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Outerlude Leaving the Emerald City I will end this book with, arguably, the place and time in which it really began. I take you back to circa 1990 when I was a college undergradu‑ ate. At this point, I was involved with youth community organizations in the neighboring community of East Palo Alto, about a forty‑minute walk away from campus. On one end was the college’s most famous and bril‑ liant architectural feature, which literally glows in the dark, as if maybe the designers really did mean for it to look like Oz (and I don’t mean the HBO series). Literally, at the other end, where mother nature somehow mysteriously stopped planting her splendidly and lavishly lined‑up march of palm trees, was East Palo Alto, a working‑class/working‑poor city of African Americans, Samoans, and Mexican Americans whose poverty seemed to exist as if solely to purpose a netherworld and opposite locus to the university campus. I walked up and down that street‑with‑the‑dis‑ appearing‑palm‑trees many times in the course of a week and did the unthinkable: I went to the netherworld, which always felt more like home, given my own working‑class/working‑poor background than the Emer‑ ald City of my university. Yet and still, as the new university subject, I was in East Palo Alto doing what could only be understood within the discursive operations of the university as “volunteer community work,” which was ironic to me given that when I lived in such communities, I do not remember us being marked with verbs and nouns such as “work,” especially during 1980s Reaganomics, nor was our presence there ever “voluntary.” On one particular day, I was wearing my standard attire for the hands‑on art classes I was teaching—paint‑stained sweats and T‑shirt, whatever was “cheapest” at the university bookstore, usually the older paraphernalia that the elite students decided was not in style and so didn’t 233 234 Vernacular Insurrections buy anymore. A woman who was strung out on drugs, showing all the telltale signs of crack cocaine addiction, ran up to me. She was frantic and was looking at my clothes, which would have been otherwise consid‑ ered “bummy” but which marked me, quite rightly, as an elite university student. She begged me, weeping frantically and yelling loudly, to adopt her child. I froze and stayed frozen until someone pulled her away from me. I don’t think I said a word for the rest of that day and when I did, I decided that I would be leaving college. The university had won. East Palo Alto was now officially the end of the line for me too. At this point in my undergraduate career, I had just recently met Sylvia Wynter, and I wanted to make sure that I said goodbye to her before I left the college. The conversation that I initially envisioned as a “goodbye” to her turned out quite differently. I did leave the university that day: I was never the same kind of theorist again. I told Professor Wynter that, as far as I was concerned, I had learned nothing but how to co‑construct corporate‑inspired versions of nonprofit organizations. After I graduated, I could ask corporate and/or philanthropic funders—people like my white, elite classmates who would be running these organizations—for money. I will add a reminder here: the names of the huge philanthropic organizations that have historically attempted to halt black education, the people whom I have talked about already in this book, the people Watkins has called “the white architects of black education,” literally bore the very same last names of some of the people in my classes and dorms. To say that my classmates would be the future funders, deciders, and demise of my nonprofit projects was in no way an exaggeration on my part. It was a logical conclusion that these people would decide the fate of the poor by controlling the organizations and economic mechanisms that “helped” them. Philanthropic giving, feeling good about helping the poor, and main‑ taining one’s wealth and status was the stuff we were being groomed for. Professor Wynter, as I realize later now that I am grown, got a kick out of this kind of questioning that I was always somehow speaking into existence. But most importantly, she gave it an intellectual frame and rigor that I hope still stays with me. In fact...

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