Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Imagination At Work

2010-02-07T16:48:00.003-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Ernie and Bert to Wilbon and Kornheiser

2010-02-05T06:13:00.003-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Being An "Ignit" American

2010-02-01T10:07:00.002-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art Rust, Jr.

2010-01-27T11:50:00.002-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nightmares and Daydreams

2010-01-25T09:15:00.001-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where's The Beef?

2010-01-20T06:49:00.003-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Being An Ignorant American

2010-01-18T08:54:00.002-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dream Sequence

2010-01-15T06:15:00.002-05:00

It must’ve been everyone I’d come to know. About twenty-five or thirty of them in all. Led by Crush #1, her eventual first love and my Italian Club tormentors, they all were marching down East Lincoln near where I lived, sticks and stones in hand. More like bricks and baseball bats and chains as they got closer. They were all dressed in Sergio Valente and Jordache, Benetton and OshKosh, Levi’s and Gap attire. They were all after me, my kufi, my life, my eternal soul. They weren’t running after me. They were marching in formation, like Soviet troops in Red Square, only with ridiculous smiles of mayhem giving away their intentions. I felt scared. But I had resigned myself to my fate. If I was goin’ down, gosh darn it, I was gonna put up a fight and take some of them with me!

Dreaming about your classmates in any other way than out of adoration or infatuation isn’t healthy. They served as a metaphor. They were an obstacle between me and my inner peace, a constant reminder that the odds were against me escaping 616 and Mount Vernon for the brighter pastures of a life and education elsewhere. They were symbols all right, symbols for everything from abuse and fear of abuse to undying and unrequited love. I woke up, sweating and with a panicked heartbeat from the nightmare. I looked at all of my body parts to make sure that I still had them in place before getting out of bed.

Later that snow-melt Saturday in early ’84, my mother sent me to the Fleetwood Station post office in the northwest corner of Mount Vernon to pick up a certified package. She had a PO box there, set up originally to protect sensitive documents from thieves in the building. I assumed that she was using it now to keep Maurice from getting his hands on any checks or other sensitive information. This was yet another task that I’d become the go-to-child for. I got dressed in my hand-me down winter coat and blue sweats and began the slushy trek to Fleetwood.

Then deja vu struck. I found myself standing at the northeast corner of Lorraine and East Lincoln, unusually quiet because of the snow and the cold front that came with it the night before. This was where the metaphorical forces of destruction had lined up and marched against me. I laughed out loud, hoping at the same time that no one saw me. I looked down at the curb and sidewalk as the slush-ice was turning into mini-glacial streams and rivers, all blending as they ran toward a storm drain. In a semi-frozen pack nearby lay ten dollars. It had been trapped by the icy H2O. “My luck is getting better every day,” I said to myself. This happened to me, someone who never found more than a penny at a time on the streets and sidewalks of Mount Vernon.
_____________________________________

It's funny how things like this happened to me at the beginning of a year. A dream, nightmare or vision that helped to guide me or gave me no choice but to gird my loins. A crisis, financial or otherwise, that left me so motivated and focused that the work that followed helped bring the crisis to an end. Maybe it's because at the beginning of a year, whatever baggage I've brought from the previous year has left me open to wisdom and understanding beyond my actual abilities. Maybe it's been in the quiet of a cold month of January or a cold winter season that I'm most susceptible to a quiet voice of reason and imagination, insight, foresight and hindsight that works better in a calmer mind.

I had planned to discuss this nightmarish dream of twenty-six years ago this week, but the cataclysmic events in Haiti and other issues have distracted me. To imagine that so many people -- through no fault of their own -- lost their lives as quickly as it would take a nuclear bomb to knock out electricity and send out a devastating blast wave. It's saddening and chilling right down to the marrow in my bones. Except that I don't have to imagine. The BBC and CNN have done much to make sure of that. So many are considered dead that it's hard to see Haiti ever recovering from this earthquake.

Except that this is more than about a 7.0 Richter scale shaking of the ground. The poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, and one of the poorest on Earth, was hit by this quake. A nation that has struggled with the scorn of idiot imperialists like Pat Robertson specifically, and the economic imperialism of the nations of Europe in general since those once enslaved there revolted against their French owners nearly 22o years ago. The richest colony in the French Empire quickly became as poor as anyone in the US Delta region or a Hurricane Katrina survivor from Ward 9 can imagine.

Civil wars and warlords and a light-skinned hierarchy, informal embargo-enforced economic inequality, and natural disaster have practically been a part of Haiti's history ever since it officially became independent in 1804. With poverty and economic and political instability comes poor building structures, limited public infrastructure in terms of doctors, nurses, police and firefighters, and a lack of the construction and demolition equipment that we take for granted in the US. Just across the street from us is an almost-finished high-rise and state-of-the-art, solar-powered office building. There's enough there to help dig out dozens of still trapped Haitians buried in rubble -- the living and the dead.

Even in the midst of all of this horror, even with the smells of rotting corpses, the moans and screams and blank stares of the injured and living, and the sights of collapsed buildings and chaos, there is hope. For I'm certain that there's a kid or an adult whose dreams remain unshaken. A tweener whose vision for his or her life remains their guidepost. A man or woman whose hurt, upset, and devastated, but refuses to surrender their wisdom and their hope because of this. And as those who hold out in hope that we can help in some way, we must not surrender our dreams either, for Haitians or for ourselves.

"Minority" Report

2010-01-06T09:51:00.005-05:00

I have a beef with the world of folks who still use the word "minority" to describe people like me. Most of them are White, a small minority are Black or Latino or Asian. Almost all of them are from Generation X or older generations. The final straw for me was the past week of listening to sports reporters talking about the NFL's Rooney Rule, the one that requires teams with coaching vacancies to interview at least one "minority" candidate before making a final hiring decision. Although I think that there are many benefits to the Rooney Rule, I don't think that calling one group of people Whites and everyone else minorities, especially if done continually, sets up the so-called others/non-Whites as outsiders, not the norm, people who need a handout from the dominant White folks who own the teams and control the hiring process.

I suppose that if the roles were reversed and we were calling all Whites "minorities" that there would be some gnashing of teeth on the part of White folk. Not necessarily. There is a power relationship issue that goes well beyond the numbers aspect of majority vs. minority. Financial, economic, social, military and cultural dominance that won't depend on Whites continuing to be the majority of the nation's population. This is something that folks who use this term without any regard to the diverse groups that they've lumped together don't understand. For those people, White is normal, White is powerful, White is dominant. "Minorities" are the other, in constant need of help, have little regard for our nation's cultural norms, deserve little in the way of educational, economic or other kinds of opportunities. Our individual and group identities are inconsequential and irrelevant, as they have little to do with the White world.

So Whites who use the term "minority" are racists, while the "minorities" who use the word are misinformed old farts, right? Absolutely not! I think that folks who use the term are lazy more than anything else. Even though the more appropriate term for people who aren't White is "people of color" -- and the term's been around for at least three decades -- many don't know it or refuse to use it even if they do. "Minority" or "minorities" is one word, "people of color" or "persons of color" is three. It takes up too much space in a newspaper article and takes too much time to say those extra two words. Saying "people of color" sounds too politically correct, because it actually makes folks see in their minds' eyes people who are Black, Latino and Asian in background. I would argue that this isn't true, that using the term "minority" is the more sterile -- and thus more politically-correct -- term being used, but used in a casual and lazy way to describe 110 million people.

This is something that's bothered me since the middle of my junior year in high school. The term "people of color" was in its infancy then, but I knew that I didn't like being called a minority, as if someone White could call me anything they wanted without my input. It was bad enough that the powers that were at Mount Vernon High School could tell me what to wear, where to go, when I could read my Bible in school. But to also be called a "minority" as a lazy substitute for Black or something else I found insulting in '85. These days, it remains lazy and insulting, and shows a disdain for the consideration for how those who are so-called minorities see and characterize themselves.

The same is true on the issue of the use of the term racism and race. Although I do see the issue of race involved in many issues that at first glance might seem to not involve race, that is hardly the same thing as saying that something is racist. There are folks who scream "racism" whenever a Black public figure finds themselves in hot water, and there are folks who scream "this isn't about race!" to every claim of race or racism, which for them is the same thing. This happened again, this time with the emerging evidence that Washington Wizards scorer and flaky idiot Gilbert Arenas semi-threatened one of his teammates with supposedly unloaded guns in the locker room of the Verizon Center in DC. Folks have spent the past few days calling Arenas' much-deserved vilification in the media "racist," and commentators denying that any of this anything to do with race.

The folks who are calling the Arenas coverage "racist" are as idiotic as Arenas. To say that what Arenas has done is typical of what Blacks from our generation grew up with are dumb asses who couldn't have an honest conversation about race if they were kneeling at the throne of Almighty God on Judgment Day. Those radio, TV and Internet commentators and bloggers whom say that this isn't about race or culture are correct, of course, but they miss one point when they make that point. That is, that anyone who is of color and learns about another famous person of color who gets themselves in legal or media trouble experiences a cringing moment. These few examples of successful individuals of color, once they become public pariahs -- like O.J. Simpson, Tiger Woods or Gilbert Arenas -- reflect badly on everyday people of color, especially Blacks. That is the backdrop to the moronic comments of folks defending Arenas against "racism."

So, do things like the Arenas situation or the revealing of Woods' recent affairs involve race? To say that it does means accusing Whites of racism, at least according to White mouthpieces. To say that it doesn't completely discounts that feeling of weariness that Blacks and other folks of color experience when rich and public people who look like us screw up legally or otherwise. Perhaps the bigger point here is that Whites who refuse to understand the dynamics of race are so tied to the notion of individualism that they're blinded to the realities of race, while folks of color are double-bond to their individual and group affiliations. Until those in the public arena can understand and articulate these tensions, we will continue to talk past each other as if one group is speaking Russian and the other is speaking Mandarin Chinese.

Comedian Chris Rock probably put it best in his Bringin' The Pain concert in '96. He said that "there are two kinds of Black people -- there are 'Black people,' and there are 'N____s'." I'm not so crass as to use the N-word to describe the likes of Arenas or jailed Louisiana ex-congressman William Jefferson (the guy with $90,000 in cash payoffs in his freezer), nor so naive as to think that these imbeciles represent me and what I'm doing with my life. But I'm also not so tied to the White notion of individualism to think that no one White doesn't equate the behaviors of prominent people of color with the millions of everyday people of color. Between the lumping together of peoples of color as "minorities" and the refusal to acknowledge that race (not racism) plays a role in our perceptions and perspectives on individuals' words and deeds, our public world needs to get into the '90s before the '10s get here. Oh wait a minute -- I guess I should revise to "before the '20s get here!"

The 40 F-Its

2009-12-31T06:28:00.002-05:00

A few years ago, a former classmate of mine -- Crush #1, in fact -- had this to say about the eventual turn to forty. She called it the Forty F___-Its, because when you turn forty, "you should just say 'Fuck it'" to the stuff that doesn't matter. I know full well that she didn't create this saying, but it sounded original coming from her. Of course, the more common saying is that forty is the new thirty. Tell that to former professional athletes who are in their forties! There is a qualitative difference, because even if our bodies are tuned up, our bones don't lie.

But my one-time crush and now married mother of two is correct. By the time we reach our forties, we should realize that there are some things we should just say "F___ it" to. I have a list of what I need to say "F___ it" to now that I'm firmly on the other side of forty.

1. Hiding my intelligence. I've been a miserable failure at this anyway. Still, I can be incredibly conscientious of the words I use and how I speak in situations and settings in which my intellectual skills are shunned, including the workplace. No more of that! I learned long ago that people are fickle, and that those who have problems with the occasional fifty-cent word should use their mobile phones to look up Dictionary.com instead of laughing or pretending to understand what I've just said. I'm not talking about talking over people's heads. I'm talking about being truer to myself.

2. Being ever more truthful about my life. For the most part I can't complain about the directions I've gone in my life over the past twenty years. Between my educational journey, teaching, nonprofit management, dating, marriage and my son, things have been pretty good for a while. But the past two or three years have been tough on us financially, despite prayer and effort. My life is far from perfect, yet from the outside looking it, I guess it looks better than what I think it is. That's fine for others. As for me, I can't look at my life through others' eyes. I don't have that luxury. We have a bit less than twelve years to get things in order so that Noah can have real choices as a young man, from the college he wants to attend to a used hybrid car to drive. That means seeing where we are now and knowing where we need to go so that all of our futures are secure.

3. Career vs. calling. For most of my time in the workforce, especially in the years since finishing my doctoral thesis at the end of '96, I've "been stuck in a moment," so to speak (thanks U2!). I've been ambivalent about academia as a full-time profession, and over the years, have discovered myself as a writer. I've also worked for a decade with one crazed nonprofit entity after another, picking up plenty of management and program development skills along the way. In the past couple of years, I've attempted to reconcile my calling with my career and job aspirations. To little avail.

One thing I have decided is that my doctorate can hurt me as much as help me on the job front, and that it matters only somewhat if my job or next job fits with my authorship aspiration. What does all of this mean, anyway? Should I go back to school and earn a law degree, a degree much more flexible than a doctorate in history? Should I decide to teach high school history for a steadier income and the ability to reach students before they go to college unprepared for its rigors? These are questions in need of an answer, but in order to answer them, I have to say "F___ it" to all of my assumptions about my career up to this point.

4. Live my dream and not just dream. Okay, this sounds weird, because I thought that for most of the past two decades, I had been doing this, and doing it well. Not quite true. Between our finances, my career goals and Boy @ The Window, I feel sometimes as if I've gotten close, but not nearly close enough, to making my visions for my life real in my life. It's clear to me now, though, what else needs to happen. I have to step up my efforts just one notch more, to recognize that I need to be bolder and more willing to network than I ever have before. At the very least, this will get me out of the house and classroom more often.

5. Move on. Sometimes I can be obsessed with a project or a person or an idea, sometimes all at once, as was the case with Crush #2 in '87 and '88. At times this has been the case with Boy @ The Window. I'm convinced that one of the reasons that it's taken me two years to make significant revisions to the manuscript is because working on it has caused me to relive many of my memories and emotions from all those years ago. Not so in the past few months. I've been able to do substantial revisions, to imbue the manuscript with words and emotions that might not have come through in previous drafts. Now that folks are reading it and liking it, now that I've revised or rewritten every section of the book at least five times (and the first chapter at least eight times), it's time to move on to other writing projects, even as I seek publication of Boy @ The Window. Let the chips fall where they may, although I think they'll fall in the right order this time.

6. You can't go home again. Nothing has borne this out better than in my work on Boy @ The Window and in my communications with former classmates and teachers on Facebook and through email correspondence. This isn't a knock on them or on me. There were good reasons for why I didn't become friends with them growing up, and going on twenty-three to thirty years on, I can see why through our expressions of thoughts and feelings now. But, Facebook and other correspondence have also reminded me about the good friends that I did and do have in my life in the years since Humanities and leaving Mount Vernon, including a couple from Mount Vernon. That good friends are hard for anyone to find, especially if you tend not to trust the people around you. And, at least in my case, why would I want to go home again anyway?

These are the ideas about where my life should go next as we enter a new decade. While the shape of things to come remains as uncertain as our world as a whole seems to be at the end of '09, I'm certain of some things. That I'm creative enough, smart enough, successful enough and spiritual enough to get where I want to go, and that it won't take until my son's in college to get there. That the people I'll meet -- including the people I need to meet -- will be ones who add something positive to my life, to the lives of my wife and child. And that there will be enough faith and wisdom, love and grace along the way. Happy New Year and decade, everyone!

Tiger's Issue, My Issues

2009-12-19T08:37:00.004-05:00

It's a shame to see what's happened to Tiger Woods in the wonderful media over the past three weeks. At the rate things are going, I could claim to have had a tryst with the man the week of the '01 US Open in Tulsa because I did a site visit for one of my previous jobs there. Of course, much of this is his own fault. Rampant infidelity. No Jordan-esque rules of sexual engagement, including a legally-binding contract. A certain lack of self-control in his personal life. And his refusal to face the public, not because we demand it, but ultimately, to protect his brand, his image. Yet none of those things are ones I want to discuss. I feel more compelled to discuss the race rules of interracial relationships and marriage in America.

As biracial -- or Cablinasian -- as Woods is, he is for all intends and purposes in this country, a Black man. Between the Choctaw and Irish blood (and who knows what else is in my genes), I can claim to be Cablin myself. Yet I know full well that I'm seen and see myself demographically speaking as Black or African American. Because of this, once one of us enters into an interracial relationship -- especially with a White woman -- smooth sailing is the only option we have in order to not be seen as pariahs. No financial problems, no hitting and certainly no cheating is allowed. There's little to no margin for error, and any major ones will be met swiftly with retribution. By the White wife or girlfriend, their family, your White friends (and some Black ones, too), and if a public figure, the media and the blogosphere as well.

What makes Tiger's transgressions worse for him are two additional components. One, his wife Elin is a blond, and not just White. Two, unlike many of the White women Black men tend to date or marry, she is perceived as attractive by many folks, if not most. The combination in our zero-sum race rules around Black men with White women means that someone like Tiger Woods can't act like anything other than the perfect husband. I'm not condoning his cheating one iota. All I know is that we were less hard on John Edwards, a guy whom was only running for President of the United States, and could've brought the Democratic Party down with him if he had made it to the nomination stage. We're harder on Tiger, not just he projected a solid image, not because he let the media and the public down, but because he's a Black guy cheating on an allegedly beautiful and blond White woman.

If you think that this is all poppycock and balderdash, anyone remember O.J. Simpson and Nicole Brown between '92 and '97? Those were the years that it was painfully obvious that White guys I knew were ready to form a mob, march over to Santa Monica, and kill the Hall-of-Fame running back for first hitting Brown before their divorce in '92, then killing Brown in '94. The last three weeks have been about the same issues. The media just refuses to see it that way. Sure, there's shock and outrage about what Tiger's done, and Tiger should go public to protect himself. But this is about race, and not in way Rush Limbaugh would yell about it either.

It's funny. There's no outrage about the fact that Tiger's wife smashed in the back window of his Cadillac SUV with a golf club. That he was obviously attempting to get away from her. That he was treated for more injuries than running into a fire hydrant would account for. Yet, I guess, it's okay for a blond White woman who's been cheated on by a Black man to flip out and commit an act of domestic violence. If the tables were turned, billionaire or not, best golfer on the planet or not, Tiger would've gone to jail, and might still be in jail.

I'm not exactly speaking from my own experience in dating White women, because I haven't. Not because I didn't have the opportunity to do so. Mostly because as enlightened as I am, I'm also a bit old school on the issue of interracial dating and marriage. That it should be more about who I am than what I look like, what I stand for and not just how much money I have in my bank account this morning, love and not just lust. But my own experiences, going back to the end of high school, have shown otherwise. Getting accused of sexual harassment after a White female co-worker had made several advances toward me was a learning experience. One of many in which my interests were primarily platonic and theirs sexual in nature. One of at least half a dozen where once my intentions were clear, I faced harassment and berating, as if I was supposed to be attracted to a White woman because they're White.

I could be crude and say that butt shape, or the lack thereof, is the reason why I never sought to date anyone White. I could be a bit more honest and say that the prospect of having to deal with their baggage while having to constantly explain my own would be another reason. Let's face it. There aren't a lot of folks who do get me, but most of them are of color. The full truth is, though, that in the area of relationships, I haven't trusted the words and deeds of White women. Not friendships, just relationships. Now, maybe that's prejudice on some scale, or maybe that's preference. It may even be a bit of both. Still, given responses I've seen to folks with way more going for them than me, like O.J. and Tiger, can you really blame me?

At the same time, though, I don't believe -- like a lot of other Black folk -- that Tiger would've been okay had he married a sista. Infidelity is serious and marriage-destroying, after all. He likely would've been better off not getting married at all. If you couldn't keep it in your pants before marriage, then it is highly unlikely that you could after getting married. Marriage is hard work, no matter how beautiful and attractive you think your spouse is. Perhaps the biggest lesson here is that Woods didn't have the capacity to work more on his marriage than his golf game.

But for me, part of the lesson here is related to race. Maybe it's important in a multicultural society for all of us to date outside of our primary demographic group before settling on a mate. Just not to the exclusion of folks that are most physically similar to us. Maybe it's not. It's not like there's a rulebook for this. It just seems that there's way too much emphasis on Tiger's cheating and not enough on the class, gender and racial dynamics of his marriage. Not to mention the fact that we can't possibly know what that marriage has been like from the outside looking in. My issue here really is about how we as a public get to sit and judge someone else's mess when most of us are wallowing neck-deep in our own crap. It's ludicrous and a shame -- on us.

The Starving Writer

2009-12-10T13:23:00.003-05:00

The other day, a student of mine made a reference that very much reminded me of, well, me, the person I was twenty-two years ago. It was as part of a conversation about looking for work. She didn't want to be another starving artist, living in some basement apartment somewhere, "smearing paint on a canvas" while waiting for a big break. I thought that the idea of a starving artist had all but died out in the era of bling-bling.

But it made me think for a while about the choices I've made with my life and career in the years since the middle of my senior year at Mount Vernon High School. As I talked about in a posting a few weeks ago, I once said to my AP English teacher Rosemary Martino that I didn't want to be a starving artist "like Edgar Allen Poe" all those years ago. Now a student had made a similar -- although better developed -- reference. I think I understand better the momentary look of shock on my teacher's face now.

It made me wonder if the quality of my life and career would be better these days if I had embraced the promise Martino saw in my writing back then. I mean, I was already a slightly malnourished six-foot-one and 160-pounder at that point anyway. The inner struggle to put thoughts to paper creatively would've been much easier at seventeen than it is as a forty-year-old.

Maybe so. But until Noah or one of his progeny design a time machine, I can't rewrite my history in order to make me embrace what I now see as my calling. All I know is that those words I uttered in March '87 have stayed with me for nearly twenty-three years. The question of finding and following my calling has always been juxtaposed with my need to eat and pay the rent and other bills. How do I do both without dropping one of the balls that I'm juggling?

The issue for more than half of my adult life was finding my calling. Along the way, I spent the summer of '88 unemployed, the first week of my sophomore year at Pitt homeless and three weeks in May '91 losing sixteen pounds for lack of food. Not to mention six weeks of unemployment in '93, walking to Carnegie Mellon many a time in the snow with holes in my sneakers in '94, and two and a half years of underemployment from December '96 to June '99. I was a starving writer long before I saw myself foremost as one. When one doesn't follow their calling and doesn't follow a typical path to making a buck, the tendency is insufficient funds.

The point is, we as Americans in a post-modern, post-industrial world have to get paid and pursue our dreams in order to succeed and survive. For educated folk like myself, "we have to get a little bit crazy," as Seal would say. If it takes a pay cut or less job responsibility to find the time to write, then maybe that's what it takes. Or maybe it's a bunch of all-nighters (non-consecutive, of course) with your manuscript, only to drag yourself into work for a full shift the next morning. Or maybe it's risking your spouse, your comfortably uncomfortable way of life, your financial present, for a more fulfilling and profitable future. Maybe it's all of these things, maybe it's none of them. There isn't a single formula or one simple path to both, not as an artist and certainly not one as a writer.

Creative abilities, even genius, may well drive people mad, but most folks in pursuit of their calling aren't fools. No one, including the starving artist, wants to starve. Some of us, though, have a desire for much more than the ability to get a job, any job, and hold one long enough to see our own kids graduate from college and meet someone they truly love. Even with the responsibilities of adulthood, we shouldn't give up on our own aspirations, for it's those things that we reach for (although not at all costs) that will help others -- including the most important folks -- in our lives pursue their own calling.

The Jobs Are Gone

2009-12-02T16:07:00.003-05:00

Like the song "The Thrill Is Gone," popularized by B.B. King in the month and year that I was born, the jobs that so many of our leaders alleged that they are holding onto for Americans are gone. Going, going, gone! Like a steroids-driven Barry Bonds home run into San Francisco Bay, the jobs that Americans have expected to be their birthright for the past six or seven decades no longer exist. For any American with less than a bachelor's degree to expect to get a job paying more than $30,000 a year with limited job experience is foolhardy. For any undereducated American to expect a manufacturing job that pays enough to support a family of four (about $50,000) with a full slate of benefits needs to be committed!

About two weeks ago, I attended a studio taping of the AlJazeera program Faultlines with the topic of "The Color of Recession." The premise -- that the Obama Administration wasn't doing enough to help Americans of color recover from the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. While that could be true, the panelists, especially talking heads like the Rev. Jesse "Keep-Hope-Alive" Jackson and Linda Chavez argued about the failures of the Bush 43 Administration to avert the crisis. It was a zoo, and the host of the show might as well been a tamer whose head was already in the lion's mouth.

Besides ridiculous arguments about the overthrowing of capitalism by folks like '08 Green Party Vice-Presidential candidate Rosa Clemente and counterarguments by Chavez about socialists not being patriotic, one thing clearly stood out. Jackson, Chavez, and even Clemente agreed on one thing. That jobs in the industrial sector ought to be saved for Americans, and that the Obama Administration could somehow play a role in saving them. That simple fact proved the one thing I've known about American politics since high school. That the distance between most Americans on the ideological scale is about the same as the distance from my right thumb to my right index finger.

But it also shows how significant the leadership deficit is in our great nation when folks who should know better spout rhetoric that hasn't been true in places like Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Indianapolis since '84, and in places like Buffalo, Rochester, Camden, and Newark since the mid-60s. This is a post-industrial economy, one that is dependent on the Information Age. While there will always be some manufacturing jobs in the US -- we still have a military-industrial complex, after all, not to mention Southern right-to-work states -- the days of factories with a workforce of 50,000 and 100,000 people has long passed. Unless we can turn the clock back to about 1890, we will never again see the days of steel mills and auto plants that single-handedly provided work for an entire city or region.

With more than eighty percent of all new living-wage jobs produced in this country requiring the equivalent of an associate's degree or some postsecondary credential, it's time we stop lying to the public about how any government can protect certain kinds of jobs for their citizens. We need more nurses, teachers, radiologists, engineers and chemists, not more young folk who can't even find their home state on a map. And that's with the name of the state on the map! Bill Gates may well be right in saying that high schools as we know them today are obsolete. But that's only true because our mentality about the kinds of jobs we can get after high school hasn't changed with our ever-changing economy.

It's a shame that our leadership can't be more honest about where we are these days on the job front. Our official unemployment rate is 10.2 percent, meaning that in reality, it's closer to 20 percent. Meaning that times are hard even for folks with at least a bachelor's degree as an educational credential. But the vast majority of our educational haves will recover from this downturn, find work -- mostly good paying work -- and put their lives back together. Those whose lives were once or ever dependent on the manufacturing world are already a part of the have-nots.

I don't care how many articles discuss the fact that there are people in this country who are making good money -- and are even rich -- and don't possess a postsecondary degree or certificate of any sort. That group is a small and shrinking one. These days, your odds are better with Powerball or Mega Millions than they are venturing into the job market for a non-service industry (read "Rite-Aid," "CVS" or "Walmart" here) job without a degree.

Bottom line: the sooner we as a people accept that the jobs of the past are gone, never to return, the sooner that we can get on to another central issues to jobs in education. We need to put pressure on our federal and state officials, nonprofit entities, and religious organizations to stop acting as if a high school education is the limit for most of America. We need to assume that most of us have the ability -- if not the training -- necessary to obtain some sort of postsecondary credential. We need to make our 15,000 school districts into ones that prepare our children for a twenty-first century, post-industrial economy. Without this pressure, we will expand our permanent underclass by the tens of millions in the next decade or two, weighing down our economy in the process. That America isn't the one I want to get older in, nor is it one I want my son growing up in.

December To Remember

2009-12-01T15:34:00.004-05:00

December, my favorite month of the year. Usually. For most of my forty years, it has represented a time of sighing relief that another year was about to pass, another twelve months of imperfection gone, a chance to reconfigure and gain momentum to have a better next year. But Decembers at the end of decades have been of even more significance for me, because they represent the precipice of the start of a new decade not only on the calendar, but for my own life. Turning ten, twenty and thirty gave me more food for thought than I would normally have in a typical twelfth month. Now it's happening again, as I officially turn forty (most of this year, I've forgotten that I'm still technically thirty-nine).

Ten years ago, I realized that I hadn't planned to live past thirty when I was a teenager. I saw my life as such a tragic and fragile one when I was fourteen that the idea that marriage and parenting would be anywhere in my future would've been about the only thing to make me laugh out loud back then. My aim in life from about twelve and a half and twenty was to finish college, and from twenty to twenty-six was to go to grad school, finish those degrees, and publish my first book. Cars, houses, specific career aspirations, a wife and a son, none of those were in my plans. Heck, I didn't even know who my true friends were until a December contemplation session in December '89, much less love and marriage.

The sad truth is, I've achieved just about everything I intended to achieve ten and twenty Decembers ago. That's good, but it also shows how limited the first visions for myself were. Being an assistant director of a social justice fellowship program and publishing a book on multiculturalism shouldn't have been the only things that I hoped to achieve in the first seven years after finishing my doctorate. Getting married in '00 was a major achievement, considering how many folks I grew up with thought of me as "asexual." But staying married and making the marriage work is the real achievement and the real work, something I've learned this decade. Having Noah around is both a labor of love and really hard work, but actually not as hard as watching after my four younger siblings would've been twenty Decembers ago.

Even putting the finishing touches on Boy @ The Window, finding an agent and publisher, and then getting it published, as great an achievement as that will be, is a limited one in the end. Even in the worst case, the manuscript's published before I hit my mid-forties. Even if the book hits the bestseller list, what do I do after that? Write more books about the imperial narcissism of everyday Americans, about the need for universal postsecondary education, about the lives of other, not-so-famous people? I know I'll keep on writing, but that's about all I know for sure.

So what will my life look like as I prepare for decade number five? Where do I want to be by December '19? For starters, steadier and better paying employment would be a goal. Making sure that Noah's education and quality of life stays on track so that he can get -- but doesn't necessarily need -- an academic or athletic scholarship for college. Supporting Angelia as she finishes her master's degree in interactive journalism, and in moving from there into a career of her own choosing and making. Freeing ourselves once and for all from debt. Those are goals, most or all of which should be met long before I can no longer jump high enough to dunk a basketball.

But what I really want in the end is a sense of happiness and peace that I've experienced only on rare occasions in my life to date. Some of that will come as some of the near-future goals get met. Still, I know even with a great job, an enviable savings account, a great kid and a wonderful wife that happiness and peace are forces that come from within. No amount of money, financial stability or independence can give me or anyone else real happiness and a sense that, no matter whatever else is going on, I'll be fine. Some would say, only God can give us that.

I would say in response that this isn't completely accurate, because we have to be willing to be happy, to be at peace, to be successful at not creating drama for ourselves and others. Or we could do what Bruce Springsteen says in his introspective "Tunnel of Love." We've "got to learn to live with what [we] can't rise above," not only in marriage, but in all of our lives, for we aren't perfect, and not every imperfection has a permanent cure. Maybe this is the thing I need to remember as I go through this end-of-the-decade December.

Sharing Is Caring

2009-11-26T21:26:00.003-05:00

A few days ago, the BBC reported a sickening fact on one of the provisions of the the Kyoto protocols from '97. Of the developed countries that did agree to them -- the US being the great exception -- one provision was for them to contribute to a fund for developing countries in order to help them with environmental cleanup and to make the adjustments necessary to combat climate change. According to the BBC, a fund that should have $1.6 billion in it by now only has $260 million in contributions. Mouthpieces for the developed world apparently said in response that, well, "we given money and helped in other ways," just not through this fund.

This may be true, but this isn't much different from what my father once said to me when I confronted him about twenty-three years ago about his overall lack of child support. "I giv' ya money every week," he said. It was true. But only because I went through a Friday night or Saturday morning ritual for nearly five years to collect $50, $60, $100, or even $200 from him at a time. In all, Jimme have given me, my brother Darren and my family at 616 (indirectly, of course) about $3,500 between October '82 and August '87. If he had paid his proper share in terms of child support (at least twenty percent of income), in those years alone, the child support payments would've been about $25,000.

No, neither I nor Darren lived with him. Still, my father had an obligation because he was our biological father and therefore was part of the reason we existed at all. It's not much different when it comes to international issues like environmental protection, alternative energy and climate change. The developed world eats up most of the world's energy resources, had exploited the resources of the developing world so that they could be developed, advanced nations. And has used the developing world and the oceans to dump much of its waste. It's only fair that the developed world should bear the brunt of paying for all of these things that the world as a whole must face.

This kind of talk makes me sound like a socialist I suppose. Not really. More like a social democrat. It's a shame that Western Europe, China, Japan, India and the US have yet to formally agree to reduce emissions substantially, to bring online new energy platforms on a massive scale, to clean up the messes made around the world. The geopolitics of this situation is like watching my six-year-old son Noah try to negotiate his way out of doing the right thing, because sometimes he can only see his own needs and wants. So much of what our world does is about looking out for self and only self, knowing full well that this deliberate ignorance hurts us all.

Of course, the US is the worldwide leader in narcissism. We act as if taxes are like cyanide pills laced with traces of plutonium, especially for the wealthy. We talk as if the progressive income tax is a penalty for success, and that the poor are poor only because they're dumb and lazy. Yet it wasn't all that long ago when the system actually worked, when government could be trusted (for the most part) to do the right thing with public funds and revenues.

And yes, after the Nixon, Reagan and Bush (both) years -- not to mention the flaws of JFK, LBJ, Carter and Clinton -- we have good reason not to trust our government to invest our tax dollars properly. But it's not as if the rich are going to employ people to fix the US's roads, bridges and rails. Or that the affluent will build a new power grid, solar collection stations, provide incentives for building cars that run on hydrogen, or create a system of postsecondary education and healthcare that is truly universal. That's what our government is for. This is why we pay taxes.

Yet all neocons and others of a selfish nature somehow still believe after all of these years that it's every man, woman and child for themselves. That taxes are bad, that giving more and more tax cuts to richest five percent will create an atmosphere of investment rather than one of greed. Didn't we already go through this in the 1920s and 1930s? Isn't this why the New Deal had to happen in the first place? To have a government that responds to all the people, and not just the ones with the ability to line politicians' pockets with checks and cash?

In the end, we get the government that we deserve because sit in stewing envy and awe over the richest folk in our country while those folk have the ears of our leadership. We need to force the government to do its job of raising all boats, of holding politicians feet to the fire, of sharing and spreading the wealth of the nation so that even the poor actually have real opportunities to rise out of poverty. Only if we make our government care about these issues will those with major means actually care to share in tax dollars.

Ironically, by insisting on more loopholes and tax cuts, the rich in many ways are working against their own interests. As they should know, they can't -- or at least shouldn't -- take their riches with them when they're dead. And as average folk, we need to pay our fair share as well. After all, to those of us who have reason to give thanks, we also have reason to share what we have for our own -- as well as others' -- benefit.

First Blitz, First Flight

2009-11-23T23:30:00.002-05:00

I experienced a series of firsts the weekend and Monday before Thanksgiving '87. I got blitzed, I took my first airplane trip, and I felt completely disillusioned about my life as a college student and a Black man. It was the worst of times, or so I thought at the time. Homelessness at the beginning of my sophomore year kind of trumped the travails of my freshman year at Pitt.

But November '87 was still painful and shameful. The downward spiral of my first semester started with a burglary. While I took a bathroom break at my computer lab job in the Cathedral of Learning, someone stole my Calculus textbook. I felt violated, especially since it happened at work. It made me more distrustful of the people I worked with and of Pitt students in general.

Crush #2's response to my letter to her about her emasculating comments about me back in the summer made matters worse. Her letter, dated November 2, was in purple ink, with heart-shapes and circles for dots over “i”s. Reading her letter was like reading the liner notes off of a Prince album in those days. Like the song “I Would Die 4 U,” Crush # 2 had decided to limit her English skills to the ’80s equivalent of text messaging, a real revolution on both their parts. I remember she started, “Thank U 4 your card 2day,” an insult to my intelligence. She wrote indirectly that she did like me at one point in time, but added “but we’re in college now . . . around lots of nu people” She admitted that I was her and her sister’s topic of conversation back in July, but “I needed 2 get over that.” She hinted that I shouldn’t write her again, and that was it. No apologies, no attempt to understand how I felt.

After Crush #2's wonderful, text-message-like response, I all but stopped going to class. I missed most of my classes the month of November, only showing up for exams or if my mood had let up long enough to allow me to function like my more typical self. The weekend before Thanksgiving, I allowed my dorm mates to cheer me up by getting a couple of cases of Busch Beer. These were the Pounder type, sixteen-ounce cans. After getting Mike to get us the cases, we went back to Aaron’s room and started drinking. I downed four cans in fifteen minutes, and was drunk within a half hour. I started throwing around the word “bitch.” Anytime anyone mentioned Crush #2's name, or any woman’s name for that matter, and one of us said the B-word, we drank some beer. I was drunk, but not so drunk I didn’t know what was going on around me. That night, my geeky acquaintances started calling me “Don” and “Don Ho,” since I was the life of that illegal party.

I barely recovered from my bender in time to go home for Thanksgiving that Monday, November 23. I was in a fog. I still managed a few firsts. That trip back home was my first on an airplane. I took a Continental flight from the old and decrepit blue hangar that was Pittsburgh Airport into Newark, with the late Craig “Ironhead” Hayward on the flight sitting in first-class. He was a senior and the starting running back for the Pitt Panthers. Besides being a great player, he was a bit of a party animal and had gotten into fights with Pitt Police. I remember the student newspaper having him in their police blotter, allegedly body-slamming a patron at the O while being arrested for a being a disorderly drunk. Yet in his sober, not-with-his-peeps state, he was a normal guy who knew how to be polite, even on this flight.

I also missed my first flight, and ended up waiting six hours at Newark for another seat. That was my first time in first-class, and it was wonderful. I also went to my first college basketball game at the old Fitzgerald Fieldhouse. With Charles Smith, Jerome Lane and Demetrius Gore, they were a really good team with a really unimaginative coach. I still blame Smith for causing my Knicks to lose to the Chicago Bulls in the ’93 Eastern Conference Finals with his hiccups at the end of Game 5.

It was the first series of events in which I couldn't use music, sports or my imagination to escape. I hadn't realized that I was attempting to escape myself, not just my immediate past or Mount Vernon. I spent the last three weeks of that semester depressed, as if draped in a fog, unable to face the world. Still, I fully understood that I couldn't drink my way out of my problems. I was obsessed with a woman that felt sorry for me, had friends at Pitt who weren't really my friends, and was homesick for a place that really wasn't mine to call home.

Most of all, after five years of hiding my emotions and opinions, I no longer knew how to be me. As a result, I didn't know how to be the man I should've been, even at the ripe old age of eighteen. I finished up the year wondering how to find myself, how to not spend the rest of my time at Pitt sullen and sober, as if I lived in a war-torn state. Luckily, thinking about Crush #2 as a "triflin' ass" was, for better and worse, a good start toward recovery for me. That allowed me to find a place for all of my rage and sadness, to get back to being a good student again. That temporary turn to the dark side was another first for me.

Basketball, Anyone?

2009-11-18T17:23:00.002-05:00

On a beautiful Monday afternoon, I decided to take advantage of the unusually warm November weather to shoot around, run a lay-up drill, work on my mid-range jumper, to pretend that I still have the athletic skills of a twenty-seven-year-old. I left our flat and walked the couple of blocks to the court on Spring Street and Georgia in Silver Spring.

Upon my arrival, there it was. A court still wet nearly three days after the last rain storm. Shredded and matted fall leaves were everywhere. Apparently a crew had cleaned off the piles of leaves that had been there the week before. But I guess it would've been too much trouble to sweep the court clean of the debris that they helped create by using shovels without brooms and rakes. It made the court dangerous, if not downright unplayable. I was fuming, and not just because of the court's condition that day.

I think that Montgomery County Parks and Recreation has a bias against basketball courts and the people whom the workers think use them most often. I've used courts all over the county over the past decade, and the problem is usually the same. Lots of dirt and other debris. Torn nets that haven't been fixed in months or no nets at all. Crooked rims and poles set at ten and a half or eleven feet off the ground. No gates or other obstructions to keep balls from flying off the court into a parking lot or into the street. It's as if they don't want the residents of Montgomery County playing b-ball.

Even when renovated, the county has skimped on the quality of its repairs. Take the revamped court at Jessup Blair Park on the DC-Silver Spring border. They closed the field used for football and soccer for a full year to let the trampled area heal, to put new sod and grass down. The tennis court got a new gate and nets and so on. They took away surface area for the basketball courts in the process, with only one full-sized court now. They raised the height of the hoops. Presumably to keep some ball hog who's only five-seven from ripping the twine, because they probably can't jump high enough to dunk on a regulation hoop. They even made the b-ball surface the same as the tennis court's which looks nice, but itself now needs repair.

I guess I should be used to the short-shrift given to basketball in many communities because of "the element" it could attract -- you know, White guys who think they can hang because their hip-hop language skills are better than mine. Pittsburgh did a lousy job with its basketball courts, too. But then again, Pittsburgh did a poor job on all of its park and recreation facilities. Montgomery County, to say the least, isn't the 'Burgh. With higher local taxes and property taxes, the least they can do is to keep the courts clean and safe so that I don't drive for a lay-up on wet pieces of leaves with broken glass hidden underneath.

What they really ought to do is what they do for the tennis courts and soccer fields. Set the courts to the correct dimensions, replace the nets regularly, clean when necessary. It would also help if they fenced in the courts. It would be nice if I didn't have to run through a Brier patch or gouge my eye on a tree branch to keep a ball from bounding into a parking lot. My goodness, even DC Parks and Recreation can afford to do that, and they haven't had any money for years!

All I'm asking is that Montgomery County maintains and repairs its basketball courts the same way it does the other parts of its parks. It would be nice to see my tax dollars at work on something I use at least forty times a years. Or, I guess, the county could wait until someone gets hurt because of shoddy work. Maybe then they'll do the right thing.

Birthdays For Me to Remember

2009-11-16T17:47:00.004-05:00

Two people who've had some influence in my life celebrate birthdays today. Well, maybe celebrate isn't the best word. The once-great Dwight Gooden turns forty-five today. And a friend and former grad school classmate at Carnegie Mellon turns the big four-oh today. Two different stories, two different messages taken from two people born on the same day in November.

Gooden's story is fairly well known, one of supreme promise and potential, but killed by the Mets leadership and by his own problems with cocaine and alcohol. It's a sad story, only tempered by the fact that for a brief moment, Gooden was the best pitcher in major-league baseball. Period.

It's a story all too common, of too much too soon with too many expectations from too many people. Gooden turned the perennially mediocre New York Mets into a yearly playoff contender. In '85, Gooden's streak of sixteen straight victories kept my Mets in a playoff run with the more talented St. Louis Cardinals. I should know. My ears were hooked to the radio, and when they weren't, my eyes to the TV as he won game after game after game. All on the way to a 24-4 record, 1.53 ERA, with something like eight shutouts and sixteen complete games. Oh yeah, he also struck out 268 batters in 276 innings pitched. No one, except save Bob Gibson, had a year that was so dominant and so intimidating. And all at the age of twenty years old.

But between Davey Johnson and Mel Stottlemyre, the drugs and the alcohol, Gooden's overworked arm and inebriated mind began to fail him well before he could enter his prime years. Gooden had won well over 100 games in his first six seasons, but would never have the chance to build on that amazing record. At forty-five, Gooden is an example of what could've been but wasn't, a cautionary tale of needing balance and meaning in one's life outside of the thing that makes one a prodigy. No balance or meaning -- Dwight Gooden. Balance. meaning and support -- Tiger Woods.

My friend from my Carnegie Mellon days was a different case. A professor now at a school in the Chicagoland area, he had learned from the excesses of others long before our paths ever crossed. There were few people I spent more time to during my last two years of grad school. Our conversations were all over the place, from sports to music, from studies to social issues. That was how I found out that he shared the same birthday as Gooden. He was really one of maybe three White students at Carnegie Mellon that I could have a conversation with without having my guard up for something bigoted or self-serving. Or even as part of some nerdy scheme to one-up me in a class or with a professor.

That changed on October 3 of '95. The day of the O.J. Simpson verdict was already a bizarre one for me. I honestly didn't understand why there was such a mix of emotions between the elated Blacks in DC and angry Whites in L.A. I figured that despite the verdict, I could just walk to Carnegie Mellon -- the land of lily-White conservatism -- and not expect the subject to come up.

Well it did, and with the one person I didn't expect it to. My friend went on for ten minutes about jury nullification and racial bias and Simpson's abuse of his ex-wife, as if I had anything to do with the verdict or the outpouring of emotions that day. I found the whole thing, including this conversation, pretty much like a soap opera. I assumed that the only reason that he talked to me this way was because I was Black, and somehow ecstatic over the "Not Guilty" verdict. I only pointed out how badly the trial was handled, making things worse. I ended the conversation thinking that if this was what my friend could be like when he was emotional, then I didn't want to talk with him anymore.

And in my last years in Pittsburgh, our conversations grew fewer and farther apart. It wasn't that I didn't enjoy talking with him. I realized that even as friends, there were certain lines that couldn't be crossed. We never invited each other over to watch a game or hang out. We certainly never read each other's research or other writings. And we never had another conversation about what happened in the History grad student bullpen that cloudy day in October '95. If I learned anything from him and that incident, it was that we were friends, but not on any deep level, and that race and other issues remained barriers to a meaningful friendship, especially for him. Still, I hope that despite their problems and inner turmoil, that today was a good birthday for the two of them.

Food, Glorious Food

2009-11-14T08:45:00.002-05:00

When I was ten, I dreamed of becoming a chef and the owner of my own restaurant. Every time me and my older brother Darren went out with my father Jimme, I'd bring home some of the leftover garbage and used it to turn my part of our room into a miniature city with local bistros and other eateries. I took my Matchbox cars -- fifty in all -- and pretended that my city was populated with the adult version of characters from Schulz's Peanuts series. Yes, even Charlie Brown had his own upscale restaurant, with steaks and shrimp that almost all could afford to eat. For the less affluent, Burger King and Mickey D's were at the other end of this eatin' and disco-in' side of town.

My dream, of course, was hunger induced. It was '80, the first year that my mother income-to-inflation ration had declined so much that we didn't always have food in the house. Cereal had become a luxury we couldn't afford, so I almost always went to school with only a glass of milk to keep me going. I ate on the free and reduced lunch program at Holmes Elementary, and dinner had become our main meal. After my mother and then idiot stepfather Maurice separated for the first time that October, we had even less food to eat. For Maurice had taken half of the frozen meats my mother had ordered -- beef, chicken, ham, and a whole leg of lamb -- with him when he left. All while my mother was at work.

I had few dreams about what I wanted to do in life prior to sixth grade. I think I went through the police office/firefighter phase all during kindergarten and first grade. Then, nothing. Divorce, shacking up, second marriage and baby brother Maurice was my home life. With the occasional sprinkles of Jimme about one Saturday every five weeks between April '79 and April '81. We didn't take vacations. So between the school year, holidays, summer day vacations at Darren's Clearview School for the mentally retarded, and Jimme outings, there wasn't much to our drab lives.

Except for the rare time out on The Avenue (Fourth Avenue between West 1st and West 3rd Streets, a strip of shops, delis, a bodega or two and small eateries) or even rarer times in the city, that was my life. But when I did get out, the things I remembered the most were the sights, smells and sizzles of food. Eating at Papa Wong's restaurant on Gramatan Avenue was a real treat for me even at seven or eight. They had great egg rolls, pork, shrimp and chicken fried rice. I loved the place. It smelled the way I thought a Chinese restaurant ought to smell. Ginger, sesame, soy, onions, scallions and garlic. It's too bad the restaurant burned down suspiciously in '82, with nothing to replace it with but a parking lot for nearly a decade afterward.

Or eating at Arthur Treatcher's Fish & Chips on Prospect and Park before it closed down that corner for two years at the end of '82. I loved their crispy chicken medallions with the chips -- splendid! Carvel's Ice Cream shop a block west on Prospect was also a good place to eat, even if the customer service sucked more times than not. I think I drove myself to lactose intolerance about five years early because of that place. Man, I miss those chocolate-on-vanilla ice cream sandwiches!

But nothing for my precious few dollars topped Clover Donuts. If you could take a Krispy Kreme glazed and genetically cross it with a Dunkin Donuts glazed, you'd end up with the best glazed donut ever! And that's exactly what Clover Donuts sold. Not to mention those juicy, grilled and amazing Sabrett Hot Dogs. It was all a "kick in da head" for me growing up. On almost every visit I made after high school, I made a stop there for a glazed donut, their nuggety yet soft chocolate glazed donuts, and a hot dog. I might've not liked many things about Mount Vernon, but Clover Donuts was one thing I really enjoyed.

But by the time I hit my mid-teens, I realized that Mount Vernon's food had changed, and not for the better. Papa Wong's was long gone, and so was Arthur Treatcher's. My home life at 616 meant that most of my shopping time was spent in Pelham at C-Town or in one of their inferior eateries. The pizzerias made slices that varied from sucky to pretty good, but were common and unimaginative enough that they blended together for me. At Mount Vernon High School, the deli in nearby Chester Heights easily surpassed anything I'd eaten sandwich-wise outside of the city.

Speaking of, going down to 241st in the Bronx, and then to Manhattan, changed my view of food for good. My years working with Jimme and Darren in Midtown, on the Upper East and Upper West Side, near Spanish Harlem on 90th and around Lincoln Center introduced me to great delis and bodegas. As well as a glimpse of what real upscale restaurants looked like. The best deli food I ever had from one at the crossroads between Broadway and Columbus between 65 and 66th Street, across from Lincoln Center. The smell of pastrami sizzling on the grill, the thick cuts of turkey and corned beef, the interracializing of cookies, my first taste of a blondie. It all happened there for me in '84 and '85, and sorry to say, I was spoiled by that food. Not to mention a place with a great Cuban pork sandwich, pizzerias with sauces that would make me want to bite the lower right corner of my lip, they were that good.

It's safe to say that these experiences had have as much influence on what I eat and what I like to cook as growing up with a great cook in my mother at 616. From veal or lamb stew to matzo ball soup, from beef and broccoli to empanadas and Jamaican beef patties, and from fried chicken and corn bread to duck a l'orange to fettuccine alfredo with shrimp and chicken. I love it all, so it's a good thing I work out and/or run three to four times a week.

Unfortunately, restaurants and eateries aren't the same everywhere. It took me almost a decade to find the best deli, pizzeria and Chinese restaurant in Pittsburgh, and we moved two years later. It's been ten years in the DC area, and Hollywood East Cafe -- easily the best Chinese we've had down here -- has been closed for almost six months. In this case, I can't even go home again. But, I do have a skillet, a spatula and a mixing bowl!

Walls and Secrets

2009-11-11T14:12:00.003-05:00

This Monday should’ve been a momentous occasion for us in the US. It was the twentieth anniversary of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the effective end of the Iron Curtain and the Cold War. Although it would be a bit more than two years before the Soviet Union collapsed, and with it, the Warsaw Pact. Still, it meant that the fear that I and millions of others grew up with — the one about having a day of mushroom clouds and shock waves, gamma radiation and the end of civilization — was over, or at least, abated somehow. But knowing my fellow citizens as well as I do, I know that most of us gave as much thought to this as we do to where our tap water comes from.

More of us give more serious thought to Chris Brown and Rihanna, my Pittsburgh Steelers and New York Giants, and who our friends date and break up with than we do of our world beyond ourselves. Which is sad. Because if gave the larger world even a modicum of thought, maybe we would have the better world that so many of us want, but don’t want to work for. While the idiot American media spent as much time talking about where they were when the Berlin Wall began to come down, the rest of the world, at least, spent a bit of time thinking about what’s actually happened geopolitically speaking in the past generation.

When President Reagan said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” in Berlin in ’87, even our bungling fortieth president was talking about more than a wall. He was speaking of a geopolitical and cultural wall between peoples who otherwise had so much in common, so much so that it was disheartening, even criminal to maintain separation because another superpower needed nation-states as buffers. Really, what Reagan was speaking of was well beyond his own neo-conservative thinking. For the wall that really needed tearing down was the one in our own minds, the one that says that we can’t do or say or be a certain way because the cultural and political norms of our society say otherwise.

It’s what I took from the fall of the Berlin Wall in ’89 and Reagan’s speech in ’87 anyway. Sometimes, though, we must put a wall around those things in our minds that would keep us from thinking, being and doing those things that others in our lives would ridicule. In my little case, it was majoring in history, finishing my degree and possibly going to grad school for more degrees that would lead to steadier employment, if not high-paying jobs. In our money-is-everything world, that’s an invitation for family and so-called friends to clown on us, to say that what were about is like spending another decade in school to “earn another high school diploma.” It’s limited thinking, the kind of thinking common behind the Iron Curtain in the Cold War era. Or at least, that’s what our leaders and the international academic community have said.

It’s tough to walk to beat of our own drums, especially if we know in our bones, minds and spirits that we were born to do and say certain things in which others in our lives vehemently disagree. And when we become side-tracked by the pressures of people and events and things of this world, it becomes doubly-hard to find our way to our proper path. Without folks in our lives who can help, or at least listen, it can be a lonely, if rewarding road.

Not too many weeks after I was swept up in end-of-the-Cold-War-fever, I realized something about the previous eight-and-a-half years of my life. That I’d been living my life for the sake of others, be it God, my mother, my younger siblings, or for the euphoria of an A or A+. That just about all of the real friends I had came out of my Pittsburgh experience. That I was no longer living in fear of having my chest caved in (as he liked to say) by my now ex-stepfather.

At the beginning of ’90, I did a bit of an experiment. I still kept in contact with about a half-dozen or so of my former classmates from my Humanities days. Which in my case meant that I wrote them far more often than they wrote or called me, if they did any of that all at. I stopped writing. I only wrote them or called if they responded in kind. I found out fairly quickly that I really only had one friend from my gifted-track days.

So I built my own wall in the first few months of the 90s. I deliberately yet unconsciously managed to put everything bad that happened between April 13 of ’81 and September 2 of ’88 inside of that wall. I only opened it up to a handful of my closest friends, and often revealed the most gut-wrenching of events in the most academic and dispassionate of ways. It worked very successfully for nearly thirteen years. But in having a child, being a married man, working with thousands of students and doing work to benefit thousands more, I realized it was time to tear down this wall.

I couldn’t write and revise Boy @ The Window without tapping into this past, and all of the emotions involved with it. For most of us, it unfortunately takes an event like the fall of the Berlin Wall for us to be introspective and conscious of the world beyond our own nose. For me, that’s an everyday thing, something I think we all should aspire to at least a few times a year.

The Last Teacher Crush -- Rosemary Martino

2009-11-04T06:30:00.003-05:00

I have written -- quite extensively I might add -- about the late Harold Isaac Meltzer over the past two and a half years. I still have plenty more to write about my favorite and probably best teacher between seventh grade and my doctorate. But I've neglected to mention that there have been others. Others whom did manage to reach me as a student and a person during my Boy @ The Window years. Don't get me wrong, it's a short list. In six years of Humanities, about six teachers in all would fit the mold of above-average or outstanding, while at least twice as many would be somewhere between mediocre and miserable.

Once again, I've digressed into the negative. I had one teacher, and only one teacher, that made my senior year at MVHS worthwhile. It was first-period AP English with a Rosemary Martino. She was someone whose aspirations beyond teaching were obvious, which both took my breath away and brought frightening chills to my bones. For she wanted to write, not just teach about writers, but actually write. Even in grad school, I only knew of one professor who loved to write beyond scholarly analysis, and his writing chops were atrocious. Oops, I went there again! Anyway, Martino could talk about the art and craft of writing for days if the course had been about more than reading the existential and the utilitarian for our eventual AP English exam.

But our AP English teacher wasn’t a favorite of mine at the beginning of the year. She was immediately disappointed with us because we weren’t particularly motivated to do the readings and the work. Almost none of us had touched a tomb during the summer of '86, and we were exactly motivated to read at thirty-five or more pages per hour to start the school year off well. We started with Albert Camus' The Fall, a bit of swirling existential thinking about the nature of inhumanity in human nature. Oui, oui -- more like Oy vey! We moved on to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic Crime and Punishment, a seven-hundred-page marathon read of humanity at its worst that took us from mid-October through early December. Martino’s choices, though impressive in complexity, didn’t exactly inspire.

I knew I needed to read more, and read for arguments, plot, hidden plot, characters and character development, the tone and pitch of narration, the shifts in the narrative, and so on. That took time, and lots of it. Time I didn't have between two other AP courses, college applications, SATs, not to mention my continuing saga at 616, as I'd become the go-to-child for every adult chore imaginable, short of working a full-time job. Of course, it didn't help that I spent most of my spare moments in October '86 watching or listening to every play the Mets made on their way to a World Series championship. I had a really wonderful teacher at the wrong time in my life. I should've found a way to have taken classes with her the year before.

So I spent about half of twelfth grade treading water in Martino's class. My grades were barely adequate C+'s from mid-October to mid-February, sneaking in an occasional A or A- whenever I found two hours and a quiet place to write. I even managed an "Outstanding" A on my Dostoevsky essay in December, this despite only skimming the last third of his long and winding road. What helped was that I also had Martino for Philosophy from Socrates to Sartre. For whatever reason, I took to the half-year course better than I did AP English. Martino's curriculum seemed more free-form and her lectures much more opinionated than in the full-year course. Her obsession with the existential and the dehumanizing made Dostoevsky easy to understand. Based on my 616, Humanities and MVHS years, I could certainly relate to existential philosophy on a personal level.

Martino shifted gears from the existential novel to poetry and plays for a while at the beginning of February, from Archibald Macleish’s “You, Andrew Marvell” and Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House to Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. She even threw in a creative writing assignment. The assignment was for us to write a short story. I wrote a short story titled “The Way It Is,” corny I realized even at the time. A better title would’ve been “On the Brink of Obsession” or “Role Reversal” or “A Pathetic Tale.” The story was about me and my crush # 2 and a take on some of our more coy conversations over the previous three years. Except that I had switched our names, feminizing my name and masculine-izing hers in this story. I handed the essay in, talked about it in class, and yet not a single person, including Martino and crush # 2, picked up on the not-so-subtle hint in the story.

We also read the late Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. This time around, the post-modern, post-structural, neo-Marxist perspectives on dehumanization and the end of the world as some of us knew it didn’t bother me. My grades went up again, even though my concentration and my time-to-task had dropped. I wrote my essay on Catch-22 the night before it was due, in my mother’s bedroom, in front of my stepfather’s portable TV, with the Rangers winning a close game. I started doing so well that Martino said to me one day before class, “you know, if you’d work harder, you could become a really good writer.”

I looked at her for a second. Martino was a very attractive teacher in her late-twenties, with that burning-the-candle-at-both-ends look around the eyes. She had short brown hair and was about five-three or five-four. Besides that, she was an aspiring writer in her own right. Martino had published a few short stories, was a big Anne Rice fan, and wanted to follow in her footsteps. So when she paid you a compliment, you tended to pay attention. Despite the backhanded nature of her praise, I thought very quickly of the image of the starving artist, the famous-after-death ones like Edgar Allan Poe, Vincent Van Gogh or Emily Dickinson. “I don’t want to become a starving artist,” I said in response. The idea of being a writer was still an attractive one to me, but I wanted to do and be something that would at least make it possible to have three squares a day. Martino didn’t push the issue. I thought I hit a sore spot with the “starving artist” image. She still talked with me first thing in the morning about the news and about her writing, but left my aspirations alone.

I only have a few regrets regarding all of the teachers I had between September 8 of '74 and November 22 of '96. One of them was that I didn't attempt to get to know Rosemary Martino better. Meltzer may have inspired to me to write more. But it was Martino whom inspired me to write better, more literary, with some degree of passion and opinion, and not just facts. While the psychological and social dysfunctions of Humanities prepared me well for graduate school, my classes with Martino did help me with no less than five undergraduate courses at Pitt.

In the process, she managed to do something that even Meltzer couldn't do. Martino awakened the writer in me, the writer that had been on hibernation since Memorial Day '82. After her class, I couldn't entirely say that I had no idea what to do with my life besides taking another classmate's sardonic advice and appearing on Jeopardy. I will forever be in her debt because of it. So, Rosemary Martino, whatever your reading, writing or doing these days, many, many thanks!

Imagine That

2009-10-28T09:41:00.004-04:00

Over the years, I've often wondered what it would've been like if I'd grown up in a different time and place. How I'd sound speaking Russian or Swahili (I do have some idea about Swahili -- not that great!). Whether I'd been born as a peasant or into a nobleman's household. Whether I would've displayed the same intelligent, the same tenacity that I've learned to tap into over the past four decades. As a person who spends a significant amount of time in self-reflection and as an historian, it's truly an interesting exercise.

But it's much more interesting to do it as a world historian than an American or African American one. In the other two cases, imagining myself in eighteenth or nineteenth-century America around folks like Thomas Jefferson, Horace Greeley or Teddy Roosevelt leads only to one conclusion. That I would've heard the N-word over and over and over again, as if it were my real first name. Even if I'd somehow pulled off in W.E.B. Du Bois' time what I've done up until now, the best case scenario for my life would be working as a professor at Howard or Morehouse, or teaching history in the segregated DC or Baltimore Public Schools. This wasn't insignificant for elite, educated Blacks in early twentieth-century America. But it's still a limited set of options in a world where race and class mattered every moment of every day.

This would explain why so many Black intellectuals became American expatriates over the past one hundred or so years. From Josephine Baker to Du Bois and James Baldwin, often the best place to live for talented folks of color in an American context has been outside of the US. American citizenship does have its privileges, ironically, if one lives away from the great beacon of democracy.

So it's easier for me to think about what it would be like to live my life in a world context, like say, in Roman times, during the time of the Arab Caliphates, or in modern-day China. To think that I'd dream continually in another language or languages. Or that the people I'd meet would likely be less selfish and narcissistic (or more so) than the ones I've met over the years. To see myself as an expert in Roman, Arab, or Chinese history than in American history. To write stories of love and loss, triumph and tragedy with a different cultural and philosophical lens than the one I have now. The possibilities would be more than I could comprehend.

But then reality sets in. As an historian, I realize the one simple truth of human history. For most of it, about nine out of ten modern humans have held one occupation: peasant. Even people with great intellectual potential tended to lead simple, if difficult, lives. Farming for basic sustenance. Even in the great civilizations of China, India, Mesopotamia, Greece, Mesoamerica, the Andes, Rome, and West Africa, this has been the case. Still, a simple village life of family, love, farming and religion would seem like a blessing compared to the great complexities that I deal with every day.

Or, of course, I could've found myself in someone's military, a harsh existence under the best and most victorious of circumstances. One billion modern humans have died as a result of war since 10,000 BCE, and serving as a soldier, even when well-trained, pretty much guaranteed injury or death. Still, it might've been cool if I'd been a ranking soldier among the Mongols or Arab Muslim armies. Not so much, though, to be part of a Roman or Greece city-state army.

Given my spiritual, philosophical and religious struggles, I may have well ended up in a priesthood or its equivalent in different times, both an intellectually and politically powerful position in many a civilization. A Brahman in India, the Mandarin class in Han China, a Jesuit in France, all intriguing possibilities when most people in the world weren't able to read or write. In other settings, though, castration to become a eunuch in some imperial court would've been involved, not something I'm interested in at forty. It's painful to just think about.

So it's interesting to look at our times to consider what is and isn't possible. With White women (despite this week's Time Magazine cover on the "American Women", not to mention Gail Collins' latest book), some Black and Latino women, and individuals like President Obama breaking through the barriers of race, gender, class and religion, I guess we can imagine ourselves into a reality that most would think impossible. On the other hand, as a historian, I also recognize that people, even friends and loved ones, might fight us every single step of the way, and then continue the fight once reality and imagination become one in our lives.

Maybe that's why so many of us see Obama as great or as the anti-Christ. It certainly explains why we treat our leaders -- however flawed -- like crap in their years, days and hours before their tragic deaths. Like Gandhi, JFK, MLK, Abraham Lincoln. Or, for that matter, like Joan of Arc, Confucius or Jesus of Nazareth himself. Maybe that's because those living symbols of making the impossible possible strained the imaginations of so many. To the point where there was a collective break with the imagined or real as a result. Unfortunately, history shows how unimaginative most of us are.

Dear Mama (More Like, "Dear Mom")

2009-10-26T09:11:00.002-04:00

Forgiveness, quiet as it's kept, is for the forgiver, not for the forgiven. Forgiveness enables us to move on with and enjoy our lives in ways that we otherwise couldn't. It keeps us sane, ready to receive love and forgiveness from others, even when we think that we don't deserve it. Forgiveness allows us to appreciate the good in people, not to mention the good in ourselves. Still, it's something that we have to do regularly, if not every day, than many a day. Especially when it comes to family.

My mother turns sixty-two on Wednesday. And I love her very much. But over the years, I've learned about my mother past, ticks and behaviors that have convinced me beyond a shadow of a doubt that she should've never given birth to any of us. Of all of the parents I've ever met or known, few have been more unhappy or miserable as my mother. That fact and two abysmal marriages have left her in some state of depression for the better part of the past three decades. She often said, “I like children when they’re [between] babies and two . . . it’s all downhill from there” while I was growing up, a sign that becoming the eventual mother of six children was perhaps not the best life choice.

For me, what made statements like that worse was when I learned that my mother grew up as the oldest of twelve -- yes, twelve -- siblings in the Red River valley area of southwest Arkansas, in a town called Bradley, just five miles from the Louisiana border. Growing up as the child of tenant farmers in the Jim Crow South in the '50s was hardly easy. Especially with cotton on the decline as a commodity. The poverty that my mother grew up with was balanced by the reality that poverty was all around, especially if you were Black. After all of that, and then finding the opportunity to move to New York with one of her cousins in the summer of '66, why would my mother fling herself into the heartache of marriage and kids that became her life in Mount Vernon starting at the end of '67?

She must've asked herself the same question some sixteen years, a dead-end job and two abusive husbands later. With a fourteen-year-old kid in a school for the retarded (even though he wasn't), a twelve-year-old getting beat up by the second husband, a three-year-old who all but refused to speak because of his abuse, a one-year-old and another one on its way, it was little wonder that she showed about as much affection as an NYPD police officer. The “I love you, Donald” faucet, which was an occasional drip prior to the summer of ’82, was pretty much turned off after that.

It would be awful enough if I could say with certainty that our hellish lives occurred because my mother made awful decisions. But the reality was, my mother often made no decisions at all. That allowed people in her life who had no interest in her interests to make decisions for her. Like when my two-sheets-to-the-wind father took my older brother Darren to Clearview in '74 and forced him into the battery of tests that would determine that his severe shyness was really mental retardation, even though Darren had taught himself and me to read. She allowed him to go to school there for six years before she made any attempt to remove him, and by then, it was way too late.

Or when she took her spiritual confusion and channeled it into becoming a Hebrew-Israelite in order to hang on to her dead-beat, no-account second husband, dragging Darren and me into it in the process. Or when my mother just kept going to work at Mount Vernon Hospital in the summer of '82, even when her friends and co-workers begged her to take part. Her non-decisions, as it turned out, were really decisions of the worst sort, the path-of-least-resistance type of decisions. Ones that didn't require much forethought, self-reflection, assistance from others, or wisdom.

These things take their toll, and they did for my mother and for the rest of us. By the time I moved from Pittsburgh to the DC area in '99, I had tired of listening to my mother's weekly gripes about "the kids," my four younger siblings from her second marriage. She'd been calling them "Judah babies" for nearly a decade by then. It referred to my ex-stepfather's Hebrew-Israelite name, Judah ben Israel, and the fact that she saw them as burdens that God had given her, because "no one else would want them."

I had been a mama's boy for years, first by nature and because I'd been the younger brother for nearly a decade. Then by virtue of witnessing the full rage that my stepfather vented upon my mother on Memorial Day '82. For years, I saw it as my duty to help her and my younger siblings survive those terrible, terrible days. But after ten years of higher education, academia, and finding myself, I no longer had the energy to provide the optimism and sense of success that my mother drew out of me time and time again.

Once I did my version of a family intervention in '02, confronting my mother and younger siblings with this and much more than I could mention here, I knew that my relationship with my mother would stayed strained, maybe for good. The fact was, I was never so mad or resentful that I had stopped loving her. I decided long before '02 to forgive, because I couldn't have met anyone, much less gotten married or become a father, walking around with the kind of hatred a person could generate from learning so many horrible things about his family or mother. Yet I also understood that if my siblings were to ever leave 616, or Mount Vernon, or learn to see a world beyond their narrow version of it, I needed to perform a version of seppuku. I had to end my mixed friendship, boyfriend-girlfriend, husband/father-wife relationship with my mother. Just so that I could be her adult son, period.

That's been tough, so tough, over the past eight years. Even now, I know that I can't have a conversation with my mother about work, writing, teaching, finances or family without inviting stories about how "them Spanish people" took some job away from her or about how "fags are ruinin'" this country. I stick to basic family stuff, nothing more, nothing less. I do love her, very, very much. I just hope that she can find her out of her own misery and enjoy life before there's no more life left for her to enjoy.

The Living Years

2009-10-24T10:22:00.000-04:00

Of all the songs I listened to back in '89, few made me think more about my future than Mike + The Mechanics' "The Living Years." It's not a great song, not one that I'd recommend everyone I know to listen to. But it's a contemplative piece, one that I've thought about off and on over the past two decades as my relationship with my father has improved, while the one with my mother has declined and remains somewhat strained. Luckily, both have spent time with my son Noah over the past six years.

I used to think that I didn't have any regrets, that I maxed out my life as best I could so that there wouldn't be anything to regret as I've grown older. Although that's mostly true, it's not, not in total. My deepest regret is that I didn't have the courage to stand up for myself and my mother all those years ago. If I had not worn my kufi to my first day of seventh grade, at least made a move for my crush #1, and called the police on my idiot ex-stepfather, maybe so many other things it took me between the ages of twelve and twenty-four to figure out would've happened much, much sooner. Maybe I would've written Boy @ The Window in the '90s instead of the '00s. Maybe, just maybe, I would've earned a different set of degrees and be well on my way as the writer and author I still aspire to be.

But despite those regrets, at least by the time I first heard Mike + The Mechanics' "Living Years," I had found enough of myself to think about whom I wanted to be and how to get there. It was my junior year at Pitt, and my first full year without the personification of my abuse living at 616 anymore. It was a time of dates and new friendships, of thinking about the prospect of graduate school. It was, even with the stress of third-semester calculus, multiple integrals and differential equations, a fun time for me.

It was also a time of learning how to see myself for whom I was at that moment and not the person I felt I needed to be for most of the '80s. I wasn't just some skinny kid who was scared to have sex because I didn't want anyone to get pregnant or someone whose sole purpose in life was to be there for his mother and for his four younger siblings. I was also a six-foot, nearly two-inch tall Black male who was a student and wanted more out of life than just striving for an emotional break from my past or for a 4.0 average for one semester.

So I did something that I hadn't done in nearly four years. I started writing down my experiences from those most traumatic of days. My mother being beaten up in front of me. My running away from 616 and spending the night sleeping at Mount Vernon High School. My experiences in Humanities and with my former classmates. I hadn't seen myself as a writer in years by then. Yet here I was, writing down my experiences, conversation for conversation, and almost word for for.

I had kept journals before, when I was eleven and twelve, before the crushing burdens of life and a horrible marriage had pushed writing -- and reading -- out of my mind. I tried at fifteen -- in the summer of '85 -- to write down my account of what happened to my mother on Memorial Day '82. I got just far enough not to start crying. I shut it down, deciding that August '85 wasn't the right time to write about such things.

But after my mother and my stepfather split in June '89, all I could think of doing was to write. I wanted to write a book about my mother's experiences on welfare and in welfare offices. I wanted to interview case workers and case managers, to learn about their experiences with their clients, to understand what made them as calloused as an iron worker's hands. I wanted to write about my academic success, to understand what made me tick. I wanted to see a real history of race and poverty, education and educational politics written from the perspective of someone who lived with the sights, sounds and smells of inequality every day.

Still, I had some more growing to do. With the earthquake in the Bay Area in mid-October, I found myself re-evaluating everything and everyone who had been in my life for the previous eight years. Should I continue to communicate with classmates whom still barely saw me as an acquaintance, much less a friend? Did I still like watching baseball, or was I watching it out of habit? How do I support my mother and younger siblings now that the biggest threat to their future has moved on without them? Was I free now to make up my own mind about my future, my life, my calling without fear or without concern for anyone other than myself? Some of these questions took a few months to answers. Others would take years. But for me, these were truly the beginning of my living years, where the specter of danger and death no longer seemed so real in my life.

The Wannabe Set

2009-10-21T12:13:00.003-04:00

I'm sure that many of you have noticed a recent slowdown in my posts over the past two weeks. I've been busy with other writing projects, attempting to keep my fledgling writing process going, for Boy @ The Window and writings related to it. I've also been catching up on my TV entertain. Thank goodness for the power of Netflix. I've been catching up on Ugly Betty of late, finding it a stomach-churning show to watch in the process. I guess naivete does have its advantages.

Something else caught my eye while watching America Ferrara's character go through life like Edith Bunker from All In The Family, only as a working woman in the fashion industry. It was an episode I'd seen a few times. One in which workers fought over $4,500 Gucci bags and $1,500 shoes. It made me think. Who, really, has the cash or credit on hand to buy such things? Even if I took my debt down to zero, I maybe, just maybe, could buy the shoes outright. The Gucci bag, I'd have to buy through a layaway plan.

It allowed me to realize why the impending recovery, if it goes as planned, will hardly lift most boats, forget about all of them. We as a society have allowed ourselves to become wannabes. We might not all want a $4,500 Gucci bag. For some of us, it's a $750,000 home, or a $120,000 Mercedes, or a $3,000 refrigerator. We want these things, but the vast majority of us have hardly the money necessary to buy them outright. So this recovery, like everything else in our nation, is borrowing-based. We may be out of a recession by the spring of '10, but we won't be out of the woods.

You see, we've made the decision as a culture that the American Dream is really about being rich. Period. It's not about just having a home or paying off the mortgage or having enough left over to send our kids to college. It's about the here and now. It's about buying the next iPhone or the next new, hip product before anyone else can get their greedy paws on it. It's all about ourselves and our immediate material needs.

So even though it's really only the folks in the top three percent of income (roughly over $500,000 a year) who could possibly afford all the stuff that can be bought in our world, many of the rest us attempt to live that way as well. The next 80 percent of us aspire to live like we're neurosurgeons and professional athletes, corporate lawyers and investment bankers. Perhaps that's why so many of us were so upset when the stock market collapsed and the banks started failing last fall. Maybe that's why we became enraged when the federal government bailed out so many of them. We saw this not as a stop-gap measure to prevent a twenty-first-century global depression. Instead, we saw these changes as preventing us from pretending that we all can be rich.

We, of course, pretend through debt. We've been borrowing our way into the middle class since the '70s, and increasingly so in the past fifteen years. It's no accident that even those of us making more than $100,000 a year have as much as six times that amount hanging over us as debt. Our natural instinct has become one of selfishness and narcissism. We don't see the point of taxes, of having a social safety net, of helping others outside of prayer and giving through a religious institution. We see government as the enemy because, quite frankly, it has positioned itself to be the enemy. We assume that everyone else is doing well or better than us because we all want the brass ring.

What's worse is that we not only don't want to help others and denigrate the poorest twenty percent in our country by blaming them for our own ills and mistakes. We don't even want to help ourselves. So many are opposed to education reform, to longer school days and universal postsecondary education that it would make you think that no one in this country wants an education that prepares them for the future. We want to eradicate climate change while we find all remaining sources of oil. We prefer universal health insurance to universal healthcare. Our priorities are so screwed up that we still think college is only for nerds, and that an online four-year degree is the equivalent to a face-to-face experience for the working adult learner.

It's a sad situation. Because if or when the bottom does fall out of our economy, it will make the past two years look like a speed bump by comparison. So many of us don't have the skill sets, degrees, or intrinsic tools we need -- like the ability to think independently of an ideology, our media, or other people in leadership position -- to weather a storm of those proportions. Heck, even those of us with the necessary sets of skills, education and experiences might well go under. As someone who is also guilty of being in the wannabe set, I remain positive about my future and my families future. But I also know it can no longer be based on my borrowing power, but rather, my saving power.