A Narcissist’s Dream

14 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

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Beauty, Bigotry, Christopher Lasch, Donald Trump, Drumpf, John Oliver, Kim K., Kim Kardashian, Last Week Tonight, Mob, Mob Violence, Narcissism, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, NPD, Obsessive Individualism, Racism, Rev. Al Sharpton, Self-Love

Spinning coin (can’t make heads or tails of it), March 12, 2016. (http://bestanimations.com).

We’re a nation of narcissists, this is true. Christopher Lasch wrote as much in his bestseller The Culture of Narcissism in 1979. But he was only examining American culture between the end of World War II and the 1970s, the “Me Decade.” Lasch wasn’t looking at obsessive individualism as a unique and historical American trait, one with roots as far back as Jamestown and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1860). He was looking at how the American obsession with self had evolved into “self-love” and a constant need for either attention or navel-gazing, as evidenced by the rise of pop psychology in the 1960s and 1970s.

Too bad Lasch isn’t around in 2016 to see how far down the rabbit hole America has gone. Between Kim Kardashian-West (at least for the moment) and 2016 GOP presidential candidate Donald J. Trump, it is obvious that we have a national crisis of narcissism on our hands. The two of them are the same side of a two-headed coin. One has traded on their family and beauty in exchange for millions of fans and tens of millions of dollars. The other has built an empire based on his father’s fortune and his brand of self-love. Both have taken advantage of White privilege and class privilege to drive their constant need for fame and attention. And since game knows game, they have both earned themselves an audience of millions who themselves are obsessed with themselves. Or at least, with seeing themselves as successful by living vicariously through the likes of Kim K and The Donald.

The New Material Girl

Kardashian “broke the Internet” again this past week, this time with a tweet that included a “naked” picture of her posing in front of a full-length mirror. I say “naked” only because she redacted her breast and privates, so that while she was naked when taking the picture, it’s not really a naked picture. Obviously Kardashian can do whatever she wants. Anyone with an objective eye can see that Kardashian has as much beauty as genetics and plastic surgery can muster. Anyone who objects to her taking photos of herself in the nude on moralistic grounds is either a prude or a hypocrite, given the number of people who pay attention to her and her brand.

Donald Trump posing with Kim Kardashian at Celebrity Apprentice event, New York, 2010. (Mathew Imaging/WireImage via http://eonline.com).

Kardashian is a narcissist, and those millions of folks who follow her on Twitter, watch her shows on E!, buy her products and/or jack off to her are narcissists as well. Not because she has maintained a slamming body despite pregnancy, reaching her mid-thirties, or her five-three frame. Kardashian is a narcissist because she embodies most of the clinical symptoms it. According to The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-V), narcissistic personality disorder (under the code 301.81) is “a persistent manner of grandiosity, a continuous desire for admiration, along with a lack of empathy.” In order to determine if a patient may have narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), a psychiatrist must determine if that patient meets at least any five (5) of the nine (9) standards below:

1. A grandiose logic of self-importance (✓)
2. A fixation with fantasies of unlimited success, control, brilliance, beauty, or idyllic love (definitely ✓)
3. A credence that he or she is extraordinary and exceptional and can only be understood by, or should connect with, other extraordinary or important people or institutions (see her collection of friends, lovers: ✓)
4. A desire for unwarranted admiration (✓)
5. A sense of entitlement (✓)
6. Interpersonally oppressive behavior
7. No form of empathy
8. Resentment of others or a conviction that others are resentful of him or her
9. A display of egotistical and conceited behaviors or attitudes (✓)
(American Psychiatric Association, 2013).

It would be hard to know for sure where Kardashian would stand on 6., 7., and 8. without some serious time on a couch or knowing her beyond her public displays of all things herself. Still, it was easy enough to get to six standards without the need for a PhD in psychology or a psychiatric license.

What is worrisome about both Kardashian and Trump, though, is their endless legions of fans and supporters. Kardashian has been peddling herself as Whiteness personified, an entitled upper-class Beverly Hills daughter of O.J. Simpson friend and defense lawyer Robert Kardashian (of Armenian descent) and Kris Houghton-Kardashian-Jenner. Despite the ethnic contradictions, Kardashian’s success has been based in the idea of the glamorous life, the ability to be ostentatious, to rub shoulders, elbows, and other anatomical parts with the rich and famous and the up-and-comers. Between the sex tape with Ray J. that made its way to the Internet and the start of Keeping Up With The Kardashians (both in 2007), her brand of narcissistic Whiteness has been on display now for a full decade. There’s no way that someone whose only job prior to reality TV was as a stylist would be doing this well without the blind support of millions of Americans who have the narcissism, but lack the funds to fuel it.

Damien Meets The Donald

The same is true of GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump. He would not be in the position to run against either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders were it not for his four decades in the public eye. Between his casinos, his business ventures (which include numerous failures and five Chapter 11 filings), his immense number of interviews, his three marriages and extramarital affairs, and his NBC TV show The Apprentice (2003-15), Trump’s name is legend. At least for 1990s rap artists and generations of Whites who have bought his books on entrepreneurship in the millions.

Trump, or to go back to the original (thank you, John Oliver), Drumpf, would fulfill all nine standards for narcissistic personality disorder. His constant expressions of misogyny, his equating of Mexicans with rape and criminality, his belief that all protesters need to “get a job,” his insistence that the world is divided between winners and “losers.” All while Trump believes that his very name equals success, no matter the amount of evidence that contradicts his inverted reality. On the 40-point-scale of the Narcissistic Personality Index, Drumpf would likely score between a 38 and a 40, a perfect or near-perfect score. A score, by the way, that no one other than a narcissist would be proud of.

Damien TV series poster, A&E, accessed March 13, 2016. (http://imdb.com).

Drumpf, though, is a snake-oil salesman who benefited from his father’s slum-lording ways, inheriting a company in 1971 and part of Fred Trump’s $200 million upon the latter’s death in 1999. If Bill Gates isn’t a self-made billionaire, then Drumpf was born two marathons ahead of Gates in the human race for wealth. Yet Trump has presented himself for years as the epitome of Horatio Alger, and to the detriment of millions of Whites who actually believe that Trump’s life is a rags-to-riches story. The bankruptcies don’t matter. The failures of Trump Shuttle, Trump University, Trump Entertainment Resorts, none of that has mattered. All that matters, apparently, is that Trump is a billionaire (no one really knows how much he’s worth; could be anywhere between $250 million and $3.9 billion), and that he promises to “Make America Great Again.”

Unlike Kardahshian, Trump openly attacks anyone who contradicts his narcissistic image of himself and his world. He has for years. The so-called Central Park Five wrongly convicted in the 1989 wilding gang rape case — Yusef Salaam Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, and Korey Wise — can attest to the impact of Trump’s money, one-page ad calling for the death penalty, and narcissism on their lives. Even after the courts overturned their convictions in 2002 and they finally settled their lawsuits against the city for $41 million in 2014, Trump still blamed the five for a crime that they obviously did not commit. “Speak to the detectives on the case and try listening to the facts. These young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels,” Trump wrote in an op-ed for the New York Daily News in June 2014. Apparently, a narcissist who always sees people of color in the worst possible light can never be wrong.

Even with his so-called friends, Trump’s narcissism is beyond the pale. When supposed friend Rev. Al Sharpton disagreed with Trump’s law-and-order stance on Ferguson in 2014, Trump responded with a personal attack during an interview with Fox News. actually addressed their relationship during a Fox News hit last December. “Al’s a con man. He knows it. I know it. Don King knows it, his friend, who I go to with fights with — with Al. And they all know it,” Trump said. He added, Sharpton’s a “professional con man” who has “gotten away with murder.”

We Are The #1s

Should we ever wonder why Trump’s rallies are a who’s who of White supremacy and privilege attracting every form of bigotry, like a nuclear missile fully fueled and ready for launch? Should anyone be surprised that whenever Drumpf blows his dog whistles to his mobs about immigration, the US-Mexico border, yells at a protester, “get them outta here” like a drunk-ass White supremacist, calls President Barack Obama “a disaster,” his audience responds with angry delight? This isn’t just racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, or misogyny at work. No, this is also a collective obsession with the self, a self that yearns to be like Drumpf in interviews, and on stage at rallies, and in proclaiming the self to be richer, greater, more successful, and more right than every other self.

Donald Trump greets supporters after a rally, Mobile, Alabama, August 27, 2015. (Mark Wallheiser/Getty via http://www.telegraph.co.uk/).

It isn’t the fault of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision (2010) that Trump is on a glide path toward the GOP nomination this summer. Nor is it the fault of Obama, or Black Lives Matter, or even The Donald himself. No, it is the fault of millions of narcissistic Americans whose billionaire and celebrity worship has trumped all sense of reality.

As psychology professors Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell noted in their recent book The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (2009), millions of Americans live in the “land of grandiose fantasy,” with potentially disastrous results (pp. 3-4), like the rise of Trump. Given that March Madness 2016 begins in earnest this week, would anyone really notice if Trump decided to make Kim K. his vice-presidential running mate? She turns thirty-five this October, after all.

The Atomic Weight of Racism

02 Tuesday Feb 2016

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

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Academia, Atoms, Black History Month, Capitalism, Carbon, Exceptionalism, Frederick Douglass, Higgs Boson Particle, Ida B. Wells, Imperialism, Institutional Racism, Martin Delany, Metaphors, Narcissism, News Media, Physics, Public Intellectuals, Quantum Physics, Racism, Social Media, Subatomic Particles, Systemic Racism

Visual representation of grand unified theory, explain physical forces at cosmic and quantum levels, via Garrett Lisi, circa 2010. (http://functionspace.com).

Visual representation of grand unified theory, explaining physical forces at cosmic and quantum levels, via Garrett Lisi, circa 2010. (http://functionspace.com).

A few months ago, I found myself pondering the many years in which I and a cadre of experts, scholars, and trolls have written and talked about American racism. The evidence (or lack thereof) that those who fight for racial justice and those who fight for White supremacy (or at least, a White-dominated status quo) have gathered. The sense of righteous indignation or dispassionate sense of racial superiority expressed in sound bites, at conferences, in classrooms, in faculty and staff meetings. I found myself thinking, “We’re never going to convince the majority that they have built themselves a hypocritical house of cards, are we?”

Of course this is true. A person doesn’t have to be a pessimist or fatalistic to arrive at this conclusion. Long before Ta-Nehisi Coates or the great late Derrick Bell, or James Baldwin or Malcolm X, or even W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, there was the sense that the house that racism built could never be broken down with faith and words alone. Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, and Ida B. Wells (or Wells-Barnett) said as much in the nineteenth century. It would take action, perhaps even, a calamity to break down this house.

I started thinking about American racism as an atom, then. It could be as simple as a hydrogen atom, but despite the preponderance of Americans who will live out their lives in willful ignorance, America and its racism is a bit more complicated than one proton and one electron. That’s the America most of my students think they live in. When it comes to racism, America is more like a carbon or iron atom before being smashed at light speed in a particle accelerator in Switzerland. With lots of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Enough so that it could combine with anything and corrupt everything.

A visual representation of a carbon atom, electrons, protons, an neutrons, February 1, 2016. (http://periodic.lanl.gov/).

Carbon is very much a constantly morphing combinator. Scientists can make virtually endless chains and structures with carbon — along with its companions, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen — giving us plenty of other organic compounds not found in nature. That is American intersectionality in a nutshell, between racism, class inequality, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and other -isms that combine and recombine from one generation and one issue to the next. Stereotypes, microaggressions, and death by a thousand cuts, are its results.

But carbon molecules in the natural world already exists in long and almost endless chains. Our DNA and its double-helix strands, the structure of hydrocarbons that make up petroleum and natural gas. Even without the interventions that make interpersonal, individual, and internalized racism the fodder for social media and American politics, structural racism and institutional racism are already well embedded in America’s vast array of institutions.

Then there’s the stuff that’s beyond the mix of the six electrons, six protons, and six neutrons that make up a carbon atom. Quarks, leptons, bosons, among as many as 248 subatomic particles — including gluons, neutrinos, and photons. The newly discovered Higgs boson particle (as of 2012), for instance, is apparently what provides matter mass.

The subatomics of American racism, though, are fairly well-known and haven’t been new to us researchers for decades. Imperialism, American exceptionalism, narcissism, and capitalism. They all help give mass to American racism, so that it is not just a matter of perception, or, as some mavericks have suggested, a disease or psychosis. These are the particles that convert the energies of racism into a tangible, weighty reality.

An example of simulated data modeled for the CMS particle detector on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. (where collision of two protons would produce a Higgs boson particle and release energy, in blue), October 1997. (Lucas Taylor/CERN via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

Yet atoms and their subatomic particles aren’t forever. Heck, electrons are often in two places at the same time, their quantum locations change so often. The way scientists know all this is through atom smashing at places like the Hadron collider in Switzerland. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to smash protons straight into a group of atoms to explode its subatomic contents. Ultimately, somewhere between fusion, fission, and smashing, to break down the carbon-like atom that is American racism. But I don’t think those of us working to do so should hold our collective breath.

The Cold Light of Grades

05 Tuesday Jan 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, earth, wind & fire, Eclectic, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Ann Jannetta, Challenge Scholarship, Continental Airlines, Crush #2, Dean's List, Disillusionment, East Asian History, Financial Aid, General Foods, Grades, Grinding, Homesickness, Humanities, Internalized Racism, Masculinity, Mom, Mother-Son Relationship, MVHS, Newark International Airport, Phyllis, Pitt, Racism, Self-Discovery, Sexism, Stereotype Threat, Travel

University of Pittsburgh after a snow storm, Cathedral of Learning, downloaded January 5, 2016. (http://www.everystockphoto.com).

Dateline, Tuesday, January 5, 2016. Exactly twenty-eight years ago on this day and date, I left Mount Vernon and New York for my second semester at the University of Pittsburgh. I sensed, but did not know, that this was a make-or-break time for me as a student and as a person. At least when that day began. I had a 5 pm Continental Airlines flight out of Newark (my last time flying out of there, thank God!), and had plenty of time to kill before catching a cab to East 241st at 2 pm to catch the 2 Subway to 42nd, the Shuttle to Grand Central, and then the Carey Bus to New Jersey.

Then the mailman arrived a bit earlier than I expected, around 12:30 pm. I’d been anticipating and dreading this moment for seventeen days, since Saturday, December 19, the morning of my last final in Pascal.

The day I was scheduled to go back to Pittsburgh was also the day I finally received my grades. I earned an easy A in Astronomy, a B- in Pascal, and a C in Honors Calc. All three of those grades I expected. The C in East Asian History was completely unexpected. My grade point average for the semester gave me a 2.63 to start my postsecondary career. That might’ve been good enough for most folks. But of course not for me. My Challenge Scholarship absolutely depended on me maintaining a minimum 3.0 average at the end of every school year in order for me to stay eligible. That was my wake up call to what I’d allowed Phyllis, and my thoughts of her and me — and of her with me — to do to me. I didn’t even give Mom the chance to see my grades.

Because I was seventeen when my first semester began, my Mom was still the responsible adult and my Mom’s address the primary address for my academic records. This was the first and last time I received my Pitt grades this way.

I was so mad. But I was more disillusioned than angry, especially with myself and my view of the world. I knew I had no margin for error this Winter/Spring semester at Pitt. I needed to raise my overall GPA to a 3.0 or higher in order to keep my academic scholarship for my sophomore year. I could barely afford Pitt as it was, between room and board and books. It wasn’t as if I could depend on Mom and my father to keep sending me money. They had sent a total of $480 my way that first semester. I was still $1,200 behind on my Pitt bill, even with student loans and me working sixteen hours a week.

The days after I got back to my dorm I spent assessing my situation and what to do about it. The first decision I made was to consolidate the funds I managed to secure at the end of December. I had General Foods cover my remaining room and board payments for the school year, increased my Stafford Loan amount for the semester, and marched down to Thackeray Hall. I waited all day to take care of my bills, get my few hundred dollars of leftover cash from all of my aid — all of which I needed for books — and registered for classes. The last part took the most time, and was the hardest to do. The low the second morning of the semester was two below zero, and the high that day was eight above. Fahrenheit, not Celsius. I stood in line outside for over an hour in that weather surrounded by two feet of snow with the occasional winds and snow drifts before getting inside at nine that morning.

But in the moments I had that week, between some quiet time for myself and in discussing my performance with two of my professors (I just couldn’t believe I earned a C in East Asian History!), I realized two or three things. One was that I over-performed, given how depressed I was the last seven weeks of the semester. I missed nearly three out of every four classes in November, and nearly forty percent of my East Asian History class during the entire semester. I went without a textbook for Honors Calc I after someone stole it from my job in the computer labs in the Cathedral of Learning at the end of October. I managed a solid C in the course anyway. It could’ve been much worse.

Two was that my East Asian History professor Ann Jannetta was right. I really was “lucky” to have managed a C in an upper-level history course my first semester of college. I still acted as if I was in Humanities at A.B. Davis Middle School or MVHS, that a C was some indication of low IQ or confirmation that Whites had bigger brains or something. Jannetta was very encouraging. It was the first time any of my professors had made me feel like I belonged in college.

The most important thing I realized, though, was that I couldn’t let anyone or anything get in the way of me bringing my A-game (or A- game, maybe) every semester and in every course. Phyllis didn’t matter. My internalized sexism or what others though of me because of their racism didn’t matter. My idiot classmates or parents didn’t matter. Heck, being hungry, cold, and short on money didn’t matter. All that mattered was my ability to do what I did best back then. Get A’s in bunches when I needed to.

Of course, all these things really did matter. I merely decided to play the game of college that semester with a combination of fear and anger, arrogance and obliviousness. To the tune of a 3.33 and the Dean’s List! Yay me!

But when that semester ended on Saturday, April 30, those demons and distractions resurfaced. Oh, the days before I spent five days homeless and weeks eating tuna fish and pork neck bones!

Black Lives Matter and My Dreamy Heaven

01 Friday Jan 2016

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

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#BlackLivesMatter, Black Lives Matter, Dreams, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, God, Heaven, Institutional Racism, Jordan Davis, Life and Death, Michael Brown, Nature, Photons, Police Brutality, Quantum Energy, Quantum Mechanics, Racism, Renisha McBride, Revelation, Sandra Bland, Self-Reflection, Structural Racism, Tamir Rice, The Universe, Trayvon Martin, Walter Scott, White Vigilantism

A shower of photons, December 31, 2015. (http://www.theallium.com).

It was a strange place, this place of peace and comfort. To realize that at the quantum level, we each were all bundles of energy, that our bodies were but vessels that carried our real selves in our earthly years. That heaven was much, much more. Pearly gates and a white-bearded God? Nonsense! Try singularities and endless connections between the past, present, and future, between multiple universes and realities! We existed everywhere and in every time. There was no pain and no need, because we were everything and everything was in us and with us.

A high-resolution picture of the Pillars of Creation, in the Eagle Nebula, 7,000-light-years from Earth, via the Hubble Telescope, circa 1995, retouched January 5, 2014. (Armbrust via Wikipedia via NASA). In public domain.

In this space and place, I met them. The ones that once left us behind. The entities who once lived in the earthly realm, whose bodies were decimated, whose minds had been wounded. It was here that I met Trayvon Martin, Renisha McBride, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Kindra Chapman, Samuel DuBose, Joyce Curnell, Ralkina Jones, Raynette Turner, Christian Taylor, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Jordan Davis, John Crawford, and Jonathan Ferrell.

There were so many more bundles of light and energy in my presence that I felt myself cry. Not real tears, because while I could see and hear everything, I didn’t have any eyes or ears. I wanted to hug them all, but didn’t have any arms. I wanted to embrace them, but didn’t have any lips.

But there was one thing I could do. I merged my little bundle of energy with theirs. It was a joining more real and miraculous than anything I ever felt when tethered to Earth. I felt so alive, so free, so one with the universe. It was as if my material life was a nightmare and a dream, and this heaven the one true real.

In an instant, every feeling and thought I had merged with the feelings and thoughts of hundreds, if not thousands of other lights. And in that instant, the one question I had they asked and answered before I knew what my question was.

Don’t feel for dead. We are alive and well, and will be always so. Feel for the living. For theirs is a world of struggle and suffering.

They do not know who they really are. They do not know that their bodies are but machines, and their lives are not real.

In that singular moment, I understood. How could anyone in the living years truly appreciate the privilege of a corporeal existence when that is but only one form of life? If we as humanity could not know ourselves, how could we protect ourselves from ourselves?

I did get a glimpse, just a brief one, of another answer.

“To make our lives matter, fight for a better world. It doesn’t matter if you lose, but it does matter if you give up.”

As soon as that thought materialized, I woke up, sad to find myself in my middle-aged body, reconnected to my one quadrillion cells and Earth’s gravity and pressure.

————————————————————

A collage of Black and Brown people killed by police and White vigilantes, February 2015. (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/ via Gawker.com).

If I could, I’d want to meet all of the recent victims of police brutality and murder and White vigilantism and have a conversation. I would ask each of them only one question. Something like, “What did you want to get out of life?” or “What did you want your life to mean?” Because ultimately, that’s the most important question any of us can ask ourselves while we are alive in this physical world.

The structures that allow law enforcement agencies to assume those with Black and Brown bodies are criminals and undeserving of life pass those assumptions on to their individual police officers. The fourth estate does at least as good a job of passing these assumptions on to millions of ordinary civilians. The result is that thousands of us never got the chance to answer this most important question in our living years. If we cannot agree that this is a shame and a pitiful way to live, than we truly live in a nation in which Black and Brown lives (not to mention, people in poverty and others of different religions and ethnicities) don’t matter. For that — if for no other reason — is why we need Black Lives Matter, and we need Black Lives Matter to matter more, in the here-and-now linear world right now, in 2016.

Fisher v. University of Texas: Supreme Court Takes Up Affirmative Action (Again!)

09 Wednesday Dec 2015

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

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Affirmative Action, Bakke v. University of California at Davis (1978), Delusions of Grandeur, Fisher v. University of Texas (2015; 2012), Gratz v. Bollinger (2003), Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), Justice Antonin Scalia, Justice Clarence Thomas, Narcissism, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Racism, Social Darwinism, Stereotype Threat, Supreme Court, Supreme Court decisions

Abigail Fisher, second from right, listens as her lawyer Bert Rein, center, speaks with reporters, Supreme Court, Washington, DC, December 9, 2015. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP; http://msnbc.com).

I wrote this a bit more than three years ago, when the Supreme Court first heard the case of one Abigail Fisher against the University of Texas admissions policy in October 2012:

Abigail Fisher has joined Allan Bakke, Jennifer Gratz/Patrick Hamacher and Barbara Grutter as part of a list of Whites who have used race as an excuse because they faced a road block for maybe the only time in their lives. The idea that we should have race-neutral college and graduate school admissions policies in a country that’s far from race-neutral shows an enormous sense of unacknowledged entitlement and privilege.

Here’s why. Using myself as an example, I graduated Mount Vernon HS (NY) in 1987, 14th out of 545 students (the top 3% of my class), with a 3.83 GPA on a 4.0 scale, with an 1120 SAT (a 1220 on today’s SAT). I didn’t get into Yale, but was accepted at Columbia and the University of Pittsburgh. Money was an issue, as I ended up going to Pitt because they offered me an academic scholarship, while Columbia offered a private investigator into my father’s finances. Still, my grades would’ve easily knocked Fisher out of contention at UT-Austin, as well as Gratz and Hamacher.

I also think about the two decades I’ve spent teaching high school, college and graduate students. The most consistently obstinate students I’ve taught have been White students who thought they knew more than me. They didn’t get that context always matters when interpreting history, especially something like affirmative action. For those students, for Fisher, et al., and for the Supreme Court, entitlement matters more than context. Facts, circumstances be damned.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

I was wrong about one thing in my earlier post. I based my comparison of my SAT score from 1986 on revisions to the standardized test in the 1990s, not in the 2000s, when they added a third section. Based on that, my educated guess for a score in that period would’ve been between a 1850 and 2000 (between the 60th and 70th percentile).

Today, the Supreme Court heard from Fisher’s and the University of Texas’ lawyers — again, about the efficacy of using race as part of a larger formula for achieving demographic diversity in the state higher education system. During today’s oral arguments, the ever-brilliantly racist Justice Antonin Scalia pressed the University of Texas on why they needed to account for race (and apparently, for class as well) in their admissions plan at all, considering the academic issues many Black student face.

Scalia said, “it does not benefit African-Americans to — to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a less — a slower-track school where they do well.” He added that “most of the black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas. They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they’re — that they’re being pushed ahead in — in classes that are too — too fast for them.”

It is fairly obvious that Scalia and at least three other justices (including his intellectual puppet Justice Clarence Thomas) would do away with affirmative action sooner than Scalia and Thomas could suck down two one-gallon tubs of rocky road ice cream. But the veneer of racism, the assumption that Blacks are “too slow” for elite public universities, the Social Darwinist interpretation of higher education? Or assuming that Blacks who go to lesser known institutions, particularly HBCUs are getting a lesser and slower education as a result? Scalia doesn’t know his history, and doesn’t care to know the history of Blacks in higher education at all.

Given the direction the Supreme Court is leaning, it may take a burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement of the scope of the Civil Rights Movement of fifty years ago to reverse this court’s attempt at a twenty-first century version of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Let’s not forget, though. There are millions of Scalias and Thomases out there who firmly believe that African Americans — even those with excellent grades, high test scores, and lots of passion and intellectual drive — deserve nothing more than a jail cell, a janitor job, or a bullet to the brain.

But what makes their perspective worse is that Scalia, et. al, are cutting off their collective noses to spite the country’s face. It won’t be just high-achieving African American students losing out if the court curtails or renders race-based admissions policies unconstitutional. A decision like that will hurt millions of White students as well. Not just because segregated higher education could eliminate a diversity of ideas and thinking and will poison the wealth of knowledge and efforts toward a better American society through the benefits of the college experience. It will also mean that Whites like Abigail Fisher will no longer have an easy and vulnerable scapegoat for their educational failures. The Abigail Fishers will be experiencing their own form of stereotype threat. Oh, how will they hold on to their narcissism, their intellectual delusions of grandeur then?

American Racism: “Same As It Ever Was”

14 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, music, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race

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"Once In A Lifetime" (1983), Beatings, Ben Fields, Booker T. Washington, Central Park, Death, Ida B. Wells, Institutional Racism, James Blake, James Frascatore, Morning Oregon, NYPD, Police Brutality, Racial Harassment, Racial Incidents, Racism, Spring Valley High School, Talking Heads, University of Missouri, White Vigilantism, Yale University

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, age 32, photographed by Mary Garrity, c. 1893, cropped and restored, September 8, 2013. (Adam Cuerden via Wikipedia). In public domain.

A young African American woman refuses to leave her seat. Authority figures arrive to demand that she leaves. She refuses again. One authority charged with “upholding the law” then picks the young woman up and drags her from her seat. But this isn’t Spring Valley High School near Columbia, South Carolina. Nor is it 2015. This incident involved the anti-lynching journalist Ida B. Wells, who sat in a first-class ladies car on the segregated Memphis and Charleston Railroad train rolling through Tennessee. It occurred on May 4, 1884. Except it was three White men, who dragged and threw the then not-quite-twenty-two year-old off the train for refusing to give up a seat she paid for.

Just like with the Black teenager whom Ben Fields assaulted in the name of the law, I’m sure one of the things Wells might have thought was, “This is 1884. Why is this still happening?” The circumstances that led to both incidents were obviously different, but the racism that led to these violent responses was not.

With all that has occurred to break the illusion that Americans live in a twenty-first-century, post-racial utopia, Americans still bring up the times in which we live whenever racism rears its ugly head. Whether it’s the NYPD tackling ex-tennis star James Blake in September, the Black teenager at Spring Valley HS in October, or the responses to Black students at the University of Missouri or Yale in the past week, the need for temporal incredulousness is often present in the midst of these racist incidents. “You would think at some point they would get the memo that this isn’t okay, but it seems that there’s no stopping it,” Blake said after the incident with Officer James Frascatore.

At what point or time? As if saying “Why is this happening in 2015?” has anything to do with bringing systemic, institutional, individual, and internalized racism to an end. If there had been truth and reconciliation commissions at the end of Jim Crow in the South in the 1960s and 1970s, maybe then Americans can quote the year as evidence of irrational racial dissonance. If the federal government had provided reparations after Emancipation in 1865 or after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, perhaps then what year this is would matter. Racism and racists have never cared about the year or the supposedly multicultural, progressive times in which Americans lived.

Harris & Ewing photo of Booker T. Washington, circa 1905-1915, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, January 18, 2010. (Cantheasswonder via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Before his death in 1915, Tuskegee Institute founder Booker T. Washington experienced something all too many Americans of color face year after year. Washington delivered two speeches at churches in Manhattan on Sunday, March 19, 1911. That same evening, Washington went to an apartment building on West 63rd Street near Central Park, allegedly to meet up with a friend of his accountant on business. After attempting to find this mystery person at the building twice, Henry Ulrich, a 40-year-old White male, confronted Washington and punched him in the head. A White bystander handed Ulrich a walking stick and together, the two men chased Washington toward Central Park, hitting him with the stick on his head and face at least a dozen times. It wasn’t until Washington fell into the arms of NYPD Officer Chester Hagan, at a southwest entrance to Central Park, that the attack came to an end. After his initial arrest, Washington produced his identification papers. Only then was he released, allowed to press charges against Ulrich, and taken to a hospital to get 16 stitches and recover from his head bashing.

Morning Oregon headline on Booker T. Washington trial, November 7, 1911.

Despite having the support of Andrew Carnegie, former New York City mayor Seth Low and President William Taft, Washington’s assault charge was destined to fail. The New York and national press — yellow journalism at its best in 1911 — tried Washington on their front pages from March 20 on. Laura Alverez did a wonderful job in misrepresenting herself as “Mrs. Ulrich” in defense of her paramour at the trial. Alverez accused Washington of saying, “Hello, Sweetheart” to her — a dog whistle back then for the ultimate taboo of interracial sex — when Washington was outside the apartment building. Two of the three judges voted on Monday, November 6, 1911, to acquit Ulrich of the assault charge, news the national press gleefully reported. Among them was the Morning Oregonian, which had “‘Beating Up’ Darky Brings No Punishment to Man” as part of its headline.

All this took its toll on an already sick 55-year-old Washington, a man already suffering from hypertension and high-blood pressure. The result was a physically and emotionally diminished Washington after 1911. Booker T. Washington died on November 16, 1915. The power Washington had exercised as an advisor to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Taft and as a racial accommodationist (some would say, an apologist) who befriended White philanthropists, it didn’t matter. His poor health may have been the symptom, but racism in all its forms was the ultimate cause.

It does not matter what year it is. Racists don’t care. It doesn’t matter if African Americans and White progressives hold die-ins in Ferguson, Cleveland and New York. Blacks and other people of color don’t have the same right to breathe without a racist’s say-so. It doesn’t matter if respectable Blacks wear nice suits and ties, attend Harvard, establish a university, or serve as President of the United States. Americans of color are all criminals and playthings in the eyes of racists, and the power structures for which they work have been set up to preserve racial inequality for centuries. And it doesn’t matter if liberals Black, White and Brown call for healing. Racists don’t want healing, and calling for it without acknowledging a flesh-eating, bacterial-infested wound like racism doesn’t do Americans any good. Booker T. Washington learned that lesson in 1911, and Ida B. Wells learned it in 1884. Millions of other Americans of color have learned that lesson all too well today.

Spring Valley HS, A Damn Shame

27 Tuesday Oct 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Politics, race, Youth

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Columbia South Carolina, Incident, Individual Racism, Institutional Racism, Internalized Racism, Misogyny, Narcissism, Police Brutality, Racism, Richland County School District Two, Spring Valley High School, Teacher Autonomy, Voyeurism

Ben Fields in midst of dragging student out of desk and throwing her across room, North Columbia, SC, October 26, 2015. (http://nydailynews.com).

We all have in the past twenty-four hours either heard about the incident, read the details, or watched the video. Ben Fields, a White police officer (called a “resource officer” in the benignly dangerous language of public schools), brutally attacked a teenage Black girl in her classroom. The asshole with a badge flipped her over her desk and then threw her across the room like a piece of garbage. Arresting her for using a phone and refusing to get up, and threatening any other kid who came to her defense? This isn’t acceptable behavior. Period.

But this is more than the issue of an individual’s racism or even institutional racism in the case of this Richland County School District Two outside of Columbia, South Carolina. Yesterday’s incident speaks to, among other issues:

1. Lack of teacher autonomy. We now live in a place where a whole generation of teachers are risk averse, partly because of school shootings, but primarily because of corporate education reform. Many, if not most teachers are ill-equipped to deal with disciplinary issues in their own classrooms, and are too quick to turn to the violent hand of police and security because they have no idea how to do this aspect of their job.

2. Black misogyny. How could that teacher stand there, watch and condone that action? Aside from this Black teacher’s lack of autonomy, there may be a lack of empathy on his part as well. For all of the complaints about the police officer, this guy masquerading as a teacher was a coward, and implicit has condoned violence against a woman in an obviously nonviolent situation.

3. Voyeurism as racism. Even though a student recorded this incident and literally millions of people are now aware of what occurred, many respectable Negroes and a cacophony of Whites support the primal brutality captured in it. So much so that one could conclude that they embrace the idea that the police have the right to kill and brutalize kids without fear of reprisals. These narcissists may even love the idea of hurting kids of color, because that’s exactly what they would if they thought they could get away with it, too.

It hurts to watch the video or read about the incident, because if someone laid their hands on my kid with that level of brutality…