Tag Archives: Racism

What Remains in the Ashes…

05 Saturday Mar 2022

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

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Jacobi playing dead on dining room carpet, Silver Spring, MD, February 13, 2022. (Donald Earl Collins).

There are so many anniversaries I haven’t discussed over the past month. Just trying to make it week-by-week through being back in a classroom in-person, trying to teach groups of bratty, disengaged students while also wearing an N95 mask over a medical mask. It is torture, an emotional labor I wouldn’t wish on any of my nemeses. My students do not (and really, refuse to) understand the toll of having to teach in front of a group who complains about not going on field trips or couldn’t care less about oppression. All with their arms folded for two and a half hours at a time. If these were my first two courses as a professor, they would definitely be my last two courses as a professor.

That and our weak ass union at American has taken up a good deal of my February. To think the previous negotiators had only gotten our “liberal” employer to pony up a $25-per-course increase per year over three years. To know the whitemansplainers on American’s side of the table thought this was asking too much. To see how shocked my white colleagues were when they realized their well-reasoned arguments, their math, their impassioned pleas, their heartfelt stories didn’t matter. 

It all merely confirmed what I have known for years. Whites unaware of their white privilege will think themselves able to negotiate their way out of all jams and all forms of oppression. Except that white privilege does not mean socioeconomic privilege. And racial capitalism is a Ponzi scheme, a form of the Matrix too many white Americans have hooked themselves into. I had to allow myself the right of righteous anger, and the ability to call out these win-at-all-costs lawyers and shills for what they are, before any of my colleagues would say anything with a sense of anger themselves. Whiteness is a Matrix-level drug, and so is the narcissism that comes with it.

Several dates have come and gone since my last post. My significant other celebrated her 55th. My sister Sarai would have been 39 years old on February 9th, that is if the scourge of sickle cell anemia didn’t exist. Toto’s “Africa” peaked at #2 on the Billboard Pop chart in February 1983 also. (I was in eighth grade, reading Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle at the time.)

Yesterday marked two milestones. One was the 40th anniversary of a crush-turned-love for me, on the wings of Ballerina Wendy (I am truly a goofy romantic). Two, it’s been two years since I taught a course in-person and maskless, the last time I felt mostly “safe” in public (truth is, with everyday racism, I have never felt truly safe). I am not sure I will ever feel either of those ways again — March 1982 and March 2020 seem like different timelines that someone who was sorta me walked once in my dreams.

What feels painfully real about the pandemic is the distrust I feel toward humanity these days, not counting my partner, my son, and my dog (and in his case, he sniffs too many disease-carrying turds for me to trust his in-stink-ts). It’s been more than 20 years (February 2002) since I did a family intervention to reach out to my mother and my siblings about being honest about where we were as a family and how we ended up with the poverty and abuse we all experienced growing up. 

I have given up on having the kind of adult relationship a 50-something Black man should be able to have with his 70-something mother. Maybe being only 22 years apart in age, and witnessing so many of her failures and her small triumphs has been too much. Then again, refusing to admit she caught COVID, and that her church friends died from COVID, and refusing to get jabbed with a COVID vaccine, all based on vanity and willful ignorance, has completely worn me out.

I have mostly given up on having the kind of adult relationship a 50-something Black man should be able to have with his four brothers ages 54, 42, 40, and 37 (my door remains open for them, but just). The longest conversation I have had with Darren since 2002 was maybe ten minutes total. My younger brothers admitted during the intervention in 2002 they were jealous of me. That, unfortunately, has not changed over the past two decades. They don’t return my phone calls or my texts. They don’t respond to my Facebook posts on their timelines, or my LinkedIn messages. Of course, at least one of them refuses to vaccinate, and would prefer unemployment instead. Their job prospects in recent years have made them bitter, especially toward me. If they only knew the extent of labor exploitation in higher education and in the writing world. But they would still be jealous anyway, I suppose.

I need no one to tell me how blessed I am overall. I have reinvented myself into the person I always was.  I still make good trouble for my benefit and (hopefully) the benefit of others. My own family life remains good. I can only hope what remains in the ashes will rise again, for me and my own family, even for the flea-bitten dog.

The Elite Jerkiness of Journalistic “Genius,” aka, Advanced White-Mansplaining

29 Saturday Jan 2022

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Politics, race, Work

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John Hodgman quote via QuoteFancy, January 29, 2022. (https://quotefancy.com/quote/2072271/John-Hodgman-After-all-there-s-no-mansplaining-like-white-mansplaining-cause-white)

I am most definitely not a journalist. At least not in any professionally trained sense. I majored in computer science, then in history, all while picking up minors in mathematics and in Black studies. Going further back in time, I refused to be part of the high school yearbook committee, even though my classmates asked me to be on it at least four times. I was always a writer, even when I was only in observation mode, even though I didn’t see myself as one until I was well into my 30s. I just didn’t want to work with a group of people who were caught up in their own middle class dramas, the petty jealousies, and the even pettier emotions over pop cultural icons and incidents. 

By the time I thought about J school, I already had my doctorate. I’d already learned from one of my former professors and several senior colleagues my academic writing was “too journalistic.” That’s what they thought, anyway. I knew my writer was stuck between the way I wrote before my PhD work at Carnegie Mellon and the four years of academic abuse I endured to make my writing colder and more “scholarly.” 

I did find my way back to writing without all the high-falutin’ bells and whistles. The words fait accompli and raison d’etre and “promulgated” and “posited,” and (especially for me) “indeed” all had to die in a supernova. Less is more, clarity and conciseness are more important than showing off my super-dense writing skills, at least that’s what the proverbial they say. And “they” are mostly correct.

But in my twenty-plus years of venturing into the world of journalism and writing, it is so clear to me the rules of academia operate in this white-male dominated world, too. Especially when discussing big ideas, like the West’s past, the US’ present, our collective futures. No, that domain is a “white man’s country.” Thomas Friedman, Ezra Klein, David Brooks, Nate Silver, Matt Yglesias, Matt Taibbi, Chris Hayes, Ross Douthat, Tucker Carlson, and an army of others. While there are Black and Brown men and some white women (and nary any Black women and women of color) working as big-idea columnists, I could lock them in a medium-sized conference room and light a match. And many in this group have spent more time discouraging me as a writer than doing anything else, from Pittsburgh to DC and back.

If you are like me and have decided to convert your research and your lifetime of expertise and experience to write about big ideas, then you know the marketplace for our ideas is small. Add to this my penchant for writing pieces on American racism and American identity, about racism’s impact on Black folx and people of color, and the window for publishing my work is a few micrometers in width. 

Rarely do I hear from folks in my circles about what they think of my writing or my ideas. Not even disagreement or open disparagement — even that would be something to work with. But it’s mostly deafening silence out there among the literati set whenever a piece of mine is out there to read. 

If it were just the geniuses group, I wouldn’t really care. (I mean, if Ross Doofus is a genius because he among the white male set was honest about the mythology of Harvard, then everyone’s a genius. Many of us knew this without spending $200,000 to go to Harvard or before even attending college at all. Elite white folk and their narcissism start off in K-12, after all. Woe to us who school with them!) 

Academicians and their silence, their “meh” responses to anything not published in a “peer-reviewed journal” with 300 footnotes and a few pages on multivariate chi-squared bullshit analysis (this includes Black academia). Journalists and their silence, their sort-of, “you write about race and racism well, but you don’t really know anything” when I do hear the occasional burp. The result is me feeling like Sisyphus, constantly reinventing the wheel to publish, well, anything, even though I have enough bylines to my credit to be part of a meaningful conversation about virtually any topic related to the US and the West.

None of this, though, is anything compared to the granting of “genius” status to the white-male set in journalism. To me, they are journalists. Period. Even the ones who have to edit and interpret the bigger picture think in newsworthy hooks, news cycles, and the relative immediate response of a reading or watching or listening audience. They do not care that their response to the January 6th insurrection might well lead to obvious fascism in the US by the 2030s. Nor do they care that their coverage and their analysis often ignores the anecdotal, emotional, and statistical regarding racist oppression in the US and its implications for the future. 

Friedman’s “flat-earth” ideas are mind-numbing. David Brooks’ conservatism is really fairly well-written middle-class white teenager angst and contrarianism. Chris Hayes’ neoliberalism assumes total insulation from the deep cracks in America’s facade of freedom and ignores the falsehoods of ever-increasing progress toward equality. Their whitemansplaing allows them to ignore the past and the future, to focus in blindly ignorant ways on the present. They are only “geniuses” because there is an army of other white men who like what they are saying.

As I have said many times, I am not going to win any popularity contests. Nor do I seek to win them either. I don’t need praise to keep writing. It would be nice, though, if maybe once every couple of months, someone I know or sorta know would go, “hey, this is really good. It’s given me lots of things to rethink about x, y, or z.” It would be better still to get paid for my think pieces, at least more than $150 here, $300 or $400 there. It’s not much comfort that the powers that remain did this to W. E. B. Du Bois, too, and often denigrated Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin as much as they praised them. 

All I know is, “genius” without challenging yourself, your supporters, or the status quo isn’t genius at all. It’s a bunch of grinning dumbasses slapping each other on the back for stating the obvious in their white-bred world.

Signs of Elitism

17 Monday Jan 2022

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Upper East Side, Upper West Side, Work, Youth

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Front cover, Joel Stein’s In Defense of Elitism (2019, cropped), January 16, 2022. (https://amazon.com).

I have spent four-fifths of my life in elite spaces among affluent whites, middle class Blacks, and Americans elites in general. I have so little in common with them aside from eating, drinking, breathing, and having a sex drive. So little that I sometimes think that God made a mistake and missed my exact time and place for my existence by 20 or 30 years, meaning 1949 or 1994 would have been better years for my birth. 

But it’s not when I was born so much as the lack of material resources with which I lived growing up in the most resourced area in the US. And that has brought consequences for me since the year I began puberty. The years in Humanities in middle school and in high school in Mount Vernon, New York. Hearing about everyone’s summers those first days of school between seventh and 12th grade, for example. Black and Black Caribbean classmates regaling us with their summers spent down South, in Jamaica or Barbados or  Trinidad and Tobago visiting close relatives. Or, their trips around the US, from the Grand Canyon to cities I wouldn’t travel to until I was 24 or 35. Or my white peers spending their Junes, Julys, and Augusts in France, the UK, Japan, Germany, Italy, Greece, Egypt, or Israel. I lied about going to Tel Aviv my first year.

I rarely left Mount Vernon and New York City those years. Albany was the furthest I’d been away from home, on a school trip in October 1985. My walks occasionally took me across the New York-Connecticut border (in 1986 and in 1987), but that was somewhat accidental.

In grad school, especially once I transferred to Carnegie Mellon to complete my PhD, these awkward communications involving my lack of socioeconomic privilege and my white classmates’ rose-colored worldviews continued. In my final semester of grad courses in Spring 1994, I took Comparative Urban History with Katherine Lynch. One week, we were in a discussion of Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, about the correlation between suburbanization and the expansion of the white middle class. Jennifer, one of my classmates, contributed her not-so-insightful analysis of what this correlation meant, about how “most Americans benefited” from the growth of suburbs between 1945 and 1980. 

I was not happy with her elitist worldview. I already knew that she was 23 or 24, married, and from suburban Philly (think a place like Cherry Hill, New Jersey). I also knew that Jackson’s point correlated well with White Flight from increasingly Black and Brown cities like Philly, New York, Boston, DC, Detroit, and Chicago. Being in my third year of grad school overall and surrounded in this course by first-years, I had one advantage. I was almost as well read on topics of inequality as most of my professors. 

So I said to Jennifer and the rest of the class, “Well, if by ‘most Americans benefited,’ you mean white Americans, then yes, suburbanization was a good thing. But cities’ tax bases didn’t benefit, and neither did the African Americans who moved into cities that whites flew out of. Redlining and restrictive covenants made it harder for middle-class Blacks to ‘benefit’ from suburbanization. And last I checked, poor people live in suburbs, too.” That last past was a direct reference to my growing up with poverty in Mount Vernon, and the scores of poor Black and Latinx and Black Caribbean folk I knew in Mount Vernon and throughout the New York area, suburban and urban. 

During the class break, Jennifer came up to me as I was standing outside the seminar talking with my other white classmates congratulating me for my eye-opening perspective on how to break down Jackson’s book. She brought all five-foot-three of her frame to bear, almost as if she had attempted to stand on a soap box (even with one, at six-three, I would’ve had to bend down to see her ire). She had tears in her eyes and one running down each cheek. “I can’t help how I grew up. I am not a racist,” she said, and then walked away in a huff. “I guess I struck a nerve,” I said in response to one of my other peers.

I really didn’t give a rat’s ass about her crying. None of it was going to make the lives of Blacks and Latinx people with poverty in Camden or Philly or even Cherry Hill any better. White women’s tears and crying foul when challenged for their elitism had already hardened me against placating them. My experiences matter, damn it!, was what I thought after that exchange.

Even outside academia, the elitism wafted like millions of gallons of human shit at a sewage treatment plant. Between Presidential Classroom and AED, I spent much of my nonprofit years (meaning, a good portion of my thirties) proving to others that despite my background, I could do work on behalf of others. My bosses held it against me that my parents weren’t GS-12 or higher federal employees, or diplomats, or advisors, or members of country clubs. Or, especially in AED’s case, that neither I nor my parents ever served in the Peace Corps or traveled overseas. I practically had to do somersaults and cartwheels to do my work between 1999 and 2008, but could not maintain social connections, because my doctorate from Carnegie Mellon would never be good enough.

Maybe I’ll discuss Black middle class folk and their rites of privilege and passage, especially fraternities and other organizations. But I’ve already written quite extensively about why I’ll never fit it with such groups. And at 52, I’m not entirely sure I want to. I guess after a lifetime of my peers ignoring me or erasing me or acting as if only their socioeconomic and racial privileges matter in explaining how the world works, I simply don’t care anymore.

My mom grew up as part of a sharecropping family in southwestern, Red River Arkansas. She’s the oldest of 12 children. She worked mostly in the kitchen of Mount Vernon Hospital or in the billing department of Westchester County Medical Center in Valhalla as a paraprofessional for 34 years, with a 16-year period on welfare in between. My dad worked as a janitor or a supervisor of janitors and building cleaners all his time in New York and in Jacksonville. He grew up as a tenant farmer (before his family bought out their land) in rural south-central Georgia. He barely finished seventh grade. His two sisters were the first in the family to go to college, and both spent years teaching during segregated times. Despite it all, I am proud of their work. No pedigree is fine with me.

The Scourge of Scholarship & Scallops

01 Saturday Jan 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Assassin’s Creed is the Story of Modern Racism

18 Monday Oct 2021

Posted by in 1, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

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Assassin’s Creed movie poster (cropped with lower resolution, per fair use laws), October 18, 2021. (https://www.deviantart.com/harzi17/art/Assassin-s-Creed-Movie-Poster-625133669)

Where does modern-day racism come from? There’s a recent movie that inadvertently attempts to answer this question, Assassin’s Creed (2016). The film did not do particularly well in theaters, making only $54.6 million in the US, and just under $241 million worldwide. Perhaps the rise of Donald Trump as president made its themes hit too close to home for too many moviegoers. But somehow, the movie’s director Justin Kurzel and its writers unknowingly shot a one-hour-and-fifty-minute crash-course in racism since 1492.

The Knights Templar versus the Assassin’s Brotherhood, a fight between shared bloodlines, Roman Catholicism, and Islam, that is what the game Assassin’s Creed is about. The movie, though, is about much more. It centers the technological science-fiction wonder known as the Animus, a machine that can tap into one’s DNA and find memories passed down generations ago. The Templars use the Animus to find the Apple, the mythical codex that would theoretically allow them to eliminate free will and the ability of people like the members of The Brotherhood to resist their reign. Except that real life has already surpassed art. In 2013, scientists had already discovered that mice and humans can both store memories in a few lines of code within DNA strands across generations. The scientific term for this is transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. 

There is no real-life version of the Animus yet. But it would figure that the Templars would use such a thing for their dystopian ends. The work of the Abstergo Foundation Rehabilitation Center, a subsidiary of The Templars’ corporation Abstergo Industries, fakes lead character Callum Lynch’s (Michael Fassbender) death and kidnaps him, then uses him to go back to 1492 Andalucia to find the Apple. Once Callum goes through this neurological and psychological “regression” to 1492, he embodies his assassin ancestor Aguilar de Nerha. Aguilar was the last ancient known to have possessed the Apple. 

The year 1492 is important, and not just because of Christopher Columbus. It’s the year Spain unified under the joint rule of Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Castile, as their forces drove the last Moor ruler out of Granada. That victory ended more than 750 years of Arab Muslim and Moorish rule on the Iberian Peninsula, the Reconquista, as Spanish historians have called it. Later that year, Isabella and Ferdinand expelled all remaining Jews who refused to convert to Catholicism. Spanish Muslims faced persecution from 1492 on, and eventually faced Inquisición and expulsion, too. Between 1609 and 1614, Spain forced as many as 300,000 Muslims of Arab, Moorish, and Spanish descent out of the country.

There are at least three sources from which modern-day racism springs. All are in the mix in Assassin’s Creed. The Arab world and the Trans-Saharan Trade, which included enslaved Africans in exchange for goods and knowledge, some of whom ended up in Arabesque Spain. The Iberian world of what would become Spain and Portugal, with a combination of anti-Arab and anti-Moor nationalism, racism, and Islamophobia on regular display. And, the English, the founders of Jamestown, British plantation slavery in North America and the Caribbean, and heavy contributors to the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The Templars’ headquarters, by the way, are in London. 

Alan Rikkin (Jeremy Irons), the CEO of Abstergo and the embodiment of modern racism, not-so-secretly plans to use the Apple to end free will. In a conversation with Ellen Kaye (Charlotte Rampling) the chairwomen of Abstergo’s board of directors, Alan Rikkin discusses the final demise of human freedom. “The threat remains while free will exists. For centuries we’ve tried, with religion, with politics, and now consumerism, to eliminate dissent. Isn’t it time we gave science a try?” 

Notice how father Rikkin does not mention “systemic racism” or “capitalism,” both central in The Templars’ quest to control people over the past 500 years. This oppression disproportionately impacts the Global South, the Black, the Brown, the Indigenous, and non-Christian Europeans. It is reasonable to conclude that these religious beliefs and their thinly veiled racist beliefs are essentially the same.

One cannot help but notice these racism-based intersections. Especially when nearly every character of color in the film is part of The Brotherhood, and nearly every white character part of The Templars. The late Michael K. Williams plays the only African character in Assassin’s Creed, and he immediately brings to light the oppressive mix of religious bigotry and racism. “They call me Moussa. But my name is Baptiste. I’m dead 200 years now. Voodoo poisoner. I’m harmless,” Moussa says while stretching out his words with hand gestures, in introducing himself to Cal. Moussa confirms he and Cal and the other Assassins are prisoners, that the Templars stripped him of his past even as he reclaimed his ancestor’s name, and signaled that they will need to fight their oppressors (any of this sound familiar historically)? 

Another example comes from Dr. Sofia Rikkin (Marion Cotillard), Alan Rikkin’s daughter and the head of the Animus project. “You are living proof of the connection between violence and genetics,” Sofia says to Cal when discussing the murder that led to his faked death and capture. That’s as eugenics as eugenics can get, the story of modern racism, slavery, colonization, and exploitation of people in a nutshell. This is how the social construct of racism becomes biological determinism, somehow superseding the truth that we are all related genetically.

There are people who would rather drink ground glass than admit how the US has its own special blend of white supremacist racism, one it has exported to the rest of the world. The whataboutisms set has zero interest in an actual answer to the question of racism’s origins. They are only interested in deflecting from their own complicity in white supremacist racism. Assassin’s Creed reveals as much as it deflects on how systemic racism has managed to thrive, through religion, capitalism, imperialism, and the elitist narcissism all of these -isms engender. Every American teacher of world history or European history should use Assassin’s Creed in this manner, providing entertainment with subliminal critical race theory hidden well enough for most white supremacists to not notice. I think.

Eric The Red

27 Monday Sep 2021

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Bryan Cranston as Walter White (“bald” edition) in AMC’s Breaking Bad (screen shot, cropped), August 2011.

All these years with this blog and I’ve never written about the first of the people who came into my life and decided that I needed their tutelage about grad school and life in general. Because of people like him, despite their helpfulness, I always have found myself leery about people telling me that they will “mentor me” or about calling myself a mentor of any kind. It should be the type of process that happens organically, based on mutual respect and trust, and not just because one person is a generation or more older than the other person.

The first person to volunteer themselves as a mentor during my first year as a graduate school in the University of Pittsburgh’s History department was Eric, who was 42 or 43 to my 21 year-old self in September 1991. A year and a half earlier, Eric was the teaching assistant for my upper-level American Working-Class History course with Dick Oestreicher. We had exactly two interactions that semester. One was when Eric had scored my midterm exam short essays an 89. I asked him, “So, what’s the difference between an 89 and a 90 on this exam, anyway?” His mouth fell open, because he didn’t have an answer. He changed my grade to a 90 on the spot. Two was at a going-away party for my TA from my Western Civ II course my first year at Pitt, Paul Riggs. Paul was headed to Edinburgh, Scotland on fellowship to explore the height, weight, and diet differences among 18th and early 19th century European men in connection to a larger econometrics dissertation. (I still don’t quite know what Paul’s dissertation was about, beyond half-starve British and French soldiers hoping to grow to five-three before dying from bayonets or typhoid during the Napoleonic Wars.)

It just happened that when administrators assigned me a cubby hole for a desk my first year in grad-school-land, that it was in the same part of the department as Eric’s cubicle. His spot included a window that looked out from the third floor of Forbes Quadrangle (now Wesley Posvar Hall) to the open space below, as well as to Hillman Library, David Lawrence Hall, and if you tilted your head to the right, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and the lower floor of the Cathedral of Learning. It was a prime spot, and Eric never hesitated to let me or anyone else know that he had earned it.

Eric had, in fact, earned it. He became a grad student in the department at the same time Pitt had awarded me an academic scholarship to attend as an undergrad, in 1987. He bragged about the fact that he had gone from having “only an Associate’s Degree to ABD in just three years.” Pitt had also rewarded Eric an Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Fellowship in 1990, making it seem he was on “cruise control” for finishing his doctorate in a couple of years.

What I’d learn about Eric over the next two years was that he was also a very active Marxist, a card-carrying member of the Community Party USA (or, maybe, if I’m remembering it wrong, the Socialist Party USA), and a trained actor who had made documentaries and written for news rags about union-busting, union-organizing, and class struggle since the mid-1970s. This would appeal to the powers that were in the department (including Oestreicher, his dissertation advisor), a place that privileged Marxist and neo-Marxist thought above all else. 

The acting and other public-facing work made Eric a stand-out pontificator, but was also where his open declaration of his “mentoring” of me irritated me a helluva lot. Many times during our two years together in the same department, Eric would interrupt me in the middle of a conversation with a peer, or when reading a book before class, or when I was prepping to TA, or otherwise just working away on a research project. It was usually with articles on a topic different from my research on multiculturalism or with an issue he wanted to debate me on. Sometimes, these interruptions and distractions I welcomed, maybe even, needed. But so many times, not so much.

Eric accused me on several occasions of having “a chip on [my] shoulder.” Maybe I did have one, mostly about the erasure of anything on American race and racism by the Marxist set in the department. Eric, though, was the proverbial pot-meet-kettle type. His chip made mine look like a speck. Looking back, Eric reminds me a bit of Bryan Cranston’s Walter White from Breaking Bad. Both he and the fictionalized White could not see how their sense of white male privilege shaped their worldview and their interactions with people. In my case, Eric assumed that I sometimes asked him a question or sought his advice as a sign that I needed mentoring, when in my mind, I was just asking a question or seeking an opinion from whomever was around at 9 pm on a Thursday night. 

But nothing piqued Eric’s interest in me more than his attempts to make me into a Marxist. “Racism is a byproduct of dialectic materialism” or “capitalism,” Eric would sometimes say (or at least, as much as I can remember him saying). This line of whitemansplaining I had heard in less sophisticated circles years ago. I never told Eric about all my arguments over the years with my Humanities classmate JD, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered if I had. Eric was deep into his cups of Marxist wisdom, deep enough to ignore my counterarguments. “You cannot understand inequality in America without also accounting for racism,” I often said. I did enjoy these debates, at least at first. By my second semester, and especially by my second year, I was weary. 

I didn’t see Eric much the second half of the 1992-93 school year (this as I prepared to transfer from Pitt to Carnegie Mellon to battle with privileged-white-privileged, ass-kissing center-right fake Marxists). I guess that was when he finally sat down to write his dissertation, though it would be a number of years before Eric would complete it to his doctoral thesis committee’s satisfaction. 

I wouldn’t have learned about the good qualities of Rolling Rock or explored hard apple cider without his encouragement. But, as intriguing as these arguments with Eric could sometimes be, I longed for being understood, for people who took the centrality of racism to everything that is the US and the West seriously. It would be a long time before I’d find people like me in this life.

The Three Stooges of My Paths

03 Friday Sep 2021

Posted by in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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This is the fourth post in my series arc of More Confessions From an Educated Fool. This one deals with the “cares of this world,” and how I got caught in a web of them, over and over again, like I was prey for a spider to bite and suck the life out of me.

So, a university president, a corporate senior vice president, and nonprofit senior program officer are all sitting at a bar off East 59th Street, after a long decision-day Thursday. Gus, their bartender, asks in his Hollywood-exaggerated New Yorker accent, “Hey jerks, what is it that youse do for a living, anyway?

Damon, the university president says, “I kneel and grovel for money.”

Steve, the senior program officer says, “I do cartwheels, somersaults, and floor exercises for money.”

After a brief pause, Alan, the senior VP says, “I use ads spots to hold up people for money,” while gesturing with his right hand in his blazer pocket. “Now give me your wallets!,” he says. The other two stooges laugh without restraint.

Gus pulls out his Saturday night special, and points it at the senior VP. “You mean like this?”

The senior VP says, without batting an eyelash or turning away, “I work for a trillion-dollar company. We get a billion people to sign their lives away every day. Hell yeah, it’s like this!”

The other stooges and Gus laugh. Damon pounds the table with his fist so hard he knocks over his drink.

After putting away his gun, Gus says, “What’ll it be? This one’s on me!”

Without taking a beat, all three gents say, “A vodka tonic.”

I have walked three paths in my career. Academia, the nonprofit world, and writing and publishing (and self-publishing) articles and books. Academia will claim that it isn’t a capitalist endeavor. The nonprofit world will say it claims 501(c)(3) tax status because they are changing the world by doing good works. The corporate world deflects while fully engaged in public displays of affection with capitalism, lips and tongues and spit included. “That’s just the way it is,” they sigh before another round of groping.

All of them are liars, I have found with 30 years (mostly) in and (sometimes) out of academia, 11 years working and consulting with nonprofits, and 20 years of off-and-on work in publishing articles and beating my brains into mush in book publishing. But if they are all liars, the lies are for people who are looking to do good in the world, for disdainful people, but people not so cynical that they have given up their core principles and universal moral values. They are for people like me.

That’s what capitalists do. They take advantage of people and rob them of their wealth, of their minds and bodies and souls. They like to do this at gunpoint, but they love to do it with slogans and pitches. “Connecting People, Creating Change” was the mantra of one Academy for Educational Development (AED), a nonprofit I worked with for nearly eight years. I used to joke that their real slogan was “Corrupting People, Creating Chaos.” The sad part was how correct I was in my assessment. This was even before I took on budgetary duties for a multimillion-dollar grant on a K-16 education project, where I learned AED had us mid- and senior-level program officer types to keep three separate budgets: one for the government, one for funders and potential funders (to hide our overhead), and the real one for AED’s nabobs. That last one included a one-percent vig on all grants that any of us brought in, a “rainy day fund” meant only for AED’s most senior staff.

It turned AED into a $600-million-a-year Ponzi scheme, and included millions in bribes to corrupt Afghans as part of the cost of “Connecting People, Creating Change” in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The truth was, the 501(c)(3) status was only to get away with making a profit off government and private foundation funding without having to pay a cent in corporate income taxes. I knew this was the reality of this world in 1999, when I made the switch to full-time nonprofit work with Presidential Classroom, when my former APUSH teacher Harold Meltzer laughed at the idea of nonprofits in the US’ capitalist regime. I had ideals about doing good outside of higher education, but I was never naive about their larger money-making agenda.

Publishers, agents, and editors would have me believe that the only criteria for publishing my stuff is if my fastball, curveball, and slider/sinker combination is good enough for dissemination. But first always comes the disclaimer: “if you have a work that doesn’t easily fit into a formulaic category, or if you are Black and over 40, or if you don’t account for the feelings of fragile white readers, we can’t make money, so we can’t publish you.” However, “we will publish schlock, how-to guides, and very famous people with ghostwriters, because that’s easy work for quick bucks.” They are the most honest liars, mostly because they don’t give a shit about the greater good. I can work with this.

But what I can no longer stomach is academia’s hypocrisy. This time 30 years ago was my first week as an MA student in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. Eric, a fourth-year grad student and PhD candidate in the program, a man who once saw himself as my mentor (I never saw him that way), explained the nature of academia this way. “The academy is a medieval institution, whose ways are founded on the idea of the guild.” In my head, I’m thinking, This is utter bullshit. The European university began its missions during the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries to be sure. But they needed funds to run then, and they damn sure do now. This analysis from an avowed 40-something Marxist let me know just how much he didn’t get about the academic world.

The only thing medieval about academia in my three decades of learning, teaching, and experiencing it is its ideals. In reality, academia is a money-making machine for its boards, for its athletics programs, and for the “hot stuff,” scientific and technological research. It serves at the will of deep pocketed robber barons, professional athletic corporations, and at the behest of corrupt governments and the military-industrial complex. That anyone comes out of a college or graduate or professional school with their sense of morality and social justice intact is no small miracle. That anyone these days earns their degrees with low debt or no debt at all is either part of the super-rich class or has performed a feat John the Baptist would be proud of. And in that latter-day case, they probably are completely fine with the system the way it is, supporting the bloated salaries of upper university managers everywhere.

The story about the three stooges of my career should end with them all stumbling drunk out of the bar, only to be robbed by some random guy wearing a ski mask. After all, that is what they deserve. What I deserve, well, that’s a bit more complicated. Loving money has a way of making the mediocre hireable, popular, and powerful, while marginalizing everything and everyone else. I spent so many years chasing promotions for funds to help pay down student loan debt and to provide for our son the life I never had growing up with poverty (and then welfare poverty in my teens). The strategy didn’t work.

I had to accept that I am not built to be a capitalist cog or hamster. I had to accept that I as a person ask questions, and make good trouble doing so. I am at my best as a writer and thinker. I am at my best when I question the worlds I have inhabited, not when I am just going along to get along in them.