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Over time, Black boys get the message. Every Black man was once a Black boy who got that same message.
Show me a struggling man and I’ll show you a boy never given a chance to change.
Mom’s moods were like weather systems that blew in and out of that apartment. And from what I could hear, one had touched land.
Each new set of owners seemed to care a little less about the quality of life of the residents. And after a while, some of the residents stopped caring too. If you share a narrative enough times with someone, they start to take it as their own.
What once felt harmless—bragging rights about whose block was the best, whose court had the finest girls—morphed into this violent, menacing thing, mostly around the drug trade.
What most people don’t realize about addiction is that it is in you before the drug even shows up. That’s because the drug itself is not the problem; it is a symptom of the problem. The drug is the culmination, the final step—not the first. The very first time I smoked cocaine in Robin’s apartment, I was already an addict, I just didn’t know it. I was a silent bomb waiting to go off, my brain looking for the right drug to take hold. And at eighteen, it found me.
“Dana on the radio!” she said. “No shit! Seriously?” I was stunned. This was about as likely as hearing Dana had moved to Venus. “Yeah,” she said, “she goes by Queen Latifah now.” “Queen La-what?” “Latifah,” they all said in unison.
I’d met some people, heard some stories, and learned that the life expectancy in the Black neighborhoods of Baltimore is worse than in North Korea and Syria.
There are higher levels of PTSD in kids from some communities of color than soldiers returning from war.
Sam, an ONS program coordinator who’s in the film, told me that in their neighborhoods, nobody knows how to aspire to be a doctor or lawyer because they don’t see that. They don’t live where they see those things. And when those who do make it leave, they leave nothing behind. No breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs. That stuck with me.
You want to eat? Read the line. You want to get kicked out of the business? Speak your mind.
Ava DuVernay made that point. “Let’s not pretend for a moment that this system is broken,” she said. “It is working properly. It is doing exactly what it is designed to do.” The kids are deprived, sorted, and discarded and then are forced to make poor choices based on that circumstance.
In the park near my neighborhood in Williamsburg, where I’ve been running, the bathrooms are open and sanitized. Four miles from my place, in Brownsville, they’ve got shackles and chains on those same doors and have blocked off the playground.
They’re hungry to take action but don’t want to be told how—especially by those who are responsible for the problems.
The price of being ignorant is they get to use our ignorance against us.
You don’t have to get scarred up in your face and go through endless rehabs and almost die and overdose to finally understand that you’re worth something.
