23 June 2023. Well, yes, some things do work, like, trolling from the right margins of our benighted two-party system. Also, banks, at least as devices by which other people’s money is “moved” in mysterious ways toward the cyberspaces where it can be used for unknown purposes while being withheld from its original if not rightful owners’ grasp.
I was reminded today of these “going concerns,” as the legal realists used to call them, to designate enterprises that succeed even as the business environment changes around them.
The first email I read this morning was from Brandi Sturdevant, a middle-school science teacher in Columbia, SC, who wondered whether I had discovered the whereabouts of “Joseph Daniels”—presumably a person—who had sent me angry messages last October threatening me with bodily harm because I had publicly resigned from the so-called white race in May of 2018 (on Facebook), thereby getting myself in trouble with HR at Rutgers University, which employed me back then, not to mention the 300 + white nationalists and supremacists who complained of my behavior to the university and directly to me.
I wrote about it here at Substack on October 12, 2022, and Ms. Sturdevant found the post when she Googled “Jospeh Daniels.”
Ms. Sturdevant wondered if I had the address of this person (also whether I had called the police) because her colleague, known to the media by her maiden name, Mary Wood, a teacher of AP Language & Composition at a high school in Chapin, SC, had received a similar email from “Joseph Daniels,” who had signed off with the same flourish he had added to the email he sent me last year, “gfy pos,” which translates, I have since found, as Go Fuck Yourself, [You] Piece Of Shit.
Ms. Wood has, it seems, become the center of a school board controversy over curriculum because two or more of her students had complained that they were made “uncomfortable” when she taught Ta-Nehesi Coates’s memoir, which of course details how and why the author has been unable, as an African-American, to identify with the dominant culture of the US. “Joseph Daniels” caught wind of the controversy because it has been covered by Fox News as well as The New Republic, and sent an angry email to Ms. Wood. Ms. Sturdevant did a Google search and came up with my Substack column, then wrote to me last night, asking if I had located “Joseph Daniels.” Here’s the email:
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Good evening!
My name is Brandi Sturdevant. I am a middle school science teacher in Columbia, South Carolina. I've also copied Mary [Wood] in this email. She is a high school AP Language teacher in Chapin, South Carolina. Mary has been in the news quite a bit lately. See the following if you are interested:
https://newrepublic.com/post/173595/south-carolina-teacher-lesson-racism-shut-school-district
https://www.thestate.com/news/local/article276257911.html
https://news.yahoo.com/teacher-couldn-t-talk-systemic-
https://www.businessinsider.com/south-carolina-teacher-ap-shut-down-ta-nehisi-coates-memoir-2023-6
https://twitter.com/amyhcolumbiasc/status/1669494201921175555
But I believe the most recent article on Fox News is bringing her some unwanted attention.
She received an email (to her school email) at 8:21 today from Joseph Daniels. A quick google search of the email address it came from brought me to your "Hate Mail, Hate Speech" post from Oct 12 of last year. You received an email from the same email address. The emails you and Mary received both even have some of the same language: She was also told that he hopes she gets cancer and rots and the sign off was "gfy pos."
I'm writing to ask if you have any further information about Mr. Daniels. Have you located him? Do you continue to hear from him? Have you contacted the police? I've looked at your other posts and don't see any more recent updates. Any information you are willing to share would be appreciated.
Thank you!
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I replied to the effect that “Joseph Daniels” is probably a professional troll, paid to scout out instances of CRT in the teaching of impressionable white youth, you know, kids whose feelings might get hurt if they’re exposed to the historical truth of systemic, structural racism in the making of the American nation. Or a bot programmed to do the same thing. I had to laugh about the “location” of this “person,” who, after I told him to fuck off, said he had seen me in my neighborhood and would soon inflict great harm on my person, in person.
Was I under “his” surveillance? I doubt it, now that he’s turned up as an interested observer of pedagogical doings in SC, but I did resist the urge to call him out, as I did the moron who challenged me to a confrontation at Harlem Shake back in 2018. (I showed up, he didn’t, but a camera crew from TV 11, the local news outlet, did, and the viral results of that impromptu interview were not good for me.)
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On the same day, I discovered that the annual “minimum required distribution” from the remainder of my TIAA-CREF pension fund—it’s an IRS rule to be followed once you retire—had not happened because two wire transfers to my Bank of America checking account had gone missing. Not massive sums, but substantial enough to worry me, in part because my health benefits as a retiree from the state university of New Jersey somehow depend on the timeliness of these transfers (don’t ask, the rules here are totally incomprehensible). The TIAA representative I talked to explained that B of A definitely had received the money—he had the dates and annotations to prove it—but I knew from my end that the money hadn’t been deposited in my checking account. Where was it, then? He advised me to go to the bank, where, he was sure, they could track down the transfers and simply move the money from a holding site to the proper account.
I did so, armed with the dates and annotations the TIAA rep had provided. Upon arriving, I explained my problem to the generic “greeter” banks now employ to direct incoming traffic to the appropriate counter or office. (The last time I went through this procedure, I ended up asking the security guard to shoot me with his firearm if I made any threatening noises or gestures as I extracted an explanation from bank officers, who had expressed their fear of my violent demeanor, of why they had frozen my checking account, so I had rehearsed my quiet, quizzical tone and posture.) The nice lady directed me to the branch manager, who quickly realized that I had given TIAA the wrong routing number in arranging the wire transfers. Such transfers, it turns out, have their very own number, separate from that of the checking account, so, yes, B o A had received the money, but it had been parked in banking limbo, awaiting instructions from . . . someone, somewhere. Since March 22.
OK, let’s give the money its marching orders, I proposed. “No can do,” said the person at the wire department over the phone speaker, presumably from another real place, an office . . . somewhere. “No,” she said, “TIAA has to retrieve the money and send new wires to the correct routing number.” The rep I had spoken to had already told me this would take 12 business days, but he was now my only hope. Could he resend the wires when he cancelled the existing transfers, rather than waiting until the money was retrieved and tallied at TIAA? After all, these are instantaneous electronic movements of credits, why the two weeks of “business days”?
I called him from the branch manager’s office, but was sent straight to voicemail. What is to be done? Then the manager had to go to lunch. “I have to clock out at 1:31,” she explained, “otherwise I’m in violation of the rules that say I can’t work consecutively, without a break, longer than five hours, and I started today at 8:31. Sorry. It’s just a half hour, if you can wait. I want to make sure this goes right.”
So I went to the waiting area, which quickly filled up with people waiting to see branch officers, who, it seemed, had all left for lunch at once, fearing the repercussions of working too long without a break. Must have been a busy morning.
There was only one seat left when a very large man in his 20s wearing jeans belted below his buttocks hustled into the waiting area and dumped the contents of his red backpack on the round table we all faced. Out came a rumpled shirt, one shoe, another belt, a pair of sunglasses, two spiral notebooks, and a huge pile of bills in rubber-banded parcels each about an inch thick. He was laughing, and then his audience was, too, as we eyed this monument to what I, and surely not only me, surmised must be ill-gotten gain. “That’s just this morning,” he noted, grinning madly, looking at each us for confirmation of his joyful mood. Goddamn, I said, that’s a lot of money, you sure you want to be carrying that much cash?
“What, they gonna knock me off my bike for a funky-ass backpack? No way. And it ain’t that much money, those are all one-dollar bills, you looking at 500 dollars is all.”
For deposit, I asked, innocently. “Well yeah, that’s what banks are for, brother, what are you doing here, just hanging around?” Everybody laughed. I wish, I said.
When the manager returned along with the rest of the officers, four altogether, it didn’t take long to decide that there was nothing more for us to do on 125th Street. I had to wait on the TIAA rep, and then I would have to wait on its timely retrieval and reissue of the wire transfers.
As I walked home, I realized that my visit to the B o A branch had somehow proved refreshing rather than an ordeal, even though not one second of the transactions conducted there made any sense. What does time or space have to do with surveillance, supervision, and the movement of money these days? Nothing. But it was nice to be reminded of both in what is left of everyday life.