On Being An Unspecial American

It's been interesting watching the recent nonsensical controversies over Clinton and Ferraro, Obama and Wright and the issue of race. These endless discussions show how far we as Americans have -- or haven't -- come around tolerance, understanding, reconciliation, transcendence and the myriad of terms we use when we use the "R" word. It's as clear as ever that Americans remain as unspecial as ever. We remain folks who believe that we are entitled to see ourselves as better than others or more deserving than others because of race, money, where we grew up, or because we live in "the greatest country in the history of the world."

Poor Obama learned once again that even as a biracial American, one is Black first and White second. For many typical Americans regardless of race, the only colorblindness we suffer is from being blinded by color. So if a pastor at a virtually all-Black church makes some rather surprising remarks on his way off to some state of retirement, one's status as both Black and White automatically Black-shifts. As Derrick Bell's writings on race illuminate, when something like the Wright sermons come to light, it becomes necessary, even required, for every available Black spokesperson or experts to appear in the media and throw the person and his statements under the bus, Obama key among them.

And although Obama might've given the most eloquent speech on race since MLK's "I've Been to the Mountaintop" on the day before he was assassinated in Memphis (more on the "I Have a Dream" speech later), he only gave it in response to a basic American rule on race relations. That Blacks are held to a higher burden of proof regarding our patriotism, our belief in American greatness, our faithfulness to America as it is as opposed to the America we'd like to see. Even with Obama's soaring speech, one that easily could make him this generation's Avatar -- the bridge between the races -- in many ways it made him more Black and less special in the eyes of many Americans.

This is what makes us unspecial. We tend to see American lives as more valuable than any others when our soldiers are off fighting somewhere in the world, whether for our national security or with no particular goal or purpose. Yet at home the only American lives that remain valuable are either White ones or rich ones or rich White ones (e.g., Katrina, Jena 6, Southern California fires). To say this means only that I recognize that money, race and power have dominated the history of this nation and remain driving forces in our politics, economics and culture. One would have to be blinded by rap videos, Will Smith, Tyra Banks and Kobe Bryant in order not to see this truism. Or rather, be comfortable in the blissful ignorance that bigotry and isolation and the addiction of misery that is all too common in our winner-take-all world these days.

So I feel for presidential hopeful Senator Obama. Any Black person that has experienced any time in the public eye or even the smallest sliver of success in life understood that he needed to respond to the Wright controversy the day before the YouTube video came to light. His speech was a great response. But it wasn't the greatest speech since MLK's on August 28 of '63. Why? Because the meaning of Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" has been lost to conservatives who haven't read much beyond the first line and the phrase "the content of our character."

Those folks have forgotten that King lived for another four years and eight months after delivering perhaps the greatest speech of the twentieth century. He lived long enough to deliver other stirring speeches. On race, on White privilege, on the Vietnam War, on jobs and poverty, on social justice and human rights. These speeches were even more controversial than anything that Wright has ever said. For Dr. King's denouncing of America's escalation of the Vietnam War and his stand against subtler forms of racial and economic injustice left him without the support of many liberals and many Black civil rights activists, not to mention the Johnson Administration. "I Have a Dream" might've stirred the country in '63, but it was Dr. King's words and work in the years after that speech that resonated in Obama's speech from last week.

Unfortunately but all too true, this is our collective burden, with much of it falling on the shoulders and backs of Blacks and other folks of color. We haven't really gone very far on race since MLK's murder in '68. My own life is a testimony of the transition from obvious Jim Crow-era racism to subtler forms of bigotry and, in some instances, discrimination. Yet in all of that, I've been accused of plagiarism because of the quality of my writing, not hired after surprising folks with my Blackness at job interviews, and vilified because I happened to go to research on the day that O.J. was acquitted of murder by a mostly Black jury. We can't help but be who we are, and bigotry, racism and American dominance have been intertwined since Jamestown.

Yet there is some light at the end of the tunnel, and not just because of Obama. In the past twenty years of my life I've met both so-called liberals and so-called conservatives who've been able to discuss race beyond the hype and the stereotypes, to talk about power and justice and reconciliation in serious and evolved ways. Many of them have been my students. Many more have been, ironically, at predominately Black churches with multiracial audiences. Even with all of this, I know that some of you will only see this post as one from a "typical Black person." Maybe in some ways I am. But the point of this blog and of the book for which my blog space is named is, if anything else, that we are all both special and typical all of the time. That's what being human -- not to mention an American -- is all about.

March Madness

Aside from the NCAA Tournament, there is another form of March madness that besets many of us -- college admissions, acceptance and financial aid. Not every talented high school student goes to an Ivy League or applies for early decision or early acceptance. Heck, the majority of students who apply for any kind of college at all apply at community or two-year colleges, and many of those students wait until the last minute (July or August) before enrolling. But for the majority of students about to graduate high school with serious college aspirations, March madness represents decision time about the kind of postsecondary experience they want and need to have. The consequences of those decisions can play out over one's entire adult life, so the decision ought to be a good one.

As for me and my classmates, the getting-ready-for-college process involved heavy doses of pain and stress. Most of both we afflicted upon ourselves. Some of the pain, though, emanated from other classmates and teachers and our own warped sense of our achievements, from six or more years in the gifted track known as Humanities. For the valedictorian and the salutatorian of my Class of '87, a near-decade long friendship crashed on the rocks of the stress and strain of our senior year, college preparations and the issue of race that presidential hopeful Barack Obama was brave enough to speak out about this week. One was a White female, the other a Black male, and both very academically accomplished to say the least. Both not only expected to get into college, they expected full-blown scholarships to attend elite or Ivy League universities to boot. Well before March, both received their wish. The valedictorian gained admission to Johns Hopkins as a pre-med major with a scholarship of some sort, while Harvard easily accepted our salutatorian.

Other Humanities students made fairly predictable decisions. Cornell, Syracuse, NYU, UC Berkeley, Rutgers, Temple, SUNY Purchase or Binghamton, Tufts and other places on the well-beaten path of students from the greater NYC area. About twenty Black students opted for an HBCU experience, gaining admission to Howard, Hampton, Morehouse, Clark-Atlanta or Spelman depending on who I talked to at the time. Some made interesting decisions. One decided on Vanderbilt for no immediately obvious reason, another chose to accept Georgia Tech's offer because of their basketball program (it's not as great a program as it used to be), and one of the other top five students went for the Naval Academy in Annapolis to be her own person. The one commonality was that almost to a person, all of my classmates had expected to go to college -- because of family background, their family's ability to pay and/or their grades -- long before we reached our senior year. I knew from the end of seventh grade on that I'd need help, and a lot of it, to get into college and have the means to cover the costs.

I applied to eight schools in all, including Yale, Columbia and the University of Pittsburgh. The first two are obvious choices. Pitt's brochure of pizza and students having a good time were enough to get me to apply. I received my first college letter in February, a letter from Yale in a regular business-sized envelope, a clear sign of rejection from that vaunted university. If I’d known about their policies to limit the number of disadvantaged students who qualified for scholarships back then, I might not have applied to begin with. As it was, I had no idea why they rejected me. Over the next five weeks, I received one acceptance and packet of materials after another, including Columbia and the University of Pittsburgh. All but Columbia gave me a full financial aid package of one kind or another. All offered either a partial or a full-tuition scholarship for four years except for Columbia. Pitt had offered me one of their inaugural half-tuition academic scholarships that they called the Challenge Scholarship, meant specifically to attract low-income students and students of color from across the country to the university.


Columbia was the only school that assumed that someone in my family could afford to cover a significant portion of my tuition. I called their financial aid office in mid-March to ask why they hadn’t offered me any kind of academic scholarship. They called me back to tell me that they wanted to "make sure" that I really couldn’t afford to go to Columbia. "But you have my Mom’s financial paperwork," I said. The man on the other end of the phone then made an offer. "Well, we could send out a private investigator to track down your father and take a look at his finances. If everything checks out, either he can cover part of your tuition or we can offer you a scholarship." I was floored by the sheer sense of arrogance coming out of the phone. "My dad hasn’t paid child support in eight years," I said. "We want to make sure that he doesn’t have money for your tuition," was the creditor’s response. "Thanks but no thanks. You either trust me or you don’t," I said, and hung up the phone. I was really and truly torn between having some idiot private investigator digging through Jimme’s pitiful life and finances and saying "Go to Hell!" to Columbia. I didn’t want to see the worst case scenario occur, which was that some fool would come back to Columbia and say that Jimme could afford to pay $3,000 of my tuition per year. In the three years up to March '87, Jimme had given me $3,500 total.

Then I thought of other pros and cons, and as I thought of them, I wrote them out. Columbia was an Ivy League school, the University of Pittsburgh wasn’t. Yet, Columbia was more expensive than Pitt by more than two dollars to one ($18,000 per year versus $7,500) and the students at Columbia would likely be similar in education, socioeconomic background and attitudes to my Humanities classmates. But the most important factor in saying "No" to Columbia besides their financial aid sleaziness was 616 and Mount Vernon. If I went to school there, where would I live and where would I study? Home? You got to be kidding! Mount Vernon Public Library? They only stayed open until nine pm, and were never open on Sundays. On campus? That would only work if I were able to get a decent paying part-time job on campus. After sorting through this, I knew that Columbia was out. Pitt was it.

The look on my mother’s face when I told her said it all. She was as shocked as I’d ever seen her. She kept trying to convince me to go upstate to Hobart and William Smith, to see about going to Columbia for their private investigator. My mother had tried all year to influence my college decision without any sense of my needs or attitudes about her or 616. First it was "Apply to West Point" because they would "make a man out of me" and "provide me good discipline," and because "women love men in uniform." When that didn’t phase me, she wanted me to go to Black college like Morehouse or Howard because "I gave them [the United Negro College Fund] some money." It was $25, not enough to buy a book bag. Too many of my Black classmates planned to go to an HBCU. These were the cool folks, the Rick James and Eddie Murphy "Party All The Time" folks, going to schools with reputations for cliques, partying, and low graduation rates. I wanted a mix of people, White, Black, Hispanic, older and my age, male and female, nerdy and normal. With those suggestions, I pretty much shut my mother and everyone else out of the decision-making process.

My classmates spent the next couple of months asking me where Pittsburgh was and why I wanted to go there. I really didn't have a great explanation. All I knew was that I needed to get away from the New York area for a while and that the University of Pittsburgh's tuition was cheaper than almost anything I would've faced in New York. I knew that they had a decent Computer Science program -- this was to be my first major. But I also knew that I wasn't stuck if I wanted to change majors or study something other that computer science.

So my decision was both rational and psycho-social, a sure sign of "madness." In the end, I obviously made the right decision for me at the time. If I had to do it again, maybe I would've applied to American University or University of Pennsylvania or University of North Carolina. But given the friendships that I formed, the degrees I earned and the wife that I have, I'm not sure if another good choice like the ones above would've been any better than going to Pitt.

Kiss Me -- I'm Irish! (Too)

Sorry to all of you who may have looked for a posting from me last week. I was on the road and with inconsistent access to the Internet and to my other tools. I apologize for the disruption. I'll save my blog posting on all things related to baseball for a later date.

Today's St. Patrick's Day, which for many Americans who aren't vehemently Irish is a day of alcoholic celebration. At least it's viewed that way, given all of the beer and alcohol commercials that pop up in the weeks leading up to this day. For many other Americans, St. Patrick's Day is the ultimate expression of Irish heritage in the US and around the world, a celebration of ethnic pride and cultural endurance. St. Patrick, of course, was the apostle who spread Christianity throughout Ireland at the end of the Roman age. So there is much to celebrate for many around the world who are and aren't Irish about the legacy of a culture and a people who've faced numerous hardships and overcome them despite considerable odds.

As for me, I'm Irish, too, at least in part. You don't get a last name like Collins by accident. Somewhere in the past, before my late grandfather Fucius Collins (1899-1988) was born in rural central Georgia, some Irish -- or more likely, Scotch-Irish -- genes mixed with our primarily West African gene pool to create the interest range of diversity that is the extended Collins family. My grandfather's skin and hair made him what we still call light-skinned in this country, and at least one of my aunt's was nearly as light as he was. My father Jimme's at the opposite end of the spectrum, and with the exception of his forehead, is as typically Black looking as anyone else who is Black in this country. Proving once again that looking at someone by itself is hardly enough to prove their ancestry or background.

On my mother's side, the Gill side, it is said that my great-great grandmother (born 1880, died in '76, and never got to meet) was half-Choctaw and half-Irish, growing up in Indian Territory before the Oklahoma rush of 1889 and the 1890s. She was my grandmother Beulah's grandmother. And my grandmother does have features that are strikingly similar to Choctaw, not to mention that she is a dark-skinned Black. I'm less certain of my great-great grandmother's exact ancestry, but she was obviously bi- or even triracial. In any case, I don't doubt that she was somehow part-Irish or part-Scotch-Irish.

All of that says to me that I'm at least 1/20 Irish and three to five percent Native American. What does this mean in terms of my everyday existence? Not much. It's not like most Whites in this country understand the difference between genetics and phenotype, care about multiple identities unless a person is of immediate biracial ancestry, or can see past skin complexion. But it does give me the sense that for all of the crap around race in this country, we are all related to each other, whether we are willing to admit this or not. That colorblindness in terms of race or ethnicity, if it does exist in this country, exists because many Americans are blinded by color and diversity.

Ultimately, my own multiracial heritage gives me reason to celebrate St. Patrick's Day, to visit the National Museum of the American Indian in DC or to visit Oklahoma, or even to go to Ireland if I so choose. I for one plan to acknowledge my Irish heritage today by playing a bit of U2 and doing a jig. Beer, whiskey and green food dye will not be involved.

The Ultimate Crush

There are many things that can motivate a person to change their life for the better. The sight of their newborn child, the witnessing of the abuse of a parent, or the help of a person in the role of mentor can all help someone choose a proper path for living their life well. Of course, being in love on some level certainly could also help. As for me, '82 was the year where several motivating factors worked in concert to lead me to the path of education as my way of getting out of the poverty and violence that I grew up in.

I've discussed my first crush in any number of postings over the past nine months, but today I want to talk about her in detail. Tomorrow marks twenty-six years since I found myself head over heals. I guess that it's a silly little thing to remember the day that Cupid's arrow pierced my heart for the first time. Especially given that as far as I was concerned, she seldom gave me the time of day unless I managed to offend her in some way.

I was fascinated with her from the day that I walked into my gifted track program in seventh grade, but not to the point of emotional distraction. She was five-feet and four-inches of whimsical golden-brown skinned beauty to me even before I found myself in the land of infatuation. Everyone seemed to gravitate to her. She was smart, sarcastic, funny, had this craggy laugh that was somewhere between nerdy and geekish, completely belying how she looked. My first crush was also fierce in her own semi-tomboyish way, not the kind of person someone would want to face in a fight. But being the person I was in seventh grade, a fight with my first crush was almost unavoidable.

It was a fight that either involved me insulting her or one of her friends in some way. It was the week after Winter Break. A part of me still thinks that my fight with her friend Mr. OshKosh and my fight with my first crush is connected, at least in some cosmic sort of way. It was a short fist exchange, one where I found myself feeling every hit. She really knew how to throw a punch. I was surprised by how quickly we went from words to fists. But I was more surprised by how my fist landed as a soft thud onto her chest. It was the second time in six months I had a minor scuffle with a girl, and both happened to have breasts in full bloom. I stopped fighting with her immediately, embarrassed and completely enamored with her, and not just because of making contact with a mammary gland. Her friends had to pull her away from me, calling me "pervert" all the while. I just stood there for a moment, blinded by the light.

We had to do some sort of show-of-talent presentation in our seventh grade English class, either soon after or just before this fight. I don't remember what I did for my presentation, but I vividly remember hers. My first crush apparently had been taking dance lessons for a few years, and gave our class a brief taste of her ballerina skills. Pirouette by pirouette, jump by jump, she had tiptoed, split, jumped, spun, and danced her way into my mind and heart. She was so athletic, so pretty, so wonderful to watch that I couldn't get her out of my mind for the next three months.

I had never felt this way before about anyone. Matter of fact, I hadn't felt much other than embarrassment or anger in a long time before the arrival of tweener love. Seventh grade had been a tough year up to my fight with the ballerina. My grades were well below the straight-A student I'd been from fourth through sixth grade. The whole becoming a Hebrew-Israelite thing was an obvious barrier to forming friendships of any kind with most of my classmates, even if my general weirdness wasn't. We were slowly falling into working-poor poverty at home, and it was becoming clearer how wrong my mother was about my stepfather being a changed man.

My first crush was the catalyst of change in my life, as it motivated me like nothing else in my life could to find a way to impress her. The only way I knew back then was to be the best student I already knew how to be, to raise all of my grades to A's or high B's, to be more vocal in class, to be more open and joking with other classmates, to even chum some of them up just to get closer to her. I did all of those things, and yet she hardly noticed me or the fact that I was on my best behavior when I was around her.

I even had music in my mind and my heart while enthralled with my first crush. If U2's "Beautiful Day" had existed as a hit song in ’82, it would’ve been my theme music for the spring and early summer of that year. The "sky falls you feel it’s a beautiful day" line from the song is a perfect description of my world between March and June of ’82. Given the music that most of my classmates listened to that year (not to mention my own eclectic music tastes), The Police's "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic" would've been most appropriate.

But recently I've rediscovered (for the third time in my life) Stevie Wonder's classic double album Songs In the Key of Life, and I realized, reluctantly, that the song that stayed in my head the most when my first crush was around was his "As." Especially the semi-spiritual referenced to eternal love -- "until the rainbow burns the stars out in the sky/Always . . . until the day that eight times eight times eight is four/Always . . . until the day that is the day that are no more/Always . . ." It's safe to say that I was in love with her as her and my image of her at the same time.

My next step was going to be to tell her that I really, truly liked her, either by note or by just saying it. But I lost my nerve after watching my stepfather knock my mother unconscious. By then I realized that I had nothing to offer my first crush. Nothing that someone as amazing and as awesome as this ballerina would want from me. I felt like crap for years after that. I had built an image of her in my mind that stayed with me far beyond the end of my crush or even when I realized that the person who was my first crush no longer matched my image of her. I likely was attracted to my second crush because I knew that she couldn't be as wonderful as my first one, which made her more attainable. Despite all of that, it was that image of the wondrous ballerina that made my summer of abuse at home with my stepfather that much more bearable. It was my seeing my first crush as someone who would easily go to college that motivated me to use my smarts to get to college myself.

Only my wife and my mother have influenced me more from the standpoint of relationships with women than my sweet ballerina. I've been married eight years -- just about anyway -- but I sometimes see myself finding reminders of my first crush in my wife or in other women. It's a reminder of beauty, of adoration and of regret. Ultimately, I wish that I had told her when I was still a child of twelve, before my life turned as ugly as it did. The fact that I did tell her at thirty-six helps the twelve-year-old in me heal a bit, but only a bit. It matters little when we're both married with children and life has changed both of us, and in such fundamental ways.

I don't regret my first crush's influence on my life. That time of excitement, of stomach-churning attraction, reminded me that I was a human being with real emotions and a person who could achieve things greater than myself because of those emotions. To my first crush, with adoration and love, many, many thanks.