Faded Black 501s. Black hoodies. Beat Wheat timbs. And a Mickey bandana.

Heading east on Hudson. Windshield wipers on. There’s negroes walking the sidewalks.

I just experienced so many emotions over the last two hours. Including some survivors remorse. And some shame for the elitism I’ve displayed over some courses of my life. Specifically with my cousin, who also like a brother to me. Six months apart exactly.

I remember when we used to watch Lion King I would position myself as Mufasa or Simba and him Scar. I was the good one, he was the bad one. I was obedient, he was mischievous. I was smart, he was dumb.

We used to clash heads a lot but we were first cousins and so always grouped

I jus ain’t want to be bothered by him and he was always bullying me. He would call me punk because I was non retaliatory and didn’t hit him back. Matter fact, one of the few fights I’ve had in my life was with him because he wouldn’t leave me tf alone so I beat him tf up.

Matter fact, the scar on my forehead. I got that because we was at his house for his birthday. And the new Nintendo 64 had just been released and I was tryna play games. And they was playing football outside. I didn’t want to go play so niggas started taunting and fucking w/ me

“You soft you soft. You a lil girl.” Yada yada. I’m like 6 or 7 so of course it shakes me. I end up going outside and I’m having a damn ball. Anyways this lil nigga that was like 11 or 12 backjuked when I was going for a tackle. I dove, another Nigga dove, and my skull cracked.

All cause I let some other niggas peer pressure and influence me. I still got this ugly ass scar but there’s a lesson learned from that.

Gotta be hardheaded to keep my skull from getting cracked. Haha

Our moms had different priorities too. My mom was a teacher and his mom was the drug dealers girl. He always had all the dope materialistic shit: the new Js, the new games, the new etc.

My mom did what she could she just valued other stuff for us.

We went to the summer camps and the tech camps and took instrument lessons and went on the field trips to other cities with the schools and was in ski club.

My dad has his lifestyle (basically me, now. He was an influencer and a photographer). His dad was a drug dealer.

We was just exposed to different shit. He had an iep that I don’t think really catered to his learning style. And my mom and dad impressed learning into me so much in so many ways that I didn’t even appreciate until very recently.

Naturally our lives went different ways.

On top of that, his mom died. That’s when I really lost my smile. It was years after uncle Fred passed and she was my favorite aunty. Mom got breast cancer. Grandma had 4x bypass. I leaned on Andrea and my brother during that time. I was in a heavy depression.

But imagine him.

I jus went to go find some pictures I know I posted back then and I jus wanna say my friends didn’t love me . But then again even if they had tried to get me to change, I wouldnt have listened . Fuck it ima share some of them

These are like 2008. My life constantly felt like Kendrick Lamar’s to pimp a butterfly. Especially “U”.

I was going through my emotions the way that drake attacked Kid Cudi for.

Matterfact this is right around the time that music stepped in and saved my life.

A lot of these images have music lyrics and poetry on them. I was getting real into my introspection bag. Caught between all the feelings I had on what was happening with my family, developing into the leader I would become, dealing with falling in love for the first time and

And then I learned how to take the negative feelings that I had and use them as fuel to keep me going. I married that fuel with the potential I was born with and that’s when I turned into a monster.

I started assuming leadership and power positions and harnessing my skills.

I started to realize how much different I was than other people. And started to understand that those differences would make me a target.
But it also made me a member of an exclusive club, where the air is just different. Our minds work different.

Btw electus means chosen.

I began to believe in things like (the social) revolution and autonomy and sovereignty. I started walking with the pride that you see on me now, because I started to realize who I was. I lost weight. I created EhKees. I knew it meant something or would mean something one day.

Iono in 2018...9-10 years later, I feel like I was kinda right.

“I Rmbr when labels said they’d have a problem marketing me. Now it’s everyone else that’s getting hard to believe”. I digress.

(I was about to post a couple more old sauceless pictures but you gotta get the book)

My cousin...on the other hand. It’s not hard to tell, neither in retrospect nor at the time, he was also depressed and going through it. It was his mom. He moved in with us cause my mom was the most stable person in the family pretty much. But he would cut tf up.

I can only dream about what therapy woulda did for him. He was fighting all the time. Failing out of classes. Just...being shitty. He was already a knucklehead but he became a nuisance.

Somehow over the time of all this, Deandre moved in (that’s a whole nother story).

Dre and I both started glowing up at the same time and started kicking it with shorties and living life and naturally me and my cousin led lives that were further and further apart.

He just had no motivation and was always fucking shit up!! I ain’t have time man.

I Rmbr he got a stupid based tattoo on his forearm and was talking about getting shit on his face. One of them said “mom” and in retrospect I see it as a cry for help. But then we was just like nigga tighten up. Stop being so stupid. I don’t even wanna deal with u.

Long story less long, I graduated from centennial and went to college. Cuz graduated from Pickerington north & was tryna be a thug. Eventualy my mom kicked him out cuz him and Ty (who had also moved in at this time ) allegedly doing b&e’s and shit. In pickerington. Just stupid

Ty gets arrested and goes away for a lil bit. Let me just tell you, waking up to the cops at the foot of your bed, guns drawn and trained on you, is terrifying. Cuz goes to live with his dad in the hood. Long story less long, cuz gets arrested down there for attempted robbery.

Life m just went differently for us. Some things we couldn’t help; you don’t choose your circumstances. But there was other things that I felt like were a choice. And he ain’t wanna live right.

I know more about people now than I did then. I know it’s not that simple.

I think if he had been shown less tough love, less physical abuse (he got punched in the chest when he was fucking up. My mom talked to me and coached me out of fucking up in the future for example), more patience (he was just high energy), etc. some things woulda been different

What I do know and am not proud of, is that I was elitist. And I thought I was better than him.

Not better than him in a typical ego-driven, Arrogant cause I’m smart type way you might normally hear from me.

Better than him like, he was lessor than me.

I felt like the joke was on him, he had all the nice shit and was a bully when we was younger but in adulthood I was the one that had shit all together. I had the ceiling. My future was promising. And I ain’t want much of anything to do with him.

Couldn’t be bothered with him. However you want to phrase it.

It’s not unlike how we be treating homeless people when we be walking down high street. Like I said, elitist.

Like Man In the Mirror. But forreal forreal and not in the abstract “there’s poor people overseas”

These were thoughts That I wanted to organize into poetry and I still may but if I didn’t at least document my thoughts on it, I might forget the revelations forever and that will never do. Plus, more true content for the book which I promise is coming.

I don’t know when my mindset has flipped. Probably when I said that I wanted to change the culture in Columbus. And that also meant I had to be real about my relationships with people. Heal.

I feel differently now. If it’s not obvious. But that’s also because he’s different now.

We chopped it up a couple years ago. He apologized for being a Lil shit when we was younger. We have so much stuff in common, it’s crazy. Cause we always been in each others lives, but distantly.

After he spent 6 or 7 months locked up, (couldn’t afford bail), he gets out

And he’s like I never wanna go back to prison again. Smart decision brody. He tells me over the summer that he got a chance to look at the people he had been hanging with and his own family members and felt that their lives are pathetic. And he looked at his own life

And he decided that he didn’t want his life to be pathetic. It was so powerful to hear for reasons that I still don’t understand. But he finally saw in his life what other Niggas had been warning him about. At the time he had been ducking his PO because dumb.

But (finally) as a man, he said that he was tired of running and was ready to start taking responsibility for his actions.

He turned himself in and asked for leniency. The PO said stay out of trouble and get a job and you good. Salute to that PO man.

Cause I truly believe he meant it when he said he wanted to be different.

We learned when pledging, a poem called See It Through, with a line: “if the worst is bound to happen in spite of all that you may do, running from it will not save you. See it through”

I shared that poem with him. I started to share a lot of things with him. Including @PBlackk’s album “I hope all is well”.

Cuz and I would sit and talk about music and life philosophy for hours in the garage. I was and am so proud of him for wanting to be a better person.

Our grandma, she would always ask me to jus talk to him or try and give insights and wisdom to him the same way I be giving it to strangers. I would tell her I don’t got time to talk to a wall and he ain’t tryna receive it. I’m not wasting my time on that.

But now we are talking about the future and new music and his aspirations to be a chef. I’m excited, giving him ideas, telling him how he can get to the bag even with his record.

I’m genuinely engaged in our conversations.

Which is how I started to realize that I’d been such a snob elitist myself. Even tho I never treated nobody funny, I definitely didn’t think I’d be having these type of conversations with him. Ever.

And I was disappointed when earlier this year, I found him a nice job but he ain’t wanna go for it. We’ve talked it through but when we was talking, I had a couple epiphanies and realized where his hesitation on it might be: Fear of real success.

So I start to share with him the shit that motivated me. What keeps my engine running. I showed him the “your why is greater than falling down” video that inspired me in 2015 and I showed him my “Your why is greater than the hook” playlist. And he told me he needed that

We talked about goals and dreams and visions and having a plan. Routine conversations that I’ve had with mentors for all of my life. So routine that I just assume everybody has had them and they haven’t. They simply haven’t. He hadn’t.

And I told him that I had him and was here to support him in any way that I could. I really mean that, even as i type this.

then I realized that I was doing the same old condescending shit. Because apparently I still think I’m better than him. And I’m really not.

Over the course of the car ride I talked about my goal of recycling all of my influence, money, and clout back into black Columbus and I told him my plan on how to do that. When he got out the car, he asked me if I care about politics.

I told him of course. I’m throwing a political brunch this weekend. And I reiterated how everything should come from the community and that’s how the world should work. We gotta care on the local level.

He told me how passionate he had gotten about politics and he’d be there

If anybody knows cuz, you’d understand how shocked I was when he started talking to me about the constitution. And all over again, I was back in Pickerington realizing that I was on some elitist cuz I’m educated bullshit.

It put a battery back in my back.

I’m reminded that this planet and this culture is for everybody. And I reached some new convictions. I’m don’t think that it’s bad to think that you’re better than somebody but you should probably frame it differently.

Better, first of all, is relative. In nearly every situation, somebody is going to be smarter, faster, stronger, more informed, more clever, more connected, more creative.

I have more influence than he does, right now. I have more money and assets than he does, right now. I have more power than he does, right now.

I have a daughter and ex wife. He has more freedom than I do, right now.

Who’s better and for what job? I can’t even relocate.

I’m becoming comfortable with the idea that I think im better than most people. Because I think the Crux of that NOW is that I am better for the job that I am here to do.

I’m here to teach, and shift momentum, and stimulate dialogue, and critique and analyze wisdom.

I no longer think I’m BETTER than any human walking this earth. And equally, I’m not WORSE than any human walking this earth. There is no undesirable—there are people who are product of different environments.

The question is what do you do with the hand you’re dealt.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with privilege. You unfortunately don’t get to choose your privilege, and everybody alive has some.

Some are more privileged than others but even that rubric can slide. I won’t get into that.

How do you use your privilege?

When you reap, what do you sow?

With great power comes great responsibility.

Take what you need. Give what you have.

We talked today about our experiences and how they shaped who we are today. For example: We both grew up poor. We both have stole before to get what we needed. He ended up in trouble with the law. I didn’t. I’m thinking about this after I drop him off...

I’m driving through linden thinking about my privilege. I had just told cuz about how the house he stays in is OUR family’s property. Growing up, we never owned, we rented. Let’s take some pride in what we own. It resonated.

It resonated With him and me. I’m thinking about how I need to make sure and take responsibility of the fact that I own property in Linden and I should make sure to think of Linden as my power grows. And to do whatever I could to support community.

I remember being younger and living hood/hood-adjacent or dropping off my friends in the slums.

Ever since becoming an adult, I would go back and drive through the hoods I used to be in and around. I said “to make sure to stay humble and remember where I came from”.

Don’t you see?! Right there! Even when I thought that I was holding up my moral responsibility, I was still being an elitist. The hoods are not meant to be pitied or frowned upon.

I thought about the consequences of me tweeting “driving through the hood”.

“That ain’t the hood” “Columbus ain’t got no hoods” “you think that’s hood, well what about this”

And I countered my theoretical self. I know some who would absolutely consider it the hood—who is to say your qualification of hood is more legitimate than theirs.

What does it really mean when we say “hood”? Is it because it is black? Not always. Is it because it is black and poor? I think the emphasis more falls on the poor side tho, (though I could say there is a racial connotation. We don’t call the poor white areas the hood...usually)

I rested on this conclusion.

We call the hood, any place that is generally undesirable to live.

Which is why everybody always tryna move up out the hood or talking bad about the hood or being thankful that they’ve outgrown the hood.

But what of the redeemable qualities of the hood.

The hood has birthed so much culture and is responsible for developing so much ingenuity and character in our people and the hood has done the best job of protecting so much history.

The hood is what we call any place that is generally undesirable. You can test to see if it is the hood by asking, “what would the average person say if you asked them ‘would you wanna live there?’”

Disdain for the hood is marketing. And it’s anti black.

What if we took the same spaces that were undesirable and made themselves desirable?

We say things like “it’s not hood anymore” when a certain population is moved out or in.

Therefore, it ain’t really about the location at all. It’s about the people.

I just think about how the world could be different, if we took the undesirable and decided that it wasn’t undesirable anymore. If we remembered that people are people.

The hood isn’t meant to be frowned upon. It’s to be embraced.

Cause a lot of times, we’re just a few decisions (or mistakes) away from being the undesirable ones ourself.

If you’re fortunate enough to have been born privileged and far away from the line of demarcation that distinguishes the desirables from the undesirables, embrace the privilege. activate it.

It’s alright to be in a better position than someone if you’re responsible abt it.

I can't wait to share the updates from this thread.