Imagination At Work

Sunday, January 31, 1988. Super Bowl XXII. Doug Williams, Gary Clary, Timmy Smith, Art Monk and the Redskins beat down the Denver Broncos that glorious evening, 42-10. I remember it pretty well. Although I've never been a Redskins fan, I was a Doug Williams fan, and more importantly, a fan of underdogs. Williams was the ultimate underdog for this game, because of his career and race, and because John Elway, was, as then NBC announcer Dick Enberg put it, "the man with a golden arm." Just as important was the fact that I was living down my underdogness vicariously through Williams' play in this game of games. His performance was part of a series of events that set the tone for my second semester at Pitt, and led to me finally beginning to find myself twenty-two years ago.

That Super Bowl was the same month as the start of semester #2 in po-dunk Pittsburgh. I came back angry but with a sense of sober clarity, like I had been on a drinking binge for the previous six or seven months. The day I had left Mount Vernon to get back to Pitt, my first semester grades had come in. I had earned an easy A in Astronomy, a B- in Pascal, and a C in Honors Calc. All three of those grade I expected. The C in East Asian History was completely unexpected. My grade point average for the semester gave me a 2.63 to start my postsecondary career. That might’ve been good enough for most folks. But of course not for me. My Challenge Scholarship absolutely depended on me maintaining a minimum 3.0 average at the end of every school year in order for me to stay eligible.

That was my wake up call to what I’d allowed Crush #2, and my thoughts of her and me — and of her with me — to do to me. I didn’t even give my mother the chance to see my grades. I said my good-byes, which was easier to do the third time around, took the cab to 241st, the Subway to midtown, and the Carey Bus to Newark.

Once I registered for classes and dumped my first-semester drinking buddies (see blog post "Resolve" from January 2008 on that), I channeled my anger by putting everyone in my life in two categories. All guys were “assholes” and all women were “bitches” until they proved otherwise. I didn’t call anyone that, anyone except for Crush #2, of course. It was my way to begin channeling my anger in a way that I could laugh at myself and concentrate on the task at hand. I needed to laugh, because there wasn't much funny to me about my life in early '88.

What carried me through that first month -- besides a reservoir of anger about the size of all five Great Lakes combined -- was a battery of new music that helped focus my anger and reinvigorate my imagination. Richard Marx’s “Should’ve Known Better” and Paul Carrack’s “Don’t Shed a Tear” were two songs that were close enough in lyrics, meaning and emotion to my situation with Phyllis that I smiled a silly smile every time I heard or played them both. Silly, even not quite applicable, I realized even at the time. But they fit my mood just fine. I "should've known better than to fall in love with" Crush #2. Yet, as the refrain from Carrack "Don't Shed A Tear" goes, "all that I saw in you, now I see through." If there had been an actual relationship with my second crush, I probably would've played Alexander O'Neal's "Fake" that month instead.

That semester, I eventually added Michael Bolton, Brenda Russell, Sting’s latest album Nothing Like The Sun, and Michael Jackson’s Bad to my collection. But for the first time in two years, I started paying attention to rap again. Rob Base, Salt ’n Pepa, Big Daddy Kane, and Public Enemy all began to seep into my consciousness that winter and spring. Geto Boys’ “Mind Playin’ Tricks on Me” would’ve been nice to hear six or eight months before when I was waist-deep in obsession over Ms. Triflin’ Ass.

One other thing I decided to do that semester was to be as much of myself as I felt comfortable being, which was a step up from hiding myself altogether. So, for the first time since I had left for Pittsburgh back in August '87, I decided to cook dinner as part of my Super Bowl Sunday. I spent the day looking for quality spaghetti (you couldn't find Ronzoni in the 'Burgh back then) and Ragu, as well as cheap pots and skillets for the meat sauce and broccoli.

By the time I reached the tenth-floor lounge of Lothrop Hall, there were four guys in there watching the last minutes of the pregame. The adjacent kitchen didn't provide a good look for the game, but I heard the boos of my fellow dormmates during the first quarter, as the Broncos jumped out to a 10-0 lead. A couple of them even wanted Joe Gibbs to pull Williams from the game. I rushed through the cooking routine so that I could watch by the end of the first quarter.

Once I sat down, Williams, Clark, Smith and the Redskins offensive line completely lit up the Broncos from that point on. Williams tossed four touchdown passes as if he were Dan Marino and Joe Montana combined. Smith might as well have been Marcus Allen, and Denver looked like the team that was too old.

Besides having Carrack's "Don't Shed A Tear" in my head throughout the evening -- not to mention second and third helpings of my cooking -- I thought about how much Williams must've had to overcome to get on the field to play in the Super Bowl, much less win the game. I thought about all of the media hype and hyperbole in the weeks leading up to Super Bowl, and how little Williams and the Redskins were part of that wave.

Williams' performance confirmed for me that what others deem impossible isn't not only possible. It also showed how small-minded naysayers can be whenever they believe that your reach exceeds your grasp. Like me, not a whole lot of folks gave Williams -- an allegedly washed-up quarterback whose best days had already passed -- a shot at performing like a Super Bowl MVP. I knew then and I know now that it doesn't really matter much what other people think. It only matters what I imagine, as well as what I do to make the imagined real in my life.

From Ernie and Bert to Wilbon and Kornheiser

What do Bert and Ernie, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon have in common? They all remind us of our youthful sides, of how opposites can banter on and on, of what two friends passionate about working together can accomplish. That, and the reminder that a skinny and a round Muppet have helped define our ideas about unique friendships for more that forty years.

About a dozen or more years ago, someone finally did an article that drew interesting parallels between Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street and the late Siskel and Ebert of Siskel & Ebert and The Movies/At The Movies. It helped that Bert and Siskel were skinny, Ernie round, and Ebert rounder. Although Bert was a skinny banana with slightly more hair on his head than Siskel, and Ernie's body type was built on a really round orange, there were a number of similarities. Bert was the more intellectual one, Ernie the more laid back and fun-loving. Ernie would come up with insane ideas that Bert would shoot down. And then, of course, Ernie would get distracted by his rubber ducky. Siskel, with his generally more critical and conservative takes on films, would balance the slightly overreaching Ebert, who occasionally exhibited the same appreciation for comedies and other zany films as he did for epic dramas of cinematic significance. It was a great combination, cut all too short with Siskel's death in '99.

About the only thing on TV that's replaced the Bert and Ernie parallel in the past half decade or so has been ESPN's Pardon the Interruption. I had already known about Wilbon, as I'd been reading his reports and columns since the early '90s. Kornheiser's stuff, not so much, although I remembered liking his Washington Post columns in the Style section. But PTI wasn't the first time I'd seen them work together. It was on another ESPN show, The Sports Reporters, where I watched the two of them duke it out with Pope Lupica on a number of occasions. Anyone willing to stand toe-to-toe with that piece of work is pretty good in my book. Remembering all of this was how I came to watch PTI in the second half of the '00.

As I watched, I recognized how much Wilbon and Kornheiser reminded me of Siskel and Ebert -- and by extension, Ernie and Bert. Wilbon brought a sense of the laid back, of charisma and hipness to the table. But unlike Ernie and Ebert, no rubber duckies or falling in love with movies that are so bad that they're good to watch. Just good critiques, something through the lens of race and class, of sports and related issues in society, although too many comments on the supposed beauty of flat-butt blonds to my taste.

Interestingly, Kornheiser is the more unhinged between the two of the them. Although the slightly more thoughtful of the two -- which, by the way, provides the appearance of being more intellectual -- in many of his comments about the sporting world, Kornheiser often has to be talked down from his emotional high chair by Wilbon. Maybe that's a sign of a New York or Long Island upbringing, maybe not. Still, the two of them provide an entertainment that's rare on TV and even rarer for sports.

Why rare? Because it isn't fake or planned. It's spontaneous, it's completely caught up in the moment, like kids opening up Christmas presents, like, of course, Bert and Ernie, Ernie and Bert. We need more Wilbons and Kornheisers in the media world, not set up to disagree, to juxtapose, to manipulate the biases and passions of the simple-minded folk of our world. No, Wilbon and Kornheiser, Kornheiser and Wilbon provide an education in the art of entertainment as two friends attempting to help us understand a world that many of us can only glimpse. Like Bert and Ernie, they provide the sharp-tongue wit of adults with child-like enthusiasm, tantrums included. For someone who occasionally needs the dessert that entertainment and sports can provide, Wilbon and Kornheiser -- my current Ernie and Bert -- are my creme brulee many a day.

On Being An "Ignit" American

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote "On Being An Ignorant American," mostly about folks in power, privileged, entitled folks, who display their arrogance and ignorance to the world every day. As a matter of fact, I made the argument that it was our hubris as American that has made us ignorant and defined our ignorance. In honor of Black History Month, I'm putting a spotlight on "Ignit" Americans. For those who don't know, it's a colloquial Black term that refers to folks who wallow in their ignorance like pigs who, in searching for water to cool off, choose mud instead.

Although I'll mostly discuss Black "ign-ence" here, you don't have to be African American to be ignit. You just have to be the type of person who loves to not know anything, to not care about not knowing. You have to be the type of person that feels entitled to being as close-minded as a stereotypical eighty-year-old who believes that they've learned everything there is to know about living, even though life has been passing them by since the end of high school for them six decades earlier.

Ultimately, being Black and ignit comes down to isolation and bigotry. Not the kind of bigotry that is equivalent to institutional racism, for the most part, but needless and hurtful bigotry nevertheless. African Americans are nearly a half-century removed from the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Yet we still have skin color issues -- redbone, high yella, cafe au lait, light-skinned, dark-skinned -- that remain a holdover from the Jim Crow era (not to mention American slavery itself). All manifested in our relationships and friendships, in bleaching products, colored contacts and other beauty products. In the past year, we witnessed the death of Michael Jackson, who himself struggled with this very issue, all references to a skin disorder aside. Although I'm sure most of us aren't trying to be White -- whatever that means anyway -- but I do think that African America still tends to validate the lighter folks in our group.

If only being an ignit American was only melanin deep. We have prejudices toward so-called others, a heightened sense of bigotry when it comes to Afro-Caribbeans, Africans and Latinos. Of course, the same can be said for many first, second and third-generation immigrants from all three groups, as I have experienced firsthand. And even though this kind of other-persons-of-color bigotry has declined in the past two decades, it's hardly gone. For so many of us, a different accent, a different look, a different way of seeing the world seems about as non-threatening as the fear of losing a good job. This is a reality for so many of us, despite intermarriage between these groups, not to mention the shared experience of racism and living in the same communities. This kind of ign-ence, unfortunately, includes my mother, who blames "West Indies," "Spanish people" and "Orientals" for the loss of jobs in my first hometown and in New York City as well.

The big one in terms of ignit Americans revolves around homophobic and heterosexism. Blacks are hardly alone in treating the subject as if it were radioactive waste without the proper lead lid and lining around it. But we are notoriously silent on the issue, as if there are few Black gay and lesbian folk around us. Except at many of the megachurches. There, our pastors and other spiritual leaders can blame the Black LGBT community for the spread of HIV/AIDS among heterosexual Blacks -- not to mention other diseases -- as well as high rates of crime and poverty in our poorest neighborhoods.

We still use the limp arm and hand motion to call something someone did or said as "gay," use idiotic terms like "no homo," and make a point of being overtly masculine or feminine in public and private to prove that we're as heterosexual as the biblical Adam and Eve. It's disgusting and disappointing. Despite all evidence, science and friends and family to the contrary, we still engage in the mythology that anyone gay or lesbian, anyone overtly different from the hyper-heterosexual model is a social pariah and should and will go to hell.

All this is a function of the less obvious but ultimately the root cause that leads to Americans becoming ignit -- the shunning of intelligent Americans. This is one that even the most enlightened of African Americans participates in every day. Although most of us believe education is important, the idea of being academically successful scares both many parents of academically gifted kids and those kids blessed with academic awareness. And for Black males, academic success at an early age can lead to social and soul destruction. Boys and young men especially aren't supposed to display in any way their academic talents, their analytical abilities, or their keen insight on the world around them. Those of us who do are automatically weird, nerds, even seen as "gay" -- as discussed in the previous paragraph -- because we don't fit in with the other guys who learned at an early age to embrace ign-ence.

Speaking in standard American English without learning how to code switch, having dreams that you may make it to the age of thirty with a college degree, wanting to experience the world beyond your neighborhood, city or country isn't allowed in the world of ignit Americans. It's better to learn a jump shot, work on running fast, or figure out how to rap or sing with rhythm and harmony, so as to cover up your constant striving to learn. There's little tolerance for Black kids who aren't cool, especially when they're smart. No wonder even many of the smarter ones act as if they are as dumb as a door post. No wonder many of our dreams remain unfulfilled.

No one wants to feel isolated, to be alone, to be ostracized. It takes truly unique individuals to break through the traps set by those ignit Americans who may determine cool, but can in no way determine success. Otherwise, so many Americans, Black and otherwise, will succumb to the not-so-blissful ign-ence of our peers, to their cool and unimaginative ways of thinking about and going about living in this world. This is the thing that Black History Month must yet take on and continue to strive against. History and education is the work that our society must continue to emphasize, even as we strive in ignorance to make nine-month-olds read and sixteen-year-olds ready for Harvard.

Art Rust, Jr.

Two weeks ago, sports talk radio pioneer Art Rust, Jr. passed away at the ripe old age of eighty-two. Other than a few short obits in the New York Times and Daily News and a few other choice newspapers, hardly a word was said about Rust's passing. Almost no mention on WFAN in New York, or on other sports radio talk shows in places like DC or other parts of the country. I guess for even knowledgeable reporters, columnists and talk show hosts on the sports side of the media, Rust's passing was as remarkable as mine would be to the academic, nonprofit and writing worlds in which I inhabit. It's much more than a shame. It's all too typical that we as a people and media types especially forget about trailblazers in the field.

That Rust was Black only makes almost total blackout of news of his death all the more atrocious. I'm in no way suggesting that race is the reason why there was almost zero coverage of Rust. Most of this has to do with generational differences and timing. Rust because a vanguard of sports radio talk some two and a half decades before most forms of talk radio were the norm on AM or FM. He was sometimes a cutting-edge figure, other times an over-the-edge and controversial figure, as evidenced by his first book, Get That Nigger Off the Field (about the history of Blacks in baseball). Rust could be a bit over the top in his comments and corniness, constantly using the term "poppycock and balderdash" with generations of fans who had never seen nor heard the term before. But if it weren't for Rust, whole generations of sports talk radio hosts -- especially ones of color -- wouldn't have had the opportunity to make an impact on how we view and participate in sports Americana.

Rust was as much as personality as much as he was a voice imparting views and information about sports like baseball and boxing. His work in Harlem and the rest of New York in the years between '54 and '81 had given him the opportunity to know many an athlete, from Joe Di Maggio and Joe Louis to Muhammad Ali and Darryl Strawberry. If you wanted insight beyond a sports writer's column or article about an athlete -- especially a Black athlete -- you had to listen to Rust. He either interviewed them, or knew the person well enough to play pop psychologist about them. It's what made him a minor icon long before I was born and the folks who host now were aspiring to be beat reporters anywhere.

I started listening to Rust during his WABC-770 AM days, between '81 and '87, during the last of his good years on talk radio. He could talk about any sport, about the connections between race and sports, about any issue that came up, really, because he believed that he had lived long enough to have seen it all. One of the reasons I came to appreciate baseball so much in those days was because I had to listen to Rust wax poetic about the game time and time again, bringing a perspective and knowledge to it that didn't exist on the airwaves otherwise. Long before I read books about Satchel Paige or Josh Gibson or the Homestead Grays and the Negro Leagues, I could at least listen to Rust talk about such things in airy remembrance or in interviews with former players. Heck, Rust might've been the reason I stopped liking baseball, as I came to understand the sport's ugly history.

So too was I turned off to the Yankees and the fans who'd call in to Rust's show. Besides the fact that the Mets would always be underdogs as long as they shared New York with the Yankees -- no matter how many good things the Mets did -- there was one simple fact. The most delusional sports fans in all of the world in the '80s were Yankees fans. And Rust would patiently, then impatiently, set Yankees fans straight about the abilities of a team with Pags, Winfield and Mattingly but little else -- as they traded away minor league talent year after year -- to have a winning season, much less win the AL East. And, of course, there was the more than occasional caller who would call in with a racist comment or a racial epithet directed at Rust. But Rust would respond with dignity and courage and hyperbole and disdain, something that probably drove the drinking-caller-public nuts.

I didn't get into his conversations about boxing as much. I could care less about Larry Holmes or Marvin Haggler or Sugar Ray Leonard or a host of others. It was already a dying sport, and Rust knew it. Rust spent a lot of time on his show going after Gerry Cooney and his promoters in the mid-80s. Too bad Cooney turned out to be one of the highlights in Michael Spinks' career.

The end of Rust's run came with the emergence of 24-hour sports radio talk in '87, turning my beloved Mets station WHN (which also played country music, and really old country music at that) into WFAN. WABC let him go to WFAN. Unfortunately, with the mercurial idiot Howie Rose leading WFAN into this brave new world, Rust's age and his lack of appeal to a younger audience made his short time on the station an unsuccessful one. I lost all respect for Rose, by the way, when he would critique Lionel Richie's music as "boring." For me, the end of my relating to Rust came in '87 as well, with my move to Pittsburgh and college that summer.

So much reminds me of Rust in the radio world now. At least, anything that's any good. The Tony Kornheiser Show and his moodiness and his friendly chats with his chummy guests. The constant interplay of music on The John Thompson Show. Interviews off the beaten path on the Tom Joyner Show. Of course, Rust wasn't the only pioneer, but so much of what Rust did is now commonplace. So much so that it's disheartening to know that so many have made nary a mention of the man and his work. Which is why I have today.

Nightmares and Daydreams

There's another side to what happens in my mind and heart when I'm asleep. And with the work in putting together Boy @ The Window, when I'm lost in thought in between new sentences, deleted paragraphs, and old emotions. Just because my life's turned out much better than expected in the years since Humanities and Mount Vernon doesn't mean that I don't have any baggage from my lost years.

Even now, precious sleep can be hard to come by as rain is for a desert. Even with all the accomplishments, accolades and affections, sleeping well remains a difficult thing. When I finally do sleep, my dreams and nightmares are populated by others’ threats and my fears from my past. My ex-stepfather, my ex-crushes, the beatings and the longing. The scars and the people whom those scars represent are still there to draw upon, seek wisdom from, and occasionally respond to with justified retribution.

I’m often naked in my nightmares while fending them all off. My high school classmates, my ex-stepfather and my mother, and a cast of others who represent the physical and psychological violence of my growing-up years. For years, I could count on fighting my ex-stepfather in my dreams and nightmares. Sometimes I won, sometimes I lost. A few times, I managed to kill him. Most of the time, I woke up before I could do anything at all.

Then there was Crush #1. She seemed to show up in my dreams at the most inappropriate of times. No girlfriends, girlfriends or marriage, somehow a younger version of her would show up periodically to give me sage advice. As much as it felt good for her to show up in my dreams, her presence usually left me out of sorts. I knew that a part of me loved her, but that part could never be fulfilled. Not with so many other nightmares associated with her.

The one I have most often is one of me metaphorically exposing myself, and not just ones where I’m down to my birthday suit. It’s a dream — but more often a nightmare — where I’m being interrogated about something I said that particular day or week. No matter how wonderful a day I’ve had, I find myself in a room or in a public place being questioned about something I’ve said or done. By God. Or by one of my former professors. Or by friends and acquaintances from my past.

If there was only a way for me to turn it all off, to not wait for the other shoe to drop. To forget about all of the hurt, the bitterness, the betrayals from my childhood, if not the actual events themselves. To have a completely clean emotional state, to be able to start over would make sleep much easier to find, and rest as common as the air itself.

I understand that I’m the ultimate questioner, but it sure would be nice if I could stop beating myself up with the regrets I have about the Humanities years. Not to mention the lean and mean times at 616 and in Mount Vernon, New York. It was the prism through which I understood my Reagan years world.

These nightmares and daydreams aren't ones that happen every day or night, nor are they the majority of my images and events that populate my asleep world. But they are there, laying in wait, ready to pounce upon me from time to time. Although I don't see myself as a five-foot-four and 125 pound tweener anymore, and haven't for at least twenty-one years, that person is a part of me. Instead of ignoring or suppressing these "bad" or "evil" dreams, I've decided to learn something from the avatars embodying them. At least when I'm asleep. I've stopped running in these dreams, and I've stopped being embarrassed at my nakedness in them.

I guess that this may coincide with having put a moratorium on revisions for the book. Maybe yes, maybe no. What I do know is that my conversations with my tweener and teenage years avatars make more sense than almost all the actual conversations I had with them in the real world. I guess that, despite the baggage, these nightmares and daydreams are a good thing, for they present a wisdom, an insight or a foresight that I wouldn't have otherwise.

Where's The Beef?

I have a beef with those who make a job search into a tryout for American Idol and Top Chef wrapped into one. It seems to me that job recruiters, human resource managers and search committees have become lazy in their approach to sifting through the resumes and cover letters that they receive for jobs. I guess that a ten percent unemployment rate and seventeen percent underemployment rate would make anyone involved with the hiring process confident to the point of arrogance about how they deal with applicants. As someone who's teaching part-time and has had a feast-or-famine time as a consultant over the past two years, I've applied for full-time, part-time and consulting work to bring in a decent income. I have been through some indifferent, even bizarre moments on phone interviews and in face-to-face interviews, with for-profits, private foundations, universities, and think-tanks. But nonprofit entities are truly a unique animal when it comes to process, so unique that the beef of their processes really add up to nothing more than beef-flavored tofu.

This isn't sour grapes over not being hired. I could've written a dozen postings about the unfairness of life, about my not knowing enough people in high places to help find the work that I want. I haven't, mostly because I understand that even people with the best of experiences and credentials get rejected for jobs. It's part of the job search process, and it's necessary, especially since I might not always be happy at a job I end up accepting. No, this is about some of my more unusual moments over the past few months in dealing with really strange job search processes in the nonprofit world.

Take my experience with the Posse Foundation. I applied for a position with them last year, and did two interviews with staff before they decided to move on with another candidate. Not unusual in any way. Except for the fact that this wasn't their typical way of hiring folks. Usually they do a group interview in a big room, for every position. From the administrative assistant to director-level positions, applicants compete in a room for the attention of interviewers, as if these were applicants for the show Job Search (no such show, although it would likely be on NBC if it did exist). Somehow I managed to bypass that bit of humiliation. Yet, more characteristic of my previous job searches, my second interview was an afterthought, with another candidate already with staff for lunch while I was being interviewed. I had to contact them some two weeks later for an official rejection for the position.

Of course, Posse's explanation for this is that its group interview process will give applicants a feel for what potential Posse Scholars will go through to obtain a slot for a four-year scholarship to a university through one of their university scholars. Maybe so. But at least the students receive a rejection letter or other assistance after the process is over. Nor do students sense on some level favoritism during their interview process. Not to mention the fact that most of your applicants are well above the age of seventeen or eighteen.

Another example of the unusual in a job search was a job I should've never applied for with The Washington Center for Internships and Academic Seminars. I managed to get an interview with folks who had all the professionalism of college students working at Jerry's Pizza and Subs. For an hour, they asked me all kinds of questions about what I knew to be a part-time position, based on their own job advertisement on Idealist.org. I guess I should've been more curious, given that five people were in the room grilling me. When I finally asked a question about the flexibility of their schedule, they looked shocked. The folks finally got around to tell me that I was interviewing for both a full-time and a part-time position at the same time, with the full-time one being the priority. Then one of their directors quickly herded me outside a side gate -- I guess he wanted to make sure that I felt sufficiently humiliated as a Black male -- to end the interview. Needless to say, these un-professionals never did send me an official rejection notice.

But nothing, absolutely nothing, is more irritating than doing extra work for a position per the request of a potential employer, completing it and then not being interviewed at all. This was the case with The New Teacher Project (TNTP). I applied for a work-at-home position in data and policy analysis with them. The original application asked for a writing sample, but I couldn't attach one on their application webpage. A few days later, I received an email from TNTP asking me to complete a series of exercises crunching and analyzing data regarding teacher effectiveness. This included writing a memo to prospective funders based on one set of data, importing another set of data into MS Access, running queries, filters and calculations, filling out tables and making appropriate suggestions based on this other set of data. I received this assignment Thursday evening at 6:18 pm a couple of weeks ago, but TNTP wanted my completed exercise by Sunday. I managed to get an extension for Tuesday and completed the assignment, only to receive a generic rejection from TNTP thirty-six hours later. It turned out that others "more closely fit" the position requirements.

I was miffed, and sent them a note saying so. It was lazy -- to say the least -- to push applicants into an exercise process before being interviewed, only to reject them based on something other than the exercise itself. I could've just as easily provided my published writing samples of my use of data on education policy related issues. To use valuable time to work on this when I could've applied for other jobs made this process ridiculous. Not to mention the fact that in going this route, TNTP should've paid folks for their time and effort. They gave me a generic excuse equivalent to the rejection note, saying that this was the best way to identify the best candidates. I have a better idea -- how about interviewing folks first, then asking them to complete an exercise!

Academia and other fields have their own quirks and nuances. But at least you know going in what those are. The nonprofit world just makes up stuff or pulls ideas out of a "How To Do a Wacky Interview" book and expects its applicants to roll with it. I don't expect a job search to be fair -- after all, I live in a who-you-know world. What I do expect is for the search process to make sense, be consistent in its unfairness and a bit of transparency in terms of what these entities are looking for. That some haven't even met this minimal requirement says a lot about how far professional standards have dropped, and why nonprofits are often seen in a bad light.

On Being An Ignorant American

What do E.D. Hirsch's books on Cultural Literacy, the commercials about nine-month-olds who can read, Harry Reid's comments about President Obama and Pat Robertson's admonishing of Haitians and Haiti have in common? They're all about us, ignorant Americans, arrogant and all-assuming in our cultural norms. They all contain seeds of Whiteness, maybe even Whiteness as an assumed sense of right and wrong, of good and evil, of better intelligence, benevolence and wisdom. There may even be a touch of eugenics involved in all four, as if the White American way (which unfortunately is still one and the same) is the only right to speak and think in this world.

It's amazing that we're still dealing with the idea that there is only one path to intellectual development and growth in our society. This despite all of Howard Gardner's work on multiple intelligences, and the work of so many others like Gardner. We still think that we should buy Mozart, Beethoven and Bach mp3's, put them on our iPods, and put the headphones on the bellies of pregnant American citizens so that their children can be proficient third-grade readers before the age of five. We still believe that behaviors that promote individuality and unthinking critiques of everything are the best behaviors for our often lonely and uncritical thinking children to grow up with.

Hirsch was the main guru of a new movement of American intellectual development with his books on Cultural Literacy back in the '80s. Now we have a series of commercials exploiting the worries of suburban and White parents with YourBabyCanRead.com. Nine-month-olds, two- year-olds and five-year-olds of the world unite in the unyielding quest to become voracious and critical readers, writers and thinkers. An all-consuming task in front of all other goals, like potty training, learning how to use a fork and a spoon, and learning how to listen to parents without whining or throwing a tantrum.

These commercials hearken back to the thinking of the first half of the twentieth century, to the wonderful world of the eugenics movement, in which scientists and pseudo-scientists sought to improve the intellectual and athletic skills of the human race -- at least the "pure" and White part of it -- by experimenting with those most pure. Or, more often, by experimenting (and ultimately, exterminating) those who were deemed much less pure or even dangerous to keep in the human gene pool. Blacks, Jews, gays, developmental disabled and mentally retarded all found themselves in the latter category. Most of the derogatory terms we use today as youth and adults -- retard, moron, dull-minded, imbecile, even nerd -- were spawned by leaders of eugenics and its off-shoots between roughly 1900 and the '50s.

Now, I'm not arguing that a kid under the age of five can't become a proficient reader. My older brother Darren -- who learned to read without any assistance by the time he was three -- is a case in point. But he didn't do it through coaching, flash cards or Mozart. Heck, my mother -- when she played music back then -- would play Al Green, Diana Ross and the Supremes and The Temptations. So why the emphasis on classical music, coaching, flash cards and the pseudo-science of the baby brain here? Because it has been ingrained in the minds of most Americans -- especially White Americans -- that intelligence is a White thing. And in a world of increasing educational competition, that intelligence no longer has time to develop. What will Jill or Johnny do if they won't be ready for a gifted and accelerated learning program in school by the time they're seven years old? How will they ever get into Harvard, Yale or Princeton? How will they ever be ready to be a neuro-surgeon or a corporate lawyer?

Of course, the commercial shows one example of a kid whose interests included basketball and other sports, and not just literacy and mid-elementary level books, a nod to the need for physical stimulation (and indirectly, a nod to eugenics as well). But isn't it interesting that not a single person in the YourBabyCanRead.com commercial was of color? Not one, not even a token one? As the late Art Rust, Jr. would say, that's a bunch of poppycock and balderdash.

So too are the witticisms of Sen. Reid (D-NV) and televangelist Pat Robertson. Between "light-skinned Black," "Negro dialect," and two-century-long deals "with the devil," we could just write the comments off as the bleating of stupid White guys. That's far too easy. Because they were and are communicating and connecting mostly with other people like them -- folks in powerful positions to influence our culture. Even though Sen. Reid didn't mean his statement to be one for public consumption, it was meant for a private group of powerful people. And Robertson knew full well that his argument about a wrathful Old Testament God seeking vengeance on darker-skinned people who didn't obey their masters (not to mention the Voodoo stereotype) would resonate well with his "White is Right" audience.

How does this make us ignorant? We assume that we're the richest and most powerful country on Earth for two reasons. One, because we're smart and hard-working individuals from mostly immigrant (and White) backgrounds, taking advantage of this nation's resources. Or two, because we're God-fearing Christians, faithful to the core, and because God blessed us with the bounty of this nation's resources. That is to say, we're good enough, we're smart enough, and doggone it, God loves us. But apparently, not all of us, and certainly not folks who aren't White and outside of the US. Our quest for a singular culture, for super-intelligence, for a world that only makes sense to a select and powerful few has left tens of millions of Americans as ignorant about the world as Americans would believe those in Port-au-Prince are these days. Except that with the ignorant and powerful people to their north, Haitians never were as ignorant as us.