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A List of the Unwritten Rules I Wish I Had Known, in 1990, 2000, and 2010

19 Tuesday May 2020

Posted by 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, Work, Youth

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Me, 23 years after my PhD graduation, May 18, 2020. (Donald Earl Collins).

As a confessed educated fool, I readily admit that there are a ton of things I understood but did not act on. But I also know that there are solar system loads of unwritten rules that I didn’t and couldn’t possibly have known going into my professional future toward the end of my undergrad days at the University of Pittsburgh. And, there’s the stuff that falls in between. The rules that are not hard rules, ones that can be bent, twisted into pretzels, and/or broken or even shattered. The things that I didn’t know I knew, the ideas and principles that are ingrained or splinters in my mind, but not quite accessible until the moment I needed them, or, even worse, right after I really could’ve used that extra bit of knowledge and wisdom.

This list is merely the beginning of the most important rules I could impart to my younger self, at 20, 30, and yes, 40 years old. Donald’s 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, and 2.5 all believed that his mind, his imagination, his hard work and achievements would all carry the day, would win him a slice of prosperity, a sliver of intellectual respectability, a piece of popularity, even. All to have moments and flashes of all three, but not usually at the same time, and all to realize that talent and hard work for Black folx in a Whiteness world matter not. Not even among most Black elites. I could list 1,000 unwritten rules and other ideas that I wish I had known or — if I did somehow already know — taken advantage of. But the real theme here is that the meritocracy is a lie. Whether in the form of rugged individualism or a belief in K-16 education as a social mobility equalizer, merit through talent and hard work is an American mythology like Abraham Lincoln “freeing the slaves” and America as always good and righteous.

1. You are a writer. Whatever the job, whatever the career path, whatever the familial and relationship and marital responsibilities, you are a writer. Yes, despite it all, your calling is to write about it all. Period. It does not matter if you think most of your writing is crap. All writers think their writing is crap. It does not matter if you’re really good at organizing conferences, retreats, and learning institutes. Or, if you are excellent at curriculum design, a tough but caring history and education professor, a science nerd and a talented computer science geek. Nearly every writer has another set of jobs and careers besides writing. Just because your co-workers, colleagues, and even family might not see you as a writer first, does not mean that you are not a writer.

And, here’s the real deal. Not everyone needs to know that you are a writer. Some dumb muthafuckas will use your expressed calling against you, especially if and when they do find out about your creative side and your one troy ounce of success. Some of your enemies, nemeses, and family members and friends will literally laugh in your face when you discuss your aspirations with them. You have to know whom to trust and not trust with this truth about yourself. You will learn, in time, to keep your own counsel, to not let everyone in your world in on your not-so-secret secret.

And you will learn that to write is not just putting pen to paper or fingers and thumbs to a MacBook keyboard. It’s reading, beyond the academic tome, beyond the occasional novel or Walter Mosley detective mystery. It’s reading folx who’ve struggled with writing just like you. It’s people-watching on trains and the Metro. It’s listening in Univision or Telemundo programs while folding clothes at a laundromat with a mostly Salvadoran, Nicaraguan, Nuyorican or Dominicanyorka audience. It’s thinking of an idea while cleaning chicken thighs for dinner or on the occasions you end up jacking off for lack of sleep. It’s all the vivid dreams and nightmares — really, visions — that you’ve had of present, future, past, past-future, future-present, and ever-present, about escape, about overcoming, about being trapped. That’s all a part of the process.

2. Degrees matter, and yet, degrees don’t matter for shit. I cannot believe that your dumb-ass self believed for years that getting the “PhD would be a passport for doing what [you] wanted to do in [your] life.” You must have said this to 50 of your closest friends, acquaintances, and even a couple of folks who you eventually realized were your enemies back between 1990 and 1997. At your most stressed times, those sudden, bolting-upright-in-the-bed-at-3am moments, with your heart thumping like you were Bugs Bunny ogling Lola Bunny, you believed the doctorate was the ticket. You kept telling yourself this, even as you had doubts about what the degree meant as you finished your coursework in 1994. You cast yourself atop this hill, especially after becoming a Spencer Dissertation Fellow in 1995, even though you and many in your cohort were all obvious misfits in the grad school system.

Yes, in the narrow sense of job qualifications, degrees matter. But, you earned your master’s degrees in History in April 1992. At 22 years old! You were all-but-dissertation at 24. 24! You could’ve taken time off, earned a teaching certificate in a year, gone on to teach at public, private, or parochial school, or even earned a degree in a more practical field, like psychology, social work, education, journalism, creative nonfiction, or sociology. So admit it, damn you! You were attracted to some aspects of the tenured faculty lifestyle. Not most of it, to be sure. Yet the idea of having a schedule where you spent lots of time doing research and writing. You secretly craved being paid to write whatever you wanted to write. Even though you already knew that you could only do this if you willing to write like a cold, dispassionate White guy well-off enough to not care about reaching an audience outside of his extremely narrow field.

So you convinced yourself for nearly two decades that you could do and be both. A writer for mainstream organs and readers and a writer for academe. You weren’t wrong. Your eclectic writing style can accommodate complex scholarly ideas and personal tales and dramas, even creative techniques to transition between them. But the world of the privileged rarely allows for the crossover-dribble equivalent for writers. With a doctorate, you are an egg-headed scholar to the average editor, and cannot possibly write in any other way. For journal editors, your style was never gonna be scholarly enough. For newspaper and magazine editors, your style was always too cerebral. And, despite your degree, you had a hard time convincing others of your expertise. You only earned a PhD in History from Carnegie Mellon University, okay? Not from UCLA or Berkeley or Stanford, or certainly not from Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, or even UPenn, Georgetown, or Columbia. Your years of published works and a couple of self-published books would be barely enough to convince Ebony to take a look at your work when you hit your mid-40s. Forget about trying to bifurcate and make your degrees work for you. Get a good job, and just find more and more ways to keep writing, and hopefully, you won’t be dead before people start reading your stuff.

3. Academia, the nonprofit world, and the writing world only make room for Blacks and other people of color when then either completely conform to its -isms (tokens), or when we prove ourselves to at least be moderately successful mavericks. There is no in between, there is no best-of-both-worlds, or straddling the fence, or finding yourself as the Emissary that can cross between worlds. You are not Avatar Aang, the Last Airbender or Captain Benjamin Sisko of DS9. Even among other Black folks, like when I was offered a tenure-stream position in the Department of Africana Studies (née Afro-American Studies) at Howard University in 2000, it came with the implicit stipulation that I needed to conform, to always respect my elders — no matter how elitist and exclusionary I thought they were. At nearly every job I have held since 1996, I have been hired as a token toward diversity with the added benefit of my degree and/or specific expertise, or because I went against the grain to do or write something counterintuitively.

But if that were all, you may have figured some aspect of this out during the Reagan years. The layers of intersectional elitism, from whole institutions like lily-White, College Republican, and two-comma-kid Carnegie Mellon, to department-level beliefs of assuming that you as someone who grew up with poverty would somehow survive summer after summer without financial support. There were also the professors, who to a person assumed that “a few years of hazing will be good for you,” as if you grew up without a material care in the world. After all, how could a Black guy from Mount Vernon, New York with your familial and socioeconomic background find themselves in the hallowed halls of major universities?

Yeah, man. There are almost as many layers of elitism in the working world as there are folds in the gray matter of an alleged Mensa genius. Racial paternalistic elitism, neo-Marxist elitism, misogynist elitism, Marxist elitism, socialist elitism, misogynoir elitism, White feminist elitism, Afrocentric elitism, corporate elitism, technocratic elitism. There’s also Ivy League elitism, HBCU elitism, country-club elitism, affluent Black elitism, African Black elitism, Afro-Caribbean elitism, Puerto Rican elitism, and biracial elitism. And lest I forget, there’s that from-the-5-boroughs-New Yorker elitism, served-in-the-Peace-Corps elitism, revolutionary elitism, anti-revolutionary elitism, and even contrarian elitism. Cutting through all these layers over several decades might leave you in a rage, ready to holler at a moment’s notice, and with some bouts of exhaustion and high blood pressure. But the truth is, none of these dumb asses know how deep in The Matrix they are, putting on enough airs to crush entire cities into oblivion.

4. You will have moments of serious doubt. You will have days, weeks, months where you will be depressed. You will have “waiting for the other shoe to drop” emotions, even when everything is going well professionally. You will feel that you do not belong. Not in academia. Not in the nonprofit world. Not as a writer. Not as an American. Sometimes, not even as a Black American. You will have bouts with what we call imposter syndrome. And yes, you do not fit in easily anywhere, because you have spent so much of your life trying to learn how to cope in places and spaces that never wanted you. Your experiences with millennialist religions, with poverty, with Blackness, with growing up in Mount Vernon/New York City, will help you cope. But you will never be a fit in any place you inhabit in this lifetime.

And, you need to know that this will be perfectly fine. Fitting in never brings you the material and psychological benefits you will seek for yourself and your loved ones. Fitting in only brings you headaches on the regular, endless cycles of diarrhea and constipation, a nearly permanent insomnia. Fitting in makes you almost forget your training as an African American historian and your expertise in understanding the human condition. Fitting in nearly kills the writer you so desperately need to become before you even fully acknowledge that you are one.

So, do not ever fit in. Do not even try. Be you. Be your best you. If that isn’t enough, that’s the problem of a world full of bullies, Head-Negro-in-Charge micromanagers, White moderates, paternalistic White women, and other who would prefer brown-nosers to free thinkers. Not to mention, the armies of sycophants these assholes tend to hire.

So, the meritocracy is a neoliberal lie, and a debt-ridden deadly one. You might never break through as a writer in all the ways that matter to you. Or you just might. Or, you may fully break through, only to find out that you are so much more than the writer you will eventually become. But do not look for approval. Especially not from the US academic and literati set. Let them continue to eat their shitty cake.

“On the Next Episode of ‘Dumb MFers’…”

04 Saturday Jan 2020

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, My Father, New York City, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Pre-speech prayers over President Donald J. Trump (led by Pastors Paula White-Cain — laying on hands — and Guillermo Maldonado), Evangelicals for Trump coalition rally,, El Rey Jesús International Ministry, West Kendall neighborhood, Miami, January 3, 2020. (Tom Brenner/Reuters via https://nationalpost.com/).

My wife can attest to this. Since the days of HBO’s The Wire (2002-2008), I have had the idea of Idris Elba doing a voice over leading into the next episode of an alternative television series. But instead of Elba narrating in his smooth American Russell “Stringer” Bell baritone, “On the next episode of The Wire,” I’d have him say, “On the next episode of Dumb Muthafuckas,” said exactly the way I’ve spelt it here. Then, the no-so-happy highlights from the next episode would ensue!

On the use of the MF word. I grew up around folx who didn’t use the n-word (with the notable exception of my idiot ex-stepfather, who said and wrote the n-word as “niggah” or “nigguh,” such were the influences of the late-1960s and 1970s on him). My mom would either say “Ns” or “Ens” (depending on spelling), or would grunt “un-un” in reference to Black folk she felt were assholes or fucking up in some way. But motherfucker, particularly the AAVE (African American Vernacular English) way of saying it as muthafucka? That could flow freely like the Hudson River after a spring or summer rainstorm, even during the Hebrew-Israelite years, though less so since we went evangelical Christian in the late-1980s! It could start a sentence and end a sentence, and in heated, violent arguments, often at the same time.

Screenshot of a younger Idris Elba as Stringer Bell in HBO’s The Wire (2002-2008), January 4, 2020. (https://hbo.com).

But it wasn’t just Mom. My father said “muddafucka” when he was in drinking mode growing up. I once played a game in my head, and counted up the number of times he used it at a bar in the Bronx to describe the other drunks, the barkeep, and other folks in the city. I lost count after 50, between “po’ ass muddafucka,” dumb muddafucka,” “git out of here, muddafucka,” and “Suck my dict, muddafucka!” And that was all in 45 minutes!

Their friends, their kids, and so many others I was around in Mount Vernon, the Bronx, and in Manhattan growing up all used variations of MF. I didn’t become regularly acquainted with the n-word outside of Roots or A Soldier’s Story until I went off to college and Pittsburgh. But when Bruce Willis said the line to Alan Rickman’s character Hans Gruber in Diehard (1988), “Yippee-ki-yay, muthafucka!,” he said it the way the Black and Brown folk I grew up around said it, and not the wimpy ways most Whites tend to use it. And every Black who was in the theater with me that night audibly gasped with delight

So when I use MF here, I am being tongue-in-cheek and as serious as a muthafucka. Especially when it comes to America’s daily reality TV show, 45 and his cabal of mostly obese in body, mind, and spirit privileged White man hell-bent on making America a blatantly White supremacist country again (see Mike Pompeo, William Barr, and Rudy Giuliani here, among a legion of others). They are stunningly craven, which also makes them stunningly stupid. They collectively are the person who comes along and knocks down the Jenga tower you have carefully constructed and deconstructed over several hours with a sledgehammer, and then burp in your face immediately afterward. All while not knowing the chain of events they have set off for themselves and for you. They are too orgasmically high on power and drunk off of spreading lies and fear to contemplate playing checkers, much less picking up a bishop to play chess.

And that’s why the show should be titled Dumb Motherfuckers. Because the 45 thesis is to destroy all of former President Barack Obama’s proverbial statues, statues, paintings, treaties, deals, orders, and obelisks in order to restore Whiteness in the White House. The problem is, the Obamas merely brought their Blackness to the White House. The government remained steeped in Whiteness in policies and in attitude the entire time Obama wore the trappings of American imperial power. But when your racism and narcissism is so great as to think that the first Black president was an affront to millions of Whites and some footsoldiers-for-racism Black and Brown folx, being a bunch of dumb motherfuckers lighting up the US and the world with tiki-torches is the result.

Screenshot of ancient Egypt’s Sphinx, complete with closeup of its smashed nose, January 4, 2020. (https://education.abc.net.au).

Now America enters season four of Dumb Motherfuckers. Season three ended with a cliffhanger, as the House of Representatives voted in favor of impeaching 45 on two counts. But, what will Nancy Pelosi do next? Will Mitch McConnell continue his pledge to march “in lockstep with the White House,” like a jackbooted SS officer in a parade at Nuremberg? Will 45 continue to play golf while the US continues its march toward full-on corporate plutocratic fascism? Stay tuned!

As of 36 hours ago, Dumb Motherfuckers‘ producers threw us a plot twist, assassinating Iran’s leading general, Qasem Soleimani, a sort of declaration of war, and certainly a violation of the Geneva Convention. Sure, this plot twist is a distraction from impeachment and the 2020 election cycle. But it is also another drumbeat toward a war that will cost hundreds of thousands of Black and Brown lives, and displace millions of people from their homes and their possible futures. But that doesn’t matter, right? Ratings, a.k.a., votes, do.

45 and his minions of motherfuckers don’t care about all that. Nor are they smart enough to know where this new plot direction will take them or the rest of the US and the world. What they do know is that there are roughly 60 million Americans who are down for anything that 45 does. If 45 ran over a White family with a steamroller, killing three children under the age of five and their Scottish terrier in the process, his fans would find an excuse, say he’s “making America great again,” call me a racist, and threaten me and my life. So know that they would support, “Bomb bomb bomb/Bomb bomb Iran,” just like the late Sen. John McCain did during his 2008 election run. And apparently, through prayers and supplications, through megachurches and the Gospel of Prosperity.

This is what makes watching Dumb Motherfuckers so frustrating, because it is all so predictable. The thinly-veiled imperialism, the rank anti-Black, anti-Brown, anti-Jewish racism, xenophobia as World War Z, and Islamophobia, the obvious women-are-meat misogyny, and the wicked hoarding of wealth. The use of blind patriotism and Christianity to rally Whiteness and White folk into supporting utter stupidity. Just like in 1968-1969, 1973, 1983, 1989, 1991, 2001, and 2002-03, from Vietnam and Grenada to Panama, the First Gulf War, and Afghanistan. Dumb Motherfuckers isn’t dumb just because the characters are dumb. It’s dumb because it will eventually leave the Whites who want to be rich and want Black and Brown people to suffer thoroughly and lethally screwed as well. But give the (White and internalized racism Black and Brown) public what it wants, right? Dumb muthafuckas — it’s a shame and a pitiful!

My Whole Self At 50

27 Friday Dec 2019

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Selfie of me at 50, December 27, 2019. (Donald Earl Collins)

The title could just as easily be, “Confessions From an Educated Fool.” After all, I am highly educated, and have done more than my share of dumb-ass bullshit over the years to avoid certain truths about myself.

I have no idea what turning 50 really means. For Black men, the average life expectancy of 64.5 years makes me worry about every ache and every anomaly. Based on my family genetics, I have at least 30 years where my age will in no way be reflected in my height, weight, athleticism, sex drive, or other general health issues. My mind should remain sharp until I am in my late-80s or early 90s, if not longer. As of now, I know I am in better overall shape than I was this time 10 years ago, but lack the running stamina I developed during most of my 40s. On the other hand, my knees have been thanking me for the past 17 months since I stopped running 300-plus miles a year.

Depending on how I look at my life, I am a scrambler who has turned an Olympic-size swimming pool full of diarrhea with turd chunks into two kilos of gold. Or, I am a once brilliant and talented young Black man whose temper and impatience fucked up his future. Two things can be true, sometimes equally so, and at the same time. That is, if I don’t account for upbringing, systemic racism, extreme poverty, the violence of misogynoir and toxic masculinity, and a host of other burdens that my differential equation mind could not factor into my life’s calculus. Much less control or counteract with respectability or kindness or the Golden Rules of Christianity.

Some context. When I was 11, I participated in my first writing contest and came in second place among the dozens of K-12 students who submitted to the local newspaper, the Mount Vernon Daily Argus. By then, I had long buried the sexual assault I endured and the subsequent suicide attempt from five years earlier. I graduated 14th in a class of 509 in 1987, only to spend my last days of high school and the year after my enrollment at Pitt treated as if I were an invisible ghost by many of my former classmates. At 25, I earned a Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. But the entire time I was in commune with “my fellow Fellows,” as I used to say, I was ambivalent about my prospects, in and out of academia. At 26, in part because of the Spencer fellowship, I completed my dissertation. Yet my advisor’s petty jealousies and psychological abuse burned me out, just as my dissertation committee’s subsequent abandonment of me once I graduated left me feeling burned.

I was a young prospect with a doctorate from Carnegie Mellon, but with little in financial support or connections to continue to spin shit into gold. After two years, I left the wonderful world of adjunct teaching for a civic education job with the center-right organization Presidential Classroom. My boss was both extremely paranoia about terrorist attacks on DC and openly racist, referring to Asians as “Orientals” and making comments like “Slavery was a hoax.” After seven job interviews for academic positions over three years, Howard University offered me a tenure-stream assistant professorship in June 2000. I said no. At the time, I told my significant other, two months into our marriage, “I do not like working for racists, but at least I know where I stand. With Howard’s constant elitism, I’d likely lose it and pop one of my colleagues in the mouth for saying something elitist and stupid.” I was averaging 100-to-110 hours of work per week and about five hours of broken sleep at night when I made this decision.

Sometimes I think it’s the dumbest adult decision I ever made. Most of time, though, I think about the broom closet that they offered me as an office. I remember the urinals in the Founders Library that dated back to the tenure of Mordecai Johnson (1926-1960). I ruminate on rough attitudes of my one-time colleagues (I eventually taught there as an adjunct in 2007). And through all this, I remind myself that it was okay to say no. Especially to colorism, respectability politics, and a campus that has been in need of a total gutting and a top-down renovation at least since I began visiting in 1993.

My career has been one of wandering by necessity. I have never been a complete fit anywhere. Damn sure not in academia. Definitely not in the nonprofit world. Certainly not in consulting. And not quite as a freelance writer and author. I have had to bend and break so many rules and norms, just to survive, that to mold and shape myself like a shapeshifter would nearly always lead to me feeling at constant war, with myself and my work.

Selfie of me post-workout, December 24, 2019. (Donald Earl Collins).

Especially since so much of this war was over who I am. I am a writer, damn it! I love teaching — most of the time. I like managing projects, and was fairly good at raising money. I am an excellent cook (just ask anyone other than my Mom). I am a pretty good basketball player even now, and could’ve made a D1 college squad back in the day. I once considered stripping to make ends meet after finishing my doctorate (my eventual wife talked me out of it, a lot, while I gunned for a six-pack). But since at least the spring of 1981 (maybe, with Peanuts Land, the spring of 1979), I have been a storytelling, introspective, imagining-of-alternative-worlds-and-lives, mixing-fictional-techniques-with-my-real-life writer. It took me 21 years to admit that I was a writer, another decade to see myself as a writer first and foremost. That no matter the job or my roles in that job, that I was, am, and will always be a writer.

That was what motivated me to write Fear of a “Black” America and Boy @ The Window and then self-publish them, even as the process of researching and writing Boy @ The Window led me to uncover so many uncomfortable truths about me, my family, and the people I grew up around. Including the truth about my greatest failure, my refusal to dig out the splinter in my mind. The dual decision to not see myself as a writer and then to not dedicate myself spirit, soul, and body to my craft and calling until after turning 45. That’s my biggest regret, my daily frustration, my constant companion, buried just a few millimeters between my flesh and my bones.

Even when I finally push through, break through, blow up, and have any modest level of success as an author of x-number of books — and I will, because, me — I will continue to carry this deep well of what coulda and shoulda been. My need to credential myself, to make up for the loss of my childhood to poverty and domestic violence and child abuse, my desire for worth and work, my simple arrogance of youth. It nearly squeezed out the divine voice of purpose in my mind. More than once, it all drove me to the edge of the galaxy, where rage against the world, a lust for lust and self-destruction, and the sheer drop into the abyss of depression all intersect into a nebula of desperate insanity.

This is precisely why it is so important to have a crew, a group of folx who will not jump into the void with you, but instead will support you with critique and encouragement, and yes, love. Of course, I could not have transitioned from the burnout of the nonprofit world and the constant search for money to “change the world” into the constant search for income through freelance writer and teaching social justice through history and education without my wife. After years of watching bosses and co-workers get down on their knees to beg for money while they morphed the grassroots and systemic social justice work they really wanted to do into inchworm-paced “social change” models, I wanted out. I figured, consulting, occasionally teaching, and doing the work I truly wanted to do would be better.

Then, the Great Recession hit, and did a number on my permanent job prospects and consulting work. If someone had told me on verge of my 40th birthday that I would spend the next decade primarily working as contingent faculty at not one but two universities, I would have laughed until I cried. I would’ve also predicted that my wife would’ve handed me divorce papers. I didn’t die from woeful laughter, and my beloved did not demand that I move on.

But we did argue. One of those arguments led me to a “Fuck It” realization at the end of 2014. No one would ever offer me a permanent position at a university as faculty, not without offering me an administrator position first. And since the unofficial rules of the academy have never really applied to me and my writing, I had the right to publish anywhere, on any topic, even if and when other academicians — including some whom I had trained — looked at me like I was some tragic figure.

Along with some counterintuitive thinking about my eclectic writing skills and queer approaches to understanding the application of history and education in mainstream journalism, this new truth has been my resurrection and insurrection as a writer. Between The Guardian and Seven Scribes, The Atlantic, Huffington Post, and The Washington Post, and especially Al Jazeera English, I have come closest to being my truest and whole self outside of marriage, friendship, parenting, and my many moments in prayer.

I owe my wife for allowing me the space necessary to finally access my calling. But I also owe my small inner circle of folx who may not have always understood my journey and the decisions I made that led me to where I am at half-century. They’ve read my horrific drafts, heard my most hare-brained ideas, smiled through my most ludicrous of plans both before and during this bitter slog of a rollercoaster ride. I’m more than sure that some in my circle still don’t understand my end game. Mostly because there is some aspect of my whole self that I haven’t shared with them. Not only my desire as a writer. But my general desire to be excellent at everything, my quest to know everything, and my contradictory default of being scared of nearly everything, especially of whatever good moments I have had. Too many times, I have seen the anvil drop on or near me all too soon after drilling a three.

I think I have one more big run in me left. The proverbial they say that life is a marathon and not a sprint. They are wrong. Life is like a continuous basketball game, where one can be overmatched, but can take timeouts and make a series of 12-0 or 30-13 runs to tie the game or take the lead. I am in the midst of a run right now, as unexpected as living past the age of 30 was for me when I almost jumped off a bridge on my 14th birthday, 36 years ago.

I need the crew I have, and I could use some help from a few more folx who may want to join me on my journey into decade six. I’m gunning for a book contract for my American narcissism and American racism work. I’m looking for some career stability that takes advantage of my work in academia, in nonprofits, and in freelance writing. I’m looking to make sure that my son becomes the whole person he needs to be without spending the next 20 or 30 years kvetching about everything in the universe. I’m looking forward to spending more time traveling outside the US with him, with my wife, with others, and with myself. It’s time. It’s been time for 50 years.

My Thoughts on Cut-Throat Finals Week

17 Tuesday Dec 2019

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, Politics, Pop Culture, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Death Race (2008) Dreadnought scene screen shot, December 17, 2019. (https://youtube.com).

I have seen some shady shit as a student and educator over the years. Between my middle school and high school magnet programs in Money Earnin’ Mount Vernon, my four years as an undergrad at the University of Pittsburgh, my three years of grad school course work at Pitt and at Carnegie Mellon, and my years of contingent teaching, I have seen students do everything short of killing me or killing their classmates for a higher grade.

This semester provided some new wrinkles (really, old wrinkles I haven’t seen since my Humanities days in the 1980s) that actually shocked me. All as I taught my 77th, 78th, 79th, and 80th classes in my roller-coaster of a teaching career. I have felt a certain way toward some of my most demanding, hold-my-hand-for-an-A, spoiled-brat students over the years. This semester, I found myself actually despising three in particular across two universities and four classes. By no means does my grading reflect what I think of them, as I assigned each of them the grades they earned. But really, there is no letter in the alphabet low enough for them that I could assign. At least, one in which I would ever feel fully satisfied. And that is all because they all made the decision to be cut-throat, toward me and toward their peers.

I fully understand the compulsion. Six years in a magnet program that was one part Benetton commercial and three parts Death Race — the Jason Statham version from 2008 — showed me George Orwell’s Animal Farm as a live-action drama set from 1981 to 1987. Students giving each other incorrect notes from which to study. Classmates telling each other they were going to fail a final, or that they didn’t belong in Humanities. One Class of ’87 star making sure to say to another that they were only getting into an elite school because they were Black.

Hazing, bullying, torture, ostracism, denigration were all part of my experience, and that was before we started taking AP courses! I even snickered when our valedictorian received a 67 on an English essay in 11th grade because she failed to underline the title of a James Baldwin book (either Go Tell It on the Mountain or The Fire Next Time, who can remember such mundanity nearly 34 years later). We became good friends for a while after high school — go figure!

So, it’s not like I couldn’t conceive of setting up a classmate to fail, using someone else’s better words to substitute for my gross and imperfect writing, or spending money to hire a tutor to study for an AP exam. I could’ve really done it, if I had the will and/or the wealth. I just wouldn’t do it. You know, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” It’s in Matthews, the first book of the Gospels in the New Testament. It’s one of the few tenets that I have tried hard to follow in all my years as a human being and as a Christian. (The tenets I follow consistently are universal ones, so please do not get your atheistic drawers all twisted.)

But not always. During finals week my second semester at Pitt, at the end of April 1988, I put that Golden Rule aside, and for good reason. During our two-hour, multiple-choice final exam in Roman History, I noticed him. A skinny, geeky White yinzer with dirty blond hair sitting behind me in the Cathedral of Learning lecture hall on the ground floor. I noticed him because I heard him, somewhere around the question 70 mark. The only time his pencil made a noise was after I had filled in a bubble with an answer. By question 75, I knew the dumb mf was cheating off my answer sheet.

Denzel Washington’s character putting corkscrew to throw/soft palate/brain cavity, The Equalizer (2014), December 17, 2019. (https://imdb.com).

So I did what my years in Mount Vernon and in Humanities had trained me for. I proceeded to answer the next 25 questions on this 100-question exam incorrectly on purpose. It was rich and dripping with caramel-chocolate-on-ripe-strawberries revenge! I knew every correct answer and just kept bubbling in one wrong one after another. And as sure as dog-shit peppering dirty snow piles on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in February, Mr. Yinzer bubbled in his answers right after mine.

Then, I stopped. I paused for a half-minute after bubbling in question 100. I picked up my big eraser, and frantically rubbed out my incorrect answers to each of those last 25 questions. Then I turned around, and gave the yinzer a “Gotcha!” look. He was pissed and scared, his face the pale color of white pastel paint mixed with water. I turned back around, and carefully bubbled in my correct answers for the last quarter of the exam.

After I got up to submit my exam to the professor, I walked up the steps toward the back of the lecture hall, passing Mr. Yinzer along the way. He shot me a look, one where he knew he was caught, like a rat in an old-style trap, about to die from the pain of asphyxiation and a broken neck. I rolled my eyes with the thought, That’s what you get, dumb muthafucka!

I am not proud of that moment. Sure, the yinzer deserved it. But, I could’ve reported it to the professor. I could have just covered my answer sheet up better. I could have confronted the student directly. I could have even let the student ride my coattails toward an A on his final exam. Instead, I went all cut-throat and ensured that this student failed his final. In what way am I really better than him when I helped an academically drowning classmate swallow more water while holding his head down?

I know. What I did may seem milquetoast on the scale between blatant cheating and the viral slut-shaming of a peer with whom you are in academic competition. But that’s the point. None of this should be acceptable. My A in the course would not have changed, and Mr. Yinzer would still have struggled academically even if had succeeded at cheating on this one exam.

At just 10 days before I turn 50, I have figured out what I hate, actually hate, about other humans. I hate habitual liars, especially the ones who regularly lie to themselves while telling me their lies. I hate elitist assholery, even from those whom I admire, even from among my friends. I hate cheating, and those who think they can get away with it. I hate brown-nosing, as I smell this shit from a mile away. Now, I despise those who would eat A’s and A-‘s for their three squares a day before recognizing that education is about much more than a high grade an a job to pay off their student loans. Education is about freedom, having and making good choices, and finding yourself a crew that you can rely on and can rely on you long after graduation. Those who think otherwise are as lost as Dr. Manhattan caught in a quantum vortex.

The Unbearable Elitism of This World (Especially Academia)

28 Wednesday Aug 2019

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

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Gated community, Houston, TX area [but virtual gates in education for years], February 13, 2012. (Chelsea Lameira via http://www.houstonagentmagazine.com)

This is my 1,000th blog, folks! It took me 12 years and three months to reach this milestone — yay, me!

But it’s on the exact day/date that I began grad school, specifically, the master’s program in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh, 28 years ago. Although that day and that semester were great times for me, my professional lifecycle has been almost as full of failures and setbacks as it has been one of triumph and overcoming. Unfortunately, the microaggressions of racism, ageism (too young and too old), and elitism have all been a central part of my experiences in academia, in the nonprofit world, in writing books, in freelance writing, and in consulting in the nearly three decades since.

In contrast to 2019, that day in 1991 was the first of many in which I heard from professors and colleagues, “You’re too young to do…” and “What? You’re just 21? You know the average age of a history grad student’s 28, right?” Now, when I say to people that I’m a fledgling writer, they ignore me or say, “but you’re too old to be a writer.”

If it were just Millennials or Baby Boomers discounting me, my successes, and my outlook on the world because of my age, I might have been able to live that down. But throw in the occasional, “Wow! You’re a program officer? I thought you only played basketball!” (this happened to me in one of my nonprofit jobs back in 2003), and, “You know what we call a Black guy with a PhD…,” and the rage that reminds me of everyday racism rises up. James Baldwin said as much as part of a 1961 conversation Nat Hentoff between him, Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, and Alfred Kasin, on “The Negro in American Culture.”  “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time,” Baldwin famously quipped.

But mostly, it has been others’ attempts to demean me by offering ashes as opportunities, whether for publishing a book, finding an agent, getting a consulting gig, or teaching a course. Or, rather, to expect me to perform free labor for a so-called opportunity at some middling job. Only to realize later on that the job was a mirage. And they really expected me to drink sand and glass shards while they mocked me by pouring cold water down their throats!

I had a reminder of the layers of professional elitism and the cruelty that it engenders in April. For nearly two years, I had been in contact with a colleague of mine at Georgetown about the prospect of teaching undergraduate education courses there. Even with my two teaching gigs (which combined make me slightly more than full-time, contingent, but not nearly as tenuous as life had been back in 2010), I still wanted to teach education foundations/policy courses. Because, well, I’m still me, eclectic and still wanting courses that fit my experiences working in multiple worlds.

Out of the blue, Douglas Reed, a professor in a related department, contacted me about the possibility of teaching a summer course. “I now direct a graduate level program that just launched two years ago and have a possible last-minute opening to teach a summer course entitled ‘Social Justice in Education’ to our incoming cohort of MA level students in Educational Transformation. Would you have time to meet over the next week or two to talk about that possibility?,” he emailed.

Now, as someone who has done this with seven universities since 1997, of course I wanted to meet! It’s a grad-level course, combining social justice and education, something that I had taught before, I thought. I hadn’t taught grad students in more than a decade, but at least I already knew how to. I figured that this was a legitimate chance at a third part-time teaching gig.

I was wrong. Instead of the informal meeting/interview process, it seemed more like a one-on-one interrogation. Reed asked questions that would have been easily answered by my cv, by our mutual colleague, by literally anyone in my classrooms that semester. I brought samples from my relevant courses, while Reed never produced a copy of his Social Justice in Education syllabus. When I assumed that I was brought in to teach this course, he mused, “Maybe there might be others involved,” a wishy-washy answer at best.

Five weeks later, after I prompted Reed several times, I got this response:

Our situation has changed a bit since we last spoke. We have extended an offer for a three year position to a candidate and that candidate has accepted our offer and she will also be teaching the course we discussed. We will definitely keep our CV in our files and be sure to reach out if we have any new opportunities.

Un-effing-believable. Unless I consider the truth. I am a 49-year-old Black guy with a salt-and-pepper beard who has never held a tenure-stream position, and one who never attended or has formally taught at an Ivy League school (I did two summers at Princeton, working with high school students, but that doesn’t count in the eyes of the elite gatekeepers). I had the nerve to leave contingent academia behind for nearly a decade, working at nonprofit entities. I made the decision three years ago to no longer pursue publishing scholarly articles, because of, well, the elitism of such publications. And, I eat friend chicken with my bare hands to boot — I’m sure that’s been a dealbreaker some time in the past twenty-something years!

The following is part of what I wrote in response to Reed:

===================================================

Thanks for your email and for letting me know. I am miffed. Not because I was not ultimately offered a teaching opportunity. Rejection is a heavy part of being an adjunct, as one doesn’t have a true home. No, what has left distaste in my proverbial mouth is the reality that this was never an opportunity for a summer teaching position to begin with, and that you were not an honest broker in discussion this teaching opportunity with me.
Let me be more specific. There are several ways in which anyone with no opinion on the matter could see that this was not an honest opportunity.
1. You never sent me a copy of the Syllabus for the Social Justice in Education course, nor did you ever provide a copy, before, during, or after our meeting on Friday, April 5. When I inquired about it on April 5, you seemed hesitant about sharing it with me.
3. You never quite said it, but you sort of implied that there was someone else who was vying for teaching the Social Justice in Education course this summer. When I asked specifically if there was another person you were considering for teaching this course, you implied “maybe” at best. You left the context for our meeting and the purpose of our meeting murky.
7. Specifically, the fact that another person was offered a three-year teaching position (one that included this summer course) in the four weeks between our meeting and yesterday afternoon is proof of 5. Since positions generally do not develop spontaneously, I can only assume that you knew about this possibility at the time you met with me, and chose not to disclose it, either because you did not want me to apply for it or because you simply felt I wasn’t qualified for whatever reason.
All of these add up to a clear example of bad faith on your part. I had to clear my schedule to set up a meet with you on Friday, April 5, in the middle of a four-course semester. I came prepared to talk about a teaching opportunity, while you didn’t even provide a Syllabus for the course you purportedly wanted me to teach. You had me travel across DC to Georgetown for a meeting that was really an interview, and one that could have been conducted by phone or videoconferencing at that. While you may have been meeting with me out of courtesy to X, it was not a courtesy to me, at least not in the ways you handled it.
I learned something from this experience. As an adjunct with a non-linear academic, nonprofit, and writing background, I know full well the snarky elitism of many of my so-called colleagues already. Now I have confirmed that in times of hiring, I have nothing to offer as an itinerant minister of education in the eyes of faculty like you.

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I ended with, “You already hold all cards. There was never a need to hide half the deck.”

Most of the time, I am okay with the idea that I can make the combination of mainstream freelance writing and full-time equivalent teaching work, for me, my wife and son, and for our future. It’s been working for almost a decade, after all. But I know that as I approach the big 5-0, that combination better become semi-successful author and term faculty pretty soon. Because I’m too young and too broke to retire, and too old and too good at what I do to try much of anything else. I have considered janitorial work or the Steve Salaita route, though.

Leaving Mom and Dad Behind

13 Thursday Jun 2019

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Woodstock Leaving Home (cropped), June 13, 2019. (http://pinterest.com).

There are so many ways to write about the idea that if one is to be a grown-ass adult in this world, it requires, actually requires leaving your mother and/or father and/or any other parents and legal guardians behind. At least, dropping their worldview, their ideologies and disciplines, their ideas about life and relationships, their marital and parenting advice, the loads of abuse, baggage, and bullshit that one learned from spending so much time with them.

Yes, we should all be grateful about whatever good our parents did on our behalf to get us to adulthood and beyond. But that gratefulness should not mean a lifetime’s supply of unquestioning everything that any of us learned from those who raised us. Otherwise, any of us are but carbon copies of imperfect beings at best, total fuckups at world. Yet, somehow, so many of us present our parents to the world as if they are marble statues set on top of alabaster pedestals.

For me, it’s taken 30 years to unlearn much of the lessons and baggage I took on under my parents and legal guardian’s tutelage. My Mom “didn’t take no handouts from no one” and saw labor unions as “them bloodsuckers.” My father Jimme asked about “gettin’ [my] dict wet” from the time I was 14 until I turned 18, and called me a “faggat” everything I told him I didn’t. My idiot late ex-stepfather Maurice/Judah ben Israel talked about “making…men” out of me and Darren. He implored us to “honor thy father and thy mother, that ye may take possession of the land that the Lord thy God hath giveth thee.” Otherwise, he was “gonna whup” our “ass, jus’ like a car burn gas!” So many lessons about manliness, Black hyper-masculinity, heterosexism, homophobia, misogyny and misogynoir, about religion and child abuse, about working and self-reliance. But so many more lessons around willful ignorance as well.

By the time I went off to the University of Pittsburgh in 1987, I figured the simplest thing I could do to break free from the thinking of Mary, Maurice, and Jimme was to “just do the opposite of whatever they would do.” That’s what I would say to myself or think about whenever I had a tough-ish decision to make.

But life was never that simple. Those five days of homelessness I had at the beginning of my second year at Pitt in 1988 proved that I needed to scramble and act, and not just think differently from my parents. The most immediate lesson I learned was about needing help and learning how to ask for it. The bigger and most important lesson that took decades for me to learn was how to embrace asking for help, to not be begrudging about the process, and to be gracious when folks who could and should be helpful are not. I am still learning how to be better at embracing help and being graciousness, because, well, people are involved.

Not so with begrudging, though. We are not all on our own deserted island, each expecting to have to do everything on our own. That’s what capitalists steeped in Western individualism and my Mom would expect me to believe. We all need help, for nearly everything we want to do in life. There’s no shame in it, and there’s nothing but success, humility, being grateful and feeling recognized and loved as a result of this help.

This week is underrated in its significance to my past three decades of living this truth. This is the week my Mom and Maurice broke up for good back in 1989. The date of this year’s Father’s Day (it was a Friday in 1989) will be 30 years since the idiot feverishly packed his bags, stole some towels and frozen meats, and moved out of 616. I saw him as he packed up the last of his gear in a suitcase and an army bag. He looked scared, and looked at me with fear and shame. It was probably the only time in the nearly eleven years we lived in the same space (not counting my two years at Pitt and his separations from my Mom) where he showed how lost a person he was. Between that, and my Mom’s post-marriage spin a few months later about how Maurice had “fooled us all,” and I knew. I absolutely knew, spirit, mind, and body, that I needed to craft my own worldview, my own ideas, my own way to deal with ideology, discipline, parenting, marriage, and so many things much more complicated than putting the right amount of seasoning on my fried chicken.

Over the years, this ultimate lesson of leaving behind most of my Mom’s, Jimme’s, and Maurice ways of thinking, doing, and being in the world has made its way into my teaching and writing. It’s why I uphold no sacred cows, and can literally interrogate and question even the most cherished ideas and people in my classrooms and in my pieces. (And yes, in prayer, in between my hallelujahs and my amens, I even question God.) Which may be also why more than a few of my students might cling harder to the lessons of their parents.

A few years ago, I had a young student in one of my UMUC classes who pushed back on a lecture I gave on de-centering Western Europe from the early modern period in world history while taking a closer look at India, China, and the Ottoman Empire.

“That’s not what my parents taught me,” she said.

“Well, maybe it’s time to realize that not everything your parents taught you is true. It’s been three decades, and I’m still learning to unlearn all the things my parents taught me,” I retorted. Most of my over-24-year-old students nodded in agreement, but the not-quite 20-year-old wasn’t receptive. It showed in her evaluation of me at the end of the course.

My soon-to-be 16-year-old son, thankfully, is learning this lesson now. Although that means he will make tons of mistakes and constantly frustrates my efforts at helping him, it also means he can reach out to me and my spouse when he needs help. Being independent requires acknowledging one’s limits and one’s need for help, community, and interdependence. Learning from whom, at what time, for how much, and how deep one can go in all this is a lifelong journey. But none of it can begin without questioning one’s parent or parents, without cutting bait from their baggage and bullshit. Even if it means that we sometimes screw up in the process.

Toronto and Miscellaneous Items

26 Sunday May 2019

Posted by in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Patriotism, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Sports, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Yonge Street in downtown Toronto, ON, Canada, March 20, 2017. (https://torontostoreys.com).

I meant to write about this a month ago, but after the Toronto Raptors’ not-so-surprising Game 6 win against the Milwaukee Bucks to make it to the NBA Finals for the first time, it’s still relevant. Last month made 20 years since the last time I’ve been north of the border (but not in Alaska, as I was in 2001). Last month was also the 28th anniversary of me finishing my bachelor’s degree at the University of Pittsburgh, and the subsequent decision to spend my first post-baccalaureate summer in Pittsburgh working and securing funding for my first year of graduate school. April 20 also marked two decades since Columbine, something that was very much on my mind during that Toronto trip and presentation at OAH there in 1999.

I can say that there are only a handful of times in my life since the end of first grade and being sexually assaulted in the summer of ’76 that I have felt “free.” By that, I mean free from the toxicity that is the US, on race, on gender, on class, on religion, on family, on friendships, on breathing, on eating, on walking, on daydreaming, on talking, on being contemplative, on laughing, on merely being myself. Those five days in Toronto to present my research on multiculturalism, to meet up with a couple of friends, to hang out in different neighborhoods and catch their subway. That was one of those times. Maybe the six months my Mom and my deceased idiot ex-stepfather Maurice spent separated between October 2, 1980 and April 13, 1981 was one of those times. Certainly when I proposed to my wife and then moved to DC and Silver Spring later on in 1999 was another. And, how can I forget the sheer ecstasy of watching my son emerge from my wife’s womb in 2003 at Sibley Hospital?

But while all of those and more experiences brought happiness, even orgasmic joy, I’ve spent more than 40 years of nearly 50 looking over my shoulder. In the back of my mind, the idea that the other shoe’s going to drop is never that far away. Even with the lack of American toxicity during my times in Toronto, I knew that this cosmopolitan city had its own unique edge. This despite the poutine, maple syrup, and Molson’s.

Plus, even with going to vegan restaurants, confirming my 1994 research on public housing policies in Toronto, seeing the diversity and freedom of movement sans the gaze of American Whites, it was still a very White city. And that Canadian Whiteness left room for a different (or really, indifferent) kind of gaze. It meant dealing with questions about Columbine and gun violence as if I could explain the actions of narcissistic White males steeped in patriarchy and entitlement. It meant remembering in subtle ways that while Canadians I met were both far nicer and kinder than most Whites in the US, they were still White. And Whiteness, like Arya Stark’s many-faced god, takes numerous forms.

I was free in ways that I couldn’t have been in the States. I walked in White neighborhoods without police following me around. I noticed how most folks didn’t lock their doors at night. I sensed that no one looked over their shoulders for a mugger. Everything was written in metric-system English, which I was happy to use in real life for the first time. It was just different, as if White Canadians hadn’t spent four centuries sitting around and figuring out even more ways to grind down Black people. I sensed that this wasn’t the case with White Canadians and First Nation tribes, though.

I didn’t feel anywhere near this free when I graduated with Degree #1 in April 1991. The immediate need of reporting to my $5.20 per hour job at Western Psych, three weeks of starvation, and the miracle that Dr. Jack Daniel performed meant that I was pensive and then relieved by May 26. I knew more twists and turns awaited me.

I want to visit again, this time with my son, and hopefully before the Fall Semester begins. I want him to see Caribana there, to breathe freer air, and to get away from the Lower 48, if only for a few days. But that’s not all. I want him to go overseas, to visit South Africa, and Nigeria, and Tanzania, and Ghana, and Mali, to see himself in everyone around him.

As for the Raptors, congrats on drudging your way to the Finals! Your organization is finally free to play for an NBA title. With Kawhi Leonard, I wouldn’t bet against you. But I’m not exactly rooting for you, either. Know that win or lose, I love your city, and the questions about freedom that it generates for me.