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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Tag Archives: Writing

Reasons and Blessings

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Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, earth, wind & fire, Eclectic, eclectic music, music, Work

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Al Jazeera, Baltimore, Blessings, Blogging Break, Gigs, Loyola University Maryland, Opportunity, Teaching, UMBC, Writing


The past three months have been a roller coaster ride. I’ve been blessed with new opportunities to teach and to write. For the next year, I am a visiting assistant teaching professor in African American and US history at Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore. The search committee offered me the job just a week after I turned in my final grades for the Spring 2022 semester at American University, and just two days after the start of summer session. I was honestly more stunned than happy at that moment — lack of sleep and constant grading will do that!

Then, a few weeks later, as the reality of having an official full-time teaching position set in (I have taught full-time before, but only temporarily, without benefits, and/or with two universities that combined for full-time), Al Jazeera came along and offered me a regular contributor gig for their Opinions page. After 19 articles over five years, I am to publish an article every two weeks for the third largest news outlet in the world. Pretty heady stuff, for sure!

In between, my son finished up his gap year (really, his mostly year-long vacation) with an acceptance to University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC, or as I like to do in the late asshole Don Imus’ voice, double-U-eMMM-BC) the second week in June. It was the school of his choice, meaning no more excuses for bad interviews, no more hemming and hawing over finding volunteer work or applying for City Year. Yay, him! And, yay us!

All these blessings (and thank God, of course!) have meant a lot of changes in the family, too. For the first time since April 1999, there will be no specific focus on DC, not for work, not for school, not for commuting, not even for shopping or food deliveries (there’s a Cheesecake Factory between Silver Spring and Towson). Maybe this will revert in a year, maybe not. But it means spending more time in Baltimore and in Baltimore County than I ever have.

For this blog, it means ever longer stretches between posts. There are maybe five months in 14 years where I haven’t blogged at all. June was the fifth time. Between my own freelance writing agenda and now this regular gig with Al Jazeera English, I simply no longer have the time to blog three or four times a month. And, as my themes have expanded from the themes of Boy @ The Window to pretty much everything else, my blog posts will be sporadic and infrequent. I am not ready to shut down the blog just yet. But it will be a less active space for the next year or so.

I do promise to keep it going, a blog once every six to eight weeks, or as I am motivated to comment on a key anniversary or a critical in-the-moment issue or incident. There are also more than 1,000 posts here, and a collection of my published and unpublished writings. Not to mention, eclectic music and my goofball videos! 

To my regular readers and to those who read and comment out of the blue, I will miss hearing from you. But hopefully, less is more, and I will check in to see if this truism is true for this blog as well. Peace and blessings to you all!

What Remains in the Ashes…

05 Saturday Mar 2022

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

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Academia, Apathy, Capitalism, Family, Intervention, Jealousy, Miscellaneous, Mother-Son Relationship, Pandemic, Racism, Sarai, Siblings, Students, Teaching and Learning, Unions, Whiteness, Writing


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

29 Saturday Jan 2022

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Politics, race, Work

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Academia, Chris Hayes, CMU, Elitism, Genius, Journalism, Mediocrity, Pitt, Racism, Ross Douthat, Thomas Friedman, Whitemansplaining, Writing


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While My PhD’s Getting Cold…

21 Sunday Nov 2021

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Bruce Anthony Jones, Career Paths, CMU, Dan Resnick, Failure, Joe William Trotter Jr., Lessons Learned, Petty Jealousy, Pitt, Self-Loathing, Self-Reflection, Success, Writing


Cold, lumpy grits, September 26, 2013. (HuffPost via Flickr: Marshall Astor – Food Fetishist).

I have been Dr. Donald Earl Collins for almost half my life. (It will be exactly half my life on October 11 or October 12 of next year, a couple of months before my 53rd birthday.) Only a small handful of things have brought me more pain, failure, and momentary triumphs than earning the PhD during the 1996-97 school year. But while writing is a profession that pays, I am still paying off the debt I generated earning this degree, literally and figuratively. This debt is something I will not pass on. I hope my life has more meaning than earning this degree ever took away.

Friday morning, November 22, 1996, I checked my email just after getting out of bed. Since the beginning of that August, after banging out a full second draft of my dissertation, I knew. Since the end of that July, really, after spending eight hours combing every iteration of every chapter of my doctoral thesis for comments from my advisor I missed, I knew. Since my advisor’s one-page response three weeks later to my six-page memo detailing every change, revision, dressed-up lie, obfuscated statistic, and glossed-over fact, I knew. Really, it was moot on October 23, when my other two committee members both approved it and knew, too.

That Friday morning before Thanksgiving 1996, Professor Joe William Trotter, Jr. sent me a rare email, officially signing off on me becoming Dr. Collins with the words, “It is done.” It was anticlimactic, but it was also freeing at the same time. Yay, me, right?

Not so much. I was a month away from possibly leaving my PhD work behind. That was how much Trotter and the whole process of petty jealous and verbal abuse and threats had taken their toll. To know that my advisor did not support any endeavors to give my career a boost, including the Spencer Fellowship that I won despite his lukewarm letter on my behalf. To feel so betrayed that I felt solace dreaming of wrapping piano wire around his throat from behind and pulling until I spilled his blood and death occurred. It should have been a sign for moving on to something less soul-destroying. But I prayed. I persevered. I finished what I started. 

And I lost the thread for why I started in the first place. I went to graduate school to become a writer with enough knowledge and authority in my expertise to not be challenged in whatever writing project I decided to take on post-PhD. Boy was I a naive, dumb-ass 21-year-old! I ruined my writing for more than a decade as a result of this path. It took me until my blog and Boy @ The Window to find my voice again, my true, authentic, uncopyable voice. By then, I was already fortysomething (or, really between 39 and 44 years old at this point). My doctoral degree was already more than a decade old.

If I could do it all over again, would I choose to relive what I have truly reviled as much as I have relished? No, no, no. You don’t need to have a PhD to be an excellent writer. You certainly do not need one to write in relative obscurity. I learned that from Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Martino in AP English in 1987. No. I probably would have earned a PhD in social psychology instead, with stints of working as a K-12 teacher and a freelance writer or journalist in between. That path would have been more fun — if not just as morbid — at least.

I can think of what pursuing a more direct path to writing and working would have done. It would’ve saved me from four years of Trotter as my advisor, from “poverty wages,” never-to-be-counted-on Bruce Anthony Jones, and from abusive theoretical Marxists like Dick Oestreicher and Wendy Goldman. It would have saved me from myself and my self-doubt and constant need to prove myself to others to the exclusion of everything else in my life. 

My mom does get a few things right about me. After I finished my master’s in 1992, she said one day, “Why you always gotta ‘I’ll show you’?” I wasn’t trying to “I’ll show you,” especially to the white gatekeepers aligned like a fraternity or a gang with baseball balls eager to jump me in (or out) of academia. Still, I do not like being told “No.” Especially by mediocre people with half-baked ideas motivated by their own racism and ageism.

This will not be a self-loathing celebration, though. I have figured it out, myself included. I know what I want to write, and why. I have succeeded more than I have failed on this front since turning 45. I may never make up for those years in the wilderness, between academia and the nonprofit world, chasing dollars and chasing the approval of white gazers and HNIC (Head N-word In Charge) types. But I am still here. I am much closer to the life I’ve always wanted than I am  to the life I have gradually been putting behind me since 2008.

From Heat Checks to Hail Marys

13 Monday Sep 2021

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work

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Failure, Fear of a "Black" America, Hail Mary, Heat Check, Narcissism American Style, Next Steps, Publishing, self-publishing, Sports Analogy, Writing


Heat Check, Hail Mary, between Steph Curry and Aaron Rodgers (cropped and spliced), September 13, 2021.

This is my final (maybe?) essay in my series More Confessions From an Educated Fool. I do need help, to keep me from self-publishing a third book, to make the leap into writing beyond the freelancing. I ask, but I don’t think I ask correctly. Or, maybe people just don’t like me. Anyway, the essay is less than 1,000 words. Please read.


Make no mistake. This post is a plea for help to reach the next stage as a writer, to get a book out into the world with some measure of success. I’d prefer not to go the route of the self-published manuscript this time, where the book has no chance to reach more than a few hundred people or maybe a couple thousand people. For those who are better positioned as writers, I’m not asking for your first-born child. However, if you have enjoyed my stories, my blog, or my published work over the years, maybe, put in a word with an agent if you have one? Or, maybe, if I ask you to read a chapter of my latest ms, that you read it and give me feedback? Or, maybe even, just the least bit of encouragement to hang in there?

My latest manuscript is titled Narcissism, American Style: Essays on Racism, Narcissism, and How to Get to a Post-Western World. (I do have an alternative title, Sage’s Gold.) It was originally supposed to be a series of essays on America’s narcissism, its origins, permutations, and the damage it has done and will do to the world if left unchecked. After I had published a piece in The Atlantic on the hidden psychological costs of college education for first-gen students five years ago, I did a heat check, put together an initial proposal and a cover letter, and sent out my idea to agents. Two immediately responded, but said no (or didn’t respond) after I sent them my initial drafts. Oh well!

Then, I started writing out the essays, all to figure out what direction this book should take. I had two epiphanies along the way. One, I needed to make my mostly US-focused book one that challenged the West, and that meant testing out parts of essays as articles. Two, I needed to figure out where this world is headed as long as the US and the West remain steadfast in leading and exploiting resources and lives.

That’s where all my articles with Al Jazeera come in. After years of mostly writing articles on education and Black and US identity, I mostly dropped looking at K-16 education reform and debates in 2017. Al Jazeera gradually gave me the platform to write about my topic for an international audience. And despite Al Jazeera’s flaws, it was an opportunity I needed.

But after a while, having figured out how to turn longer essays into digestible article- and op-ed-length chunks, the obvious question to me was, Who’s gonna offer me a contract for a collection of essays that were mostly published as articles internationally — especially in these elite New York streets? That was in the fall of 2018. It occurred to me that I could take another approach, to embed these essays as conversations about a post-Western and post-US world. That made me think of Derrick Bell and his best-selling allegories, published as the nonfiction books And We Are Not Saved and Faces at the Bottom of the Well. Bell demonstrated the necessity of critical race theory to describe the permanence of racism within the American matrix in both books. I needed to do something similar, an ms where systems of racist and class-based oppression had been destroyed as part of the climate-change apocalypse, but the narcissism of our current age lingered on in this new world order.

In early 2017, I had written a post where I envisioned a descendant of mine in Olivia, and what her post-Western and post-US world might look like. I sensed this could be useful in furthering my book idea. I began writing up allegories based on my vision of Olivia in 2018, and worked them out for most of 2019. I wasn’t sure I could completely mesh these allegories with the fuller version of my published pieces, or with those essays I hadn’t published. This was why I asked friends, colleagues, frenemies even, to take a look at earlier drafts. My PhD-ed colleagues mostly didn’t get it. My writer buddies told me they liked it, with two telling me “less is more.” Or, they were like, “Can you even sell this in today’s market?”

Then I fully committed. After separating the nonfiction essays from the allegories about Olivia’s world to rework them as standalones, I sensed in my bones that they needed each other. I spent much of 2020 writing and rewriting to bring the two halves together, but cutting and rewriting anything that didn’t fit. Once I got sections to the point of “this works,” I began contacting publishers, agents, and colleagues again. Some obviously liked what they read, but because Narcissism, American Style was now both nonfiction essays and speculative allegorical fiction, they didn’t “know how to sell this book.” It didn’t matter that I identified Bell, Patricia J. Williams, Kiese Laymon, Octavia Butler, and Erica Armstrong Dunbar (among others) who had successfully done what I am doing now in varying degrees with their books.

This is where I stand right now, about to make another run at finding a publisher this fall. I need any and all help I can get. I have previously reached out to folks who have agreed to read and critique, and then, nothing. Sometimes, I find myself trusting no one. The pandemic has made this mistrust worse. If people can’t consistently keep a mask on, how can I put faith in anyone to read my manuscript with care and honesty, assuming they actually read it at all? It would be one thing if I didn’t think my work was good enough. But even the most self-disparaging of writers knows when they’ve written something publishable, if not for themselves, then for the world. This is my Hail Mary. I pray someone will see or sense it, and respond.

When Their Lies Become The Truth

16 Monday Aug 2021

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, music, New York City, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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"Billie Jean", Distractions, Doctoral Thesis, Failure, Fear of a "Black" America, Michael Jackson, Plagiarism, Theft, Whose America?, Writing


Michael Jackson in the middle of his first public moonwalk while singing “Billie Jean” (cropped screen shot), Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever, May 16, 1983. (NBC/Starvista; https://www.smoothradio.com/artists/michael-jackson/first-moonwalk-motown-video-1983/)

This is the third of my multi-part series on my paths as a writer. This piece is one that I’ve work on for nearly a year. Mostly because of the issue to out or not out the guy who plagiarized me in 2002. Partly because I do not really want the kind of attention this post could bring. But the more uncomfortable and painful a writing becomes all the more reason to share it with readers.


There is an ugly truth that inhabits every arena of work. Racist, misogynistic, and elitist politics make all workplaces toxic, some dangerously and lethally so. The never-ending palace intrigue, the perpetual ambitious drive and thirst for clout, the absolute must of self-promotion. All of it makes the idea of “just here to do a job” laughable.

With this toxicity comes the need to lay claim to words and works that are not one’s own. In academia, it means stealing ideas, references to primary resources, even actual words from the work of lesser known academicians. All for the lofty prize of permanent tenure and plum professorships at elite universities. All while destroying careers and breaking people.

I was a victim of such a theft. The plagiarist was one Dr. Jonathan Zimmerman, today a decently prominent full professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, with a career that was undoubtedly helped along by a book about the so-called culture wars. It nearly broke me as a writer. It took nearly 15 years for me to fully recover. In some ways, I am still recovering.

My story is a case study of how easily White mediocrity can trump Black excellence unless or until the latter forces acknowledgment out of the world. But it is also my tale of an aspiring academician snuffed out in his younger years, a wonder-man who had yet to decide the kind of thinker, writer, educator, and gift-user he wanted to be.

I was only partly aware of the possibility of being plagiarized in the 1990s. Oh, I was paranoid enough. As a Black doctoral candidate at lily-White Carnegie Mellon University, I worried about losing my own work and not finishing. By the summer of 1996, I was mailing out seven 3.5-inch, not-so-floppy-disks-at-a-time to my trusted circle, because I had little trust for folks in my academic world, including my dissertation advisor. But I had no idea that I should have extended my lack of trust to trained academicians who were so devoid of ideas and so bereft of imagination that they would steal from little-old me.

My off-and-on dealings with Zimmerman was where I learned eggs should never mix with stones. In 1994, Zimmerman was an assistant professor in the subfield of social and historical foundations of education at West Chester University. I and a couple of other Black doctoral students (the latter two from the University of Pittsburgh School of Education) had promised to present our work at a conference Zimmerman had organized, but reneged at the last minute. The two thirtysomething Black students felt leery about the invitation. “This is very disappointing…I wish you’d let us know sooner…I was so looking forward to reading your work,” Zimmerman said haltingly over the phone with a tone that combined reassurance with condescension when I informed him of our cancellation. Zimmerman had me agree to send him a copy of my dissertation, “A Substance of Things Hoped For”: Multiculturalism, Desegregation, and Identity in African-American Washington, D.C., 1930–1960, once I finished it.

I bumped into Dr. Zimmerman twice at scholarly conferences after that, in 1996 and 1997. He sought me out about my dissertation, for what purpose, I wasn’t sure. I was too worn out after finishing my degree to find out. The next and last time I saw Zimmerman was at the end of April 1999. New York University invited me to their campus for a job interview in the school of education. It was for a social foundations in education opening. I learned that Zimmerman was on the search committee. He had moved on from his previous job, and was now a tenured associate professor.

I gave a seventy-five-minute job talk about my dissertation research and soon-to-be book topic, titled “Fear of a ‘Black’ America: Multiculturalism and Black Education in Washington, DC.” During the talk and Q-and-A session that followed, I noticed Zimmerman had brought with him a paperback copy of my doctoral thesis to the talk. He must have ordered a copy from ProQuest, the main depository for dissertations in the US.

“Can you tell me more about why Black parents didn’t want Little Black Sambo taught in DC Public Schools?,” Zimmerman asked. “Why do you keep using ‘multiculturalism’ to describe what happened in the past — isn’t this anachronistic?,” he inquired with a bit of disdain. “Do you have a publisher lined up for your manuscript?,” I remember him probing, as if that was really his damn business.

It should have been obvious, but at the time, I honestly wasn’t sure why Zimmerman asked me so many questions. Between a two-year-long search for full-time work, of living off fumes from the one $1,850-class I taught at Duquesne University every semester, of burnout and rage from completing my degree, my head wasn’t right. I also wanted to move on from Pittsburgh. “I’d just about have to wait for Joe or Larry [my former dissertation and graduate advisors] to die before I’d get a job that pays around here,” I said to my significant other numerous times.

I didn’t get the NYU job. Six weeks after that interview, I ended up with a job in civic education in suburban DC, working with high-potential high school juniors and seniors. Soon after, I landed a literary agent with my book proposal for Fear of a “Black” America.

Three years and two jobs later, I heard from Zimmerman again, indirectly. I had stumbled into an opportunity while already working as a nonprofit administrator for the New Voices National Fellowship Program to teach a graduate course in social foundations of education at George Washington University. In looking for books suitable for the class, I discovered Zimmerman had published Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools, his book on a century of America’s culture wars as embodied in history textbooks. I decided to buy it in case any of my students wanted to research this topic.

In those pages, Zimmerman carefully avoided referring to the book Little Black Sambo. Instead, he used the term “Sambo” in reference to mainline history textbooks from the 1940s and 1950s. But in one paragraph, Zimmerman’s skill in textual microsurgery broke down like an old and rusted-out car. Where Zimmerman had written, “[e]ven champions of so-called intergroup education in the 1950s turned a blind eye — or a disdainful frown — on black text protests,” I had written, “the Washington Post [in September 1947] published an editorial on the Little Black Sambo controversy that accused the [NAACP-DC] Branch and the…black Washington community of overreacting.”

Where he had wrapped his quote with “opined the Washington Post, denouncing blacks’ ‘humorless touchiness’ about the term ‘Sambo’ in textbooks,” I had the fuller quote, as “the Post could not ‘believe that the humorless touchiness reflected in these protests represents the attitude of Negroes in general.’” And where Zimmerman cited the original sources as the Washington Post from September 30, 1947 and some reference to papers from the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, I also had those same references, plus additional references to the Washingtoniana Division of DC Public Library.

If this theft of ideas and research was pure coincidence, then so is the existence of systemic racism in the US. Zimmerman had access to my doctoral thesis for at least three years before the publication of his book. The likelihood that Zimmerman independently went through the same files at Moorland-Spingarn to address the specific issue of “Sambo” references in textbooks during the 1950s when the controversy over the children’s book Little Black Sambo occurred in 1947 is infinitesimally low (he doesn’t refer to Moorland-Spingarn as a place he visited to conduct research in Whose America?).

The specific Washington Post quote could be coincidental, but not when combined with the Moorland-Spingarn citation. Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, one couldn’t just do a Google search for a then-55-year-old article. One either had to dig it out from among the thousands of files in archives like Moorland-Spingarn at Howard University, where I spent nearly two weeks in March 1995 uncovering information about issues like the 1947 Little Black Sambo controversy. Or, a researcher would have had to go through reels of newspaper microfilm at libraries looking for clues and key words, like I did for another two weeks at the Washingtoniana Division of DC Public Library’s main branch, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, in February 1995. My doctoral thesis was never cited as a source in these sections, either.

A couple of weeks later, I found Dr. Zimmerman’s NYU email address. I wrote to him about his erasure of my years of sweat, tears, and even blood (in the case of paper cuts) in gathering the information that had gone into my dissertation. “I don’t know who you are,” was his one-sentence response, as was and remains the typical retort from those who are caught using another’s words, work, and ideas as their own. “Fuck it,” I said to myself after that exchange. I definitely should have found a lawyer back then.

I received a note a few days after I discovered Zimmerman’s thievery from my one-time agent Claudia Menza about the acquisition editors at Random House. They had come close to accepting my book, but ultimately rejected Fear of a “Black” America for publication. It was a gut punch while walking carelessly through Central Park on a cloudless early fall day. The kind of punch that leaves one falling on their ass while exchanging pain for air, trying one’s hardest not to cry or scream for fear of embarrassment. I eventually self-published my book in 2004, a shell of the dream I originally held for this manuscript.

I hated academia and academicians. I hated myself for the desperate academic/nonacademic/non-writing writer-who-also-wanted-to-write-more it turned me into. I hated that I had earned a PhD, only to find myself working as a nonprofit administrator where the only thing people cared about was bringing in more multimillion-dollar grants. Most of all, I hated that I had never thought enough of the possibility that others would find ingenious and craven ways to steal from me, and that I couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

Fast-forward more than a decade later to 2018. I am no longer working as a nonprofit administrator chasing dollars for watered-down education and social justice efforts. I am teaching full-time as contingent faculty between two universities. My writings are now meant for the world, and not for academia. After reading a story about how a plagiarist had copied and pasted huge portions of the author Leta Hong Fincher’s words from Leftover Women, it dredged up my experiences with Dr. Zimmerman.

This is how the big dogs do it. They steal your ideas, your ideals and your soul, really. They do it while simultaneously erasing you from the public record. They violently make you into the intellectual undead, a ghost that exists, but cannot haunt. Like with Napoleon allegedly blasting away at the Sphinx’s nose for fear that the truth of ancient Egypt as a Black civilization would drown the myth of white Egypt. The big dogs make you feel the theft, the death, and the erasure, right down to them blowing your bits of graphite, wood pulp, and synthetic rubber off of history’s pages.

“And mother always told me be careful of who you love/And be careful of what you do ’cause the lie becomes the truth.” These are the last two lines of the second stanza in Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” That Michael Jackson — the Black genius that he was — also was a pedophile who preyed on star-struck children and their naive parents. He lied by omission and commission, for nearly half his life. The topic of multiculturalism, and being able to profit from it, no longer matters to me. But having people like Zimmerman out there profiting from their theft and their lies does.

Agents and Not Agents, The Hard Way

10 Tuesday Aug 2021

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, music, New York City, Patriotism, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Barbara Sizemore, Book Publishing, Claudia Menza, Failure, Fear of a "Black" America, Joe William Trotter Jr., Literary Agents, Mistakes, The Business of Writing, The Hard Way, Writing


Agents from The Matrix (1999) screenshot (cropped), August 8, 2021. (https://matrix.fandom.com)

This is the second of several posts I’ve put together about my journeys as a writer. Please laugh when and where appropriate.


“You always gotta do things the hard way, don’t you?” my one-time professor Barbara Sizemore said with some sighed frustration. It was in response to me telling her I had decided to stay at Pitt, to pursue my history doctorate at the University of Pittsburgh and possibly transfer to Carnegie Mellon to complete it. It was April 1992. We were standing in the main corridor of the third floor of Wesley Posvar Hall (née Forbes Quadrangle), I was on my way back to my grad student cubicle in the History Department. Sizemore was heading back to her office in the adjacent Africana Studies Department. If I had known this would be my last conversation with the prickly educator, her of squinty eyes and well-manicured afro, before she return to Chicago, took a position at DePaul, and passed away in 2004, I would have done more than given Sizemore a blank stare. As the tall, lanky, and sarcastic 23-year-old I was, I probably would’ve said, “Why yes, professor, I really do!”

I knew what Sizemore was really saying. It was about attending a lily-white university, where there were only four tenured Black professors out of 800 total faculty. My advisor Joe William Trotter, Jr. was one of them. Sizemore assumed that going to Ohio State or Temple to earn a doctorate in Black studies would have been my best move. But even though Sizemore was incorrect about my education decision, she was definitely correct about me taking “always doing things the hard way” paths toward so many of my goals.

Claudia Menza became my first (and so far, only) literary agent in July 1999. The idea of finding a literary agent to help me publish my first book was something I had played with as an idea for nearly a year. At least once I had begun to emerge from my state of rage, depression, and sheer burnout from my years finishing my doctorate at Carnegie Mellon and having Professor “running interference” Trotter as my advisor. I made the decision to turn my doctoral thesis into a book that would straddle the fence between the scholarly and the general. I wanted to publish what would become Fear of a “Black” America for a larger audience, to include both the academic and the personal in the same book. No one told me this was impossible. No one said this was the harder road for a first-time book author. I owned books by scholars that had mainstream imprints and labels. And many, if not most of them, had an agent helping them.

Soon after I finally found my full-time gig with the nonprofit Presidential Classroom in the DMV, I went ahead, did some research in those big, thick books on books and lit agents at Pitt’s Hillman Library, and wrote pitch letters to seven of them. Three weeks later, Menza wrote me back offering to represent me.

She started querying publishing house editors in October 2000, just as I was leaving Presidential Classroom for a higher paying nonprofit job working in social justice in DC. I was so busy with work and my New York family and with married life that I took my eye off the process. One year went by, with a few rejection letters here and there. Then 9/11 happened. I met up with Menza in New York six weeks later. I was already there to do a site visit with a social justice fellow. That’s when I learned Menza at this stage of her time as an agent predominantly represented fiction and poetry. Still, she had some high-powered authors under her belt. I remained confident in her and the mysterious process of finding an editor willing to publish me, in between bites of delicious pasta at a wonderful Italian bistro in the Village.

Two more years went by after that. I received rejections from Basic Books, Random House, Palgrave, Oxford University Press, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, among others. Some stood out because the acquiring editors met to debate the merits for my book before ultimately rejecting it. Some stood out for being two-sentence rejections. I remember Menza saying, “I don’t understand why they don’t want your book.” That was at the end of 2002. By then, even though I remained outwardly confident, I had given up on finding a mainstream commercial publisher. “Maybe I need to go learn how to write again,” I said to my partner more than once. This, just after she became pregnant with our first and only egg.

With the ugly transition between jobs within my nonprofit organization and the birth of and caring for our one and only son, I knew I didn’t have it in me to continue the process of pitch-and-reject with Menza. I was also thinking about writing a memoir, something that could explain how I got to be me. I wrote Menza in March 2004, formally cutting ties with her as my agent. “I wish it had all worked out,” she wrote back.

That July, with some encouragement from my new boss and from my significant other, I decided to look at Fear of a “Black” America one last time, but this time, to self-publish. I went and found a house that did its own reviews of manuscripts and provided adequate enough copyediting to make sure I didn’t embarrass myself. Sometime in that process, Barbara Sizemore died. I read about her death in a nicely done obituary DePaul University put out (The Washington Post obit, not so nice about her years as DC Public Schools chancellor). I imagined Sizemore looking down at me that July and August, shaking her head.

The book came out at the end of August. Somehow, despite myself, I sold over a thousand copies in 16 months, did radio and newspaper interviews and talks and signings all over the DMV. I was happy and a bit bitter, like a cup of black coffee not sugary enough for my taste buds. This book could’ve been so much more, I thought so many times in 2004 and 2005.

But none of this is Menza’s fault, or Trotter’s, or even my fault, not in any direct sense. The world of book writing is more mysterious than the cloistered world of academia, and much more mercurial, too. It’s a popularity contest cloaked in American -isms, especially individualism and elitism (which of course contains racism and misogyny, too). It puts all the effort and blame on you and me. In my case, for not having a job in academia that lined up with my expertise in writing Fear of a “Black” America. For not having a degree from an Ivy League institution, or for not having enough successful writer contacts in my genre(s) or in general. For not living in New York as a writer. Maybe even for not being light enough or good-looking enough.

And, even in the four-and-a-half years of having an agent, for not paying close enough attention to how the industry had become a set of six monopolies. All with independent presses being squeezed, to sell out, to fold, to become niches for a small group of aspiring authors. It went from being an industry where you could pitch your books directly to publishers with or without an agent to “Get outta here!” unless you do have an agent. So many agents would prefer DIY schlock or books that easily fit the tastes of elite or hokey white readers than to ever read a query from me. I’m too eclectic, too determined to write for Black folk and beat up on white ways of thinking. I received more than 130 rejections from agents for my memoir Boy @ The Window, between 2007 and 2011, including one that read, “Alas, another book on childhood abuse!”

So, is it really me making it more difficult, because I like to “do things the hard way?” Is it because I have frequently put the need to pay bills and eat over pursuing my art and craft first? Is it because my writing sucks and agents see that immediately? Is it because I don’t know what I’m doing, or because of all of the above? Well, fam, what I do know is that I need help. I don’t quite know what I need to know to navigate this strange world of finding representation. I don’t quite know what I need to know to make publishing with a reputable press work without representation. Kenny Loggins says “when you can’t give love, you give out advice.” Advice with love is preferable, and usually, specific to where I am.

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