I never intended for this blog page to become centered around the issues that I as an African American face. Nor have I wished to turn every topic into an argument against racism and acts of violence. But, I just wanted to mention Stephon Clark and say that his story adds to the collective pain of the Black community. He died in a situation that didn’t call for his death; murdered by two startled people who happen to wear badges. It is a shame. His autopsy confirmed that the majority of the shots he took entered his body while his back was turned. So, I guess the police academy teaches people to shoot until the clip is empty even if the “threat” is no longer a threat and never was a threat. Now some more children can say their father was gunned down and more family members can view the video of the person they loved losing his life and becoming a story for the news to cover until it gets boring for their viewers. Two kids who’ll remember their dad as not just their dad, but as another casualty on the kill sheet these cops seem to be marking off and not getting convicted for. Trayvon died with Skittles in hand and Stephon died with a cell phone in his. Such a shame. But the real tragedy is that it isn’t new and it most likely won’t be the last time that it happens. You can look at pictures of the police letting their dogs bite and tear at the flesh of Black people when Martin still had life to look forward to. You can always think about Rodney and how the cops had him sprawled out on the ground as they continued to beat him with batons, and for what? Were they hitting him because he was a threat? Because the video evidence shows that he wasn’t but video evidence doesn’t mean anything if a cop who lacks pigment says he “thought” he “felt threatened” he “seemed belligerent” he “wasn’t cooperating.” And those statements allow them to avoid conviction even though in the grand scheme of things they will die with murder in their history. Blood on their hands. Nobody is a saint, but now two children who probably aren’t even old enough to understand the world yet have to look at it through the lens of their father’s murder. But, I digress.

I imagine fear coursing through the veins of those cops as they turned the corner and saw an unarmed man who they thought was armed. They take one look at him and yell “Gun!” and proceed to fire in order to prevent themselves, officers of the law, from being shot and killed in uniform. The man takes to the ground and the officers, rushing with the adrenaline of the moment, continue to fire shots at his body. They’ve done it. They’ve avoided death and now they can approach their would be assailant and see who he really was. And when they look at the dying man, they see that they were dead wrong.

A young Black man in Sacramento, with two children and many years of life ahead of him, shot and killed by the constables on patrol. Lying face down in his grandmother’s backyard, a place that probably once held fond memories of youth. Had he died at 15 or 10 or 5 we would’ve felt the same feeling. But I feel that if my eyes were scanning the sideways image of two officers rushing towards me after having rendered my body useless, as my crimson paint swarms the ground of my grandmother’s home, with the thought of two kids and only a little more than twenty years of my life to think on, I would not have felt that I deserved it. Whosoever reads this portion must understand.

It isn’t about race. It isn’t about justice. It’s about the level of communication and perceptiveness that we as a HUMAN RACE must at some point come to have in those moments of uncertainty. When the sun is no longer high above the horizon and we can’t see each other too well. When the moon hovers over our shoulders and our natural instincts for survival kick in. When the blood is pounding in our ears and when the protestors are stomping so hard that my, your, our African ancestors can hear the thunder from beyond the grave. In those moments we have no time to react with any sort of sense or inhibition so what do we do? Stephon turned his back and those cops turned his lights off.

We don’t know if they regret that decision. But when the sun rose on March 19th there was one less Black man in the city and there was one more Black man whose face was about to be put on t-shirts and television screens for the whole country to gawk at.

I only see a couple dozen sun kissed faces on this campus daily. And that is something that I’ve wanted to address about the sun kissed community at Penn State since it was brought to my attention; there are only a couple thousand of us. With such small numbers, and with the majority group dominating everything from leadership roles to faculty positions, my brothers and sisters sometimes feel that they don’t have a leg to stand on. The question is: how can we feel respected and recognized with such small numbers? And also, how can we seek justice for things that we see, but other groups don’t even have to recognize?

Just this past weekend, my cousin who’s my age was leaving campus with her mother and two sisters in their family car. It took no further than three blocks for the police to pull my cousin and her family over, outside of the CVS downtown. The officers called it a “random license plate check,” and proceeded to make them take all of their things out of the car. They even had to take my cousin’s 3 month old sister out of the car and place her on the sidewalk while the cops had a towing company hook it up. To add insult to injury, the towing company sent their man, clad in a confederate flag t-shirt that read “The South Shall Rise Again,” to take the car. A few minutes after I got there, the cop turned to this young man and asked, “How’s your grandfather doing?” I suppose they know each other very well.

Seeing the tears in my cousin’s eyes does not leave me with much else more than disdain for the racists who dwell within and around this campus. This man’s shirt really got me thinking. I don’t use the word racist to depict just anybody that I feel personally are trying to harm us; and I recognize that not everybody is out to get us. And maybe those cops did see something they needed to harp on; but for them to call it “random” is where I see some nonsense. They could’ve articulated the nature of the stop and actually given a reasonable answer. The man’s shirt was just the icing on a cake of ideas that people who are sun kissed have swarming in their heads in moments like those and it’s very disheartening. I can’t say that the same situation would’ve made the same bad impression on someone who isn’t sun kissed, and that makes me care for these kinds of situations less than I care for the All Lives Matter movement.

We know that all lives matter, that isn’t something that I nor anybody with sense can really debate. Historically though, racist and bigoted people did not treat sun kissed people as if their lives mattered, unless we were the ones building the cotton industry for free. Unless we were the ones filling up factory positions for cheap and keeping money in their pockets so their future generations didn’t have to worry about things like tuition. And it is a damn shame that we even have to make a campaign for our own lives and then have it thrown back at us by the same people who didn’t think we mattered. That’s exactly how the Black Panthers became synonymous with rebellion; because little do people know that they had to arm themselves to fight off police brutality.

To me and my thick skin, I could care less if someone doesn’t think I count. But if I see the tears in my sun kissed brothers and sisters’ eyes, that’s when I feel like wearing black leather and stepping up to point guns at the people who point guns at us, and that’s just pure honesty. And things like this piss me off to no end: “When a man strikes his male or female slave with a rod so hard that the slave dies under his hand, he shall be punished.  If however, the slave survives for a day or two, he is not to be punished, since the slave is his own property.”  It brings me to question that moral compass on which humans rely; I wonder if disregarding others is just the natural thing to do and if I should be that way as well just to feel totally human. But for my own sanity I have to try to understand. And even with a passion for grasping the reason behind actions, I stand firm in my resolve, and if anybody on this planet earth tries to raise a rod to my back and scar my sun kissed skin out of ignorant hate, for my ancestors, I will give that person hell on earth.

Let’s be clear, I make no assumption that those cops or anybody in particular is against us. Even if they are, respect and understanding is absolutely non-negotiable for me so I remain respectful in all given situations. But to say that means to confront my own emotions and keep them in check, so I cannot wear that black leather and pack heat every time somebody brings tears to my family’s eye. I choose to take my time in understanding why those individuals feel the way that they do and how I can properly A) avoid them, or B) change their perspective of us. Their presence doesn’t negate the presence of genuine people, like Sydney Mingle for example. I could choose to see her blue eyes and straight hair as the epitome of the opposition, which admittedly, a certain number of us do. Or I could choose to see her as my homegirl and hold absolutely no negative feelings towards her because she has done nothing more than show me love and friendship. But the people who are open about how they feel our friendship is the work of evil reminds me that I can put the black leather on whenever I see fit.

Way back, almost seven years ago, my brother and I had became friends with a kid named Saadiq. A couple times prior to actually introducing ourselves, we had seen one another in the neighborhood and when we were at school. He attended a school down the street from mine, so when my brother and I would stop by the Dunkin’ Donuts a block away, we would see Saadiq and his younger brother walking to their school. Time passed and we met, talked about our shared love for Bruce Lee and anything martial arts related, figured out that our houses were literally across from each other’s, and that friendship blew up quicker than you could imagine.

This is the story of how that friendship ended in hilarious fashion.

A few months in and Saadiq had felt like a brother to us. We frequented the courtyard outside of his house, which was visible from our bedroom window, and we had so many different mini adventures. He was very narcissistic but had a flair for showing off and wanting to help others show off too. The kind of person that you could tell had never met his match before, in dancing, fighting, smooth talking the girls in the neighborhood, or anything else really. He often called the house to talk to me about the newest girlfriend he had and how she was everything he ever wanted, I just smiled to myself because I knew a week from then he’d forget her name and move on; something I was not partial to doing. In every aspect, we all had the kind of vibe that reminds you of those old coming of age stories. One day in particular changed that era of peace forever, and that was the day that my brother and I met Thomas.

Tom (in the red shirt) was a this guy who had charm and a laid back style nobody could duplicate. He was over 6 feet tall and had green eyes, in all ways he stood out. He was playing basketball in the same park that I brother and I were at practicing our different martial arts. I was doing some capoeira that I’d learned and my brother showed me how to box. This caught Tom’s eye and he came up to us and asked where we’d learned. We had no formal training, but he did, and upon realizing that we were self taught, he encouraged us to exchanged numbers and we were training in Kenpo karate under him the very next day. Come to find out that he and Saadiq knew each other from way before, to the point that they called each other “brothers.”

Saadiq had not planned for us to cross paths. It wasn’t until a few years later that I would learn he didn’t want us to meet because he would feel threatened by us, as we proved a few times to be better at hand to hand combat than him. Needless to say, when we started hanging out with Thomas, Saadiq felt some kind of way. And things got even worse when we began training karate at Tom’s house, bringing in more and more people who wanted to learn and become a part of the team. It started out with the 4 of us, and by the end of the second year of that brotherhood, we had around 14 guys all learning the style and hanging over Tom’s house nearly every weekend.

We trained for years to become as strong and goal oriented as the characters we looked up to in the movies. There were plenty of days where we would spar with each other, barely able to breathe, but we kept at it. Even a few summers ago when there was a heat wave, 7 or 8 of us were outside every summer day without fail, sparring and morphing our minds. When there was snow caked on the ground and ice crystalized across the park benches, we still fought one another. And after 3 years of fighting and having deep conversations about the world and who we all want to protect, there was a legitimate brotherhood between Thomas, my actual brother, and I. And Saadiq had slowly shown his distaste in the imagery. He eventually only came around every once in a while.

One day, when we all we over Tom’s house and after two or so hours of practicing, we all sat in the living room and joked and talked, like usual. The conversation fell upon Batman and how he ran his city from the shadows, something Thomas was always a fan of. He began to compare himself, rightfully so, to the Batman, and he named my brother Bane, for his brute strength and how well he held his own  against Thomas. Then came the moment I’ll never forget. He looked at me, and with a look of pride he called me Dick Grayson. The very first Robin, the ultimate protege, the one who would eventually become Nightwing and even don the Batman’s cape himself. I was more than happy to be such a strong person for our group, but Saadiq, who heard it all and didn’t say a word, left the house and we didn’t see him for another couple of weeks.

Time passed and my skills were becoming undeniably sharp. Me and Saadiq used to be equals, but I gained headway because he stopped coming to train, so he felt a little insecure about that. It all came to a boiling point when his little brother got hurt on a summer day and Saadiq refused to console him. He told him to man up and stop crying. I on the other hand, tried to help him stand. Saadiq got mad at me and Thomas told us to fight it out because this was something that was obviously deeper than the situation at hand. Saadiq put on his boxing MMA gloves and I refused to put mine on, choosing to keep my hands down during the fight. He got many good hits in, but when his little brother looked at me afterwards and said “Thanks,” I knew I won. I showed him what it really was to have peace on the brain and still defend what you thought was right.

Some time later, Saadiq and his brother moved away to California. We had squashed the remaining beef we had but I knew he was taking some feelings with him. At first it was only for the summer, but the summer turned to fall and then winter, and we were told later that the move was permanent. He was no longer around, yet my brother and I still trained with Thomas and developed our skills. The idea of a rematch did come to mind for me, but it would be futile. By now he has probably moved on and learned a staggering amount of new things, as have I, and a rematch would only call old bad blood to the mix. But, with that being said, despite the tiny instances of drama, I look back on our 5 year long friendship and feel happy that it happened. It truly was a coming of age journey.

As I’ve mentioned before, my mom was never in the picture because she died shortly after I was born. I never even got a picture with her, which says a lot for the brevity of our unity. As far as I’m concerned, the idea of a mom is one that I know very well, but just can’t relate to.  Seeing people my age with their mothers feels like I’m witnessing the practices of a foreign culture. I don’t feel any sort of deep, inward incompletion though, mostly because I had my grandma around throughout my life to sort of fill in for where my neither ought to have been. And my grandma, Irma, who we all call “Mommom,” is that motherly figure that I have to thank for giving me a glimpse of that foreign culture.

Mommom was born Irma Elizabeth Hite and raised in Kentucky from 1939 until the day she was 22. It was there that she met and fell in love with my grandfather, Sam Sheppard. They moved up to Philadelphia and started a family, something that Sam, through reasons only he could justify, did not want to do. He was a snake, from what Mommom has told me. As soon as they arrived in Philly his entire attitude flipped, and the man she fell for became an abusive alcoholic who cared as much for his children as he did for vermin. She told me that Sam loved to cheat, so being a good father was not his specialty at all. By the time my dad was born, he had openly confessed that he “doesn’t give a shit” and basically walked out of the family. She took it in stride and also took on the responsibility of raising her 3 children, my father being the youngest.

In addition, she took in their cousin, Darrin, and raised him as a 4th child, further putting the pressure on herself to make things work. It is because of this that she took on two jobs at once, basically only having time to go to and from work. In many ways, she had to be the mother and father of the house, which I assume is the reason she is able to assert herself in plenty of family roles when people exit our circle. During my 9th grade year, Mommom told my brother and I that she wanted us to attend an after school program downtown. We did, and this led to us staying with her on a couple of nights during the week instead of with our dad since his house was further away. Though my brother eventually grew bored of the program and stopped coming, I stayed, and this is how I came to live with Mommom altogether for 3 years.

In that time, she and I grew closer and became something like Luke Skywalker and Obi Wan Kenobi. Her stories of the past somehow mingled so well with me divulging the intricacies of my teenage life. And best believe there were clashes of ideas and regular conversations where one of us got annoyed. Something I remember vividly

is how she told me that I was too good for my then girlfriend, Blue. She said, “Nah, she’s not the one. Have your fun but eventually move on.” My immediate thought was that old people were supposed to be nice. I loved my girlfriend and I was very offended by her saying that. But this blunt honesty is something she is very good at, especially since me and Blue did eventually break up and I felt what Mommom said was coming true. Blue and I are good friends to this day, and when Mommom sees and hears of her she’s very happy to see her. That’s the way she is. She also told me to be wary of people. Anybody can make you laugh but not everybody can stay in your life, and that’s the truth. I was given so much food for thought in those 3 years that I couldn’t deny how important she had become to me.

It may sound macabre, but she and I joke about death and the inevitability of it. She wants me to be the one to toss her ashes into the Atlantic, where her father died during WWI, when she dies. And our bond is so chill that when she told me this, I said, “What if I miss?” She also told me that she wanted me to speak at her wake and be honest about things. To say, “She was born in Kentucky before the time of Martin Luther. She’s seen some good things, and some bad. She’s done some good things, and some bad. At the end of the day she’s somebody different to everybody. And whether you liked her or not, we’re here to remember her.” And that’s how it’ll be.

Before her time though, I have plans that she needs to be present for. She’s longed to go to Paris her entire life, and I want to be the one to take her there. I also want to see her sitting in the front row at my wedding, on a cruise ship through the Caribbean, at the table while I take my “first” shot. And most importantly, I want her to hold my children like she did with my brother and I. I want them to know who it was that I attribute a lot of my happiness to. And since she’s still got a lot of time left on this planet, I’m certain that one day they’ll be able to talk to her and see for themselves.

Chapter One (Twenty Days and Twenty Nights)

~On a busy brick street corner with a cage sitting near the edge of a park

My favorite place is on the planet Earth, older than the borders made to segment turf, a place with heart and moving dirt,  where chemicals mix with edibles and suffer the works.  My favorite person lives within a box surrounded by crowds, she’s never alone and never strong enough to cancel them out, she was never told to use her two hands to signal them down, and when I met her smiling on a weekend without… food or water. That’s somebody’s daughter smiling through the thirst, someone has left her here and yet she doesn’t reverse… that simple smile.

I laid down and talked with her for a while, while she craned her head up to look up at the clouds. So I said, “The birds can chirp until you wake and make a song you can relate your morning to and in the day you think of it and recreate the melody and sing it, say ‘the birds have waken me today’ and lay away that feeling til you sleep and see them in your daze.” Again, she smiled.

She reached her hand through the metal bars, I had to move myself because I was sitting far, she touched my hand and thumbed along the scars, and asked me who had hurt me long before we had our talk…

Chapter Two (Opening Up)

~Around 10 p.m., after pulling the cage into the grass

My favorite place has made mistakes as well, I told her what that meant for me in depth, a snake had slid its way along a couple steps, and up the tapestry and through the sheets all on the bed… she asked to see the scars that I had,  none of them from my mom or my dad, or the widows that be calling , instead, they came from the dark in my head..

“Damn, dude.” That’s all that she could say to my tune, I could tell that I had ruined the mood, I grabbed my stuff to leave but she had told me “don’t move,” She had a gift for me sitting between her old tennis shoes… She said “here I made this for you,” and handed me a paper that was scribbled on and folded, took me by the hand and told me that I could hold it, but don’t unfold it til I’m home and out from the coldness.  I took it in, lightly grabbed her smiling face by the chin, through the bars that were thin, through the morning when it’s dim, through the weather and the wind, feeling better than I did, seeing clearer than the glasses that I hid in a bin in my room cause I thought she’d see me better with nothin’ on my face. This girl that’s stuck within my favorite place… now on to change the pace….

Chapter Three (Desert the Box)

~Midday, after having read the note

Crowded and deserted yet, I put it on my life, I bet… Nobody shielded you from the desert sun, or monsoons, or loud cracks from metal guns… I put it on my life, I bet… when your family left you here, you didn’t feel upset, when the nightmares came to you you never woke and wept, I bet you pushed through and told them dreams to jump and jet… Cause that’s the one I knew you as… never frown and never sad, I brought a brick to you and knocked along the box and tried to make you free but to me you started getting mad!…

~One hand on the bar, the other playfully tugging on my hair

“Do you wanna see me in the crowd?” She asked. “You wanna see me get run down!” She laughed. “You wanna treat me like a lady with a crown well I’m down but you gotta love the box I came to you in and treat it as…” She paused… I realized she was never mad, at all. The box was the only thing she had, in all, the world, so I need to ask before, I try to break it open and collapse… “Put your hands on mine,” she said, “It doesn’t have to make sense within your clouded head.. I’ll put my hands on yours and think of freedom and these bars will swing open like revolving doors!”

Chapter Four (A New Life)

~The street is clear for a moment

Chemicals mixed with edibles, tangible love tethered between two human hearts, I placed my shaky hands on the metal bars,  immediately feeling dizzy and seeing shooting stars. “You’ve known me long enough so this shouldn’t be hard..” Her eyes went all white, I kept saying “Hey are you feeling alright?”  I tried to lift my hands but hers were holding mine in place, no way to make a quick escape… but then…

Those gorgeous eyes were staring into mine. Outside of the box, on the opposite side of the bars. She was next to me, freely holding onto my hands and moving them up my arm further than she previously could. She laced her fingers behind my neck and stopped smiling… tears started blocking her vision and I believe this was the first time they’ve ever fallen down her face.  “What’s wrong?” I asked… “Nothing,” She said, “This is the greatest feeling I’ve ever felt.”

The streets remained crowded, my mind remained clouded… my favorite place in all the planet Earth, all along in the heart of this one lonely person, broken free of bars and nights filled with peaceful longing, I brought her home and waited for the birds in the morning.

I don’t want to create an illusion. I’m human just as you, but the feelings I have are unmistakably my own. These kinds of stories are always present in my mind. Sometimes hard to grasp. I’m not talking about an actual person, but a memory of something beautiful that has never really been resolved for me. And as you read it, you’re reading my emotions, the ones I don’t show with my face. It may be lame to some but to me it’s the truth that I can’t bring to spoken word. And that’s why I share it here.

Can you imagine being 11 years old again, having the same level of intelligence that you have now? Things would be different for you. You would be able to ask for things and speak to people in a way that impresses not only your family, but probably your school and outer circle.  A young child who has the intelligence of a college kid, which right now doesn’t impress me at all. I say that because when I was 11 years old, there were things running through my mind that my peers, nor my family, could quite understand. I should mention that my OCD doesn’t allow me to have a natural train of thought, so all of my thoughts are dwelled on for extremely long times before I speak on them. To this day I still have those ideas in mind, and it doesn’t impress me at all because I thought that by now I would’ve figured out something deeper, more complex, than I had as a child.

One example that I can readily give is a time when I was in 5th grade and my brother and I were picked up from school and were going home with our dad. We did this everyday, driving by and thinking to ourselves or talking abut funny things. But, one day I had an idea come to mind that made me ponder reality itself. I turned to my dad and asked him, “If the universe is a vast expanse of matter, does that mean that there is a place in space where space is still expanding? I mean, it’s infinite, but in order to be infinite, it has to have no end. So there must be a place where it is still growing.” He looked at me and didn’t say anything. Years later he brought this very moment up at a family gathering and expressed how shocked he was that I was so young with such a large peripheral. But, what sucks is that to this day I haven’t thought of anything that goes beyond such a theory.

There were plenty of eureka moments like these that I had in my youth. By the time I became 9, I had totally disregarded the notion of religion, having read the Bible and saw no legitimate value in such a belief system. From there I studied Buddhism (my 2nd favorite), Greek and Roman mythology (1st favorite), ancient Egyptian religion and the development of monotheism. All of it was incredible, mind enriching, wonderful, but none of it was true to me. I was on the same level as Santa Claus in my mind. You can just imagine how my mostly Catholic family felt about this, so I decided to ultimately keep my secularism to myself. I still intend on researching Islam, Sikhism, Hinduism, etc. Only a few people I personally met would share this mindset, but even to them my ideas were alien and totally out there.

For one, I don’t believe that humans are the true inheritors of the Earth. We often make ourselves out to be the rulers of the world, the alpha of all organisms with and without intelligence. But, this isn’t what I believe to be true. My mind dwells on the many ways in which animals, like bears, lions, sharks, or even mosquitos, have a tactical advantage over us in close quarter combat. Or I think of how it takes a baby dolphin no more than a second to swim around with its mother after birth, but a human child needs coddling and is totally dependent for a few years after birth. Or even further, I think of how efficient we would be if we had the same level of teamwork of ants or bees, who can create colonies and find food sources quickly without getting into arguments with one another. 

I don’t say any of this to discredit any other person’s opinions or ideas about the world, it is solely the product of my own ideas that I share and discuss with people if they ask. Sometimes conversations are just as deadly as knives, killing friendships and spreading a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. I try to avoid this kinda thing by having conversations that, if ideas are shared, do not get to a point where anything we are saying is meant to act as a “shot.” For anyone who is unaware, a shot is something you say that is meant to hit the person you’re talking to with disrespect. I have my verbal gun in a holster most times so nobody catches a shot…

Sometimes though, you have to throw shots. Because some people don’t get it. As a child I specifically remember being the kid who sat back and watched my classmates do things that I felt were below me. In grades 4-12 I had a friend named Jhéda (pseudonym) who was constantly picked on by the boys in the class. They would tease her about any and everything, crushing her spirits and driving her to hurt herself. It got so bad that whenever she raised her hand in class, she would immediately shy away and refuse to speak. As a kid, I understood this, I saw how this behavior was undesirable. One day, a kid told Jhéda that she’ll never have her first kiss, and that people would pay to see her in a zoo. I turned in my chair and said to him, mind you, he and I were friends, “Is that the zoo I saw you and your sister in? Y’all were in the cages they keep in the corner to keep you from sh*tting everywhere. Y’all were so adorable.” 

My young mind was met with such a taste for blood when it came to bullies. Me and Jhéda are still pretty tight to this day, and she lovingly calls me “Bro” because I’ve been there for her with a lot of things. That’s just the way things were back then, I saw an issue and tried to analyze it to a point where I understood and could act appropriately. Although I am nowhere near a genius nor am I as wise as any of these stories could make me out to be, I feel that what sets me apart from others is the amount of time I put into my thoughts and actions. It’s just a difference, not an advantage or disadvantage. And with that in mind, I say that as I try to figure out things that are more complex than what I’ve known, I act normal, but in my noggin there’s a blaze of thought burning through every turn of a clock hand.

Rhyme and Poetry ~ Rap

Somebody banging a beat onto a table and his friends throwing together words to rap over the sound is a small step into a world of communication. Whenever I was in school and heard, “Okay… okay…  look…” I, along with everybody in a 20 foot radius, would turn and look at the guys producing that familiar sound. Then, they would take turns knocking on the table and spitting lyrics that they have swarming in their heads. It’s a thing that we all did back in school, and it has a deeper social influence than we thought back then.

If it doesn’t rhyme, and if you cannot say it like a poem, then it isn’t rap to me. Rap is a form of art that needs to vindicate itself from its thuggish image, words that have no value. That image has been in place for such a very long time that it’s hard to escape. It seems to be synonymous with a social class of people who talk about violence and drugs, objectifying women in videos and glorifying the idea of being on top of the world. Admittedly, the rap game is saturated with this kind of thing, and it’s fun to listen to. But there are so many artists out there who take a more stylistic approach and make art with their words without making threats.

Movies and popular media eat up every word a rapper says if it promotes the image of an ignorant person who lives a grandiose lifestyle. Sometimes we get lost in this image because it shows that you can become rich just by being a fool. These are people who just say random things over a beat and have no actual need for style and purpose. But in recent years there has been a resurgence of “conscious rap” that creates a market for intelligent bars, wordplay that would shock Shakespeare, and a mix of metaphors and double entendres that all go together to actually mean something.

See I’m the type to get a check and invest it/ Buy some land and protect it/ Live off the interest and give my family the rest/ and then start from square one on some first cigarette sh*t in a whole new direction

Like these Big Sean lyrics here from Who’s Stopping Me, there needs to be a message in the lyrics in order for me to consider it real rap. Otherwise it’s just music, which isn’t a bad thing, but it isn’t within the genre people mostly associate it with. For example, you have terrible artists like Lil anything, etc., who are no older than 20 and put out songs that talk about the 4 pillars of nonsense: I got money and drinks, I got girls, I drive a Ghost/Phantom/expensive car, I came up on my own. For way too long, Blacks were characterized by this trash that a good number of us recognize as trash. I never call this rap, this is a wave of music that is for parties. Rap is made with a purpose to tell a story or utilize the genre as a message board. It isn’t just J. Cole speaking truth, it goes deeper than 4:44 and anything Drake puts out that speaks to the heart.

When Migos released the Culture album, yeah it was filled with beats and ideas that even I could relate to. They are, collectively, some of my favorite artists. But if I were to call their music real hip hop, I’d be lying. They influence the culture, but the idea behind the music is seated in expression through wordplay. And that’s why Eminem has my respect, he is the greatest rapper I feel has ever lived because he mixes a fusion of styles and uses his ability to make songs about his personal life as well as the game he’s in. He talked about his mother, daughter, spouse, friends, fans, peers and so on and opened up a chasm of depth for the genre that people often times try to catch up with. Even Kendrick, who was titled the new King of Rap, gave props to Eminem, going as far as to say his own style was influenced by Em. So even though Culture made a huge wave, there are levels to this game that it didn’t reach, and I try my best not to confuse sound with substance.

You see, rhyme and poetry can be a great influence on the minds of the public if you use it right. Logic made an album and dedicated a lot of it to talk about how him being mixed has been a blessing and a curse. Hopsin has a series of songs he titles Ill Mind of Hopsin, which are all different, but #7 in the series talks about his falling out with religion. In the song Neighbors by J. Cole, he wrote based on his experience with a neighbor who assumed he was selling drugs just because he was Black in a White neighborhood. There are stories in rap that are not being reached with the nonsense.

But, with a lot of younger generations of people coming up and adopting the rap mentality as their own, I’m looking at you Penn State, the wave has escaped the Black community and can be utilized as a platform for all people to voice their own stories. Mumble rap and Trap music ran the world for a bit, making people famous for recycling the same bars. And some of us laugh at it while others dance to it.  Dr. Dre said in an interview with Real 92.3, “This whole ratchet thing, I think it was fun. But it just didn’t have the substance that I appreciate in music.”

In the song King Kunta by Kendrick Lamar,  he says, “I swore I wouldn’t tell… but most of y’all share bars like you got the bottom bunk in a two man cell.” Something is definitely in the water with that.. the genre is being used for quick fame instead of messaging.

Some people are prone to sinking into comfort and disregarding other people’s discomfort. Such is human nature. The perception of our own mental and physical state is one of the most important things; noticing another person’s total current state is extremely difficult, and acting towards helping that person can be even more difficult. Such is the case when someone born with melanin is dealing with a person who does not have it. And this is not to say that people without it can’t understand people with it, it’s just that, through experience, you see that there’s always a metaphorical wall between the two individuals where certain bits of information don’t pass. For example, culture. My brother and I couldn’t even walk down a supermarket aisle in North Carolina without scared mothers rushing their children away from us, whispering, “Did you see the niggers in the next aisle? Don’t go near those.” The year was 2014, but the mentality was 1914. And they, just like my brother and I, are a product of their culture.

Melanin means that you come from a history that is a mix of tragedy and triumph. It means that you are born with two separate images: the people around you want you to realize your glory and become the King or Queen that you’re meant to be. The people who have never experienced us before want us to stay in our lane. Stay in the hood. Stay in the courtroom. Stay in the grave. Their heroes are comedians in movies. Our heroes are activists who were gunned down. They forget that Mansa Musa was richer than their parents ever were. They don’t realize that crocodiles aren’t native to Italy, so their fancy Italian shoes really come from Africa. They call them boxer braids because Kim wore them, but people with melanin have worn them for ages. They forget that Garrett Morgan, a man with melanin, invented the traffic light, and they wonder why we are always ready to go.

A lot of people with melanin have, at some point, considered these two different images but that doesn’t mean they are true. Being born with it doesn’t make you a saint; it doesn’t entitle you to a throne. Being born without it doesn’t make you cruel, nor does it mean you cannot empathize. But, the sad thing is that there are cases where these ideas come to mind for me, even up here at Penn State. Last semester, I had the cops called on me on the west side of campus. The officers pulled up on me with a van and a car on either side, spotlights flashed in my face and hands on hips. One of them got out the car and approached me, saying they were here for a belligerent man. I was the only one there, and I was on the phone with my girlfriend who heard this whole interaction, fearful for my life.

Now that’s something to focus on, she was FEARFUL FOR MY LIFE. I had to think in that moment about the young men and women with melanin who died in similar situations, and I had to speak to this officer as if I wasn’t preparing myself to fight him; recent history had prepared me to fend him off in order to preserve my life. Luckily, he turned out to be understanding and apologetic. Tragedy and triumph.

A hand up that we have to consider is that there are people out there who actually understand. Sympathizers who don’t see people with melanin the same as their families might. These are the people who can casually make a friend

with me just as easily as they can with anyone else. The kinds of people who can sing along to a song but pause when the word “nigga” comes up, then immediately get back to it, and we all can laugh about it. The kinds of people who “Can come to the cookout.” Whether they have ever met one of us before or not, they see that our history is different from their own and they recognize that, but don’t let that get in the way of a good potential friendship. Having people like this around in large numbers is what separates 2014 from 1914; that’s why I couldn’t be too mad inside that supermarket in NC.

I could, however, be mad when during the Schreyer dinner for parents, my father and his wife were approached by a

couple who lacked melanin, and the wife asked, “Oh! Did you two sneak in here for the free food?” My father, who saw me work for months on end to make it to the honors college, felt insulted by a woman whose child would be one of my peers. We had to really reconsider who we were walking alongside here at Penn State. Long story short, we didn’t sneak here for the food. I didn’t work two jobs over the summer to be insulted, I didn’t write essays for several dozen scholarship applications just to be insulted, and I didn’t sacrifice endless nights of sleep for this college just to be insulted. You see, we with melanin don’t take that as a joke when it comes from someone without. We with melanin, who actually are goal oriented, don’t hear things like that and feel beat down like our ancestors before us. We keep on doing our own thing.

I decided to ascend the metaphorical wall and see things from the other end of it, so these insults don’t hurt me anymore. There is something too valuable in having people from either side coming together and being better than the misguided. We all are contributing to a world built on love and respect, not hate. I sink into my comfort and smile at the discomfort of those who want me in the hood, want me in the courtroom, want me in the grave, anywhere but where they are. I smile because I’m way too comfy with my melanin to frown.

As far as I’ve gone with my life and daily activities, there was never a time when I thought to slow up and make time just to relax. I fill my time doing whatever comes to mind. It was particularly bad when I was younger and had a lot of free time on weekends; the things I thought of could be expanded on back then. Even though these impulsive ideas have been to me so natural in life; they made almost zero sense to everybody on the outside. People of different ages would confront me on a bunch of these impulses and ask why I did what I did or said what I said; I was just a little too involved in ideas that were too advanced for my age. Understandable. Here were a few of the not-so-intense examples:

For a good year and a half, back when I was starting out in high school, I went vegan, cold turkey, just because I felt like it. There is a lot of information online, articles filled with a lot of pleonasm, that supports claims of veganism being a better lifestyle than eating meat with normal daily meals. I took this information in like crazy. Spending hours and hours watching YouTube videos talking about the vegan lifestyle and articles that shared statistics on life expectancy of people who became vegan at different ages. This information filled in me this need to be more health oriented, out of the fear that my life would be threatened by the food I ate. So, one day I just started refusing any and all products that came from animals.

It was an amazing experience that had a ton of challenges in store for me and my will to resist food. On a normal week day, seeing as how there weren’t many vegan friendly options in my home, my dinner would be boiled peas and spinach that I ate out of a bowl. At school I couldn’t eat the lunches, which I never ate anyway because they were gross. But, feeling deep hunger pain in the middle of the day became a normal thing that I eventually learned to ignore. I’m not saying veganism is starving yourself. But, I was just ill prepared to go on that journey at the time. Even still, I kept to my ways for well over a year. What made me eventually end the journey was the fact that I developed an iron deficiency and lost too much body fat in a short amount of time.

Also, when I was 12 years old, I ate Honey Nut Cheerios everyday, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, just because I felt like it. That was a good 3 weeks in hindsight because I saw that my resolve to stick to things was very strong. This was one of many food related impulses I had that often resulted in weird health implications. Beyond that, I’ve put myself in small spaces to do things that I felt as though were “complete” exercises. For example, and remember that judging is left up to Judy, I would sit on the floor in my grandma’s bathroom with books, reading and writing while taking breaks to do push ups and other exercises. This kind of impulse had health implications that were actually beneficial, I gained muscle fast and became stronger while practicing my craft. In this case, it was a good impulse.

Some, however, went further than physical health. For a good majority of my life, I would have these brief but intense philosophical journeys. I read books and researched philosophical poems and sayings while doing my best to interpret them. They carried me down long rivers of ideas through which I encountered pacifism, the art of Leonardo da Vinci, Buddhism, etc. All the things I have taken into account and geared my life towards. These journeys I took through literature would last for days on end, having me in a state of mind where night became day and vice versa. I was insatiable. The end of one book sent my world crashing down until I picked up another.

As I mentioned, people didn’t see things the way that I saw them and often questioned me. Call it stubbornness or ignorance, but I listened to them and listened well but I still decided to continue on my path. I saw logic in the things that I did, and I wasn’t hurting anyone else with it. I would think back on the things I did and remember the advice everyone gave me, and once I was done with that one journey, I would begin to see the logic in their words while still having the experiences that shaped me. People don’t like this way of thinking but that’s the way that I grew to have an understanding of the world that is unmistakably mine. 

“Molten.” The word I grew to love and fear equally in my adolescence. It refers specifically to the feeling I had when I witnessed acts of injustice; things I knew I couldn’t change. The pain and anger welling inside me culminated into this rushing sensation where all the blood goes to my arms and I want to fight. Molten. Like lava, like liquid metal. A stream of this heat building higher and higher until I feel it in my eyes. It brought me to so many different places, and I’ll share one.

In my 11th grade year, I was in a relationship with someone whose little sister treated me like a brother. We would listen to music and bob our heads to the beat while riding the train to the el station under City Hall. One day in particular, all was well until I saw a man waiting for the el with his girlfriend. At first they seemed to be speaking calmly, yet they both were obviously irritated. My “basically” little sister kept running around me in circles chanting that I wouldn’t catch her. Usually I’d play along, but in the moment I was too distracted by the arguing couple. They were getting closer and closer into each other’s faces, more aggressive with the way they spoke. I told Kahleesi (that’s her pseudonym for the sake of anonymity; p.s shoutout to GoT) to stop running around and relax.

My girlfriend at the time asked me why I was being so distant. My honest answer was that I wasn’t, when situations like this one occurred around me I can’t help but stop. My brother and I had a system where we would watch and wait to see if something happens so we can step in; we’ve been doing that for years. I told her that I’m fine and to just hold on until the couple stops fighting. They weren’t stopping. In a moment of heated anger, the man gripped his girlfrend up by her collar, spun her around, and put her in a headlock. That’s when something inside me snapped 

As calmly as I could, I told the sister not to move, as I didn’t want her running around while I handled things. My girlfriend told me not to do anything but I couldn’t stand by like everyone else down there. My mind was ready. I sped over to them and grasped at his arm, pushed it from around her neck, and stood between them. “What the *fudge* do you think you’re doing? Back the *fudge* up before I break your *shirt*.” He backed up like I politely asked, knees shaking a bit. I looked around the room at all the people staring at me. They didn’t step in to help but you could see on their faces that they were relieved someone had. As I gazed at them, one word came to mind… “Molten.”

“You think because no one else stepped up that I wouldn’t? *Forget* that! I don’t play that hitting women *Shimmy* acting like you weren’t raised around a mother or sister. Put your hands on someone like me and see how long you last!” Admittedly, I was a little enraged, but it felt amazing. He tried to play the victim saying “We’re just talking,” but I wasn’t in the right state of mind to listen to that. I looked at the girlfriend and said, “Honestly, *Funk* him. You need to find better.” She just looked to him as if she couldn’t respond without some sort of permission. After a second of silence I backed off and let them be.  He put his arm around her shoulder in a look-I’m-not-gonna-hurt-her kind of way. I held onto my little sister’s hand when I returned to them and said, “Don’t ever let a man put his hands on you like that.” She nodded and smiled at me then said, “I’ll kick his behind!” 

From that day, I knew what would happen if the word “Molten” ever came to mind. There have been a plethora of situations where I’ve had to step in, one being in Dilworth Park which is right next to City Hall. A man fighting a couple people, the cops didn’t want to help, so I broke it up. My adrenaline is in check, I don’t do things without thinking first, but my actions are swift and rough. I’ve had to put my hands on people, but not to hurt them; only to stop them from hurting others, which I cannot stand. Only in those moments of rage and physical dominance do I feel that source of anger become satisfied, when an issue at its boiling point gets dealt with.

I’ve talked to Khaleesi and her older sister about this day a few times afterwards, letting them know that I would always be there when they need someone. I try to stay true to that, but Khaleesi is pretty tough herself and has shown a few times that she can beat the boys in her 3rd grade class, so I’m not too worried. As for my ex, she’s tiny so she had to learn a few moves from me before our split, but she can still fend for her own.

When the word “Molten” creates a shield before my eyes, anybody who knows me will tell you, just stand back and pray for the other person.