Learning What “Stability” Can Do

After my arrest, my uncle convinced the court to allow me to move to Atlanta, where I could get away from New York and, hopefully, stay out of trouble.

Atlanta and I did not immediately agree with one another. I was angry. I was displaced. I was a New York kid suddenly living in Georgia.

But Atlanta gave me something extraordinarily simple that I had rarely experienced consistently: I could sit still. I could sleep. I had meals.

And almost immediately, my academic performance changed.

I attended Open Campus High School, where students completed coursework through packets. I tore through them—sometimes completing approximately two packets a week.

The same student who had failed every class during his freshman year eventually accumulated enough credits to graduate from high school six months early.

That experience taught me something I would spend years studying formally: we often evaluate students as though academic performance exists independently of their environment.

It does not.

Give a child safety. Give him food. Give him sleep. Give him stability. Then see what he can do.

I was the same person in New York and Atlanta. What changed were the conditions under which I was expected to learn.

Learning to Question Institutions

Atlanta also contributed to my developing skepticism about institutions—including institutions within the Black community.

I encountered adults, Alphas, who spoke passionately about uplifting young Black men but who, when presented with an actual young Black man in need of guidance, offered surprisingly little meaningful assistance.

This contradiction stayed with me.

I would later become a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc., an organization with a distinguished history of scholarship, leadership, and service. I remain capable, however, of loving an institution while critically examining whether its actions consistently live up to its ideals.

The same is true of my relationship with the broader Black community. I have tremendous pride in our accomplishments and our history. But I have also spent much of my adult life questioning the distance that can exist between our rhetoric about helping young Black men and the actual, sustained investment required to change their lives.

I know what that distance looks like.

I was once the young man standing in it.