I Followed Every Rule About Being Black. It Ruined Me

[00:00:00]My mother asked me a question when I was 15 years old. She asked me, "Why don't you hang out with any kids who take school seriously?"

[00:00:10]I told her that in my classes, I don't know any.

[00:00:15]That was the truth.

[00:00:17]But it wasn't the whole truth. The whole truth was that I didn't know any black kids who took it seriously. This video is about a lesson.

[00:00:25]You already know it. Most of us have learned it.

[00:00:29]I'm talking about acting white, >> [snorts] >> talking white. Terms like sellout, Oreo, Uncle Tom, these things were part of that curriculum.

[00:00:41]I didn't just hear about this lesson. I graduated from the course with honors.

[00:00:46]And I'm going to show you exactly where that lesson takes a person, because it took me there. Then I'm going to show you the people who designed the curriculum in the first place, because somebody put this coursework together.

[00:00:58]This didn't come out of nowhere. It has a starting point, and there are people attached to it, and I'm going to say who they are out loud.

[00:01:06]Before I get into all that, you got to know a lot about me. I grew up in two worlds at the same time. The first neighborhood I remember was black and middle class. Good people, good kids. We all had bikes, parents who knew each other. It was a lot of fun. But I went to a Montessori school, and that school was mostly white. So, for most of my life, I was used to being around groups of black people and then groups of white people. That was just normal life to me. It was like a Tuesday.

[00:01:41]But then my parents got divorced.

[00:01:49]I was three or four.

[00:01:51]One important piece you should know about me is that my mother, who passed away just a few years back, was Puerto Rican. So, if you think about my household, there was no black father there, and there was also no black woman, either, because my mother Puerto Rican.

[00:02:07]My father is his own kind of dude. Like, he's a psychiatrist. He got his own private practice. He does really well. At one point, he had this huge Adobe house built. Olympic-size pool, separate living maid quarters. Every bedroom had a loft over the top of it. So, it was basically a two-story bedroom in each bedroom.

[00:02:29]>> [clears throat] >> During summers and holidays, that's where I'd spend my time. That wasn't the only house that he lived in over the years, but it's probably one of the most notable.

[00:02:39]Now, he's somebody who rides bikes all the time. He's a cyclist. He used to do triathlons. He meditates. He was into Eastern philosophy, religion, and Native American culture.

[00:02:51]He's a vegetarian, and for the most part, he keeps to himself. He isn't big on socializing.

[00:02:58]Now, I love my father to death, probably more than he knows, and I should probably tell him more often. If he ever watches this, Dad, you should know that. But, you have to look at things through the eyes of a teenager in the '90s.

[00:03:13]I mean, my dad is basically everything everybody was accusing me of being.

[00:03:19]Well-educated.

[00:03:21]Talking white. Eating essentially white.

[00:03:24]He's living the way a lot of wealthy white people live.

[00:03:29]Out in a big house and away from other black people.

[00:03:33]That's how most of my black peers would have seen him, and I knew that.

[00:03:37]So, what kind of position did that put me in? I had black success sitting right in front of me. I could literally swim in all of this success, and it didn't pull me over to that way of thinking an inch, because I already knew the social cost. So, on one hand, he was a role model. He had achieved all this success, but on the other hand, he didn't achieve it through the way that was, {quote} {unquote}, black enough.

[00:04:07]So, I didn't have a road map for what it meant to be black, essentially. The only real place I had to look was media and my friends.

[00:04:16]So, whatever they told me black was, that was what it was, because there was no black man in the house to tell me any different.

[00:04:25]This is a important part of the story, right?

[00:04:28]>> [snorts] >> We stayed in that same black middle-class neighborhood a little longer after the divorce.

[00:04:34]And then my mother moved us into an apartment complex that was mostly white.

[00:04:40]This part is important because it's probably not the story most people expect.

[00:04:45]That white apartment complex is where I learned how to curse. The kids were wild. There was a good bit of racism there, too. A lot of single white moms.

[00:04:54]People cursed at their kids and disrespected each other in ways I hadn't seen in the black community I just came from.

[00:05:01]So, by the time I was about 7, I didn't see white as meaning proper.

[00:05:07]And I didn't see black as meaning ghetto.

[00:05:10]That's not the experience that I had.

[00:05:13]But then, I went to public school.

[00:05:16]And that's when I got my experience with black kids from the projects.

[00:05:20]They'd see me eating granola bars. Haha.

[00:05:23]I didn't get free lunch. My mother packed my lunch in a brown bag, and they saw me talking to my white friends. They didn't like any of it.

[00:05:31]At one point, I thought I was at war with the entire projects.

[00:05:36]This was all for no reason.

[00:05:38]My mother was from the projects herself, New York City, Puerto Rican. So, her thought process was, we're going to go and talk to these people. She found out where they live, drove up, knocked on their door, and made us become friends.

[00:05:54]>> [laughter] >> That was that. That's the kind of woman my mom was. She ran an after-school program with kids of every race in it, and I grew up around every kind of kid.

[00:06:05]And they'd all be at our house. And uh you know, I I I appreciate my mom for that.

[00:06:11]If I don't say this part, somebody's going to dig it up and have their gotcha moment.

[00:06:16]One of the kids in my mother's after-school program was a white kid. Uh he was growing up with his brother and a single father.

[00:06:25]Uh his father would pick him up from my mom's house.

[00:06:28]Eventually, my mom and this gentleman started dating. After several [clears throat] years as a couple, he passed away.

[00:06:35]Um he left his two boys behind, and he left a house that was paid for. So, my mother got guardianship of his two kids.

[00:06:42]We stayed in that house.

[00:06:44]That was their house, and she basically just covered the bills every month and raised them in it. She wasn't married to their father, so she didn't have any claim to the property. And she didn't have to do what she did, but she did because she cared for them. And so, she raised them from about the time I was 7.

[00:07:01]Once they were old enough, my mother bought her own house and moved on and out. And I moved to New York City before that. So, it was a really interesting upbringing.

[00:07:12]My Puerto Rican mother from the projects raising two white boys who lost their father. I could tell you some stories about going to the grocery store and things like that. It was it was all interesting, but people wonder why I think about race the way that I do.

[00:07:27]And if you hear the story, you now you can understand.

[00:07:32]Now, if you can, try to look at the house from the outside, right? You're probably looking at it that way already.

[00:07:40]But that's the same way my friends looked at it.

[00:07:45]You know, you ask yourself how did they see it? They saw a black kid at a white school with white friends with white stepbrothers and that's it.

[00:07:55]But it doesn't matter what it was. To most people what matters is what it looks like.

[00:08:01]At that point in my teenage years, I had something to prove and I had a lot more to prove than anybody else, especially to my black peers.

[00:08:11]So later I got sent to this Quaker school, a friend school. If you ever heard of friend schools, that's that's the Quaker schools and they were kind of like hippie schools and I made a lot more white friends there.

[00:08:22]But I still had my black friends back in the old in the old neighborhood. I never dropped anybody. But around that same time is the time when I started hearing all the nonsense from the black community. They'd talk about how I talked.

[00:08:35]I had to hear about the whole talking white thing. They talked about how I dressed. I had to hear about how I couldn't dance, that I spent too much time with white people, yada yada yada.

[00:08:46]So there's parts of my life that I'm not so proud of and it's a part of the reason why I made this video.

[00:08:52]See, I didn't fight against the lessons I was taught.

[00:08:56]The lessons or the lesson plans, I learned them.

[00:09:00]I got a high top fade. I listened to a lot more rap. I changed how I dressed, started watching Rap City and Yo! MTV Raps religiously. I studied what people were wearing, how they talked, how they carried themselves, all of it like it was homework.

[00:09:18]In the late '80s and early '90s was the pro-black era of hip-hop. Public Enemy, KRS-One, Gang Starr, Boogie Down Productions.

[00:09:28]Now I was always into reading and during that time, my mother was dating a black man who was also a civil rights attorney. He stayed at our house a lot.

[00:09:38]It was basically his second home.

[00:09:40]He was definitely a good dude. He gave us books to read and took me to one of those local black bookstores to buy books. We talked about black history and black issues. He even took me to see Nelson Mandela once in DC. That was right when he got out of prison.

[00:09:55]So, there was a black man in the house, educated, successful, a man who fought for black people for a living.

[00:10:02]He was more like the role model everybody says black boys need. I had that.

[00:10:08]At the time, he gave me a version of what being black meant. And because of the consciousness in hip-hop back then, reading, studying, and building something, and standing up for people was very much a part of that. But then, he got caught cheating on my mother.

[00:10:25]And after that, he was out of there. But the people who stayed, the people who never left, were all my black friends and peers.

[00:10:36]Every day, I had to go out and be judged by them.

[00:10:40]Talk wrong, they got you. Dress wrong, they got something for that, too.

[00:10:44]Do good in school, you might hear about that.

[00:10:48]And they had their own version of what black meant. And it came at the same time rap started to change and veer more toward gangster rap.

[00:10:58]So, hopefully I got your attention because this is an important part.

[00:11:02]Growing up, none of this really felt like peer pressure at the time.

[00:11:07]It felt like the right thing to do. It felt like I was becoming a better young black man. It almost felt like I was becoming part of something I'd been separated from. And that's how the lesson gets you. It doesn't feel like it's enslaving you. It feels like a homecoming. So, I kept pushing in that direction. And at that point, I wasn't doing well in private school.

[00:11:30]I had this thing where I'd I'd always skip. Since my mother was the one paying for the private school and I wanted to go to public school anyway, she was okay with that. She didn't want to keep paying while I was doing poorly.

[00:11:43]So that summer before I started the new high school, I went looking for a black friend group so I'd know a few people before I even got there.

[00:11:52]I found a neighborhood a few miles from where I lived that had several black kids in it. So I started riding my bike there like every day all summer long just to be around them so I could fit in when I got to the new school.

[00:12:06]And while that neighborhood wasn't the hood, I still got into a lot of nonsense a lot of black kids get into at that age. My first time smoking cigarettes, it was there. First time dealing with marijuana, it was there.

[00:12:22]That was the neighborhood. First time getting drunk right over there.

[00:12:27]All at age 15 and all of it from peer pressure trying to fit into what I thought being black was and not just what I thought, what everybody pushed me towards who was black.

[00:12:39]I think about my friends from that time and not one that I can recall was doing really well in school. Not one.

[00:12:47]So my mother asked me the question, why don't you hang out with kids who take their education seriously? And I said, "I don't know any."

[00:12:57]You got to think about that.

[00:12:59]I was a kid purposely trying to be as black as possible and to do that, I had to go find the worst outcomes available to me and walk towards them.

[00:13:11]I didn't get lost. I followed the directions people were giving me. Black people were giving me these directions.

[00:13:18]My friends, my peers, all of this didn't start with them.

[00:13:23]They inherited these ideas the same way I did. The difference is a lot of them got their ideas straight from their parents or their family members.

[00:13:34]And look, I'm not the first person to notice this stuff. Researchers have studied it, argued about it, written about kids who hide how smart they are, so they don't get called out. Some say it's everywhere, some say it's overblown. The people who study this for a living don't even agree.

[00:13:52]But I don't need them to agree. I lived it.

[00:13:57]And a lot of you watching this, I'm sure you lived it, too. So, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

[00:14:04]Not all, not all.

[00:14:05]>> [clears throat] >> What I care about is where the lesson came from in the first place. And that brings us back to my favorite time, the 1960s.

[00:14:16]Dead in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement, right? You've got this huge discussion about integration, having a seat at the counter, going to the same schools, being a part of the fabric of America instead of a race of outsiders.

[00:14:30]So, around 1966 everything [clears throat] changed. A lot of black folks looked at integration and said it had failed. It wasn't working fast enough. It wasn't working at all. Stokely Carmichael steps in and says, "Stop crying, we shall overcome."

[00:14:47]and start screaming black power. And of course, we know about people getting sprayed with the big hoses, the German Shepherds attacking people, people hitting black people with billy clubs, and all of that is well known in the black community. Those images are stamped on our minds forever. But something snuck in at that moment, an idea got into our heads, and a lot of our black leaders were pushing it hard. A lot of people have heard me say this in other videos and given me pushback on it, but I strongly believe that this is where this entire idea of blackness started to stick in people's mind as being the opposite of white.

[00:15:30]In other words, we had to oppose everything that was white, oppose the white power structure. And if we oppose the white power structure, then anything that looks like the white power structure becomes suspect. Anything.

[00:15:46]And unfortunately, that includes success.

[00:15:49]>> [snorts] >> Now, back then, they had a name for successful black people, the black bourgeoisie.

[00:15:55]Did I pronounce that right? Bourgeoisie.

[00:15:58]People don't know this, another thing, I had cancer and I had it in my salivary glands, right? So, I can't I don't talk the same as I used to. It's difficult to talk, but you now you know that, too. But, the black bourgeoisie, and in the writing that came out of that moment, the black bourgeoisie wasn't described as proof that we could make it.

[00:16:21]They were described as a tool, a tool the power structure was using to squeeze black folks in the ghetto.

[00:16:28]This idea was that the successful black man wasn't the goal.

[00:16:34]He was the enemy's weapon.

[00:16:37]Then you had Huey Newton who took that idea further. Around 1971, Newton had this idea he and his black Panthers wanted black business owners and black capitalists to make contributions or donations, money. He wanted these [snorts] successful black people to fund the Panther survival programs with their money. And in exchange, the black community would be told it's okay to shop at these black stores.

[00:17:03]Now, some of you might be thinking that's not terrible. Successful black people funding the folks who haven't made it yet. That sounds all right, right?

[00:17:12]But, watch how it worked.

[00:17:13]If the black business owner paid in, the community backed him. If he didn't, Newton said the community should let his business die. Black people who wouldn't pay money to him were basically parasites, he said. And if they didn't participate, he felt that the black community should run them out of business.

[00:17:34]So, if you do well, you now owe the entire black community proof that you didn't sell out. And that proof is monetary.

[00:17:46]So, what happens when black success gets seen by black leaders as negative?

[00:17:51]If you do that, you can't point to successful black men and say, "Hey, be like him."

[00:17:57]Because instead you got people calling him a sellout.

[00:18:02]He must have been kissing the white man's ass to get that.

[00:18:05]And if you can't hold him up as an example, then what do you hold up for black kids?

[00:18:13]You got nothing to give him to look forward to. All you have is a list of things this black kid can't do.

[00:18:21]So, what does a kid do with that?

[00:18:26]I'll tell you what he does. He picks something that's definitely not seen as white.

[00:18:31]That picture stays in the kid's mind until he gets older and it gets reinforced over time. You get different versions of it in media and everywhere else.

[00:18:40]One of the strongest reinforcements of these ideas came in 1977 with the TV series Roots.

[00:18:49]Now, there's a particular scene in Roots that's probably one of the most powerful in the entire series. You probably know the one I'm talking about.

[00:18:58]>> Toby be good for massa.

[00:19:00]>> All right, you be a good field hand and you can stay here.

[00:19:03]>> That's the one.

[00:19:05]A black man on his knees promising to be a good while a white man pats him on the head.

[00:19:12]And I'm sure we all know that's John Amos playing an older Kunta Kinte.

[00:19:19]Now, if you know the story, you know that Kunta Kinte was the the same man who wouldn't take the the name Toby.

[00:19:26]>> Your name is Toby.

[00:19:28]I want to hear say it. What's your name?

[00:19:33]>> Kunta.

[00:19:34]Kunta Kinte.

[00:19:39]>> That's another that's probably the most famous scene in the movie. They whipped him and whipped him and he wanted to keep going by his African name Kunta.

[00:19:49]He'd run, they'd catch him, he'd run again. Eventually, they cut off his foot.

[00:19:55]So, there's no bigger symbol of black resistance from American television that I can recall.

[00:20:03]Yeah, I think that's probably the only one.

[00:20:06]When we talk about a black man who would not bend, that's who we're talking about.

[00:20:12]But, at the end, he's on the ground kneeling talking about Toby be be good.

[00:20:17]Toby be good. But, here's the thing, almost every black person who grew up in America and is watching this now probably has that scene somewhere in their head.

[00:20:28]Roots was one of the biggest things that ever aired in this country. My parents watched it. They told me to watch it.

[00:20:35]That picture got put into all of us early.

[00:20:38]I don't know anybody in my age group who hasn't seen it if you're black.

[00:20:43]So, that fear of being a man on his knees got transferred to so many black Americans. Black people are afraid of becoming Toby on their knees. And if you are a fighter for freedom, you should be able to understand that, right?

[00:20:58]But, today people take that clip and put it on other black people. It's a meme.

[00:21:03]They'll clip Toby on his knees and drop it under a video of a black politician.

[00:21:09]They'll put it under a black man who talks about cleaning up the neighborhood. They'll put it under a black man talking about getting rid of the criminals in the community who are taking black lives. They'll match that meme with anybody who says something a group of white folks might happen to agree with.

[00:21:28]Somebody made a video of Toby begging and put it on Byron Donald's.

[00:21:33]They're basically trying to say that black people are serving their enemies.

[00:21:38]You might hear it said as tap dancing for whitey or said in some other way, but it's all the same. It's all cut from the same cloth.

[00:21:48]The question we got to ask ourselves is was Toby actually good?

[00:21:54]Go back and take a look.

[00:21:57]He wasn't good.

[00:21:59]His spirit was broken.

[00:22:02]That's all. Now, I know Roots is fiction, but really look at the situation and think about it because a lot of people back then didn't see it as fiction.

[00:22:14]What we eventually started doing is we looked at Kunta Kinte's trauma and somewhere along the line we mixed it up with being good. We started treating being good and being broken like they're the same thing.

[00:22:29]What does that mindset do to children?

[00:22:33]If being good means being broken, then the only way left to prove you're not broken is to be bad. That's it.

[00:22:41]That's the mindset running this whole thing. That brings us to why so many black people will defend their criminal element quicker than they'll defend a man out here trying to fix something.

[00:22:55]Because whatever else that criminal is, he isn't Toby. He isn't bending in front of a white man for a pat on the head.

[00:23:04]I recently saw a website that I won't name here. It basically laid out what a portion of the black America sees as a [clears throat] It defined the word and it had a list of all the people they think are coons and Uncle Toms or sellouts or whatever, but the basic definition is a black person who will do anything for white people.

[00:23:27]Anything to make them happy.

[00:23:30]This highlights what I'm talking about.

[00:23:32]To them, the crime these so-called coons commit isn't doing wrong. The crime is pleasing white people.

[00:23:41]Do you see the difference? And they listed a whole bunch of people. Michael Jordan, Steve Harvey, Ben Carson, Pharrell, some of the most famous black people on the planet listed as traitors.

[00:23:54]Basically, take any black person out here who talks about cleaning up the community. You do that and you'll see that there's a contingent of the black community that will hate them for it.

[00:24:07]Because in their mind, cleaning up the community sounds like doing what white people want.

[00:24:14]It's all about the optics and that's basically what I call the white man can't jump theory.

[00:24:22]Y'all remember that scene when Woody Harrelson's character told Wesley Snipes' character that black ball players are more worried about looking good.

[00:24:30]>> You'd rather look good and lose and look bad and win.

[00:24:33]>> Now, to a lot of us, cleaning up our own communities looks bad because it looks like that scene from Roots. It looks like we're bending to the will of the white man. It's all about the optics. Far too many of us have invested in protecting the optics over everything else.

[00:24:52]>> [sighs] >> I think this will be clearer if I just show you with my own life.

[00:24:57]By the time I was 17, I was in a lot of trouble. I was involved in a lot of criminal activity. Basically, anything you can name outside of anything violent. I didn't do anything violent.

[00:25:10]I well, not everything, but I did a lot of dumb stuff. Let's just say that, right? And I wasn't just getting in trouble with the law, there were people out there legitimately gunning for me.

[00:25:22]I had my ops, as they say, right? So, I had to take a a moment and just slow down from what I'd been doing. It's all because a lot of this stuff came to a head at one time. Nothing more than that, really. It just got to the point where it was overwhelming.

[00:25:39]But, I'd already gotten into the music business before that, and music became a sort of escape. So, I started doing a lot of beat production.

[00:25:49]That's why you see this keyboard back here. I still do some every once in a while.

[00:25:54]I was good enough that I thought I could do something with it. So, I I talked to my mom and talked her into sending me to New York City to go to school for recording engineering.

[00:26:04]>> [snorts] >> I worked for various companies in the music industry after graduating from that school. One supplied equipment to basically all the major studios in New York City. So, I'd been in pretty much every big studio in the city at that point, and there was one that caught my attention that was like it was just extravagant and better than all the rest, and that was The Hit Factory.

[00:26:30]At that time, it was probably the biggest studio in the city with the most clients, and anybody who was anybody had recorded there. So, I applied, and about 6 months later, it took that long, I got on as a gofer, basically doing whatever whatever they needed, right? And [snorts] you had the who's who of anybody who was anybody coming through there at the time. It was crazy.

[00:26:52]Michael Jackson couldn't even be seen when he came in, so he had his own special entrance.

[00:26:58]That's the level of what was going on at that place, right? Eventually, though, I got fired.

[00:27:05]That's the only job I've ever been fired from. And And it wasn't even for something I did, but I'm not going to get into what what happened. It's a long story, but after that, I became the office manager at a record pool and promotion company.

[00:27:18]I was producing a lot of beats in my apartment, and a manager that I had met back at the Hit Factory ended up getting one of them placed with a member of the Terror Squad.

[00:27:28]Uh the artist was Cuban Link, and the song was called Flowers for the Dead, and it was a tribute to the late Big Pun.

[00:27:36]Think about where I was at that time.

[00:27:39]I'm rubbing elbows with some of the top rappers and musicians in America. Not the top musicians of white America. This is the top of probably the blackest thing in America at the time, which is hip-hop. Hip-hop in New York City in its prime, the late 1990s.

[00:27:56]See, that's the lesson I followed all the way up there. Every step I did what I was told that I was supposed to be doing as a black person, and it carried me all the way to that point, right? And [snorts] guess what I saw there.

[00:28:11]People getting in beef. People getting shot. People smoking weed every day.

[00:28:16]People drinking. Wanting to go to the club every night. And people were still committing crimes through all of this.

[00:28:22]And the main thing was a lot of people had horrible attitudes and personalities.

[00:28:29]These were the exact same things I ran into at 15 in that neighborhood that I rode my bike to.

[00:28:36]Same problems. Nicer buildings, and now people had a lot of money, right?

[00:28:41]So, by the year 2000, I went back home.

[00:28:45]Back to my mom's house.

[00:28:48]I didn't fail at being black. The lesson plan I followed worked. I did it exactly how it was supposed to be done. It took me on a 20-year tour and dropped me right back where I started.

[00:29:02]But that's how this lesson plan works.

[00:29:04]It might get you the money, but there's no personal growth, no mindset shift, no getting away from all the traumatic stuff that happens in the hood. It's why rappers who made millions still end up shooting at one another.

[00:29:18]It's why athletes still get caught up in criminal activity off the court, because they still want to hold on to the thing they think makes them authentically black. So what got me out of all that?

[00:29:30]It wasn't more black pride. I'd already tried that. I went all in on black power. That made things worse.

[00:29:38]Two things pulled me out and neither one is probably what you expect. The first was consequences. I had to face real-world consequences. Some I couldn't talk my way out of. The law was coming.

[00:29:51]People had legitimately shot at me.

[00:29:55]Criminality got more expensive than it was worth. The only benefit to me was those optics I talked about before.

[00:30:02]Somehow all of this stuff looked good to my peers.

[00:30:06]So I quit.

[00:30:08]Nobody gave me a speech. It just got real.

[00:30:12]Now the second one came from my old middle school.

[00:30:16]The one that my friends made fun of me for going to. That same hippie Quaker school. The friend school. The thing I'll never forget is they'd put us on opposite sides of a field, right? Two sides of a field. They'd give us an argument. Two people would stand there, one arguing for each side, and you'd sit there and you'd listen to both. And if the other side made a better argument, you had to get up and move to the side with the strongest one.

[00:30:45]The physical act of walking across that field to stand on the other side, you had to move your body and admit to somebody that you changed your mind.

[00:30:55]I was just a kid, but I never forgot that thing because it taught me something nobody in the street ever taught me, not one time.

[00:31:03]It taught me that changing your mind isn't losing.

[00:31:07]It's what you're supposed to do when the other person is right.

[00:31:11]I used to catch hell from my friends about my proximity to whiteness. That's what they call it today, anyway.

[00:31:18]That was what I was when I was at that school, right? They thought that school was where I'd catch the sickness of whiteness, I suppose.

[00:31:26]But that school is where I learned how to think. That's what my black peers were protecting me from.

[00:31:33]Once I could change my mindset, everything else started to come easier.

[00:31:38]I went back to school. I graduated from an HBCU, magna laude. I built businesses. I got here. I started talking to you.

[00:31:48]So, it was the consequences plus the mindset shift.

[00:31:53]A lot of people look at all of this and they see it the wrong way.

[00:31:58]They say the problem with black kids is there are no consequences, no discipline, nobody holding them accountable.

[00:32:06]But that's not exactly what happened to me.

[00:32:09]I had consequences. I had them every single day. They were consistent. They were immediate. They never missed.

[00:32:18]Talk a certain way, my peers delivered the punishment. Do anything my peers deemed was white, they delivered the punishment. Smoke, drink, steal, run the streets, rewarded every single time with the one thing a 15-year-old wants more than anything.

[00:32:35]I was accepted.

[00:32:38]See what I'm talking about?

[00:32:40]It's like that word a lot of these folks you like to use, systemic.

[00:32:46]Because this was a system that worked.

[00:32:48]It worked on me. It's working on somebody's son right now, today, while you're watching this.

[00:32:54]So, the problem is not that black kids can't learn from consequences.

[00:32:59]Black kids learn from consequences perfectly. We're excellent at it. The problem is who's handing those consequences out and what those same folks are rewarding us for.

[00:33:10]Back in the '80s and '90s, people used to talk about peer pressure. A lot of times, I didn't hear that in the black community. But, it's a real thing. The peer group is the one delivering the consequences, and they're the ones rewarding black kids for failing.

[00:33:26]So, the adults have to take that job back.

[00:33:30]That means getting active in the household, in the school, in the neighborhood. The same consequences, consistent every single time. No debates, no lectures. It doesn't depend on the day, doesn't depend on the teacher, doesn't depend on what mood somebody's in. The consequences have to stay the same each and every time.

[00:33:50]Because if the consequences are the same every time, it doesn't matter who's watching. Doesn't matter who his mom is, doesn't matter how the kid is feeling.

[00:34:00]They'll learn. That's how people's minds work. That's how it's always worked.

[00:34:06]And if our grown folks won't be consistent, here's one thing we can bet our bottom dollar on. The streets will be. The streets never miss a day. The streets are consistent.

[00:34:20]And the second half of the fix is all on us.

[00:34:23]There's got to be some reward, something for them to walk towards. Black people need to learn to be okay looking at people who did it right. They need to hear the grown folks around them say, "That's okay for us.

[00:34:37]That person is one of us. He's not acting white. He's not doing something white."

[00:34:43]Not, "Oh, he forgot where he came from."

[00:34:46]or all of that kind of nonsense.

[00:34:48]Goodness is not white.

[00:34:51]Excellence is not white. There's no such thing as black excellence or white excellence. There's just excellence.

[00:34:58]So, I want to talk about my mom one more time.

[00:35:02]She looked at her 15-year-old son and asked him a fair question.

[00:35:07]"Why don't you hang out with kids who take school seriously?" And I looked at her and I said, "I don't know any."

[00:35:15]And what that meant when I said that was I didn't know any black ones.

[00:35:20]Now, you know what that really was.

[00:35:23]It wasn't a kid who didn't care about school. I read Malcolm X for fun. I studied black history on my own. Nobody made me do those things.

[00:35:32]I was a kid who'd been taught there were two versions of myself and I could only keep one.

[00:35:39]The black one or the successful one.

[00:35:42]I picked like I was supposed to.

[00:35:47]So, my question for you is this.

[00:35:49]Who taught you that?

[00:35:51]Who sat you down and split you in half?

[00:35:54]And what has it cost you already?

[00:35:57]Think about it.

[00:35:58]Let me know in the comments because I try to read them.

[00:36:02]And if you want to know how black culture started to become synonymous with ghetto culture, take a look at this video right here.

[00:36:08]If you haven't subscribed, go ahead and hit the button. Share it with somebody who needs to hear it, especially somebody who will probably argue me down in the comments. I love those sorts of people and I want to hear from them.

[00:36:21]So, if you want to support the channel directly, there's a link in the description. Just remember, we all have choices. We can blame things on our race or we can consider culture.

[00:36:35]I'm out.

[00:36:38]>> No more yabba dabba doo.