Can There Ever Be Too Much Race In A US History Course?

05 Monday Jan 2015

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

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African Slaves, Capitalism, Carnegie Mellon, CMU, Course Evaluations, Critical Thinking, Democracry, Duquesne University College of Education, George Washington University, History as Trivia, Independent Thinking, Native Americans, Pitt, Racism, Slavery, US History

ODing on chocolate via a hypodermic needle, January 5, 2015. (http://buzzfeed.com).

For nearly every semester in which I have taught a US history course — and I’ve been teaching them on and off since ’92 — one or two students have complained in their course evaluations that we “spent too much time on race.” Pitt, Carnegie Mellon, Duquesne, George Washington, UMUC, the refrain from this small but vocal minority has been the same. It was no different this past semester, as two students complained that there was too much about race in the course. But over the years, I’ve never seen any of these students ask themselves the question, “How do you define ‘too much race’ in a US history course?”

I guess I could look at it this way. That a small minority of my students like their US history the way most Americans like their churches — segregated and unequal. US history for them is supposed to be about the building of the greatest nation on Earth/in the history of humanity, preordained by God to dominate the world with its military, its capitalism and its brand of democracy. US history for them is the history of how Europeans escaped political persecution and religious oppression for the pristine wilderness of the New World, broke free of the chains of absolute monarchy and tyranny, and built this great country from the basement up.

John Gast’s Spirit of the Frontier (aka American Progress), with American personified by Columbia in a toga, 1872. (Jeff G. via Wikipedia). In public domain.

I guess I could teach a US history like this. A course that completely ignores the existence of Native Americans, numbering in the neighborhood of 10-15 million in what would become British North America (now the US and Canada) at the time of Jamestown settlement in 1607. A class that could gloss over the diseases, wars, starvation and constant encroachments that reduced this population by ninety percent within a century of the real British invasion. I could skip over the economic imperatives — really greed — that led to the use of White indentured servants and West Africans as indentured servants and slaves to make the colonies profitable through growing tobacco, rice and indigo. I could obfuscate the eventual creation of an institution that made permanent the connections between African skin and slavery in what would become the US, codified in law and in the US Constitution (albeit indirectly).

I guess this US history course could focus mostly on the genius of the great White men that made this a great nation, slave owners like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Andrew Jackson. I could then focus less on the crucial reliance of the US economy on the profits and products of slavery that made industrialization possible. A system that supplied the US and the UK with the cotton that would make modern capitalism — with its multinational banks, international commerce and movements of large numbers of people to cities for work — a reality. A system that so contradicted American ideals that it led to a civil war that killed and maimed nearly 1.2 million people.

Original Trivial Pursuit, Master Game, Genus Edition, 1981, January 5, 2015. (http://epicrapbattlesofhistory.wikia.com/).

And all this only gets us to 1865. There’s also Indian removal, Mexican-turned-Americans in the Southwest, Southern and Eastern European immigrants and Social Darwinism, Jim Crow segregation and lynchings, race riots, Black migration, Mexican migration, Whiteness and the assimilation of White ethnics, the early Civil Rights Movements, the Civil Rights Movement, the post-Civil Rights era. This is hardly an exhaustive list of the topics that are key ones in any US history course.

So short of deciding to only teach a US history that only focuses on great, rich White males, I have to discuss race. If only to teach this history properly and well enough to give all of my students food for thought and thought for food. Otherwise, I might as well be teaching Trivial Pursuit or change my name to Alex Trebek.

Biting Off Too Much, And Almost Choking On It

03 Wednesday Dec 2014

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

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Arrogance, Calculus, Differential Equations, Football Analogies, Grad School, Graduate School, Heimlich Maneuver, History Major, Humanities, Joe Montana, Lifelong Learning, Limitations, Multiple Integrals, Overachievers, Overachieving, Partial Derivaties, Pitt, Pride, Self-Discovery, Warren Moon

“Bush Gag” cartoon, Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune, November 5, 2008. (http://dailykos.com). Qualifies as fair use under copyright laws — low resolution picture.

I’m someone who’s in a state of constant learning, constantly wanting to challenge myself and others to be better, to do more and better. I don’t apologize for this. But I do need to acknowledge that too often, I exert so much pressure on myself to excel that I take on a Thanksgiving feast’s worth of challenges. More times than not, I come through on the other side, but frequently in need of the Heimlich maneuver to keep from suffocating on it all.

For those of you who are still in undergrad or have recently finished, or at least, still remember clearly the details of this part of your academic journey, this story is most poignant for you. After years of relying mostly on my great memory and very good writing skills to be the very good student I’d been over the previous decade, I wanted to do better, to not have to scramble in the last three weeks of a sixteen-week semester and look like a dog with a serious constipation problem trying to void, like almost two-thirds of the sickly, underdressed, raccoon-eyed students I’d seen on campus during my first two years at the University of Pittsburgh.

As I wrote at the end of my coming-of-age memoir Boy @ The Window:

I reasoned that I needed to have balance to my semesters so that I wouldn’t spend the last two or three weeks of them playing catch up. Starting with the fall of ’89, I took all my syllabi from all of my classes, grabbed a calendar, and crafted a table where I knew exactly what to read, when to study, and when to begin my research and writing projects for each class I had in a semester. That way, I could know when to slack off or party, when to buckle down and study, and when to just shift into academic cruise control.

Hall-of-Fame QB Warren Moon with Houston Oilers, throwing from within pocket on his 527-yd passing day against the Kansas City Chiefs, December 16, 1990. (http://spokeo.com).

Those were literally my words and thoughts from a quarter-century ago. I also decided to become more organized because, thinking back, I knew that I couldn’t be a scrambling student in grad school. At least one who could be consistent and successful, who could sit and step up in the pocket and deliver academic darts for touchdowns — to use one of the many football analogies I would’ve said in ’89 (and probably now, too). All I knew was that after the spring semester — with thirty-six-hour workweeks and five courses — that I wanted more time to hang out with friends, to even maybe date.

Only, I was dumb enough to take third-semester calculus a year and a half after my last math course, and I was now a history major taking writing intensive courses. But at the time, I had my very good reasons. I was only one course shy of a minor in mathematics, which I figured would look good on my academic resume when I did apply to grad schools. I wanted to learn the basics about differential equations, because I was just that kind of guy. I wanted, most of all, to challenge myself, because that part of my Humanities indoctrination had stayed with me well beyond my high school graduation.

That course was a struggle, mostly because my attention was split between writing papers and reading thick history texts, constitutional law books and African American literature on the one hand, and math equations on the other. Fourteen months away from derivates and integrals and volumes was too long for me. I couldn’t really adjust to being in a lecture hall with nearly 400 students, being in memorization mode, no longer with much in common with this huge group of STEM-inclined classmates. By the middle of October, I was miserable whenever it was time to march up that hill to Benedum Hall.

A simple first-order linear differential equation (nothing “simple” about it), December 2, 2014. (http://revisionworld.com/).

But it did get worse. About a month before the end of that semester, my friend Terri looped me into unwittingly setting up my friend Marc with our mutual friend Michele. And it worked! All too well, as I realized that I had a bit of a crush on Michele myself, but only after they’d started dating. It was a rocky last three weeks of ’89. I managed a 2.98 GPA that terrible semester, including a D+ in multiple integrals and differential equations. I missed a C- in that class by two-tenths of a point. Terrible by my own standards.

Lessons here, if any? Don’t bite off more than you can chew, maybe? I know that three admissions committees used that D+ against me in either rejecting me outright or in not offering me fellowship money to cover tuition when I applied to grad schools a year later. So, one other lesson could be to not take unnecessary risks, to not challenge myself. That would be the wrong lesson, though.

The real lesson would be to know our limitations, that we can’t be all things to ourselves and others and do well at all things all the time, that we have a finite amount of time and choices, in school and in life. With so much going on in my life these days, it’s still a lesson of which I have to keep reminding myself, practically every single day.

Tyranny of the Self-Righteous “Liberal”

18 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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ADM, Agribusiness, Amazonian Rain Forest, Archer Daniels Midland, Climate Change, ConAgra, Decriminalization, Drug Policy, Economic Development, Economic Inequality, Environmental Justice, Environmentalism, Food Justice, Food Policy, Global South, Global Warming, GM, GMOs, Gun Control Debate, Gun Safety, Hypocrisy, Monsanto, Pitt, Saving the Planet, Species Diversity, Third World, Veganism, Vegans, White Liberals

Toni Collette as Fiona, “Ms. Granola Suicide,” in movie About A Boy (2002), screen shot, June 18, 2014. (http://hotmovies.com via Universal). Qualifies as fair use – low resolution picture is personification of topic (self-righteous liberal).

More and more, I’ve tired of folks who proclaim that because they’ve finally “seen the light” on a particular niche or chic liberal issue, that their view is not only the right and only one. Anyone who doesn’t fall in line with their perspective is the enemy, a sap in support of the destructive forces of capitalism, a person whose individual actions will destroy the world.

That most — but not all, of course — of these people are White liberals isn’t exactly a surprise. This first occurred to me a quarter-century ago, when, as a Pitt undergrad, students active in environmentalism were going around campus asking us to donate time, money and signatures to stop Brazil from tearing down their Amazonian rain forests. Though I understood that we needed to process as much oxygen as our bodies would allow (and pull as much CO2 out of the atmosphere as possible), I also thought, “where the heck do we get off telling Brazil what to do?”

Brazil was and still is a leader in Global South economic development, with massive inequalities to boot. After two and a half centuries of virtually unchecked economic and industrial growth at the expense of the environment, though, where did we as Americans have the right to tell people in other countries to slow or halt their economic development? After exploiting the riches, resources and peoples of the world, where did these do-gooders get off telling other countries that they ‘d have to find a slower way to deal with poverty, or to not exploit their own resources?

An aerial picture of an area of the Amazon Rainforest, Brazil, September 9, 2009. (Felipe Menegaz via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0/GNU.

I would get into the occasional argument about this very White, very un-liberal liberal way of thinking. One where we’d get to keep our modern development while countries like Brazil were supposed to languish in the Third World box we and Europe built for them. Of course, the do-gooders would argue back at me, telling me that I wanted to destroy the environment and make the air unhealthy for our future kids and grandkids to breathe. As far as they were concerned, keeping the Global South poor and exploitable was our only chance at beating back global warming and species destruction.

It’s not any different today with issues like food justice, gun control and safety, and drug policy (and for some, religion). I have a Facebook friend who has become more belligerent about promoting veganism and condemning us so-called meat-eaters (technically, humans are omnivores) over the past half-decade. The issue for him couldn’t just be about agribusinesses and their gross abuse of the land, of crops and of domesticated animals, their control and degradation of much of the world’s food supply. No, it’s about individuals making choices that empower these massive corporations instead of going to an organic farm or farmers market or choosing to turn away from all animal proteins for the sake of their bodies or to curtail climate change.

I have no problems with vegans or veganism (I’ve tried it myself on occasion) or with fighting Archer Daniels Midland, Monsanto and ConAgra. I do have a problem with the myopic thinking that people like my Facebook friend have in attacking individuals. It’s such a ’70s liberal way of confronting a huge issue. Not to mention a very White and elitist perspective. Fact is, a truly healthy and well-rounded vegan diet is an expensive one, as the federal government doesn’t subsidize vegan products like it does agribusiness. In a nation like the US, with a shrinking middle class and growing inequality, to expect every individual to stop shopping at Walmart and eating Big Macs in exchange for the organic farm and lentils is arrogant and wholly unrealistic.

There’s no way I’d tell my Facebook friend all this. I’d get argued down as if I were attempting to spread a superflu across the planet. And it wouldn’t be a rational argument either. But then again, it’s okay for White liberals to be irrational in their arguments, especially when it’s in defense of the planet!

ConAgra Foods logo, June 18, 2014. (http://innovate.unl.edu/).

There’s also irony around gun control and safety and drug policy. When it’s so-called Black-on-Black crime, or a drive-by in New York or Chicago, those meet White liberal expectations. When it’s Columbine or Newtown or Santa Barbara, involving White-on-White crime, then it becomes time for more mental health screenings and more gun control. When heroin and crack cocaine found their way into poor Black and Latino communities in the ’70s and ’80s, we needed tougher drug laws to lock away “the animals” and “thugs.” Now that crystal meth and heroin have made their ways into White-middle-class suburbia, it’s now time to decriminalize some drug possessions and legalize marijuana. But no contradictions there!

A big part of the problem with everyday White liberalism is the idea that individuals and their individual decisions will add up to a groundswell of societal change. Yet how can you change the world if you’re not willing to sacrifice the structures that exploit others who aren’t White and middle class, who don’t live in America or in some suburban cul-de-sac? But go ahead, keep on keeping on with your non-GMO, organic vegan tuna salads made of soybeans and carrots while yelling at the rest of us impoverished shlubs to get with the program!

When Those Close Put Up Roadblocks

07 Saturday Jun 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Coming-of-Age, Detours, Dr. Don, Dreams, Faith, Forgive and Forget, Forgiveness, History, Internalized Racism, Jealousy, Memoir, Past, PAT Transit, PhD, PhD process, Pitt, Roadblocks, Self-Discovery, Self-Loathing, Sellout, Writing

Detours vs. roadblocks, June 1, 2012. (http://www.ideaarchitects.org).

This was the best title I could come up with, since it’s about folks in my life with whom I’ve shared some affinity over the years, beyond family, and to a lesser extent, friendships. This isn’t about haters or crabs-in-the-barrel mentality per se. It’s simply the observation that as I pursue dreams and push through goals in life that some whom have the choice between being supportive or actively working against my interests, how more than a few have chosen to do the latter.

That this has occurred in my life mostly as I pursued my doctorate and pressed on as a writer isn’t a coincidence. The things I’ve worked the hardest for in life, the dreams most difficult to achieve, the amount of energy and pressing through needed to overcome my own doubts in the process — all came with an audience of detractors. A bit more than twenty years ago, some of my Pitt friends started falling by the wayside as I pursued my grad degrees, which is normal, but there were some pretty weird conversations I had with them as they did. One insisted on calling me “Dr. Don” about a dozen times during a PAT Transit bus ride one day in September ’92, laughing to the point of hilarity while doing it. I thought that he was going to choke on his own spit all the while, he was laughing so hard. Or that I was going to choke him myself if he said “Dr. Don” one more time!

Screen shot of character played by Samuel L. Jackson in Django Unchained (2012) with “Sellout” addition (not an endorsement, by the way), October 31, 2013. (http://forwardtimesonline.com/2013/).

Another guy — who eventually committed suicide in ’98 — told me straight up that people like me were “sellouts,” that “The Man” wasn’t going to accept people like me or him “no matta how many degrees we get” or don’t get. That was six weeks before my committee approved my dissertation, in October ’96. Luckily, I learned not to bring up my education to folks unless it was for professional purposes or unless someone asked.

That these were Black acquaintances from my days as an undergrad at the University of Pittsburgh was a bit surprising, considering that my tendency is to always encourage folks to pursue their dreams. I’d always assumed the worst of the folks — Black, White, Afro-Caribbean and Latino — that I grew up with in Mount Vernon, New York, precisely because their encouragement literally made me suicidal by the time I turned fourteen. By the late-90s, I realized this was more than a New-York-area-social-etiquette-disorder.

With writing and books over the past decade — especially with Boy @ The Window — I’ve experienced some of those same headwinds from folks who seemed to think they had a better idea for the direction of my life than I. When I first started working on my memoir at the end of ’06, I had a conversation with my Pitt and AED colleague Stacey, whom I’d known for sixteen years. Upon telling her about my project, she said, “You need to wait on that,” that I should “publish a few more books,” be in my fifties, before “writin’ a biography.” So I knew that she wasn’t going to buy a copy when it came out. Oh well!

Last fall, at an African American Alumni Council event at Pitt, it was one of my first opportunities to discuss the now published Boy @ The Window, which was immediately followed by public criticism. Right after I talked about the book, an older alumna walked right up to me, and got within a foot or so of my face — close enough to hug. “You’re too young to have a memoir,” she said with a smile on her face, and then walked away as if her’s was the final say on the topic.

At the least, it showed that most don’t know the difference between a memoir (on one period or aspect of one’s life, often with a look at the world beyond) and an autobiography (the story of my entire life). Boy, understand the genre before criticizing it or my role in it already!

One foot in the grave (apparently), June 7, 2014. (http://www.virginmedia.com/).

And, yes, I know. I see my Facebook friends especially posting other people’s sayings every single day. About letting go, moving on, forgetting the past, pushing past the haters, sitting in a lotus position, meditating and praying, and then drinking a wheat-grass smoothie. I do let go, I do forgive, and I don’t let the naysayers in my life have the final say. But letting go doesn’t mean I don’t get to highlight some truth, point out hypocrisy, and that I should just be quiet for the sake of being quiet.

It hasn’t been lost on me that most of these specific, potentially dream-destroying microaggressions have come from Black folk, male and female, well-off and immersed in poverty. Do I put these people in the same category as White literary agents who’ve said things to me like, “Oh no, not another abuse story!” or “There are too many black coming-of-age stories in the market?” Of course not. Gate keepers practicing ignorance in the midst of structural racism isn’t the same as people who may have internalized racism.

Or in the latter case, it could just be that my pursuit of what I’ve wanted and finally come to know for my life brought attention to dreams deferred, delayed and denied, by others and by their own fears of failure and success. If I’d let this stand in my way, I’d still be living in Mount Vernon, undoubtedly living in grinding poverty, wondering how could I let everything I wanted out of life get away from me.

Mothers’ Meeting Day, 1997

17 Saturday May 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Cleaning, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Abuse, Alcoholism, Baggage, Betrayal, CMU, Insomnia, LaGuardia Airport, Laurell, Misogyny, Mother's Day, Mother-in-Law, Mother-Son Relationship, PhD Graduation, Pitt, US Air, US Airways

Normally I do a post every May 18th on a topic related to my PhD graduation ceremony at Carnegie Mellon. They usually revolve around two subjects: Joe Trotter and my Mom, betrayal and burnout. For once, I have no intention of doing a post on the seventeenth anniversary of officially becoming “Dr. Collins” and all of the baggage that I brought/came with that. Instead, today’s post is about the day before, Saturday, May 17 ’97. It was the day that my Mom and my future mother-in-law would meet each other for the first time, during my Mom’s one-and-only visit to Pittsburgh during my twelve years there.

I covered the cost of my Mom’s round-trip flight on US Air from LaGuardia to Pittsburgh, knowing that she wouldn’t have been able — or, as it turned out, willing — to see me graduate otherwise. That Friday evening, May 16th, was my Mom’s first time on an airplane since she was pregnant with me, the summer of ’69, when she visited her family in Arkansas. She’d already missed my ceremonies at Pitt for my bachelor’s and master’s in ’91 and ’92 respectively, and, as a result, I hadn’t gone to my graduations those years either.

So I made it easy for her this time around. Or rather, me and my then girlfriend Angelia made it easy for her. I gave up my studio apartment that weekend, because my Mom wasn’t comfortable with me putting her up in a hotel. Angelia cleaned my apartment from top to bottom — including the moulding at the bottom of my apartment’s walls. The place wasn’t this clean the day I’d moved in back in ’90!

But with so many other things that week, my Mom showed little appreciation for the significance of this trip, or for what we were doing to make this trip as convenient for her as possible. I went through Friday night and Saturday at Angelia’s apartment on the edge of East Liberty, about a twelve-minute walk away, where I hadn’t done an overnight before. I spent the first half of the next day going back and forth between my Mom, Angelia, my high school friend Laurell and her sister Naomi and unofficial surrogate (who were all staying at the Downtown Marriott). I took my Mom to both Pitt and CMU, to show her the place of my ten years’ working toward something much more important than a second high school diploma. I might as well have been taking my son to both campuses when he was a newborn!

Around 2:30 pm, I realized we needed to get to Angelia’s mother’s place in Homewood for a mid-afternoon meal. That was next on the schedule. I think we took the bus, the 71D from a block off CMU to Homewood, and walked the three blocks up a steep hill to Monticello Street. There, Angelia’s mom extended a long greeting, a hug for which my Mom hardly seemed prepared. Angelia was also there, and had bought a KFC bucket meal for the four of us to share.

After a few pleasantries, it started. How my mother and eventual mother-in-law, in their first-ever meeting, spent three hours discussing their failed marriages and the horrible nature of Black men the day before my graduation, I really don’t know. I was in a fog, worn out from a week’s worth of insomnia and from the growing realization that my Mom didn’t really care about my journey or accomplishments.

I stayed and respected my elders, maybe too much. Three hours listening to stories I already knew, between my first-hand knowledge of my father Jimme and my idiot ex-stepfather Maurice, not to mention the stories Angelia had told me about her mother’s trials (luckily, Angelia never witnessed these, because her mother’s marriage was over by the time she’d turned two). A concussion here, a bruised lip there. A broken jaw, a fractured arm. Alcoholism and abuse, and men, working or unemployed, not paying any bills. “Men are no good,” my Mom said over and over again.

Of course, I didn’t count, for as far as my Mom was concerned, I wasn’t a man, because I’d spent the previous decade as a student. But that wasn’t the worst part. My Mom did a bunch of revisionist history in telling the story of “raisin’ six kids” and her doomed two marriages, somehow writing me and Darren and the decisions she had some degree of control over out of this story.

I’d never been part of a conversation like this as an adult. As a six or ten-year-old kid on The Avenue in Mount Vernon with my Mom and her hospital friends, yes, but not since those times. I felt as if I might as well found some stoop outside, sat down with a 40, and fallen into a deep sleep.

Even Angelia’s mom wanted to change the subject by the middle of hour number three. Instead, she used her elderly-ness as a excuse to beg off more conversation on the topic of misogyny, told me that she was proud of me, said that she was excited about going to the CMU ceremony, and retired for the evening. I wish I could’ve gone upstairs with her and done the same. I instead had the distinction of dropping my Mom off at my apartment, picking up Angelia and going down to Station Square to eat dinner with Laurell, Naomi and Archie. And that was all the day before the graduation ceremony!

Where 1 PhD = A Second High School Diploma

14 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Associate's Degree, CMU, High School Diploma, Homelessness, Jealousy, job search, Lame Jokes, Mother-Son Relationship, PhD Graduation, Pitt, Subway, Teachers College, Westchester Business Institute, White Plains New York, Yonkers

Absurditty (or an Absurd Ditty, deliberately misspelled), where $100 = 2 quarters, May 14, 2014. (Donald Earl Collins).

I could’ve just as easily titled this post, “Road to Boy @ The Window, Part 5: My Mother and My Doctoral Graduation.” Precisely because any chance I had of immediately getting over the psychological and emotional hump of finishing a doctorate while dealing with the betrayals of an advisor and dissertation committee was gone by the end of my graduation day, the third Sunday in ’97 (anniversary number seventeen, just four days away). That process opened me up to looking at my past, to figuring out how someone like me could go on to do a PhD, to teach, to write, to learn, all well beyond the expectations of my parents and my classmates.

The process of feeling uneasy about my relationship with my Mom, though, had begun the day after my interview at Teachers College. That Tuesday, May 13th, I left the Hotel Beacon, made my way down to the 66th Street stop, and caught the 1 train to The Bronx and Van Cortlandt Park. I then caught a Westchester Bee-Line Bus up Broadway and crossed the Yonkers-Bronx border, where I got off to walk up a one-block-long hill.

I arrived at my Mom’s temporary place on Bruce Avenue. This was where she and my younger siblings had been living since the end of ’95, as a result of an electrical fire that swept through two floors of 616. Not to mention, an incompetent Mount Vernon Fire Department that did more damage by flooding two of the three buildings on the property in the process of putting the fire out. It was a sparse place that made 616 look like a luxury high-rise by comparison. There were holes in the walls because my younger siblings Yiscoc and especially Eri had punched through the cheap plaster and nonexistent sheet rock in their teenage anger and rage.

Front door of 85 Bruce Avenue, Yonkers, NY (screen shot), taken in October 2007. (Google Maps).

It was in the midst of all of this that my Mom was finally graduating from Westchester Business Institute with her associate’s. I was happy for her. The only thing that concerned me was the kind of work she could find with the degree. I was willing to help her in any way I could, including coming up and spending a few days in Yonkers to attend her ceremony in White Plains that Tuesday evening. I wanted to continue to provide my Mom the emotional support that I thought she wanted.

That began to change the morning after her graduation ceremony. We were sitting down at this cafeteria bench that served as the kitchen table, with her drinking cream-infused tea from a chipped white flower mug and eating a piece of toast while I contemplated walking down the hill for some yogurt. We’d been talking about looking for work, about her moving out and finding a place in White Plains, or even moving back to a fully renovated 616. I brought up the real possibility that if I got the Teachers College job, I would move back to the New York area (though not Mount Vernon — out of the question).

This was when my Mom said, “You know, you were in school so long, you could’ve had another high school diploma.” It was out of the blue, and caught me completely off guard. It was quiet for a moment, with me in a deep frown, and my Mom sitting there for a few seconds. Then she forced a laugh. “It’s a joke,” she said, as if I was supposed to be oblivious to the nonverbal displays of disdain for nearly a decade’s worth of my work. And, what was the joke? My degree, or the amount of time and energy I spent in earning it?

I sort of ignored what my Mom had said at first. But really, how could I? Mom had told the lamest of jokes over the years — like about how diarrhea “was like ‘dying in the rear’,” she’d say as if she heard the joke from someone else. But no matter how I looked at it, comparing everything I went through from August ’87 up to that point to a diploma that I earned while living in two hells — 616 and Mount Vernon High School — wasn’t a joke. Not for either of us.

My Mother’s Associate’s Degree Photo, Westchester Business Institute, May 12, 1997.

My Mom disappointed me a day later, as she said, “I don’t have to tell you that I’m proud of you. I tell other folks, just not you.” It was in response to me saying that I thought her joke wasn’t one at all. But she hadn’t sealed our fates as a mother and son in a long-term strained relationship, at least not yet. That would occur a few days later.

Even under the strictest of measures, comparing a PhD to a high school diploma is ridiculous. It’s like comparing the buying power of Oprah to an ant colony. But I figured out a long time ago, long before starting my master’s program in history at Pitt, that a degree is only worth anything if you use it to enhance your life, advance your career, or pursue your calling. Even with all my qualms. About academia, about the publish-or-perish model, about the not-for-profit profit world, even about myself as a writer. It was all worth it.

One thing I did learn, though, about my Mom, maybe for the first time. I’d always wondered about the saying, “I love you, but I don’t like you.” I hadn’t really understood what that meant until the week of my doctoral graduation.

Last Dance, The Last Class

09 Friday May 2014

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

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"Last Dance" (1979), Boredom, CMU, Coming-of-Age, Coursework, Department of HIstory, Donna Summer, Grad School, Growing Up, Loneliness, Pitt, Single-Minded, Student Life

The late Donna Summer, album cover, circa 1979, May 9, 2014. (http://digboston.com/).

Twenty years ago on this date was my last formal class as a formal student, a grad course at Carnegie Mellon with Kate Lynch on Comparative Urban History. I spent that evening of my last day of classes polishing up a twenty-five page research essay that compared the development of public housing practices in Toronto, Berlin and Chicago. It was too ambitious a paper, especially given that I did all the research for it in the final four weeks of that semester, after spending a week at AERA (American Educational Research Association) in New Orleans presenting on a panel and networking, and two days meeting the Gill side of my extended family for the first time. I just wanted to get it done, though.

I made my final edits to my introduction and argument and to a few of my citations and references just before 9:30 pm that second Monday in May ’94. I was working in a computer lab in Wean Hall, using one of the rare PCs on campus. Rare because Carnegie Mellon had made a ridiculous deal with Apple back in ’83 to be a Macintosh campus — a terrible move if you were using Macs in the 1990s.

Apple Macintosh II Computer, April 15, 2004. (Alexander Schaelss via Wikipedia). Released via GNU FDL/CC-SA-3.0.

Normally I wrote my papers on the University of Pittsburgh’s campus, as my alumnus status gave me access to computers and Hillman Library. Plus, it took Pitt almost a year to shut down my grad school accounts, allowing me to make thousands of copies of materials that I would’ve needed a month’s worth of my stipend to make at Carnegie Mellon’s Hunt Library. And, even after a year of torture and courses, nearly all of my friends and interests remained across the bridge connecting Oakland and Pitt with Schenley Park and the southern end of Carnegie Mellon’s campus.

Once I completed my paper, I walked over to Baker Hall, went up to the second floor, and dropped it off for Lynch to review and grade. It was all over but the dissertation overview defense and the dissertation itself. I was happy, but I was more relieved than happy. The last year of transferring to and doing coursework at Carnegie Mellon had taken a toll on me. For the first time ever, I found myself actually hating classes and school in general. Sure, there were individual teachers and professors I despised. Dr. Demontravel. David Wolf. Estelle Abel. Dick Ostreicher. But not the formal process of classroom learning itself. It took a year of redundant courses at CMU at the insistence of the powers that were to steal that immutable joy of learning from me. At least, temporarily.

I thought about it the next day. My first day of kindergarten was September 8, ’74, which meant that I had experienced twenty school years between the ages of four and twenty-four. For virtually all of my life, I’d been a student, from kindergarten to PhD, between Presidents Nixon and Ford and Bill Clinton. I had done several thousand assignments, hundreds of exams, and dozens of papers and essays. Combining undergrad and grad school, I’d taken fifty-eight (58) courses. It’s a wonder I hadn’t tired of listening to mercurial professors any sooner.

Keep Calm and Hate School poster, May 9, 2014. (http://keepcalmstudios.com).

Keep Calm and Hate School poster, May 9, 2014. (http://keepcalmstudio.com).

I spent the next few days doing something I normally didn’t have time for. I slept in late, took lots of naps, and watched my Knicks play and struggle with the Jordan-less Bulls in the NBA’s second round of playoffs. It would be the most rest I’d have for the rest of ’94.

Two decades later, and I’ve taught nearly as many courses as I took to earn my bachelors, masters and doctorate. I do like the view of a classroom — in-person or virtual — from the instructor’s perspective. But I learned so much about being a teacher, too, from what to do and what not to do, long before my final semesters at Carnegie Mellon. Ms. Griffin, Mrs. Shannon, Mrs. O’Daniel, Mrs. Bryant, Harold Meltzer were great counterbalances to the teachers/professors who were as inspiring as watching paint dry in a desert.