The Black Man-White Woman Matrix

05 Sunday Dec 2021

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Marriage, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Alfonso Ribeiro, Binary Thinking, Dave Chappelle, Homophobia, Hubert Davis, Misogynoir, Misogyny, Patriarchy, Pitt, Sexual Harassment, The Matrix (1999), Transphobia, White Supremacy

Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus in The Matrix (1999) chained up (screen shot), accessed October 14, 2021. (https://racism.org/articles/defining-racism/338-thematrixa).

There have been and will be tons of think pieces about the misogyny, the homophobia, and the transphobia in Dave Chappelle’s The Closer, his latest/last stand-up comedy special for Netflix. Within that maelstrom of using the stage as a 75-minute patriarchal therapy session, I noticed how most of the people whom Chappelle apparently discussed his id issues with were white women, whether straight, lesbian, or transgender, including the late Daphne Dorman. “Maybe he should spend time with transgender Black women. They are among the most marginalized in the US, with deadly results, between suicides & murders,” I tweeted. But Chappelle never would. His hypermasculine defense of transphobes and homophobes like Harry Potter billionaire J. K. Rowling, fellow comedian Kevin Hart, and rapper DaBaby, means seeing the binary and non-binary white women he referenced throughout his latest stand-up concert as a sign of personal progress, or even, as part of a televised revolution.

From a deeply emotional and psychological level, I fail to understand this penchant for Black men like Chappelle to use and idolize white women as if they are the pentacle of all that America ought to be. Hubert Davis and Alfonso Ribeiro have publicly uplifted their marriages to white women as a commentary on racial progress. “I’m very proud to be African-American. But I’m also very proud that my wife is white, and I’m also very proud that my three very beautiful, unbelievable kids are a combination of us,” Davis said during his opening press conference as the first Black men’s head basketball coach at the University of North Carolina. Ribeiro of Fresh Prince fame believes “the Black house” has ostracized him. “I am in a mixed relationship….And it’s not easy to make that choice…I’m never going to be white and I’m never going to be fully supported in the Black house,” he said in an interview with Newsweek in August.

Davis’ and Ribeiro’s are both very strange statements. Somehow they and many other Black men have convinced themselves that marrying white women is a sign of racism’s end. Somehow, this is the televised revolution the US needs. Somehow, marrying white will dismantle the latticework of racism on which this nation is built. But, as sociologist Crystal M. Fleming wrote in her How to be Less Stupid About Race, “we’re not going to end white supremacy by ‘hugging it out.’ And we’re certainly not going to fuck our way out of racial oppression. That’s not how power works.” The US Supreme Court’s 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision that legalized interracial marriage was groundbreaking, but it never was the “promised land” that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. envisioned the night before his death in 1968.

My first time thinking through the social and political implications of Black men and white women together in union or solidarity was in 1990, my third year at the University of Pittsburgh. At the student union one day, I sat down for lunch in between classes to hang out with three of my friends. Two were already in the middle of conversation about a growing visible concern on campus — young Black men dating young white women. The two of them (one man, one woman), were biracial themselves, each the child of a white mother and a Black father. One other Black girlfriend also chimed in. They were decidedly against the idea of interracial dating and marriage. At one point I said, “If they love each other, what does it matter?” My two Black biracial friends both sighed and side-eyed me, and then laughed like I was telling a cruel joke.

What they understood and I didn’t get in 1990 was that while universal love ultimately conquers all, romantic love and friendships will never negate racism in any of its forms. I also knew about Emmett Till’s lynching for winking or whistling at a white woman. I definitely knew from the movie Birth of a Nation (the original one) the deadly dangers of white women accusing Black men of rape or unwanted flirtations.

I also knew this from personal experience. The year before, and with the support of my one-time boss, a 26-year-old white woman at my campus computing lab job who was my supervisor’s high school friend accused me of sexual harassment. This after she had groped and squeezed my ass cheeks on two occasions during our shifts. I was 19 years old at the time.

In his Afropessimism, Frank B. Wilderson III wrote, “You marry White. It doesn’t change…What do you do with an unconscious that appears to hate you?” The bigger question is, why would any Black man ever expect to end the latticework of American racism and anti-Blackness through interracial marriage? This is the typical combination of Black mens’ colorism, hypermasculinity, and seeking the same status as white men through white women. “Those black men who believe deeply in the American dream…a masculine dream of dominance and success at the expense of others, are most likely to express negative feelings about black women and…desire [for] a white woman,” as bell hooks wrote in her Ain’t I A Woman.

Davis, Ribeiro, Chappelle, Wilderson, and many other Black men are too susceptible to the idea of interracial relationships as their revolution, their American Dream. The late critical race theorist Derrick Bell foresaw this in one of his lesser known allegorical essays from Faces at the Bottom of the Well, “The Last Black Hero.” It’s a story about a leading Black revolutionary who fell in love with a white woman. As Bell wrote, many whites in power see Black men with white women “as proof that black men in such relationships were, despite their militant rhetoric, not really dangerous.” For anyone working to dismantle the matrix of American racism, though, this way of Black-man-thinking (and white-woman-thinking) is very dangerous. Especially in the words and deeds of people like Chappelle, Davis, Ribeiro, and Wilderson.

This is why if the revolution does come, not only will it not be televised, it will rely predominantly on Black women binary and non-binary to lead it from imagination to actuality. Like in The Matrix movie series, there are too many Black men and white women who have “the world pulled over their eyes,” a world of white binary hypermasculine and patriarchal racism. Too many Black men — whether they are entertainers in need of long-term therapy like Chappelle or are people who see themselves leading revolutions — are too compromised by their own gendered privilege and social status desires to be the leaders they’ve all been waiting for.

Music of the Dystopia

25 Wednesday Nov 2020

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, earth, wind & fire, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon High School, music, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

"Cry Freedom" (1997), "Fantasy" (1978), "Land Of Confusion" (1986), "Silent Running" (1985), "Welcome To The Terrordome" (1990), "Zombie" (1995), Afrofuturism, American Dream, Dave Matthews Band, Delusions, Dystopia, Dystopian, Genesis, Mike + The Mechanics, Narcissism, PE, Public Enemy, Self-Reflection, Silent Running (1972), Subversive Music, The Cranberries, The Matrix (1999)

Screen shot, Silent Running (1972) poster, November 24, 2020. (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067756/mediaviewer/rm3505217792/).

Music has nearly always been a dreamscape from which I could envision alternative histories, sense multiple futures, uncover possible presents, feel and find my best self.

It has also been a place for revealing the naked, uncomfortable truth of humanity’s existence in real life. If one were to take the music of the late 1960s and first half of the 1970s, the R&B that clearly outlined the combination of migration, poverty, heroin addiction, the Vietnam War, police brutality, unemployment, miserly government social welfare and urban living would be one way to go. If one were to take the eclectic British and Irish pop and rock of the 1980s, those folks illuminated the connections between rising conservatism, austerity meant to cut the social safety net, and the normalization of government oppression, corruption, and infiltration into the private lives of everyday people.

It all adds up to one simple yet very scary truth. Our world, the one in which my mother birthed me, the one in which I have grown up and grown older, has always been a dystopia. That’s it. All this talk of technological innovation, of moral and philosophical advancements, of a post-World War II, West-led democratized, globalized, capitalist meritocracy is simply The Real-Life Matrix pulling the dystopian world over our deluded, narcissistic eyes. And nearly everything in the world of mainstream news and journalism, in everyday national and international politics, in formal education systems, and in every single iota of American and global popular culture.

Except in the occasional and deliberate attempts made by artists and authors to expose the underworkings of this Matrix. I have written far too much about those authors of late, from Sarah Kendzior, Mona Eltahawy, and Leta Hong Fincher to Kiese Laymon, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Derrick Bell. Truth is, I felt and sensed this truth in music even before I had read Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, or William Faulkner’s short stories about racist White men sleeping in beds for 20 years with the dead bones of their incestuous mothers. Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues {Make Me Wanna Holler),” Stevie Wonder’s “Living For The City,” and Donny Hathaway’s “The Ghetto” brought the dystopian of Black life in the US to my attention long before I knew what the prefix dys- even meant. The contrast between this and the Afrofuturism of Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Fantasy” and “Boogie Wonderland” of the late-1970s wasn’t lost on me, even though it would be nearly 15 years between these songs and my reading of Octavia Butler’s Kindred.

But the 1980s hit me and my family as hard and fast as a government coup in Brazil or in Trump’s version of the US. It’s wasn’t just that it was our apocalypse. It revealed that the American Dream was a nightmare for so many people. It opened up my 100 billion neurons to the possibility that there could be no American Dream, no rise of the West, no Euro-American hegemony over the world without it being a dystopia for billions of people in the US, in Europe, and around the world.

It was also the decade of the Ethiopian famine of 1983-85, “We Are The World,” Bob Geldof and Live Aid, Farm Aid, and protests for South African divestment. So it seemed normal for groups of White guys in bands to write music, play instruments, and belt out lyrics like the ones below from Mike + The Mechanics’ “Silent Running” (1985).

Don’t believe the church and state
And everything they tell you
Believe in me, I’m with the high command

The post-apocalyptic movie of the same title from 1972 was apparently on Michael Rutherford (guitarist of Genesis), et al.’s minds when they decided to work on the lyrics for this song. The idea that someone from the future would communicate with their ancestors in the past to resist the forces of totalitarianism and propaganda in order to preserve the path to a better future? Boy does that sound like the stuff of Octavia Butler, Derrick Bell, Kiese Laymon, and Colson Whitehead (not to mention, Tomi Adeyemi in her Children of Blood and Bone), where ancestors and descendants can somehow have confabs in real life! All in an effort to swap ideas, to conjure up solutions before we understood the problems, to recognize that time is nonlinear, and so are we.

As a teenager who saw more than most that the Reagan Years were part of the dystopian present, and not a return to American greatness, “Silent Running” was refreshing, if also incredibly scary. I was like, if these White guys from the UK and Ireland get it, then why don’t folks in America get it? At least, the folks I saw at school and in running my errands every day.

But it wasn’t just Mike + The Mechanics. A lot of music from the 1980s and 1990s was subversive, including the more obvious Springsteen and the E Street Band’s “Born In The U.S.A.” and John Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses” to KRS-One and Boogie Down Productions, Alanis Morrisette, and The Cranberries. It was just that the less subtle, the Billboard Top 40 hits and the B-side non-hits stood out for their double-meanings. When I stripped away the male bravado, the love and the lust and the loneliness from the repertoire of rap, R&B, hip-hop, and ’80s pop I listened to, the subversive was the remainder.

In my family-level apocalypse and resistance against my stepfather, the subversive helped. In the disconnect between the normalcy of magnet-program-learning among a cabal of Benetton-commercial-wannabes, the undercurrent understanding that this fakery belied a world very much like the one in The Matrix. The lyrics, the synthesizers, the heavy guitar strums and the drum rolls meant something different to me than anyone I knew growing up could imagine.

It wasn’t just “Silent Running” for me, nor something that hit like a sledgehammer like Genesis’ “Land of Confusion” that hit the radio waves my senior year of high school. There were others. For more than a decade, there were others, including:

PE, “Welcome to the Terrordome“
Sting, “Love Is The Seventh Wave”
Dave Matthews Band, “Cry Freedom“
The Cranberries, “Zombie“
Peter Gabriel, “Biko” and “Shaking The Tree”
Des’ree, “Crazy Maze“
James Blake, “No Bravery”
Seal, “Future Love Paradise” and “People Asking Why”
U2, “Bullet The Blue Sky”
Arrested Development, “Tennessee”

In the years after I finished my doctorate, I didn’t forget these songs, and may have taken on some more obscure ones by Floetry, Coldplay, U2, Bryan Ferry, Pharcyde, The Fugees, among others, along the way. Popular music has become more vapid and craven and corporate as the leaders in our world have made their taste for a dystopia that advantages them more and more obvious. This position is probably why I can’t find a nod to the dystopian in Rihanna, Cardi B, Chance the Rapper, Rick Ross, Beyoncé, Gary Clark, Jr., or Chris Stapleton (although Solange’s and Missy’s music videos at least contain subversive and dystopian wisps).

This world is the dystopia that has always been. And those of us who talk to ourselves while speaking out at the same time have been trying to get everyone else to see it and sense it all along. I should know. I’ve been talking to myself since my week of homelessness at 18, and speaking out as the world has lurched itself toward calamity for nearly as long.

Aside

My “-tions” and History as Conjunction Junction

02 Wednesday Sep 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Movies, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

American Exceptionalism, American Mythology, AP US History, AP US History Exam, Ben Carson, College Board, Conservatives, Curriculum Framework, Cypher, Educational Testing Service, ETS, Founding Fathers, Harold Meltzer, Joe Pantoliano, Lynne Cheney, Mealy-Mouthed, morison, Morison and Commager, Selling Out, The -tions, The Matrix (1999), WASPs

AP US History curriculum framework and Common Core, July 24, 2014. (Todd Wiseman; http://www.texastribune.org/).

So, the College Board and ETS sold out last month to the willfully ignorant, ideologically conservative set, and will mythologize AP US History after all. The tales of the perfectly brilliant Founding Fathers, of great, rich, powerful White men who built this nation with their bare hands, who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps without any help, will be front and center now. AP US History has gone through a re-re-revision of its curriculum guide to spend time providing lessons in blind patriotism, in American civics as great legend, making a generation of already over-tested kids even more ripe for being underprepared for college and beyond. One more instance where providing an opportunity for independent thinking has knuckled under to the profit-motive for two so-called, multibillion-dollar nonprofits.

I wrote about the small scale of the College Board’s middle-of-the-road approach in its second revision of the AP US History curriculum in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in May, a few months before they showed flexibility to the right-wing nut-jobs. As a historian, professor, educator, writer, and critical thinker, I don’t think I was ever satisfied with AP US History or its mealy-mouthed curriculum. Just because one presents a complex concept that can be difficult to discuss in pleasant language doesn’t change the fact that people and even students will frequently resist that concept. The idea that slavery played a central role in building the economic infrastructure of the US, for instance. That’s hard for most Americans to accept, even with the evidence staring in their faces every single day.

Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, The Growth of the American Republic, Volume I (unknown edition, but the edition I had access to in 1985), September 2, 2015.

As a student in the late Harold Meltzer’s AP US History class at Mount Vernon High School in eleventh grade back in September ’85, though, I found the once nationally recommended textbook for the course unacceptable myself. It was a textbook people like Lynne Cheney and Ben Carson would’ve loved, and can still be found in many high school classrooms even today. Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager’s The Growth of the American Republic, originally published in 1930, a time when rich WASP males were the only people of US history who counted.

I don’t recall exactly what edition we had, but it was a 1962 version, well-preserved by Meltzer. It was built fundamentally on what we academic historians call consensus history, meaning a unified, singular march toward a better society, a better American republic. Meaning that American Indian removal, slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow, the Cult of Domesticity, the anti-immigration movement, the battles between labor and robber barons, got almost no play in the textbook. I was so bored with Morison and Commager that I stopped reading the book after the first eight pages, including the table of contents. I earned my 5 on the AP US History exam anyway.

That’s what the privileged set wants for our kids from pre-K through graduate school. A steady diet of history from a patriotic victors’ perspective, of progress and constant triumph, of narcissistic navel-gazing. But teaching history in the twenty-first century needs to be about more than powerful people, famous places, significant events or even a mass of faceless victims. Add to this the fact that most high schools and many undergraduate programs still teach US, European and most aspects of history around the world as if the subject was a trivia game like Jeopardy or Trivial Pursuit. I know that’s what most of my students would want — although a few would pull their hair out from a well-learned hatred of the subject or from sheer boredom.

What I have done in my US and African American history courses over the years is talk about what I call “the -tions.” Assimilation, civilization, exploration, and gentrification, and especially immigration, industrialization, migration, and urbanization. The -tions represent large-scale processes and patterns that add up to defining themes in history, especially for the past 500 years. After all, history is about people, and what people say, do, and leave behind over the course of their lives. Not just famous, rich, slaveowning individuals who came together to found a country to maximize their own material advantages. But the millions of African slaves and dusky non-WASP European immigrants whom those same WASP males worked to death to build this great nation.

The -tions give us historians the what and how, but not the why people did what they did. This would be where capitalism, sexism, imperialism, racism, and ethnocentrism come into play. The idea of profit, whether for oneself or for king and country, drove the need for cheap labor, and thus, the use of kidnapped African slaves on plantations or starving Irish peasants in northeastern factories. Or, the idea that middle class WASP “ladies” shouldn’t work outside the home or have a say in public life, lest their moral centers become corrupted.

“Ignorance is bliss” scene screen shot from The Matrix (1999) with Joe Pantoliano as Cypher eating a Matrix steak, September 2, 2015. (http://chicagoboyz.net).

I try to channel these ideas through my teaching, in smaller doses in introductory courses, in larger ones in upper-level courses. The majority of my students fight it like my teaching methodology is chemotherapy or like Joe Pantoliano’s character Cypher in The Matrix (1999), desperately desiring to be blissfully ignorant over knowing the full measure of US history. For me, it’s not even about ideology. It’s about truth, about viewing life and history and people with an independent and skeptical lens, as “everybody lies…but we don’t lie all of the time.”

To work through all this may be too much for many. But it’s better than taking the free ride of lazy history that the College Board and ETS are now providing, courtesy of the privileged class.

Social Media Trolls, In a Pic or Two

16 Saturday Aug 2014

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Blogging, Facebook, Harassment, Personal Attacks, Racial Harassment, Sentinels, Sexual Harassment, Social Media, Swarms, The Matrix (1999), The Matrix Revolutions (2003), Troll, Trolling, Trolls, Twitter, WordPress

Some folks who come at me through Twitter, my blog on WordPress, even in the “friend” zone on Facebook, are by definition trolls. According to Wikipedia (and apparently, an Indiana University webpage where the definition below comes from), a troll is

a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.

A Sentinel cutting through the Nebuchadnezzar (screen shot), The Matrix (1999), August 16, 2014. (Donald Earl Collins). Qualifies as fair use under copyright laws – especially low resolution.

But this isn’t a complete definition. Trolls are often anonymous, or, if not hiding in the shadows, often have few followers/follow few people in social media. They don’t just “start arguments” — they launch vitriolic personal attacks on individuals with whom they disagree in order to distract from that person(s) point or main topic. They often express every -ism and -phobia they have toward other humans, as if their own humanity and the humanity of the group they think represent is the only one that matters.

And when they find themselves engaged with other trolls, they swarm an individual in the social media world like Sentinels from The Matrix series, hoping to destroy the person in the process. It’s the virtual equivalent of bullying and harassment, and they deserve as much respect in the social media world as we’d give to a bully in the real world. The kind of respect that calls trolls out and puts them in check, the kind of respect that may well involve law enforcement and legal actions.

Swarm of Sentinels about to attack Neo in Machine City (screen shot), The Matrix Revolutions (2003), August 16, 2014. (http://www.cgw.com/images/). Qualifies as fair use under copyright laws – low resolution.

Trolls do one good thing, though. They remind us there are millions of people who want to sleepwalk through life unaware of power, privilege and injustice. Or maybe, they’ve become addicted to their own misery and narcissism. So though we may want to strangle them, the best way to deal with them is with a swarm of our own, to ignore, block and check them at every turn. Too bad we can’t also use an EMP on them.

Racism Doesn’t Care What Year It Is

09 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Movies, music, Politics, Pop Culture, Youth

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

"And The Beat Goes On" (1979), "I Have A Dream" speech, "We Shall Overcome", Bigotry, Civil Rights Act, Individual Racism, Institutional Racism, Internet, James Byrd, Jonathan Ferrell, Laws, Marissa Alexander, MOVE, Oppression, Philadelphia PD, Racism, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Social Justice, Social Media, Sophia Stewart, Structural Racism, Technology, Television, The Matrix (1999), The Whispers, Trayvon Martin, Voting Rights Act, Wachowski Siblings, Yusef Hawkins

Joel Ward in celebration with Washington Capitals teammates after scoring game/series winning goal in Round 1 of Stanley Cup Playoffs against Boston Bruins (all while fans chanted racial slurs), April 26, 2012. (http://www.flightunit.com/).

One of the many throwaway sentences I’ve heard and read for almost all of my life has increasingly driven me more nuts over the years. In response to a racist statement or incident, an interviewee on the air or someone writing a column will say, “It’s 1984!” or “This is 2006!,” with “and we’re still putting up with this?” or “and we’re still dealing with” racism or bigotry to finish the thought. It’s the one phrase you can expect anyone White, Black, Latino, Asian and/or American Indian to use when interviewed or with access to a public platform. As if the year in which racial injustice and bigotry manifests itself actually matters!

Seriously, did people think that marches, speeches and laws alone would end up killing the complex and morphing structure of American racism that’s existed for more than three centuries? Did we really think that singing “We Shall Overcome” and quoting Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech would allow individual Whiteness and hatred to melt away? Was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 somehow supposed to end all race-based discrimination, even when fully enforced (of course, the federal government has never fully enforced these laws)?

Picture of Michael Griffith, killed by car after group of Whites in Howard Beach, Queens attempted to beat him and his friends with baseball bats on December 20, 1986. (Denis Hamill; http://nydailynews.com).

Yes, we live in an ultra-modern age, where my generation and my son’s generation know more about the world, the universe and life than my mother and grandfather’s generations. But having more knowledge often means that we as humans tend to be more destructive toward each other before becoming wise enough to end that specific pattern of destruction. Or, as has often been the case in human history, until a new group comes along and topples one structure of oppression before implementing a new and sometimes kinder and gentler one.

To think about it another way, just because we’re technologically advanced and more scientifically driven doesn’t mean that humans in general — and Americans specifically — will act rationally and change their behaviors. Especially if it involves giving up an advantage — real or perceived — in the process.

Even though we invented the atomic bomb in 1945, it didn’t stop us from using it against the Japanese or racist White rednecks from beating to death Black veterans of World War II. Though we had television sets in nearly every American home in the 1960s, it didn’t stop Bull Conner from unleashing dogs and turning fire hoses on Black kids in Birmingham, Alabama, Medgar Evers from getting shot in Mississippi or Selma, Alabama marchers from getting beat up. And though we were poised to land on the Moon in July ’69, it didn’t mean that James Earl Ray wouldn’t take a moment to blow away Dr. King fifteen months earlier.

The first oracle from The Matrix (1999, 2003), played by the late Gloria Foster, February 9, 2014. (http://matrix.wikia.com).

In my own lifetime, there’s been more of this lag between knowledge, self-interest and racism. From Yusef Hawkins in Bensonhurst in ’89 to James Byrd being beaten, chained and dragged behind a pickup truck in Jasper, Texas in ’98. From the Philly PD’s bombing of MOVE and the community around it in ’85 to Hurricane Katrina in ’05. Not to mention individual incidents and distinctions, like Trayvon Martin, Marissa Alexander and Jonathan Ferrell. As the ’70s hit by The Whispers goes, “And The Beat Goes On.” We have the Internet, social media, the ability to mobilize outrage and righteous indignation into demonstrations for human rights and social justice. But the human capacity to build oppressive institutions remains, as well as our capacity to hate.

But, to quote The Oracle from The Matrix trilogy (1999-2003), not to mention Buddha, “Everything that has a beginning has an End,” right? Of course, that quote might well have been inspired by a story written by Sophia Stewart in ’81, whom the Wachowski siblings apparently plagiarized in making their multi-billion dollar films. Again, why does the year racism manifests itself matter?

What I Didn’t Know (in ’81, in ’97, in ’13)…

18 Saturday May 2013

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

616 East Lincoln Avenue, Anticipation, Back Stabbers, Bruce Anthony Jones, Child Abuse, CMU, Domestic Violence, Family, Hustling, Joe Trotter, Joe William Trotter Jr., Not Knowing, O'Jays, Pitt, Poverty, Publishing, Success, The Matrix (1999), Welfare Poverty, Wisdom, Writing

Noah with me, January 3, 2004 [he was five months old]. (Angelia N. Levy).

Noah with me, February 28, 2004 [he was seven months old]. (Angelia N. Levy).

What I didn’t know across the past thirty-two years could be another book for me. I assume that would be the case for anyone would could look back across their life and second-guess themselves over that long a period of time. For me, though, the significance of today comes out of my mathematics background. You see, today’s my sixteenth PhD graduation anniversary. Not all that significant, I suppose. Except that I’m as far away from the end of my graduate school days at Carnegie Mellon today as I was from the first days of being a Hebrew-Israelite and watching my family fall into welfare poverty when I graduated in ’97.

100th Commencement Ceremony program, Carnegie Mellon University, May 18, 1997. (Donald Earl Collins).

Two things will hurt your success in this life. One is not acting on the things you know you should or must do. I learned that hard lesson from watching my mother make the decision to not make any decisions until it was too late, all while growing up at 616. Two is the enormous danger of not knowing, and therefore, not being able to act or respond to new or damaging situations as they arise. I’ve learned that lesson pretty well, too. Sometimes the hard way, through really bad experiences or decisions I didn’t play out like a game of eleventh-dimension chess. Sometimes through insight, foresight, even divine inspiration, anticipating what I didn’t know ahead of time.

And even with anticipation, you still might not be able to do anything about what you do and don’t know, simply because you’re not in any position to change things. That was especially true in ’81. I knew that my now deceased idiot ex-stepfather Maurice Washington was no good. But when my Mom decided to end her six months’ separation from him, there was nothing I could really do about it. I knew that with inflation rates of 14.5 percent in ’79 and 11.8 percent in ’80 (thank you, Scholastic Weekly Reader) and my Mom income of roughly $15,000 per year that we had less and less to work with at home. Again, not much I could do about that, either. Even paper boy jobs were drying up by the time I turned twelve!

O’Jays Back Stabbers (1972) album cover, November 10, 2011. (Dan56 via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use as low-resolution illustration of subject matter.

What I didn’t know was how quick and violent the shift into poverty would be. What I didn’t know was that Maurice would use his/our conversion as Hebrew-Israelites as justification for abusing my Mom and me. What I didn’t know was that my Mom would have three more kids by this man between July ’81 and May ’84. What I didn’t know was that I would feel so low about the loss of my best friend and my sense of self that I’d attempt to take my own life on my fourteenth birthday, at the end of ’83.

But when I looked back on this in ’97, I mostly thought about the good things that had occurred in the fifteen years between the domestic violence my Mom endured on Memorial Day ’82 and my doctoral graduation ceremony. My independent conversion to Christianity in ’84. Knocking out a 5 on my AP US History exam without ever cracking open Morison and Commager. Overcoming poverty and my lack of self-esteem to build a life at Pitt and in Pittsburgh between ’88 and ’97.

Still, I’d already been wounded, badly. By the things I knew but did nothing about. By those things I could’ve anticipated but my efforts to counteract were insufficient. By those things I couldn’t have known at all. I knew I’d have problems with my “running interference” advisor Joe Trotter coming down the dissertation stretch. Yet because of departmental politics and my need to be done sooner rather than later, I did nothing about this until I was six chapters into an eight-chapter dissertation. I knew my mentor and committee member Bruce Anthony Jones could sometimes be unreliable. Yet I had no idea that he would completely abandon me and his other doctoral students the moment he signed his name to my and their dissertations.

My dissertation’s signature page, May 18, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins),

Most of all, I never anticipated that my Mom would actually be jealous of me, and would spend a whole week with me at 616 and in Pittsburgh doing and saying things to completely disparage what I’d worked so hard for. For me, for her, for my family. That was hard to get over. There are times I’m not sure if I’m entirely over this yet.

What I’m sure of in ’13, though, is what I do know, don’t know, and can only anticipate with the wisdom of experience and wisdom beyond my experience. I know that I love my wife, that there’s a lot in common between her and Crush #1 (for those of you who’ve read Boy @ The Window so far, the implications should be obvious), real and from my own imagination. I didn’t know that I’d have a kid, a son who at nearly ten is both wonderful and perplexing, and hopefully, off to a much better start in life than I ever got. I suspect that one of my references for jobs and consulting gigs has been undermining my efforts over the past five years, and have thus removed her as a reference.

What I don’t know — but can only hope and work like a dog toward — is whether Boy @ The Window will be a success. I’m not sure if quantifying it would help. I sold a thousand copies of Fear of a “Black” America between August ’04 and January ’07, without the benefit of this blog, Twitter, Facebook or the e-book platforms. How long before I sell my first hundred, thousand, 5,000 or more? I have no idea. But as they say, I “must walk the path, not just know it.”