Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Man in the Mirror

2009-07-04T10:56:00.004-04:00

I guess that I should be discussing the meaning of Chicago's "Saturday in the Park," especially with this July 4th being on a Saturday. But in light of Michael Jackson's death last week, it's an even better idea to discuss the effect that his music had on me at various times in my life. My first exposure to Michael Jackson came through the Jackson 5 cartoon series that was on in the early '70s. Then he did The Wiz in '78, and his first solo album Off The Wall came out in '79. I remember that one of my first times hearing "Rock With You" was at an in-class dance party in my fifth grade class with Mrs. O'Daniels. Of course, who could forget Thriller and all that came with it between October '82 and April '84? Twenty-five million albums sold in the US alone during that time, and some 50 million worldwide. They should've renamed Sony "MJ-ony!"

And that was when all of the weirdness and changes began. The plastic surgeries on his nose, the changes in his skin tone, the permanent straight waviness of his hair. Not to mention the studded glove and the semi-punk style by the time Michael Jackson's Bad dropped in late August '87. I remember those days well. It took time for this album to grow on me, partly because it was hard to look at Michael Jackson with all of those changes at first. "Bad" was all right, "Just Can't Stop Loving You" would've been better if I hadn't been in the process of getting over Crush #2, and "The Way You Make Me Feel" was turgid. I guess I didn't like the girl in that video either.

Once again, I digress. I was feeling at bit of MJ fatigue in April '88 when his folks released "Man In The Mirror." Man In The Mirror.mp3 I found myself falling in love with the song despite myself. My rational side thought, "Boy, these lyrics are corny!" My optimistic side, though, thought, "Wow, he's putting all of himself into this song!" As much as I found "Man In The Mirror" ironic, given Michael Jackson's idiosyncrasies, I found it a bit inspiring. The video, while overdone, was also uplifting. It was '88, after all, and with the coming summer, it was NBA Finals, the Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, and time home at 616, where I needed all the inspiration I could get.

That's how I thought of "Man In The Mirror" at first. Watching Pistons great Isiah Thomas (notice I'm not saying anything about his work with the Knicks) drop 20-something points in the third quarter on the Lakers in Game 6 of the NBA Finals, single-handedly willing the Pistons into the game, and on a bum ankle at that. Watching Magic and the Lakers respond by beating down the Pistons in Game 7, with Isiah on the bench for most of the second half. These memories often bubble to the surface when I listen to "Man In The Mirror."

I also find myself thinking about Carl Lewis, Flo-Jo, Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Greg Louganis, Bob Costas, Bryant Gumbel and the '88 Olympics always twelve hours or so ahead of us on the East Coast. Weren't they all great, even with the crappy coverage? I remember Florence Griffith-Joyner and her wonderful runs, racy outfits and sexy bod. Too bad she's gone away as well. Of course, I can't help but think of Ben Johnson in that light as well. Setting a world record, only to be banned for life from his sport for using steroids. Ah, sports and politics!

Most of all, I think of the last of my difficult summers at 616, the summer of unemployment, 120 days of torture. The one bright spot for me that summer was spend time with my younger siblings, Maurice, Yiscoc, Sarai and Eri. They all were receptive to me, especially my music. They loved it whenever I'd pop Michael Jackson's Bad album in my tape deck, especially when it would get to "Man In The Mirror." I don't think that Eri or Yiscoc would like me reminding them of how much they got into it trying to sing to it, though.

The ONE song I listened to during my week of homelessness on Pitt's campus was "Man In The Mirror." Hokey, I know. But when you're in the worst of all possible situations, hokey and optimistic's much better than pathetic and pessimistic. It was at that point I no longer needed to justify listening to MJ. Even with the molestation and related charges in '93 and '04 -- not to mention his social and racial identity issues -- I separated the work of a musical genius from the troubles of a man who hadn't quite grown up, even though he was in his forties by then.

It's funny to see how many Michael Jackson fans have come out of the closet now that he's dead. I think it would've given MJ something to smile about had he known how much we all treasured his music. It's too bad folks didn't express this much love for the man and his music in the last years of his life. Still, his music lives on, in me and in so many of us. And though there will never be another Michael Jackson -- short of reincarnation -- we can hope for another great musical genius who will touch us in ways we can only dream of. By the way, I still sometimes look in the mirror and say, "I'm gonna make a change, for once in my life..."

"Southern" Poverty Tour

2009-06-30T09:00:00.004-04:00

I've been everywhere, man, especially when it comes to poverty. I've seen more kinds of poverty than I'd ever want to know. And '01 was a banner year to see it all. President Bill Clinton might've gone on some form of a Southern poverty tour in his pre-presidential campaign in '96. But I had the chance to see American poverty in all of its various forms in June '01, and not just in the South. Although it did start for me in the South, up close and personal.

I took off a couple of days early for my social justice fellow site visit in Jackson, Mississippi. I flew into Shreveport, Louisiana -- as part of an extended layover in the days before 9/11 -- to do something I'd never done before. I was on my way to visiting my grandparents on my mother's side in Bradley, Arkansas. I was there, once, physically, as a second-trimester fetus in the summer of '69. I found myself both excited and in dread of what I'd find going there. I knew it would be poverty like I'd never seen it. And it was, even before I reached the Gill family in Bradley.

I called for and took a cab from my Holiday Inn Express next to the beat-up airport in Shreveport and paid for a forty-mile trip. If I'd been driving, I would've missed it. Bradley was a yellow-flashing, one-stoplight town. There was a bar, a laundromat, a church and a store on the four corners, with one side of town White, the other Black. As we drove deeper into the Black side, the houses looked more and more run-down, with corrugated rooftops and often outhouses. The section of houses that included the Gills were all shotgun ones. They had no running water and had not turned on the plumbing in their place for the past three decades, even though they were still using the toilet. The house was dirty, and not in a typical American sort of way. It was as if they lived on a garbage dump next to a toxic waste site. When I opened up a partially broken cabinet door to get a cup, I was hit in the face and head with what seemed like dozens of roaches.

I spent one long and desperate night with the Gill family in Bradley, waking up over and over because roaches crawled across my body and flies constantly buzzed. I couldn't get myself to use their bathroom, and their outhouse didn't work anymore. Luckily my Uncle Charles got his broken-down Chevy Cavalier to work. As soon as I returned to my hotel room, I took one of the longest showers of my life, somewhere near an hour. I was heartbroken to have seen so much poverty, especially since my grandparents were eighty-two and seventy-three at the time.

Jackson, Mississippi's poverty wasn't as obvious as the quasi-Global South/ Third World poverty I saw in Bradley. Still, it was all too sad. Even with a degree -- albeit a tiny degree -- of residential integration, the run-down Black side of town was just that. Jackson State University looked more like a cheap comprehensive high school than a major historically-Black or any other kind of university. The community around the campus varied from block to block. One block would have a series of fairly well-kept working-class and middle class homes. The next would have a half-torn-down house next to an empty lot next to another dilapidation. For all of the progress since the end of Jim Crow, Jackson might as well have been stuck in 1961.

Tulsa, Oklahoma was next, and it wasn't pretty. I spent most of my time in its dead downtown or on its bombed-out North side. There, poor Blacks and extremely impoverished American Indians lived. There were even more monstrosities for homes, evil-looking projects and empty lots there than in Jackson. But what made it worse was getting in a car with a social justice fellow and seeing her side of town, the South side. It's where Tiger Woods played in the US Open the following week. It's where I saw stately mansions and an abundance of middle class homes. It's the home of Oral Roberts University and the University of Tulsa. The contrast was greater than seeing the difference between high-priced, high-rise condos on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and where we lived at 616. It was absolutely disgusting.

After a two-week break, I flew out to Fairbanks, Alaska for the Summer Solstice. Twenty-three and a half hours of sunlight for three straight days. About half spent fifty miles of driving and thirty miles by boat away from Fairbanks, in a Athabascan fishing village. There, I did get to use the outhouse while being eaten alive by mosquitoes during central Alaska's short but intense growing season. The kids all thought that I was either Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods. Even with the lack of technology or civilization, it was the least poor place I'd visit throughout that month.

A couple of days after Alaska, I went to Durham, North Carolina, to see the kind of poverty I had grown accustomed to growing up. It was Southern Latino immigrant poverty, but it wasn't the grinding, never-ending poverty I had seen in Alaska, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas or Mississippi. Even with that, this relatively new community faced financial and other forms discrimination that could've had the effect of putting them into a hard-steel poverty, one that ages someone from the outside in. The best thing about that trip was the social justice fellow I met there, the rabbit stew I ate for dinner, and the Durham Bulls memorabilia I bought for my wife.

What made the month so depressing was the impoverished thinking I encountered throughout. From social justice workers, government officials, everyday people, the poor folks I met, including my grandparent. Despite all of the difficulties between me and my mother, I appreciated the strength it took for her to move from Bradley to the Bronx in '66. It obvious took a lot of it. I only wished that so many others I met that month could've done the same.

Mr. Meltzer

2009-06-27T10:04:00.003-04:00

I plan most of my postings in advance. So there's a bit of irony involved in this particular posting, since I had already planned to write about one of the great influences in my life to date, a man who died all too soon and with all too much bitterness in his heart and mind. Then Michael Jackson died on Thursday, a loss I can't fully comprehend just yet. Even when accused of molestation, I kept playing his music, separating the genius from whatever issues he struggled with outside of his musical artistry. I know that I am hardly alone in saying that MJ will be sorely missed. However, another great influence -- one who will remain relatively unknown -- is one I also miss, for his eccentricities, his wisdom, his passion for students and teaching. One Mr. Harold I. Meltzer.

My second interview with Meltzer occurred on a typically windy fall day in November ’02. I came up to New Rochelle by Metro-North’s New Haven Line. I knew that my favorite mentor wasn’t in the greatest of shape based on his recent letters and my first attempt to interview him that August.

I rang Meltzer’s doorbell four times before he answered. His voice now labored to say the words "H.M. here?" It was a third-floor walk-up for me, but it left me in less distress than the heavy-breathing Meltzer was in just walking from his telephone in his dining room area to his front door, about thirty feet in all. I was in some shock when he answered the door. Meltzer had gained about fifty pounds in the three-and-a-half years since my ’99 visit. His broken and in constant-traction-back, not to mention his surgically-repaired knees, had left Meltzer barely able to walk with the assistance of a cane or his walker. He always had a bow in his upper back. With the extra weight, my former teacher now looked about fifteen years older than his actual age. He was shirtless, but did wear some gray sweats to cover his bottom.

His apartment, though messier than when I visited him last, still felt like a teacher or artist’s flat. Having seen Finding Forrester the year before, his apartment reminded me very much of the hermetic character Sean Connery had played in the film. It was old and musty, a place just big enough to get lost in but not big enough to feel luxurious. It was filled with books and magazines and newspapers. Not to mention blue books, essays, and other evidence of Meltzer’s long career in Mount Vernon’s public schools. Meltzer had the radio set to WQXR-FM, a New York-area classical station. The music was bittersweet, as was Meltzer’s mood. He was definitely happy to see me, but probably would’ve preferred being in better physical shape.

"So, you wanted to know what these characteristics were . . . what kind of student you were based on what I perceived. Well that’s the easiest thing in the world!," he began after I’d gone to the store to buy him lunch. To me at least, Meltzer’s voice had immediately changed from this worn and forlorn tone to his more cheerful and hopeful one. He must’ve transported himself back to ’85.

"I had a few students, not many, just a few, you were one of the few, you would sit on the edge of your seat because you were so skinny . . . and you eyelids never blinked . . . because when you were fascinated, you know, everything fascinated you, you watched the chalkboard like a hawk. . . ." he continued. I found myself in ’85 again, reliving the memories of Meltzer and his classroom, the rhythm of his voice, the stunned silence of my classmates, the rustle of leaves from the high school courtyard tree closest to Meltzer’s window, the occasional chalk-trauma. " . . . even though you never moved a muscle in your face, your eyes used to flash . . . I could see that. . . . no one else could see but I could see . . ."

Meltzer meandered into a discussion of my academic progress in his class. "And many times when you read the question over and tore open the blue book . . . and in the end there were maybe three or four lines written. They were gems of writing, absolute gems, but you needed to have more, you see, because they [the College Board] wanted more," Meltzer said.

And because of Meltzer, I did give them—and him—more. So much more that I earned the coveted "5" on the AP American History exam. I guess that was why he never worried about me.

We spent the last couple of hours discussing the book idea that would become Boy At The Window. Meltzer thought that it should be a fiction novel, based on the real flesh and blood folks in my life, but with different names of course to protect me from any potential lawsuits. He did make me rethink the project from a simple research study of my high school years into narrative nonfiction and memoir. Then we hugged and said our good-byes.

"It was so good to see you, Donnie."

"Me too."

"Come back over soon. We should talk again."

"Don’t worry. I will."

Who were we kidding? We both knew that his days were numbered, and that this second interview was likely the last time we’d talked. I was honored to be able to spend the day with him, to gain some additional insight about my long-time mentor and friend. Not to mention Mount Vernon and MVHS. Those eight hours together in conversation were as precious as any moments I’ve experienced as a student and a teacher. And in making sure that Meltzer knew how much I appreciated him, I kissed his forehead and gave him a big hug as I left his place for the final time. He died on January 9 of ’03.

Crush #1 once said, "[Meltzer] really taught me how to write. . . . I know I relied on his methods heavily when I was at NYU writing all of those essays." I just wished that she and so many of his other students had told him the same thing in his final days.

I learned so much about how to be a good teacher from Meltzer. But I also learned how much of a toll teaching and dealing with uncaring teachers, administrators, parents and other adults can take on you. I have vowed to strike a balance ever since. It's been almost six and a half years since his death, but I know his influence on me will continue for as long as I continue. Still, I miss Meltzer very much.

Starks for 3?

2009-06-24T11:52:00.002-04:00

Wednesday night, June 23, '94. One of my worst nights as a Knicks fan. That night, the dream of a NBA title for my favorite team died, and it died hard. Losing 90-84 to Hakeem Olajuwon and my uncles' Houston Rockets, I was depressed for more than a week afterwards. It was a horrible series to watch from an offensive basketball perspective. Too many missed shots, blocked shots, 24-second shot-clock violations, airballs and other misadventures on both sides and for both teams. I had no voice by the time it was all over, having dedicated the previous six weeks to every possession and every game. Watching Patrick Ewing, Charles Oakley, John Starks and the rest of the gang of free-agent veterans and rookies take the Knicks to a partially-blocked three-point shot away from a championship. Such bittersweet times!

Technically, the Knicks have won two championships in my lifetime, one in '70 and the other in '73. I vaguely remember the second one, as it happened when I was three and a half years old. The first one, I was still learning how to crawl when Willis Reed limped onto the court at Madison Square Garden in May of '70 against the Lakers of West and Chamberlain. They barely count in my mind. For the Knicks I truly remember are the ones of declining talent in the '70s, followed by moments of hope with Micheal Ray Richardson and Bernard King in the '80s, and then of Ewing and Marc Jackson in the late-80s. Knicks that varied from God-awful to pretty good.

They just weren't good enough to be tragic, at least not until the Pat Riley years. Losing a close series against the Bulls in the second round in '92, after giving MJ and Pippen all they could handle for six and a half games. Taking their feet off the necks of the Bulls in '93, after being up 2-0 in the Eastern Conference finals. Especially with fellow Pitt Alum Charles Smith blowing a game-winning layup in the closing seconds of Game 5. It might as well have been me out there against Horace Grant and company.

Then came Games 6 and 7 in Houston in '94. It was horrible and heartbreaking. With Olajuwon draped all over Ewing and with mediocre guard play from Derek Harper and Hubert Davis, John Starks became the go-to-guy for Ewing. Starks really did have a great Game 6. He shot 5-for-8 from three before his dreaded last-second shot, was the leading Knicks scorer with 27 points (including 16 in the fourth quarter), and really was the only reason the Knicks had a chance to win. The problem was, he didn't necessarily need to launch a three to win that game. A two or a pass inside to Oakley or Ewing would likely have tied the game and sent it into overtime, especially with Olajuwon playing Starks straight up. On the other hand, thinking about it as a shooter, as streaky as Starks was back then, the shot probably would've gone in if Hakeem hadn't partially blocked it.

But instead of following it up with a good performance in Game 7, Starks had one of the worst shooting slumps of his career, going 2-for-18, including 0-for-11 in three-point attempts. That included at least three airballs by my own count. It was like the team had eaten some form of poison before the game, that's how awful they played. Starks, though, played worse than anyone, taking ill-advised shots and ignoring Riley's frowns and screams.

It wasn't so much that he didn't perform well under pressure. It was more the fact that Starks refused to pass out of double-teams or throw the ball inside or across court to a teammate with a wide-open shot at the hoop. Starks needed help, and refused to seek it or to anticipate it. He tried to take over a sloppy offensive series singlehandedly. As a result, Ewing faced more pressure, and the game -- even as close as it was at 90-84 -- was a constant uphill battle for my Knicks.

I was pissed to the point of tears when that game ended fifteen years ago. I've long since forgiven Starks for his performance. Those kinds of things can happen to the best of us. Still, there's an important lesson to learn about teamwork and help from Games 6 and 7 of the '94 NBA Finals. Sometimes it's up to you to knock down a shot, and sometimes, you give it up to a wide-open teammate so that we can all win, in basketball and in life.

Strange Days

2009-06-24T07:04:00.003-04:00

Being on campus at Princeton teaching for a few weeks and working with college-ready high school students sometimes takes me back into my past. It's funny really, realizing that the "best and the brightest" were hardly the best and weren't quite so bright, even at the time I went to school with them. That's not to say that the students I've had or have now at Princeton or the classmates I graduated with didn't or don't have loads of potential. They did and do. It's more about what can happen when teachers, administrators and parents fill our heads full with delusions of grandeur, with ideas of intellectual greatness based on signs of academic excellence. It's what can happen when students spend more time trying to keep up with the image of high academic achievement that others have created for them rather than finding their own path, one that allows them to be themselves and to tap into their potential.

I know, I know, some students strive and thrive even with the pressures from their parents, the doting of teachers, and the turning-the-other-way of administrators. I could also be accused of playa hatin', I suppose. After all, I was far from popular in my glory days of high school, and only found myself in the last two and a half years of college. But that's just it. Even I had to come to grips with my family's expectations -- especially the lack of them -- in high school and college. I needed to find myself in order to be all that I could be in college and in grad school. I needed to make a clean break from the doubters in my life -- including of course, my teachers and administrators.

That's the unfortunate truth I faced in my last two years at Mount Vernon High School. Especially when the class rankings came out a month into our senior year. Out of 545 potential graduates, I was ranked fourteenth. I was a little disappointed because I didn't crack the top ten, mostly because I knew I needed scholarship money and a good financial aid package to help pay for college, wherever I went. I had already learned that my performance wasn't good enough for my teachers in eleventh grade. They kept reminding me that I was doing nothing in comparison to the salutatorian in our class, an involved-in-everything Black male. I guess I could've argued that they should've been comparing me to our Class of '87 valedictorian, but my teachers saw the second in our class as a much more well-rounded student. At the very least, I knew from the comparisons that the person I was supposed to be more like had a charming way with our teachers.

I saw this particular classmate as more of an enigma than many of the other ones I had done time with in Humanities. I genuinely felt both in awe of and disheartened by his presence in my life during the Humanities years. I thought it was amazing that he was able to do as much as he did. The high school band. The mock trial team. The school newspaper. Our yearbook. An appearance on Phil Donahue! At least he wasn’t a star basketball player too, especially in Mount Vernon.

Yet I saw the results of all of that involvement on his part, and not just in terms of how teachers saw me. As far as teachers were concerned, it was as if I was this classmate's younger, underachieving brother. But I also saw how the young man occasionally worked his reputation to his advantage, cashing in on his built-up academic capital to give himself more time to work on assignments no one else got a second of overtime to do. I don’t think I ever wanted to be him or become close friends with him, though. Something about his need to be well-liked by our peers and teachers bothered me. So I was happy in more ways than one to see our salutatorian gallop into the sunset with his diploma, a law firm job in Manhattan, and his ticket to Harvard punched some twenty-two years ago.

Something strange happened in the days after the final fight between my mother and ex-stepfather in June '89. It was a week after idiot Maurice had moved out for the last time. Me and my older brother Darren were on our way to my father Jimme's for money and because Darren was in the process of moving out of 616 -- God knows he needed to. Along the way, we bumped into crush #1, which is a story unto itself, a good one that is. Ten minutes later we bumped into salutatorian off The Avenue and West First, still trekking toward Jimme’s. This surprise meeting trumped my crush #1 conversation and made a lasting impression on my understanding of myself as a Black male. So much so that I had a long conversation with my late teacher Harold Meltzer about it years later.

When I bumped into the man en route to Jimme’s with Darren, he’d just gotten off work at his summer law firm job in the city, his third summer working there. He was wearing a hideous green-and-white-checkered dress shirt with dark green suspenders and even darker green slacks. Why hideous? Because on a hot and hazy day in late-June ’89, a day in which batting an eyelash required some degree of sweat, the guy was dressed like it was the middle of March. The color scheme didn’t blend at all with his dark chocolate skin, and his face was both greasy and sweaty from a long, hard day. But the biggest shock was his hair. It was conked — or fried as some folks say — ala Miles Davis or Malcolm Little before he became Malcolm X. This was the first thing I noticed, even before the Green Giant getup. Since I was already in a pissy mood, one only mildly moderated by my crush #1 sighting and conversation, I didn’t outwardly react to it.

I realized as I stood there with Darren talking to my former classmate what had bothered me about him during all of our years together in Humanities. I had called him an "Oreo Cookie "—Black on the outside, White in the middle — in my head and under my breath on a few occasions during our Humanities years. Yet this sighting and conversation let me know that I was wrong. Sadly, I realized that our salutatorian didn’t have any identity at all. He made himself into whomever others wanted him to be. To his family, he was the mild-mannered and religiously faithful kid who just happened to be smart. To our teachers, he was super-intelligent, an overstretched overachiever whom teachers gave the benefit of the doubt if his assignment was late and he needed an extra day. To many of us, he was the polar opposite of our eventual valedictorian, a talented competitor who was far more worthy of our school’s number one status. I’m sure to a fair number of his Harvard classmates saw him as a marvel, either not "Black" enough or too much of a "credit to his race."

The person I saw that day wasn’t the confident, take-on-the-world with a-smile-on-his-face person I’d seen in action for six years in Humanities. He was confident enough to attempt to act that way toward me, though. I got the story about how life at Harvard was good, that he was succeeding academically and that he’d found a way to fit in with his mostly White, six-figure and two-comma classmates. He also still intended to go to law school. And though his job at the law firm was difficult, he said that he enjoyed that also. My former classmate must’ve thought that he was talking to the uncultured twelve-year-old I once had been. His utter lack of details about classes, people, majors or professors let me know right away that life for his at America’s preeminent university was somewhere between rocky and a living hell.

My conversation with the person folks thought I should be much more like was a major revelation. It explained why it took until I was a sophomore in college to find my footing. We all had significant identity issues, exaggerated by our competitive conditioning as Humanities students. These weren’t typical teenage struggles over being cool or not. Especially when being cool meant being "Black" or "Italian" or "anti-intellectual" or a "brainiac," not just "cool" in general. You could say that our grades and ranks—or shunning them as the case might’ve been—were as much a part of our individual identities as being affluent or Jewish or Black. Our salutatorian may well have been an extreme example of this, but he was hardly alone. Everyone in Humanities, even the "cool" cliques within had their share of identity issues to reconcile or struggle with.

My own identity issues were many and varied. In my case, though, I’d been working on reconciling mine since the middle of seventh grade. I realized that the battle I’d been waging for so long came out of my identity crisis, one that started as a spiritual disconnect between being a Hebrew-Israelite and watching my stepfather break every rule in the Talmud while attempting to break me and my mother. That battle didn’t even begin to subside until I decided to embrace myself for who I was, good, bad and ugly. Once I took that proactive step, shooting for the best person I could be and small miracles like real friendships were only a matter of time. It's a lesson that I hope the high-potential students I've taught the past couple of years learn, and learn well.

Summer Camp

2009-06-20T18:04:00.002-04:00

I’ve had more than a few friends ask me, "Are you sure your doctorate’s not in psychology?" over the years. I usually laughed it off, saying that well-heeled historians are ones that can look at the human condition through a variety of disciplines. But that’s hardly the whole truth. I have a lifetime of experiences that have enabled me to play the role of pop psychologist and psychiatrist, mostly because of Darren and issues related to him.

For example, if this were any summer between ‘77 and ‘83, these would’ve been years I could’ve gone with my older brother to his summer day camps at The Clearview School in Dobbs Ferry, upper Westchester County. For four summers I did go with Darren to his private school for the mentally retarded and developmentally disabled, between ‘77 and ‘80. It was a strange experience, but I learned a lot about diversity, the human psyche, and perceptions of intelligence. I hardly realized how much until much later, in my years in the workforce and in grad school.

The first two summers at Clearview were a blur for me. I remember a few things. Like going to see Star Wars for the first time. Or going swimming, learning how to ride a bike, bowling, and lots of other fun activities. In that sense, Clearview was a fun place to be. I picked up a bunch of things there that I would’ve never learned at 616.

It wasn’t until my third summer there, the summer of ‘79, that I noticed the distinct differences between myself and Darren’s friends and classmates. Not to mention between Darren and them. It came as a bit of a shock to realize that Darren simply didn’t belong at a school for the mentally retarded — he was acting out at times in order to get whatever he wanted. As for me, I seldom had any lengthy conversations with the other kids. Not for lack of trying, though. It was the summer between fourth and fifth grade for me, and I’d already become used to talking politics and pop culture with a few kids my age.

I ended up talking mostly with staff, summer staff or regular staff. It didn’t matter. Even as socially awkward some of the teachers were, it was far better than forcing a conversation with a kid who might’ve had the equivalent abilities of Noah at two and a half or three years old. I had nothing against the kids at Clearview. They obviously suffered from Down’s syndrome, autism, bipolar disorder, severe brain injuries and so on. But at nine years old, I recognized the differences, and they were in stark contrast to anything I’d ever seen from Darren. I knew by the middle of that summer that my older brother wasn’t mentally retarded. I also knew, deep down, that staying at Clearview would do permanent damage to his psyche and destroy his best chances at living a normal life.

A visit to Darren’s psychiatrist’s Hastings-on-the-Hudson home in ’79, in which the front sat on a hill, the back on stilts, all overlooking a pale sandy-rock beach and the Hudson River below, was further evidence of both his relative normalness and of what bothered me about Clearview. This was my first experience of visiting anyone from an affluent or upper-middle class background, and certainly anyone White. A bunch of kids were there, including Darren. My older brother’s well-practiced autistic behavior — similar to at least three of his friends — was what bothered me about the visit. That, and being in a house I’d only seen before in a Hollywood movie. Wow, I remember thinking. Psychiatrists must make a ton of money.

I learned about other things affluent and White through my summers at Clearview in ‘79 and ‘80. That Darren’s initial diagnosis had changed, from "mildly mentally retarded" to "emotional mentally retarded." That Clearview’s tuition was $33,000 a year – about $55,000 in today’s dollars. That New York State was paying for all of the tuition. That our group of healthy-eating White counselors thought that a cottage cheese and cucumber sandwich on whole wheat was a normal lunch. And that they were moving in ‘81 to a lush private campus in Briarcliff Manor.

I did get something out of that summer. Another layer of eclectic-ness to add to my already eclectic music tastes. Donna Summer, meet Kool & The Gang. Billy Joel, meet Barbra Streisand. I did get to see Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. But I also saw affluent White parents who’d occasionally visit, sometimes with their "normal" kids in tow. It made me realize that despite all of the hardships of life, many of these mentally retarded and developmental disabled kids had it better financially than anything I would see for more than twenty years. That’s hardly to say that this wasn’t a hardship, either for the parents or the kids in question. It was something I noticed, an ironic twist between the psychology of race and class and the psychiatry involved in working with both.

I provoked my mother into at least thinking about getting Darren out of Clearview after my last summer there in ‘80, six years after my father Jimme had him placed there because of Darren’s shyness. Darren at twelve had been institutionalized long enough to become more comfortable around the mentally retarded than in mainstream settings. He threw a temper-tantrum, kicking and screaming on the floor of our neighborhood laundromat when my mother suggested that she should send him to our local public school. My mother gave up, saying that "Darren only listens to White people," and Darren stayed at Clearview for another seven years. This was typical Mom, taking the path of least resistance when the best option was often the more difficult one. It’s sad, but I still haven’t given up, on Darren or my mother.

The O.J. Effect

2009-06-17T13:01:00.002-04:00

For those of you who haven't checked in yet, today's the fifteenth anniversary of the bizarre police chase of NFL Hall of Fame running back O.J. Simpson in a white Ford Bronco with friend Al Cowlings on I-405 in the Los Angeles area. In the process, he took all of us -- the media, the sports world, and anyone who cared about race and justice -- on a ride that folks are still talking about a decade and a half later. It had an impact on me in terms of how I saw Blacks and White sand race. It's amazing to think that so many would become so emotionally caught up in a double-homicide case involving what at one time was one of the world's most recognizable faces.

I guess that my slight sarcasm was unnecessary. Except that I was a bit surprised at the time. I was surprised when I first heard the news that Monday, June 13 in '94, about the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, and that O.J. was wanted for questioning. I was surprised to learn that his divorce from the woman was far from amicable, especially from a financial perspective. Most of all, I was shocked when I heard that Simpson was going to be charged for the murders, and that he had agree to turn himself in on that fateful Friday, June 17. With so many other terrible things that happened in my life up to that point, I tended to think, "Say it isn't so, Joe."

That week was my absolute commitment to two events. The NBA Finals between my New York Knicks and the Houston Rockets. And a church retreat for the male members of Covenant Church of Pittsburgh. It was to be a week of watching my Knicks play at home and three days in the mountains of Western Pennsylvania at a retreat lodge, in a spirit of learning how to be godly men and of adult male bonding. The first full day of the retreat was June 17. After a day of workshops, prayer, praise, and singing (at least for me and the rest of the men's choir), we all piled into the rec room to watch Game 5 of the Final. Only to see an overhead shot of a slow-moving white Bronco being trailed by an escort of L.A.'s finest instead of Patrick Ewing, John Starks, Doc Rivers, Charles Oakley, and the rest of the cast of characters from my favorite team.

The Knicks won, which was great, but I barely saw the game. They were up 3-2, but would lose the last two games in the next six days in Houston, turning Choke City into Clutch City overnight. But that wasn't what I was thinking about when it first happen. I hoped that the police wouldn't shoot Simpson before he had a chance to go to trial. The L.A. riots were just two years before. I feared that the issue of race would be front and center, with Simpson's issues with his now dead White ex-wife. I knew that with the intense coverage that had been a part of this week, that this would all go away.

On that point I was more than wrong. I was naive, thinking that our world of '94 would simply attempt to determine if Simpson was guilty or innocent. Instead what I saw within ten days of the Bronco chase was an artificially darkened Simpson on the cover of Time. I watched as the media condemned Simpson well before the trial. As Blacks were becoming angrier about the coverage. As Whites grew more confident about Simpson being convicted, losing his fortune and fame, and possibly getting the death penalty (or at least, life imprisonment). It was amazing how quickly folks took sides on the issue. My mother proclaimed that O.J. was innocent long before the prosecution botched the trial. Some of my grad school colleagues -- all White, mind you -- made all kinds of assumptions about where I stood on O.J. They didn't like the fact that I was willing to wait until the trial to make up my mind.

When the verdict came down some sixteen months later, in October '95, it was stunning to watch ecstatic Blacks and angry, dejected Whites react to the "Not Guilty" verdict. And not just on TV. A friend of mine from my Pitt grad school days spent his lunch break in my apartment gritting his teeth in anger as the verdict was read. I was more shocked than anything else. I smiled, but it wasn't a smile of joy. It was of wry bewilderment watching the reactions.

That smile disappeared the following day when I went to Carnegie Mellon to drop off a draft of a couple of chapters of my doctoral thesis. A colleague of mine, one who I had called a friend up to this point, immediately started in on me about the verdict, as if I was on the jury. He kept spouting the media's line about an all-Black jury, about jury nullification, and so on. I politely pointed out that the jury was mostly, but not all Black (three members were White or Latino, if I remember correctly), and that the prosecution lead by Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden left the door wide open for an acquittal. He assumed -- wrongly -- that I wanted O.J. free regardless of his "obvious guilt." I told my colleague that what else could the jury do, given the compelling defense put together by the late Jimmie Cochran, the mistakes with forensics, with the glove, with putting Mark Fuhrman on the stand? I also said that "I don't represent all thirty million African Americans in this country," and that our conversation was over.

That reminded me how irrational the issue of race can make even the most sound-minded and allegedly progressive of us all. I found that conversation unsettling because this colleague was one of the few folks at Carnegie Mellon who had earned my trust. It reminded me that if I were to ever date or marry someone White, that there would be hell to pay.

But many have benefitted from the O.J. Simpon effect over the last fifteen years. From lawyers to journalists, TV stations and authors, many have reaped benefits and have built careers from the O.J Simpson trial and verdict. Greta Van Susteren, Dan Abrams, Nancy Grace, Court TV (now truTV), the late Jimmie Cochran, Alan Dershowitz, Christopher Darden and Robert Shapiro, among so many others. Even Mark Fuhrman got a book and a radio talk show (at least for a while) out of the trial. One could argue that Kim Kardashian, daughter of Simpson defense "Dream Team" lawyer Robert Kardashian, has benefited, albeit indirectly (it's not as if her father's a regular on her family's reality show, right?).

You could even so far as to suggest that conservative media in general received the greatest indirect residuals of all from the murders, trial, and acquittal involving Simpson. The events between June 17 '94 and October 3 '95 helped intensify an atmophere of conservatism, a sense that our nation was out of control. With the acquittal, it made sense for cable and talk radio to increase its coverage of news, especially news with a more "fair and balanced" slant.

But of all of the people who have reaped the rewards of "If It Bleeds, It Leads," most of us have little to show for our overblown anger or joy over the verdict, and have long since recovered from the initial shock of those days in June '94. I know that I haven't seen any benefit from O.J.'s fall from grace, other than the warning that the public is very fickle and will turn on you as soon as you screw up. And O.J. screwed up royally. Add to it all his years of stumbling and bumbling through life and his narcissistic need for the spotlight. He's now serving time in prison because he wanted a few more moments in the public eye, this time as an obvious criminal. It's "a shame and a pitiful," as my father would say.

The Miracle of Divorce

2009-06-15T09:10:00.003-04:00

Twenty years ago on this date, the last days of my mother's marriage to my idiot ex-stepfather Maurice Eugene Washington/Judah ben Israel began. This story is as much about faith and miracles as it is about my bizarre life at 616 and in Mount Vernon.

They were arguing in the living room, sounding like they could kill each other with a steak knife. My mother was "sick an’ tired" of my father’s constant abuse, not physical mind you, but just as disabling. One of the things my mother had vowed to do during May and June was to quit smoking. It wasn’t exactly the first time she tried. Only this time she’d been successful, so much so that Maurice had taken to blowing his Benson & Hedges smoke into her face when she sat in the living room watching TV and jonesin’ for some nicotine. It was that, Maurice’s garbage job and his inability to pay any bills or put any food in the house, his obvious signs of cheating, and his eternal threats of physical violence to her and my siblings she went after him about. Maurice just complained that she didn’t "love" him anymore. When my mother said, "I stopped lovin’ your heathen ass a long time ago!" I snickered and fell asleep.

I was somewhere in dreamland when I heard this loud crack hit against the wall of our room. "Oh my God!," I yelled and jumped out of bed. I ran into the living room to see my mother’s heavy crystal ashtray on the floor, five feet to her right, and my stepfather on the other side of the living room, with a combination of rage and bafflement on his face. The wall itself had multiple fractures and a dent about a foot and a half in diameter.

"Are you okay?," I asked my mother.

"Yeah, Donald, I’m fine. This between me and him."

I didn’t move, figuring I either needed to take on Maurice myself or run to the back and actually call the police.

"Get the fuck out of here!," Maurice yelled, seemingly ready to get up and attack me.

"Go on Donald. I’ll take care of this," my mother said with a strange combination of calmness and confidence. I’d never heard my mother sound so sure about anything. Despite thoughts of Memorial Day ’82 going through my head—not mention my better judgment—I slowly backed out of the living room and into the hallway. All the while Maurice started to rise up off of the sofa to threaten and possibly attack me.

I went into the back and got into bed, thinking about what I knew I needed to do if he actually attacked my mother again. I waited for what I thought would be the grand finale. Nothing. Nothing else happened. It was like they were both in shock. My stepfather left the living room, rumbled through the hallway and punched open the door to our room before slamming the door to the master bedroom. Darren jumped out of bed and yelled this piercing yelp, like he was being tortured. I was mad at him too at that moment. I closed the door and went to sleep.

By the time I got up the next morning, my stepfather was packing up his clothes in one of my mother’s suitcases. He soon left, as if he were scared. When I asked what had happened the night before, my mother said, "A miracle." In the heat of their argument, Maurice had picked up the crystal ashtray and thrown it at my mother. She said that it bounced off her right cheek and jaw, plowed into the wall three feet to where she’d been sitting, and then hit the floor to her right. If it had hit her as she said, my mother should’ve been unconscious with multiple facial fractures. But other than a minor scrape on her cheek and a headache, she was fine. The wall behind her wasn’t. My choices were to somehow believe that my stepfather missed her at point-blank range and took out part of the wall. Or to believe that a major miracle had occurred, leaving my mother with almost no physical damage.

Considering how Maurice left, it was much easier to believe that a miracle had occurred. What else would explain the silence, the sudden turn away from my mother and to the master bedroom, the sense of fear that my stepfather had the next day? The only other explanation would’ve been that he was afraid that we’d call the police. I was still willing to, but it wouldn’t have done me any good if my mother didn’t press charges. All I knew was that for the second time in nine years, Maurice had packed his things and left without any indication of where he was going. It turned out that he moved in with one of his women, and within three months, asked for a divorce so that he could get married again. My mother, true to form, said, "If he wants a divorce, he can paid for it his damn self."

Two decades later, and I still don't know what to believe. Even if I accept the probability of a miracle here -- at least in terms of my mother coming out of a fight unscathed -- then I also have to accept something else. That my mother needed another miracle, one from within. The one that allows her to see herself as having worth. To have taken enough charge over her life to have moved out, moved on, or to have gone to the police over what was happening at 616. To at least have the courage to have dropped the whole Hebrew-Israelite thing at the first sign of trouble, for herself if not for her kids. Of course, that's not a miracle. It's a transformation, one that took seven years and sixteen days to accomplish.

For most of us, a divorce can be anywhere from sad to abysmally devastating. Even if necessary, divorcees can take as long as two years to recover from their marriage's dissolution. For their children, despite their resiliency, it could take even longer. In my mother's case, the separation and divorce was the beginning of her recovery, and hardly the worst thing that could've happened to her. As far as I was concerned, it never was a marriage to begin with. It was an eleven-year odyssey of servitude, sexism and stupidity, and I couldn't have been happier to see my ex-stepfather walking out of our lives for the last time.

My 15 Books

2009-06-13T07:11:00.004-04:00

A few weeks ago, a friend and academic colleague of mine challenged a bunch of us to come up with a list of our top fifteen books of all time -- in fifteen minutes! He had already done his own test, coming up with a list of fifteen books that were theoretical, scholarly, and somewhere between neo-Marxist and socialist in nature (there is a difference between the two ideologies). Given my own progressive tendencies, I don't have any problems with his list. It did get me to think a bit, though, and not just about my fifteen all-time books. I thought about how much my top list of fifteen books would've changed over time, about what these fifteen books could say about me through the years. I also wanted to make sure that the books I picked were ones that I had read cover to cover, or at least, wanted to read in totality. For all of my top fifteens, I used the additional criteria of having read them over and over again to rank them, to see if I really saw them as the best books I've ever read.

So, here's my all-time list, done in fifteen minutes while eating some awful Italian food at a restaurant in Louisville on Monday:

1. Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well (1992)
2. Nicholas Lemann, The Big Test (1999)
3. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (orig. 1903)
4. Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities (1991)
5. Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
6. Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1952)
7. Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation (2002)
8. Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Random Family (2002)
9. James Baldwin, Notes from a Native Son (1955)
10. Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906)
11. Studs Terkel, Race (1992)
12. Andrew Hacker, Two Nations (1992)
13. Toni Morrison, Sula (1974)
14. Charles Schultz, Peanuts (anything in the series)
15. Dr. Seuss, Green Eggs and Ham (1960)

I ranked these a bit, but generally speaking, I've read and re-read these books over the years. As as scholar, student, father, husband, loner, worker, educator and writer. These books have helped me laugh, smile, frown and cry, motivated and depressed and disillusioned me. My choice reveal as much about me as anything does. They reveal that I prefer great writing with possible (though not always likely) academic or scholarly applications than great scholarship. That I have read much about race and diversity, inequality and unfairness in our world. And that I prefer nonfiction, however implausible those stories are, to fiction, because real life is always more interesting to me.

So then I thought, what would my list have looked like ten, twenty, even thirty years ago? What about the hundreds of scholarly volumes I was forced to read in grad school, or the books I've read in order to publish a scholarly journal article? What about the wonderful novels I read in high school? This next fifteen would've been my all-time list if I had put one together nine or ten years ago:

1. David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois, Volumes 1 & 2 (1993 and 2000).
2. Michael Eric Dyson, Race Rules (1993).
3. Robin D.G. Kelley, Race Rebels (1994).
4. Carter G. Woodson, Mis-education of the Negro (orig. 1933).
5. Michael Eric Dyson, I May Not Get There With You (2000).
6. Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling (1988).
7. T.J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance (1995).
8. Cornel West, Race Matters (1992).
9. Tricia Rose, Black Noise (1993).
10. Jacqueline Jones, The Dispossessed (1992).
11. M.M. Manring, Slave in a Box (1998).
12. Robin D.G. Kelley, Yo' Mama's Disfunktional (1997).
13. David Roediger, Wages of Whiteness (1991).
14. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (1935).
15. Mary Patillo-McCoy, Black Picket Fences (1999).

The list above isn't a ranked list, at least not completely. It merely confirms what I've been saying about myself for nearly nine years. I saw myself as an academic historian first, and a writer or educator second. These books reflected my academic training, the issues I cared about, and the kinds of reading I expected to do back then. With the exception of Black Reconstruction or David Lewis' Pulitzer Prize-winning volumes, I'm not sure if any would make my top thirty, forty or fifty if I had one.

But there are other readings, books, volume sets, and articles, that just change the way you see yourself and your world. Like when I read about the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in my social studies textbook in fifth grade. I was mortified looking at the pictures of the mushroom cloud, realizing that a city the physical size of Mount Vernon was leveled in seconds. Or when I read Howard Rabinowitz's article on segregation as a compromise between integration and exclusion at the beginning of the Jim Crow era -- as understood by Black leaders during Reconstruction. That was my second year of grad school. Those readings are just as important -- if not more important -- than the lists of fifteen I have above. These include books that have influenced me, even though I may have never finished some of them. Such readings include:

1. The Bible
2. The Torah
3. The Qur'an
4. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1969).
5. Lerone Bennett, Black America, Volumes 1-3 (1971).
6. World Book Encyclopedia, Volumes 1-28 (1978).
7. Nella Larson, Passing (1929).
8. Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (1843).
9. George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945).
10. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886).
11. William Shakespeare, Hamlet and Othello.
12. Thomas Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).
13. George Lipsitz, Possessive Investment in Whiteness (1998).
14. Nicholas Lemann, Promised Land (1991).
15. George Orwell, 1984 (1949).

It's hardly surprising that I could go on and on and on about books. I've written a couple, been required to read hundreds, and have read hundreds more on my own. In fact, I have no idea how many books I've read in my life. Most of them, unfortunately, aren't memorable, because of their dearth of ideas, dry writing style, lack of coherence, or inability to communicate on an intellectual or emotional level. I hope that folks don't see me in any of those ways. I've worked hard over the past nine years to distance myself as much as possible from this kind of writing, to find balance between the academic and the personal, the intellectual and the emotional. Let's hope that the lessons I've learned from these readings continue to stick.

My Last Day

2009-06-10T10:11:00.002-04:00

My last day at MVHS was a complete blur of "goodbyes" to teachers and classmates who I considered friends and "good riddance" to some classmates and my wonderful incompetent and uncaring guidance counselor, Sylvia Fasulo. My eighth-period Health class was the last class I’d ever have at MVHS. It was the class where a drug-dealing-student who lived near East Lincoln and Sheridan had suggested that Saran Wrap was a good substitute for a condom. I don't think I'll ever forget that. After class, I walked down the second floor steps and the first floor halls of the high school to my locker one more time.

While clearing out my locker, Estelle Abel walked by and asked to meet with me. I went over to her office, and for the next fifteen minutes, she proceeded to explain to me how much of a disappointment I was while a student at MVHS. Abel claimed that I had underachieved throughout my four years as a student, that I should have been ranked in the top ten of my class, and that my performance in AP Physics was beyond abominable. All I could focus on was the amount of anger and emotion she possessed in her voice and eyes. You’d have thought that I’d been expelled from school or had raped her daughter.

There were two really odd things Abel said during her attack on my character. One was that I had let down the Black students of the school and "my community" by not finishing closer to the top of my class. She said, "You could’ve been a shining example of achievement to us," all but hinting at Sam as the person I should’ve been like. I guess I did let my Black classmates down. I only ranked second in GPA among Black males and eighth among all African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans in my class.

Abel’s other comments really surprised me."You don’t have any excuses! There is nothing going on at home that could justify your performance." When I disagreed, the Science department head’s face turned stern. She said that nothing occurring in my life would ever compare to the problems Blacks faced "back in the 1960s . . . I marched with Dr. Martin Luther King!" My mind clicked off my eardrums at that point. Short of showing her my war wounds and having her meet my family, what could I possibly do or say to that?

I left her office feeling like my years at MVHS and in Humanities were just bullshit. I was in a mood and in a mode in which I needed someone to be there for me, to not judge me, but to save me again. If anyone had walked up to me on my way home to tell me how great a place Mount Vernon was to live in, I would either chewed them out or punched them in the jaw. Mount Vernon, MVHS, Humanities, 616. I saw them as different sides of the same box, a place of isolation, ignorance, abuse and apathy, a macabre place where only the stereotypical and the cool could survive.

My opinion about Mount Vernon hasn't changed much in the twenty-two years since Estelle Abel acted an ass with me present. Despite all attempts by former classmates and former neighbors to make Mount Vernon sound like, say, the Black suburbs of Atlanta, it isn't that place, not by a long shot. When one in five residents are below the poverty line, with a school district among the worst in the state (even though I know it's getting better), a crime rate that would make folks in the DC area take notice, and with a generational and ethnic divide still in existence, I think that it's difficult to argue that Mount Vernon is a great place to live. But then again, I've seen the worst the former "city on the move" has to offer.

I guess that it wasn't all bad. I miss Clover Donuts, Papa's Wong's, Prisco's Used TVs and Radios, the Army-Navy store, Mount Vernon Public Library, some of my teachers, and a few folks I did get along with. Those places of business mostly don't exist, the libraries I go to now are just as good and the buildings much better maintained, and many of the folks I liked are either dead or scattered to the four corners of the Earth. I guess that you can't go home again, in this case, thankfully so.

With the exception of a few friends, 616 and crush #2, I really had left Mount Vernon in my mind by the time I walked out of MVHS for the last time as a student. There are some things I wished I could've done growing up there. Like hanging out more, going to the basketball games and other sporting events. Or spending more time at public gatherings in Hartley Park or at th Wilson Woods pool. Yet it wasn't to be. I was a Mount Vernonite, in it, but certainly not of it. Maybe that's why I don't feel like I've ever really had a hometown, why I prefer my remains to be scattered than buried in the city of my birth. All I know is that by the time of my last day at MVHS, twenty-two years ago to the date and day, my hometown had shown no interest in me or in my success. That, folks, is reason enough to not see a place you grew up in as your own.

What We'll Do for $$$

2009-06-08T08:04:00.000-04:00

Which is worse? To have worked for a bigot who once said, "You know, slavery was a hoax" as a joke? Or to have worked for an in-the-closet micromanager with a form a bipolar disorder? As someone who's done both, they're both difficult people to work for. But if I only had two choices, the bigot is a better boss to have any day over a bottled-up manager claiming to be a progressive. The key, of course, is to know what you've bargained for when taking a given job with a given organization.

I didn't know exactly what I had accepted when working for these men between June '99 and February '04. Oh, my emotional instincts told me not to trust them, at least not entirely, even at the time of my interviews. Still, I needed a job. A decent or good-paying job. Part-time work in academia teaching only one class a semester only went so far. I had over $40,000 in student loan debt to pay off. And me and my soon-to-be-wife wanted out of Pittsburgh. For all of those reasons and more, I took my job as director of curriculum at Presidential Classroom -- a civic education organization that brought high school juniors and seniors to DC for a week at a time -- in Alexandria, Virginia in the spring of '99. At first, it was a hokey yet relaxed place to work. Most of the staff was affable enough. Even if most of them couldn't be accused of being intellectual powerhouses. Yet I had this sense that the other shoe had yet to drop.

It did, all right. In drips and drabs at first. With me being used as both the educational representative of an organization intent on making money through edu-tainment and as the one full-time person of color on staff. With the occasional comments that questioned my commitment and competence, based on nothing I had or hadn't done. With the 110-hour work weeks on program with staff calling Asian students "Orientals" and Latino students "Spics," as well as with Black students treated as if they were severely mentally retarded.

But the final straw occurred the week of my marriage ceremony, the last week of April '00. After a semi-friendly argument between me and a co-worker over the intersections of race and gender in American history (she was and remains incorrect in her second-wave feminist assumptions), my boss walked by to tell me that "slavery was a hoax." I already knew he was a political conservative who wanted so badly to be in the blue-blooded in-crowd of the Republican Party. I knew intuitively that he had hired me as a two-for-one show pony, a young African American male with a doctorate in history. I didn't know that he was that bold and that ignorant, though. I was pissed, and stayed that way through the spring and summer of 2000.

Even when we had a loud argument in my office about his bigotry and my obvious unhappiness about being there, we found areas of agreement. He actually made it much easier for me to look for work while I was doing my job. I did my part as the show pony I was. And my boss continued to be the hands-off, almost neglectful boss he had been for all of the eighteen months I worked at Presidential Classroom. I couldn't stand the man, his ignorance, bigotry and paranoia.

Still, it was easier working for him than for a progressive, in-the-closet gay micromanager whose obvious jealousies made it almost impossible for me to do my job at times. I've never had to manage anyone more that this boss, my immediate supervisor who was in charge of a social justice fellowship program. Ironic because if there's any kind of job someone shouldn't have to worry about how they're being treated, it's one as an assistant director for a social justice program. Ironic, too, because I wanted this job. I wanted to practice grantmaking, to help others make a difference in the world, even if it meant using a teaspoon to clean up an ocean of injustices.

Even here, there were signs early on. My eventual boss was nervous at both of my interviews. As if I were interviewing him. He also seemed quite keen on comparing his joint master's degree program in religious studies and philosophy at Catholic University to my doctorate from Carnegie Mellon. Most importantly, he went about checking on me in my work as if I were a seventeen-year-old high school student. We met three or four times a week to go over the same tasks, ones that would normally take a person several weeks to perform, like lining up speakers for a conference, finalizing the logistics for a program, and developing a social justice curriculum. He once held up the printing of our first conference agenda because I used the word "forums" instead of "fora." I said to him at the time, "I doubt the Fellows care what we call it."

Like anyone with bipolar disorder, my former boss' highs were way too high and his lows oh so low, to the point of being semi-suicidal. On the days of our conferences and retreats with the Fellows, he might as well had been on crystal meth and coke at the same time. On others, it was as if his family had been killed and that an asteroid was on a collision course with DC.

It meant that my boss paid too much attention to the details that didn't matter and not nearly enough to the ones that did. Like one email run-in I had with a Fellow who insisted that it was his job to tell me and the rest of the staff how to do our jobs, that we "served him." Somehow after putting up with this for four months, I was in the wrong for telling this Fellow to stop harassing me and the other staff. Of course, we didn't receive any more condescending emails from this Fellow after that, but I was "too confrontational." On the other hand, when our foundation told us in June '01 that we should think about looking "for alternative sources of funding," my boss somehow didn't take that message seriously.

Then a meeting in New York on March 31 of '03 happened. That was when the foundation had told my immediate supervisor that they were cutting our funding by 15 percent, and that funding would be a year-to-year decision, not a two-year check as it had been before. My boss called me from a bar around the corner from the foundation, drowning his sorrows in a bottle of MGD while telling me the news. He was obviously sloshed and depressed. Every time I hear Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus," I think of him and that phone call.

After I realized that my boss had no clear vision for our work in social justice, I made the decision to quit, to find more meaningful, if less exciting, work. But not before he attempted to demote me for no apparent reason other than paranoid about me wanting to take his job. In the weeks that followed, he snapped, abruptly leaving a retreat-planning meeting two days after biting off the head of our organization's CEO. My boss called me from the psych ward at Georgetown University Hospital a few days later, leaving the message that he "loved me."

It's been ten years since I accepted Presidential Classroom's offer. Eight and a half since I said "yes" to the assistant director job. I've made a point to keep all of this in mind in the jobs I've held since the end of '03 and in all of my job searches since then. There's a reason why most people are unhappy at their jobs, even at jobs that they would ordinarily like or love. It's not just because it's not what they want to do or because of inadequate compensation. Working for and with incompetent, insolent and unstable people can make even a job we would otherwise love a living nightmare. I hope that no one I know ever has to go through this to make ends meet.

How Ron Suskind Let Me Down

2009-06-06T12:57:00.002-04:00

A few years before I finally girded up my loins to write Boy At The Window, I bought a copy of Ron Suskind's bestseller A Hope in the Unseen (1998). It's a book that looks at the life of one Cedric Jennings between his junior year of high school and the beginning of his sophomore year at Brown University. It's a well-written and heartening account of how this African American teenager from Southeast Washington, DC overcomes his family's poverty, the complete absence of his father and one of the worst school systems in the US to get into and succeed at Brown University. Suskind had won a Pulitzer in '94 for his series of Wall Street Journal articles on Jennings during his junior year of high school in Southeast. It was and remains a great book about overcoming stereotypes and poverty and resisting the temptations that a quick and-all-too-fleeting-buck can offer. But it's also a book that offended me as a writer and as someone who understands what Jennings went through to get to Brown.

It started when I first read the Acknowledgements section at the end of A Hope in the Unseen. In commenting about the grand achievement of reporting and writing an authentic book about a poor Black person's experiences growing up, Suskind wrote, "I hope this book will go some distance toward refuting" the idea that "there’s simply no way a white guy can ‘get it’." I found the comment ridiculous on its face. The fact is, "White guys" and gals have been writing about Black people's experiences for years. Or at least, they've worked with us in writing about some aspect or another of an African American's experience. The same is true for White writers who've worked with Latinos, Asians and people from other backgrounds to put out a book or an article. It would be like me patting myself on the back for being able to understand White male angst as presented by Pearl Jam, Live or Nirvana. Gimme a break!

I've known White males for years who've "gotten it." Poverty, racism, ostracism -- even at the individual level -- isn't all that difficult to understand. Especially if a writer or journalist, researcher or a friend simply follows one simple rule -- to keep an open mind. If you have to say that your great success in writing a book about someone else's life is that you've proven that you can understand something about that person's life, then you shouldn't really say anything at all. Now, I know Suskind is known for much more than his account on Jennings, including his even-handed coverage of the Bush 43 Administration and his look at American foreign policy post-9/11. But as an author writing a book that I expect my audience -- affluent Whites included -- to get, it's strange to see those words after reading such a wonderful account.

So I went back through A Hope in the Unseen a second time in '02. I read Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's depressing but well-written Random Family a few months later. Hers is the story of a Latino family in the Bronx struggling through crime, drugs, loves, and poverty and finding out how hard life can be when people consistently choose to make the wrong decisions. LeBlanc spent fourteen years observing, interacting with and writing about this family and the people they encountered or fell in love with. Despite the family's many flaws and LeBlanc's occasional need to distance herself as a writer, it's a great book for anyone unfamiliar with the deficits in decision-making that poverty can bring.

After reading Random Family, I realized what bothered me about Suskind's book. With Jennings there throughout, Suskind never asked the most important "Why?" questions. Oh, Suskind asked a lot of general "How?" questions, asked "Why?" questions about Cedric Jennings' family and their struggles through welfare poverty, frequent evictions, lack of food or stylish clothes and so on. But not too many important "Why?" questions. Especially about why Jennings was doing what he was doing when he was doing it. About why Jennings kept pushing to go to Brown after eleventh grade when all he had to look forward to at school was getting clowned on. Don't get me wrong -- I think that many of the answers here are almost completely self-evident. I'm sure from Jennings' perspective that he saw himself having little choice other than getting out of DC and going to college, getting a degree and making something of his life. The fact that Jennings never talked about -- nor was asked by Suskind -- about his sense of isolation and his near ostracism by almost all of his classmates is a bit puzzling.

If you peer deeply enough into A Hope in the Unseen, you can find quite a few holes in Suskind's treatment of Jennings' story. Although the absence of Jennings' father does come up -- frequently I might add -- little about what Jennings thinks of himself as a young man or Black male shows up in the book. Maybe Suskind didn't think it important. Maybe Jennings didn't think that it was important either. But given the geographical, psychological and social context of the book, for this subject to have not been addressed is another disappointment. Readers Black, White, Yellow and Brown could've related to Jennings' struggles to define himself beyond being the resident nerd in nearly the poorest high school in the second or third worst urban school district in the US. It would've given readers further insight into Jennings' dreams and aspirations, his coping strategies for dealing with the slights and rejections he received from his peers, his intestinal fortitude to carry on to Brown and successfully transition to an Ivy League university.

This is as important -- if not more important -- than what Jennings actually did as a student, a mother's child or as a Southeast DC resident before attending Brown in the fall of '95. For sure, anyone, including yours truly, can point to handfuls of examples of people with next to no supports becoming successful as high school students, going on to college, and then graduating with honors. That message, I guess, is "I did it. So can you." Or as one young businessman put it an assembly I was forced to attend my sophomore year at Mount Vernon High School, "I got mine! Now you go on and get yours!"

True that. Except that so much gets lost in the concentration on the achievement, the end result. Like understanding the mechanics of how someone separates themselves from the violence and poverty in their community. Or how one cuts themselves off emotionally from the ostracism and loneliness that results from their overachieving at school. Or their thought-process about making their academic dreams a reality. Or even how they see themselves beyond their burdens at home and their need to achieve academically at school. That may involve race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and the application of their aspirations to how they want to live their lives. All important and all near-absent from Suskind's work.

So maybe Suskind was being tongue-in-cheek when he made that statement in his Acknowledgement section eleven years ago. I doubt it. He would've followed up with something to show that his wasn't a statement to take literally. Unless of course, there was another message here. That Suskind wanted to let his peeps in the publishing and journalism world know that despite their socioeconomic, geographical and educational distance from the world of Cedric Jennings, they too could "get it." At least enough to publish books that are bestsellers. Don't get me wrong. I want to see Boy At The Window do that well. But I want readers to see the mechanics that made me who I was in doing so.

A Man and a Tank

2009-06-03T10:07:00.002-04:00

Saturday, June 3, 1989, 12:04 pm. Me and my younger siblings were at 616, watching cartoons on ABC. It was a run of old Looney Tunes cartoons, which had Maurice, Yiscoc, Sarai and especially Eri cracking up. It was a great morning, with my mother taking her Saturday classes at Westchester Business Institute, my idiot stepfather out carousing, and my older brother Darren roaming the streets like the goofball he could be. Then the late Peter Jennings broke into our local New York area broadcast to let us know that Chinese tanks were rolling into Tiananman Square in Beijing, breaking through seven weeks worth of protests over the government's continuing limits on the civil and political rights of its citizens.

It was after midnight in Beijing, already June 4. For the next forty or forty-five minutes, images kept coming on to our TV from Tiananmen Square as the Chinese military and their tanks toppled barricades, ran over cars and literally chased thousands of protesters out of the square. When I saw the first images of a blood-splattered protester and then of another one crying, I started to cry myself. My siblings looked at me like I was crazy. Then, no more images. Jennings reported that the Chinese government had forced ABC to shut down their satellite communications from within China. My guess was that they did it at gun point.

By the time I switched to another station for my siblings to watch, I found myself wondering why I hadn't followed the story more closely. I mean, I was actually following it. But I guess I assumed that, like the glasnost and perestroika that had been pushed by Gorbachev since '86, that the protests would be allowed to continue in Beijing. And like many other naive Americans, we were wrong about that. We hardly knew enough about four millennia of Chinese political history to understand how important an unopposed central authority has been to this culture. If I had applied anything I learned from a semester of East Asian History at all, I wouldn't have been surprised at all.

With me crying -- albeit not audibly -- my youngest brother Eri asked me what was wrong and what was going on. I explained to them as best I could that this was a government crackdown on dissidents, that the Chinese government engaged in human rights abuses all the time, and that this crackdown meant many people were dying and going to die. Those few minutes were the most in which Eri and my other siblings had shown any interest in the world outside of Mount Vernon and New York City in all of times I spent with them growing up.

In the days that followed, the occasional picture or piece of film made it out of China to Hong Kong (still a British territory in '89) or Japan or South Korea showing images like the man standing in front of a column of tanks, ready to die in the crackdown on him and other protesters. I must admit, it moved me. It was obvious that people would go to jail, likely face torture, that many would die and many more would lick their wounds as the Chinese government would blackout all but the official state news about what really was going on.

Larry Glasco, one of my Pitt history professors, was there for a visit when the crackdown began. He said he saw dead men hanging from lamp posts, bodies of dead and injured in spots, and faced his own crisis in dealing with the military. They confiscated his camera and threatened to hold him in jail in order to make sure he didn't take his pictures back to the US. From what I remember, he did managed to smuggle some film -- not much -- out after the crackdown had ended. His wasn't the only story I would hear during the second half of '89 about what people witnessed as tourists and researchers in looking at the Tiananmen Square protests. It was the first time I had the chance to see up close what a tyrannical government really looks like when acting to protect itself.

It's different than police brutality or even a racist mob. For better or worse, we've never seen this level of government or military intervention in this country over protesters that those everyday folks in China faced down twenty years ago. Even if we count what Native Americans faced in the late-nineteenth century or the Bonus Army crackdown by General Douglas MacArthur in 1932, that would only get us to a limited sense of what the Tiananmen Square dissidents faced. It made me think about how wrong one of my Humanities classmates was when he argued about the long-term viability of communism because it would reduce economic inequality and give people a greater degree of freedom.

But we were both incorrect. Any economic or political system in which citizens and others must show deference or actually walk in fear of isn't one that any should follow. I don't care if the system is communist, capitalist, or socialist, or if the government is a monarchy, a constitutional monarchy, or a representative democracy. If folks living in these systems and under these governments can't speak their minds or publish their ideas, especially if they contradict whatever the government or system says, the government isn't a just one. Although governments and systems should fit the cultural and historical context of a given population, it also should remain flexible enough to adjust to the changing needs of a people. That's what the regime in China failed to understand in '89 and for years afterward.

I'm hardly advocating the overthrowing of governments or even the imposition of American democracy. If anyone's bothered to notice, we haven't exactly been living up to many of our ideals overseas and at home over the last six decades. I'm merely attempting to remember the events of early June '89 that touched me emotionally, that enabled me to understand that beyond the political and economic theories there's the reality of the human condition, the need to keep humans who have authority in check. I learned this all too well growing up at 616 and attending Mount Vernon's public schools. Without those checks and balances, the rights and lives of others face tanks lined up in formation, ready to run them over.

In the Closet, On the Down Low

2009-06-01T11:20:00.002-04:00

It's Gay Pride Month, or LGBT Month, or GLBT Month, I guess, depending on one's perspective. I have nothing directly to contribute, being the semi-well-adjusted heterosexual I am. But I do have something to say about what it means to me to have moved from a world where homophobia and heterosexism was a part of everyday speech (and sometimes action) to a place where it's actually easy for me to embrace others of a different sexual orientation. Of course, I'm not talking about the world at large. I'm talking about 616 and the folks I knew growing up in Mount Vernon.

This isn't easy for me to discuss. It means revealing more about myself and some painful memories growing up than even I'm used to doing. Still, it's important for me and for others to understand that uncomfortable as folks may be about the reality that some people aren't strictly male, female or heterosexual, these so-called others exist, and are a part of our family, among our co-workers, and deserve our acceptance, love, friendship and support. Or at least, our tolerance.

This story starts with an exchange I had with my father Jimme a couple of weeks before the start of my senior year in high school, August '86. In a summer when my sexuality was no longer a question -- at least to me -- my father still had his doubts. I’d hardly seen Jimme most of the summer, only coming over occasionally to see how he was doing or to bum a few bucks off of him. I saved enough money from my job to cover the cost of my three AP classes — $159 to cover the $53 fee for each of the three classes. The College Board and MVHS didn’t grant fee waivers for these courses. Even though I had put that money in my mother’s checking account, I knew that with our money issues my savings were gone. So I found Jimme one Saturday morning near the end of August hanging out on the street corner and having drunk his fill.

His mood was especially foul that day, like his body odor. He refused to give me any money. "I don’ give my money to no faggats!" Jimme yelled at me as he came walking down his block toward me. He’d seen me come out of the front yard of the house he lived in. I wasn’t in the mood for his crap. "I’m not a faggot and I’m not gay," I yelled back. When he got closer, I could see that he’d been out too long already. Jimme’s clothes were a mess, and his face was in a twisted rage. He grabbed me by my arm.

"Did you get yo’ dict wet?," he asked as usual.

"Even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you," I said.

"YOU’RE A FAGGAT," he yelled again.

I was so pissed with him that I said, "Forget it. I don’t want your money. I’ll find a job somewhere."

That was when the conversation got ugly.

"Ain’t no one gonna giv’ a faggat like you no job."

"You’re a drunk and you’ve had a job for years."

"Watch who you talkin’ to bo’. I da boss of the bosses. No one tell me what to do."

"Why should I? I’m a faggot, right? Faggots don’t have to listen to an alcoholic like you"

"I yo’ father, an’ if you want my money, you do what I say."

"I don’t have to listen to you or anybody else."

"Come here bo’!"

At that point, I came over and Jimme grabbed my arm. Then he tried to punch me in the face. I caught his right arm, twisted it away from me and toward him, and then pushed him away. The push sent him to the ground, tipsy as he was.

"I can’ believe you hit yo’ dad"

"I didn’t hit you, I pushed you. Besides, you tried to hit me first. You’re not acting like much of a dad right now, anyway."

I started to walk away, only to be hit in the head with folded up money, about $200 in all. "Take it all, faggat. I don’ want you aroun’ here no more," he said.

This time I grabbed him and stuffed half the money in his pocket.

"Don’t you still have to eat, pay rent, get some more to drink?"

I kept all of the rest because I figured I earned it that day. Darren, par for the course, just stood around and watched.

That was a scary conversation and confrontation for me. It meant seeing myself for the first time as someone not only defending myself, but defending unnamed others. I could've easily said that I love women, and only women, that there was something wrong with gays and being gay. But I didn't. I guess because at least gays hadn't chased me down the street, calling me a "faggat" in the process.

I was also ambivalent, though. My mother, for all of her quietness about my lack of dating and friends in the five years before I went off to college, would make weird statements basically daring me to say that I was gay just so she could somehow un-gay me if I was. For her, the mixed signals she received from me started when I was seven. We had just moved to 616, and after a summer camp at Darren's Clearview School, we went outside on 616's grounds for the first time, in August '77. The kids at 616 and 630 harrassed us, chased us around while throwing rocks at us. Scared, we hid behind the big, wooden, dark brown front door and huddled, hoping that the kids wouldn't find us.

Instead, a couple of young Black turks saw us, took us to my mother and stepfather, and declared that they saw us doing "the dukey." I had no idea what they were talking about. All I knew was that my mother and stepfather proceeded to whip us as if we'd gone to the grocery store and stolen $100 worth of candy and soda. Besides "dukey," the only other new word I picked up that day was "faggot." That, and an incident one year earlier, one in which an older boy attempted to force me to suck his penis, was about all I knew about how others were "different" and how others saw difference until high school. Even then, I understood at some level the difference between someone attempting to force you to into a sexual act and someone simply being themselves. It didn't necessarily make me feel better, though.

There were others who dropped the F-bomb on me over the years. Most of them were Black and Afro-Caribbean guys whom I'd shown up in the classroom or in gym class. All of it made me feel as if there were something wrong with me, like a target had been painted on my forehead that said this fool is so different that we can see in him the worst of our homophobic fears.

Even when I started to date, and even after I started having sex, I would occassionally run into women and men who assumed I was gay. Or at least, "asexual," "sober," "boring." It was partly due to my overintellectualizing sex as a distraction, combined with a well-developed habit of protecting myself emotionally, that led to others making these cosmic-leap assumptions.

By the time I had reached my junior year at Pitt, I knew full well that not only I wasn't gay, but that I was comfortable being about gays, lesbians, even transgender folk. And that made me uncomfortable. I was also a Christian, and between my mother, televangelists like Frederick K.C. Price, Kenneth Copeland, Jimmy Swaggert, Oral Roberts, as well as some of my friends, I found it difficult to reconcile their interpretations of scripture with my own natural comfortability with people of different sexual orientations. Even in grad school, if someone asked me -- I certainly didn't volunteer this -- I'd trip over my own words quoting scripture while saying that it's not of my business what other people do in their private lives.

It took an interview I did with an office at the University of Maryland in '98 to finally see what I was doing. They asked me flat out if I had a problem advising LGBT students. I actually didn't, but I also didn't want to come off as gay myself. So I kind of tripped all over the place while answering the question. Not only did I not get the job. The phone clicked about five seconds after I gave my answer.

I realized that I was still being heterosexist myself, that I had yet to confront the issues I has around sexuality growing up. I made a few decisions around this issue after that interview. One was to stop spouting out-of-context scriptural rhetoric about homosexuality, and to stop attending churches where gays and lesbian were blamed for high crime rates and poverty, like the church I used to attend in Wilkinsburg back in the '90s. I realized that there was a higher law, one that says "judge not, lest ye be judged," and "do unto others..." Beyond that, it's okay to say "I don't know" when it comes to Christianity and to say "I'm comfortable" when I'm at work or in conversation with someone who happens to be gay or lesbian.

For those wholly uncomfortable with what they've been reading, let me say this. Uncomfortability with someone different is hardly unusual. But your uncomfortability shouldn't mean that someone else's human and civil rights should be trampled in the process. On the spiritual front, we aren't supposed to pass judgment on others because we're uncomfortable with who they are or even how they live as Christians. Otherwise, we're no different from the White bigots who rapped themselves around a Confederate flag while killing, maiming and intimidating Blacks and others of color out of their rights. Oh well! I guess I'm out of the closet now myself.

More on Brandie

2009-05-30T09:27:00.001-04:00

It's all too unfortunate how much we can learn about someone once they've passed away. All secrets can come to light after we've died. If our death is through an unfortunate accident, a coroner can perform an autopsy and find out what we've been eating, snorting, ingesting, imbibing, what Rxs we've been taking, what diseases we may or may not have. They could do a genetic profile, and if we've giving consent, use our organs as a gift of life or to teach medicine to others. Beyond that, our words, our deeds, our dreams and our shortcomings are all there for others to look at. All anyone has to do is be curious.

That's been the case so far as I've looked into the life of the late Brandie Weston off and on over the past twenty-one months. In that time, I haven't learned much more than what I already knew about her last years before her death in August '07. Through public records, I discovered that Brandie had left New York sometime in '02, lived for a while in Montana, spent a bit of time in the Bay Area, and made her way to L.A. and Santa Monica by '05 or '06. She had been homeless pretty much that whole time. There's also evidence of vagrancy arrests and her own paranoia regarding the police and being medicated through the bits and pieces I and one of her best friends from our high school days pulled off of the Internet.

I'd like to know more about Brandie's last years and days, but that's going to take a lot more work, like an investigative story piece. I need to reach out to her mother again, who didn't want to talk about what happened when I called her a year ago. I might have to contact her sister, but that may mean opening up some bad memories for both of us. It may even mean me going to Santa Monica or L.A. to talk to folks at local homeless shelters. That, of course, takes money, and I'm pretty tapped out right now from doing Boy At The Window in terms of tracking down people and memories.

But I've learned a bit more about how Brandie lived in her years after high school. I've received at least a dozen emails from her SUNY Purchase classmates and friends, and some anonymous communications as well. All of them seemed shocked about Brandie's end. All of them seemed like they knew Brandie -- or at least a side of her -- better than anyone she grew up around. All of them seemed like they would've wanted as much information about her mental illness and homeless state as they could've gotten in real time during all of those years before her death. It was nice to know that Brandie's calling as a music artist took her to places that she did want to go, and that her SUNY Purchase and other friends wanted to go there with her.

This is as important a lesson as anyone can learn from life. However we leave this world, it's important to have touched as many lives as possible with your calling, your dreams, your successes, even your shortcomings. It's always important to have friends in your life who know the real you, not the one you have to show at work to get a promotion or at home to please family or at school to satisfy your teachers and your alleged friends. From the looks of things, Brandie had more than a few of those.

But not in total. Obviously Brandie didn't exactly go around sharing the news of her mental illness and her homelessness with most folks. From what I've uncovered so far, she also didn't share too much about her family or her Mount Vernon, New York past either. That's unfortunate, and for several reasons. These college and music artist friends were the people most likely to have understood what she was going through and how much hell she had to go through in her final years. They would've been there for her in ways that even her family couldn't (and likely wouldn't) have been. Keeping her past, her struggles, her emotional aches and pains, the things that vexed her all bottled up couldn't have helped her state of mind or decision-making in the years after '02. It would've tormented Brandie, as it would anyone with aspirations and the talent to reach them under less trying circumstances.

As a writer and an educator, I understand the grand irony of a calling. That without the pain and trauma of the past, I wouldn't be the writer or the teacher that I am today. For Brandie, those things should've driven her, maybe even made her a better singer and artist. There's a danger to embracing one's past and one's pain, though, because both can become an addiction, driving people out of one's life in the process. In the case of a couple of our former high school classmates, I think that's exactly what happened. I just wish that Brandie had at least given her SUNY Purchase friends a chance to know that part of her before she died, and certainly before she left on a multi-year, homeless, cross-country journey to nowhere.

It makes me think of the still relatively new Nickelback song, "If Today Was Your Last Day." What would really matter? Who would I choose to spend my last twenty-four hours with? As much as I want to publish Boy At The Window, I'd likely spend the day with everyone I've ever loved, make amends to whomever I felt I needed to, and go to a park to spend time enjoying nature. I'd leave my book manuscript with someone whom I could trust to publish it. I'd make them promise, but then I wouldn't think about it again. I hope that Brandie didn't spend so much of her precious few moments of clarity thinking about what could've been. I hope that those of us still here do make the most of Brandie's warning to us to get our acts together while we still can.

The Gameplan

2009-05-27T05:43:00.000-04:00

It was right after Memorial Day '92 that I first set out to write a doctoral thesis on multiculturalism. Who knew that my first plans for finishing my doctorate would lead me straight to a memoir about navigating different worlds, different spheres in my life during the Reagan years? I realized some six weeks after finishing my master's that it was going to take a monumental effort to do my coursework, fulfill my quantitative methods requirement, take my PhD comprehensive exams (written and oral), research my topic, put together an acceptable dissertation proposal, and then go out into the world to conduct my research and write up a several-hundred-page-study. Oh yeah, I'd also have to teach, should at least think about publishing a few academic pieces and presenting papers at a few conferences. I knew by the time Memorial Day '92 rolled around that the plans I made to finish my masters in two semesters wouldn't work for getting my dissertation done.

Of course it wouldn't work! That plan was designed for me to work at warp speed, to take advantage of my previous four years as a Pitt student, to exploit every loophole in the University of Pittsburgh's rulebook for their undergrad and grad students in Arts & Sciences. If I worked at the same exact pace for another year, well, there wouldn't be any more years. I knew that burnout was inevitable. I saw it nearly every day during my Pitt grad school days. Students who'd been "All But Dissertation" -- ABD to the uninformed -- since the OPEC oil crisis and folks whose kids were now as old as I was and no longer had the energy to finish their thesis. People who under a different set of circumstances might've shot up our department or killed their dissertation chair or committee. I knew I didn't want to become any of those people.

But I also knew that working at a leisurely pace would keep me in grad school at least for another eight or even ten years. The average graduation rate for a PhD in the History Department at Pitt was at least a decade (I'd learn later it was fourteen years). I needed to strike a balance between working with a sense of urgency, but not at a killer pace. I also needed to figure out if I really wanted to stay at Pitt to finish this degree -- I already had two degrees from the same department.

So I did what I've always done, or at least, had been doing since the summer of '82, the summer of my abuse. I came up with a plan. I wrote down all of the different requirements I needed to fulfill to become ABD and came up with a rough outline of how I would want to approach the topic of multiculturalism as a historical construct among African Americans. Off and on throughout the summer of '92, starting with the last days of May, I worked on my two-year gameplan to get to the dissertation stage. I even included a contingency plan for the real prospect of me transferring to another school to finish my advanced terminal degree.

As for the dissertation topic itself, that took a bit longer to define. I spent the twelve months that followed thinking through the topic of multiculturalism and what bothered me about the idiotic, so-called Culture Wars commentary and insufficient research on the subject. One thing that influenced my thinking on the topic that I was only semi-conscious of was my time in Humanities, around all of those students from different racial, ethnic, religious and socioeconomic backgrounds. Even though Humanities was a poor experiment at multiculturalism -- because it was seldom acknowledged, and because our "creme de la creme" nerdiness was our common currency -- it gave me some idea of how to think about multiculturalism and its relationship to African Americans.

I knew to approach the topic with the assumption that most African Americans wouldn't know that they were practicing multiculturalism when they discarded certain notions of inferiority, but adopted and adapted notions of the American Dream and made White notions of equality and freedom their own. That socioeconomic distinctions between elite and ordinary Blacks, that interactions and even intermarriage with other groups of color, and even the issue of passing for White or not made some Black communities practitioners of multiculturalism. Or cultural pluralism as it was called until the '80s. Yet I also knew that I needed some additional backup. I needed to confirm that African American intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke and Carter G. Woodson and Anna Julia Cooper were all thinking along these lines. I needed to find a place where such ideas and interactions did take place in the public and private sphere.

And at that point, I realized that Pittsburgh wasn't going to be the locale I would study. I suspected as much as I walked home the day after Memorial Day in '92 from the nearby Sears on North Highland Avenue in East Liberty. Pittsburgh's Black elite, even in its heyday during the '30s and '40, wasn't as big as Mount Vernon, New York's Black elite. In the early '90s, to be Black with a degree and an income over $30,000 was about as middle class as most folks got in the 'Burgh. Forget about teachers, doctors, lawyers, postal workers, barbers and other members typical of an African American elite. There really hadn't been much of an intellectual culture in Black Pittsburgh before the '50 and '60s. The schools weren't legally segregated, and with so few African Americans teaching in them prior to the '60s, there wasn't a whole lot to look at in terms of multicultural influences on Black education. Forget about the racial demographics. Pittsburgh was White -- with some differences as indicated by the area's Southern and Eastern European immigrants and their progeny -- and Black throughout the twentieth century.

Based on my first visit to DC in March '92, I kind of figured that this would be the place to do my research. Its Black community was much more vibrant, with an HBCU in Howard, a segregated school system with African American administrators and teachers, a rich intellectual heritage, and a more ethnically and socioeconomically diverse city overall. It took a summer and a Spring Break '93 trip to DC to confirm my sense about the city. By then, I realized that my Humanities years and my struggles to leave Mount Vernon and 616 behind did have some benefits. It was those experiences -- and the need to make plans to overcome and accept them -- that enabled me to come up with a dissertation topic based on "the power of another E" (see April postings) and a four-block walk home from buying a $15 fan from Sears.

Seventeen years and numerous writings later, I still am working my dreams into gameplans and picking out lessons learned from the worst years of my past. If there's anything I hope comes out of Boy At The Window for others who read it, it's that sense of converting imagination into plans and plans into action that provides motivation to those whom most need it.

Top Cook

2009-05-25T12:15:00.000-04:00

I'm sure that many of you are familiar with the Bravo show Top Chef, hosted by Padma Lakshmi and with head Italiano judge Tom Colicchio. It's been a reality-series-mainstay for five years, with chefs in constant competition over the quality of their dishes and the ambiance with which they present them. When I do watch -- it's one of my wife's shows, not so much mine -- I find myself thinking, "I can out-cook most of these people, no problem!"

But as the mafioso-like Colicchio has said numerous times, "the show's called Top Chef, not Top Cook." Given the fact that most of the contestants don't even bother to taste what they cook, I don't think that they should be in competition for either title. I should know. I have twenty-five years of experience to prove it.

One of the consequences of my youngest brother Eri's birth in the spring of '84 was that I learned how to cook, at least enough to make sure that seven people actually gained weight and enjoyed eating my food for the next two months. It was a time of irony and hypocrisy (as if any other time during my Boy At The Window years wasn't), putting another nail in the Hebrew-Israelite coffin in which my stepfather was prepared to bury himself. It also gave me the opportunity to see myself as an adult beyond my academic abilities. It provided a level of confidence that would be helpful in my Pitt years.

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My conversion to Christianity and my developing interests in sports, music and girls in the spring of '84 couldn’t have come at a better time. The week before Memorial Day ’84 was when my mother gave birth to my baby brother Eri. The little porker came in at just under seven pounds. Two weeks before that, my stupid stepfather invited his Hebrew-Israelite matriarch “Balkis Makeda” (she believed that she was the reincarnation of the Queen of Sheba, the one who would marry King Solomon of ancient Israel) to stay with us. She was moved in before my mother could seriously object. What a situation! Six kids, including me, plus Mom, Maurice, and an old woman living together in a 1,300-square-foot, two-bedroom apartment. We now needed to behave like good little Hebrew-Israelites with this woman in our house, so as to not embarrass my stepfather.

One of the wonderful rules of our absurdly orthodox practice was that my mother couldn’t cook or do any familial tasks for the next three months. She was “unclean” because she’d just given birth to Eri. This might’ve made sense in the deserts of ancient Canaan, with no antibiotics and drugs to deal with unclean "issues of blood" and other bodily fluids. It didn’t now. Plus I didn’t remember my mother not cooking for three months after Yiscoc and Sarai were born. This was suck-up time, plain and simple.

Maurice made what was an abyss-of-bad even worse by cooking dinner for three days. Three straight nights of overboiled and under-ripened cabbage drenched in its own juices and seasoned to high heaven with red and black pepper. My stepfather could’ve been the founder of the cabbage soup diet if he’d actually eaten his own cooking. Man, a week of cabbage like his would’ve left skinny me in an emergency room in need of an IV. As it was, my younger siblings couldn’t even eat a mouthful of the gruel. We needed someone else to cook, and soon. My mother knew just who to ask.

So from the end of May until mid-July, I cooked dinner night after night for my family of eight. Makeda refused to eat my food on principle -- the man of the house or a female servant was supposed to cook, not me. Before this crisis, I’d only cooked a few things, like baked chicken leg quarters, fried and boiled eggs, sticky-bad grits, and toast with butter. I immediately learned to control temperatures on our gas stove to fry chicken Southern-style, started making spaghetti and meat sauce, and figured out how to season meats and the difference between that and seasoning veggies. All while still doing my other chores, helping out with my siblings and getting ready for Regents and final exams.

I learned how to make the five-dollar-spaghetti meal for eight. For that amount of money, I’d shop at C-Town, buy a pound of ground beef (two dollars), a box of Ronzoni spaghetti (eighty-nine cents, often on sale for fifty cents), a can of Hunt’s spaghetti sauce (ninety-nine cents), and a box of frozen chopped broccoli (fifty-nine cents). With the fifty-four cents left over, I could buy two packs of grape and lemon Kool-Aid or a pack of Wise Crunchy Cheese Doodles as payment for my shopping expertise and culinary services. Sometimes I'd even squeeze a Twix candy bar out of the remaining change.

It was a sharp learning curve, but I wanted to learn. I’d been asking my mother to teach me how to cook since I was nine or ten. Now I was learning under a bit of pressure. Our health and my continued psychological wellness depended on me making food we not only could eat but enjoy as well. By the middle of my second week as 616’s master chef, even Maurice was complimenting me on my skills at the stove and oven. My mother was the only holdout, constantly saying that my food was only “okay,” or “It needs more seasoning,” or that my gravy was “oily and lumpy.”

I did the best I could under these difficult circumstances. My grades remained consistent all year and remained that way even through Regents and finals the third week in June. I managed an 86 on the Geometry Regents despite seeing too many proofs, a 91 on the Biology Regents, and scores in the high-80s and 90s on my Literature and History exams. I got a 73 on my Italian final, a sure sign of things to come with me and Romance languages. My fourth semester GPA was a 4.48, and for the year it was a 4.26. If I could keep this pace up, Humanities in high school would be “as smooth as a milkshake,” as a former classmate would’ve said.

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I've added quite a few dishes to my repertoire since '84. I can make everything from broiled salmon to veal stew, from wine-drenched pork tenderloin to wok-cooked vegetable fried rice. The most important thing I've learned as a cook is the ability to walk in a kitchen, look at a bunch of raw ingredients, and come up with something to cook, without a recipe or without it being something I normally make. I figured out how to make good gravy from scratch one time in '93 when the only thing I had to work with was water, oil, flour and seasoning. I combined ketchup, soy sauce and chili sauce to make barbeque sauce one day in '99 when we had only $10 to work with while living in Pittsburgh. Learning this, and that my palate is pretty good in discerning seasonings and tastes, is what makes me as good a cook as I am.

None of this would've likely happened, though, without going through those years of malnourishment and wanting for food. None of my ability to cook would've been converted to actual cooking without those weeks of cooking in volume for hungry mouths at the end of my freshman year of high school. I likely wouldn't have finished college or grad school without the ability to cook my own food -- it would've been too expensive to go to school otherwise. Like reading, critical thinking and creativity, cooking to the point of chef-like ability is a skill that always comes in handy, that makes the most boring of meals worth eating. It also revealed a lot about my character and my sense of initiative than I knew before, especially outside of the classroom.

The Meaning of Eri's 25th

2009-05-23T07:24:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, my brother Eri Washington turned twenty-five years old. He's my youngest brother (technically, half-brother, but I don't bother with such labels), and he's as old now as I was when I was in the middle of my dissertation process. Wow! To think that it's been a quarter-century since his birth makes me think about how much has happened and how much my youngest brother didn't have or get to experience in the twenty-five years since his birth.

For starters, Eri's birth ended a cycle of bad experiences and bad decision-making on the part of his father and my mother. I love my brother and know that the world would be a different place for me and others without him here. Yet his birth was in the middle of our fall into welfare poverty. Eri was the fourth of my younger siblings born in less than five years, between July '79 and May '84. He was also the third kid born during our dreaded Hebrew-Israelite years. Although his would be and remains a Hebrew name, it was also one of my family's final acts as Hebrew-Israelites. My mother didn't believe in abortion, nor in any form of birth control. My idiot stepfather didn't believe in condoms. But he loved hanging out with other idiot guys bragging about how many kids he sired -- I caught him once sharing cigars with these imbeciles soon after Eri's birth.

Once again, I digress. The worst of things were over. My mother wasn't physically abused in the final years of her so-called marriage, and I only had to face down any form of physically abuse once after Eri's birth. Our financial status was so far below the poverty line that the only place to fall was in homelessness. Between AFDC, WIC, and FS (as my wife calls Food Stamps), we had about $16,000 coming in to feed, clothe and pay rent and other bills for a family of eight. Of course, my obese stepfather shouldn't have been there, but oh well! There weren't any more kids on the way, and it seemed as if my mother and I were both waking up from the illusion cast by the cult that we lived under for the previous three years. Having too many mouths to feed can do that, I guess.

There were also things that Eri would never see as he grew up, especially as he reached his tweener years. Me, my older brother Darren, and my younger brother Maurice all have memories of my mother working as a supervisor in Mount Vernon Hospital's Dietary Department. We all knew that she worked very hard at her job and fought to keep it even though it was a losing battle. (You can't cross your own picket line and expect to keep your job in the long run.) So Yiscoc, Sarai and especially Eri never saw my mother as a worker growing up. My mother didn't start working again until the fall of '97, and would work off and on as a temp for six years before getting a job with Westchester County Medical Center. Eri was nineteen years old by the time that happened.

He also never saw me slogging my way through Humanities and Mount Vernon High School to get into the University of Pittsburgh. Heck, Eri was a just a bit more than three years old when I went off to college. He took it harder than any of my siblings when I left for Pittsburgh in August '87. When I did my family intervention in January '02, Eri was still angry with me about it, accusing me of "abandoning the family." In a way, I guess he was right. This despite the fact that I visited every summer through '94 and every Christmas through '97. My need to go away to school meant that there was little reason for Eri -- or any of my other siblings for that matter -- to follow my example. Of course, by '93, none of them could have even if they had wanted to. The Humanities Program graduated its last cohort of brainiacs that year.

For better and for worse, Eri was born into an era of limited possibilities and little imagination. His first nine years of life were spent in welfare poverty during the Reagan and Bush 41 years. Not exactly a time of optimism about American innovation, social mobility, and racial harmony. Not in Mount Vernon, not in the New York City area, not for the poor and for people of color of this more conservative era. With no Humanities and living in a bedroom suburb not exactly "on the move," Eri spent his formative years without the constant academic and familial encouragement necessary for early successes -- small and big -- that could provide fuel for optimism later on as a tweener or teenager.

Then the fire of April '95 at 616 happened. It left my mother and younger siblings in a semi-homeless, semi-halfway-house state for nearly three years. They lived most of that time in Yonkers, just five blocks from the Bronx and within a half-mile or so of Van Cortlandt Park. It changed all of us. But I think it changed Eri most of all. He was always angry. Even when I visited, I could see how angry he was with me and with the rest of the world. By the Yonkers years of '95 to '98, he was in middle school. But instead of sending him to middle school in Yonkers, my mother made the decision to keep all of my younger siblings in Mount Vernon public schools. Only Maurice did well. Of course he did -- he was a junior at MVHS when they all lived in Yonkers. Not so for Yiscoc, Sarai and especially Eri. My youngest brother spent three years and one summer in middle school, including two years at Davis in seventh grade and a summer making sure he didn't have to repeat eighth grade.

Eri continued to behave as if his actions had little meaning after moving back into the new, insane-asylum-looking 616 in '98. From the fall of '99 until he dropped out in '02, Eri was a ninth-grader at MVHS. He was a drop-in, cutting classes, hanging out with his buddies, bringing girls home apparently to hump. It wasn't until he managed to knock up one girlfriend in the middle of '01 that Eri realized that his life couldn't get better without him making an effort to make it better.

By the time of my family intervention in '02, Eri was enrolling in JobCorp in upstate New York. Still, I wanted to make sure that I gave him as strong a push as I could so that he would take the program and its possibilities seriously. Within eighteen months, Eri had completed his GED, gotten his driver's license and earned an auto mechanic's license. Even after not being able to find steady work, Eri made the decision to join the Army Reserve, earning him a tour of duty in Iraq in '07-'08, not to mention a broken toe.

Not everything in Eri's life, especially of late, has been bad. Yet when living with so much anger because the world seems like it's against you aspiring to anything, it's easy to just throw up your hands and say, "No mas!" The meaning that I can take from the past twenty-five years is to never give up, especially on yourself, and never let the world take your dreams from you. I hope that Eri can continue to do the same.

Testing 1-2-3

2009-05-20T10:23:00.000-04:00

I had planned to write something about President Barack Obama or about some other pressing issue. Like, is President Obama really operating as a Vulcan when it comes to his policy decisions, all logical with repressed emotions? Or can a computer virus ever become a real world one, and start a pandemic that will destroy our civilizations? Or if we ever created the Star Trek equivalent of a holodeck program, will our birthrate drop to the point where humanity would be in danger of extinction because we engaged in sex with virtual people? Or is it possible to impregnate a nine-dimensional hologram? Sadly, I decided against all of these topics because of an article in today's Wall Street Journal about the efficacy of test preparation programs for the SAT and other national standardized ETS and College Board exams.

The article goes on to say that there isn't much bang for the buck from the Kaplan's and Princeton Review's of our world. For the $1,000 or $1,500 folks plop down to make their scores a couple of hundred of points higher, they really only raise their scores by a handful, maybe even 50 or 70 points. True that. Yet is this really news to anyone who has ever taken the SAT, ACT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT, Praxis I and II, GMAT, PSAT, AP and other exams? Books like Nick Lemann's The Big Test and Jerome Karabel's The Chosen have shown over the years that family income as it relates to race, gender, neighborhood and public schools is the single biggest factor in the scores that students earn on these exams. In other words, if you didn't grow up with parents who read to you as a toddler and young child, have immediate access to information through physical or online encyclopedia, dictionaries and thesauruses, or traveled to various parts of the world, oh well! That's a disadvantage that can't be made up by taking a six or ten-week class in test strategies and cramming words like "acerbic" and "esoteric" and "etymological" into your brain.

I should know. Even with years of accelerated classes, of being around kids who traveled and lived the boring lives of the upper middle class and the affluent, I wasn't as well prepared for standardized tests as them. Of course, some of them took test prep classes even with their built-in socioeconomic advantages. October '85 was the first time I took the SAT, when it still stood for the "Scholastic Aptitude Test." I scored a 1050: 480 Verbal, 570 Math. That's well above the national average even now, and was about 200 points above it back then. For African Americans, whose average scores in the mid-80s was a 736, it made me seem genius-like by comparison. I knew those kind of statistics even then. But I also knew if I wanted a scholarship or to get into a school like Columbia or Yale, I would need a score closer to 1200.

The following October was when I faced the SAT again. I prepared dutifully at the end of the summer of '86 and into September. I went through the entire Barron's SAT prep book. With all of that, my score went up, but only by another 70 points. I scored an 1120 this time: 540 Verbal, 580 Math. My classmates scored 1360, 1350, a couple of them 1280s, one a 1220 and a bunch of them 1200s. One of them had the nerve to say, "only an idiot would score under 1200." I assumed that the comment was directed at me, since the asshole looked directly at me when he said it. I know for a fact that some of them took a Kaplan or some other course to help them prepare. The reality was, though, that most of them would've scored at least my score without any test prep at all.

A new standardized test cycle began for me during my junior and senior years at Pitt. Luckily, I did learn a thing or two about taking these kinds of tests during my undergraduate years. I hadn't learned nearly enough, though, and I still didn't have the funds to pay for a test-prep course. I took the GRE for the first time in February '90, with next to no preparation. My total score was a 1680 out of a possible 2400: 530 Verbal, 580 Math and 570 Analytical. The Analytical section was new, having just been added to the exam that year or the year before. Based on my SAT experience, I knew I'd have to take this exam again.

But there were a couple of interesting wrinkles in my standardized test plans. One was that I was learning how to drive that spring and summer, and for me, that was tougher than the GRE. Especially since no one in my family owned a car, and I split my time between Mount Vernon and the 'Burgh between May and September. I also wasn't certain whether I should go to grad school for a master's in history, or to law school for something a bit more sensible. So I bought two Barron's books, one for the LSAT and one for the GRE in August, and hoped for the best.

I ended up taking the LSAT the week before I took the GRE for a second time. I'm not sure what the LSAT is like now, but back in '90, it was virtually two-thirds Analytical and one-third Verbal Reasoning and Reading Comprehension. I spend about two weeks off and on preparing for it. I scored a 31 (out of a possible 47) on the exam, which put me at the 50th percentile. Pretty average, obviously! But it also helped me prep for the GREs. The one area my score improved was the Analytical section. My total score was a 1720: 530 Verbal, 570 Math and 620 Analytical.

In a twist of irony, because the section was so new, not one of the admissions people I talked with even knew what to do with my Analytical section score. I was rejected by UC-Berkeley and the University of Virginia because my verbal and math scores didn't put me in the 70th or 80th percentile (I was only in the 64th and 51st percentiles for those scores). Mind you, my Analytical score -- the one that involves critical reasoning, a key component for being a brilliant historian -- put me in the 74th percentile. Even Pitt, NYU and the University of Maryland -- all schools that accepted me into their programs -- didn't account for that particular score.

I say all of this because standardized testing, test-prep and other related work is really a crock when it comes to evaluating students for college or advanced degree/professional programs. At best, they can be used to show how students with a certain level of life knowledge can perform under the pressures of a timed bubble exam (of course, now they use essay writing too). These tests, regardless of what the psychometricians at ETS and The College Board say, don't correlate well to how students actually perform while in postsecondary, graduate or professional education. They tend to weed out folks who otherwise would do all right, but not great, in college or graduate school more than they help others who would likely get into an undergrad or grad program even without taking these exams. Two friends of mine from Pitt both took the LSAT at least three times. Between the two of them, their highest score was a 17 (back in the day when the point-scale for the LSAT was between a 12 and a 47).

Anthony Carnevale, a former vice president at ETS (and someone the folks I used to work for full-time should've hired for our education reform work back in '02), let it be known a decade ago that ETS had been doing some promising research into understanding the correlation being SAT scores and family income as it related to race, gender and neighborhood. It snowballed into a controversy over what many in the press called the "Strivers Report," where it was suggested that someone with my upbringing could have my SAT score of a 1120 weighted to reflect my relatively high score. In other words, an affluent White male from Scarsdale with a 1280 SAT score and my 1120 score would be seen as the same under the circumstances. The mere suggestion led to many a conniption fit among policy makers, educators, and affluent parents.

I respectfully submit that any education system or policy that doesn't account for relative circumstance is an inequitable one, and that not all standardized test scores are created equal. If the elite schools like UC-Berkeley, Harvard and Princeton can recognize this, why can't the rest of us?

The Curse of "Dr. Collins"

2009-05-18T16:10:00.000-04:00

Those of you reading this may think that this is my "woe-is-me" posting about how horrible my life is as an underemployed professor. Well, not exactly. On this date twelve short years ago, I officially walked across a broiler of a stage inside a tent on Carnegie Mellon's small quad to receive my doctorate from then dean Peter Stearns. It was a bittersweet day, for I already knew that my relationship with my mother would never be the same. The reality is, though, that my relationships with folks who knew me while I earned my doctorate have changed, and the way folks attempt to relate to me has changed too, and not necessarily for the better. There are days that a part of me wishes that I never set my sights on anything higher than a master's degree, or had just taken my chances as a broke-butt writer eighteen years ago.

With my mother, despite what almost every person who's never met her has said, I know that she isn't proud of me. She's completely puzzled by me, because I don't act like my other siblings, sound like my other siblings, or complain about life like my other siblings (or like her, for that matter). Mind you, the way I sound hasn't changed much since my tweener years -- I just speak much faster than I did when I was twelve. But somehow, it was me earning my PhD that made me this way, not the fact that I aspired to one in the first place. So if I give my opinion on something and my mother doesn't like it -- which is almost all of the time -- it becomes an issue of my "secular education" or having exposed myself to this wicked world of diversity, evolution, gay rights and social justice. It can't be because I am who I am and have made myself to be over the years.

My mother-in-law's the same way, picking arguments with me over the silliest of things. She assumes that I assume that she's "stupid" because I have a doctorate. I don't think my mother-in-law's stupid. Like me, (but by a factor of ten or fifteen times more) she has a tendency to say really dumb things. That I sometimes point out the illogical nature of what she has said is usually what gets me in trouble. It would just be nice to have a conversation in which we not only disagree but agree to disagree without my so-called advanced education getting in the way.

Among my co-workers, some of my colleagues, and a fair number of undergraduate friends from my Pitt days, my degree sometimes confuses, even intimidates. I've seen it in numerous conversations. People whom I know may be yakking away about the NBA playoffs or the news of the day. I join in the conversation, and my colleagues give themselves a code-switching upgrade, using words I know they don't use in everyday conversation. What do they think, I'm going to assign them a grade for vocabulary usage or something?

Some of my Pitt friends started falling by the wayside as I pursued my grad degrees, which is normal, but there were some pretty weird conversations I had with them as they did. One insisted on calling me "Dr. Don" about a dozen times during a bus ride one day in '92, laughing to the point of hilarity while doing it. I thought that he was going to choke on his own spit all the while, he was laughing so hard. Another guy -- who eventually committed suicide in '98 -- told me straight up that people like me were "sellouts," that "The Man" wasn't going to accept people like me or him "no matta how many degrees we get" or don't get. Luckily, I learned not to bring up my education to folks unless it was for professional purposes or unless someone asked.

There are other issues that come with an advanced terminal degree. Especially when you've been teaching college and grad level courses off and on for eighteen years and have ten years of nonprofit management experience. I can't apply for just any job, full-time or part-time. Most human resources people probably laugh when they see my c.v. come across their desk. Other writers and editors assume that the only experience I have as a writer is through peer-reviewed academic journals and long-winded monographs about how to use statistical analysis and dry-as-dust-writing to wring the life out of history. If I decided to go back to school, what for? Unless I want to become a lawyer, medical doctor, or astrophysicist, there's really little reason for me to earn another degree. I could go do some executive or professional program in journalism or writing, get certified as a K-12 teacher or administrator, but given my limited experience with these programs, I wouldn't want to be my teacher -- it's scary, it's just too scary!

I could act as if the past twelve or eighteen years haven't happened. That is, merely list my bachelor's and master's, create a true resume instead of a c.v., and only list my job experiences. Even with this, though, there would be problems, as some of my work has required someone with a minimum of a doctorate to do it. Plus, it would surface at some point anyway. In a conversation, in hanging out with co-workers, in occasionally bumping into my former students, in the two-dozen or so articles, book reviews, op-eds and other pieces I've published. I am who I am and have made myself to be, and part of who I am is because of those five and a half years of graduate school.

Now what I have done is de-emphasized the degree as the end-all and be-all of my existence. For many, including those whom I know in academia, the degree and tenure are pretty much all that matter. Not so for me. I've always been ambivalent about my doctorate and what it means, to me and to others. So I've rearranged my priorities, seeing myself as a writer first and an academic historian second (and more often than not, third or fourth, behind teacher and consultant). Now I'm "showing off" again! I've just shown how much of a glutton for punishment I am. Is being a writer any easier that being an academic historian?

A Star Trek Education

2009-05-16T08:06:00.000-04:00

I plan to see the new Star Trek movie in the next couple of weeks, even if I have to go to a matinee showing of it minus my wife and son. I've heard so many good things about the film. So many that I've been catching the other Star Trek movies on cable over the past couple of weeks. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek: Generations, Star Trek: First Contact, Star Trek: Nemesis, as well as the TV series Star Trek: TNG, Star Trek: Voyager, Star Trek: Deep Space 9 and Star Trek: Enterprise. The day that the new movie opened, AMC, Cinemax and SciFi were all showing different Star Trek movies at the same time! With all of the talk of warp drive and the use of antimatter as fuel, using electroplasma energy as electricity, and protein resequencing machines to turn normal human waste into kobe beef, we'll still apparently have an education problem in the 22nd, 23rd and 24th centuries as a world.

The one thing all Star Trek movies have in common is this common context of all Starfleet officers having a common public school experience prior to attending Starfleet Academy. They attended elementary school, had tough and demanding teachers (notice that I didn't say good teachers), and went to high school. You get some sense, at least from the Star Trek movies done with the cast from Star Trek: TNG, that the high schools are a bit different, that those 24th century folks were required to excel in differential equations before graduation. Beyond that, their education sounds very much like an early twenty-first century American K-12 one.

And that's the interesting part. I don't think that our 15,000 school districts as they stand right now could ever hope to produce someone like a Zephyr Cochran, the series' fictional inventor of a warp drive engine. One of our universities could, but that's only assuming that his or her sense of creativity, critical thinking, and innovation hadn't been numbed out of them by the time they reached college. It's the sad truth that our nation has a four-track, K-College education system -- one for the poor and not-so-well off, one for the affluent, one for the obviously analytical and scientific, and one for those of us willing enough to pick up any certificate or degree from anywhere.

None of these systems are compatible, and only the high-potential affluent have the best chance of earning advanced degrees and making the most of their education. We in education often talk about the low high school and college graduation rates for students of color from low-income backgrounds. What about for the White and the affluent? Even for them, roughly 22 or 23 percent don't graduate college within six years. So even if we improve education for the less well-off to the standards of upper middle class Americans, we'll still lose nearly one in four students at the college level.

Ours is a system that was designed for the early twentieth century, when not-quite White immigrants from Italy, Poland, Russia, Greece, Serbia and Croatia and Romania were streaming in by the millions to fill factory jobs. It was designed to take in folks who had little hope of social or career mobility, of doing something other than work with their hands. Our K-12 system as we know it today is the result of actions taken as early as the 1890s, when schools began to sort students based on their abilities through testing. Obviously, if one was a non-English-speaking Italian Catholic from agrarian Sicily living in New York City, one's chances of performing well in a school district run by Protestants with very American and English ways of thinking were about the same as a snowball's chance in a fiery pit.

Over the years, educators and policy makers have tried to make this system more user-friendly, but have not taken apart its fundamental premise. Many, if not most, students don't have the mental stones to graduate from a dummied-down high school curriculum, much less go on to college. Even with community colleges, online and distance learning experiences, and so many other programs for the educationally down and out, the likelihood for success would be better if we had the academic equivalent of American Idol for thirty weeks, with handfuls making it to the next level. Because of the complexities of race and socioeconomic status, ability grouping or tracking, and our own idiotic perceptions of intelligence, American education remains a system that grinds up many more students than it actually graduates. That includes the ones they graduate, as most are without the leadership, critical thinking, creativity, and innovation skills necessary to go to college or take a good-paying job in the here and now.

The folks of the Star Trek world don't need good-paying jobs, for money is no longer necessary in a world without poverty. Somehow, those people have figured out how to train good teachers who can teach, run good schools, foster the holistic growth of kids intellectually and psychologically, and managed to raise high school standards to the equivalent of one's sophomore year in college. Not a community college, but more like an Oberlin, Grinnell, Pitt or even a University of Pennsylvania. That's more amazing than the ability to warp space to exceed the speed of light.

But we all know that this Star Trek world is a bit of fiction. Many things we have seen created in our real world since the days of a fit William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, though, were inspired by the first Star Trek series, from cell phones and hand-held computers to breakthroughs in particle physics, quantum mechanics and nuclear fusion. Maybe enough folks can be inspired to help create the big leap we need in American education, to make our education system one that leads the drive toward creativity, critical thinking and innovation, rather than driving it away.

AP Exam Blues

2009-05-13T09:48:00.000-04:00

For so many high-potential high school students, this week represents an interesting, if excruciating privilege. This is traditionally AP Exams Week for this group of students. By the hundreds of thousands, these sophomores, juniors and seniors will sit for three hours at a time to take college-equivalent exams in well over thirty subjects. Theoretically, a student could come out of this week having achieved sophomore standing, with at least 24 credits of college taken care of before throwing their caps in the air at their high school graduation ceremony.

But it can also be a week of torture, disappointment, even bitterness for those whose classes, studying, and teachers did little to prepare them for these exams. Unlike my first foray into the land of AP exams my junior year -- where I was among three students who scored "5s" on the AP American History exam -- my senior year of AP classes didn't come close to yielding the same results.

Over a two-day period in the second week of May '87, I took AP English, AP Calculus, and AP Physics on consecutive days. AP English was Monday afternoon, and I was cruising through the exam until I hit the essay questions. My time management was so poor that I barely started the second of two essay questions before time ran out. AP Calculus was the next morning, and I felt much, much better about that. It was the easier of the exam’s two versions, Calc AB. I figured that I scored at least a 3 on it.

Then there was AP Physics A, B, and C Wednesday afternoon. All but our valedictorian took the easier versions. But for us, this was hardly easy. "J", who had paid our valedictorian to tutor him in the weeks before the exam, just started laughing in the middle of it all, knowing that he was putting the nails in his own coffin. “You get a 1 for just signing your name,” he snickered. I was determined to get at least a 2, but that would’ve meant learning something useful from our teacher David Wolf other than how to hang students out to dry.

I knew as the proctor asked us to put our pencils down that I scored a 1 on the exam. It was confirmed a month later. I also scored a 3 on AP Calc, good enough for earning college credit at some schools -- but not at Pitt -- and a disappointing 2 on the AP English test. Our valedictorian scored a 5 on the AP Calc BC, AP Physics C, and AP Biology exams, and a 4 on the AP English exam. She guaranteed herself twenty-seven college credits, counting her 5 score from the AP American History exam the year before. Our valedictorian was a college sophomore a full month before we graduated from high school.

Admittedly, I spent most of my senior year distracted between 616 and school, the Mets, the NY football Giants and crush #2. It wouldn't have been the greatest year even if I'd only taken regular Humanities courses. With three AP courses, it was too much to manage while still at home. If that were the only factor in all of this, senioritis and my constant struggle for time to study and being a surrogate father/older brother/errand boy would be the only thing to talk about here. But it wasn't.

I struggled in all three of my AP classes my senior year, but none worse than in AP Physics. Even without studying, I managed Cs and C+s in AP English and AP Calculus during the first third of the school year before kicking my efforts up a couple of notches. Not so in AP Physics. David Wolf was having a bad year, and it seemed like it was his intent to make our year as miserable as possible. He taught the far more difficult AP Physics C version of this Physics course, involving mechanics, electricity and magnetism. It was the equivalent of second semester Physics right from the start, and most of us needed at least a semester of Calculus to keep up with the class. Our valedictorian was more than ready, and the only person able to solve Wolf’s multidimensional problems. After all, she had spent about 200 hours -- pretty much every spare moment she had between work and family -- during the summer of '86 with our Physics and Calculus textbooks preparing for this class. Things like understanding wind drag and gravity, velocity and the physical properties of work, meters per second squared and foot-pounds, Joules and amps took me most of the year to grasp when our valedictorian was practically using third-semester Calculus to build the Great Pyramids by comparison.

At first I saw this as a new challenge that I could take on and will myself through. After the first two months of the year, it crossed my mind that struggling through this course wasn’t worth it. My knowledge of mechanics equations and the calculus involved to understand and calculate these relative motions of objects was limited to what I’d been learning in AP Calc, a complete mismatch. On our first big exam, only two out of seven of us passed. My grade was a 22, and it was still the fourth-best grade on the exam. I knew then that taking AP Physics was a mistake.

As if this wasn't bad enough, Wolf berated us in class. We were “lazy,” “too smart for [our] own good,” and “didn’t deserve to be in this class.” On top of that, Wolf’s supervisor, Science Department Chair Estelle Abel, came into our class soon after this exam. In three-and-a-quarter years of MVHS, I’d never met the woman, never seen her in the hallways, and never heard a classmate speak of her. For about fifteen seconds, I found myself surprised by the fact that she was Black. Then she opened up her mouth. “I suspect that all of you realize that you’ve gotten in over your heads. I expect each of you to drop this course before you embarrass yourselves any further.” She directed some of her attention to me, saying, “and you should be ashamed of yourself!” Wow, I thought. I knew a 22 was way below my own standards, but there were at least three other students with lower scores than me. The order of the scores didn’t matter to me too much. But Wolf having his boss come into class and embarrass us into dropping just left me pissed.

This was the first time that we had a teacher who was more interested in humiliating us than in teaching us. We had plenty of teachers in the recent past who weren’t interested in being good and energetic teachers. This was different. Wolf had an ax to grind. Meltzer might have been the best teacher I ever had, someone who gave us a glimpse of what college would be like at its best. Wolf was the equivalent of a more typical college professor, a sink-or-swim teacher with no ability to help other students grasp his material, and no sympathies for students other than his best ones.

By the time I had finished the AP Physics exam seven months later, I realized that a lot of what I was doing was out of a combination of my own curiosity and need to compete with the best and brightest in my school. It wasn't as if I had planned on majoring in Physics or Civil Engineering at Pitt. I could have easily taken AP Biology, or better still, taken AP European History or AP American Government. I had wasted $53 of my summer of '86 earnings on a class that wouldn't matter on my college or high school transcripts.

It did teach me a few important lessons about college and about education. That not all people who are teachers or professors really know how to teach, or want to know how to teach, or think about the relationship of courses in their teaching. That students at the postsecondary or near postsecondary level should and must take responsibility for their own learning, even if it means taking a course in which they might not do particularly well (that was me in third-semester Calculus my junior year). And that taking a class to prove to anyone other than yourself that you can master material that is of interest to you -- and in which others have suggested you can't master -- is a horrible reason for taking a course.

For these reasons, it was good to have David Wolf and AP Physics my senior year -- it helped prepare me for graduate school. It also makes me a better teacher every time I remind myself of what bad teaching looks like.

Running Away

2009-05-11T07:40:00.001-04:00

This isn't about me, at least not directly. It's about my younger brother Maurice. It was twenty years ago yesterday that he didn't come home from William H. Holmes Elementary School. It was the beginning of the final month of my mother's so-called marriage to my now ex-stepfather Maurice. And it was the beginning of a bumpy ride, to say the least.

It happened right after I returned from my second year at Pitt, flush with money but with only about three weeks to look for a summer job. In the meantime, I came home to a pigsty. It was the filthiest I’d ever seen our apartment at 616, not that there was that much to dirty. The entire hallway and foyer had bags full of dirty clothes piled up to wash. Some of the bags had overflowed. There was an endless amount of dust along the washboards of the hallway walls, as if they were in bomber formation. Trash and food were all over the kitchen, and the once-brown carpet in the living room was literally black and gray from Eri’s spills and my stepfather’s feet and oily body. I had steeled myself for the disconnect between my life at Pitt versus 616, but almost nothing could’ve prepared me for that. Boxes of my stuff from Welsford were coming in at the beginning of the week, so I knew it would be impossible to walk into the house if they were stacked in the foyer too. So I did what I always had done, only with some righteous indignation. I sorted two or three bags of clothes, made Darren get our siblings dressed, and went down to Pelham to wash clothes.

Over the next two weeks, that was mostly what I did it seemed, wash pile after pile of dirty clothes. I figured that there were about six weeks of clothes sitting in the hallway and foyer the day I came home. I also cleaned up as much as I could, got my siblings out of the apartment. I didn’t have much help. My mother was taking three courses at Westchester Business Institute that quarter. Darren had taken a job as a courier down in the city with a company that had a weird name, something with Blake in it. He was a foot courier. Darren had neither a license nor a bike. On weekends Darren would just lie around on his bed, or worse, he’d spontaneously jump up and down in his room with a big grin on his face, about what I didn’t know. My stepfather Maurice had gotten a job with the Mount Vernon Sanitation Department in February. He was a garbage man, an irony too delicious for my mother to leave alone. “Of all the jobs out there, ‘garbage’ goes and become’s a garbage man,” she laughed sarcastically on a couple dozen occasions. Their fights were every day now, with constant and open name-calling to boot. It was the worst I’d seen it since before my mother had been beaten up by Maurice seven years before.

So it was that on the tenth of May, with everything going on between my mother and my stepfather, Darren in his own world and my own hands full with my younger siblings that no one noticed that my brother Maurice hadn’t made it home from school. He was almost ten, but he still didn’t have friends he hung out with. I started worrying about an hour after he should’ve been home. I asked Yiscoc, Sarai and Eri if they’d seen him at Holmes during the day. Of course none of them knew anything, a sign that my mother and their father’s willful ignorance of the world around them had penetrated all of their heads. By 7 pm, I was really worried, to the point where I told my stepfather that I thought his son was missing. “Whatcha want me to do about it, look for him?,” he laughed. I was so horrified that I immediately called the cops to report my brother missing.

Just before my mother came home from class, the police called back to report that Maurice had been found, safe and somewhat sound. He was in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and having soiled his clothes from the long and unending walk. I went downstairs to wait for my mother, bumping into our neighbor Helene along the way. She had this “What’s wrong?” look on her face, so I told her what was going on. My mother had made it to the front steps of 616 by then. Within a few minutes, Helene was giving us a ride in one of the Milton limos to pick up Maurice from the police station in Fort Lee. “He must’ve have walked twenty or twenty-five miles,” I said as we merged on the Bronx River Parkway. It turned out it was only somewhere between fifteen and twenty miles. My younger brother somehow figured his way through the Bronx and into Manhattan, taking Route 9 and Broadway through the Bronx, crossed the Broadway Bridge into Manhattan, and followed the signs to the George Washington Bridge. From there Maurice found his way onto the pedestrian path on the upper deck of the mile-long bridge across the Hudson and meandered his way to nearby Fort Lee before the police picked him up. When we finally arrived and saw him, I was really happy that he wasn’t hurt. I wasn’t angry at him, I just wanted to know why. My mother hardly said anything herself. When I asked Maurice, “What were you thinking?,” he said “I don’t want to go home!” That was all he said the whole ride back in Helene’s car. When we got back, we both thanked Helene, and my mother attempted to give her money for the ride, which she didn’t accept.

But it was more than enough, at least for my mother. She laid into my stepfather after we cleaned my brother up, fed him, and sent him to bed. For big Maurice’s part, he just left the house, presumably to carouse with another one of his victims.

My brother Maurice was in fourth-grade Special Ed at the time, labeled as mildly mentally retarded with an IQ of 78. And he was in a way. Holmes and the Mount Vernon Board of Education had no idea that my brother had been physically abused at the ripe old age of six months, beaten by my stepfather because "he was cryin' too much." Neglected often while I was in sixth and seventh grade, as my idiot stepfather rarely changed his diapers or fed him during the school day. My brother Maurice's childhood was a disaster, and with the whole Hebrew-Israelite thing, he might've been better off homeless. Years of chaos, poverty, and abuse and lack of food must’ve had some impact on my younger siblings, especially Maurice, as he lived through the worst of it all. Putting him and Yiscoc in Special Ed at five or six years old seemed rash, a cruel punishment for kids barely old enough to understand what was happening. I refused to believe that either of them were actually retarded. Certainly life at 616 had stunted their mental development. Retarded? Sure, if by that they meant that my mother and stepfather never read stories to them, took them places to learn about the world, or even took them to the park to play. That role usually fell on my shoulders.

So I didn't blame Maurice for running away. He had many reasons to run. It was a watershed moment in a eight-year period of drama and grinding impoverished boredom. Within two months, my stepfather and my mother would be well on their way to divorce, my older brother Darren on his way to moving out. And I would begin my journey away from seeing myself as the surrogate parent to my siblings and surrogate husband to my mother.

Finding Forrester

2009-05-09T07:42:00.000-04:00

This week I was reminded of why Boy At The Window was necessary for me to write, and for others to read. I watched, probably for about the fifteenth or sixteenth time, Finding Forrester. For those of you who don't know, it's a coming-of-age movie about finding your own path, even in the midst of racial stereotypes and arrogant affluence, the blending of multiple worlds. With Rob Brown and Sean Connery as the lead actors, it actually is one of the better movies of this decade. But if you're asking me, it's among my top five movies since 2000.

What takes Finding Forrester from the vaguely plausible to the real in my book starts with Rob Brown. He played a character in Jamal Wallace that had to have so much more depth to him than most people would think possible. An incredibly smart and withdrawn teenager who hides all of those things when he's with his friends or in public school somewhere in the Bronx, presumably in or near the South Bronx. A well-developed basketball player who spends at least an equal amount of time keeping a journal of his writings, reading Coleridge and Tolstoy and numerous other literary giants. All of this, and his face for most of the movie is as blank as a clean chalkboard at the beginning of a new school year.

That face. That's the first thing that I responded to when watching Finding Forrester for the first time in February '01. It reminded me of my face when I was in high school, especially my last two years at MVHS. I've discussed it before. Brown's character might've concealed intelligence and an intellectualism that most academicians would envy with his face. It may have hidden the emotional scars of a father who abandoned him and his family. It certainly kept under wraps the hardships that the character lived with every day at home and in a New York City public school. But that where the similarities end. My face also hid my contempt for the politics -- racial, socioeconomic, academic and athletic -- that I saw play out every day for the six years I was in Humanities and the four years I was in MVHS. My late teacher and mentor Harold Meltzer said as much to me one day about how he could see the "laughter in my eyes" about all the hypocrisy that was MVHS for me in eleventh and twelve grade.

That wasn't my only takeaway from Finding Forrester. Sean Connery -- who has a tendency to be a bit over the top, and has done more than his share of God-awful movies -- really does a great job playing the reclusive writer William Forrester. Having written a bestselling, Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel about life and death and loss and suffering didn't seem to help Connery's character, who had spent the better part of five decades scared to experience life again. His life, his world, had gone cold after his brother and parents died within months of each other in the 1950s. His agoraphobia had kept him from recovering from this grand-scale tragedy until Brown's character shows up in his life.

For most people, the likelihood that a depressed and hermetic White guy would become friends with a sixteen-year-old Black male who guarded his every facial expression and kept his writing and other non-athletic talents a state secret borders on the impossible. Yet I know all too well how the impossible become real. Whether the person's name is Meltzer, or Lazarus, or Lacey, or any number of unlikely friendships I've had over the past quarter century, I've learned that age, race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion are only barriers if we make them such. The most important component of any friendship, any mentoring relationship, is an intellectual bond that allows folks in the friendship to learn lessons from each other. Without this, all friendships are superficial.

Just as important as the lesson of friendships and difference is the lesson of finding one's own path. Finding Forrester from the very beginning isn't a movie about how an elderly White guy helps out a poor and worthless African American boy. Nor is it simply about a Black kid shunning his world for a White one. It's about finding balance between two worlds that rarely meet outside of sports, entertainment and crime. After Brown's character is "outed" by high test scores, he's accepted by one of NYC's private academies for the destined-to-go-to-an-Ivy-League crowd. Of course, the fact that he's an excellent basketball player helps him as well. The character Jamal Wallace finds himself very quickly negotiating multiple worlds, all of which he's in, but not necessarily of.

Obviously I didn't go to a prep school that I could barely afford to send Noah to now. But being in Humanities classes full of folks from middle class and affluent families within a working-class, working poor and welfare poor school district, and coming home to 616 -- the land of ignorance, poverty, abuse and younger siblings -- would cause most people's heads to spin. I could've, with some work, used basketball as a vehicle to traverse these worlds, I guess. That wasn't my way. I became an academic achiever and knew I could write well -- but didn't quite see myself as a writer -- long before I realized I had the height and athletic skills necessary to knock down a seventeen-foot jumper. As my so-called MVHS counselor Sylvia Fasulo said about me, "There goes Donald, always daring to be different," a sarcastic refrain she used more than once.

Finding William Forrester did help Brown's character find his own way in life. As a writer. As a person with integrity and intelligence. As a whole human being. Still, the character Jamal Wallace possessed all of these traits and used them long before meeting Forrester at the age of sixteen. Brown's character and his friendship with Forrester gave him access to the career choice he wanted, confidence in the abilities he possessed, and a sense that he had more control over his life than he had dared imagine before. It took me a bit longer to begin to find myself, to make my own way and follow my own path. It's hard to break away from a past of pain and betrayal with little to guide you. But I did. I had to. And I used every experience and every lesson I could to do so. It helps that a few others were there along the way to help, and for me to help them as well.

The Legend of "Captain Zimbabwe"

2009-05-04T08:36:00.000-04:00

"CAPTAIN . . . ZIMBABWE!" was what "A" spontaneously yelled out loud to me one day in Doris Mann’s art class. It was late in the school year that was seventh grade, sometime in the middle of May ’82. I didn’t know where A got the idea for his new nickname for me. All I can remember was that I was wearing the same white shirt I’d worn on the first day of school, only that after about fifteen washes it probably wasn’t as white anymore. Of course I had my white kufi on. I’m sure it needed some washing. I probably needed a haircut, and being the tweener I was, I didn’t exactly wash, clean, grease up and comb out my knotty roots the way I needed to. My best guess was that A took a look at me in class and decided I looked like some primitive African attempting to wear Western-style clothing for the first time, as if I were in some Tarzan film or some other movie with Whites on safari.

It pissed me off to no end that A would say such a thing. What made it worse was that the "Captain Zimbabwe" moniker stuck in the minds of several of my other 7S classmates. A.N., A.Z., A.C., and others from the "Italian Club" picked up on A’s cue and took turns calling me "Captain Zimbabwe" for the rest of the year. I protested as much as I could. I said that they didn’t know what they were talking about. I certainly didn’t like being called it. Among other classmates, my eventual crush #2 and even crush #1 protested on my behalf. But to no avail. Even if they didn’t call me "Captain Zimbabwe" in homeroom or in English or in art class, we all had Italian together, and there weren’t any other non-Italian classmates around who’d step in on my behalf. So for the last month of the year, I’d occasionally have to hear this weird chant of "Captain Zimbabwe" from the Italian Club in Italian class. It was probably the closest, wittiest term they could come up with without calling me a nigger.

What struck me as odd during this latest episode of "Making Fun of Donald" was that it was contained to a specific group of boys in Italian class and that it didn’t spill over into all of 7S. I never understood "Captain Zimbabwe" as anything other than a racial slur. Something that A and company thought that they could get away with because it wasn’t obviously racist, at least to them. They assumed that others in 7S would have their back. Once they realized that other classmates weren’t all that cool with calling me "Captain Zimbabwe," they were smart enough to just do it in Italian before our teacher—who was usually late—showed up.

Besides the looks of meanness and glee that appeared on A’s and others faces during these rounds of calling out "Captain Zimbabwe," something else struck me as weird. Of all the folks in our class, I was surprised that A.Z. was involved in this. Not that A.Z. wouldn’t have participated. But given the fact that he was part Black as well as part Italian, it would’ve made sense for him to have sat this one out. That he didn’t was interesting only in understanding how much more he identified more as Italian in Italian class versus how he may have seen himself outside of Italian. He certainly didn’t identify himself as similar to me. I was too weird, too different to be considered "Black" by him. He let me know as much on any number of occasions. That ability to establish different parts of his identity in different settings may have justified A.Z.’s participation in the "Captain Zimbabwe" teases, but I saw it as a betrayal anyway.

A was by far the leader and the most interesting contradiction-of-a-person in what I called the "Italian Club" even before we had an Italian Club in high school. His was a world of cool, at least an updated ’80s Italian version of it. He acted like he was a twelve-year-old John Travolta with blond hair and blue eyes. Or like a younger version of "The Fonz," Arthur Fonzerelli as played by Henry Winkler on Happy Days, still a hit TV show on ABC by the time we started seventh grade. The way the A.N., A.Z., A.C., J.S. and D.M. spent time with him, you would’ve thought so. The way some of the Italian girls would seem to swoon over him and laugh at his constant banter in class, you would’ve thought A was a future rock star, Billy Idol or something.

But A wasn’t cool, at least not to the rest of us, and certainly not to me. He was a smart ass who didn’t know when to stop making light of folks and their faults. Like the times he’d just go after Brandie Weston about being fat. I don’t remember his multitude of comments, just the fact that he made them. It wasn’t that Brandie didn’t respond. But how often would anyone want to get into a war of words with A, especially since the more you said the more excited he was about saying something even more outrageous or offensive in response? After a few months, I learned to just lodge my own protests but otherwise ignore him. It wasn’t worth the time and effort to yell, complain, plead and threaten A when he went into his Rodney Dangerfield mode. To be a good class comedian, it’s as important to know when to stop as it is to deliver a good joke.

Only A never knew when to stop. A couldn’t just stop with touching a nerve by joking about any fault he noticed about you. Your identity was often a topic to poke fun at, especially if you seemed uncomfortable with it or if you were more than a little different. It wasn’t just me that A went after. The Jewish students got to hear A’s rendition of The Beatles’ "Hey Jude," where he’d sing "Nah, Nah, Nah, Nah, Nah-nah-nah-nah, Nah-nah-nah-nah, Hey Jew. . . ." One girl in my eighth grade homeroom was a "monkey" and a "baboon," two references to her West Indian heritage and her au naturale. Although he never said it to the biracial (or at least, allegedly so) in our classes directly, the terms "mixed" and "mutt" were ones that he’d use if they peeved him in any way. It was usually meant for only A.N. to hear, though.

A must’ve fallen in love with the Eddie Murphy film 48 Hours, because every chance he got he sang The Police’s "Roxanne" refrain the same annoying way Eddie Murphy did in the film. I can still remember his "Roooooxxxxanne" yelp as A walked into class on many a morning. A also loved to belt out Devo’s "Whip It" as a subliminal message to some of our Italian female classmates on occasion. In eighth grade, A and A.N. came up with the brilliant "kufis-on-the-half-shell" joke to make fun of my multi-holed hat.

A wasn’t all bad. Whenever students outside of Humanities picked on me and he was around, he came to my defense. There was an incident in eighth grade in which a Black kid snatched my kufi from my head and started to run up the hall with it. The incident occurred as me, A, and D.M. were in the middle of an errand for a teacher. I immediately ran the boy down, knocked him to the floor, dusted off my kufi, and put it back on my head. The boy got up and threatened to beat me up. It was at this point that A intervened, saying that he would "have to take on all of us" if he wanted to fight me.

It could be that by then that A had matured. But that wouldn’t be the whole truth. I think that despite all of his search-and-destroy efforts that A never got over the fact that there were other students—Jewish, Black, Afro-Caribbean, affluent White, Latino, Biracial and female—whom were at least as smart and as witty as he was. Not only wasn’t he the smartest kid in class, he wasn’t the coolest either, certainly not outside his cloistered Italian Club.

A didn’t seem comfortable with the reality of an academically-gifted multicultural classroom until we were in tenth grade. By then, for so many of us, A was an academic afterthought, someone who could be a pain in the ass, but otherwise was somewhat harmless, like a gnat in the summertime heat. I learned to like A only because I saw him more and more as a class clown that likely had larger issues at home than any one of us would ever want to know. I could see it because I could look at my life at 616 and see how little anyone really knew about me as well.

Why didn't folks come to each other's defense when A was on the prowl? My best guess was that it was the fear of competition, of giving anyone in Humanities an added advantage. It was a fear, a worry, an anguish that was with most of us every day regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, religion or level of affluence. Perhaps A and his lot could get away with their brand of verbal harassment because the alternative meant sticking your neck out for someone whom you might prefer not to be in competition with in the future. If you were weak enough to knuckle under because A called you a "monkey" or a "brainiac" for a month, then you didn’t deserve to be in Humanities. A program where the ultimate show of strength was your grades. Not to mention your ability to negotiate the social terrain of the in-crowd, the folks from Grimes and Pennington who’d been taking courses together since at least second or fourth grade. If you failed in one, you had a chance to redeem yourself with the other. If you failed at both, you’d likely either drop out of Humanities or fade into the background.

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I interviewed A for Boy At The Window in March '07. Sometimes it's amazing how much a person can change in two decades. This wasn't the same person I met in 7S or by the time we graduated high school in '87. He seemed more humble, more truthful, more accepting of people not like him than the person who spent a month calling me "Captain Zimbabwe" so long ago.

So I asked him about the Captain Zimbabwe taunt and where that came from. "I never called you that!," A said, likely realizing that he actually did. He’d borrowed the title from one of his older neighborhood friends. That friend had called a mutual friend of theirs "Captain Zimbabwe" because of his dark brown dot in the middle of his Italian forehead, "like the red dot Hindus have," A explained. "That’s where Captain Zimbabwe came from." His explanation made me chuckle. It was the first time I admitted to myself how goofy the bigoted joke was. How many kids even knew about Zimbabwe (known as Southern Rhodesia until ’80) when we were growing up, or know about the nation now? I think we both knew how racist the "Captain Zimbabwe" label was, but it still required some level of nerdy wit to coin the title in the first place.

A’s identity issue revolved around being cool, not cool and White or cool and Italian, just cool. That our other Italian classmates gravitated to A because of his coolness reflected as much their insecurities in Humanities as it did A’s. Because he was younger that most of the kids he grew up with in his Mount Vernon enclave near Davis, he was motivated to attract their attention, to be the best jokester and athlete he could be. "The only thing I could do get acceptance was to play baseball," A said. He learned by seventh grade that "it wasn’t cool to be smart," especially around Davis’ majority African American student body. Davis’ Black students were "different . . . they were older, bigger, bully types." With all of us grouped together in Humanities, A thought that it was his obligation to fight the nerd tag. "Back then, of course I thought I was cool" and "a freakin’ know-it-all . . . when I met you in 7S, I knew I could push you around," he said.

I'm in no way condoning A's use of "Captain Zimbabwe" toward me, or any of his other Rush Limbaugh-like comments towards my other former classmates for that matter. I'm merely empathizing, if only to understand how different folks from different backgrounds approach a weird and nerdy multicultural environment. The irony is, A's married to a Puerto Rican (or Nuyorican, I guess) woman and has two kids, and seems to be generally comfortable with other people now. Maybe Humanities contributed to that, maybe it didn't. The important lesson here is that people can and do change, even if it takes years for them to do so. The "Captain Zimbabwe" episode made me tougher in school, and five years of Humanities may well have made A more sensitive to his own bigotry. Perhaps there's hope for us all.