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By Corey Lee Wilson on July 25, 2020.
Here is a survey and points challenge to see who is blacker in “heart and soul.” That’s right! Who has had more “black-like” or similar black American or simply human being adversity like experiences (regardless of their color) in their lives from another race or ethnicity—incident by incident—and who also had less privilege as well.
There are three parts to this survey for scoring:
1. TOP 10 ADVERSITY INCIDENTS LIST
2. LESS PRIVILEGED HISTORY LIST
3. DIVERSITY EXTRA CREDIT BIO
All can be ranked with each item scored on a scale of 1 to 3: 1 being less meaningful, 3 being the most, and 2 in between. If you cannot produce 10 items in the first two sections, that’s okay, list as many as you can. Don’t be intimidated with few incidents because like a game of cards, 3 scores of 3 points each equals 9 and 5 scores of 1 point each only equals 5.
The third section is an extra credit or bonus section if you believe you have some diverse life, work or family history, etc. Please keep this diverse biography info related to this topic no more 2 to 3 paragraphs long. You can only earn 1 to 3 points for this section.
You can do a blind survey if you like with the identify of each contestant (so as not to influence the scoring) and let the judges in a Townhall group rate each item on a scale of 1 to 3, and see who scores the highest, and then discuss the results and conclusions. When all three sections are added together, the highest possible score is 63 (30 + 30 + 3).
To get the discussions started I entered my list below and you can compare it to yours. Please number your list 1 to 10 with each incident. You can also score the same way for each less-privilege item with your top 10 listed. Add the scores up from each section, and compare to the others, or add them together, and compare.
The 3 sections for COREY LEE WILSON are listed below and ready for presentation and scoring at any Townhall session related to race relations, diversity, adversity, interracial victimization, etc. Please score mine if you like and let me know what my final score is at sapientbeing@att.net.
1-TOP 10 ADVERSITY INCIDENTS LIST
Incident # 1:
When in the second grade, in north Long Beach, my brother and I invited two boys of the same ages but of another race to play in our backyard and it seemed to go well so I invited them to come inside the house to play. However, I had accidentally locked the back door and had to climb through an unlocked bathroom window while standing on my brother’s back to get back inside.
Just as I was ready to slip through the bathroom window, with no provocation, the two boys jumped us, punching us in our backs until my brother holding me up, lost his footing and I fell to the ground stunned. Immediately, my brother picked up a 2 x 4 lying nearby and chased the two boys out of our backyard gate and into the alley.
Besides in class at our elementary school, this was the first time we had ever played with boys our own age of a different race. When we told our single mom, what happened the next day after she came home from her bar shift she said, “Fight your own battles!”
However, our babysitter listened and aware of similar incidents from his sons and the other boys on our street he took action. He was a WW II vet and a martial arts instructor, and he taught my brother and I self-defense because the other boys from another race were coming into our neighborhood and beating up boys of an opposite race for no reason other than the color of their skin.
Incident # 2:
On my first day at a new school in Venice the fourth grade, a pretty girl of another ethnicity sitting next to me, flirted with me. When it was time for recess, a boy of the same ethnicity in my class, chased me around the playground with a switchblade knife. When none of the playground supervisors stopped him, I had to climb up the baseball backstop chain-link fence about ten feet high to avoid being cut.
When school was over the same boy and another one of the same ethnicity followed me home and when I was certain I was going to get jumped, I ran up some adjacent stairs to hide in a nearby apartment building and hid on the landing. It didn’t work and the two boys found me and then punched me until I keeled over and rolled down the stairs all the way to the bottom.
Satisfied, they left me there, curled up in pain. A few minutes later when they were gone, I staggered home, bruised but with no broken bones. Later that week I learned the girl that liked me was the younger sister of the boy with the switchblade knife who had been held back a grade, maybe two, and the only reason I got jumped was because I was of another ethnicity.
Incident # 3:
After high school graduation, I was evicted from my apartment (for excessive parties, noise, and girls and not necessarily in that order) along with my brother and we had no place to live because we had no parents to go to, so we had to stay at the cheapest motel in town, a Motel 8 on Holt Ave. in downtown Pomona.
We never made it through the first night. Right after sundown, a crazed man of another race burst through our motel door with a handgun and pointed it at my brother’s forehead and forced him down unto the bed ready to shoot him saying, “No honkey motherfucker propositions my sister and gets away with it!”
While I pleaded with the man that my brother (who was the same race and blond hair color but not the same man that accosted his kid sister at the payphone) was innocent and here with me all this time. Slowly, the anguished man calmed down, and believed me, returning the way he had entered after stuffing his gun down his pants.
Immediately thereafter, we gathered our belongings later that night escaped into the darkness in my brother’s station wagon to nearby Ganesha park where we slept for three nights until we were able to find an apartment that would rent to us without a cosigner. We were homeless then, but it was June, we were alive and well, and the station wagon provided shelter!
Incident # 4:
While I worked at the USA gas station for the midnight shift after high school and before college, a gang banger of another race tried to steal the money from my cash drawer and I instinctively fought him off with a karate kick to his ribs and another to his groin and he staggered off into the night—unsuccessful.
I called the police to report the incident, but they never found him that night—but he found me the next night and pointed a handgun at me to finish what he started the night before. Methodically, I talked him out of it when I told him it wasn’t worth it for chump change which aptly described the cash drawer after I had emptied it into the safe an hour before. Amazingly, he listened to me and left without any further incident and after my shift ended at 8 AM, I quit my job and looked for another.
Incident # 5:
I found a much better and safer gas station job working for three-time mayor of Pomona Eddie Cortez. As a gas station attendant, I had a knack for spotting stolen credit cards. When I held on to one presented to me by a man of another race, using a credit card with a Japanese last name on it, he objected when I questioned if it belonged to him because he obviously was not of Japanese descent or a woman.
While big Eddie Cortez held the angry man at bay, who tried to get at me before calling his card in, corporate did confirm the credit card was stolen and they advised me to “pick it up” as was the term they used and so I did.
The angry and threatening man accused me of being a racist but Eddie but him in his place explaining I was only doing my job. Fact: I had worked for a number of gas stations through college in Pomona and collected 21 “pick up” credit cards (the $20 reward for each was big dating dollars in those days!). I kept track of the perpetrators demographics and they were: 1 white, 1 Hispanic, and 19 black.
Incident # 6:
While I was riding my motorcycle to Mt. SAC a man of another race, jumped the green light (in front of Eddie Cortez’s gas station at the corner of White and Orange Grove) in his car and I slammed into the side of his car shattering my right femur and was taken away in an ambulance for treatment.
Without me at the accident to give my statement of what happened, the man that ran the red light before it turned green said I was at fault for running a red light and that’s how it ended up in the police report and on my driving record.
I was crippled for one year (handicapped) because my lower femur rotated 45 degrees when I fell at school on crutches after being released from one month at the hospital and twisted it on a flight of stairs. The doctors had to perform a second surgery a year later, by rebreaking my leg (cutting it in half to be precise after they removed the 17 inch samson rod that held the two pieces of femur together that ran like an axle rod through the marrow of my femur) and then rotating the bottom of the femur by 45 degrees for correct orientation and reinserting the samson rod from my pelvic bone area on my buttocks.
The surgery was successful (and I remember one nurse asking me as the anesthesia wore off if I “dated older women”) but I lost a half inch of length on my femur and had to wear orthopedic shoe lifts ever since. I also needed a third operation to remove/pull the samson rod out of the center of my femur from another incision at the top of my buttocks. I survived and if I never told you of this incident, you would never notice I had been in an accident because my gait and balance are all good.
Incident # 7:
While doing my laundry at the nearby laundromat on Holt Ave. while living in the frat house, I was followed by a gang banger from the laundromat a few blocks away to the frat house and my hands were full with a laundry basket of clean clothes as I walked home doing my best to ignore him.
Halfway home, the gang banger pretended to poke a gun at me from his jacket pocket as he walked beside me, but it was obviously his finger when he demanded, “Hey Holmes! Hand me your money!” When I told him, I didn’t have any we were now in front of the frat house (with Brother Razo in view on the front porch).
Confident I could turn the tables on him with a home field advantage, I dropped my laundry basket and chased the gang banger down at the corner and threw him down into the middle of the street. When Razo came to intervene, he held me back from doing any more harm, and let the gang banger escape.
Incident # 8:
When the original owner of the frat house put our property on the market for sale before we could get alumni to make an offer to buy it, a group of urban renewal investors, all of a different race than mine, made an offer and informed me as chapter president, that we would be evicted as soon as escrow cleared.
I pleaded with them to give us more time to look for another buyer as many of us, particularly me who was poor, had no other place to live. They seemed unmoved by my passion plea and excused me as they moved to the front porch to discuss their options.
As they did, I listened in on their conversation from an open window in the living room without them knowing it, and the leader said, “I couldn’t care less if they’re evicted because all of them are nothing more than spoiled white boys!” Luckily for our chapter, their offer fell through, and another was made by alumnus George Kornhoff, who purchased the house and later sold it back to the house corporation that I created.
Incident # 9:
While my girlfriend/Cal Poly professor and I were coming back from the lumber yard in my hatchback car (with 12 ft. pieces of clapboard running from the top of the dashboard to hanging out the back but tagged with red flags legally) we stopped at a red light.
While waiting for the light to change, another vehicle behind us driven by a man and a woman of a different ethnicity struck the back of the marked clapboards that then smashed through my front windshield. When I asked the man driving the car to stop and produce his license and registration, he replied, “No se hablar ingles!”
When I turned my back to get my license and registration for an exchange, he drove off never to be seen again. When I reported his license plate number to the police, they said the plate didn’t match the description of the car and he was most likely an illegal alien. My insurance deductible was $500 and the new front windshield cost $470 so I had to eat that cost out of my own pocket.
Incident # 10:
While on my honeymoon cruise through the Hawaiian Islands three years ago, a local of another race stormed the beach where my wife and I were resting on (with a dozen others) and he literally jumped over me while I was lying down beside a fallen palm tree, kicking sand in everyone’s faces.
His pit bull was right behind him and he started cursing the other “Howlies” and their non-howlie wives or girlfriends for being on his beach and while doing so he sicced his dog on everyone who confronted him and two of the men tried to fight him off the beach and when he still wouldn’t leave, I tried to prevent him from attacking anyone else by attempting to reason with him.
It didn’t work and I had to stand my ground against a 250 lb. man so he sicced his dog on me and he bit my leg (the dog--not the local). The police arrived after the man and dog left, and I had to get my dog bite looked at in the cruise ship infirmary to make sure the dog wasn’t rabid—which it wasn’t to our relief. However, I had to pay $240 for that out of my pocket because my medical insurance didn’t cover it.
Natedao and I continued on with our magnificent Hawaiian honeymoon cruise with stops at the islands of Hawaii, Maui, Kauai and Oahu and I put the incident behind me, like all the other ones, because I would never blame an entire race or ethnicity for the bad/racist/hurtful actions of a few of their members. Neither should you and this is how I earned my PhD in Life and my PhD stands for personal human drama!
2-LESS PRIVILEGED HISTORY LIST
1. I was raised by a single mother after she and dad divorced when I was 4. She never remarried so I grew up without a father figure in my troubled life.
2. I hitch-hiked across the USA in 1968 with my mom and my younger brother Todd and a dog named Robespierre. The historical novel and screenplay Wildflowers is based on this adventure at: https://www.amazon.com/Wildflowers-Corey-Lee-Wilson-ebook/dp/B0792KR7K1
3. I lived with my grandparents on two occasions for a total 3.5 years.
4. I was arrested 6 times for misdemeanors and went to juvenile hall 3 times.
5. My mom died in a car accident when she was 33 and I was 14. After her death, I went to live with foster parents and my brother went to a boys home.
6. I attended 18 different schools; 17 in California and one in the Bahamas before I graduated high school. I went back a grade in the fifth grade due to all the moving.
7. I was handicapped for one year.
8. I put myself through college with no parental support.
9. I’m the only college student in the USA to graduate on triple-secret probation. Follow link for short story about: https://www.fratirepublishing.com/blog
10. My brother Todd died of AIDS when he was 33. Background: He was not gay, but he was indeed white trash and blamed everyone else for his problems except himself. However, he loved brown sugar and his one month marriage in the mid 80’s to (Motown Records) Berry Gordy’s niece Crystal was annulled while he lived in the Gordy's Beverly Hills mansion. I sometimes think of Todd as the “White Prince of Bel Air” but he was no prince by any means, just a flawed young man (like myself), and I’m certain we both would have turned out better if there was a father figure in our lives. How I didn’t end up like him is something of a miracle!
3- DIVERSITY EXTRA CREDIT BIO
Corey Lee Wilson, the Phi Kappa Tau Fraternity's Shideler Award in 1985, Founder and CEO of Fratire Publishing and the SAPIENT Being, is no stranger to diversity.
Corey was raised an Atheist by his liberal Playboy Bunny mother, has three Anglo-Hispanic siblings, a brother who died of AIDS, baptized a Protestant by his conservative grandparents, attended temple with his Jewish foster parents, baptized again as a Catholic for his first Filipina wife, attends Buddhist ceremonies with his second Thai wife, became an Agnostic on his own free will for most of his life, and is a lifetime independent (Centrist) voter who has never registered as a Democrat or Republican (and voted for 5 Democratic and 4 Republican presidential candidates and abstained from doing so in the 2016 presidential election and will do the same in 2020).
Corey felt the sting of intellectual humility by going back one grade in elementary school because he couldn't read proficiently enough in the third grade. He knows adversity having attended 18 different schools before putting himself through college (without parents). He's the only college student in the USA to graduate with honors (on triple-secret probation), receiving a BS in Economics in 1985 and named Who's Who of American College Students the previous year. Using his PhD in life (PhD standing for personal-human-drama), Corey started the Make Free Speech On Campus (MFSAOC) and World of Writing Warriors (WOWW) programs as part of the mission and vision statements for the Society Advancing Personal Intelligence & Enlightenment Now Together (SAPIENT) Being.