 Why is a 16-year-old being sent to pick up his siblings at 10 o'clock at night to an unfamiliar location? I want to check our people. Why is a 16-year-old black boy? Why wasn't he properly made aware of the circumstances and the world that he lives in? Why was he not properly made aware of how white people actually see him? I ground this conversation or at least my understanding of this conversation through my understanding of blackness and recently a young man was shot for being black. I'm a young man. I used to be a younger man and I want to play this video and I want to help frame this the way that I understand it. Folks, protesters in Kansas City have repeatedly gone to a neighborhood where a black honor student and talented musician Ralph Yorle was shot by a white homeowner as he went to the wrong house to pick up his siblings. Protests around the event included several hundred individuals demanding the homeowner be charged in silent stating ringing a doorbell is not a crime and the shooter should do time. Again, the 16-year-old has been hospitalized on social media. They posted photos of him on social media in the hospital there as he is fighting to survive. He was trying to collect his younger twin brothers from their friend's home. This took place on Thursday when he rang the doorbell of the wrong house and unknowingly went to the incorrect address. Northeast 115th Street instead of northeast 115th Terrace. The white homeowner in his 80s, according to the Kansas City Defender, officially injured Y'all. He shot Y'all once in the head as they opened the door and again in the chest when Y'all was on the ground. Y'all researched for help from three neighbors who refused to open the door until one opened the door but only helped after Y'all was told to put his hands up and lay face down. That's when he lost consciousness. The homeowner who shot Y'all, his identity was not, it's not been made public, but admitted to the shooting and was taken into custody and placed on a 24-hour investigative hold. What disappoints me is that when I listen to some of our leaders and more prominent voices in this space, they would have you believe that we live and we operate in a post-racial society. Kind of like when I talked about meritocracy a couple streams ago, that if you are a quote-unquote good black person, you have nothing to worry about in the hands of white people. What they forget to mention is for instance the guy who shot this boy, he was born in 1940, in the 1940s. So anybody in their 80s, I'm sorry not 60s, 80s, anybody in their 80s was around before the civil rights era, during the civil rights era, after the civil rights era. And just like we talk about black trauma not leaving in a couple years or in a couple decades, white supremacy does not leave overnight either. And there's no amount of being one of the good ones that helps you. I expect or I expected leaders in this very black space to be giving the lesson of yes, talk to the police with respect. Yes, talk to white people with respect. Yes, articulate yourself, pull up your pants, but still understand how they see you. I know for a fact, the fact that I wear glasses makes white people a bit more comfortable. The fact that I'm a bit more articulate than the average bear makes white people just a bit more comfortable. Therefore, it tells me that their baseline is a certain expectation of me. This is the kind of game that our young boys deserve. This is the type of game that our young boys should be getting, as opposed to naively sending them out into the world and thinking they can be white for all intents and purposes. So with this particular case, if this white guy gets life, he's going to end up spending what four years, five years in prison. He's already in his 80s. It doesn't mean shit. What I want it to mean for us, it's time that we prioritize proactivity over reactivity. It's time that we prioritize foresight over hindsight. And a lot of us, unfortunately, have become accustomed and our community has become accustomed to simply reacting to something when it happens, as opposed to putting things in place for things not to happen in the first place. My mom would always say prevention is better than cure. One of the questions I have is why is a 16-year-old being sent to pick up his siblings at 10 o'clock at night to an unfamiliar location? I want to check our people. Why is a 16-year-old black boy, why wasn't he properly made aware of the circumstances and the world that he lives in? Why was he not properly made aware of how white people actually see him? Some people would have you believe, I don't want my kids paranoid. The critical race theory people say I don't want my kids paranoid. I don't want the black kids to feel inferior. I don't want the white kids to feel guilt. But the reality of it is we must tell the truth. And the truth is white people have to be biased against us. They did a study recently and they gathered a group of some of the good white people, liberals, freedom fighters, the ones who show up with running shoes to protest. And they flashed images in front of their face, random images, and they wanted to monitor their brains responses to these images. Even the good ones, when they were shown a picture of a black male, their autonomic response was triggered. That fight or flight reflex was automatically triggered. So what does that tell me? It is a baked and implicit bias. We could talk about birth of a nation. We can talk about the fact that, shit, you Google three white teens right now, you're going to see a picture of three white dudes holding hands or something. You Google three black teens, you're going to see mugshots. It is baked into our consciousness as Americans to think black criminal, black dangerous. You see a black boy, he looks larger than he actually is. He looks older than he actually is. This is game we need to be telling our boys. This is game we need to be telling our girls. We shouldn't be waiting until the world shows us what it really is before we react. Again, we talk about, you know, women saying, you know, I should be able to, you know, go outside butt naked and nothing should happen to me in a perfect world. Yes. This ain't a perfect world. I should be able to be a black man and not have to a black boy and not have to worry about anything in a perfect world. Yes, but this isn't a perfect world. So we must be telling our children. We must be telling our black boys. We must be telling our black men or black women. We must be telling them the truth because we must be dealing with how shit is not what shit looks like. I think that's the L black men have to take. I don't know the situation of his family, whether he has a father in his life or not, but I maintain the position that women's job is to teach children why to survive. Men's job is to teach children why to I mean how to survive. I'm sorry. So some of those harsh, hard truths, it needs to come from a man because in order for us to protect the provider for damn, we have to be kind of pessimistic. We have to kind of expect the worst right to prevent the worst from happening. So one of the consequences of the men being taken out of the home or the men being incentivized out of the home, our community is less proactive and it's more reactive.