Tag Archives: Whiteness

What Remains in the Ashes…

05 Saturday Mar 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Unbearable Whiteness of White Proximity Fuses, Part II

03 Saturday Jul 2021

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, eclectic music, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Front cover of my copy of Rebecca Carroll’s Surviving the White Gaze, July 3, 2021. (Donald Earl Collins)

The other and more direct parallel with Carroll’s journal in Surviving the White Gaze that comes to mind was someone I worked and went to school with at the University of Pittsburgh. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call her Heather, because I can no longer recall her name. She was a Black/biracial young woman from Erie, Pennsylvania, adopted by a white couple as a baby. I met her my third year at Pitt in 1989, when she was a freshman. We worked together for a while on a psychological epidemiology project that the great Juan Mezzich ran, as part of a larger project to revise the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (turning the then-DSM-IIIR into the DSM-IV) and the International Classification of Diseases (turning the ICD-9 into the ICD-10). Aside from the fact that I thought Heather was cute, the first thing I noticed about her was her hair. It had been straightened, permed, and blown out beyond all recognition of a curl. Even at 19, I knew immediately that she was biracial, and didn’t have a Black woman who knew how to do her hair in her life.

I didn’t say a word. It wouldn’t have mattered if I did. Heather was very much standoff-ish, to me and the couple of other Black and Brown students who staffed up the project. She got along extremely well with the White students and staff, though. She rarely said hello when I saw her outside of Western Psych, on or off campus. Honestly, I felt sorry for her.

In the summer of 1991, when I became a full-time staff member on another of Mezzich’s projects, I worked with Heather for a few weeks. This was when I learned more about her upbringing and extremely limited exposure to Black folk. The questions she would ask about what I listened to on my Walkman, songs by Anita Baker, PE, Earth, Wind & Fire, even Phil Collins. She was maybe two years younger than me, and only knew ‘70s and ‘80s rock. Wow.

But, one day, Heather or another staff member had asked me a question — I don’t remember who asked, or what the question was. It one with a historical component, which I answered in typical granular exactitude, because, me. “Are you autistic or something?,” Heather immediately blurted out, as if I had some disease she had yet to see first-hand. “If by autistic, you mean the Rain Man movie? No, I just have a very good memory,” I answered back, rhetorically, with irritation and a bit of side eye. “Oh, I didn’t mean to offend you,” Heather continued, and then she went on for several minutes about why she thought I was autistic. 

I was gobsmacked by Heather’s entitled ignorance and by the racist and ableist implications of her questions and response. Seriously? I’ve been living on my own, mostly successfully navigating the world since I was 17, adulting since I was 12, and somehow I’m Dustin Hoffman with the most serious form of this neuro-social illness, all because my memory is stronger than a bank vault made of titanium and cobalt? And all this because I’m probably the first Black guy you’ve met with a bachelor’s degree from anywhere other than podunk Western Pennsylvania? All this and more ran like a chyron in my brain as I listened to Heather, now sensing my ire, stumbling over her words to make herself sound like she knew what she was talking about.

There were more than a few places in Carroll’s book where I saw the girl and the young woman that I saw in Heather, taking all of her assumptions about Blackness, about Black people, about whiteness and race, and applying them, often in damaging ways. I was absolutely disgusted at what Carroll and Tess did to her one-time English professor and advisor at the University of New Hampshire. I literally stopped reading Surviving the White Gaze for a week afterward. How could you?!?, I thought. Even with zero exposure to Black men, you had to know you put this man’s job in jeopardy over a minor utterance. You had to know that Tess’ vitriol toward him was about him not finding her intellectually interesting, or worse still, rebuffing potential flirtations. As a professor teaching mostly white students off and on for nearly three decades, I know this part all too well.

Carroll gradually embraced and uncovered her Blackness, over time, through years of alcoholism and eating disorders and fresh traumas from folks White and Black in her life. Her experience, though, is all too uniquely common from where I sit. There is the all too common story of someone the product of a Black-White relationship stumbling through life to discover their true selves and their Blackness, a story that is sadly still so easy to sell to a white-dominated book publishing industry and to a white-reading audience. But even for this sub-genre, Carroll’s willingness to reveal more than she conceals is really necessary, even as it feeds the beast, because she is still a work-in-progress at 52. 

There is also the all-too-common assumption that Black folk who aren’t raised by white parents or the product of a biracial pairing somehow don’t have any identity issues at all. Seriously? Anyone ever read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye? We live in a white-dominant society, with white supremacy and white-ways as its main, everyday features. While most Black folk know and love their Blackness, it does not mean there isn’t a struggle to secure our identities as Black folk. Proximity to white people, class privilege, gender, age, and more play a role into the growing-pains-trajectory of how each of us gets to be comfortable in our own skin (or not). 

As for Wendy and Heather, it’s difficult to say where they are on their own trajectories. I haven’t spoken to either of them in years, decades in Heather’s case. But last time I saw Heather, it was May 1995 at a Pharmor store in the East Liberty section of Pittsburgh. I had just received my Spencer Fellowship award to write my dissertation. Heather was different, too. Her hair had gloss and curls, and her clothes fit better. We ended up talking for a few minutes, with me wishing her well. In thinking about this moment, I’ve wondered if Heather ever fully embraced her Blackness. In my imaginations, I think of her as having done so.

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

04 Saturday Jan 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Grace,” #MeToo, and Our Binary World

20 Saturday Jan 2018

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Water buffaloes in mud, January 2017. (http://reddit.com).

Part of me knows that some of you will assume that I shouldn’t be discussing this on my blog at all. I’m a man, a Black man, a middle-aged Black man, so what do I know, really? I haven’t been on a date with anyone other than my wife since 1995. And my own history with hypermasculinity and sexism combined with my exposure to patriarchy and misogyny should disqualify me from making any comments on Babe.net’s “Grace” piece, right?

But I do have a few things to say. That is, after a week of reading tweets, articles, Facebook posts, as well as conversations with my wife and a couple of friends. Most of the divide has been between those adamant that “Grace” was a #MeToo victim of some form of sexual violation and those who believed that her evening with Aziz Ansari was little more than a bad date. This is yet another time in which the American penchant for seeing the world as white or black, or in computer code, as 0s or 1s, can literally blind most from the truth. Both sides are sort of right and sort of wrong. And like an electron (which can be in two places seemingly at once), this isn’t a binary issue. It’s a both-and situation.

Either-or thinking, December 2014. (http://survivingchurch.org).

Ansari was a doggish pig. Period. His intent with “Grace” was purely sexual. He saw her as a piece of meat (or, really, a “piece of ass”). That would explain both Ansari’s words and actions as Katie Way wrote them last week. Does that make his sexist? Of course!

Ansari also tried to persuade “Grace” into full-blown intercourse a couple of times after she had expressed her uncomfortability with moving beyond kissing, oral sex, and other fondling. Coercive behave is also doggish, venturing toward the misogynistic. All of this is true, and is certainly part of how entitlement and patriarchy can work together in sexual relationships.

Context, however, is always important in any situation. Especially one that isn’t as cut and dry as what Way described regarding “Grace” and her Ansari date. So many have harped on the idea that questioning “Grace’s” decision-making in any form is the equivalent of what misogynists do to rape victims. Not true. Not when the power dynamic is limited and diffuse at best. Not when Ansari never used physical coercion or the threat thereof to get the sex he obviously wanted.

And certainly not when “Grace’s” actions didn’t line up with her word. Some have argued about the inability of men to read the subliminal subtext of women when they are saying “No” or “I’m leaning toward no.” And for many men, this may well be the case. For so many women, being too direct may well lead to a verbal or physical confrontation with a misogynistic man. But that negates the context of Way’s piece. “Grace’s” physical responses and cues throughout the sexual encounter either belied her words, or her words were simply unclear.

Truth is, after their first try, Ansari should’ve not only just stopped, which he did. He should’ve also immediately called “Grace” a cab and sent her home. But in even writing this, isn’t this as much a form of ceding power to patriarchy as it would be a sign of sexual maturity, at least on Ansari’s part? 

Truth is, “Grace” should’ve also have been clearer with herself about what she wanted from her date. And should’ve just ended the date, rudely, discreetly, with clearer words and clearer actions, either at the restaurant or after the first sign of being uncomfortable. Because feminism is about taking charge of one’s own womanhood, and not just merely resisting patriarchy and misogyny with mealy-mouthed language.

Truth is, “Grace” had very different expectations of Ansari and that one-and-only date. The kind of expectations that are a bit immature, especially for a women who thinks that “[y]ou guys are all the same. You guys are all the fucking same.” That the main divide among women who’ve commented on “Grace” is age (with the over-under around 35 years old) is telling. Some will say that women (especially younger women) shouldn’t put up with legal yet boorish behavior, either. So don’t!

Truth is, “Grace’s” story via Way’s article is a hit piece, a sort of revenge for Ansari bursting her internalized image of him as one of the few “good guys.” “Grace” got to violate Ansari’s private life because she was enraged that Ansari saw her as little more than a piece of sexual meat. And while Ansari showed himself on this date with “Grace” to be a sexist pig, this isn’t a #MeToo moment.

Unless, of course, we distance ourselves from context, privilege, and intersectionality. Most assume that “Grace” was a 22-year-old White woman. Probably. But even if not, Way’s article about “Grace” is drowning in Whiteness. Especially when considering “Grace’s” relatively lofty expectations that Ansari would be different from other men. Especially when taking the approach that she wanted Ansari to calm her down after the awkwardness of their first sexual try. What made “Grace” think that he was so different? What made her actions as confusing as they were?

A lock of blonde hair (an allusion to Pope’s Rape of the Lock), June 18, 2013. (http://allure.com).

The Sturm und Drang over this hit piece reminds me of when I read Alexander Pope’s mock epic poem The Rape of the Lock in tenth grade. I might not remember much from Mrs. Buckley’s otherwise boring-ass English class in 1984-85, but I do remember the story of how a war started because a baron cut a lock of Belinda’s hair and kept it. It’s also typical of how race riots and lynchings of Black men often occurred, over perceived slights and embarrassing winks.

Speaking of intersectionality, where have all the “Grace” defenders been this week on serious #MeToo issues? Where have they been on Jade Martin for the past week, as a video of her assault at the hands of a Pizza Milano manager in Pittsburgh went viral, an instance of both racism and misogyny? Where have they been on the sentencing phase for Larry Nassar, a man who sexually assault over 100 young women and girls over decades? Where are they on the Rohingya, as the Myanmar security forces have admitted killing and raping women and children while driving them out of the country?

No, for so many privileged, younger, and White American women, a bad sexual encounter with a man whose sexual sexism was obvious is more important that the felony assault of a Black women for wanting to use the bathroom. The last week has shown yet again the racial, ethnic, class, and even age divide that has plagued #MeToo ever since it became more about White women and less about marginalized women and people.

Black Power Generation

24 Wednesday Feb 2016

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Black Panther national chairman Bobby Seale, wearing a Colt .45 and defense minister Huey Newton with a bandolier and shotgun, poster, Oakland, CA, 1968. (AP via http://pbs.org).

Black Panther national chairman Bobby Seale, wearing a Colt .45 and defense minister Huey Newton with a bandolier and shotgun, poster, Oakland, CA, 1968. (AP via http://pbs.org).

This year marks a half-century since the official shift of the Civil Rights Era from the traditional Civil Rights leadership of the Black Church toward one of “Black Power.” Between Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Touré’s famous 1966 speech, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale’s founding of the Black Panther Party that October, and riots that began with Watts in L.A. the year before, this was a pivotal year in American and African American history. Of course, as historians and other scholars like Peniel Joseph and Alondra Nelson have illuminated in recent years, while 1966 was a pivotal year, it was not a departure from a long history of the Black freedom struggle, but part a continuity. For Joseph and Nelson (not to mention, Robin D. G. Kelley and Michael Eric Dyson), Black Power was a continuation of radical ideas and actions in order to stand in opposition to American capitalism and racism as an intertwined system of oppression. The roots of which go at least as far back as Black sharecroppers and their union organizing efforts during the Great Depression, if not in fact to the radicalism of Martin Delany of the 1850s.

These wonderful scholars are absolutely right to dump the simplistic narrative of Black Power as a symbol of/departure from the struggle for civil rights or as a philosophy that advocates violence against Whites, especially Whites in law enforcement. They are also more than right to point out how Black Power and the Black Panther Party did way more good on a policy level than most Americans would ever give their leaders credit for. Fred Hampton and Newton and the Free Breakfast for School Children Program that started in Chicago and Oakland between 1969 and 1972. The People’s Free Medical Centers (PFMC), Free Ambulance Service, and other direct community involvement to provide free access to health care and screenings for thousands of impoverished Black families. Free food programs for the destitute.

Angela Davis on Newsweek cover after 1970 arrest, October 26, 1970. (http://pinterest.com). Qualifies as fair use due to adjustments for low resolution.

Angela Davis on Newsweek cover after 1970 arrest, October 26, 1970. (http://pinterest.com). Qualifies as fair use due to adjustments for low resolution.

But more than that. The idea that Black communities could work to provide services and opportunities otherwise denied to them by American society was to be a major takeaway from this era of the overall Black freedom struggle. And of course, the idea that police served as an oppressive occupying force, and that Black citizens had every right to defend themselves against police brutality. Though direct armed struggle with law enforcement was in the Black Panther Party toolbox, the notion of policing the police, community control over schools, a community using its available resources, is still more positive than negative. These remain implementable ideas that have and do provide an outlet to the daily grind of racial discrimination and deep poverty in so many parts of the US.

Culturally, the freedom struggle as expressed through Black Power and the Black Panther Party, particularly by leaders like Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, Amiri Baraka, and Kwame Touré, was one of what we know would call Afrocentricity today. This was/is far more than wearing Afros, daishikis, sea shells and beads (or for that matter, black turtlenecks and tight pants). It would mean advocating for and getting universities (both predominantly White universities and HBCUS) to adopt Black Studies programs. It would mean influencing a whole generation of Black artists (the arts, music, and cinema) to adopt a “I’m Black and proud” stance in their work, from Marvin Gaye and the Lost Poets and Gil Scott Heron, to movies like Shaft and that first mainstream miniseries, Roots.

The Black Power Generation (kind of like Prince and The Revolution that tried to incorporate a mesh of messages between 1979 and 1986), for all of the elements that survived Huey Newton and his purges of the 1970s and early 1980s — not to mention their continuing influence in American pop culture, in Black intellectual thought, and in Black movements in general — was hardly perfect. Some, like the late Kwame Touré, promoted Black Power as a sort of authentic Blackness, a kind in which one had to buy all of the options on the table in order to be authentic. The “Uncle Tom” accusation or its equivalent was thrown at Martin Luther King, Whitney Young, Arthur Ashe, and others whose support of Black Power was less that full-throated. Not to mention, the tensions between leaders within the Black Panther Party and among African American intellectuals who attempted to ride the wave of Black Power, as nearly forgotten Black intellectuals Harold Cruse and Nathan Wright, Jr. noted in the late-1960s.

Gemasolar Thermosolar Plant (solar power concentration, converting solar energy to thermal turbine power generation), Fuentes de Andalucía, Seville province, Spain, June 22, 2014. (Wikipedia via http://vice.com).

Gemasolar Thermosolar Plant (solar power concentration, converting solar energy to thermal turbine power generation), Fuentes de Andalucía, Seville province, Spain, June 22, 2014. (Wikipedia via http://vice.com).

That lingering legacy of Black Power is part of its appeal and one of its limits — the ability to redefine ourselves and retell our history in a way that brings nuance and truth. But nuance and truth are not always absolutes. In many respects, Black Power over the generations shares a similarity with Marxist thought and action. Just as Marxism represents a dialectical opposition to capitalist oppression, Black Power has always represented a dialectical resistance to Whiteness and the racist/capitalist oppression that comes with Whiteness. It just doesn’t represent the only form of resistance there is, at least not as Newton, Touré, and others lived their resistance. Black Power is more than resistance, and more than just an amorphous idea standing in opposition to Whiteness. It’s just not the only form of Blackness there is. My own upbringing would be a further testimony to this (to be continued…).

My Private Aftermath of the O.J. Simpson Verdict 20 Years Ago

01 Thursday Oct 2015

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

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O.J. Simpson with his attorneys F. Lee Bailey (left) and the late Johnnie Cochran (right) after being found not guilty, October 3 1995. (Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Daily News/AP, via http://theguardian.com)

O.J. Simpson with his attorneys F. Lee Bailey (left) and the late Johnnie Cochran (right) after being found not guilty, October 3 1995. (Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Daily News/AP, via http://theguardian.com)

To think that it’s only been two decades since the overhyped “Trial of the Century” came to a close with a clerk’s initial mispronunciation of Orenthal James Simpson’s first name. And of course, with O.J. Simpson’s acquittal. It’s amazing to think that so many would become so emotionally caught up in a double-homicide case involving what at one time was one of the world’s most recognizable faces. But it did happen, all of it in a sixteen-month span, and the reaction was as predictable as the sunrise, racial profiling, and police harassment.

During the Ford Bronco chase on I-5 on Friday, June 17 (during my Knicks’ Game 5 of the NBA Finals against the Houston Rockets), I hoped that the police wouldn’t shoot Simpson before he had a chance to go to trial. The L.A. riots were just two years before. I feared that the issue of race would be front and center, with Simpson’s issues with his now dead White ex-wife.

O.J. Simpson on the covers of Newsweek and Time Magazine, (the picture on right altered to make Simpson appear darker and caused an outcry), June 27, 1994. (Theo's Little Bot via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use due to low resolution of image and relevance to subject matter.

O.J. Simpson on the covers of Newsweek and Time Magazine, (the picture on right altered to make Simpson appear darker and caused an outcry), June 27, 1994. (Theo’s Little Bot via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use due to low resolution of image and relevance to subject matter.

I was naive, thinking that our world of ’94 would simply attempt to determine if Simpson was guilty or innocent. Instead what I saw within ten days of the Bronco chase was an artificially darkened Simpson on the cover of Time. I saw Blacks who became angrier about the coverage, even as Whites grew more confident about Simpson being convicted, losing his fortune and fame, and possibly getting the death penalty (or at least, life imprisonment). My Mom proclaimed that O.J. was innocent long before the prosecution botched the trial. Some of my grad school colleagues — all White, mind you — made all kinds of assumptions about where I stood on O.J. They didn’t like the fact that I was willing to wait until the trial to make up my mind.

When the verdict came down on Tuesday, October 3, 1995, it was stunning to watch ecstatic Blacks and angry, dejected Whites react to the “Not Guilty” verdict. And not just on TV, although it was obvious newsrooms were actively looking for a racial divide. My friend James (who’s Black, by the way) from my Pitt grad school days spent his lunch break in my apartment gritting his teeth in anger as the verdict was read. I was more shocked than anything else. I smiled, but it was one of bewilderment observing the reactions, as if we all had some deeply personal stake in the trial and verdict.

That smile disappeared as I went through my day editing and printing out chapter drafts of my dissertation. That was my real focus, not the soap opera enveloping the rest of the country. Late that afternoon, I went to Carnegie Mellon to drop off a draft of a couple of those chapters for my thesis advisor Joe Trotter. Carl, a colleague of mine, one who I had called a friend up to this point, immediately started in on me about the verdict when I reached the grad student cubicles in the History Department. He kept literally spewing the media’s line about an all-Black jury, about jury nullification, about Johnnie Cochran. Carl was in a rage, belligerent, possibly drunk, and seemingly ready to throw down. Seriously, aside from showing up to drop off dissertation chapters, what did I do?

I politely pointed out that the jury was mostly, but not all Black (at least three members were White or Latino), and that the prosecution led by Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden left the door wide open for an acquittal. Carl assumed wrongly that I wanted O.J. free regardless of his “obvious guilt.” I asked my colleague what else could the jury do, given the compelling defense put together by the late Johnnie Cochran, the mistakes with forensics, with the glove, with putting Mark Fuhrman on the stand? I said that “I don’t represent all thirty million African Americans in this country,” and that “our conversation is over.”

Mary J. Blige, No More Drama (with extra tracks) album cover, 2002. (http://amazon.com).

Mary J. Blige, No More Drama (with extra tracks) album cover, 2002. (http://amazon.com).

That reminded me of how irrational supposedly rational, forward-thinking Whites often are on race matters. They either ignore, deny, or when compelled by some betrayal or injustice, badger, threaten and retaliate in response. Carl that day was no exception. I found that incident unsettling because this supposed friend was one of the few folks at Carnegie Mellon who had earned my trust. It reminded me if I were to ever date or marry someone White (not exactly my plan), there would be hell to pay. I had a grand total of three conversations with Carl after that between October 3, 1995 and August 6, 1999, the latter the week before I left Pittsburgh to live in suburban DC/Maryland.

I’m sure that I wasn’t the only Black person who had to confront Whiteness in all of its angry, hurt and juvenile forms in those first two weeks of October ’95. I’m equally sure that if the O.J. Simpson trial’s verdict occurred in 2015, Carl and his like-minded ilk would’ve set off race riots the likes of which this country hasn’t seen since Detroit in 1943, Tulsa in 1921, and Chicago in 1919. You know, the kind where Whites go into segregated Black communities and rape, kill, steal and destroy as much as they can. To me, Carl just represented the White privilege and resentment of millions, smoldering yet ready to erupt at a moment’s notice. Not that many haven’t benefited from the O.J. Simpson effect in the years since.

Carl has a professorship somewhere in New York these days, and we are professional colleagues who maybe exchange an email one or twice a decade now. I’m sure, though, that he avoids the topic of race in US history like most would want to avoid catching Ebola. Especially given his reaction to one jury verdict twenty years ago.

Aside

Running Away, 30 Years Later

25 Tuesday Aug 2015

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, music, My Father, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Today’s date marks three decades since I took on my idiot stepfather Maurice Washington, and actually won, even though I didn’t realize it at the time. I’ve written about the incident and my twenty-three-hour trek through Mount Vernon, my dreams, prayers, and wishes, and my confrontation before, here and in Boy @ The Window. (Even now, the baseline to Pharcyde’s “Runnin'” (1995) is running in my head, temporarily replacing my writing theme song for the past week, Maverick Sabre’s “Emotion (Ain’t Nobody)” (2011), but that’s how my mind works). So I won’t go over all of the details again. Still, there are a few important takeaways that puts Sunday, August 25, 1985 in my lifetime victory column.

Michigan WR Jeremy Gallon's spin move gif on way to a 61-yd TD against Notre Dame, Ann Arbor, MI, September 7, 2013. (http://thebiglead.com/).

Michigan WR Jeremy Gallon’s spin move gif on way to a 61-yd TD against Notre Dame, Ann Arbor, MI, September 7, 2013. (http://thebiglead.com/).

1. Physical advantages. It never occurred to me until Maurice tried to blindside me in the apartment hallway with a punch that I had much faster reflexes than the idiot. It also never occurred to me that I had a better sense of balance. I managed to avoid the punch and spin around him by using his 350-400 pounds of bulk against him (I really hated having to touch the unwashed, greasy fat frog of a man), and in only a foot of space between the two of us. That’s how I escaped Maurice’s punch and grasp, and got out of the apartment to begin my trek. Knowing what I know now, I should’ve tried out for basketball instead of baseball in eleventh grade.

2. Not finding my father. I kind of wished I had, just to have a few hours that day not to think about my present and future. But my alcoholic dad was a significant part of my present, and his absence gave me real time to think about how jacked up my family life was. I knew, if nothing else, that Maurice, Mom, and Jimme couldn’t pin that on me.

3. Walking up Gramatan Avenue and into Fleetwood. It was partly a walk that reminded me about how the other half of Mount Vernon — affluent and predominantly White — lived. I knew that I’d never be a part of that Mount Vernon, and not just because most of them would run me over with a car sooner than say “Hello.” It was the sense of exclusively, the ability to check in and out of progressive issues, like Humanities and magnet programs, that made me see. These folks I could never befriend.

St. Ursulas Roman Catholic Church, 213 East Lincoln Avenue, Mount Vernon, NY, August 2012. (http://maps.google.com).

St. Ursulas Roman Catholic Church, 213 East Lincoln Avenue, Mount Vernon, NY, August 2012. (http://maps.google.com).

4. MVHS overnight dreams and Catholic church prayers. Both reminded me that if I played my cards right, I could be on my way to college in two years, twenty-four months, 730 days. I could cope with 616, Maurice, my older brother Darren and my younger siblings and high school and Humanities for that much longer, I thought. But I also knew I needed to make a conscious, almost single-minded effort to do so. Even then, I was tired of burying my thoughts and emotions and playing the role of enigmatic weirdo, though. I realized this was going to be a battle with myself.

Yet what I didn’t learn from my ordeal would also be two more reasons to leave Mount Vernon. I wouldn’t learn those reasons and lessons until the spring and summer of ’87, when the respectability police, the good middle class folk of Black Mount Vernon, would give me just the push I needed…