humbugging out about the holiday, though. I just want to remind people to not wallow too much in the mythology they tend to believe is universal about the holiday, because most of what people believe about Christmas is at best only one-third true. The fact is, some folks do bug out this time of the year, from loneliness, from a daily reminder during this season that they are the have-nots in a holiday myth built on fables of abundance. And some people attempt to and actually succeed in checking out — some permanently — this time of the year. I should know, because I almost did thirty-three years ago.

And with social media, we reinforce these tensions of economic inequality, of moralistic exclusion, of reading more spiritual meaning into a holiday that has been a big driver of consumer capitalism for nearly 150 years. We essentially stick up middle fingers at those whose families are distant and dysfunctional. We basically blow raspberries at those who do not have enough resources to do much more than provide the basics for themselves and their loved one, with many more having even less. And we shun those who have the audacity to point out the hypocrisy that is the annual holiday season.

Christmas for me has only been a holiday for me because of my younger siblings (when they were just kids, between 1988 and 1996) and because of my wife and now teenage son. I went nearly a decade of my life without Christmas trees, cards, and gifts, a combination of being a Hebrew-Israelite and abject poverty between 1979 and 1988. So despite the temptations of being in this capitalist world and somewhat of it, Christmas is only a big deal to me because of kids and their vulnerability during this time of year. Otherwise, a moment of thanksgiving and prayer, well-prepared food (but not a Saturnalia feast’s worth), and being around those who truly love and care about me is really all I’ve ever needed. That folks may only get a facsimile of this, and only around holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas (if at all), is part of the carnage that is Christmas.

This, by the way, is what all of us need, every day, Christmas or not. So, Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, and Merry Kwanzaa, but let’s pay it forward, too!

Montgomery County Public Schools’ World Studies Mythology

29 Tuesday Sep 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Comfort Food, Common Core, Common Core State Standards, Crock, Curriculum 2.0, Curriculum Development, Eurocentric Perspective, Eurocentrism, Falsehoods, Latin America, Maryland, MCPS, Middle Ages, Middle School, Montgomery County Public Schools, Multicultural Education, Multiculturalism, Mythology, Teaching and Learning, Technocrats, Western Civilization, Western Dominance, World History, World Studies


Satirical cartoon of Rudyard Kipling's The White (?) Man's Burden ("white" colonial powers being carried as the burden of their "colored" subjects), Life Magazine, March 16, 1899. (Travb via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Satirical cartoon of Rudyard Kipling’s The White (?) Man’s Burden (“white” colonial powers being carried as the burden of their “colored” subjects), Life Magazine, March 16, 1899. (Travb via Wikipedia). In public domain.

My son is taking Advanced World Studies in seventh grade this year. As a historian — and one that’s taught World History fifteen times over the years — I thought it was a good thing that he would have exposure to world history and cultures before engaging in US history in eighth grade and in high school. Once again, the technocrats in K-12 education have proven me dead wrong. While there may be some exposure to the rest of the world, the frame for the curriculum is one that not-so-subtly implies that world studies, advanced or otherwise, cannot exist without a European or Western frame to tell students how to think about the non-Western part of the globe.

I noticed it the first week, but didn’t pay much attention to the brief synopsis (what teachers call their “syllabus”) of the course until Back to School Night last week. The four units for my son’s course are

  • Unit One: The Foundation of Modern Political Systems: Europe in the Middle Ages
  • Unit Two: The Influence of Culture in Africa: The Middle Ages and Today
  • Unit Three: Geography Shapes Latin America
  • Unit Four: The Impact of Economics: One World Past and Present

When I finally read through it, I was incensed. It sunk in with my experiences with AP World History and with World History at the college level why so many of my own students were almost completely ignorant of world history that wasn’t about ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, or Western Europe. School districts, even ones as above par as MCPS, have helped lull students into a false sense of security through the exchange of knowledge as comfort food, rather than a higher protein diet of actual history.Screen Shot 2015-09-29 at 7.12.09 AM

Unit One is fine, for the most part, although the idea of a nation-state or some sort of constitutional democracy doesn’t entirely come from Europe. But it’s downhill from there. Culture, Africa and the Middle Ages for Africa? Really? The Middle Ages is a specifically Western and Central European experience, as no civilization from the classical world experienced a greater decline or collapse than Rome in the fifth century CE. To just take that term and paste it unto another continent, another group of people, and their different history is just plain wrong. How about Culture and Africa, 1000-1500 CE? You don’t need the frame of Europe’s Middle Ages to discuss Africa, unless your point is to embed some sense of Western dominance as a subliminal theme within the curriculum.

Or unless the curriculum developers in Rockville were thinking about making the Age of European Discovery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade Africa’s “Middle Ages.” The period between 1450 and 1800, in which the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Spanish, the English, and the French helped stoke the fires of intertribal and cross-kingdom warfare to obtain millions of slaves for their colonies in the Western Hemisphere. That’s probably too much for the advanced twelve-year-old, though, no?

Storming of the Teocalli by Hernán Cortez and His Troops (1848), painting by Emanuel Leutze, January 11, 2012. (Penelope37 via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Storming of the Teocalli by Hernán Cortez and His Troops (1848), painting by Emanuel Leutze, January 11, 2012. (Penelope37 via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Unit Three and the term “Latin America?” Seriously? It covers the Maya, the Mexica (or rather, Aztecs), and the Inca, all prior to European contact in the sixteenth century. So technically, there’s no Latin in the Americas before 1500. MCPS, ever heard of the Americas, the Western Hemisphere, Mesoamerica, and Andean civilizations, all terms that are more accurate alternatives to Latin America in the time before Columbus and conquistadors? Unless, again, the point of curriculum designers here was to bake into the recipe for this course a sense of inevitability. That is, that the pre-Columbian cultures of the Western Hemisphere, no matter how sophisticated, were doomed to fall by the wayside in the wake of Western dominance over the globe.

Unit Four and “One World Past and Present” in the context of trade, economic systems, and communication bring the themes of European dominance together in the period since 1450. The MCPS curriculum designers do hint that “the cultural diffusion between many ‘worlds’ had both positive and negative consequences.” But for the most part, the technocrats provide a sense of progress to market-based economies and positive globalization in this unit, as Europeans led the charge to make the world one and whole.

Stainless steel Crock-Pot, September 29, 2015. (http://amazon.com).

Stainless steel Crock-Pot, September 29, 2015. (http://amazon.com).

This is a crock of a curriculum, MCPS, a shameful attempt at world studies. The course might as well be called, Advanced and Expanded Western Civilization, How Europeans Went From the Middle Ages to Dominating the World. The point of any world history or world studies course is supposed to be the study of specific bits of history of the world, without imposing a Western model, frame, or sense of progress and comparison on the rest of the world in the process. Otherwise, what’s the point? You might as well teach Western Civ in middle school, then, and save world history to teachers and curriculum designers who understand that the world is a bigger place than Western-culture-navel-gazing.

Though the pressures of Common Core may have birthed this new curriculum as part of MCPS’s Curriculum 2.0 efforts, it’s not specifically a Common Core-inspired curriculum. One of the problems with Common Core State Standards and PARCC assessments is that they mask the problems that existed in America’s K-12 education long before. One of which is fake efforts at diversity and a multicultural curriculum, of which MCPS’s World Studies is but one example. It may well be true that virtually all world history curriculum is bs, however. But that is an article for another day.

JFK & Innocence Never Lost, RFK & Real History

21 Thursday Nov 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Movies, music, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, Youth

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Activism, American Exceptionalism, Assassination, Baby Boomers, Backlash, Camelot, Gun Violence, History, Innocence, JFK, JFK Assassination, LBJ, Lee Harvey Oswald, Legend, Mythology, Neo-Conservative Movement, President John F. Kennedy, President Lyndon Baines Johnson, RFK, Robert Kennedy, Social Justice, The '60s, Violence, Violent Society


President John F. Kennedy, presidential portrait (1961-63). (Wikipedia via John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library, Boston)

President John F. Kennedy, presidential portrait (February 20, 1961). (Wikipedia via John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library, Boston). In public domain.

I’ve heard about the JFK assassination in Dallas my whole life. Only the Civil Rights Movement, World War II and the Holocaust outrank JFK’s murder at the hands of Lee Harvey Oswald (or numerous other candidates) as subjects more often discussed in pop history circles of which I’ve been a part. But with the fiftieth anniversary of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s upon us tomorrow (fifty years to both the day and date), the mythology of his presidency and the state of the nation’s soul since November 22, 1963 is well into high gear.

But of all the myths and legends — including this ridiculousness about Camelot and the Kennedys in the White House — there’s one that bothers me more than any other. The common refrain that “America lost its innocence” the day President Kennedy took three bullets to his back and head in Daley Plaza in Dallas. Really? What about Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield and William McKinley? What about slavery, the Civil War, the eradication and forced relocation of American Indians, nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Heck, what about the Cuban Missile Crisis, where JFK came within hours of jeopardizing the lives of eighty million Americans thirteen months before his murder?

Bloom off the rose, November 21, 2013. ( ).

Bloom is off the rose, November 21, 2013. (http://www.marctomarket.com).

The fact is, America has always been a violent nation, especially for those not in charge of running things here. But this bald-faced lie of a myth has been one built by those who were young when Oswald took out JFK. Teenager Baby Boomers and those only a few years older, big fans of President Kennedy, and those who loved him and lamented what could’ve been. Those are the folks that claim that the nation was young and innocent, but somehow deflowered on that dark, dark day. 

I call poppycock and balderdash on this one. Like Malcolm X in the days after the JFK assassination, I say that this was an example of America’s violent chickens coming home to kill. Luckily it’s forty-nine years and 364 days later, so I won’t be setting up my own assassination at the hands of former friends and real foes. Yet there’s some truth to Malcolm X’s statement. In a country as violent as ours, where Presidents like Kennedy endure death threats day after day, where arguments and oppression lead to mass shootings, should we ever be surprised? Ever? I say that there was no innocence lost here.

No, what we should really be discussing this week in terms of what could’ve been is RFK’s assassination in June ’68 in California. For all the sorrow over JFK’s murder, one good thing came out of it. President Lyndon Baines Johnson. LBJ took the best parts of JFK’s potential legacy — civil rights, the spreading of prosperity and Vietnam — and doubled down on it. Given LBJ’s scope of influence when compared with JFK’s, it was doubtful if the slain president could’ve pushed through half of what LBJ did get done. LBJ revealed himself to be to the left of JFK, a real Cold War liberal (for better and for worse), and not a borderline centrist.

Robert Francis Kennedy, Life Magazine Cover, November 1966. ( )

Robert Francis Kennedy, Life Magazine Cover, November 1966. (http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/)

Of course, RFK likely wouldn’t have had the chance to run in ’68 but for his brother’s assassination. Keep in mind, too, that LBJ’s successes, failures and decision to not run for re-election also made Robert F. Kennedy’s run possible. But bottom line: RFK’s assassination affected America political and culturally in ways that have been deeper and longer lasting than even JFK’s. For starters, Americans likely do not elect Richard Nixon president in ’68 if RFK’s steadying influence is present at the ’68 Democratic Convention in Chicago. That would’ve set up some real opposition to the neo-conservative movement and the ’70s and ’80s backlash against Blacks, women, gays and labor that had been brewing since JFK’s assassination in ’63.

I know that many of you will vehemently disagree, shake your heads, or deliberately ignore the ideas of this post. What else is new in the land of the Baby Boomers, where a few so-called activists get to tell the rest of us how to see the 77 million of them and their growing up years? I say that this narrative is worn out, and neglects the reality that neither JFK nor America were innocent, but RFK’s evolving left-of-center integrity was a much bigger loss.

The Falsehoods of a Civil Rights Movement Legacy

15 Tuesday Jan 2013

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

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Birthday, Civil Rights, Civil Rights Movement, Class Divide, Educational Aspirations, Estelle Abel, Generation X, Generation Y, Generational Divide, Generational Prejudice, Legacy, Martin Luther King Jr., Mythology, Myths, Police Brutality, Post-Civil Rights Generation, Poverty, Racism, Stop and Frisk


Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial statue, National Parks Service, Washington, DC, August 2, 2012. (NPS via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws, as this is a 2D picture of a 3D sculpture.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial statue, National Parks Service, Washington, DC, August 2, 2012. (NPS via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws, as this is a 2D picture of a 3D sculpture.

Well, it’s not officially Martin Luther King Day yet, but since Dr. King was actually born on January 15, 1929, better for me to talk about him today than next week. Especially with President Obama’s second inaugural going on at the same time. But what a legacy! Yet his generation of civil rights activists and righteous protesters have done as much harm to his legacy as have conservatives invoking his “I Have a Dream” speech every time they’re called out on their bigotry.

Yeah, that’s right, I said it! One of the benefits — if you want to call it that — of being born in ’69 is that I’ve witnessed the devolution of the Civil Rights Movement and its leaders and followers into a gauntlet of gatekeepers who expect everyone from my generation to start every sentence paying homage to their sacrifices. I have no problems with that, at least in theory. But the reality is that most folks from the Civil Rights generation — at least the successful ones — made few if any sacrifices for “the cause.” They were in the right place at the right time with the right education and managed to find jobs, careers and positions of influence while the least fortunate of us all saw few material or psychological benefits from Dr. King’s ultimate sacrifice.

I’ve already talked at length about Estelle Abel, a former Mount Vernon High School Science Department chair (see my posts “My Last Day” from June ’11 and “In-Abel-ed” from June ’12 for much more). Her soliloquy about sacrifice and the Civil Rights Movement was supposed to make me feel bad about letting Black Mount Vernon, New York down because I only graduated fourteenth in my class out of over five hundred students. There are others, former and current teachers, professors, librarians, politicians, writers, producers, editors, pastors, politicians, bosses and charlatans who’ve made a point to discuss their elitist notions of the Civil Rights Movement and generation with me.

Hundreds of thousands descended on Washington, DC's Lincoln Memorial August 28, 1963. (Marines' Photo via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Hundreds of thousands descend on Lincoln Memorial August 28, 1963. (Marines’ Photo via Wikipedia). In public domain.

But most — if not all — of these folks are wrong about their glorified view of the Movement and its legacy four and a half decades later. For college educated, middle class African Americans, life has gotten better, even with bigotry, glass ceilings, DWB, a less stable economy, and the conservative backlash that has gone on unabated since the three years before Dr. King’s assassination. For Blacks not as fortunate, almost nothing has changed, at least not for the better.

Some of it, to be sure (and to cut Bill Cosby some slack), is because of individual choices and poor decision-making. Folks, however, can rarely make decisions outside of their own context and circumstances — think outside of the box, in other words — without a significant amount of help. Poverty in all of its forms is just as grinding now as it was a half-century ago. To expect people from the generations since Dr. King to suddenly forget their poverty, abuse, neglect and exploitation and give praise to a generation where many but far from most made sacrifices for the Movement is ludicrous.

I’m certain that had Dr. King lived over the past forty-five years, he wouldn’t have stood by to allow his generation to constantly criticize the under-forty-five as slackers and immature and unfocused, as folks more concerned with money than equality. King likely would’ve made the point that the post-Civil Rights Generations X and Y are merely a reflection of their upbringing, of their parents and teachers and mentors’ nurturing and training. He would’ve made the same point that others from his generation like the late law professor and scholar-activist Derrick Bell has made over the years. That fighting racism, educational neglect and economic exploitation requires more tools than the moral high-ground, protests, marches, a sympathetic media and obvious redneck tactics. The Movement is itself a shifting terrain that requires new tools and tactics to achieve small victories over a long period of time, longer than most folks from the era are willing to admit.

I actually don’t have a strong ax to grind against the Civil Rights generation. Without folks like Dr. King or Jesse Jackson, Medgar Evers or Ella Baker, I wouldn’t have found myself in a gifted-track program in middle school or high school in the ’80s. But let’s not act as if my life was a walk in the park. The legacy of the Civil Rights era never stopped a fist from being thrown into my face by my now ex-stepfather. It never kept us from going on welfare or kept two of my siblings from bring diagnosed as mentally retarded.

NYPD Stop and Frisk caption (actual details for photo unknown), August 2012. (http://thinkprogress.org).

NYPD Stop and Frisk caption (actual details for photo unknown), August 2012. (http://thinkprogress.org).

Nor did the Civil Rights Movement’s legacy stop teachers and professors from putting up barriers to my success as a student or employers from putting up a glass ceiling in an attempt to slow my career advance. It never stopped me from being followed and frisked by police or harassed by overzealous security guards. It’s never paid one of my bills, kept food on my plate or kept me from experiencing homelessness. It’s never even been a source of pride, because that would mean that the Civil Rights Movement and its legacy would belong to me as much as it does to the people who allegedly marched with Dr. King.

I can’t wait for those who cling almost in desperation to the idyllic legacy of Dr. King and the cause to retire and fade away, for the ’60s to truly be over. Maybe that’s when folks from the post-’60s generation — folks like me who care about economic and educational equity, social justice and spiritual transformation — will be able to make an impact on our nation’s sorry state of consciousness without pouring libations to folks who gave up on Dr. King’s work ages ago.

On Baseball & Hyprocrisy

02 Saturday Apr 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Sports, Youth

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Tags

Babe Ruth, Barry Bonds, Baseball, Bigotry, Bob Ryan, Color Line, Cy Young, George Will, Hank Aaron, Henry Aaron, Hypocrisy, Integrity of the Game, Joe Di Maggio, Josh Gibson, Lou Gehrig, Mike Lupica, Mythology, Myths and Legends, Pope Lupica, Purists, Purity of the Game, Race, Racism, Records, Reggie Jackson, Satchel Paige, Sports, Steroids, Ted Williams (Baseball), Willie Mays


Fenway From Legend's Box, Fenway Park, Boston, June 21, 2008. Jared Vincent via Flickr http://flickr.com/photos/23999911@N00/2607333633 - Permission granted under the terms of the cc-by-2.0 license.

A new baseball season has arrived for this estranged ex-fan of the game. Millions of people celebrate as if this is a rite of spring, like a cherry-blossom festival or an opportunity to spend more time outside. When I see the start of baseball, it merely reminds me to up my dosage of Zyrtec and Rhinocort.

 

But that’s not quite true. It also hits me in the brain and gut with the common mythologies and hypocrisies of America the Beautiful. Especially this spring, with Barry Bonds on trial for perjury — and indirectly, for using steroids, sullying the game, not to mention his Hall-of-Fame record prior to ’99. The guardians of the game — baseball purists like George Will and numerous others, and sports reporters like Pope Lupica and Bob Ryan — supply us with the myths and legends of Babe Ruth, Joe Di Maggio, Ted Williams, Lou Gehrig, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Mickey Mantle and Cy Young. Along with their records, those precious records. Of home runs, total hits, hitting streaks, RBIs, strikeouts, wins, stolen bases, games played, batting averages, slugging percentages. The stuff that makes baseball America’s pastime (which should always be written as past-time, or past-its-time), different from all the other major sports.

The hypocrisy comes from this ridiculous notion of keeping the game separate and holy, like the sabbath for orthodox Jews and for the most devout of Christians and Muslims. Except that this game, this most American of games, is about as pure as New York City snow two minutes after hitting the ground. The biggest, most disgusting hypocrisy of all is how most baseball purists will celebrate Babe Ruth’s greatness any day over a Henry Aaron, Willie Mays, Reggie Jackson, or Josh Gibson. Or Walter Johnson over Satchel Paige. That sixty-four years since Jackie Robinson broke the color line in major league baseball, there’s still a color line in baseball’s precious records, as well as among the people who hold them. That alone is a stomach-churning, blood-pressure-raising shame.

But this issue of who should and shouldn’t be in Cooperstown because of the Steroids Era in baseball, well, it presupposes a false dichotomy. That there was a time before, say ’88, where baseball wasn’t dirty, and that with anabolic steroids and HGH, baseball became dirty. But since ’03, baseball’s become clean and transparent again. This is beyond ridiculous. Baseball’s been as dirty as any sport in American history, in fact dirtier, than the other sports put together. Between amphetamines and illegal drugs, pine tar and Vaseline balls, sharpened cleats and headhunting and the exclusion of Blacks, the sport and the individuals involved in it have been seeking and finding competitive advantages for as long as baseball has been a professional endeavor.

Still, the biggest myth and hypocrisy in baseball remains its insistence that its records are sacred, above critical scrutiny and reproach. I have a problem with this, and not just because of the racism that’s built into any records achieved prior to 1947. But because baseball’s sanctimonious bigotry infects any record that’s been achieved in the sixty-four years since. Whether it was Roger Maris in ’61, Hank Aaron in ’74, or Barry Bonds before ’99, much less after.

As long as the guardians of the game remain White, male and overly connected to baseball as patriotic and its records as sacrosanct, baseball’s hypocrisy will know no bounds. “It’s a shame and a pitiful,” as my father would say. And it’s also a reason I hope my son never plays this wretched game.

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Places to Buy/Download Boy @ The Window

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Barnes & Noble (bn.com) logo, June 26, 2013. (http://www.logotypes101.com).

Boy @ The Window on Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/boy-the-window-donald-earl-collins/1115182183?ean=2940016741567

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