So like, what do you make of all this? What do we do about it? And like, what is your book? How can your book help us get there?

I think we have tried, America has tried, to raise generations of warriors, if you will, to be on the front lines of American imperialism.

And you can't be human to do that.

You can't think, you can't question, you can't be vulnerable.

So what we have done is raise two or three generations of men in America who don't know how to be human, who don't know how to lead into full range of who they are.

We've been socialized to show up only certain kinds of ways, anger, rage, the ability to follow directions, right? You know, things like vulnerability, are made fun of at the highest levels.

And those of us who are

of.

What was that first therapy appointment like for you?

My first therapy appointment was surprising to me, because it dispelled all the myths [laughs] of what I thought therapy would be like.

You know, it, it really was a get to know session.

My therapist, um, who was a younger Black woman, um, really wanted to get a sense of how my emotional mind worked, what my emotional life was, what were the things that motivated me in my everyday life to be the person that I was.

What that first session revealed to me, and why it was so important for the five years that I stayed in therapy, was that it gave me an opportunity to talk to someone about what was going on in my life without the fear of judgment.

Uh, I think my sense of therapy prior to that point in time was that the therapist sat there in judgment of you, to tell you what you did wrong, what you're doing wrong, what you should do right.

It was never that, you know? It- our conversations were never prescriptive.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm

... that were different than my father.

On the ground fatherhood was really different, and my daughters were two very different daughters, and it took...

You know, they're now 27 and 23.

It took me learning how to listen to them and father really based on their needs as opposed to what my expectations were as a dad.

What I thought society needed from me as a dad, and particularly as a Black dad, I had to be able to be flexible enough to hear them, to show up in the ways that they needed to show up, even if I was uncomfortable in those roles.

Uh, what roles were you uncomfortable in, and what roles came more naturally to you?

You know, when I think about my own dad, right, he didn't talk much, but, you know, I, I always listened to him, right? You know, he...

How so? How did political ideas weave into this cultural and, and artistic reality?

It's the era of Du Bois.

We have to [laughs] you know, talk about how important a figure he was as an intellectual, you know, beginning with his study of the Philadelphia Negro in the late 1890s.

He, of course, publishes The Souls of Black Folks, which began as a collection of essays that appeared in The Atlantic.

This idea that with the new century, post Plessy versus Ferguson, that Black folks would begin to not only use their physical and artistic tools, but the intellectual tools to think about a way out of the conditions that they were in.

So Du Bois, the creation of the NAACP movement, which then creates the creation of the NAACP.

You also have the creation of the Urban League.

Yes, that's what he-

How so? How did political ideas weave into this cultural and artistic reality? It's

the era of Du Bois.

We have to... talk about how important a figure he was as an intellectual, beginning with his study of the Philadelphia Negro in the late 1890s.

He, of course, publishes The Souls of Black Folks, which began as a collection of essays that appeared in The Atlantic.

This idea that with the new century, post Plessy versus Ferguson, that black folks would begin to not only use their physical and artistic tools, but the intellectual tools to think about a way out of the conditions that they were in.

So Du Bois, the creation of the Niagara Movement, which then creates the creation of the NAACP.

You also have the creation of the Urban League.

Can you explain that term? Am I talking about something you're familiar with?

Hmm

... you know, whether it was mental illness, dude just lost his mind for a moment.

We needed to sit, I needed to sit with the idea that in these cases, there were children that lost their lives.

There were wives that lost their lives.

Whatever choices Mr. Fairfax made or, or the guy in Lu- in Louisiana made, w- w- we have to sit with the violence against those women and children first.And I think too often because he was a prominent Black man, and we're overly protective, I think, as a community, as a culture, about what befalls prominent Black men, right? Uh, because and somehow we think in protecting and, and creating a context to understand them, it's, it's a more of a benefit to our community, to the race.

I think in leading with that, we miss fundamental issues around violence against women, the role of patriarchy and misogyny and sexism in our lives, and how violence against Black women becomes an afterthought.

I think about, for instance, in, in a separate space, when we see young white women who are killed by folks who are immigrants, and how that bubbles up to a national conversation because it's connected to this larger discourse about immigration in the country.

But from what you've seen of situations like this before, what could healing look like?