America’s Worst Dad 

Dedicated to Viviana and Vinny:

Somersaulting over translucent horizons

with the levity of the ancestors

& the lightheartedness of our parents

My son Ernesto was nine years old in the summer of 2011. I applied for and received a research grant from the Professional Staff Congress, the union for professors at the largest university system in the country, the City University of New York (CUNY). We traveled to Maui and the Big Island to visit friends and research how the U.S. government and elite agribusiness interests coerced and trafficked Puerto Rican jibaros (peasants) to the Hawaiian islands to toil in sugar cane and pineapple plantations in the early 1900’s. These rich tracts of land were owned exclusively by the oligarchs of the “Big Five,” Castle & Cooke, Alexander & Baldwin, C. Brewer & Co., H. Hackfeld & Co. (later named American Factors) and Theo H. Davies & Co. Our friends in the working-class neighborhoods far away from Honolulu proudly wore t-shirts that read “I am HawaiiaChinaFilaPortRican and proud!” The national slogan spoke to the diverse ancestry of a nation of some 1,000,000 Native Hawaiians who have a mix of “native Hawaiian, Chinese, Filipino, Portuguese and Puerto Rican ancestry.”

I took Ernesto hiking through the steep rungs of Mauna Loa volcano. He was overwhelmed by the grueling climbs, but he fought through, too proud to complain. In the early evening, I asked him if he wanted to learn how to drive on the top of Mauna Loa. His legs could not reach the break and accelerator. He sat on my lap. I had Biggie Smalls and 112’s 1996 classic “Only You” on repeat as he learned to smooth out the initial herky-jerky movement an untamed car makes. We had fun on our trip. We camped out with native Hawaiian communities who had been pushed out of their family and ancestral lands by one of the highest real estate markets in the country. Our favorite memory was a specific utterance of Hawaiian Creole that the native islanders spoke. One displaced worker, Uncle Keanu, was squatting on the beach playing with his dog and telling us stories of Waianae and Makaha resistance against police evictions. We stayed in his makeshift camp, making friends who I keep in touch with until today. Uncle Keanu’s signature phrase was “Fuck a booby right here!” as he called his dog back to him. He kept his rifle close in case any Hawaii Five-o’s dared to return to evict him and his family. 

The following summer of 2012, I took my son to hang out and box with the Inmaculada Boxing Club in the 6 counties in the north of Ireland, divorced from the 26-county Republic. It was marching season in Occupied Ireland.

By night, the bonfires roared across West Belfast. Many a colonial Union Jack met its incendiary fate hung above 40 feet of wooden crates alongside other occupying enemy flags. This was Ireland Ireland. Green. Bold. Nationalist. The local Catholic youngsters kept the police entertained and busy all night.

When the paddy wagons stopped at the intersection of West Falls Road, the local ruffian‘s pounded two by fours over the peelers’ (Belfast slang for police or pigs) windshields. The 12-year-old urban guerrillas lobbed bricks, stones and molotov cocktails at the police who didn’t dare get too close. Former IRA commanders dressed as uncles took a swig of Guinness applauding the lads with hands that were not guaranteed to have five fingers. These were anti-colonial snipers and anti-humiliation bombers’ hands.

Ernesto was right there with his peers and sprouting comrades. He had turned 10 years old the month before. One social worker masquerading as a reveler whispered to the local gossip girls that the other side of the pond brought “America’s worst dad” back to Ol’ Ireland.

The Hunts Point section of the Bronx has long been known for its infamous alleyways and boulevards with the freshest drugs and baddest prostitutes. Hunts Point always had a reputation that preceded itself. A fatal overdose brought the faithful-to-death forgotten herds scampering for the most sought after of fixes. Boyfriends met their girlfriends and husbands met their wives outside the six train or at the Bx 6 bus stop because it was too dangerous for the women to walk home alone at any time of the day. Addicts screamed at dealers, showing off their punctured and penetrated veins as proof that they were not undercover cops and were worthy of their heroin and fentanyl. I taught my son how to drive in Hunts Point. I made a video for Facebook of “the youngest Dominican taxi driver in the history of the Bronx.” Family members felt I was being reckless with my son, raising their objections under my post and in real life. Someone called Children Protection Services on me. As I told the CPS agents who arrived at my home the next night, “driving is a skill.” By the time Ernesto could reach the steering wheel and brakes, he drove like a man. I have observed his nerves of steel under extreme duress. I have also witnessed him fall 100 times. He has stood right back up every time. 

Lenore Skenazy was “America’s worst mom.” In 2008, she granted her nine-year-old son Izzy permission to ride the New York City subway by himself. She dropped him off in one part of Brooklyn, armed him with a map, a paper with their address written (just in case), a $20 dollar bill and quarters in case he needed to make a phone call. He was home within 45 minutes. The story of the atypical mother became big news. First amendment lawyer Greg Lukianoff and New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt tell the story of Skenazy in The Coddling of the American Mind, How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure: “two days later [Lenore] was on the Today Show, and then MSNBC, Fox News, and NPR. Message boards were flooded with posts,” as she recounted, “mostly condemning our decision, others applauding it.” Soon Skenazy was decried as “America’s worst mom.”

I lectured my college students today in this my 20th year of teaching as only a 47-year-old grouchy professor could. This was no classroom lecture with a powerpoint. I was lecturing them. I broke everyone of Paulo Freire’s rules from Pedagogy of the Oppressed as I scolded them in a way only their parent’s generation, Generation X, aka Generation Grumpy, could: 

“You all are of the fragile generation; the screen generation; the iPhone generation; the terminally-online generation; the depressed generation; the anxious generation; the asocial generation; the fearful, punk generation; the call-out, cancel culture generation; the filtered, plastic-surgery Instagram generation; the paranoid parenting generation; the Culture Wars generation; the doxed generation; the social media generation; the addicted-to-porn and addicted to everything generation; the microaggression generation; the catastrophizing generation; the gender identity generation; the safetyism generation; the trigger-warning generation; and the identity politics generation. But does your generation know inner-peace?” 

One intrepid student did not blink: “Professor: do you like anything about us?”

It was an honest question. 

I collected my thoughts. 

I did not see this type of cowardice growing up, though I was surrounded by no lack of cowardice. I appreciate everything you teach me every day. It is humbling. At times, the spiritual disconnect could not be greater.

As Haidt’s research shows in The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, for the first time in millions of years, there is a generation of mammals who did not grow up playing with one another. Nor do these un-curious mammals have a relationship with nature. This is the first technology-based childhood in the mammal timeline. Our sons and daughters are the guinea pigs of the billionaire CEOs of TikTok, Call of Duty and Pornhub. Haidt and Lukianoff sum up their conclusions: 

The establishment’s treatment of my new favorite mom, Lenore Skenazy, is a reminder that we will never be lauded and will always be judged when we teach our children to think independently, because it is only then that they are a threat to the order of things.

In contrast to many of his peers, my son is a chameleon. Drop him off in Beverly Hills. He will make 10 friends. Drop him off in South Central. The result will be the same. “Fear is a thief” so Ernesto Dessalines pickpocketed fear. 

I never read a book on parenting. I never reflected on any of this until I got completely sober. Like no starches and no dating sober. (What percent of America is completely sober?) I made my share of mistakes for which I’ve made amends. I raised my oldest son instinctually the way I lived every day of my life. My class instincts are his. His class reflexes are mine. 

From the streets of Santo Domingo and Brockton to the streets of Paris and Kuala Lumpur, my son taught me how to be a man. In the process, I exposed him to the infinite beauty of this vast, open road we know as life. Bob Marley raised this very question in “Rebel Music 3 o’clock roadblock:” “Why can’t we roam? There’s open country. Oh Why can’t we be what we want to be? We want to be free.” I modeled being a natural-born ethnographer to my son and he revealed this to me in words I’d never heard.