The Scourge of Scholarship & Scallops

01 Saturday Jan 2022

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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Academic Culture, Bias, CMU, Elites, Elitism, Fishiness, Fishy, Genius, Joe William Trotter Jr., Objectivity, Oppression, Privilege, Racism, Scallops, Status Quo

Pan-seared scallops with bacon cream sauce, February 10, 2015 (cropped, December 31, 2021). (https://www.cakenknife.com/pan-seared-scallops-bacon-cream-sauce/).

I am not much of a scholar. No, really, I’m not. At least not in the extremely narrow way those who taught me to do historical research defined scholarship. For me, uncovering deliberately hidden truths or coming to new ideas, realizations, and leap-in-logic epiphanies was always about more than just “evidence.” It was about the nexus between human history and human behavior, the ability to use the past to understand the present and possibly the future. And through all that, to predict, to prevent, to propose remedies or possibilities for being, and being better, as a person, as people, as entire societies.

But all through graduate school in the 1990s, especially during my Carnegie Mellon years, all I was supposed to learn was about the greatness of “scholarship.” The way my dissertation advisor Joe Trotter would say “scholarship,” it reminded me of how my now recovering-alcoholic father would say “pep-up” when he wanted a drink. Trotter said “scholarship” with the zeal and relish of a person ready to eat at their favorite down-home restaurant or fish shack.

For years even after finishing my doctorate, I could still hear Trotter’s “scholarship” and think of scallops, the ugliest and fishiest tasting of mollusks, in my opinion. I imagined them raw, then either sautéed or seared in butter, as this is the only way to eat the nasty things. Just like with academic scholarship. None of this removed their fishiness or the loads of carcinogens lurking in their lumps of meat.

For years, I have watched former and current colleagues, former and current students, and big-fish academicians I have only seen from my cold and cheap seats in the Kuiper Belt promote scholarship as a great and mystical process. “This is groundbreaking scholarship” is a common phrase in my academic world. “The genius of” so-and-so’s “scholarship” can also be read and heard, in book reviews, in scholarly journals, at academic conferences. I could be jealous, but I’d eat a can of unseasoned and undressed tuna again before eating up these scallop-y descriptions of scholarship.

For those who really don’t know, “scholarship” is really a combination of three things.

1. Research, which in my field usually involves archival materials, like a letter Martha Washington might have written about making “her” Rum Punch, or a diary left behind by a granddaughter of an enslaved African woman, providing details not normally found in historical literature. For me, it’s interdisciplinary. Interviewing people about their experiences, asking common questions along the way for comparative purposes. It could also mean looking at census records, running microfiche machines for 100-year-old op-eds about “Saturday Night and the Negro.” But it is ALL research, and you don’t even need a high school diploma to be this nosy. I knew this already, but was reminded of this by a former student, an archivist who recently completed his bachelor’s.

2. Training and Methodology helps folks shape the research they do into what we call scholarship. It is very hard to do historical research on any given topic without “going to the archives.” That’s where researchers can commune with the primary sources, where they can most readily find the first-hand and “objective evidence” they need. But, if dead folks didn’t write anything down, then proximate evidence, like census records, can tell us about a people who didn’t leave written records, or because of oppressors, might have seen their records destroyed. Ethnographies, all the rage in my profession in the 1990s, are a sociologist’s and an anthropologist’s tool. So is mere observation or years spent reading others’ research. This is how I and so many others know lazy-ass Martha Washington ain’t never mixed no drinks in her Mount Vernon mansion. Not when she had trusted enslaved Africans as cooks and mixologists doing all the work.

3. Experience works on multiple levels, and is often the way others who like what they’re reading reach the conclusion that so-and-so’s “scholarship” is “genius.” There’s the experience of interpretation and being able to take new information and meld it with everything one already knows about a specific person, a group of people, a given topic, event, question, and/or social problem. There’s the experience of being a human being, and how those experiences have shaped you and how you process information, including the small and big epiphanies gleaned from one’s research. There’s also the experience of being oppressed or benefiting from oppression, which utterly colors whatever “objectivity” one may believe they have. In the case of oppressors and their beneficiaries, those experiences often dilute one’s ability to take quantum and cosmic leaps in logic to cover up the ginormous holes in their research, training, and methodology.

So when like-minded people get together to discuss what is and is not “scholarship,” 3. outweighs 1. and 2., just like Jupiter outweighs the other seven planets in our solar system — combined. It is a toxic, cannibalizing system, made more potent by the riches and miseries of capitalism, where research grants, book deals, and media appearances, and lecture circuit checks are on the line.

When people ask for “evidence,” whether at this year’s American Historical Association conference or on Twitter, they are saying, “My experiences in life and in my field are privileged and limited, so I have decided your experiences in life and in my field do not matter.” When people refuse to accept your findings, it is often their myopia and their sense of narcissism and entitlement at work, and not flaws within the research you did. Especially when one’s research is about oppression, oppressors, how to fight oppression, and what happens when a people succeed in that fight.

This is why I chafed at Trotter’s salivations over scholarship some 26 years ago. This is why I find much about the idea of scholarship offensive today. Oh, I think doing one’s own research in a field of expertise or even to acquire expertise is fundamentally important. I just don’t think genius and scholarship are in any way related. Not without the experiences of life, the understanding of one’s positionality in privilege, not only to do research, but one’s unique life experience through which to process it. This is why I can never be a scholar. I refuse to be part of a club that has to sear and sauté its poisonous, fishy-ass scallops and declare themselves all “geniuses” for doing so.

One might say that there’s something fishy going on here in the academic world. Scholarship is like scallops in that way. Do not leave it at room temperature for too long. Just like the academic “geniuses” who refuse to shower while writing their latest unreadable tome.

About That Time at Van Cortlandt Park, and Other Bricks in the Wall…

28 Monday Sep 2020

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

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"And The Beat Goes On" (1979), "Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2)", "Good Times", "Love To Love You Baby", "Rapper's Delight", "Take Your Time (Do It Right)", 616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Autocracy, Barbra Streisand, Chic, Donna Summer, Frank Sinatra, Friendships, Kool and The Gang, Luther Vandross, New York, Oppression, Pink Floyd, Queen, Repression, SOS Band, Stephanie Mills, Sugar Hill Gang, Teddy Pendergrass, The Clear View School, The Whispers, Tré

Van Cortlandt Park screen shot (parade grounds, cropped), June 4, 2020. (https://www.thisisthebronx.info/a-van-cortlandt-park-living-room-picnic/).

I don’t consider myself to be a seer. Not exactly. I might have gotten a thing or 1,000 predictions correct in my life. But since I usually prefer to expect good outcomes, I do not indulge the dreams I have of destruction, or the muses who conjure the possibilities of apocalypse, whether for me, my family, or at larger scales.

But the last half of 1980 was different for me. I’d come into my own as a kid. I finally had a posse of classmates and friends, between the two Joes, Starling, Chris, Ronald, Vanessa, Eric, Ray Ray, Sean, Lajuan, and Dahlia, among others. I was kicking ass academically, and was on the verge of discovering other talents, including writing. After my last summer camp with Darren at Clear View, and rereading the late Lerone Bennett Jr.’s Ebony Pictorial History of Black America, I understood my Blackness, really and truly, for the first time.

But I chose to see the glass as half full, both for myself and for Black folk in the US. Why wouldn’t I have? Somehow, in the middle of what I call “deep summer,” when the previous school year and the start of the first day of the next school year are about equally far away, it happened. My stepfather Maurice got a call from his music-obsessed friend Dennis (who was also a professional musician, by the way) in the middle of a Sunday afternoon in mid-August about going to some concert in the park in the Bronx. There was no mention of who the headliners were. I just remember playing Peanuts Land with my Matchbox cars and driving down along the shoppes in the nightlife district of the city underneath my bed when Maurice came in and rushed us to get dressed.

Mom, Maurice, Darren, little Maurice, and me. We piled into a cab over to Van Cortlandt Park, where we met Maurice’s friend Dennis. He knew a couple of the headlining people who were playing. I don’t recall tickets, but I do remember flyers everywhere. It seemed like this was a spontaneous gathering, where people somehow knew where to go and where to gather. I remember it being sometime around 7 or 8 pm when the jamming began, with all the music of the late-1970s and 1980. It was mostly an MC mixing a string a songs together, between Chic and “Good Times”, The Whispers’ “And The Beat Goes On,” and Michael’s “Off The Wall.”

But maybe 45 minutes in, three guys got on the stage to do their performance, Sugar Hill Gang, and the crowd of hundreds erupted into a roar as they rapped to “Rapper’s Delight.” They did a bunch of songs beyond the “a hip, hop/the hippie, the hippie/To the hip hip hop/a you don’t stop…” I was into it like everyone else, doing my terrible version of a Michael Jackson dance routine while clapping my hands to the beat. Sometime between 10 and 11, we left, I think, between a cab and Dennis giving Maurice and Mom and little Maurice a ride home. Even Mom looked like she had a good time. It would be just about the last good time we would have as a sort-of-family.

But the music didn’t stop with Van Cortlandt Park or the Sugar Hill Gang. The spring and summer of 1980 was the transition to a new decade of music, as homophobes from New York to Detroit and L.A. had spent the past year killing disco by smashing vinyl and smashing in Toyota Corollas and Datsun Zs. (By the way, for those who are still kicking and screaming over Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP,” go on YouTube and listen to the late Donna Summer’s “Love To Love You Baby“. It’ll probably make you question the meaning of your false sense of morality.)

Kool and The Gang had crossed over with “Ladies Night,” and were about to walk the fine line between success and selling out with “Celebration.” All summer on the bus back and forth from Clear View with Darren, SOS Band’s “Take Your Time (Do It Right)” was on at least once a day. There was also Teddy Pendergrass, the one, the only, and emerging, Luther Vandross’ “Searching” (yes, not his official solo debut, but), and of course Stephanie Mills with “Never Knew Love Like This Before”. And all that because my father had introduced us to Toni, a new drinking budding of his, herself a professional singer. Not to mention, a couple of bartenders in Mount Vernon and in the Bronx who didn’t mind a 12 and a 10-year-old sitting around on off nights in July and August.

On the AM side of things with 770 AM WABC radio, there was still Billy Joel, Kenny Loggins, Barbra Streisand and her collabs with The Bee Gees, “Guilty” and “Woman In Love.” Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” was the second half of the summer of 1980, old and yet new, at least to me.

But as that summer moved into fall and 6th grade, I sensed something was changing, and not for the better. I sensed it in music, more than I did with Jimme’s alcohol abuse and fewer visits, more that even in Mom’s inability to keep food in our stomachs or in her failing marriage with Maurice. The music seemed more sinister, less hopeful, darker somehow. Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust” somehow conjured “No mas! No mas!” and Roberto Duran giving up against Sugar Ray Leonard that November, the same month Reagan beat a beat down, haggard Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election. The beginning of four decades’ worth of hollow promises to White Americans, millions willing to sell the rest of us to Hell for their macabre pleasure and some tax breaks.

But no song signified the transition of the US for me in 1980 more than Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall”. It was likely the first true music video I ever saw, courtesy of my 616 friend Tré, who lived on the second floor. I spent a lot of time hanging with Tré, his older sister Renee, and her friend Stephanie (who I had the tiniest of crushes on, but I digress). It was during the months after Maurice and Mom had separated, with him taking the TV and a month’s supply of mail-ordered meats out of our two freezers. Tré, Renee, and their mother made me feel welcome between that first Saturday in October and when the Hebrew-Israelite bullshit began six months later.

“We don’t need no education. We don’t need no thought control…” It was about much more than strict teachers and social control over students. It was a prediction of a future, my future, our collective futures. That’s what I thought about this time 40 years ago. I had conversations with my classmates about this, about Reagan, about double-digit inflation and unemployment, about the Iran hostage crisis, about the rumors that the US had given Israel nukes, and Israel had, in turn given nukes to apartheid South Africa. “You’re so weird!” they’d say. Or, more often, “You worry too much, Donald!” Only Starling understood. But he expected me to “become one with Jesus,” as if Jesus alone could stop me from worrying about the future.

In short order, the Reagan Years came and gutted the relative economic security of the US, disrupting the shaky gains Blacks had made in the years between 1946 and 1980. Mark David Chapman murdered John Lennon to ring in the holidays, and Blondie’s Debbie Harry badly rapped her way through their January 1981 hit “Rapture” while Mom began to talk about being raptured up for the first time. My family was at the edge of an abyss, a mini-apocalypse that would ultimately transform all of us. It would certainly sidetrack me from my calling as a writer for years to come.

But the world didn’t stop spinning. Nor did life stop handing me days of happiness, of contentment, of miracles and even some joy. It just meant that I would be more cautious, anxious, depressed, worried, on edge. Because America believes itself above reproach, even as it deals in shit and blood, and drags the rest of us into the burgundy-soaked muck with it. The distance between 1980 and 2020 might be 40 years, but with Trump and his army of minions, I might as well be in the same moment. Only, I’m 50 now, and I know much better about listening to my inner voice and my muses.

Fife and Shalom

12 Tuesday Jul 2016

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

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A.B. Davis Middle School, Black Male Identity, Black Masculinity, Chorus, Domestic Violence, Fife, Judah ben Israel, Manhood, Maurice Eugene Washington, Mentoring, Music Lessons, Oppression, Poverty, Pulaski Day Parade, Summer of Abuse, Tamrin, Trombone, Type 2 Diabetes, William H. Holmes Elementary

Civil War-era wooden fife, May 19, 2004. (Kevin Saff/National Parks Service via Wikipedia). In public domain.

One thing I never discussed here or in Boy @ The Window were the handful of “leisure” activities I had during the Hebrew-Israelite years. The world in which we lived back in the ’81-to-’84 period had precious few resources and even less room for things like summer camps, overseas travel, baseball games, amusement parks, or even a free impromptu rap battle at Van Cortlandt or Hartley Park. Heck, the Kool cigarettes’ music series that sponsored “Teddy Pendergast” or “Rufus and Chaka Khan” in those days might as well have been a trip to see the World Cup in France compared to our pitiful roach-and-belt circumstances.

One of my idiot stepfather Maurice’s Hebrew-Israelite friends, though, did provide a free service for us males in ’81 and ’82. His name was Tamrin. He was a heavy-set dude, probably about five-foot-eight, maybe 120 or 125 kilos (between 245-260 pounds), and likely in his late-thirties. Unlike so many of the Hebrew-Israelite men I had the curse to meet in those naiveté-shattering years, Tamrin had a lighter touch. His idea was to put together a boy’s band of fifes, drums, bugles, and other marching instruments to lead us Hebrew-Israelites in marches through the street of Mount Vernon, as well as temple sites in the Bronx, in Harlem, and in Brooklyn (specifically, Bed-Stuy and Flatbush, if memory serves). Even at twelve, I knew how ridiculously uncool that idea sounded.

That was his plan, anyway. So off and on, between August ’81 through the second week in July ’82, Tamrin gave me and other kids music lessons to play overly bombastic marching band music. These were the kind of joyless songs which one was mostly likely to hear at Moscow’s May Day parade of soldiers and nuclear missiles than hear anywhere in ancient Israel. I was picked out because I had musical training in my immediate pass. I played the trombone in fifth grade. Or rather, I had six months of trombone-playing lessons at William H. Holmes ES before my music teacher had a heart attack and died in March ’80. I sang in chorus all through sixth, seven, and eventually, eighth grade. I could read music, though I struggled in transition between half-notes and quarter-notes.

Pulaski Day Parade on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, October 6, 2013. (http://www.posteaglenewspaper.com).

So Tamrin would come over about twice a month, usually on Saturday afternoons, and spend a couple of hours with me playing the fife. (Can you imagine that? A twelve-year-old, kufi-wearing Donald playing such a small and delicate reed instrument? Really? Really!) Tamrin took us to the Pulaski Day Parade down in Manhattan the first Sunday in October ’81 to see how the pros do the fife-and-drum thing. The costumes I found fascinating, but I dreamed of food, not of marching around with fife.

Once Mom’s already pitiful funds got down to a disposal income of $5 per day — that was in December ’81 — Tamrin didn’t come around as much. Though he wasn’t getting paid much, I think he still expected $10 per lesson. Still, he came around even when he wasn’t getting paid, though it was only once a month during the ’81-’82 winter. That’s when I noticed, though just barely, that Tamrin had diabetes. His fingers had swelled during the winter, and he moved slower, too.

From mid-April to the beginning of July, Tamrin was around nearly every Saturday for an hour at a time, working with me on marching while playing fife, polishing up fife-ful flourishes, and getting me to learn more bombastic music. There were a couple of times I played with the other preteen and teenage Hebrew-Israelite kids. They seemed about as cool with this fife-and-drum band as I was with having an abusive stepfather.

And that’s who stopped my participation in Tamrin’s pet project. After my summer of abuse began in earnest on July 6, ’82, Tamrin came around that Saturday, July 10. I played my fife to some music, but the knot on my head, the bruises to my left cheek and jaw, and my busted lip would’ve been obvious to any observer in the week after Maurice tried to beat me into submission. I kept playing my music, but I knew that Tamrin and Maurice were jawing at each other about something or other, hopefully not me. All I know was, that was Tamrin’s last time working with me to play the fife. I’d continue to see Tamrin at temple. But that second Saturday in July ’82 would be the last he’d come over to 616 to teach me terrible music for the fife.

Oppression graffiti, January 15, 2013. (Students for Liberty via http://genderlitutopiadystopia.wikia.com).

Did I play a good fife? Tamrin thought so. Compared to my Hebrew-Israelite comrades, I’m pretty sure I did. But like with so many things Hebrew-Israelite during those years, it was a bitter march to nowhere. The fife was part of a Hebrew-Israelite physical and spiritual gulag that put me into more chains, rather than freeing me to be me. Despite Tamrin’s intentions, the idea of molding me and others into men in conditions that would make most “men” contemplate homelessness or running away was a ridiculous pipe-dream.

That Tamrin was likely the only adult male in the Hebrew-Israelite camp who saw Maurice for the lying, abusive, womanizing asshole he was made me realize not everyone in this world was against me. But in a religion that when practiced helped oppress me and others more than the outside world, what was any Tamrin to do?

Continuum’s Legacy: Dystopia Now

07 Saturday Nov 2015

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

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2077, Alex Sadler, Alternate Future, Alternate History, Bill Gates, Charles Koch, Continuum (2012-15), Corporate Congress, Economic Inequality, Erik Knudsen, Firefly (2002), Fringe (2008-13), Kiera Cameron, Liber8, Michael Bloomberg, Oppression, Plutocracy, Rachel Nichols, Resistance, Revolution, Sci-Fi, Simon Barry, SyFy, Time-Travel, William B. Davis

Continuum series art, August 2012. (http://liber8thecontinuum.tumblr.com).

Continuum (2012-15) ended its fourth and final season on SyFy here in the US and Showcase in Canada last month (we can still watch it — eventually all of it — on Netflix, though). Typical of most science-fiction series, Continuum ended with a six-episode arc that cannibalized its main theme, in this case, time-travel. Six episodes about soldiers from the future attempting to prevent the creation of a better-future-alternate-timeline for the year 2077, one that didn’t include corporate plutocratic totalitarianism over the rest of the world. Continuum’s creator Simon Barry could have and should have done better. This ending obscured what Barry attempted to illuminate throughout the series. Despite the problems of a bludgeoned timeline and plot in Season Four, Barry did get the idea of a potential corporate dystopia correct. His Continuum offered up the idea that the twenty-first century world is already at war, between more economic and political freedom on the one hand, and increasing global economic inequality and corporate influence on the other.

Continuum was the Canadian sci-fi show about Kiera Cameron (played by Rachel Nichols), a police officer from 2077 but stuck in the 2010s with a group of time-traveling anti-capitalist terrorists known as Liber8. Continuum, though, is hardly the only show with the theme of a dark near future. FOX’s Fringe (2008-13) and the short-lived yet cult favorite SyFy series Firefly (2002) were both examples of a world in which corporate interests and government power had nearly become one and the same. Yet in those series, whether located on an alternative Earth or the twenty-sixth century, there remained a line between corporate influence and governmental authority.

Humans as mindless drones (implanted with mind-controlling chips) working off debt at a factory in British Columbia, Continuum, Season 2, Episode 9, July 7, 2013. (http://www.syfy.com).

On this point alone, Continuum succeeded precisely because it didn’t pretend there were better days of capitalism and democracy in the past. From its pilot episode, set in present/alternate future Vancouver, British Columbia, Barry’s vision of a plausible darker future shined through. It was a future in which corporations would eliminate the nation-state entirely as the middleman for its profitability and power interests. The Global Corporate Congress would be the resulting outcome of the failures of governments around the globe to address population growth, climate change, trillions of dollars of debt and a host of other issues. But really, it would also be the outcome of corporations using governments and government tax breaks to corrupt democracy and hoard wealth. Barry realized that this alternative course is one the world is already on.

The biggest question any serious fan of Continuum should have is this. Why didn’t Barry send the terrorist group Liber8 back to 1977, where the path toward the Global Corporate Congress could’ve been destroyed before billionaire social-control advocates like Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, and Charles Koch would have been able to build their paternalistic view of the world? After all, it’s really not that much of a leap from Gates’ heavy-handed philanthropic work in public education and the Citizens United decision in the US to a world plutocratic government run by the heads of multi-trillion-dollar corporations.

The saddest aspect about the end of Continuum was the idea that it ultimately took a 83-year-old robber baron with a conscious in Alec Sadler (played by William B. Davis and Erik Knudsen) to change this dark trajectory. That billions of humans didn’t revolt to a future in which corporations controlled every aspect of their lives — that’s just appalling. Yes, Liber8 and other anti-capitalist and anti-Corporate Congress rebels (or terrorists) were around and engaged. But most people apparently allowed themselves to be led like sheep to the slaughterhouse, all for reasons involving food and security. Still, were it not for Sadler and his great time-travel device, this would be a world in which all of us would be plutocratic corporate slaves. Hard to imagine anyone like Sadler willing to change this future, precisely because this is the future real-life plutocrats like Gates, Bloomberg, Koch (and Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg, and Phil Knight) want.

Then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg attempting to sell soda size ban to New Yorkers, May 30, 2012. (http://adweek.com).

That a corporation could arbitrarily decide how families could discharge their debts, make works of art of acts of free speech contraband, and insert microchips in humans in order to keep them from rebelling or to force them to work off their debts. As disgusting as that was to see on Continuum, the sad truth is that we’re not very far from this future at all. If anything, we needed more examples of this soul-destroying future, not more muddled attempts to destroy it.

This is the real legacy of Continuum. Not its fancy time-travel motif or cool-looking gadgets. The reminder that freedoms from economic and political oppression are ideals humanity must fight for in every era. That people shouldn’t cede power to corporations over the food supply, water, law enforcement or education out of fear or desperation. That societies shouldn’t blindly trust billionaire robber barons—no matter how well-intentioned—simply because they promise some of their billions to help the poor. We the people need to trust and verify, through governments, through muckraking, protests, and, if necessary, through revolution, against this plausible future.

“Animals” and “Respectability”

27 Wednesday Aug 2014

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

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Animals, Authentic Blackness, Authenticity, Eric Garner, Gospel of Prosperity, Institutional Racism, Jamal Harrison Bryant, Masculinity, Michael Brown, Murder, Officer Darren Wilson, Oppression, Police Brutality, Politics of Respectability, Racial Stereotypes, Racism, Respectability, Rev. Al Sharpton, Stereotypes, T.D. Jakes, Thugs, White Privilege, White Violence, Whiteness

Rev. Al Sharpton waiting to speak at Michael Brown funeral, Friendly Temple Missionary Baptist Church, St. Louis, MO, August 25, 2014. (AP Photo/St. Louis Post Dispatch, Robert Cohen, via http://www.wkbn.com).

With America’s history of racial oppression, it should come as no surprise that the range of reactions to events like the police killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown (among many others, male and female, Black and Latino) have been on the side of racial stereotypes and assumptions. On the one hand, police officers, ordinary Whites and some ultraconservative Blacks have used the terms “animals” and “thugs” interchangeably because Garner and Brown were big Black guys, the stereotypical boogeymen, lurking and ready to rape, maim and kill scared-shitless White folk.

On the other hand, the traditional civil rights establishment and its cadre of ministers have equated the lessons of Brown and the Ferguson protests with the need to stop “looting and pillaging” and to stop wearing baggy pants. That’s the fallback position for attempting to explain why the message of police brutality and militarization against communities of color because of racism and classism isn’t getting through to Whites who have mostly been silent on these incidents.

As I’ve written in the past year or two, both of these perspectives suggest that Blacks and Latinos must somehow make ourselves worthy of humanity. That way, even the most racist of Whites could see that we’re not animals or thugs, but human beings worthy of the same human rights and civil liberties that they enjoy. This didn’t work even during the height of the Civil Rights Movement some five decades ago. Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., John L. Lewis, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, and the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Wearing suits and ties, marching with White allies, having the backing of the President of the United States. None of that swayed most Whites, as evidenced by changes in American politics since 1968.

Screen shot of CNN newscast coverage of support for Officer Darren Wilson at rally, Ferguson, MO, August 23, 2014. (http://rawstory.com).

The fact is, those Whites and sycophant Blacks who call African Americans and other people of color “animals” and “thugs” know we’re just as human as they are, if not more so. It’s their way of asserting that they’re better than us, precisely because they believe they can get away with seeing, calling and treating Blacks and other people of color as such. Especially since so many of these “animals” and “thugs” advocates have missed the full material benefits of American capitalism. And with America’s long history of allowing Whites to get away with lynchings, murders, rapes, race riots and other forms of violent oppression, why shouldn’t Whites think they’re in the right when they give money to Officer Darren Wilson for “doing his job” in murdering Michael Brown? As I’ve said before, the year doesn’t matter, the clothes don’t matter, our demeanor in public or how perfect our walk doesn’t matter to many — if not most — Whites. That may be our problem as people of color, but it’s definitely their problem as well.

Rev. Al Sharpton, sexual predator Jamal Bryant, megachurch-Gospel-of-Prosperity pastor T.D. Jakes and so many other men who spoke at Michael Brown’s funeral Monday put themselves on the other side of the “animals” and “thugs” coin with their agenda-loaded bloviations. Sharpton especially should know better, given his history of talking out of both sides of his mouth about the limits of the politics of respectability (Tawana Brawley comes to mind). Yes, being able to orchestrate nonviolent protests with proper victims in a way in which the mainstream media cannot dehumanize or engage in stereotypes was how the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum in the first place. But this methodology had its limits then, as it led to some victories that looked more like symbols than actual victories (even Dr. King said as much in his final three years). It definitely has its limitations now.

Foot on my neck and head, symbolic of oppression in terms of view of Black and Brown as “animals,” April 18, 2011. (Donald Earl Collins).

We have a leadership that has grown corpulent and ossified in its stomach, pockets and spirit when it comes to oppression and how to respond. Their thinking in so many ways isn’t much different than the Whites who post pictures of President Barack Obama eating a banana with his face pasted onto the head and body of a great ape. That’s the full shame of watching a funeral that was more about individual agendas than it was about Michael Brown or his family and friends, or his life and death, or mobilizing a larger effort.

It’s already terrible that we already have a nation of millions trying to hold people of color back, if only in their own minds (to quasi-quote Public Enemy). We can no longer afford to have an aging leadership whom, even when well-meaning, is unable or unwilling to move beyond symbols and pontification to an effort that promotes new tactics and strategies and younger leadership. It’s beyond time for younger generations to take the reins, and not in a respectable way, either.

Shalom Milhama, Where Do My Sympathies Lie?

21 Monday Jul 2014

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

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Arab-Israeli Wars, Colonialism, Conflict, Gaza, Gaza City, Hamas, IDF, Intifada, Invasion, Israel, Jewishness, Judaism, Oppression, Palestine, Palestinians, Police State, Rebellion, Revolution, Settler Colonialism, Terrorism, Two-State Solution, Zionism

“Israel-Palestine peace,” July 29, 2013. (Wickey-nl – Own work via Wikipedia). Licensed under CC-SA- 3.0 (converted from .svg to .jpg file).

As a Hebrew-Israelite between ’81 and ’84, I was taught in temple that we as the members of the Ten Lost Tribes of ancient Israel shared a spiritual and physical bond with the descendants of the tribes of Judah and Levi. As a Hebrew-Israelite, I was also taught that Arab, African and Black Muslims were my spiritual cousins, due respect because of the whole Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael story from the Torah. We, Black Jews, Arab Muslims and European-Jewish-Israelis, were related by blood, history, and Yahweh, and so should support each other.

There were to be no contradictions in supporting the right of Israel to exist as a nation-state, this despite the fact that the Arab states of Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan had fought “to push Israel into the Mediterranean Sea” in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973. Israel had a Jehovah-given right to the land between the cedar forests of Lebanon and the Sinai Desert, between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean, at least, that’s what the Torah said. It was a covenant right that couldn’t be undone by anyone or anything except by El Shaddai himself.

So naturally, despite my growing knowledge of history, I supported Israel in everything it did in defense of itself. So if Mossad or an Israeli commando unit assassinated a foreign minister, it was fine. When Israel launched an air strike and destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor in June ’81, I was all for it. Golda Meir was among my group of female heroes as a preteen and teenager. Somehow in those three years as a Hebrew-Israelite, my political perspective on Israel merged with my religious perspective on Judaism and my understanding of the oppression that Blacks, Africans and Jews have all faced in recent centuries.

My understanding of all this, though, began to change even before I converted to Christianity in ’84. It started with an exodus of Ethiopian Jews to Israel in ’84 and ’85, during the government-imposed famine that killed nearly half a million Ethiopians. Unlike the claims of Hebrew-Israelites in the US, the claims of Ethiopian Jews could be clearly traced back to 1000 BCE, the time of King Solomon. Yet for months, Israel held up the immigration process, and then created policies that would make it even more difficult for this groups and the country’s other 120,000 Ethiopian Jews to assimilate. No doubt the fact that it took Israel until ’75 to officially recognize these Ethiopian Jews as Jews has played a role in their somewhat segregated existence in the country.

Faris Odeh throws a stone at an Israeli tank near the Israel-Gaza border, October 29, 2000, during the 2nd Palestinian Intifada (ten days before the IDF gunned him down in Gaza). (http://socialistworker.org).

Then came the First Palestinian Intifada of ’87 that ran well into the ’90s, when the setting up of Palestinian self-governance zones in Gaza, the West Bank and Jericho gradually began to take shape, leading ultimately to the current state of invasion and chaos between Israel and Gaza. The Intifada began just as I was beginning to understand the full nature of oppression beyond slavery and the Civil Rights Movement. For years, it seemed like I saw the same images of Palestinian youth throwing rocks and marching in the streets while the Israeli Defense Forces responded with tanks, machine guns, tear gas and bulldozers, taking land to build new Israeli settlements in the process.

By that point, I’d become interested in South African history, or apartheid in another part of the world. Comparing and contrasting student movements against Jim Crow in the US and against apartheid in South Africa led me to one simple conclusion beyond that undergraduate research paper. That settlement for one group of people was removal, segregation and loss of rights and lands for another group. This was a process that was particularly horrible in South Africa. It led to protests nonviolent and violent, terrorist activities, extreme and ruthless counter-terrorist activities, and international outrage, protests and divestment before the Afrikaner leadership in South Africa finally moved to dismantle their ugly system.

It made me realize that what was going on in Israel wasn’t all that different from what had been going on in South Africa for nearly a century. Only, it involved a population of Palestinians only slightly larger that the population of European-born Israeli Jews and their descendants, not a nine-to-one advantage in favor of Black South Africans. Only the form of nationalism in Israel grew out of a mix of Torah-based birthright, European-based ethnocentrism (the first two otherwise known as Zionism) and post-World War I imperialism the British imposed on the crumbling Ottoman Empire, and not out of Boer nationalism and anti-Black African racism.

A Palestinian boy rests on a mattress next to the rubble of a house destroyed in an Israeli airstrike, Gaza City, July 9, 2014. (Reuters; http://www.dailymail.co.uk).

Aside from these unique features, the theme was the same. A democracy for a select and easily identifiable us (read race and religion here, or at least, skin color and not obviously Muslim). A refugee existence and well-policed apartheid state for those who aren’t us, an assumed group of radical terrorists, even from birth.

It’s a bit too late to be on any side that supports the dissolution of Israel as a nation-state. But to support this Israeli government, a right-wing one that responses to any act of violence toward Israelis — whether random or deliberately terrorist in nature — as if Egypt, Jordan and Syria are invading again. It strains my almost boundless imagination. To say that it’s okay to respond to homemade rockets with a military airstrike and ground invasion in an area as densely population as the island of Manhattan is ridiculous. To suggest that the demolition of Gaza isn’t about resources or is a both-sides-are-equally-guilty scenario is to either live in denial or to see Palestinians as less human than Israelis. Last I checked, Hamas doesn’t have an air force or Russian T-72 tanks.

So here’s what I see. A one-state solution, forcing Israelis and Palestinians to live together, forcing Israel to end its version of an apartheid system, and forcing both groups regardless of politics to come up with a path to full citizenship rights for Palestinians. Period. The two-state solution is a mirage, and some Israelis seem to only want one state, for Israelis only. Of course, this means that those Palestinians who support an armed struggle will eventually have to follow the path that Nelson Mandela and the ANC and Yasser Arafat and the PLO followed decades ago. Just not today, not while the IDF is destroying a city. At least not until the world and especially the US divests from the state of Israel and embargoes all arms shipments.

I wish sometimes that I could go back to that simpler time, when Israel seemed to represent what was right in this world, and the US in supporting them. But I can’t. Those Hebrew-Israelite days were my most oppressed ones as well.

Racism Doesn’t Care What Year It Is

09 Sunday Feb 2014

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

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"And The Beat Goes On" (1979), "I Have A Dream" speech, "We Shall Overcome", Bigotry, Civil Rights Act, Individual Racism, Institutional Racism, Internet, James Byrd, Jonathan Ferrell, Laws, Marissa Alexander, MOVE, Oppression, Philadelphia PD, Racism, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Social Justice, Social Media, Sophia Stewart, Structural Racism, Technology, Television, The Matrix (1999), The Whispers, Trayvon Martin, Voting Rights Act, Wachowski Siblings, Yusef Hawkins

Joel Ward in celebration with Washington Capitals teammates after scoring game/series winning goal in Round 1 of Stanley Cup Playoffs against Boston Bruins (all while fans chanted racial slurs), April 26, 2012. (http://www.flightunit.com/).

One of the many throwaway sentences I’ve heard and read for almost all of my life has increasingly driven me more nuts over the years. In response to a racist statement or incident, an interviewee on the air or someone writing a column will say, “It’s 1984!” or “This is 2006!,” with “and we’re still putting up with this?” or “and we’re still dealing with” racism or bigotry to finish the thought. It’s the one phrase you can expect anyone White, Black, Latino, Asian and/or American Indian to use when interviewed or with access to a public platform. As if the year in which racial injustice and bigotry manifests itself actually matters!

Seriously, did people think that marches, speeches and laws alone would end up killing the complex and morphing structure of American racism that’s existed for more than three centuries? Did we really think that singing “We Shall Overcome” and quoting Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech would allow individual Whiteness and hatred to melt away? Was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 somehow supposed to end all race-based discrimination, even when fully enforced (of course, the federal government has never fully enforced these laws)?

Picture of Michael Griffith, killed by car after group of Whites in Howard Beach, Queens attempted to beat him and his friends with baseball bats on December 20, 1986. (Denis Hamill; http://nydailynews.com).

Yes, we live in an ultra-modern age, where my generation and my son’s generation know more about the world, the universe and life than my mother and grandfather’s generations. But having more knowledge often means that we as humans tend to be more destructive toward each other before becoming wise enough to end that specific pattern of destruction. Or, as has often been the case in human history, until a new group comes along and topples one structure of oppression before implementing a new and sometimes kinder and gentler one.

To think about it another way, just because we’re technologically advanced and more scientifically driven doesn’t mean that humans in general — and Americans specifically — will act rationally and change their behaviors. Especially if it involves giving up an advantage — real or perceived — in the process.

Even though we invented the atomic bomb in 1945, it didn’t stop us from using it against the Japanese or racist White rednecks from beating to death Black veterans of World War II. Though we had television sets in nearly every American home in the 1960s, it didn’t stop Bull Conner from unleashing dogs and turning fire hoses on Black kids in Birmingham, Alabama, Medgar Evers from getting shot in Mississippi or Selma, Alabama marchers from getting beat up. And though we were poised to land on the Moon in July ’69, it didn’t mean that James Earl Ray wouldn’t take a moment to blow away Dr. King fifteen months earlier.

The first oracle from The Matrix (1999, 2003), played by the late Gloria Foster, February 9, 2014. (http://matrix.wikia.com).

In my own lifetime, there’s been more of this lag between knowledge, self-interest and racism. From Yusef Hawkins in Bensonhurst in ’89 to James Byrd being beaten, chained and dragged behind a pickup truck in Jasper, Texas in ’98. From the Philly PD’s bombing of MOVE and the community around it in ’85 to Hurricane Katrina in ’05. Not to mention individual incidents and distinctions, like Trayvon Martin, Marissa Alexander and Jonathan Ferrell. As the ’70s hit by The Whispers goes, “And The Beat Goes On.” We have the Internet, social media, the ability to mobilize outrage and righteous indignation into demonstrations for human rights and social justice. But the human capacity to build oppressive institutions remains, as well as our capacity to hate.

But, to quote The Oracle from The Matrix trilogy (1999-2003), not to mention Buddha, “Everything that has a beginning has an End,” right? Of course, that quote might well have been inspired by a story written by Sophia Stewart in ’81, whom the Wachowski siblings apparently plagiarized in making their multi-billion dollar films. Again, why does the year racism manifests itself matter?