Cold Drank

At any given moment, 2.4 million men, women and children are trafficked to provide, among other things, forced labor.[i]  They are victims of human trafficking – a modern-day slave trade that is valued at an estimated $32 billion[ii] and is second in scope only to the illicit drug trade.[iii]  They are invisible victims, hidden in plain sight, and found in nearly every country and industry.  They are people who are being trafficked to, from and within the United States.  And it’s happening right here in the State of Michigan.

What Is Labor Trafficking?

The federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act (“TVPA”) defines labor trafficking as “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.”[iv]

Types of Labor Trafficking

Foreigners – legal and undocumented – are particularly susceptible to trafficking, in large part because of their limited language skills, unfamiliarity with U.S. laws, fear of reprisals, fear of criminal prosecution or immigration detention, and fear of deportation to countries in which they may face retribution by those complicit in the trafficking, including in some instances, foreign governmental officials.[ix] In addition, traffickers may prefer children, both foreign and U.S. citizens, because they are more easily controlled, cheaper to sustain and less likely to complain or demand better working conditions.[x]  Notably, the range of victims in a given trafficking event can involve anyone from a single victim held in domestic servitude to hundreds of agricultural workers held in debt bondage.

Recognizing a Possible Trafficking Victim

Undoubtedly labor trafficking victims have many differences, including age, sex, race, nationality, citizenship and immigration status.  However, these victims often share a common reality – one that is marked by inhumane living conditions, merciless working hours, burdensome production requirements, and brutal consequences for attempting to escape or failing to satisfy labor expectations.  In these circumstances, traffickers exercise complete control over their victims.  They commonly compel submission through, among other means, actual or threatened physical or sexual violence against the victim or his or her family; confiscation or destruction of identification and immigration papers; actual physical confinement (including the use of locked or guarded facilities); and the threat of arrest and deportation. 

Labor Trafficking in Michigan

Michigan’s labor trafficking victims are found in many of the same industries in which people are trafficked nationwide, including domestic service, strip clubs, restaurant service, and agriculture.  Though only a handful of labor trafficking cases originating in Michigan have been prosecuted, the actual incidence of labor trafficking is believed to be higher.[xii]  Between 2009 and 2011 alone, the National Human Trafficking Resource Center (NHTRC) received 26 reports of labor trafficking in multiple industries and businesses, including domestic service, agriculture, restaurants, door-to-door peddling and nail salons.[xiii]  And those are only the reported cases.

Teenage Girl Forced Into Years of Domestic Servitude

Notably, Michigan may be an especially attractive location for traffickers.  It is a border state, making it a point of entry for foreign victims coming into the United States, and it borders Ohio, which some characterize as a human trafficking hub.[xvi]  In addition, Michigan houses industries in which trafficking is prevalent (including agriculture and exotic dancing), it suffers widespread poverty, and it’s home to a number of vulnerable populations, including impoverished persons, at-risk youth and undocumented migrants.

Federal and State Anti-Trafficking Laws

The problem of human trafficking is not going unaddressed – although there is still a great deal of work to be done.  Both the Michigan and federal governments passed laws specifically targeting trafficking.  In 2000, Congress passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, 22 U.S.C. § 7101, et seq, which, among other things, criminalizes human trafficking and provides immigration relief for qualified victims.  Congress renewed its commitment to deterring trafficking and increased resources for the prosecution of traffickers and protection of victims in the 2003, 2005 and 2008 Reauthorization Acts.[xviii]  At the state level, the Michigan legislature passed in 2006 a state anti-trafficking law, MCL 750.462a, et seq.  In doing so, the legislature criminalized trafficking and provided for fines, restitution and prison sentences ranging from ten years to life imprisonment if a violation results in the death of another person[xix] or involves actual or attempted kidnapping, criminal sexual conduct or killing.[xx] In July 2011, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette launched the first Attorney General Human Trafficking Unit to identify and prosecute trafficking offenses.[xxi]

In addition to the anti-trafficking laws, federal and state labor and employment laws may also assist trafficking victims or law enforcement efforts.  Potentially applicable federal laws include:

• the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and statutory involuntary servitude laws, 18 U.S.C. § 1581, et seq., which prohibit involuntary servitude, peonage and trafficking;

• Title VII, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2, et seq., which prohibits employment discrimination based on sex, color, race and national origin;

• 42 U.S.C. § 1981, which provides that all persons within the United States’ jurisdiction have certain rights, including the right to the full and equal benefit of all laws;

• the Fair Labor Standards Act, 29 U.S.C. § 201, et seq., which regulates wages and overtime compensation for nonexempt employees, as well as regulates child labor;

• the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act, 29 U.S.C. § 1801, et seq, which requires employers who employ migrant agricultural workers to pay wages when due (29 USC § 1822(a)); to comply with the terms of the work arrangement (29 USC § 1822(c)); and to maintain records showing the number of hours worked, the net pay received by the worker, the sums withheld from pay, and the basis on which wages are paid (29 USC § 1821(d)); and/or

• the Occupational Safety and Health Act, 29 U.S.C. § 651, et seq., which requires the promulgation of regulations promoting safe and healthy working environments.

At the state level, relief may be available under the:

• the Elliot Larsen Civil Rights Act, M.C.L. 37.2101, et seq., which prohibits discrimination based on sex, color, race and national origin;

• the Wage and Fringe Benefits Act, M.C.L. 408.471, et seq., which regulates payment of wages and fringe benefits, as well as prescribes the rights and responsibilities of employers and employees; and/or

• the Minimum Wage Act, M.C.L. 408.381, et seq., which establishes a minimum wage and protects against wage discrimination.

Trafficking victims may also find justice through other federal and state civil rights laws, racketeering laws and criminal statues prohibiting acts frequently committed in conjunction with trafficking such as rape, assault, kidnapping and extortion.

How Can Attorneys Help?

Labor and employment attorneys are uniquely situated to assist in the fight against labor trafficking.  They can educate their clients on the issue, encourage the adoption of corporate anti-trafficking policies and practices, and help victims navigate the web of state and federal laws that may apply.  More specifically,

Report Suspected Labor Trafficking.  The National Human Trafficking Resource Center maintains a national hotline at 1-888-3737-888 to which incidents can be reported.

Offer Pro Bono Service.  Volunteer to assist victims and/or victim service and legal aid organizations that assist trafficking victims.

Educate Your Clients.  The U.S. State Department’s 2011 Trafficking in Persons Report recommends “increase[d] cooperation between the private and public sectors to encourage business practices that rid supply chains of trafficking . . .”[xxii]   Moreover, as governmental and media scrutiny increases, employers will likely bear greater pressure to identify and rid their supply chains of human trafficking.  Given this developing environment, and the moral and ethical responsibilities of our employers and businesses, it is prudent for them to get out in front of this issue now and begin adopting policies and practices with an eye toward eliminating human trafficking from their labor and supply sources.  More specifically, employers and businesses can aid the fight against labor trafficking by, among other things:

• establishing a corporate policy denouncing labor trafficking in all of its forms and clearly articulating the steps that the company is taking or will take to identify and eliminate labor and supply sources that result from trafficking;

• promoting industry-wide codes of conduct encouraging fair labor practices, safe working environments and fair wages;

• including clauses within contracts with suppliers and other partners prohibiting the use of forced labor or any labor resulting from human trafficking;

• educating key personnel on the existence of forced labor and training them to recognize employment practices that may violate international, national and state trafficking or forced labor laws;

• encouraging employers to know their suppliers and contractors and, when labor trafficking is suspected, to take appropriate action which can include reporting the offense, disengaging the supplier or leveraging the business relationship to improve working conditions;

• establishing a monitoring or auditing system to ensure suppliers’ or partners’ conformity to anti-trafficking policies, or collaborating with a nonprofit group to provide such monitoring; and

• establishing a channel through which workers can safely lodge complaints regarding working conditions.[xxiii]

Resources

If you are interested in learning more about labor trafficking, there is a wealth of information available online.  Below is a non-exhaustive list of resources that may assist you:

• 2011 U.S. State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report, http://www.state.gov/j/tip/rls/tiprpt/2011/index.htm

• Polaris Project, www.polarisproject.or

• Michigan Human Trafficking Task Force, http://www.humantrafficking.msu.edu/

• Michigan Attorney General – Human Trafficking, http://www.michigan.gov/ag

• University of Michigan Human Trafficking Law Project, http://www.law.umich.edu/clinical/HuTrafficCases/Pages/searchdatabase.aspx (a searchable database of human trafficking cases arising in the United States and its territories).

For technical assistance, victim identification training or to connect to agencies that may need your support, contact the National Human Trafficking Resource Center Hotline at 1-888-3737-888.

Whenever you go to mass you try to sit at the pew that has “New Kids on the Block” carved on the side. You’re not allowed to wear nail polish or colored shoes so these things matter. It matters that someone had a friend watch out for Sister Mario, Watch my back, that kind of thing. A pocket knife scratched fast into the wood and the thought is profound but also, it isn’t. A thing you’d bleed for in the 90’s splinters into dents.

Daily life is excavation, skin cells crusting windows and floors like sediment or cake frosting. You dig to the rough core beneath the carpets but you can only find 80’s teen romance novels covered in soot. The girls on the covers are impossibly wholesome, their creamy fuzzed turtlenecks blending seamlessly into skin.

School will be a big part of it. Some guy at your dad’s favorite bar says, I used to go to that place. The nuns liked to shut me and my brothers in the lockers. It makes you laugh because the lockers open and close together, like jazz hands. What would they have looked like stuffed with children?

There aren’t any words for you yet, there’s no “subculture” or “idiosyncratic.” You believe that words are meaningless and you’re right. The universe for you is a prehistoric cell, oozing DNA from its pockets.

The thing is, you like to hurt people because everyone bruises despite the thick sweatshirts. To make a girl cry you say, My brother thinks you’re a boy. Then you tell everyone that she threw up in that club pool over the summer. You stab a kid in the hand with a pen until he bleeds. Every single time you see your best friend you kick him in the shins.

You’re hardly the first of your kind. You have an art teacher who pushes a child face-first into the schoolyard gravel like the kid’s a plastic toy. Older teenagers like to hurl limes at girls and steal children’s backpacks. A church neighbor hits your friend in the eye with a shard of glass. (Everyone laughs.) You get stabbed with a rusty nail in the gym. (Everyone laughs.)

Not much will happen to you. The world has a single red door, the world has a case of rampantly liberal, Californian stomach flu. The world has only one carnivorous God and your aunt was married inside of him by that pedophilic priest who was either dismissed or arrested, who knows what happens to those men.

You trade music and go out, roughing yourself up. Lots of sweat and obvious English rock bands. A chorus of cloudy diffused matter that echoes the domestic. Some sort of subconscious denial of your physical stagnation, your dull need to please administrators you’ve never met, your dull need to please the only white girl in your class. It’s a bit of a life, you reason.

Not everything is good.^. Someone steals a really nice record out of your desk but they leave the cover, the one with the woman clawing her way up a shower wall. There are song titles written on her back in black marker. Who wouldn’t take that? you think and you’re right, it makes no sense.

Last summer your family left couches and cars on the lawn and now your friends think you’re trash. The white girl makes fun of you in science class, There’s nothing to sit on in your house, but you laugh genuinely. Not having couches is cool. Not having heat is cool. Neighbors who illegally supply fried orange wheels to the food carts on East 14th are cool. You build your personality.

You argue with the other kids about plastic bracelets and metal buttons but you forget the big things. The Rolling Stones. Elliott Smith. The Internet. Fucking. Where did you learn? As a child, under the bed, from faceless teachers. They were best when wasted, just totally smashed. They liked to leave you outside of head shops for hours at a time.

It won’t be months until you realize how everything aligns. Kids talking about your mother, a grown man who holds your gaze and says, It’s not all about you, free rides and dollar bills paid for soul–the world shortens itself into electric crackles. Fizzles connect to a Corpus Callosum, biology tacked onto a diagram. You can hardly imagine.

You’ll know, eventually. See, one afternoon he’ll shake you awake screaming, Hit me in the fucking face. He’ll throw your stereo across the room. It will stop working. You won’t be able to explain how this has happened.

Not much can be said; your skull, thick and flooded, will attempt to ground this new information into digestible filth. Conclusion: You’ve always been such a useless, Mexican trash, chess club-loving nerd and the species of useless, Mexican trash, chess club-loving nerd isn’t the type to hit anyone at all, even if they beg for it.

He’ll drive off and you’ll sit on one of the nearly-abandoned couches, the brown leather one that’s squeezed onto the porch. You’ll absorb orange light as it seeps into the afternoon, saddled by the stench of cooking, the residual autumn heat amplifying the yellow tones in your skin.

It’s not a tragedy, for at some point, all human animals learn that evolution has a brain. It’s just that you will no longer think of New Kids on the Block and you will no longer think of the church–you will try to be something more. There are words and phrases you need for this situation,  “information super highway,” and “arrested development.” You will not learn fast, but life will continue, yes. The color of your shoes will devolve alongside the color of your voice. You will relearn law and order, the possession ending. The world will be far less English and obvious than you could have ever expected, but it will hold so much discovery. The Rolling Stones. Elliott Smith. The Internet. Fucking. Don’t wait too long, people will say. Alcoholics, the learned tribe. These things can become your life.

You will wait too long. It will be your fault. You will waste years, just years, trying to fix that stereo.

Diana Rae Valenzuela is a life-long resident of Oakland, California
who chooses to write small, fictional stories about the universe. Her
work has appeared in the Cynic, L’Allure Des Mots, and the Olympia,
Washington publication Works in Progress. She currently studies at the
California College of the Arts.

The dead I know, who would have been men now, lived in Queens since birth or from when they were very small. The dead that I speak of did not live in a place like Harlem. They had yards. Small patches of green in the front and the back. A shade tree that gave off crab apples. An awning above a patio. They were the children of clerks and factory workers. Some parents had post office jobs. Worked for the Transit Authority. Teachers, some doctors. State troopers. Like that.

The statistics that were compiled, comparing Bangladesh with Harlem, do not count. The dead I know are not numbers. They say naught about the guys I knew. Allowing for standard deviations does nothing to change the fact that these brothers had mothers who would call them in for supper the same time every evening. No numbers explain that I knew their fathers, their cousins, their sisters and brothers. I knew whether they were tenderheaded near their temples or at the backs of their heads. I knew the sound of their voices; their laughter. I knew all of these things, yet the memories of them are faint.

Since their deaths, I have missed them for what they were or what they could have been. Whether I liked them or not. Whether they were good or not. That I knew them when they were physically embodied and that I witnessed the time of their deaths means that they are part of who I am. Since time is time, and I have had my own burdens that made me wish I was dead, the impressions of the brothers that I thought were indelible are not. So I write to chronicle remembrances.

– Cooter

He had a martial walk. Erect, sturdy, determined. He was in the Seven Crowns or the Seven Spades or some such thing. The last time I saw him, he was walking along Linden Boulevard near 204th Street wearing a dungaree jacket with tails hanging off of the back like the ones on Davey Crockett’s hat.

Cooter was a big-headed proto gangbanger, St. Albans, Queens style, which was softer and less treacherous than Bed-Stuy, and cruder than Harlem slick. He was also the first teenage father I had ever known. Someone shot Cooter.

Arlene, his baby-mother, was quiet, pretty, and church-going. The day of Cooter’s funeral, which I did not attend, I saw her walking down the boulevard looking as though she had been crying for hours and hours. Her fists were balled up at her sides. She pouted mightily. Looked like she wanted to kick someone in the head. She was crossing the same intersection that I had seen Cooter cross a few days before. A line of Cooter’s gangbanger brethren walked behind her. Memory says that I did not know who all of those gang members were, but I presume that most, if not all, are dead today. Had Cooter and Arlene been married, she would have been a widow at age fifteen.

Cooter did not live on my block to hear Lefty chanting “Black Power,” but surely he had heard of it. His color consciousness made gangland hues more definitive than racial ones, however. But a stance for the rights of his people would not have assured his survival. After all, someone shot Dr. King.

– Tony

Tony was another one with a big head. Bigger than Cooter’s. Nobody liked Tony, except for that dude, Frenchie, who nobody liked either. Another set of proto gangbangers trying to live up to the reps that the hustling Brooklyn boys and the money-making Manhattan cats had.

Cynthia, Laurie, and I were friends. We had a joke about Tony’s head. Tony tried to walk real cool, with his head tipped to the side, like he had not a care in the world, but we swore we knew the real reason. Tony held his head to the side like that when he walked because his head was so big that it was too heavy for him to carry. That’s how big his head was. I’d spot Tony all the way down the boulevard doing that side-headed diddy-bop. I’d say, “Hi Tony,” and all he’d do is nod, grimace as though he was angry, and keep right on walking.

Tony, evidently, did not have time to wait for his dreams to be deferred, where he was surely a rich man like the Rockefellers and Nicky Barnes. The grocery store owner shot Tony on a Sunday. Point blank. In the head. Was trying to get away with the man’s money. Tony was seventeen. Too young to be called an armed robber, even though he had committed the act.

– Terry

The first time I saw Terry, he looked like a prototype for some Ralph Lauren clothing line made especially for the people who spend their winters in Aspen and their summers on Nantucket. Tweed jacket with suede elbow patches. Brown leather pants. Brown suede loafers with a gold buckle across the top. We had a nodding acquaintance. We both attended Andrew Jackson High School. He was glib, intellectual, well-liked. Made bad choices and the streets claimed him. For Black men bad choices are not always just bad choices. I had always heard that Black people did not commit suicide. I now know that young Black men have some of the highest rates. Terry shot himself in the head a few years after graduation. Some say he sacrificed himself for his family. He was not going underground, so somebody could kill his mother or nephew or any of his family. So he blew his brains out. Too deeply involved in the drug trade. And elegant. So elegant. Even if his dressing was far more sophisticated than John Gotti’s, whose sartorial effect was the subject of many newspaper articles, because Terry was Black–if he would have ever become as famous as the Teflon Don–he would just have been another lawless Black man to the same people who romanticized Gotti. What a dubious argument I just made. What a silly comparison. This is what happens when one is obsessed by race.

– Bobby

He lived across the street from Lefty. His skin was saddle-bag brown. Black Larry is what we called him. And not even to differentiate him from another Bobby, because as far as I know, there was no other Bobby that he could have been confused with.

Bobby’s voice at around 6am in 1973: “Floyd! Floyyyyyd! Floyd!” He was standing in the driveway between my house and Floyd’s, right underneath my bedroom window. It was a still summer morning. Bobby’s whining holler woke me up. I could not figure out what he was doing that time of morning calling Floyd.

“Floyd! Floyyyd! Wake up man. Play some of that Marvin Gaye. Play that Marvin Gaye, man.”

Next thing I heard was the twang-twang-wah-wah sounding guitar, then the drum and the bass hitting on the downbeat, and Marvin’s voice: “I’ve been really trying baby. Trying to hold back. . . . ” And Bobby was down there saying “That’s my song. Yeah. That’s my song.”

When it ended Bobby said, “Play it again Floyd.” And the guitar that set the groove traveled through the heat of the morning energizing me. The sunlight came through the sheers at the window, and it was a great way to start the day. Next morning. Around six. Bobby again. “Floyd. Yo, Floyd, man. Let me hear some of that Marvin Gaye.”

I was half asleep, half awake this time. “. . .Sensitive people. . . .Let’s live. . . . Oh baby now, now. . .” After the song faded down. “Play it again Floyd.” And then Bobby’s sounds of satisfaction: “Yeah.  That’s my song.  Marvin bad.”

The next morning, and I swear on all that is sacred to me, Bobby came again.” Floyd!” So, Floyd put on the record, let it play, then Bobby said, “Play it again Fl. . .” All I heard then was the needle ripping off of the record, then “Would you go away. Leave me alone Bobby. I’m trying to sleep.” Floyd shouted so hard, I imagined a vein popping out of his neck. I thought he was going to go outside and smack Bobby upside his head, but he didn’t. Bobby walked out of the driveway mumbling and muttering to himself, pissed. I’ve heard “Let’s Get It On” literally hundreds of times in the thirty years since it made Bobby holler to Floyd under my window, and every time I hear it–every time–I think of Floyd and Bobby.

Bobby was only friendly, it seemed to me, to people who knew him well. Otherwise, he seemed pretty evil, and would stare right in my face and walk on by. Most of the time he would not even speak when I said “Hey.” I guess I did not warrant any more attention from him than I got, because I was around five years his junior.

People said that Bobby was spoiled. I thought he was just evil. My former husband, Butch, knew Bobby well. Bobby, he says, was not evil, he was just into developing his street persona. I think it’s a charade that in some brothers becomes too hard to sustain, so they drop it and remain who they are. But in other brothers the charade takes them to the tomb–the one with bars or the one that is a more permanent resting place. I have no idea what the deciding factors are. I know a cat–I’ll call him Peter–whose father was a prominent judge in New York City. His mother would pop up in the society pages of the Amsterdam News from time to time. They spent time at the Inkwell on Martha’s Vineyard, but Randy Crawford’s song “Street Life” describes Peter best. He’s lived far beyond his youth, but barely, even though he’s in his late fifties now. The coke and the streets caught up with him, and strokes have claimed half the marbles he still had left. I’ve also seen the charade dropped by children whose mothers are their sole support on two minimum-wage jobs that go from can to can’t.

But some of the brothers just want to be hard, trying to figure out the manhood thing, and so they learn from other men. And most men seem hard. Then there’s the chippie that made Bobby evil. That made his behavior a little abstract. The chippie is a malign, invasive thing, dragging itself through the joints and running out of the nostrils like the flu, letting the body know that it’s time for another hit.

Bobby would walk up and down the block, up and down the block, up and down the block. His body tight. Looked like something was going to pop. Like maybe he’d pull his elbows out of joint, because of the way he was holding on to them. Or he’d break his knees because they were rubbing so close together.

I was too young to know that he was looking for the next hit. The hit to soothe the chippie would keep him, temporarily, from the colossal jones that were in his future. And, surely, he would get there. Once heroin got hold of the brothers, it made them too weak to fight for the power that Lefty’s chant promised.

Not many summers after, and he could not have been far more than twenty, Black Bobby died from an O.D. Sitting on the toilet, his arm tied off. The spike still hanging from his vein. His mother’s only child.

– Franklin, also known as Fly

A great smile he had. I loved the way the corners of his eyes crinkled up. A beautiful, muscular body and bow legs. Moody. Pissed off half the time. Charming the other half. The summer I came to know him was the summer I had somehow or another become the official cornrow girl of the block. I’d be on that stoop for hours or holed up in Floyd’s backyard braiding his sister’s hair or his niece’s hair. All day long. I braided Fly’s hair. Wasn’t hardly long enough, but I think the fact that I had very thin fingers helped me grab up that hair because it was around two inches long.

I’d say, “Franklin. Your hair is too short to braid. Just let it grow out and then I’ll braid it.”

He’d smile and say, “It’s not too short. Come on. Braid it. Please?” And that smile. God, he was handsome. A broad angular face with high cheekbones, flaring nostrils. Skin the color of pecan pie. A beautiful gap between his two front teeth.

“It’s too short Franklin,” and I had a half-way crush on him anyway. “Look, you gonna braid my hair.” He’d show his impending manhood side, then whip his comb out of his back pocket, sit his behind down on the stoop, and I’d start parting and braiding. And he was tender-headed, too, which did not make things any easier. I braided his hair twice, and twice he took it out after two days. “Never again,” I said. And he didn’t ask.

Franklin went to the Army. Franklin went to school. I lost track of Franklin, then heard he died. Checked in the hospital with pneumonia and some oddly configured ailments. Never came home again. We didn’t know much about AIDS then.

– Scott

Franklin and Scott were friends. I braided Scott’s hair too. The challenge with his head was the fact that he had very fine, straight hair that curled at the ends. His kind of hair did not hold a braid, but he wanted braids anyway. He would sit there grimacing, clenching his teeth, flinching as I worked. I am sure he had never known that hair could cause so much pain.

“Am I hurting you Scott? I have to braid it tight or else it will come out. Your hair is too straight.”

“I’m alright. Just keep going, Miss Taylor. Just keep going.”

” The very next day, Scott had no more braids. He had gone back to his fluffy afro.

A few days later, I allowed him to dupe me into believing that if I braided his hair one more time, he would keep it in. He didn’t.

He was colorstruck to boot. I loved him anyway. His entire family was light-skinned. His aunt, Miss June; his uncle, who everyone called Uncle Roy; his cousin, Bull. All the cousins that ever visited, the aunts, the uncles. Light-skinned. Do you know how hard it is to keep Black people light skinned in North America? Do you know the level of work and machinations that it takes to keep an entire family of Black people the color of butter and vanilla pudding? If you have never considered these questions, think about them now. Uncle Roy and Bull were the family rebels: Both eventually wound up with women the color of coffee.

Scott was mechanically inclined, and could fix a bicycle in a heartbeat. I think he believed in the saying about don’t give a man a fish, teach him how to fish, because whenever my chain would come off, if I sought his assistance, because I forgot how to put the chain back on, he’d stand there, joking. “You think you can get the chain back on the bike without messing up the derailleur this time, Miss Taylor?” Scott would chuckle at his own sarcasm. I was so mad that he was teasing me I wouldn’t answer.

“Okay. Turn the bike upside down. That’ll be easiest for you. All right, pull the chain around that thing right there, now turn the pedal.”

I could only fix the chain with Scott standing there. I always wanted him to do it because the chain was nasty greasy and the bike was too heavy.

Scott.  Making go-carts. Riding his bike with no hands. Doing wheelies. Working behind the counter in his family’s candy store on the corner. Letting me be short for a pint of Louis Sherry cherry-vanilla ice cream. Carrying his schoolbooks in his waistband on the way to school.

When I went away to college, I heard that he had died. It bothers me that I can’t remember why or how, and I can’t find anybody who remembers either. Some memory about a high-yellow girl with gray eyes and sandy hair that he married stabbed him when she was drunk, but not to death, keeps replaying itself in my head. But was it pneumonia?

Scott for years and years. Always laughing. Dead and not yet twenty-two.

– Keith

I spent more than a little bit of time sitting on the stoop, as I’ve said previously. That’s what we did on 204th Street between Linden Boulevard and 118th Avenue in the 1970s. The young folk sat on the stoops. I’d braid hair there. Listen to the music I had playing in the living room, as it grooved out of the screen door. Talk to neighbors passing by, coming from work. Talk with my friends, and try to avoid the “he said, she said” intrigue that ruined many good relationships.

I’d see Keith walking through the block up to Scott’s family’s candy store to get some of his favorite snack foods. He’d buy potato chips, corn chips, cheese doodles, popcorn, and pretzels, then dump them all into a brown paper bag. He would enjoy big handfuls as he walked his bow-legged walk back down the hill to where he lived with his mother and brother. His father was dead from cancer. Sometimes he’d go next door to visit Floyd or Gail–Floyd’s sister–who was his sweetheart.

“Hey Kaaan.” Some folks are just so cool, they shorten my name to one syllable and leave out the r all together and drag the  a out. This was Keith. This is how he said my name. The girls, both younger and his age, all had crushes on him. I didn’t. I just thought he was hip and smart. Like an older brother. Although he did accuse me of being a lesbian because I would not have sex with him a few years later. But I am getting ahead of the story, which I will not tell here anyway, because it has nothing to do with his death.

“Hey, Keith,” I’d holler out. I always felt like an ugly duckling when I saw him, because he was just that pretty. Skin the color of caramel. Lashes the color of crow feathers. Thick, dark, and long. Black loopy curls and dark lips. Smart. He was good in math, so he tutored me in algebra a few times. While he was there, explaining how to actually put PEMDAS in action, I got it.

“Just remember your order of operations. Parentheses Exponents Multiplication Division Addition Subtraction. Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally. Do the equation in that order.” Soon as he left, I went back to being the dope I was, although I knew what PEMDAS stood for linguistically.

Year after year, there was Keith. Always with something intelligent to say about someone or some thing. He joined the Navy. The military was, as it is today, a last refuge for the brothers to get away. To go to school. To be paid. He came home from the Service. I’d see him coming up the hill from his house with his eyebrows raised, wincing. He’d hold his neck stiffly as though he was trying to carry a heavy parcel on his head.

“What’s wrong Keith?” I asked.

“I’ve just been having these headaches. I can’t sleep. I’m going down to the Naval Hospital.”

He was diagnosed with brain cancer. The Naval Hospital down Linden couldn’t care for him, so they sent him to the Bronx VA Hospital.  I’d go all the way up to see him on the bus and two trains. He hardly knew I was there when I went. He was on morphine. Keith thought the doctors were not treating him properly. They, basically, just cut away the tumor in his head, gave him painkillers, and that was it. Keith became frustrated and left the hospital in the hospital gown he was wearing, with the woman he eventually married, because the doctors were not doing enough for him. The people who study these things say Black people receive inferior cancer treatment, compared with white people. The people who study these things make it seem like the cancer is treated better than the Black cancer patient. Keith went into remission. Moved to Ben-Salem, Pennsylvania with his wife and kids. Commuted daily to New York for work with the Transit Authority.

The cancer came back. He died not too long after, outlasting, by a few years, the others from our block, our neighborhood.

– Rich

I clipped a composite drawing out of the Daily News one day. The tiny article accompanying the picture stated that a Madison Avenue jewelry store had been robbed. No one was hurt.

“Butch, look at this. Doesn’t that look just like Danny?” The drawing showed a dark, pie-faced Black man, with a head that seemed to come to a slight point under the Kangol he was wearing. Butch stared at it for a long time.

“Yeah. That’s not Rich, though.”

“Well, if that’s not Rich, he better be careful, because this picture looks just like him. You should show it to him. The cops might shoot him.”

I think Butch knew that it was Rich, but did not want me to know that it was Rich. To this day, and I don’t care what Butch has to say, I know that was Rich. I did not like a lot of Butch’s friends, and I didn’t know that Rich was a stick-up kid until after he died.

Whenever we had company, my son, Chenzira, before he began to read on his own, would pop up the stairs to his bedroom, pop down with a book, sit on the couch next to the guest, and hand them the book. The first time he did this to Rich, Rich did not know what to do. Chen sat there looking at him, waiting. Rich looked confounded and slightly panicked.

I said, “He wants you to read to him.”

Then Chen chimed in, in a voice that was husky for a two year old saying read, and opened the book, which was sitting on Rich’s lap. So, Rich, hard-rock for the ages, who, as it turns out, spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to abscond with rich people’s money and jewelry, without harming them, started reading The Little Engine that Could.

“Puff, puff, puff. Ding-dong, ding-dong . . .” Rich read with very little expression, but, once he got into it, he placed his arm around Chen’s little shoulder and read the book all the way to the end. When he finished the story, he said to Chen, “You liked that story, little man?” Chen nodded.

On subsequent visits Rich would read to the end, the other books that Chen would bring him. When he was through reading, Rich would hold out his palm and say, “Give me five, man.” Chen would slap it and continue sitting there, while his father resumed the discussion that he and Rich were having before Rich began reading.

Rich was sharp. Wore clothing from Saks, Altman’s. Had diamond cufflinks. Silk shirts. And was respectful of the little family we had. Me, Butch, and Chen. When we were short on money Rich would give Butch a few dollars. But, recently, around twenty years after the fact, Butch told me he thinks Rich’s the one that stole my $200 Minolta.

Like Franklin, Rich contracted some unusual form of pneumonia and some oddly configured ailments. He was admitted into the hospital. Never came home again. Dead in a week or so.

– David

Had a certain effect on the opposite sex. He knew it too. Had a shop on Linden Boulevard. He was a barber and a beautician. The best of both worlds? Some people say his sexuality ran that way also. He was my friend. Had thirteen years on me when I was twenty-one. He liked women for sure, though. From the tender age of legal right on up to menopausal.

Tall, thin, light-skinned with a toast-colored birthmark across his cheek, around the size of a quarter. A receding hairline. Not handsome. Not ugly. But with an outsized personality. Flirtatious and complimentary. Women loved to be around him. A forthright, secure masculinity. Other men respected him.

He was committed to whoever he was with at a given moment. Committed in the way Stephen Stills meant when he sang, “Love the One You’re With.”  He lived with a woman, who loved him obsessively. His “baby,” as it were, was not “so far away,” but around the corner, which for him was far enough. So, I became the one he was with. He asked me not to avoid his cohabiting beloved, but to smile and treat her nicely (which I did), so she would not be suspicious (which she was, because she knew his tendencies). But before that time, he was a soldier. His protest against the war, like many of the bloods who had been sent there for that most preposterous militaristic madness, was to go hide way up in the jungle, away from “the Cong,” away from the arrogant, white military officers who had been dispatched from West Point with no combat experience into the middle of the theater to tell soldiers who had been fighting for months what to do, to which many soldiers said, “Kiss my ass. I’m not doing that shit.” And went up into the jungle.

He told me for next to nothing, he could get a Savarin coffee can filled with brown heroin and stay high. All he had to remember, he told me, was to hold on to his weapon at all times. Came back from Nam with a habit. Lived a busy dopefiend street life until he could get it together to go to rehab.

And like every Vietnam vet I have ever known, he was not scared of a soul, a thing, a neighborhood, a situation.

***

David took over the shop from a barber named Fisher. When Fisher owned it, there was drinking, cursing, numbers, raucous pool games, and a generalized lascivious ogling of every woman who passed by the plate glass window.

When David took over, he changed all of that and people didn’t mind taking their little boys there for hair cuts anymore. David was mild-mannered. Enjoyed people. Enjoyed me in the manner of the Stephen Stills song. He thought it was funny that a young woman as nationalistic as myself wanted to go to Forest Hills Stadium to hear Joni Mitchell. As a gift, he bought tickets.

He was calm but not a pacifist. He told me a story once. A man he was arguing with spit in his face, so David had no choice but to take out his pistol, because he was going to kill him. When the man ran from the shop for his life, David ran after him shooting. David contended that he was temporarily insane. He had to apologize to Sonny Carson, as in “The Education of . . .,” and all the Carson brothers when they came to talk to him about why on earth the bullet from his gun grazed their father’s hand. The only thing that saved David was when he told them a man had spit on him. Coming as they did from Black America, the Carsons were very understanding about why David would want to shoot the man.

The Carsons shook his hand, made jokes about his aim, and forgot about it.  I don’t know how it is outside of the Black American world, but I will tell you right here, right now that spitting on someone is the same as shooting them with a gun. According to Black folks, it’s like, “Im’a have to kill you now.” If you don’t kill the person you spit on, you better run for your life, because they are surely going to kill you. And that is all there is to it. I hyperbole not.

Early 80s. In the back of his shop on a Sunday morning in April. I could have been there. I could have been there, visiting with David that morning, because I went by early to see how he was. But before I walked over, I called. When the phone was answered, I thought that David had picked it up in a semi-sleep state, been too tired to speak, so let it fall to the floor. I called back. The line was busy. I decided to go over.

The boulevard was quiet. At that time of day the people most likely to be seen were churchgoers on their way to service, and people who liked to get up early to get their Sunday papers, especially the Times, because that sold out quickly.

I knocked on the glass door of the shop, which had the kind of lock that could be opened with a key from the inside as well as the outside. I could have been there. His keys were in the inside lock. I peered into the shop, knocking again. Through the two-way mirror that hung at the back of the shop from Fisher’s days, I could tell that there was a light burning in the back room, the door to which stood slightly ajar. I stood there a moment. Thought I heard him say, “You’re not going to let me answer my own door?” I thought he was back there arguing with Maureen, who may have been giving him a hard time about seeing me, seeing others. I was ashamed. I did not want to stir up any more trouble.

A little later, I stopped at the shop again on my way to visit a friend. The light was off in the back room. There were no keys in the door. The door to the back room was closed up tight.

A man came from around the corner near the alley. He was not a churchgoer. He did not have a paper or buy one. Walked right up on me, said, “Good morning. And how are you today?” He was in my physical space as though he owned it, and could remove me from it anytime he felt. I smiled, responded “Fine. How are you doing?” like a little coquette. An ever so subtle shift in his mouth made it meaner, disgusted.  Looked like he thought he had spit on better whores than me. Instead of answering, he looked at me dead in my eyes, then walked toward a car that had pulled up at the curb.

“Take care of yourself,” he said, as he got in. They pulled away slowly, made a right at the corner. I continued on, trying to figure out who the hell he was.

When I got home that evening, my grandmother told me they found David dead in the back room and the detectives were looking for me, because I was a prominent character in his diary.

He was tortured. Eleven stab wounds within the space of two inches on the left side of his chest. I could have been there.  He cancelled our tryst. They were superficial puncture wounds. Not deep at all. I could have been there. When we spoke he said I’ll see you tomorrow. Shot five times in the chest. I could have been there.

These twenty-six years later, I think that his killers knocked the phone out of his hand and disconnected the call, because they had already decided his fate. Just like that. Men to men. Choosing whether another was to live or die.

His father offered a reward. Nobody who knew anything said a word. If I had called the police when things seemed strange to me that morning, maybe David would have lived to see the son that Maureen–the woman who loved him obsessively–was carrying.

After the funeral, I gave Maureen Nikki Giovanni’s poem, “The Women Gather.” I copied it in longhand onto pretty stationery:  “the women gather strangers to each other/because they have loved a man.” Folded inside of the paper was money. When she opened the envelope, she placed the money into her pocket, glanced at the writing scrawled across the page, looked at me, then looked away.

“Who could have done it? Do you know?”

“I don’t know, Moe.”

“Don’t call me that. That was David’s name for me,” she said and a depth of pain arose in her eyes.

David was the only full-grown man. There are more Black young men that I knew that never got to 18, 25, 30. In the same way that I could continue the litany and go on to describe the lives of the others, there are other Black women, who remember their brothers, lovers, sons, cousins. The men that never were.

When one lives an oppressed life, one carries the oppression on even when striving to surmount it. When one lives an oppressed life, one’s children absorb it somehow or another, and it stains the cultural memory, altering the psychology in complex ways. Of course not every little thing is caused by racism, but the question I have is at what point does the collective heart rend irreparably from it?  At what point are we justified in asking people to take it like a man? To take it like a woman? To take it?

– Karen D. Taylor received a master of fine arts degree in Creative Nonfiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She was a finalist in Narrative Magazine’s 2012 Story Contest. As an adjunct professor of English at the College of New Rochelle, she taught Freshman Composition; and for many years, she has been a manipulator of words, serving as managing editor for Amistad Press and Scholastic Books, production editor for Audubon Magazine and Taylor & Francis. She is a jazz singer, who has appeared at the Schomburg Women In Jazz Festival, as well as at various venues in the northeast. She has two sons, Chenzira Imani Malcolm Taylor-Lewis and Siyaka Paul Taylor-Lewis. 

– Reviewed by Abby Raskin

Before I reached double-digits, I was a budding pessimist. Figuring their matrimonial
bond-breaking a sort of cosmic irony brought on by the suburban gods in an effort to
rustle up some privileged-kid feathers, my parents’ divorce jaded me.

It also brought me double vacations.

At the time, my parents’ insistence on double-booking trips in the name of parental equality felt incredibly exhausting, and in my mind, their compulsion to spread my time so thin was simply inexplicable and borderline control-freakish. The earliest post-divorce jaunt I remember was dad’s turn and it arrived during the height of my pre-preteen angst. Barely old enough to read, I squinted to make out the three words sketched in curly blue font across the pastel T-shirt of an overweight waterslide operator in the Wisconsin Dells: “Life is good.” I muttered to myself the six year-old version of “you’ve got to be fucking kidding me” as I plunged stumpy, cynical legs-first into the beautifuldarktwisted tube. Forming an L-shape with my torso and clenching my eyelids together, I crossed my fingers in hope for a Waterslide to Nowhere.

While I’ve managed to keep a few gratuitous handfuls of good old fashioned, woe-is-me pessimism within reach, my twentysomething outlook is considerably more hopeful (and considerably less narcissistic, I hope) than that of my earliest years.

So when I first learned the title of Nas’ new album, his tenth total and first in four years, I didn’t bear any visceral resentment toward the three-word phrase in the way I once did. Nas’ Life is Good, not much unlike his debut Illmatic, invites listeners to actively—and at times, counterintuitively—choose optimism.

Launching Life through the eyes of a hungry, hustling younger Nasir Jones, “No Introduction” sets the stage for an album comprised of the hazy dotted lines between past Nas and present Nas, between son Nas and father Nas, between “hood” Nas and “civilized” Nas, between Ether Nas and heartbroken Nas. Nas the Celebrity confides his biggest secrets to us—well aware that we probably already know them. His lyrics, sometimes violently so, serve as testimony to the consistencies and inconsistencies in how he lives and loves.

Revealed my life/You will forgive me, you will love me, hate me, judge me, relate to me

Life’s opening beats and rhymes coalesce into a sort of nostalgic force-field that surrounds the rest of the album. Over the course of its 14 tracks, Nas shouts out some of hip-hop’s most formative players, from Biggie (“No Introduction”), to Slick Rick (“Loco-Motive”), to E-Money (“A Queens Story”), to Eric B (“You Wouldn’t Understand”), to MC Shan (“Back When”), and finally, the late Heavy D (“The Don”). The air of nostalgia is carried by the samples as well; Rather seamlessly, Nas integrates the work of Run-DMC, Eric B & Rakim, Super Cat, MC Shan, New Edition, Miles Jaye, and Isaac Hayes, to name a few. Lyrically, he looks to the past perhaps most clearly in the final verse of the third track, “A Queens Story,” as he laments the role money has come to play in the death of his peers (“cash corrupts the loyal”), his present voice rhetorically wondering where all the hustlers went.

As the album progresses, his brashly honest take-me-or-leave-me (“either you’re laughing at me or you’re laughing with me, ha”) approach becomes nearly impossible not to take. Though his verses narrate tales of struggle, the sincerity by which Nas reveals and relives those hardships, the fluidity by which he launches himself and listeners into and out of old and new imaginations and reimaginations of Nas and Nasir Bin Olu Dara Jones, all breathe life into the album’s deceptively simple title.  Nas’ personal growth becomes embodied by his daughter Destiny in the track “Daughters” as he reconciles the reality of his own flawed past with the mistakes of his daughter, hoping to both empathize this time and do better next time.

They say the coolest playas and foulest heartbreakers in the world/God get’s us back, he makes us have precious little girls

But despite a collection of tracks that, like “Daughters,” both entertain and edify, the album doesn’t fall short of a few cheap shots at women. On “Summer on Smash,” in particular, Nas and Miguel’s verses are coated in little more than bad ass bitches, champagne (wishes), freaks and bathing suits on a yacht.

She’s fly; Black, Asian, Boriqua/Italian, mixed chicks, Middle Eastern/Eritrean, Ethiopian, how you opening. 

Even so, the presence of female vocalists, from the powerful R&B flow of Mary J. on “Reach Out” to the honeyed neosoul hooks of Victoria Monet on “You Wouldn’t Understand”—is felt.  The posthumous and penultimate track “Cherry Wine” summons the retrograde crooning and scatting of Amy Winehouse, forming a syncopated hide-and-seek number between lost soul mates. The song is primarily carried by Winehouse and may even be the highlight of the album.

Where is he/The man who is just like me/ I heard he was hiding somewhere I can’t see …Your smile put me at ease/You’re the woman I need but where is she?

The final track “Bye Baby” is a reflection on the love he once felt for his ex-wife, a thoughtful sequence of verses all at once accusatory, loving and complacent.

You screaming at the racist cops in Miami was probably/The highlight of my life/…Just another day in the life of two people in love/But it wasn’t enough

At moments, Life is Good seems to function as little more than a confessional for all the rapper’s secrets everyone already knows: he and Kelis divorced. His teenage daughter Instagrammed her collection of rubbers. He owes money to the IRS. He sleeps around a little. He smokes weed (a lot). Keenly self-aware of the limitations to “revealing” the life of Inner Nas in light of (and perhaps in spite of) Celebrity Nas, his lyrics manage, painstakingly and beautifully, to evoke moments of one-on-one intimacy with the figure’s mostly public life. It speaks to a (maybe) collective inclination to retreat toward pessimism and cover-up in moments of embarrassment or struggle or regret—but whether his pseudo-confessions are merely a symptom of fame or are evidence of some of the most complicated relationships he’ll ever have to divorce or parent, Life is Good compels listeners to compassionately, optimistically—and maybe even publically—reckon with our imperfect parents, selves, daughters, and husbands.

Put simply: Nas’ tenth offering serves as a reminder that whether your struggles seem as small and straightforward as a parent who loves you too much, or as big and complex as a water-slide, that in the end, you can always pull your head above water.

Life is good, no matter what.

– Abby Raskin  was born in Chicago and is a 2011 graduate of Vassar College, where she majored in International Studies and wrote a senior thesis titled “Rapping the Diaspora: Constructing and Deconstructing Narratives of Haitian Rap Artists Living in the United States.” She is currently working at a nonprofit in New York and lives in Harlem with her 7.5-pound dog. She can be contacted at abbyraskin@gmail.com.

I haven’t been this happy-sad in a long long time.

It’s eerie that Professor James Peterson is here addressing this particular group of Vassar graduates today. James and I have been deeply invested in each other’s work on Hip Hop, race, geography and gender for a while. But it wasn’t until last semester that James finally made time for a group of us to sit down and build. A few months later, James wrote an essay in the Huffington Post called “Occupy the Academy.”

“We have to Occupy the Academy,” James wrote, ” — transform the ivory tower from its traditional gothic structure — featuring racism, sexism, classism, and ism-ism — into a more malleable structure, where ideas can live and breathe. The Academy must be a place where respect for peace, equality and humanity is an absolute given.”

James’s essay charged those of us inside institutions like Vassar with the work of occupying the possibilities of “real” academic life and reckoning with our history. “Reckoning,” that wonderful worn blue-black word, is a word that this Class of 2012 uses more than any class I’ve taught at Vassar. And since you, Class of 2012, decided to call this Baccalaureate service, “Revelations in a Broadening Sky: Reckoning With Our Past,” it’s only right that we do some reckoning, some reveling and maybe even some occupying  in this chapel today. You taught me, in word and deed, that reckoning and reveling only begin with reluctant acceptance of those hard and soft truths.

So here are a few hard truths:

Class of 2012, you have spent the last four years of your life living in a lush state park, with fat curious squirrels, gregarious gallivanting white people and free gym memberships.

Your Vassar ID has gotten you endless smoothies at UpC, free admission to concerts, plays, stanky Mug nights and access to one of the most beautiful libraries on earth.

Your job for the last 4 years has been to imitate, interrogate and innovate. You’ve had professors listen to and/or read every last one of those imitations, interrogations and innovations, often cleaning up the messiness of it all when you were done. When you had papers due for those professors, you sometimes created fiction in the form of emails that said in caps:

“DEAR PROFESSOR LAYMON, MY COMPUTER CRASHED AGAIN! CIS IS TRYING TO RETRIEVE MY PAPERS BUT THEY’VE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE THIS. BEST …”

Or:

“KIESE, I REALLY NEED THAT EXTENSION. HOOK ME UP? BEST …”

Or:

“DEAR PROFESSOR KIESE,  DID YOU GET THE MESSAGE FROM BALDWIN ABOUT MY CONCUSSION, MY FRACTURED FIBULA, MY RUPTURED PELVIS LAST WEEK? NOT SURE IF YOU DID SINCE I DIDN’T HEAR BACK FROM YOU.  ANYWAY, I’M JUST GETTING OVER AN EYE TRANSPLANT THIS MORNING. SO I CAN’T MAKE IT TO CLASS TODAY EITHER. THANKS FOR UNDERSTANDING. SEE YOU THURSDAY. BEST …”

You have updated facebook and twitter statuses in the middle of class and shamelessly finished papers that were due at 9:00 Tuesday morning by 12:00 noon Wednesday.

You have had captivated audiences watching and clapping as you danced, sang, rapped, recited poetry, made speeches and led marches. You have had administrators slap you on the wrist for smoking lord knows what, popping lord knows what, drinking lord knows what and breaking lord knows what.

You entered Vassar as President Barack Obama beat John McCain into All-American dust. As first year students, you filled the Quad that November night and hoisted up cardboard versions of our President Elect, screaming loud as you could, “No more Bush! No more Iraq. No more white lies. My President is black!”

Four years later, many of you took off all your clothes and sprinted butt-naked through that same quad while hundreds of underclasspeople cheered rabidly like drooling spectators at the Hunger Games. And after that public butt-naked sprint, or jog, or skip, you weren’t arrested. You put your clothes back on and went right to the library to work on those innovative final papers.

We must accept that this sanctioned free-spiritedness has been part of your Vassar life, part of your life in the academy. And this part of your life is why many of your families, professors and friends have said you’ve spent the last 4 years of your life outside the real world. In your most cynical moments, you’ve agreed, too. “I know this ain’t real,” some of you have told me. “What’s real about Vassar?” you’ve asked yourself over and over again. However, part of reckoning, you’ve taught us, is not simply lingering in the creases of questions you’ve asked a millions times, but having the imagination and toughness to tweak those questions just a bit in order to occupy what my Baldwin called “rugged truth.”

So our tweaked question for today is:

Vassar College Class of 2012, have you done enough with your time at Vassar to reveal more real transformative possibilities for the real students coming after you?

I’d like to argue that the answer to that tweaked question, Class of 2012, — is undeniably yes.

In addition to everything I said earlier, many of you really fell in and/or out of love at Vassar. Some of you have had to really deal with brothers, sisters, first cousins getting locked up in the prison industrial complex. Some of you have studied here while draconian immigration policies really made life at home tenuous and unpredictable. You’ve pushed on at Vassar, despite the passing of a mother, a father, a grandparent, a sister or brother who was really your life’s anchor. You’ve negotiated the mangled psychological state of being perceived not as “normal” Vassar students, but as a homogenous blob that some reactionary fools really call “Vassar diversity.” Many of you have had to deal with some professors, administrators and students no more equipped to respect and understand from whence you came than they would be if you were big-headed aliens descending from Planet Grape Drank.

All of you really came into Vassar as a recession melted away 5 million American jobs, widening an already wide economic gap between those with plenty and those with little. And you know personally that the black and brown of our nation, felt it more acutely as our net worth fail to less than 40 times the net worth of white Americans. In addition to the recession’s real impact on the lives of workers at Vassar, a number of you felt the recession most profoundly in the voices and experiences of your parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents who lost their jobs, lost their retirements or had their hours cut in half.

While other academic institutions made substantial cowardly cuts to their student aid contribution and many Americans corporations have, to this day, opted to keep trillions of dollars on the sideline, you really encouraged Vassar to reckon with its mission and commit to finding and funding students in need, no matter what. You reminded faculty that while all of us at Vassar would like higher salaries for less work (our own different kind of grade inflation), we are in the business of dutifully serving, educating and transforming students, by any means necessary.

In doing all of this work, you really stepped to the center of this college and made affirmations of our dignity part of your work at Vassar.  And you did it not simply by being excellent in your classes (which is so important); you did it also by leaning heart first into conflict, and most important, by leaning lovingly onto each other while really insisting that Vassar perform a bit of institutional revision.

And we know it was hard. When no one at Vassar imagined a little black girl from Plant City, Florida really becoming student body president, y’all imagined it. When no one at Vassar really imagined an a cappella gospel group at Vassar bringing that necessary soul, y’all imagined it. When no one at Vassar really imagined sustainable ways of connecting with the alums whose work made your presence here possible, y’all imagined it. When folks really doubted the viability of healthy reciprocal relationships with kids in the city of Poughkeepsie, y’all imagined it. When folks really doubted your ability to make it as doctors, artists, teachers, urban planners, y’all persisted and began carving out your own route to wonder.

I’m not sure when, but at some point, you knew that those 34 black female students didn’t Occupy Main building in 1969 just so you could just be “regular” Vassar students.

At some point, you knew that Jade Keith didn’t get suspended two years for defending her mother, then come back and earn Phi Beta Kappa in 2005 so you could just be regular Vassar students.

Tierra, Victor, Folayemi and Adam weren’t targeted by white supremacists in 2005-2006 so you could come to Vassar and sleep through class.

Rachel Tetteh wasn’t thrown in jail for jay-walking in the town of Poughkeepsie in 2007 so you could bite your tongue when you had something to say.

Kendall Coleman, Leona Brannon, Torrie Williams didn’t reckon with the backlash of a noose found in Jewett in 2008 so you could wait for the administration to fix problems.

Paula Madison and her family didn’t give all that time and money to enhance life for Vassar’s African and African American students just so you could chill and excuse terrible decision-making with hollow utterances of YOLO.

Yes, these Vassar alums did all of this so you could be left alone, but they also hoped that you too would do your part to creatively occupy and institutionally renovate this place for folks coming after you in even more imaginative ways than they did. Really, they knew that occupation and institutional renovation were part of what made their Vassar experience so rich.

You listened to their narratives, reckoned with their narratives, and in refusing to be a marginal, mediocre, debilitatingly depressed or pacified, you continued the revelatory work they started of occupying Vassar.

I talked to one of your parents a few weeks ago and he honestly told me that he regretted sending his daughter here. “It hasn’t been the nurturing place we wanted for our daughter,” he said.  While I could hear the sincerity and anxiety in his voice, I wanted to really assure him that his daughter would be fine, great even. I wanted your father to know that there was no way this critical mass of students, faculty and administrators were going to let what he feared happen to his daughter happen. But the more I listened, and reckoned with our conversation, I understood that just because I’d taught and cared for his daughter for four years, it didn’t mean that I had a clue what it was like to worry about the psychological, soulful, intellectual and physical health of his child from thousands of miles away.

As I look down at you and feel so much sadness and thankfulness at how you’ve changed this place, I need to reckon with the fact that though you are our students and our family, you are the child and the work of somebody in this chapel. Personally, it’s hard for me to see you as someone’s child not just because I met most of you when you were 18, but also because you maturely reached out to me when I had my face down in the bottom of a well. When I was diagnosed with a shitty illness a few years ago, you were there for me. Last year, when I felt I needed to scrap with some professional cowards who got caught cheating, you let me know you had my back without ever saying a word. When the Poughkeepsie police stopped me in one of your neighborhoods convinced I’d stolen a raggedy blue Kia, one of you saw me from the window of your apartment and ran out there to make sure I was all good. Most importantly, when I have lied, manipulated and given back the biggest blessing of my life, you showed me that there is no meaningful love without honesty, and meaningful love of all kinds requires a wide open heart with plenty of colorful room to breathe.

And I’m sure you’ve done the same for other faculty, underclass people and administrators in this chapel today. So the hard truth we’re reckoning with today is that it has always been hard for us to see the “child” in you these past four years.

But you are, and forever will be, a child of your parents, grand parents, god-parents. As clichéd as it sounds, everyone in this chapel is somebody’s child. Cappy is somebody’s child. Chris is somebody’s child. James is somebody’s child. Jon is somebody’s child. I am somebody’s child. And sadly, our parents and grandparents — who are also somebody’s child — don’t get a Baccalaureate celebration or an ample tribute, though they probably need it more than us.

If you don’t know it now, you will know it soon that four years is four years. When I finally graduated college, my mother had gained a good amount of weight and my grandma seemed to have lost about forty. The skin under my Mama’s eyes was worn like a deflated burnt football. Mama had grown less patient from dealing with her own life and worrying about the life I was living miles away. Grandma, who once to seem like she was 7 feet tall and the thickest Grandma in all of Central Mississippi, seemed to now be tiny as a beautiful troll and narrow as a beanstalk. I kept asking myself the day after graduation what happened to Mama and Grandma. I understood much later that the answer was four years. Four years happen to them. I was too self-absorbed in school to realize that the intense four-year change that happened to me was happening to my mother, my grandmother, my village too.

Tomorrow, when your experience as a Vassar student is finally dead, and everyone is telling you how proud they are of you, I want you to linger in the eyes, voice and stories of at least one person in your family. Reckon with them. Revel in their stories. Allow them and their lives to consciously occupy you. And if your family members have passed, get on your knees and listen to them. Occupy their point of view. Listen to them share, in their own way, their desire to reckon and revel too.

So that’s it.

We all know that people, like experiences, die. We all know that people, like experiences, should be mourned, eulogized, accepted. But work, when its done in the service of those coming after you, must be honored. So, to all the parents, aunties, uncles, godmothers, grandma’s and grandfathers in here today, we want to say thank for trusting us with your most precious work, your child. We are institutionally and individually forever indebted to your trust.

To the Class of 2012, on behalf of the teachers, administrators, staff and underclasspeople of Vassar College, we are absolutely heartbroken that you are leaving us, but we are better because of your reckoning, your reveling. Thank you for allowing us to love you. Thank you for loving us.

Thank you for your occupation …

Kiese Laymon is the author of  Long Division and How To Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America.

In 2001, I ate my first dinner alone in an airplane to LA. Also in the plane, I sat next to a white person for the first time. At LAX I talked to a black person for the first time at customs. He asked me a question which I think was “where are you coming from?” He answered it himself with “Korea, right?” after asking me the question four or five times. I was eight at the time and I had just left my family in Korea to live with my mom’s friend, Mrs. Engel, in LA.

Mrs. Engel had a big house. I had never seen a Volvo or a garage before. I walked into a house with three bathrooms for the first time. I saw a backyard for the first time. Then I met Mrs. Engel’s son Billy. Billy was three years older than me, was 5 ’10, and weighed 220 pounds. He only spoke English when I couldn’t even spell my own name (a new, pronounceable American name that my dad made up on spot and told me over the phone that night – and which I wrote down as Daveid). He had a CD collection of 400, with every Zeppelin and Beatles album, handed down from his dad. At the time, I thought Madonna was an actress and Nirvana was a mental state.

Billy was determined to teach me how to “be American.” He taught me how to ride a bike, what clothing brands I should wear, and what TV shows were cool. He took me to a movie theater for the first time (to watch Ice Age), showed me my first PlayStation game (Frogger 2: Swampy’s Revenge), bought me my first album (Good Charlotte’s The Young and the Hopeless), showed me my first nude picture (a fake Britney Spears one), and taught me the “seven bad words” in order of intensity (ass-1, fuck-7). He then taught me my first Asian jokes.

At Desert Christian, Billy and I were the only Asians in our classes. There were less than sixty kids in each grade and only about five of us were kids of colors. Billy was the funny Asian guy in his class and when I became fluent in English, I took his character to my class. We could make these jokes, because, essentially, we didn’t see ourselves as the Asians we were putting down. We weren’t small, squinty-eyed, dog-eating, glass-wearing, afraid-of-family-dishonoring Asians. We spoke without accents or bad grammar mistakes, had white friends and girlfriends, went to a conservative Baptist church in a suit and tie, and could parallel park on our first try. Or at least within three tries. We attributed racial identity to characteristics and behaviors instead of our background and heritage.

But the jokes worked. When we said them, there was always a response. Kids cracked up. We knew they wanted to hear them, but just didn’t feel appropriate to say it themselves. So we brought the jokes into our everyday conversation. Eventually, we made it okay, not only for ourselves, but also for our friends to say any derogatory and offensive thing about Asians or any other races, and be ok with it. We invited them in to share our language. Soon, Clayton, the only black guy in my class, started a series of black jokes. He also started referring to himself as “the only black guy in this class.” Solomon started doing it with Hispanics, and Stephanie, a shy Chinese girl who came to Desert Christian in fifth grade, started doing it too. We made race our foremost attribute and identifier, because we felt, in this environment, it was the most apparent. No one in this school would refer to us as “that nice guy” or “that tall guy” before saying “that Asian/black/Mexican guy.” In a way, it was our desperate attempt of not letting race wholly define us. We tried to distance ourselves as far as we could from the common stereotypes by speaking adversely of them on a casual basis. We behaved as if it didn’t offend us, because we weren’t them. Even if we were secretly offended, we hid under more offensive language and slur in the fear of being that sensitive guy who couldn’t take a joke. We couldn’t afford to be seen as the Asians, blacks or Mexicans we were degrading.

One day, in Mrs. Blanchard’s English class, we had an in-class spelling bee. In the first round, Jimmy, my best friend at the time, had to spell “restaurant.”

“R-E-S-T-I-don’t know,” he said. I laughed at him.

My turn.

“Spell sycamore,” said Mrs.B.

“S-I-C-A-M-O-R-E, sica-more,” I said it without any pauses between letters to show I was extra-confident. I looked at Jimmy and gave him a smirk.

“Wrong. S-Y, not S-I,” said Mrs.B.

“Ha! Ha!! Stupid Asian!” said Jimmy. Those of us used to this language – Jimmy, me, and the kids around us – all laughed.

But not Mrs. B.

Instead, she ordered Jimmy to go to Mr. Roseborough’s office. Fifteen minutes later, Mr. Roseborough, our principal, called me in as well. When I walked in, Jimmy sat with a pink half-sheet of paper in his hand, meaning that he got a referral and at least a lunch detention. “Sorry, you know I didn’t mean it like that,” I remember Jimmy saying to me.

I felt bad for Jimmy. I felt something here was my fault and I needed to get him out of it. “I don’t even care Mr. Roseborough. . . It’s just a joke. Why do you care when I don’t?” I asked him.

“It’s not just you,” said Mr. Roseborough.  “It’s the language.”

On our way back to class, we made as many bad comments about Mr. Roseborough as we could in our three minute walk. We talked about his high-pitched voice, his ever-seriousness, his “right guys? mmhm?s” and labeled him with words 1 through 7.

But later that day, Jimmy apologized for the second and third time.

Few months later, in an unrelated incident, I got a call from mom telling me to come back home. She told me that she and dad have been thinking about me and that they missed me. “If you go to college, get a job, and get married in the states, we might never live together,” she said. She was right. It’s been four years since I lived with my family and I missed living with them too. I agreed to move back and she told me I could go to an international school in Seoul. And if I wanted, I could go back later. So I got on the plane to Seoul in 2006 and I never saw Billy, Jimmy, Mrs. B or Mr. Rosebourgh again.

Fast forward two years.

It is now 2008 and I’ve moved again, this time from Seoul to Texas. I’m with a new family, with new friends, and in a big public high school with a large Hispanic population. It’s been two years and counting since I told an Asian joke and a year since Kanye dropped Graduation. I’ve been slowly getting into hip-hop, one song at a time, one album at a time. One day, while browsing through YouTube, I found Wale’s “Kramer” that started off with the following voice clip:

“Fifty years ago we’d have you upside down with a fucking fork up your ass! You can talk, you can talk, you’re brave now, motherfucker. He’s a nigger! A nigger, look there’s a nigger!”

After hearing that, I refused to believe it was a real voice clip from a real person. I refused to believe it, because I refused to believe that we still live in a racist society. But I had a bad feeling it was real.

And it was.

I watched Michael Richards, better known as Kramer from Seinfeld, apologize on Letterman for the remarks he made to black hecklers in a comedy club. Appearing clearly distraught, he said “I’m not a racist, that’s what’s so insane about this. And yet, it’s said. It comes through, it fires out of me.” I believed him, but I wasn’t sure if I was even offended in the first place. I wasn’t sure if I was receiving an apology or if I should be giving an apology. I didn’t think I was the group he tried to offend nor did I think I was the guy who was being racist. I never even considered that I could be both.

Fast forward three more years to 2011. It’s been almost ten years since I decided that I didn’t like hip-hop (after listening to “In da Club”) and ten years since I secretly liked hip-hop (since “Lose Yourself.”) Since then, I went from listening to songs to listening to albums, albums to artists, and in some cases, even artists to labels. But after finally admitting that I loved hip-hop, I realized that I had to defend it from other friends who didn’t love it. Unlike any other genre, hip-hop needed to be defended. I had to defend why it was music, why it was art, and why it isn’t all that misogynistic and violent. So I would mention “Renegade,” “99 Problems,” and “The Kramer.” But in the midst of that, I became too defensive and stopped questioning it myself. I somehow just accepted that that was hip-hop. I accepted it as “just entertainment” and shrugged off any accusations against hip-hop as “people being too sensitive.”

When I saw “Hip-hop and Critical Citizenship” in the Vassar College course catalog, I decided to take it before reading the course description. I read that the aim was to get students to accept hip-hop and its culture not as “a cool art form” but as “a meaningful American text, complete with . . . signifiers of class, race, gender, citizenship, and identity.” I wasn’t convinced. Instead, I thought about how the description of this course was at least four times longer than any other course descriptions. I wondered if that length and detail was what hip-hop and this class needed to be considered as a serious and meaningful American text and art to those who didn’t love hip-hop.

The first full album we listened for the class was Ice Cube’s Death Certificate. When we discussed “Horny Little Devil” in class, there was a discussion about who Ice Cube was addressing and if we thought he was addressing us as well. No one in the class thought they were being addressed by Ice Cube, because they weren’t “barbaric, uncontrollable, obstinate beast” mentioned in the song. But when I heard that song, I tuned out as soon as I heard “she don’t like white men.” I listened to the song as an audience, never even doubting I could be the victim or the aggressor. I treated most of the songs on the album with a similar attitude until I heard the forty-six second long Black Korea. I didn’t see myself as the Asian store owner in the song, but I felt like I was addressed. It was the first song that forced me to acknowledge, refute, and be a participant. It had me thinking. It had me thinking about my place in hip-hop and hip-hop’s place in my life. With seventeen other people who loved hip-hop in the class, I didn’t have to defend it anymore. We did more attacking than defending and asked questions we formerly answered with “that’s hip-hop.” I thought about race, gender, class, language, and relationships through hip-hop. But more than anything, I thought about me, what I really believe, and what I value.

So when Rick Ross released “You the Boss” and “I Love My Bitches,” I felt good about myself for not being able to sit through either of the songs. I listened to Nicki Minaj whisper “I’ll do anything you say cus you the boss,” and repeat “you the boss” for the seventh, eighth, and the ninth time. Each repetition became more disturbing than the last, because it just seemed to confirm and ruthlessly reconfirm the helpless compliance. Then I moved on to “I Love My Bitches,” in which the chorus repeats “Aww man, I love my bitches.” After the chorus, I turned the song off. I treated it as if my immunization to misogyny had worn off. I treated it as if I had reached a new moral and intellectual ground, sensitive and responsive to the degrading language. I smirked the way Bush did under the “Mission Accomplished” banner. I counted it as a small moral victory and a Critical-Citizenship-mission accomplished.

Then Drake released Take Care.

I was on my way to New York City to meet friends in NYU. On the train to Grand Central, I listened to Take Care for the first time. After my first run-through, I thought about Rihanna’s voice that seems to be on every recent release. Then I thought about André 3000’s that I have heard so little of recently. I got off at Grand Central and as I walked towards the subway, I thought of the verses “Bitch I’m the man” and “Fuck that nigga that you love so bad, I know you still think about the times we had.” By the time I got off at Union Square, I identified the songs with these lines and started singing along to it.

I thought about lines that bothered me: “Fame on my mind, girl on my nerves,” in Underground Kings, unmistakably patronizing “I’m so, I’m so, I’m so proud of you” in Make Me Proud, and “All those other men were practices” in Practice. I felt good about myself for recognizing them and then I remembered lines like “Girl I can’t lie, I miss you. You and the music were the only things that I’d commit to.” I remembered those Star Wars-y lines like “may the trouble neglect you, angels protect you.”

I think it’s good, then I think it’s fucked up, then I think it’s great.

Two days later, I left NYC and headed back to Poughkeepsie. When I arrived at Poughkeepsie Station, I realized that I didn’t have a ride, didn’t know a cab number, and that the buses stopped running. Just then, a cab appeared from the opposite corner of the street and stopped in front of me. “Did you call a cab?” the cab driver asked.

I saw some people standing around down the street so I assumed that they called the cap. “No,” I replied as I pointed down the street. “They probably did.”

“Ok. Get in,” the cab driver replied.

I wasn’t sure if he just heard me wrong, but I needed to go back to campus so I just got in. As I tried to figure out what had just happened, the cab driver, a big white dude in his forties or fifties, told me that it would be seven dollars flat.

When the cab entered through the gates and drove up to the parking lot, we passed by a group of Vassar students walking on the road. “Man, when I was in school, I stayed in school. I didn’t wander around,” the cab driver said. “I swear I’m not a racist but. . .”

At this point, I was prepared for some racist comment about Asians, because I know that any sentence that starts with “I swear I’m not a racist but. . .” will be a racist one.

“But I swear it’s the blacks,” he said. “It’s because they don’t know what the fuck they wanna do with life.”

I handed him his seven dollars and cowardly stepped out without saying a word. I walked up to my room and replayed the conversation in my head over and over again. ‘Why did he think it was okay to say that me?’ ‘Why didn’t I say anything back?’ ‘And what the fuck is he doing with his life?’

‘But should I care if he’s not insulting me?’ ‘What if he was Asian or what if he said that about Asians?’

Then I thought of Jimmy. I thought of Kramer. I thought of Ice Cube.

I thought of Imani Perry who said that our twenty-first century conversations of race are “episodic responses to celebrity episodes.” She was right. Such conversations lay dormant and only explode in responses to individual episodes. I needed Jimmy, Kramer, Ice Cube, and this cab driver to confront racism. I needed shit to be right in my face to be able to confront them. Perry was also right when she said that such discourses also “prompt accusations the subjects of racist language are “too sensitive” or “can’t take a joke” because, after all, we aren’t really a racist society anymore.” According to Perry, such moments “leave us simply confused, angry, or self-satisfied (because we’re not like “that.”)” But we are. The worst in us are. And I am.

I thought about Drake. In “Shot for Me,” Drake tells his ex-lovers: “Bitch I’m the man, don’t you forget it.” Then he says that he made them what they are, from the way they walk and talk, to the way they dress. “First I made you who you are then I made it,” says Drake. I felt good about myself for not liking Rick Ross’s “You the Boss” and “I Love My Bitches” or Kanye West’s “Blame Game,” but I just couldn’t hate this song. I couldn’t even dislike it. Though I want to say that I’m not like “that,” the worst in me just wants to say “Bitch I’m the man. Don’t you forget it.”

I react to the sensual – Rihanna’s and Andre 3000’s voice, “Bitch I’m the man,” and “fuck that nigga that you love so bad” – before I even recognized the content. And even when I do, I allow some half-decent, nice-guy-sounding lines like “Girl I can’t lie, I miss you,” to justify and compromise with myself. Even when I recognize that, I still allow myself to say “its okay because you’re not that guy” or “don’t be so fucking lame.” When we discussed Kanye’s “Runaway” in Hip-Hop and Critical Citizenship class, I remember Meg saying that Pusha-T’s verse “killed the song” for her, because of its misogynistic content. But I couldn’t hate the song, for the same reasons that I can’t hate “Shot for me.”

Freddy loafers. Versace sofas. Young, rich, and tasteless. They just sounded too right. Too good.

It took Jimmy, Mrs. B, Kramer, Hip-Hop and Critical Citizenship, and that cab driver to even make me recognize it, but it took two songs to break it all down. I remembered Joe Biden describing Obama as “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” I’d like to think our society is equal for all races and genders and I’d like to think that we’re sometimes just being too sensitive. Like Kramer, I say I’m not a racist. I say I’m not misogynistic.

But sometimes it “fires out of me” as well. It constantly wants to. The racial and misogynistic narrative that we made acceptable in our conversations and songs is a part of us and is a part of me.

“Gettin’ brain from a bitch and thinkin’ “god damn, what’s her name?”Sometimes I just shake my head and tell myself this is a shame and then my other side kick in like, “bitch, don’t be so fuckin’ lame”-J. Cole, “Dollar and A Dream III”

It’s a part of me that just lies dormant and, even as I write this, makes that J. Cole line sound good. It’s too easy to say “bitch, don’t be so fuckin’ lame” and too hard to say no when it sounds so good.

I have to beat and force myself just to think about it. And I need reminders – constant reminders. I need hip-hop to force me to be a critical citizen.

“But in the meantime. . . It’s lights please.”

Actually. . . no. I need to not end this essay with another J. Cole line …

David Lee is a first-year student at Vassar College. 

“It’s partly American tradition of paranoia, and partly just plain old racism. Illegitimacy is the rule, not the exception. It’s the sort of thing that people come up with regularly when there are African-Americans operating at high levels.” — Professor William Jelani Cobb

A few weeks ago, Vassar’s Faculty Appointments and Salary Committee (FASC) recused itself from my tenure case.  As rumors of my “bullying President Hill to get FASC off of my tenure case” limp around campus, I figured I should make it clear what my responses to FASC have been.

In February, FASC (The Faculty Appointments and Salary Committee) made the unprecedented request of asking for “documentation” on one of my unredacted book contracts, though they had proof of a contract. After giving them the contract, I wrote the following email:

Dear FASC,

I’ve talked to a number of folks on campus about your request for “documentation” of my contract and Chair’s ——– assertion that s/he would indeed “redact personal information” on that book contract. My initial anger, sadness and dismay came from the fact that the entire contract is indeed personal information, which is why I included the signed document by my agency stating the that the contract with my publisher had been fully executed on September 19 2007. This documentation of contract has been more than okay in my other reviews.

It is beyond unprofessional and unethical for FASC to request and/or offer to “redact personal information” on my contract. No one on FASC, or in my department has any right to know how much my advance was, the insurance policy on the book, whether or not I own foreign rights, what I’ll be paid if I win awards, etc.

Your request for “documentation” of my contract was beyond troubling; it was insidiously disrespectful and sad. I submitted my contract to you out of fear and a desire to shut up anyone on FASC who didn’t believe the contract existed.

Chair ——’s initial request that I further document my contract suggests that FASC thought I was lying about the existence of a contract. I’m still curious why you needed to see the contract. What did it prove? Is this general tenure review procedure? What did you get from the contract that I didn’t explain in my portfolio and/or that my agency’s letter didn’t convey.

Most importantly, why did Chair ——- suggest that s/he, not I, redact “personal” information from the contract?  The burden of proof here seems incredibly
invasive, but the request by the Chair of FASC to edit out what s/he deems as “personal information” is more than infantilizing.

Though I am your junior colleague, I am not a child.

I’ve been through two major reviews at Vassar College. In my last review, I was granted the highest honor of distinction. In that review, I supplied my department
with the same “proof” of secure contract that I did in this review. I’ve signed two major publishing deals since I’ve been at Vassar … and  I literally explained and creatively explored this relationship (to my publisher) in my tenure portfolio. If my outside reviewers and my department deem the work mediocre, so be it. My instinct and
literary history tell me that that both sets of reviewers may actually speak to the wonder and possibilities in my work.

I love Vassar College and have worked generously to make it a better, most daring, compassionate and excellent institution, but please know that I choose to be here.
I’m not crawling to the finish line; nor am I crossing my fingers for tenure. I never thought of FASC as celestial gate-keepers who can ask for whatever they want from potential candidates.

Perhaps I was wrong.

Many of us junior people here have been offered jobs at other institutions but we choose to stay, frankly, because of our students, some of our colleagues and the institutional commitment to innovation and social justice. But make no mistake about it, Vassar is lucky to have us, and you as a committee are elected and granted the privilege of ethically reviewing our materials.

Vassar deserves better.

If any of you would like to speak, I look forward to it,

Kiese

After meeting with President Cappy Hill, who understood all my concerns and actually disagreed with the unprecedented request for unredacted contract, I met with a senior member of FASC. This senior member of FASC expressed that some members of FASC were upset with letter I’d written and that their asking for an unredacted contract, though unprecedented to his/her knowledge, was “not an abuse of power.”

A few weeks after my meeting with this senior committee member, my four anonymous outside review letters came in. All four overwhelmingly supported my candidacy for tenure. Similarly, Africana Studies submitted a letter recommending promotion with distinction and the English department voted 15-1 in favor of my promotion to tenured professor. 29 reviewers other than FASC reviewed my file and 28 of those folks reviewed me favorably. None of the other 29 reviewers asked for more personal financial information. After FASC got all of the outside review letters,  I found out that this same senior member of FASC who I met with earlier sent a link to the rest of other members of FASC questioning my graduation date from Graduate School. I found out after s/he mistakenly emailed one of my colleagues in the English department who was also up for tenure. After reading the “mistaken” correspondence, and knowing that my reviews inside and outside Vassar were on point, I wrote the following email to FASC:

To Whom it May Concern,

My colleague inadvertently received this email from —– —— today. I have no clue why you’re sending around a profile of me from Indiana University, but I can’t assume your intentions are good.

I’m going to ask you kindly one more time to please stop fucking with me. I mean that with sincerity and kindness.

Either you are incompetent or inconsiderate. Either way, you should think about stopping whatever you’re doing.

If you have a question, ask it. If it can’t be asked with grace and professionalism, maybe it shouldn’t be asked. My colleague should not be privy to the silly investigating reportage of FASC.

I’m not going to ask you again. Please stop fucking with me.

Kiese

Again, the President and Dean were supportive and understanding that something monumentally wrong had happen in this tenure process. Later that night, I received a perfunctory apology from the senior committee member who sent the suspect correspondence.

I responded with the following email,

“You’re a funny guy, ——. When the game is over, it’s okay to go home.”

A week or so later, I received an email from FASC that said,

“Dear Kiese,

FASC has decided to recuse itself in the case of Kiese Laymon.

Sincerely,”

This isn’t an essay. It’s simply an account of what I’ve said and done in response to what feels like a committee/country’s obsession with delegitimating extremely competent candidates and contributors of color.  I don’t know whether FASC recused themselves on their own or if they were forced to recuse themselves. I do know that this isn’t about me. It’s partially about the maniacal anxiety that bubbles up when awkward absolute power is no longer revered or accepted. Due diligence does not give anyone or any committee the right to invade privacy and/or consistently thwart procedure laid out by governance. Powerful, hard working committees like FASC can not be allowed to workout their “private investigatory skills” at our expense, especially when our files are excellent.

Though we love Vassar and we have become central to the college’s mission, Vassar didn’t save us and we subsequently don’t feel lucky to be here. We know Vassar is lucky to have us and if we are to make this place one of our homes, we must excellently engage in some institutional renovation.  Imani Perry writes, “The stress of feeling constantly called into question, constantly under surveillance, has emotional and physical consequences for us.”

Us.

Of course, Imani Perry is right. And of course, we’re tired of fighting for institutional renovation and communal integrity when there are so many bigger problems in the world. But we have to accept — especially when we perform with excellence — that this is ours. We are responsible to, and, for it. These are our institutions. We have to open these institutions to more of us and part of that opening means that we have to be excellent, public and persistent when we lay claim to dignity in spite of stress, depression, sadness, fear, physical, spirtitual and mental deterioration.

These public claims to dignity aren’t panaceas, but they are reminders to those in front and behind us that we are worthy, colorfully human and potentially beautiful practioners in the messy art of being human. Our public claims to dignity are prickly proof that this, in all its malignant wonder, is ours. It must be shared, changed and brilliantly loved

Ether.