Mistake: I Got Hired As An Adjunct Professor—And Thought Everything Was Comin’ Up Eric

The Trump era was dawning. Colleges were hiring us on the cheap. My students disliked me, and I disliked them back

by

Eric Farwell

Season Categories Published
MP608 Personal History

Jan 03, 2023


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In my fifth year of adjunct teaching, I parked my car on one of the upper floors of my university’s student garage and willed my body to move. I had 15 minutes to get to a class. My students disliked me, and I disliked them back. That same semester, I had tried to harm myself by turning quickly into oncoming traffic outside the one university that treated me with respect and kindness. I didn’t want to die, but I wanted to hit pause on the misery of part-time collegial instruction.

Time ticked. I took a minute to cry and scream in my car while students with bored or smug faces ambled to class in my rear-view mirror. Then I grabbed my legs and hoisted them outside the car, and I made a compromise with myself: I would run 10 minutes late. I grabbed an accordion portfolio of what I hoped were the right essays, crossed my fingers I had graded all of them, popped an edible, and started the walk to the classroom.

My bleak journey began six years prior. After getting an English degree from a college of zero repute, I’d spent my next year depressed, drinking and trying to pass the time in between glasses and bottles. In those sober hours, I’d write bad poems and apply for jobs before ending up with a Craigslist job like “women’s self-defense practice body (padded costume included)” or “document shredder” that would promptly close, fire me, or some gray area between. After writing more bad poems and getting a Master’s in two years, the same pattern emerged, but with herbal tea and acid substituted in place of alcohol.

My friend and mentor at the time, Gordon, suggested adjunct teaching after seeing my spirit decline over a series of meetings in his humid office. He regaled me with tales from his own road to tenure, and I fell for it, imagining students standing to applaud me as I entered, the life-transforming lectures I’d deliver. It didn’t matter that it was part-time work. I was catching adjunct fever, and believed Gordon when he told me, “You could probably build up your CV and then get a full-time position at a community college in a year or two.” Leaving his office, I felt triumphant: I was becoming the person I was meant to be.


Adjunct faculty are part-time professors who have their contracts renewed semester to semester. They often teach full workloads despite being part-time. They earn lower wages than full-time nontenured faculty. Adjuncts make up more than 50 percent of all postsecondary instructors.

As Herb Childress details in The Adjunct Underclass: How America’s Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission, the number of students enrolled in America’s colleges and universities has more than doubled in the last 50 years. Full-time faculty hiring has roughly kept pace, from 370 thousand to 790 thousand. Yet the number of part-time faculty has increased sevenfold, from 105 thousand to 755 thousand     .

The rise of the adjunct reflects changing expectations of U.S. higher education institutions. As universities hired non-faculty staff to run the growing list of campus amenities, administrative costs swelled and administrators felt pressure to make cuts. With professors retiring, and graduate schools turning out large numbers of PhDs willing to teach a course or two, hiring non-tenure-track teaching faculty became increasingly appealing.

Against this backdrop, there I was one August, sweating in my suit in the air-conditioned comfort of a department head’s office, trying to sell myself. I needn’t have worried. The job was mine before I entered the building, the meeting a formality. I met with them for five minutes, and the only thing they said was: “You have an MA, which is great. Would you prefer to have two sections or three to teach?”

At orientation, I mingled with other adjuncts in their mid-20s in a marble-walled ballroom, all of us calculating our interest in sleeping with one another while retaining our professional veneer. Once we’d stopped making the smallest of talk, we sat at a long dark oak table in our Estée Lauder and J. Crew dress clothes and practiced grading essays that were better than anything we’d ever read from our actual students. Amid the hiss of pens marking up papers, I thought: I could do this no problem.

However, after completing the exercise and having our photos taken for the department website, we shuffled into a classroom for a seminar about designing syllabi. The talk mixed obvious information (you need to grade a minimum of three to four essays per student) and confusing jargon (the sliding scale of determining A and B+ grades) that had us all scribbling notes for follow-up email questions. By the time we left, the summer sun was high in the sky, and we went blinkered into the evening just as unsure about everything as when the day had started.   

On my first class one September morning, two-dozen fish-eyed students walked into the fireplaced former drawing room of a slave owner and took seats. When we shared our favorite musical artists, I was unprepared for a.) how long it would take, and b.) the students’ overwhelming love of the country duo Florida Georgia Line. We managed a simple discussion about music and a few pages of the syllabus in the 80-minute class. When the bell rang, I knew that I needed to be better with time management. I went to my car to get high and hoped a future me would figure out how to do that.


Unless I was hustling to teach eight sections of a comp or lit course, there was no such thing as making $50,000 a year, let alone 30. I made $2,400 for a section at a community college and $3,200 at a four-year institution. If I was very lucky, I might teach at a state college, making about $10,000 to teach six hours a week for four months—but that entailed eight or more hours of commuting each week.    

In my first semester, I found out that at one of the colleges I taught at, adjuncts weren’t paid until after they’d taught for two months. Standing in the bright sun, I paced between the literal former slave quarters that contained my office, and the white master’s former summer mansion where we held English courses, trying desperately to get someone from payroll on the phone. When I managed to get through and ask why we weren’t paid bi-weekly, I heard a tired sigh on the other end. The voice took a minute to compose itself before saying “Honestly, there are so many of y’all part-timers that we have no idea who ever is actually doing their job. We pay you this way so we have time to try and guess who is actually showing up to teach.” Later, when I called the same college for not paying me, the bursar gently explained that, this semester, adjuncts wouldn’t get paid until they’d taught for three months.

I applied for a full-time position with a community college that seemed to like and respect me enough to ask me to host workshops. I thought I would at least get an interview. I’d been toiling away there without complaint for three years. One of my best friends was on the hiring committee, and my faculty reviews were stellar. But in the end, I reached out to the department coordinator and learned I’d been tossed out with the other rubbish candidates. Over dinner, my friend confided that in the committee meeting, someone said “we should have someone with a PhD, but that person shouldn’t be, you know, an adjunct.” Sitting alone in my basement office, I began to realize just how much time I’d wasted teaching, and how disrespected and unimportant the adjunct caste is viewed in the eyes of college hiring committees. I looked out the small bay window across the room, watching it catch dust particles in a beam of light, and began to have a panic attack.


The one benefit to getting rejected is that it encouraged me to double down on pursuing the writing work for which I’d gotten my Master’s degree. As students whose names I didn’t bother to learn whiffed on turning in assignments, regarded me as a jester they could wave off, or treated me with unwarranted contempt, the frustration of the job continued to fester, calcifying into a need to publish as much as I could for the most prestigious titles I could. The intense spite that allowed me to white-knuckle through a semester was sated only by my ability to work on other things in between classes that would carry my byline and stand in digital ink as a “fuck you” to the blank stares I faced every day for 80 minutes or so at a time.

As an English adjunct, I was relegated to teaching the worst courses in the department: composition one and two, or literature one and two. These survey classes are the bread and butter of the department, ensuring funding keeps piping in, since every student has to take them.

I taught eight of these a week each semester and didn’t change my approach at all to cope with fatigue. I essentially lived in a rerun: I would take an edible, walk into a classroom with high energy, run ten minutes of warm-up where I tried to get students excited to learn about rhetorical arguments, and then… time would melt as I stood there, faux-smile plastered on my face, waiting for a group of students to share thoughts on MLK’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and its use of diction and argumentative tactics. Two hundred and forty sets of eyes all stared at me, blinking, confused, or bored. One dark-haired female student raised her hand to cut the tension of the awkward silence.

When it came time to grade, I doubled down on the THC gummies and mild psychedelics to combat the hopelessness of grading what were essentially 240 identical essays. I came up with a system of giving five comments per page, two consisting of the phrase “this is interesting,” and three critiques. I had two weeks to turn all essays around, and found myself grading in the morning, on the dashboard during long drives to and from each campus, and nights where I’d take the small green bottle a friend kindly put into my mailbox each week so I could microdose as a means of combating depression.

One semester, a white baseball player came into my office, frustrated with a grade. While I tried to stand my ground, he kept pushing me to change it. With each smack of his gum, I felt more pressure to just give in and shut him up. When I relented and gave him a C+, he smirked with crossed arms, but I figured there was no way to tell academic advising to add that to his file.

Another time, a loner student requested a higher grade, and I had to meet with a department council about the paper he’d turned in—which argued for the incarceration and deaths of Antifa supporters, the resegregation of school systems, and a new outlawing interracial marriage—to figure out how to handle it. The student’s family donated to the college, and thus it was decided I should meet with him in my office to let him down, explaining that his views were “interesting” but that the sourcing was an issue. “Change his grade to a B, but don’t go higher than that. You know, if you want to.”

You wouldn’t necessarily know it to look at me, but my family is largely Black. This—combined with the renaissance of Black entertainment and culture in the 1990s—shaped me in profound ways. Everyone I knew, regardless of race, was cheering on Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, whose psychic connection led the Bulls to victory time and time again. All of us packed cafeteria and gymnasium dances to awkwardly flail to Q-Tip rapping “Bonita Applebum,” DMX informing us we were going to make him “go all out, up in here,” Ms. Lauryn Hill singing us something beautiful and broken we weren’t ready to appreciate, and Mark Morrison bestowing “Return of the Mack,” one of the few true anthems we could carry from preteen to adulthood. We had Seinfeld, Friends, and George Carlin. But perhaps more importantly, we had Martin, The Bernie Mac Show, and Chris Rock. The day Aaliyah died was the first time I remember crying for anyone other than myself.

This is the context for the defining moment of my adjunct experience, which took place on November 9th, 2016, the day after Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency. Driving to my first class, I watched drivers get into arguments with one another. I myself had a brief altercation with a woman—not because there was a problem, but because we both had our hearts broken from seeing a crook beat someone with passion and experience, despite a long, slimy trail of assault, fraud, and tax avoidance.

I walked into class to find that the white students decided to arrange their desks in the back of the class, like a conspiratorial barricade, leaving Lisa, the best student in my class, and coincidentally the lone Black person, sitting in a row of one, crying as if in an art installation.

I don’t know what happened prior to my arrival, but for the next 80 minutes, the election result weighed heavily in the classroom. While my white students were noticeably emboldened by the news, folding their arms and blatantly texting to show their disinterest and refusal to be corralled into any type of academic discussion, Lisa locked eyes on me, the only other person in the room that understood that the assumptions about transcending our race problems we’d formed during the Obama administration had been proven wrong, and that while we were asleep, antiquated racist groups we’d forgotten about had gathered—to remind us just how powerful they were, and worse, that they counted among their members people we knew.

The semester darkened. Previously, when I had challenged students who parroted bigoted quips about Asian people’s dietary habits, gay marriage, or Black women’s intelligence, they had dropped the subject and flushed red with embarrassment. But in the play the semester became, Lisa and I would talk about the assignment and discuss rhetorical modes of persuasion or proper source citation, while the other students watched, daring me to get angry.

One day, the building in our classroom lost power. We were temporarily relocated to a classroom that had different tiers of seating, with the professor situated in front of a podium a few steps up, and then two circular arrangements of desks below this, not unlike 19th-century Parliament. We were discussing artistic integrity in connection to Mo Tzu, and no one contributed except for Lisa. When I pushed for more participation, Carly, who had never spoken out before, snapped back “Why bother? You just want to hear what Lisa wants to say.” When I asked why she felt this way, Carly popped her gum and said, “You know, because she’s dark.” The class snickered, flashing weasley smiles of agreement with Carly. From my podium, time slowed to a halt, and when I looked at Lisa, her head tilted down and tears streamed down her cheeks as she headed for the door.

Lisa aspired to produce for TV or film, and I’d often stay after class to give her advice, primarily helping her with an application to intern at Vice. When she didn’t get the internship, she stopped attending and only showed up for the final after a month-long absence. I gave her an A and took strong THC-infused chocolates to grade the rest of the class, crying as I read what Bryce thought about climate change.

In these Trump years, I adopted the celebratory approach to teaching of one who is not long for the profession. Everything I found interesting and worthwhile about academics I packed into my courses. In one spectacular failure of a class, we examined male privilege and the lack of substantive female power in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and other centers of cultural influence. I overestimated both my class’s interest in discussing such topics, as well as their familiarity with their own feelings on feminism and power. The students met my every question with strained faces, as they did their best to separate their own thoughts from those of their parents, or begin forming opinions on this for the first time outside TV and film narratives that had colored their worldview. In another more mild failure, we examined racism in sports and medicine. The evaluations were terrible, but I was undeterred.

One time, students staged a “sick out” that I failed to notice until a student without any hard feelings one way or another explained to me what was going on. “They think you unfairly favor… certain students, um, and reward certain ways of thinking that they don’t like. They think by not being here this will, like, get you in trouble. But if you didn’t notice, I guess that kind of proves they’re wrong.”

Covid came next. Instead of teaching to bored students, I was suddenly teaching to (possibly) the idea of bored students, as many logged into class but didn’t turn on their microphones or cameras. I let class run this way, assuming that if students were absent, they had their reasons. For a few weeks, I didn’t mind the cameras being off, the uncertainty about whom was listening.

I staved off malaise and depression with writing, and my burst of teaching topics I found essential in the early days of Trump thickened into a straitjacket of suicidal ideation once lockdown hit. Even upstate in New York’s beautiful Hudson Valley with my partner, I found myself losing my grip. The more I taught to an online void of students clever enough to both skip class by signing in and turning their cameras off and complain to my chair for not getting better grades despite their skipping class, the more the world dimmed.

From sunrise to sunset, I became needier than I was used to being, and tried to yield to the love of my girlfriend, the voice of my parents crackling on Facetime, the laughter of my friends during virtual game nights. These things helped me survive, but I felt my body shut down at the idea of teaching again. I knew that if I didn’t walk away, I’d find myself in the kitchen or on the road, making the wrong call.

As I eyed the end, my class was not demanding, and I went to some lengths to respond to students’ thoughts through email. Still, complaints came in about slow grading. One student went so far as to not email me or the department chair, but the president of the college directly: “Professor Farwell said he’d return our grades promptly. It has now been two weeks, and with the stress of the pandemic being enough I do not need the extra concern of not knowing my grade. My parents pay $80 thousand a year for me to attend this college. I demand Professor Farwell either grades more quickly, or is swiftly fired.”

Still, pockets of solidarity remained, When a white student said “Fuck, I’m hungry” just before class began, a Japanese student said, “Then fuck off to eat. Don’t complain here.” I looked at my computer screen, at five people who decided to turn cameras on to ask questions during class. It was the international students who, between class, were trying to navigate safe passage home. ▩


You Are Invited To Relinquish Control

Total exposure, on land and at sea

by

Dominique Cherie

Season Categories Published
MP606 Personal History

Dec 06, 2022


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I feel different today. A freshman in college, in a salon, I sense my foreignness reflect in the contortions of this blonde woman’s face as she tries with a great deal of effort to manage my hair. My mother stands by and offers suggestions. The hairdresser nods, but she doesn’t understand. She can’t fathom why this dark wad of what should be hair won’t behave and straighten. I could see her gears turning. She was using the hottest straightening tool they owned, and nothing was happening. How odd.

At first I was amused. I walked into a room full of people, none of whom resembled the person I was used to seeing in the mirror. I’d thought, “It will be fun to see these hairdressers make an attempt at doing my hair.” A social experiment or something.

My amusement fades quickly. The woman trying her best to work with my hair whispers to another worker. By this time, everyone in the shop knows that “different” is present. I see the other patrons in the room glancing at me out of the sides of their eyes. My reflection seems distorted in the mirror. I recoil.

I know the onlookers mean no harm. At least, I hope so. But they are definitely part of the problem. They are the enemy. Or are they? I wonder whether they would rather have “different” go away, to stop grating against the nice and neat world they prefer to perceive.

Where amusement once sat, anger emerges. How can this woman refer to herself as a professional hair stylist and not know how to do all types of hair? Should I just get up and leave? Why is my hair so nappy, so kinked and coiled? Why do I even need my hair done? It’s fine the way it is in its natural state. I’m just going to leave. My anger grows like a giant wave, swelling before crashing on the shore—and then, all at once, my anger turns into embarrassment.

My face runs hot. Maybe it will be enough heat to completely disintegrate me. Poof. I’d be invisible. No more eyes darting my way. My ears tingle, and I could feel a lump forming in the back of my throat. I’m embarrassed to be different. I’m embarrassed by my hair. I’m embarrassed by my skin. I’m embarrassed for being Black.

I’m backed into a corner, suffocating. I look around and motion for my mother to come closer. She is standing behind me, beside the hairdresser. I say “please, let’s go.” She throws a confused look. I repeat myself: “please, let’s go.” I struggle to get the words out. I fear I’ll burst into tears.

I pull away from the hairdresser, get up from my seat, and leave an incoherent apology about being an inconvenience trailing behind me. I’m apologizing for being different. I’m apologizing for existing.

My mother pays the woman, though I’m leaving with a head full of hair resembling that of a clown. I can feel my mom’s stare, as she tries to decipher all that was going on in my head. She can tell I’m bothered, but to what extent, I do not think she knows. At that moment, self-hate sprouts within me. It sets up camp.


I was raised in church—a “pew baby.” Dynamic and vibrant choir choruses, stained glass windows, blue jean skirts, and prayer meetings in Detroit filled my childhood. Church was our home away from home, and the congregants were our extended family. 

If a church service went too long, and you intended to attend the next service, rather than go home, there were two separate lounges, one for men, the other for women. You could change your clothes, take a nap on the couches, or watch TV. I remember the afternoons, curled up on the carpet with a pillow listening to the women of the church discuss that morning’s sermon, or laugh about the growing hole that had appeared in someone’s tights.

During the summer, a friend and I would plot to ensure we had our sleepover time. After asking permission from her mom, I’d smuggle her into the backseat of my family’s vehicle without a word. My mother would turn around to see her smiling face in the backseat and, privy to our schemes, would simply inquire what day she had to be back home. We were a community. We cared for each other.

I talked to God in the privacy of my room, on my knees at church, and at our family Saturday prayers. I talked to Him about the little and big things, the safety of my friends, my yearning to wear glasses just like my dad.

In college, I made a conscious decision to stop going to church all together. I was eighteen and I had just moved out of my parents’ house. I was used to attending church, but I wasn’t sure why I needed it.  I threw myself into unhealthy relationships, used my body as a pawn. I denied what I determined to be useless traditions of modesty and chasteness and just had “fun.” On the cusp of adulthood, I partied late, experienced many firsts. Drinks flowed and music blared at dimly lit house parties.  I danced until I dropped.

One night, the party had waned, and I made my way to my dorm. The street was quiet and barren. I walked toward the opposite side of campus. There were only a few cars parked on the street and the trees swayed in the gentle breeze. I didn’t resemble the person I used to be.

I isolated myself. In my dorm room, I prayed that I would find community. Then, one rainy evening while studying for a test, a stranger shared a study room with me. She invited me to a bible group.

By day I worked and attended class. By night I played praise music and listened to the bible. I intentionally avoided the people with whom I’d spent late fruitless nights. During my time of prayer and meditation, sometimes on my knees, other times curled up in bed, I wrote a list of specific attributes and characteristics I wanted in a mate, then asked God for them. I journaled about my desire to travel, to be a writer.

I had fewer friends, but I had a better understanding of who I was, who I wasn’t, and the potential of who I could become. I enrolled in a study abroad program, secured financing, and then headed for a five-month voyage around the world, on a ship.


The vastness of the sea makes you feel small. Cultivating a new and temporary community takes effort. At the mercy of nature and all its forces, you are invited to relinquish control.

I’d been nervous to live for five months in a small space with a complete stranger. But Hailey was quirky, energetic, and kind. She had long brown hair and she looked like a Disney princess. We spent late nights watching movies and talking. Christians from different backgrounds, we challenged each other on scriptural interpretation—what it meant to “be saved,” or the virtues of modesty. One Saturday, we woke up late and missed breakfast. From our room, we sang hymns we both knew and grew up with.

Between ports, we studied world music, local foods, history, and literature. Weekends, I watched classics like Casablanca, did a CrossFit or yoga routine on the deck at sunset or sunrise. Other times, I sat in a lounge chair or at a table, writing and staring out at the water.

The small Black community on the ship grew close. I operated as I always had, connecting and finding security with those who looked like me, while venturing out toward those who shared my humor and faith. Hailey and I became friends with a small group of girls. Amid homestays on land, we would often grab a bite, enjoying the pizza, hamburgers, salads, the occasional wine.

We existed on a ship in our own microcosm, a little world that allowed me to see and redefine how I fit in into the bigger one. I realized the importance of a simple hug. Growing up in an affectionate family, I never knew how much I needed physical contact. But then, for a few days, I felt “off” and isolated. I hugged a girl who hated hugs, yet embraced mine. In small revealing glimpses, I saw myself.

Journaling along the way, I came to treasure the differences that make this world our home. How the world is large, yet how humanity connects us all. We each experience joy, embarrassment, sadness, and even hate. I came to see how every person has two perspectives on themselves. One, based on the viewpoints of those around us. The other, based on the way in which we see ourselves.

On the last major leg of the journey, I kept with a sailors’ tradition. It was “Neptune Day,” which dictated that I shave my head bald after crossing the equator. Classes were canceled, replaced with food, music and silly rituals, like jumping in the pool and swimming across it after having supposed fish guts poured over you. Many of the boys on the ship gladly shaved their head, but only a handful of the girls did. Hailey declined, but documented my experience with glee. 

A crowd of onlookers surrounded me. As each loc fell from my head, I gained freedom. I didn’t realize until that moment how much of my identity I held in my hair. The invisible veil over my insecurities lifted. With a bald, cold, exposed head, and what felt like nothing else to hide behind, all I had to offer those around me was me. All I had to offer was my life experiences, my chocolate skin, a quirky free-spirited personality, my love for the Lord. I had to rest in that truth. I had to breathe it in, and exhale it. ▩


First Tracks

She offered me an all-expenses-paid weekend in the snowy mountains. In exchange, I would supply her and her friends with snow from the hood.

by

Corey Devon Arthur

Season Categories Published
MP601 Personal History

Sep 27, 2022


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“I double dog dare you to do the double black diamond.”

That was the challenge Karly gave to me. It was December of 1996. I was 18 years old. It was my last December as a free person.

Back then I lived in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. I’d traversed dangerous terrain in the hood, but nothing as formidable as a double black diamond. Conversely, I didn’t think Vermont’s Stratton Mountain ski resort had seen anything quite like a Black, 18-year-old, ex-convict goon out of Brooklyn.

Karly was 5’3”, around 140 pounds, a brunette with hazel eyes. She was a 40-something account manager for an advertising agency. I met her when I was 15 at a gathering of mutual friends. Karly left behind her pharmacy prescription, so I offered to take it to her at her job the next day. We talked and connected from there. Every so often we partied on the weekends. During these parties, I sold her weed and coke. That’s how my ski adventure started.

Karly offered me an all-expenses-paid weekend in the mountains of snow. In exchange, I would supply her and her friends with snow from the hood. Karly and I sometimes slept together, and she hinted that I could share her bed. This bed came with two additional snow bunnies named Dena and Allison. I was in.

Friday afternoon we bounced from Brooklyn in Dena’s jeep. The tree-shaped air freshener perfumed the vehicle with the aroma of tango mango. Karly and I played in the backseat with a blanket, booze, and blunts. Dena drove, while Alli angled herself in the passenger seat so that she could take the blunt from Karly and swigs from the bottle of Bacardi lemon.

Dena passed on the smoke and spirits. Instead, she sniffed some coke from her right knuckle. We sang along with the songs blaring from the Jeep’s sound system and bastardized the lyrics with sexual adaptations. The radio pumped the ‘80s while Karly played with my penis. Alli eventually joined in too.

We kept it to a tease during the drive there. It gave us something intense to talk about until the time came to tear our clothes and each other apart. By the time we arrived at Stratton Mountain, no one was thinking about skiing.

That night Karly took me into her bed along with Dena and Alli. We continued for hours until the sex broke us and the drugs dragged us the rest of the way to slumber.



Saturday morning I rolled out of Dena’s blonde locks and into the brightest morning sunlight I had ever seen. The sun reflected off the snow and through the window to reveal Karly and Alli already dressed in their Columbia and North Face snowsuits.

Dena and I made a beeline to the bathroom for sex and coke. Then we showered and got ready for the snow.

I got dressed in my two-sizes-too-big Guess jeans, Timberland construction boots, Champion hooded sweatshirt, brown leather bomber, gold chain, and gold grill.

“Where’s your clothes?” Karly asked.

I thought I had literally fucked her brains out, because she just asked me the stupidest question. Or, so I thought. “I’m wearing them,” I said.

“No, your snowsuit,” she replied. “That’s not gonna keep you warm.” Alli giggled from her succulent lips.

“Nah, I’m good like this.” I brushed them off. My pride wouldn’t allow me to admit that I didn’t know I needed a snowsuit. I figured, I’m tough. I’ve been locked up north in the mountains. I’ll thug it out. The way Karly, Dena, and Alli look at me made me doubt myself on the low.

I’ve always been a quick learner. My secret: confidence. Also, I was an expert at mimicry. I’d seen people ski on TV. I figured I could wing the rest.

We got to the ski rental cottage. I got my gear, put my snow boots on, and clicked into the skis well enough. I looked around and noticed I was literally the only Black person there. It didn’t surprise me since skiing wasn’t something that most Black people normally did.

That, along with my inappropriate attire, should have been a dead giveaway that I couldn’t ski. Yet no one ever asked me if I could ski or not. The adults I usually associated with assumed I was older than my true age. They assumed I knew how to do things. I wanted to belong, so I usually found a way to live up to their expectations.

While the girls smoked another blunt, I tested out my ski legs on the flat snow. I matched all the moves I seen on TV. I figured how to stop, propel myself forward, and a few tricks. I had everyone fooled including myself. The girls finished smoking and I sniffed a line to smooth things out. By then I was easily gliding across the snow.

The girls sped off. I slid right behind them. We arrived at the ski lift at the base of the double black diamond. I wasn’t sure how it worked. I watched Alli and Dena get on first. I mirrored them. Karly and I got on next. I had never been that high up before. The daylight sky featured soft parcels of light blues, whites, and pinks pushing against one another. The sky colors performed the past, future, and present all at once. I stared out in wonder at the world from the heavens.

We approached the landing at the top of the lift. I froze. I didn’t know I had to jump to get off. It was too late, and I missed the jump. I fronted like I meant to do that. I grabbed Karly and slid my tongue in her mouth. “Let’s make out in heaven.”

When we finally got off the lift, Dena and Alli already skied down a quarter of the double black diamond. They were as graceful as two snow rabbits running from a fox.

My plan was simple. I would let Karly go first and follow her movements. We skied to the edge of the mountain slope. I wasn’t intimidated by the mountain until that point. I looked around and saw the universe. I saw nothing but sky, tendrils of shaped smoke and tips of green tree tops sprinkled with flakes of snow. I wondered how a common street thug could stand on the same peak as God.

“I know, it’s beautiful, right?” Karly said, and then she was off. My ego tipped me over the edge and I flew behind her.

I accounted for everything except speed. Nothing I’d ever seen could have prepared me for the speed that I gained in a matter of seconds. There was no friction between my skis and the snow.

The trees and people became blurry images of color that blended into each other as I blew by them. I angled my skis to slow down, but even that was too fast. I tried to fall to break my speed, but I only went faster. I dodged people, trees, and boulders by instinct.

Up ahead I saw a cabin. It was one of several rest stops down the mountain. If I didn’t find a way to stop, I would crash into it and die.

I saw a child. No, it wasn’t a child, but a gnome. I tried to avoid hitting it and panicked. I crossed my right ski over my left, and flew through the air. I saw everyone on earth looking up at me. Then I landed head first in a snow bank.

I was in too deep. I couldn’t get out. I was upside down in the snow, with my legs in the air. I could still feel one ski attached to my snow boot. Panic became submission, which turned to sobs. I was going to die.

My snot and tears started to melt the snow around my head. Then I felt my body being pulled up and out of the hole. Everyone was looking at me. It seemed now that everyone realized I was Black, and dressed completely wrong.

“Hey guy, what the fuck is wrong with you?” one guy asked.

“Mommy, where are his clothes?” a teenage girl asked, as if I were naked.

They stared at me in disgust. I sat there looking as dumb as I felt. That’s when my three snow bunnies pulled up. They surrounded me with concern and bewilderment. They shielded me between my shame and the world. I had just been exposed as a fraud.

“Call for a snowmobile,” a man yelled. “Get him the hell off of this mountain.”

“No, I can get off myself, I just slipped,” I shouted. I suspended all concern for my physical wellbeing. There was something more vital I was trying to save: my pride. Looking weak and vulnerable in front of Karly, Alli, and Dena was killing me in ways the elements could never do.

“Boy, you can’t ski. You’re about to die of exposure,” the man countered.

“We got him. He’s fine. We’ll get him back down,” Karly shouted over the rambling crowd. “Thank you, now you can go.” After they left, Dena admonished me: “You can’t ski, can you? You asshole.” My teeth chattered. My adrenaline was subsiding and hyperthermia began to set in.

Karly took compassion on me. She cupped my chin and looked me in the eyes: “We’re going to get down this mountain. Just you and me. You can do this, right Corey?”


I started to feel like a man again. I was cold, but convinced I could do this. I just had to trust Karly.

Karly didn’t know my real age. She was old enough to be my mother. It was during that exchange that the natural rhythm of our biological relationship surfaced. She had transformed from my lover to my guardian.

I composed myself. Karly helped me into my skis.

“Get behind me. Slide your skis inside of mine. Hold me around the waist,” Karly ordered.

Karly’s warm body comforted me through her snowsuit. She shifted her weight forward and I followed. I felt like Lois Lane riding on the back of Superman as I flew over the earth. Except I was a young Black teenage goon gliding across white snow on the back of a white woman. I had just become a mystery for Karly to solve.

Later that night Karly, Dena, Alli, and I hung out in various states of undress. The day took its toll on us. We partied at a slower pace. The women were baffled that I hadn’t incurred a single injury—except my bruised ego.

We concentrated more on conversation and cuddling than climaxing. Karly called the resort’s kitchen and had our food delivered and catered to us. We had steaks, salads, rolls, and pastries. I ordered a liter of Bacardi lemon rum to go with the coke.

I usually kept away from the coke to make sure I had enough for my clients. However, since I had sniffed some for courage earlier, I carved out lines and snorted it off the women’s bodies. It kept me from caving in and crying. Alli and Dena were cracking jokes about the comedy show of me crashing in the snow. My emotional immaturity got the better of me. As a result, I closed down and only connected with them through my cock.

We laid in a heap of intertwined limbs, rubbing against one another. Somewhere in that arrangement I came face to face with Karly. Our eyes locked. From her stare, I could tell she knew something about me that I didn’t want her to know.

“How old are you?” she whispered behind a nervous smile.

“25,” I answered. I wasn’t quite lying because I believed it myself.

Her look of relief assured me that my secret was safe. Had I told Karly I was 18, it would have taken her seconds to deduce she was a pedophile. Karly and I had been having sex off and on since I was 15.

Our sex was different for the rest of that night. We remained close to Alli and Dena, but Karly and I only had sex with each other. She became the dominant one between us. She dictated the positions we screwed in. No longer would she just let me bang away at her body. Karly made me slow down and take my time. I figured I owed her for saving me on the double black diamond. I fell asleep inside and beneath her body.

I woke up some hours later before sunrise. I walked over to the sliding glass doors of the cottage. The view opened up to the double black diamond mountain. I saw its outline against the stars along with my naked reflection in the glass doors. I curled my fist because the mountain had taken my courage.

The Enya Bad Boy remix “I Don’t Wanna Know” was playing. I was blowing a blunt to the dope baseline. Karly brushed up against my naked back with her bare breasts. I blew a shotgun in her mouth. She dragged her nails along my nut sack.

“What’s the matter, hon?” Karly moaned as she massaged me.

“Nothing,” I hissed in anger.

“Oooookay,” she said, letting go of my unresponsive penis. Karly stepped in between me and the mountain. She hugged me around the waist and laid her head into my chest.

“It’s just a hunk of rock made of dirt and snow. You’re a man. You’re made of this,” she said, softly head butting my chest in the place where my heart beat. “And you got will. I can teach you how to ski the mountain. But it’s you that has to want it. Do you want it?” She asked me more with her eyes than voice.

“Yes,” I said, hugging her tightly to me.

“Sunrise. We’ll do it.” She looked up in my eyes for confirmation. Then she left me standing alone to continue staring at the mountain.



Sunday morning she took me back to the ski rental place and bought me the proper clothing. I wanted to buy a Columbia snowsuit like she had. “Name brand won’t get you down the mountain, Corey! Be reasonable. I’m not made of money, mister big time drug dealer!” she said in hushed tones.

Instead she bought me an Element one-piece ski jumper and a matching black, orange, yellow, and blue jacket. The set came with gloves. Karly also got me some goggles, socks, thermals, and a ski hat with a stupid looking fuzzy ball on top.

“So cute,” she said, playing with the fuzzy ball on top of my head. Then we went back up to the top of the double black diamond. Karly spent the rest of the day teaching me how to ski.

The first five times, Karly made me ride down the mountain while holding her from behind. She said, “Use your body to feel what my body is doing.” Then she let me try it at lengths by myself. I still saw everything move at warp speed. Only now I could anticipate it and react without panicking. When I lost control, I forced my falls until I learned how to skid into a stop on the spot.

The pivotal moment came when I remembered what Karly said earlier that morning: “The mountain doesn’t ever move. Everything you see stays right there. You have to navigate around, through and over it. If things get too crazy, bail! But do it on your terms. Control the fall and you’ll be alright.”

I felt cocky. There was a slight bump coming up on the slope. I saw people using it as a ramp. I headed right for it. Up I went. In the air I soared. Flat on my face I fell. Karly and I laughed. My manhood was intact. I got up and started from the top. I skied the entire way down without falling again.



Monday morning the women dropped me off in Bed-Stuy. I kissed and hugged Dena and Alli. Then I squeezed Karly with something extra in my hug, gratitude. She threw in a few extra seconds of tongue just to leave me with a lingering taste of my triumph over the mountain.

It felt like I fell from heaven back into hell the moment my boot crunched the muddy crystalized snow. Under my full weight I sank a few inches deeper. I was home. I blended in with the hood.

The women pulled off. I did a hand-to-hand drug sale to Keisha before the Jeep turned the corner at the light. “Yo homegirl, you short,” I said counting the money.

“I ain’t got nothing else to pay you with unless you want some pussy.” I passed her the rest of the coke I had left. “I’ll holla at you later.” Then I kept it pushing.

Twenty-six years later, I’m on top of a different mountain, in Otisville Correctional Facility. In 1997 I was convicted and sentenced to 25 years to life for robbery and murder of my former English teacher. I am sincerely sorry and ashamed for my crime.

Karly isn’t here to help me off this mountain. I doubt she would even if she was. Karly found out my real age when the media reported my arrest.

I know I’ll never hear from her again, although what Karly told me that weekend on the double black diamond stayed with me: The mountain doesn’t ever move. Everything you see stays right there. It helped me to traverse the many prison obstacles—shanks, gangs, drugs, solitary confinements, abusive guards—I’ve had to survive over the last quarter century.

Unfortunately, these aspects of prison aren’t going anywhere. It’s been up to me to change my relationship to them, anticipate them, navigate around them. Just like I had to do on that unmoving mountain so many years ago. In those cases where I failed and fell, I didn’t stay down. I got back up, and kept striving forward. Karly showed me I had the heart to survive any mountain if I wanted to. I did, still do, and always will. She’s still my Superman. ▩


Some names have been changed to protect privacy.


Change Your Life

Rebecca Hall’s new film traces the delicate line between fascination and jealousy.

by

Cheyann Harris

Season Published
MP413

Dec 07, 2021


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“You dislike negros Mr. Bellew?”

“No, no, not at all… I hate them” says John Bellew, laughing sinfully, seated next to his Black wife. She laughs alongside him; seemingly unfazed. Sitting across from her is Irene, a visibly uncomfortable “negro” friend.

Based on Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel of the same name, Passing follows the reunion of two biracial childhood friends who had lost touch. Both women are Black, but given the fairness of their skin can ultimately pass as white. This has affected their lives in different ways. Clare Kendry (Ruth Negga) has been living as a wealthy white woman, and spends her days following John, who works in banking, on business trips while caring for their daughter Margery. Irene Redfield (Tessa Thompson) lives in Harlem as a Black woman, with a Black husband and two Black sons. When Clare brags about her white life, Irene surprises Clare by informing her, proudly it seems, that her two sons are dark and her husband can’t pass.

Passing, Rebecca Hall’s directorial debut, shows how unfounded perceptions of others can alter one’s personal identity. Prior to their unexpected encounter, both women seemed content with the lives they had made for themselves. Now, as their lives become entangled, they crave the freedom they perceive in that of the other. Clare envies Irene’s stability. Irene envies Clare’s ability to blend seamlessly into white culture. Through the prism of race, Passing traces the delicate line between fascination and jealousy.

Clare and Irene run into each other at the Drayton Hotel. It’s been more than a decade. Clare is almost unrecognizable to Irene, who pegged the old friend by her distinct laugh. She seems shocked, but also a bit impressed, that Clare was able to renovate her entire life so smoothly.

Surprisingly, Passing is less about Clare’s long-held secret than how, once Clare enters the picture, that secret comes to destabilize Irene’s life. After the hotel exchange, Clare integrates herself into Irene’s world in a strange effort to “reclaim” her blackness. She hangs around Irene’s Black family and Black friends and worships Irene’s apparent ability to stand proudly in her ethnicity. “You’d think they’d be satisfied being white,” Irene says to her husband as she lies in bed, telegraphing her own sense of personal dissatisfaction.

Passing takes place at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, a period of vibrant Black cultural production—and in some cases, wealth accumulation—in the context of an unabashedly racist society. Irene enacts anxieties of the moment. She and Brian, a doctor, live with their children in a brownstone with their own maid. Yet, despite her class and fair skin, she moves through the film timidly, paranoid that her race will bring punishment upon her. In an opening sequence, she walks the city with her head and eyes hidden behind a hat, avoiding eye contact with anyone white.

When in Clare’s presence, Irene seems to be content to share a home with a family that doesn’t pass. But her insecurity becomes conspicuous throughout the film. She shelters her sons. When her husband tries to tell them about news of a Black man’s lynching in Little Rock, she swiftly changes the subject and asks him to stop talking. “You are not to talk about the race problem,” she says. And even as Irene judges Clare for using her passing abilities to such a consequential effect, Irene herself actively uses her fair skin to her own advantage, when she is alone.

As Clare admires Irene’s life, Irene obsesses over Clare’s effervescence, her ability to gracefully steal the attention of anyone with whom she crosses paths. Irene is at times a confident woman, and she occasionally betrays streaks of elitism. But these pretenses crumble into naked insecurity when her life brushes up against that of her old friend. She comes to suspect her husband is falling for Clare and at a gathering at her house, she watches them chat, breathes heavily and angrily before dropping a teapot and shooting Clare a look. “It seems to me,” she screams at Bryan in an earlier scene, “you are a lot less content with what you’ve got when she’s not here.”

We never see Clare’s daughter, Margery, but early on, we perceive the predictable fact that their family has fragile dynamics of its own. Clare admits to Irene that, throughout her pregnancy, she feared her daughter would come out dark—revealing her ancestry. In another scene, John describes Clare as having been “as white as a lily” when their marriage began. He has since nicknamed her “Nig” because he suspected her skin was getting darker. Irene witnesses the marital exchange. The jocular banter leaves her shaken.

Passing never has a distinct climax. It is slow-paced, occasionally even boring, though Thompson and Negga’s performances are not to blame. Neither actor would necessarily “pass” in the real world, but they play their insecure characters well—Thompson especially, whose Irene accentuates in her own inadequacies as she unravels.

Clare and Irene’s oscillating mutual sentiments of idolization and resentment give Passing its depth. We often see Irene looking at Clare in the distance, with a look of admiration… or is it repugnance? Clare may have laughed as her husband mocked negros. Irene may speak highly and confidently of her Black family. But, though they experience the color line from different aspects, it leaves both women fundamentally insecure. ▩


Colin Kaepernick: Mangoprism Person of the Decade

by

Mangoprism Editors

Season Categories Published
MP115 Person of the Year

Jan 01, 2020


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Colin Kaepernick, whose modest but courageous act of protest cast a provocative new light on nationalism and racism in the United States, is the Mangoprism Person of the Decade™ spanning from 2010 to 2019.

Through his NFL career, Kaepernick attained outsized privileges with which few in the United States could identify. His decision to kneel during the national anthem to protest police brutality, which ultimately got him blackballed from the league, is hardly one many of us are in a position to explicitly replicate. But the form his story took, of a person who happened to face down his particularly high-profile context with self-assured thoughtfulness, in effect sacrificing the relative privileges of his situation for a more interesting and meaningful existence beyond it, serves as a lesson that anyone can absorb and apply in concrete ways.

Drafted by the San Francisco 49ers in 2011 after a productive college football career at the University of Nevada, Kaepernick started his first NFL game in 2012. With a long stride and an improvisational playing style, he found immediate success, leading the 49ers to the Super Bowl and breaking Michael Vick’s playoff rushing record along the way. His 2013 season ended in a loss to the Seattle Seahawks in a dramatic NFC Championship Game. The game constituted a matchup of two dynamic black quarterbacks whose self-representations vis a vis Instagram were juxtaposed in a Seahawk’s fan’s viral post, which portrayed Russell Wilson amidst dogs, military personnel, and charitable events, and Kaepernick hanging with J. Cole and showcasing his impressive shoe collection. This post epitomized Kaepernick’s racialized media framing in the national consciousness. After a loss to the Seahawks, Kaepernick signed a $126 million contract extension with the Niners.

Kaepernick’s performance dipped somewhat in 2014 and 2015, but he remained the 49ers starting quarterback going into the 2016 preseason, when a reporter noticed him sitting down on the bench during a pregame rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner. Mainstream national discourse regarding a spate of well-publicized police killings of unarmed black men had been influenced in part by the Black Lives Matter movement, and after the game Kaepernick told reporters: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”

In order to render a more precise message amid bad faith interpretations regarding his lack of patriotism, he knelt for the anthem during a subsequent game, in part as a show of respect to U.S. military members, and he knelt during the anthem for the entire rest of the season, inspiring similar acts among other athletes in professional and amateur contexts across the nation. The protests came amid the rising pitch of the 2016 presidential contest, in which Donald Trump effectively used the kneeling movement as a cudgel to highlight the supposed excesses of a political opposition that did not respect America’s greatness. Kaepernick, beset by injuries, missed numerous games that season, while continuing to kneel prior to each of them. In 12 games, he passed for 16 touchdowns and four interceptions and occasionally demonstrated some of the flair that propelled him to the national stage in the first place. In March of 2017, facing a release from the 49ers, Kaepernick opted out of his contract.

In the time since, in a league where the likes of Nathan Peterman, DeShone Kizer, Blaine Gabbert, Mark Sanchez, David Blough, Geno Smith, and Devlin “Duck” Hodges have started games at quarterback in the last three seasons, no team has signed Colin Kaepernick. In October 2017, Kaepernick filed a grievance with the NFL – since settled – for colluding to keep him out of the league. That same month, at an owners meeting about how best to deal with plummeting favorability ratings and boycott threats from fans who were offended by players kneeling during the anthem, Houston Texans owner Bob McNair, a major financial backer of President Trump, said of the players in a majority-black league run by a nearly entirely white ownership class: “We can’t have the inmates running the prison.” This comment prompted much of his own team to kneel during the following game in Seattle, at which, according to a Mangoprism correspondent present at CenturyLink Field, some Seahawks fans could be found casting their hands to the air in disbelief as they screamed at kneeling Texans players to “grow up!”

One thing about this whole story – and decade – is that it could be challenging to parse the substance from the noise. Kaepernick made it clear that police brutality in the United States was the subject of his protest, but media perpetuated the asinine and incoherent narrative that Kaepernick and his comrades were protesting the anthem itself and all the things it represents. (FWIW, the MP editorial board agrees with Vince Staples’ assessment that the Star-Spangled Banner “don’t even slap.”) The internet in particular has supercharged the blunt meanings of certain performative shorthand identity markers by which a person can assert their tribal affiliation in the culture wars. Sometimes, the markers became so potent that we had no choice but to choose a side. As the anthem began, anxiety swept through stadiums at the start of every game the nation round and, whether on the field or in the stands, the very fact of one’s action – or inaction – all of the sudden became meaningful in itself (with a few notable exceptions, white players opted not to protest during the anthem). An invisible political ritual previously only explicitly considered on the fringes of mainstream discourse became entirely conspicuous to pretty much everyone. Does this matter?

As Ameer Loggins, who shared political reading materials with and had a class on black media representation audited by Kaepernick at UC Berkeley during the summer of 2016 told the journalist Rembert Browne, “Colin represents an inconvenience.” The NFL’s brand – violence, military partnerships, the lucrative Viagra marketing contracts that adorn its every game, its evident comfort at the center of American nationalism and consumer culture – proved shockingly fragile in the face of this gentle disruption of its harmoniously choreographed antiseptic image. Notably, the people who were triggered by this disruption stood not on the supposedly reactionary political left, but among the true believers, the diehards who have staked so much of their identity – or in the case of owners and ad partners, finances – in the NFL’s inane theatrics.

That a mere “inconvenience” could so shake such a powerful institution is a testament to the power of rhetoric and action that does not conform to the banal political platitude perpetuated in the interests of that institution. As the writer George Orwell wrote in his classic “Politics and the English Language,” political, as opposed to meaningful speech like Kaepernick’s, “give[s] an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Enjoining us to deal in authentic and thoughtful discourse generated from our own personal convictions and feelings, Orwell added, “probably, it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.”

Kaepernick, whose fabulous afro no doubt in itself rankled some of the more unsubtly racist owners in the National Football League, cut a powerful image on the sidelines that demonstrated his dissent from one of the most idiotic and thoughtless mainstream institutions in American cultural life. Kaepernick chose a meaningful life on his own terms and solidarity with those who have less power than himself, over mere status contingent on the edicts and regulations of the cynical power-hungry men who own the NFL and, more broadly, so much of American society.

For the inconvenient example he set, the Mangoprism editorial board is delighted to award Colin Kaepernick our highest honor: the Mangoprism Person of the Decade™. ▩


Runners up: Beyoncé, Marshawn Lynch