Afrocentrists, Evangelicals, Hebrew-Israelites and the False Revolution

28 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, Patriotism, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Afrocentric, Afrocentricity, Authentic Blackness, Authority Figures, Black Action Society, Child Abuse, Covenant Church of Pittsburgh, Cross of Gold (1896), Dick Oestriecher, Domestic Violence, Estelle Abel, Evangelical Christianity, Frances Cress Welsing, Frederick K.C. Price, Gospel of Prosperity, Hoteps, Jack Van Impe, Judah ben Israel, Karl Marx, Kenneth Copeland, Kufi, Marxism, Maurice Eugene Washington, Molefi Asante, Neo-Marxists, Ostracism, Prosperity Gospel, Racism, Rapture, Religion, Wendy Goldman, William Jennings Bryan

Kenneth and Gloria Copeland, Believer’s Voice of Victory television broadcast, November 23, 2011. (Carpetsmoker via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

For nearly all of my life folks with even a kernel of authority have tried to convince me that there was one right way to live, one true path to liberation. Mostly religion has been the means through which others have attempted to box me in, although ideologues around Marxism, Afrocentricity, and Capitalism have all been in my figurative kitchen over the years. And like any well-meaning human being, at times I tried real hard to adapt myself to these right ways of thinking, of living out the one correct way to live. Only to fail, or rather, to recognize that none of these ways are the one right way, unless you are a closet right-winger, a conservative (non-ideological) wearing revolution-esque clothing.

My introduction to this madness began with my years as a Hebrew-Israelite, from April ’81 to April ’84 (although I wore my kufi until September ’84). That any parent could suddenly impose a new religion on their kids without explanation is abusive enough. When combined with vague notions about the Lost Tribes of ancient Israel and the wearing of clothes that set us apart culturally while in the middle of puberty, it was a forced societal ostracism. Even still, I tried to live by these strictures. “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.” Eat kosher food, don’t use Ivory soap, shop only at Black or Hebrew-Israelite stores, avoid “unclean issues of blood.” But the physical abuse and poverty that came with being a Hebrew-Israelite in the Judah ben Israel madhouse of contradictions at 616 made me despise anything involving Hebrew-Israelite pretty much for all time.

Molefi Asante speech, Philadelphia, PA, September 13, 2014. (AP photo/file).

Fast-forward a few years to the early 1990s, to the rise of Afrocentricity and the Afrocentric ethos. After three and a half years of being around Hebrew-Israelites, these kente-cloth wearing fools made me weary more times than not of their exclusionary our-way-or-no-way Blackness. Molefi Asante and the late Frances Cress Welsing were just the tip of a much larger iceberg in search of revolutionary “authentic” Blackness. From the Afrocentric undergrads who hijacked the Black Action Society leadership at the University of Pittsburgh in 1991 to folks who picked arguments with me for “sounding White” while I was in grad school, I saw them the same way I saw my now idiot ex-stepfather and the obnoxious Estelle Abel from my high school days. They were well-meaning but stupid. As far as I was concerned, they thought that their words alone would foster a revolution, that being Black meant turning one’s back on the world while also indirectly embracing an ethnocentric capitalism. Or at least, a Black American collective individualism, otherwise known as an “Afrocentric cool.” I could not, I would not, exchange one form of oppressive uplift in Hebrew-Israelites for the shiny fool’s gold that mostly represented the Afrocentrists.

The neo-Marxists I met in Pittsburgh throughout the 1990s were no better. For all their revolutionary rhetoric, theirs was a world of theoretical activism, of scholarly examples of past oppression. Most of them didn’t know poverty and didn’t comprehend oppression beyond their own limited experience. Most of all, they couldn’t find a connection between American racism and class oppression if I gave them an industrial strength magnet. The fact that most of them hadn’t read Franz Fanon, W. E. B. Du Bois, Eric Williams, C. L. R. James, Anna Julia Cooper, Zora Neale Hurston, Derrick Bell, Angela Davis — but could quote Karl Marx the way Hebrew-Israelites could quote the Torah and Afrocentrists could quote Asante and Welsing — I found troubling. That’s putting it nicely. I found it contemptuous that folks who didn’t know my experience or who would all but refuse to read folks who written about experiences like mine would expect my allegiance to an ideology that was never meant for people who look like me.

The evangelical Christian part of my life was literally the last of the major dogmas to go. It was the hardest for me because I literally had given my life to Jesus in the midst of the whole Hebrew-Israelite crisis, Easter Sunday ’84. With my Mom coming down the same path by the late-1980s, it made it easier to not interrogate my Christianity as thoroughly as I would excoriate Afrocentrists and Marxists in graduate classes and in articles and papers a decade later. But even at nineteen, I realized that the Van Impe’s weekly predictions of the Apocalypse were as ridiculous as Welsing’s exulting of the magical properties of melanin. Or, for that matter, a fake Balkis Makeda cautioning against the use of Ivory Soap among her Hebrew-Israelite flock because of a dream she had.

Grant Hamilton cartoon for Judge Magazine on William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech, Democratic National Convention, Chicago, July 9, 1896. (Wikipedia). In public domain.

I went along to get along for years, until the hypocrisy of evangelical Christianity’s Gospel of Prosperity became too much. They took the metaphor of William Jennings Bryan’s cross of gold and actually went literal and nuclear with it. Somehow being Christian now meant blind patriotic allegiance to anything US and fully supporting capitalism, and yet an exclusionary separation between “true” evangelical Christians and the rest of the world. Especially on Rapture Day.

The last time I sat comfortably in a pew was in January ’97, although I’ve been to churches of various denominations dozens of times since. I still believe in Jesus, the life and the death and even the resurrection. But I don’t believe in most who claim to represent him, yet turn around and ignore the vulnerable standing right in front of them, making weak claims around individualism and poverty in the process.

In so many ways, evangelicals, Marxists, Afrocentrists, and Hebrew-Israelites are more alike than different. They all insist on a singular path, a quintessential truth. While some aspects of their thinking are appealing, I find accepting their bullshit in entirety poisonous to my spirit, mind, and gastrointestinal tract. There still may well be a revolution or even a rapture, but it won’t be because of any of these groups.

Ass Whuppins and NFL Fanatics

18 Thursday Sep 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Sports

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Adrian Peterson, Anheuser Busch, Arizona Cardinals, Ass-Whuppin', Belts, CBS, Child Abuse, Denial, Deniers, Domestic Violence, ESPN 980, Extension Cords, Hannah Storm, James Brown, Jonathan Dwyer, Maurice Washington, Minnesota Vikings, Racism, Ray Rice, Religion, Roger Goodell, Spanking, Steve Czaban, Switches, Violence, Whiteness

Collage of Houston PD pics of cut/contusion marks on Adrian Peterson’s four-year-old son, September 12, 2014. (http://atlantablackstar.com).

I’ve been irritated by what I’ve seen in the media and in social media over the past week. First, the idea that Minnesota Vikings’ running back Adrian Peterson’s alleged crime was the spanking of his four-year-old kid back in May, one that left cuts and contusions all over his body, including the kid’s scrotum. In Peterson’s world, in the world in which I grew up, and in the world of millions of Americans, we didn’t and don’t use the term spanking at all — ass-whuppin’ (or a beating) is what constitutes corporal punishment.

Second has been the response of sports talk radio and many NFL fans — especially including the less enlightened and more entitled of the sports media — to public criticism and how teams have reacted to recent domestic violence and child abuse revelations. Their response to CBS’ Thursday Night Football host James Brown speaking up about men needing to take more responsibility for their actions vis-a-vis domestic violence: “Shut the hell up! You’re ruining my mood for the game! This isn’t the right time or the place to talk about domestic violence, just before my football game!”

Outlander character Jamie Fraser in midst of second 100-slashes punishment, screenshot (cropped) from S1:Episode 06 "The Garrison Commander," September 13, 2014. (http://plus.google.com).

Outlander character Jamie Fraser in midst of punishment, screenshot (cropped) from S1:Episode 06 “The Garrison Commander,” September 13, 2014. (http://plus.google.com).

Both reflect the insularity of the elitism that is mainstream media and the denier-resentment that is Whiteness in America as reflected in sports and especially football. To call what Peterson did to his son a spanking, well, it defies all logic. It was an ass-whuppin’, plain and simple. Journalists, bloggers and tweeters dedicated many posts and articles over the past six days to the issue of spanking and why so many wee common folk accept spanking as a form of discipline for their children. I have yet to see an article that makes the correct distinction between a spanking — the use of a hand or a light paddle to smack the butt of a child — and an ass-whuppin’.

See, between the ages of three and thirteen, my Mom, my father Jimme, and my idiot stepfather Maurice Washington gave me between twenty-five and thirty ass-whuppins, but only two or three spankings. Here’s the last ass-whuppin’ I got from Maurice before he transitioned to upper cuts and kicks to my stomach:

This wasn’t the first time I had to strip down to nothing to have my butt, back and legs beaten to the point of welts and contusions, though this ass-whuppin’ led to my second incident of severe abuse. Over the years, my Mom and my babysitter Ida (she died recently at eighty-six — RIP) had whupped me and my older brother Darren with a switch (though with one far more prepared for beating a child without marking up skin than what Peterson allegedly used). They and Maurice had also used the standard leather belt, an extension cord (the type that you plug into a wall socket), and a shoe (my Mom did that in front of a crowd at a July 4th picnic in ’79).

Over those years, my parents and my somewhat legal guardians slapped me, smacked me, kicked me in the eye, and put me in a head-lock, all before my summer of abuse in ’82. Not once did anyone responsible for disciplining me call it a spanking. Based on my own experience and the experiences of people I’ve met and known over the years, I can pretty much guarantee Peterson didn’t call it a spanking either.

Steve Czaban, host of The Drive, ESPN Radio 980 Washington DC, November 2013. (http://www.theczabe.com/).

Then there’s been the NFL’s reaction to the gigantic PR hit it has taken over commissioner Roger Goodell’s handling of the Ray Rice case and the Baltimore Ravens’ subsequent termination of Rice. Not to mention the Vikings’ deactivation-reactivation-deactivation of Peterson, the Carolina Panthers’ deactivation of convicted woman abuser Greg Hardy, and yesterday’s arrest of Arizona Cardinals running back Jonathan Dwyer, whom the Cardinals also deactivated. I’m more than certain that ESPN Radio 980 show host Steve Czaban wasn’t alone when he called these sanctions “overreactions” and lamented the “slippery slope” that the NFL as “moral police” has started to slide down. Czaban represents an ilk of sports show hosts and corresponding listeners and fans who want sports to remain a “diversion” from “real life,” to not have someone’s “politics” like James Brown’s ruin their spectator experience.

To that, I say, good! Men shouldn’t be comfortable living in a bubble in which the athletic “freaks” who entertain them in sports should then be excused when accused of committing crimes. Nor should they be called “animals” when the law proves that they are guilty of such crimes. White men especially often act as if it’s their world and they have the right to a relaxing day without dealing with issues of racism, misogyny, patriarchy, homophobia and other forms of inequality from which they benefit every day.

To that I say, we need more statements during sports programs from James Brown and Hannah Storm, more advertisers (even ones as hypocritical as Anheuser Busch, as their beers help fuel domestic violence and child abuse) “venting their spleen,” more people taking a stand against people who like their spectator entitlements a bit too much. To those denialists, especially Czaban, I say, kiss my abused Black ass.

All Work and No Play

28 Monday Jan 2013

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

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Acid, Acting, Atheism, Balance, CIS, Computer and Information System, Evolution, Falcon Crest, Fringe, History Major, Intolerance, John Noble, LSD, Neal Galpern, Pitt, Religion, Robert Foxworth, Sexual Harassment, University of Pittsburgh, Walter Bishop, Yin and Yang

Yin & Yang symbol from Taoism, good symbol for balance in life, January 28, 2013. (http://taoism.about.com).

As those high schools students I taught through JSA at Princeton in the summers of ’08 and ’09 either have come to realize or are realizing now, finding balance between school, full-time or part-time work, family and some semblance of a social life is just a tad difficult. Sometimes, it’s even impossible. So it was for me the spring of ’89, the last spring before I’d put together what I came to call my “16-week strategy for success and a social life.”

It was the semester where in which I worked 36 hours a week over a seven-week period and faced sexual harassment from a co-worker who was the BFF of my supervisor of Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning labs for Computer and Information Services (CIS) (see my post “On People and Stress” from February ’09). It was the last semester in which I had to worry about my mother and my younger siblings from afar because of the possibility of domestic violence, as my idiot stepfather Maurice still lived with them at 616.

This was my first set of classes as a History major, but I also had some general ed requirements to fulfill (see my post “Major Change” from October ’10). It would’ve been a tough semester even if I hadn’t worked, but with the CIS schedule the way it was, I was in for an interesting ride. For Macro, the chair of the Economics department was our professor. The class was at nine o’clock in the morning on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with a discussion section at 8 am on Tuesday to boot. It was almost as if he wanted folks to fail. With my schedule the way it was, I rarely made it to class on Tuesdays, and I only made it to one discussion section all semester long. To make up for that, I never missed the class on Thursdays, and often participated in the lecture discussions, such as they were.

Actor Robert Foxworth on Broadway in August: Osage County, August 2008. (Joan Marcus/Playbill).

Shakespeare was later in the day on Tuesdays and Thursdays, taught by Wion, who looked like the actor Robert Foxworth from the CBS show Falcon Crest, only not quite as handsome. He delivered lines from Taming of The Shrew and Othello like he’d been a wannabe actor in a previous career but realized teaching was more of his shtick. Wion often used Freudian pop psychology to explain the motives of characters in Shakespeare’s plays, and as he did, all of our eyes glazed over. This analysis for us was so ’70s, especially for the second-wave feminists in the class.

My Bio and Philosophy classes seemed to fit under the theme of “questioning God,” as there were students in both who had an ax to grind against “dumb Christians.” Bio in some ways was easier, at least because we had a professor who understood why some of us who were Christian might find evolution difficult to swallow. After several yelps from students during one of his lectures on evolution, mutation and reproduction, he said, “just because there’s evolution doesn’t mean that God doesn’t exist. Who’s to say that evolution isn’t a higher being’s method for the creation of life?” I appreciated that answer very much.

In existentialism class, especially the discussion section, no reconciliation was possible. My discussion section instructor was an Australian man in his late-twenties, with curly hair like the lead singer from Simply Red, except my instructor’s hair was a dirty blonde. He spent discussion after discussion railing on Christians as “people who refuse to believe that God doesn’t exist.” One of our discussions was so anti-anything other than atheism that I found it just as bigoted as anything I’d heard from Hebrew-Israelites or out of a televangelist’s mouth, and said as much. I was ignored.

No class that semester drove me nuts like my History majors writing seminar with Neal Galpern. We met on Monday and Wednesday afternoons for about an hour and a half, and it was the most boring hour and a half on my schedule. Galpern was an aging hippie complete with comb-over who graduated with doctorate in hand from Berkeley in ’75. He sometimes acted like he was still dropping acid. His stuttering starts and stops and numerous “Um”s could stop his lectures and our discussions cold. He wanted each of us to write a research-based paper of no less than twenty papers on any comparative topic in history that we could come up with, as vague as the man himself.

John Noble as Dr. Walter Bishop on Fringe, Season 5, after dropping acid, December 2012. (http://fringetelevision.com).

I couldn’t stand Galpern and his constant skipping over my hand in class and his snarky comments to all of us as if we were all dense and he was clearer than Antarctic ice melt. I didn’t challenge Galpern in class, at least not directly. I challenged him with my project. I decided to do a paper that compared the main features of the Civil Rights Movement in the US to the Anti-Apartheid Movement in South Africa. Admittedly it was too big a project, but it was Galpern’s job to help me narrow the topic into a doable chunk.

Instead all the advice he gave me consisted of “You need to find another topic, um . . . because, um . . . I’m afraid . . . I don’t, um . . . know much . . . about this.” I refused to budge. I wasn’t about to do a stupid paper on medieval Europe just because that happened to be his area of alleged expertise. After a meeting where Galpern finally gave in to me, I went across the hall to our classroom on the third floor of Forbes Quad and imitated my professor’s halting style of conversation. Galpern walked in, and I just kept going until I finished my, um, sentence. Yeah, it would be safe to say that he didn’t like me too much either!

I finished that semester with two A-‘s in my writing seminar and in existential philosophy, a B+ in Shakespeare, a B in Biology, and even pulled out a C+ in Macro, despite my lack of attendance. It was a difficult time. Yet it was also the start of my growth into early adulthood, and understanding that finding balance would be the key to sustained success.

Randomness & Faith

27 Thursday Dec 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, earth, wind & fire, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Politics, Pop Culture, Religion, Youth

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Agnostic, Atheism, Atheist, Belief, Bible, Buddhism, Evolution, Faith, Forgiveness, God, Grace, Love, Mathematics, Mystery, Physics, Randomness, Reason, Religion, Science, Scientific Method, The Universe, Youth

Randomness equation, Schrage random number generator, December 27, 2012. (http://ops.fhwa.dot.gov).

Today’s my forty-third birthday (at least, as of 8:37 am EST). It means that I’ve been a spiritual believer of one sort or another for nearly thirty years. With so much that has happened in my life, there are many who wonder why I believe in God, or why I’m a Christian in particular. With my expertise as a historian, my background in math and science (and continuing study of such), there have been many who’ve mocked and questioned my faith in anything other than the randomness of the universe. With the world in seemingly endless turmoil, good people maimed and killed, and evil people able to get away with maiming and killing others, there are those who greet any profession of belief in a higher power with anger and bitterness.

To me, that’s too bad. I can see all sides of this argument. I’ve been a Christian for more than twenty-eight years, and before that, an unwilling, if outwardly obvious, Hebrew-Israelite. In that time, I’ve also been an atheist, agnostic and angry, a bit of a Buddhist and a Muslim to boot. I’ve gone years without prayed and prayed at least once every day for nearly twenty years. I’ve read the Bible cover to cover at least six times in three decades, but also the Torah and the Qur’an. I’ve gone to temple, to Roman Catholic mass, to church, sometimes every week for years, sometimes not at all for years. I’ve had crises of faith and been almost unquestioning in faith over the years.

An actual double-slit experiment (electrons or photons behaving as particles and waves, in two places at same time), December 27, 2012. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour)

I’m also a believer in science and the scientific method. I realize that even with all of the advances in biology, physics, chemistry and mathematics, that there is much more we don’t know versus all that we’ve learned in the past two centuries. But that doesn’t mean that I believe that the universe — that life itself — is some random event or a long-chain series of random events. I’m with evolution on everything except the random. I don’t think that the universe can be seen as random. Even as chaotic as our lives may seem, the choices that we make do provide order. It’s never been sheer dumb luck that has determined everything that has occurred in my life, as other people have made their own choices that can easily affect the range of choices in my own life.

Most of all, while I do believe that there are reasons behind the events that occur in our lives and in world, that these reason are neither random nor something that God somehow came down from on high to make possible. Whether it’s Hurricane Sandy or Sandy Hook Elementary School, the civil war in Syria or a tsunami in the Indian Ocean, somehow so many have it that either God’s angry with us or that God allows horrible things to happen to us. Or that there is no God, because a real God would prevent these seemingly random events from occurring at all.

All this proves one thing, and one thing only. That most of us have little understanding of faith, of God, or of the universe itself. Period. Even those of us who are experts in particle physics or theoretical mathematics don’t know enough to dismiss God or to prove their educated guess (otherwise known as belief) in the randomness of the universe. Most of us who do believe in God — at least, those of us who are Christian — treat God as if he were Zeus casting down lightning bolts to keep us in line.

Roman Seated Zeus, marble and bronze (restored), Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia, January 4, 2006. (Sanne Smit via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Roman Seated Zeus, marble/ bronze, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia, January 4, 2006. (Sanne Smit via Wikipedia). In public domain.

I see God in the universe, in the creation and re-creation of life, and yes, even in the various tragic and apparently chaotic events that have occurred in my life and in this world. That I don’t think these events to be random doesn’t make me any less of a thinker. I just don’t accept the blind faith of scientists in the idea that maybe cosmic rays led to the mutations in the primordial soup of our ancient oceans that led to the spark of life and evolution. I also don’t believe that God is simply presiding over every event on our planet and in the universe, making life-and-death decisions that bring pain and anguish to our lives for enjoyment or as a form of punishment.

Rather, God for me has been about living life by principles like social justice, social and spiritual mobility, love, forgiveness, grace and wisdom. Explaining what may or may not be random, each and every conceivable mystery of the universe or of life? I know that this isn’t in the Bible. But I do know that the reasons behind why bad, ugly, even evil things have happened in my life don’t include the “random nature of the universe.” People made decisions, I’ve made decisions, institutions made decisions, that have had an impact on the course, speed and direction of my life over the last forty-three years.

So, even when I’ve found myself angry with God, I’ve also been cognizant of the role all and each of us play in the heaven and hell that tends to be our lives, separate and together, in this world of ours.

Anatomy of An Abuser, Hebrew-Israelite Style

07 Saturday Apr 2012

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

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Benson & Hedges Menthol, Blackness, Child Abuse, Emotional Abuse, Isshin-ryu Karate, Manhood, Psychological Abuse, Religion, The Jammers, Verbal Abuse

Abomination as played by Tim Roth, The Incredible Hulk (2008) screen shot, April 6, 2012. (http://www.comics2film.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws, as the image is only used once and is rendered in low resolution to avoid piracy.

This month marks thirty years since my idiot stepfather Maurice Washington first attempted to make me a man, a Black man, a Hebrew-Israelite man, all at the same time, through karate and physical abuse. But there were any number of signs that his conversion to this strange mix of Afrocentricity and Judaism wasn’t genuine, and that his re-entry into our lives as husband and father in April ’81 was teetering on the edge of disaster only twelve months later. At least for me, my older brother Darren, Maurice’s two young boys, and for my mother. Certainly not for him.

As early as September ’81, my chronically unemployed stepfather had started acting strange, expecting us to run errands for him without question or comment. Armed with the conviction that comes with a recent religious conversion (who during the early-80s was “Judah ben Israel;” see my “The Tyranny of Salvation” post from April ’11), Maurice began to demand that we call him “Dad.” We were required to wear our kufis whenever we left 616, which identified us immediately as our stepfather’s kids to our idiot 616 and 630 East Lincoln neighbors.

Maurice also made it mandatory for us to pray aloud every night, giving us a four-page, single-spaced document full of “Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe…” lines to recite as part of our daily Black Jewish ritual. The first time we went through it, in both Hebrew and English, it took well over an hour. If we started to nod off, Maurice would slap us upside the head, or actually give us one of his “whuppins.”

His language was also changing, becoming coarser and more threatening as ’81 turned into ’82. For just asking, “Why?” or “What?,” my stepfather would often say, “Take that base outta ya voice, boy, before I cave yo’ chest in!” Maurice would sometimes sing his threats, bellowing “I’m gonna beat yo’ ass, jus’ like a car burns gas,” adding, “And you know that!” at the end. That last part was something he pulled from a song by a disco group called The Jammers. His language was worse now than it had been before he had separated from Mom eighteen months earlier. I found myself scratching my head, and not just because it itched.

By April, Maurice had become a hanger-on at a newly opened Karate studio down the street from 616, next

Benson & Hedges Menthol, hard green pack, April 6, 2012. (http://cigarettespedia.com).

door to the old dry cleaner business on East Lincoln Avenue. He made me come to the studio because he wanted to show me “how to be a man.” But when I saw him on my almost daily runs to the grocery store, he mostly hung out with young Turks and wannabe thugs from the Pearsall Drive projects across the street. Maurice smoked up a storm of Benson & Hedges Menthol while talking about women, being a Hebrew-Israelite, and about me as his kid, at least when I happened to walk by.

My stepfather made it known that he thought of me as soft, a boy who spent too much time in books and not enough time on New York’s mean streets. These despite the fact that we lived in Mount Vernon, a quietly violent city whose meanest streets were on the South Side, the part of town that bordered the Bronx. Not that 616 and the Pearsall Drive projects (consisting of six five-story buildings) down the street didn’t qualify as “mean.” They were tough by North Side standards, but at least people didn’t go into parks with baseball bats attempting to head hunt (see my “A Baseball Bat and a Father’s Absence” post from July ’11).

Maurice had tried to teach me and my older brother Darren Isshin-ryu Karate two years earlier. Despite myself, I did pick up a few moves. Now he decided that I would learn how to fight no matter the consequences. It was all about breaking bones and inflicting maximum pain. When I told Maurice that I didn’t want to learn, he said “You will learn because I’m your father” as he started to throw hard punches into my midsection.

Squidward losing to Seabear, SpongeBob camping episode, 2011, April 6, 2012. (Nickelodeon). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws due to picture's low resolution.

After I yelled “You’re not my father!,” he drop-kicked me to the floor. Maurice, all six-foot-one and 270 pounds of him, then pulled me up by my arms, slammed me back-first into a mirrored wall, and punched me several times in the head, chest, and stomach until several of the men in the studio surrounded him. My stepfather, completely exasperated and winded, yelled “Don’t you EVER say that again, muthafucka! I’ll kill you next time!” I ran for home with a knot on my forehead that didn’t go down for almost a week.

I was slowly learning a very valuable lesson (see my “Never As Good As The First Time” post from April ’11). I didn’t have control over anything in my life, even my emotions. I also learned to not trust Black men, especially fast talkers who thought with their fists and penises like dumb ass Maurice. It took several years for me to unlearn part of that second lesson, no thanks to him.

The Beatdown

05 Saturday Nov 2011

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

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7S, A.B. Davis Middle School, Anti-Bullying, Bullying, Captain Zimbabwe, Hebrew-Israelite, Humanities, Italian Club, Mount Vernon New York, Mount Vernon public schools, Race, Racism, Religion

Ironing out balled up paper, a bullying symbol, November 4, 2011. (Donald Earl Collins)

An anti-bullying video’s been trending in the social media sphere this week, in which a teacher demonstrates to her class the effects of bullying on a student’s psyche. All courtesy of balled up, stomped on and unfolded yet crumpled pieces of paper. It’s a good, though incomplete description, because it doesn’t address the great feeling of superiority that those dispensing the verbal, physical and psychological abuse get from bullying their classmates.

Though I seldom have thought of myself as someone who was bullied, by today’s definition, that’s exactly what happened to me for the better part of five months of seventh grade, from November ’81 through February ’82 and late-May to early June ’82 (see my post “The Legend of Captain Zimbabwe” from May ’09 for much more). I guess I’d been called so many names by so many people in 7S so first few months — and, to be truthful, did the same in response to a fair number of classmates myself — that I didn’t think too much of it as November ’81 began.

About two weeks after my fight with Brandie (see “Adverbs and A-Holes” post from last month), I experienced a serious physical bullying altercation (there were one or two attempts by neighborhood kids while I went to Nathan Hale and Holmes Elementary, and a couple of attempts in high school). The best way to describe it is that I got jumped and then beat-down after the end of the school day on the first Friday in November ’81.

It wasn’t a random jumping or beat-down, and not one that involved Davis’ Black or Latino students, who were always described to us super-nerds as “dangerous.” No, the perps in this case were from what I euphemistically called the “Italian Club,” a full two years before we had an official Italian Club in high school. They’d been on me in 7S homeroom and in Italian class with nearly constant verbal abuse for the two weeks or so since my scuffle with Brandie. Apparently, my decision to ignore them didn’t work well enough.

The leader of this pack of uncouth Italian or White working-class preteen Humanities boys was “A,” who presented himself as between John Travolta’s character on Welcome Back, Kotter and Arthur Fonzerelli from Happy Days. A’s favorite move those Humanities middle school years was to walk into our homeroom and belt out The Police’s “Roxanne” refrain, as if he were Eddie Murphy in 48 Hours. The way his band of Italian or Italian-esque brothers hung around him, you would’ve thought he was a rock star, someone like his fave, Mr. “White Wedding” himself, Billy Idol.

A Christmas Story (1982) screen shot of bunny suit kid, December 11, 2009. (http://myhealthypassion.wordpress.com). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws, between low resolution, cropping, and intent of use.

Led by A, about ten 7S classmates attacked me after school as I was on my way out the school’s side door closest to the Humanities wing to walk home. They grabbed, punched, and kicked me, and called me everything but a child of God. A, of course, wasn’t actually involved in any of the dirty work of beating on me. Like a about half a dozen other 7S classmates, A watched as he directed his gang.

That was my third A Christmas Story moment. Except I’d been better off wearing the pink bunny suit over my kufi! Bullying is a funny thing, even when you’re one being bullied.

But unlike the piece of trampled, stomped, balled up paper, I wasn’t scarred in the sense that my self-esteem was shattered. Far from it, my self-absorption and delusions of academic grandeur shielded me, made it possible for me to iron out most of the wrinkles in my psyche from being jumped that day. It took my grades, a crush, and events that played out at home, at 616, to shatter my childhood.

Of course, being called a “dumb ass” as if it were my nickname, or “Captain Zimbabwe,” as a proxy for “Negro” or the N-word, wasn’t exactly besides the point. Nor was the idea that a bunch of White kids could decide that they could gang up on me essentially because I was an enigma to them. Like me being weird, uncool and smart was too much for their pubervescent heads to handle.

The best revenge, though, was going through puberty myself, to find myself growing ten inches in twenty months, between March ’82 and December ’83. That, and taking care of my body, mind and spirit over the past thirty years. Not that I have a dart board of my tormentors or anything, but I think it would be hilarious if any of them attempted to bully the 225-pound me today. Of course, I’d probably laugh so hard that they’d get a couple of licks in, at least before my sense of righteous rage would kick in.

The moral here, I guess, is to have a sense of how to deal with bullying if and when it does occur, to not shrug it off as “boys just being boys” or, for that matter, “cliquish girls being cliquish girls.” By middle school, though, it’s not just about reporting it to teachers or parents. It’s about other students stepping in, and students the subject of bullies’ discontent defending themselves. And that is what I’m instilling in my son. Of course, I’ll step in when necessary, too.

Flexing muscles, as in too bad I didn't have these 30 years ago, November 4, 2011 (Donald Earl Collins).

Adverbs and A-Holes

22 Saturday Oct 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, race, Youth

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

7S, A.B. Davis Middle School, Adverb, Brandie Weston, Fight, Humanities, Mount Vernon public schools, Offending Others, Pervert, Puberty, Race, Religion

Good or well cartoon, January 24, 2009. (Gaurav: http://mbatutes.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of lower quality resolution with purpose for describing a part of speech.

Puberty is such a strange time in life, whether you’re male or female. It’s even worse when you don’t have the maturity to deal with the changes, physical, social and emotional. Add to that no real guidance from parents, teachers or other adult figures about how to deal, and you have a recipe for disaster, even social suicide. That became the case for me thirty years ago, in a fight with a history, with my late ex-classmate, Brandie Weston.

But I planted the seeds for it almost a year and a half before, the second Saturday in May ’80, the very first time I met Brandie. My father Jimme had taken me and Darren to his “girlfriend’s” two-bedroom apartment on Mount Vernon’s South Side. His alleged girlfriend — drinking buddy, really — turned out to be Brandie’s mother. When Brandie walked through the apartment door an hour into the visit, I greeted her with the words, “Wow, she’s fat!,” as if I’d complimented her on her great beauty (for full story, see “First Impressions and Brandie” post from May ’10).

Irony, of course, has been one of the ways I’ve come to be sure that there is a God. Why else would I have ended up in Humanities and in the same classroom with Brandie in September ’81? I had no doubt that Brandie told her Pennington-Grimes friends about the incident as soon as she saw me in class on the first day of seventh grade. Every time I saw them, my shy “Hi’s” were greeted with grunts, names like “dumb ass” and “idiot,” or just plain ignored.

My cold war with Brandie became a fight only weeks into seventh grade. It wasn’t much of a fight, though. It was in Mrs. Sesay’s classroom, our 7S homeroom where we started the day, ended the day, and had our first-period English class. At the end of this day in October, Brandie was clearing out of room from the back, passing by my seat on the left side of the classroom toward the door.

“Dumb ass,” Brandie said out of nowhere, as usual.

“You’re stupid,” I said, not even bothering to look up as I put my plastic Mead, three-ring and five-subject notebook in my book bag.

Mike Tyson laying out Larry Holmes, January 22, 1988.

Within a couple of seconds, I got pushed from behind. I turned, and Brandie threw a punch into my chest. I threw one back into her right arm as she recoiled from landing her first punch. We were fighting in the back of the classroom.

It was two semi-nerds in a fight of words, lots of shoves, and a flurry of half-hearted punches. It was an ugly display, like watching a Larry Holmes fight or Muhammad Ali in his last days before his retirement. In one corner, at five-foot-two and 120 pounds was me, in the other, at five-foot-seven and about 150 pounds was Brandie. I certainly didn’t want to fight a girl. Brandie seemed to think that she could pound me into the ground, hitting me on top of the head a few times.

At one point I punched Brandie in the chest, only to find that her chest felt spongy. It dawned on me that Brandie had breasts. I stopped pushing and punching her right then and there, somewhat in shock from the revelation.

“You’re a pervert!,” Brandie yelled while two of her friends pulled her away from me.

I didn’t know what “pervert” meant — not that I would’ve admitted such a thing, since I was the “smartest kid in the whole world.”

“Well, you’re an adverb!” I yelled in response. Someone I pulled that out of my brain to call Brandie in response.

Of all the words — adverb? That ended our fight in horrific laughter from Brandie and the classmates who witnessed it. It was another About A Boy moment. It was a weird moment, even for me. I was embarrassed, all but sure that my classmates thought that I was incredibly dumb.

My fight with Brandie had awakened some sleeping wolves, what I called the Italian Club long before we actually formed one for our Italian class. And these preteens had social adjustment issues that made me, Hebrew-Israelite and all, look like a model preteen by comparison — a story for another post. But, still, on the next to last Friday in October three decades ago, I made myself into the adverb greater, as in an asshole to a greater degree. Seriously.