Istvan Bio 2

Let's workshop this bitch!

M. A. Istvan Jr.—born May 31st 1985 (although he tells everyone April 27th 1983)—was raised in Beacon NY in the 80s and 90s where, in addition to the overarching soft bigotry of lowered expectations, a decades-deep tide of negative stereotypes about his family normalized children with his last name being placed in special education by default (only to graduate into special targets for law enforcement barely after double digits). Istvan was one of the few in his family to break the mold: learning to read, securing a place to bathe that was neither a creek nor a neighbor’s hose, and earning multiple graduate degrees (including a PhD in Philosophy). Unfortunately, victim culture bloomed into full-blown cancel culture just as Istvan—already a transgressive artist, a professor whose lectures expose students to difficult moral questions, and a colleague unable to internalize middle-class manners—was, in spite of these liabilities, hitting his stride in academia. Diverse even beneath the surface (rather than some Oreo conformist token of marginality), it took little time before his presence—his section-eight talk and his underclass gait coupled (hazardously) with both an appreciation for nuance and a refusal to truckle to the dominant ideology of anti-intellectual outrage—“offended” and “traumatized” enough intent-disregarding woke whites, with their imperious scarves, that he was barred from his career (and from most other honorable sources of livelihood).