I’m writing this because I’m troubled by the state of race relations in America.
Before I got into politics about a year ago, I didn’t really think about race because it was never a problem for me. I was born in the Bronx to Ghanaian immigrant parents who never once racialized anything. They never spoke about white people differently than black people or brown people. Growing up, people were just people.
I’ve never been political. I was a Democrat by default. I was excited when Obama got elected in 2008 because it felt like a cool historic moment—having someone who looked like me in office.
I don’t know if racial relations have always been this bad or if it’s a product of social media, but something troubling is happening in America.
I believe America is objectively the best place to be a black person on earth, and this is the best time in history to be alive as a black person. Yet I constantly see narratives pushed that seem determined to convince everyone that life is horrible—that we’re oppressed, and if the oppression isn’t visible, it’s invisible. These unprovable assertions must be believed, or you’re either a bigot or self-hating.
I worry particularly about young people subscribing to these self-defeating, disempowering beliefs. These racial divisions don’t just push us apart—they hurt our relationships with each other and with ourselves.
Black people are being taught to hate white people. White people are being taught to hate themselves. White people feel that hatred, and some are resentful.
This became particularly evident after Karmelo Anthony’s murder of Austin Metcalf. What appeared to me as a tragic inability for two young men to resolve conflict peacefully—with Karmelo engaging in a massively disproportionate response to Austin’s minor provocation—was justified by people in the black community as “self-defense” or saying Austin “had it coming.”
I saw many black people rush to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to Karmelo and justify his actions, acting on racial preference rather than principle.
Several weeks later, I witnessed white people do the same thing.
When Shiloh Hendrix called a little black kid the n-word, rather than condemning a grown woman’s actions toward a small child, I saw resentful white people rush to her defense and donate upwards of $1 million to her cause.
We’re well aware that modern media is biased. What hasn’t fully dawned on us is that historical information is biased too. Many people walk around assuming slavery is an evil that belongs to or originates with white people. Neither is true.
I’ve seen people engage in motivated reasoning, which is interpreting facts or events in a way that protects your pre-existing beliefs or identity, rather than looking for the full truth.
I see them determined to hold onto race essentialism and the idea that white people are inherently evil. They’ll say, “Okay, maybe white people didn’t invent slavery, but they did it more, and were more brutal”.
Or “the transatlantic slave trade was uniquely brutal.”
These people aren’t looking for disconfirming evidence. They don’t realize the Arab- run trans-Saharan slave trade spanned nearly two millennia and involved systematic castration of young boys and atrocities rivaling the transatlantic trade.
They castrated men and boys so that they wouldn’t reproduce, and thus needed to “replenish” their slave supply regularly.
They operated at industrial scale - they just weren't as technologically and organizationally advanced as the Europeans were by the time the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.
But the point isn’t to engage in comparisons or weigh scales of evil. That is a distraction from the core message.
The point is to help people see that group identities and making morality a matter of melanin—causing us to believe some people are inherently damned—is in fact damning us all.
I made this video to introduce a more comprehensive view of humanity and the sins of our forefathers. To help us acknowledge choices made in the past, which were none of our faults, while taking responsibility for the choices we can make in the present.
