Labor of Love: For Carlos McBride, Enlightenment is a Commitment

Written by Melissa Karen Sances
Photos by Nikki Gardner Photography

Sponsored by Valley Home Improvement

Published in Northampton Living (February 2023)

On the first day of class at Holyoke Community College, the teacher arrived early. He walked past rows of empty desks to the chalkboard, where he scrawled his last name, McBride, next to the title of the course, Introduction to Sociology. On the table in front, he put down his stuff, including the syllabus featuring readings by Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim. Then he adjusted his fitted cap, grabbed his hip hop magazine, and walked to the back row. His sneakers scuffed the floor when he took a seat. The pages of the magazine fluttered as he leafed through them. The people filing in barely glanced at the middle-aged man of color whom they assumed was a fellow student. Forty of his peers sat down and waited to learn.

Suddenly, McBride got up and eased his way through the rows. But instead of taking his place at the board, he walked out of the room.

In the hallway, he peered into other classrooms and saw students slumped over their desks, their hands barely holding up their heads. He walked into the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face, careful of the tattoos peeking out of his shirt collar. Then he clapped his hands. Ready.

Back in the classroom, he clapped his hands again. “Can we just get into a big circle, because these lines – it’s just not going to work,” he said loudly. Students of various backgrounds, races, and ages stared at him as he tried to keep a straight face. “Okay, real quick, for the non-believers,” he conceded. “My name is Carlos ‘Rec’ McBride, I’m a doctoral student at UMass Amherst. Can we just get into a circle?” Reluctantly, the students made a ring with their desks and sat back down.

On the board he wrote, “Sociology: the study of society.” Then he joined the circle and asked, “Does anybody know what happened in the beginning of this class?”

“The idea,” he said as the students leaned in, “is that we don’t see each other.”

Growing up in what McBride describes as “a world riddled with addiction and depression,” he lived a dual life. At 16 he read Ayn Rand’s first novel, The Fountainhead, about an architect who envisions a society built on integrity but attains his ideal rashly, imperfectly. McBride, who by then was known in Brooklyn for his stubborn streak, had recently earned his nickname “Rec,” short for “reckless.” His alias was an identity to slip into like a coat of armor – as he dropped out of high school, as he became a young father, as he stood before a judge. As he considered the logical next step: Jail. Years later, while completing his doctorate, he would begin “The Healer’s Project” to understand how men of color coped with trauma. For McBride’s documentary, a friend who spent 5 years in solitary confinement would describe looking at the world through a window so small that in the right light, it didn’t even reflect his face. Just his eyes. That’s what McBride would show on-screen: Darkness. Then two eyes illuminated by a sliver of light.

Through the justice system, McBride was admitted to the James Baldwin Scholars Program at Hampshire College. “I didn’t even know who Baldwin was at the time, who is now one of my favorite writers,” he says. “Because I was just angry. I was 25, I had two kids, my name was Carlos, I was in a school with like 17-, 18-, 19-year-olds driving Range Rovers, and I was just feeling inadequate.”

Baldwin, who taught at the Amherst-based college in the 1980s, often wrote fictional characters who were searching for meaning. They found it in open-eyed love, a truth the author believed in – and knew he could always choose. So far, McBride felt his life had been about survival. It was predictable, something to endure.

After graduating from Hampshire with a degree in media studies, a friend asked him to teach a film class in Manhattan. “I’ve never seen a teacher like you,” an awed student told him. Seen, he thought. What did an educator look like? If he became one, would how he looked make a difference in a kid’s life? The word seen was sharp as a sword, but it was double-edged. He decided that it glinted with promise.

After earning a master’s in social justice at UMass Amherst, he began to teach. Some of his students didn’t know how to read and write. A five-paragraph essay was so overwhelming that they wouldn’t attempt a word. So he asked them to speak it. “When I put a mic in front of them, it was phenomenal what came out,” he says. As the director of New England Public Radio’s media lab, he helped high school students create powerful podcasts, and, eventually, essays. They’d transcribe the audio, revise it, and voila: Now they could see their story.

Today, McBride lives in Northampton with his 7-year-old daughter, Milani. Her education is paramount, so this is her home. And his. He’s been seeking for so long that he’s never really stayed in one place. He’s created community wherever he’s gone, but he’s never felt like he belonged to one. Part of what he teaches Milani is that even if love is a decision, some don’t have the capacity to make it. “I use the cabinets,” he explains. “When we open the cabinets and we’re trying to figure out what to make, sometimes we don’t have certain things. Sometimes people just don’t have stuff in their cabinets.”

It’s tiring, always teaching. “Enlightenment is not a joyful process,” he admits. “The Buddha didn’t become the Buddha because it was all good.” But it makes him come alive. When he describes his first, post-master’s teaching gig at Holyoke, he bounds into the center of the room and acts out every moment, claps and all. It is almost reckless, his abandon. He just can’t help it. But the acting is illuminating. Rather than tell me the story from one perspective, he shows me the scene from multiple points of view. He identifies with all the characters and he weaves their stories together. If I were to try to capture the moment on film, like he does. I’d start with darkness, like he would. Then two open eyes, then two more, then two more … finally, there would be a luminous circle of seers.

He would be the light.

McBride is on the boards of 33 Hawley and the Northampton Center for the Arts.