Growing up as a young kid in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn was anything but easy. The mindset in my community was if you were strong, you stood up for yourself. If you were weak, you got bullied and picked on until you got strong enough to fight back. I grew up under a great family that helped me stay out of trouble and put me around other kids that were staying out of trouble. But even still once you get to a certain age, you still have to be able to maneuver throughout the neighborhood. So it's kind of like you have to create an alter ego, this person has to be willing to fight at any time, speak up for themselves at any time, have the knowledge to know when's a good time to stay and fight, and when's a good time to just go home. My alter ego kept me safe, and plus where I come from, once people see they can take advantage of you, they always take advantage of you. So if you don't stand for yourself then you go from having a problem with one person to 10 people because the word got out that you were soft.

My definition of poverty is being mentally trained to believe that your inferior. Once you convince a person that they are less then what they are their more open to do things like murder a person, commit a robbery, hurt someone they love. Another factor of why the youth in my area commit crimes is because they lack the right role models that can steer them in the right direction. When kids don't have family, they turn to gangs, where I come from. And whatever particular gang they choose becomes their family. Now you find yourself getting into problems with people from other gangs and it normally leads to physical violence which then turns into gun violence. Thousands of kids die yearly due to gun violence. Thousands of young kids get killed over neighborhood territory, gossip leads to violence based on what one person said about another person. Being that these kids suffer from a lack of resources, robbery becomes a problem because when some of these kids don't have all they know is to take away from the weaker people around them.

The truth is I think that slavery and Jim Crow left millions of people that look like me with a lasting anxiety that will last until we face the problem head on. We have to find a way to channel our pain and then turn that pain into joy. It's hard being a person of color in this world. I mean for 500 years people were trained all over the world to hate us. We were taken from our home country and brought to land where we were used for free labor. We were taken away from our families, given different names and religions, so that we would never figure out how great we are. I know where the pain comes from, people that look like me still have to worry about being gunned down in the streets because of how they look or dress. The judicial system seems as if it was created to help maintain a system of Jim Crow. We still don't have equal opportunity, our schools are still not equipped with the resources and teachers that can really help these kids succeed in life. I understand the pain, I know where it comes from. Some of these kids don't know anything about slavery, but they do know that their parents are never home, and no adult around them, cares about them. A lot of families are broken where I come from and the children that grow into adults just do their best to stay above water. 

If we want to end poverty, it first starts at home. We have to rebuild our family structures. Back in the day home was where the heart was. You learned everything from home, how to interact with other people, how to protect yourself, you learned how to educate yourself at home. Being home meant you was safe, being home meant you had a piece of mind. We need to get back to having Sunday dinners, to eating together as a family. Technology has disconnected people from connecting to one another. This generation can barely eat dinner at the table because they are on their phone or iPad. Love, unity, and a shift in consciousness is what's going to change this world for the better. It's makes it very hard to connect with one another if nobody is paying attention. Good conversation, connection, interaction is still needed if we are going to make this world better place. This creates an environment in your household where you can talk about your daily issues, you can talk about what's bothering you and you can come up with solutions together. People of color need to get back to depending on each other. We need to start taking back control over our communities and that first step is getting control over your own household. People of color have made it through slavery and Jim Crow. We have made it this far, in a world that was trained to hate us and do their best to keep us oppressed physically and mentally. There is no other race that has been through what people of color have been through, and truthfully in 2015, society is still trying to oppress and mentally enslave people of color. The only way we can change that is identifying our problem, coming up with a solution and then working together in unity to create a world that we feel comfortable raising our children in. I mean it's not like we didn't change the world before, we created the Civil Rights movement and took control over our own destiny, it's time we come together and do it again. Remember the power will forever lie with the people, the people just have to remember that they have the power.