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Im gonna be honest: Its very difficult to have these conversations and not lose patience.
An impressive balancing act is at the heart of his work.
And the formula worked out.
Dinner Party: So first of all, obviously a big fan of your work.
Itsreinvigorated my spirit toward, like, having patience with manosphere niggas.
F.D Signifier:Thats so important.
I wanna give space to dudes, cus aint nobody really gonna do it but us.
That shit is dirty for sure.
Have you been keeping upwith the Ja Morant story?
You know, not really.
I dont watch a lot of basketball.
I know hes newer.
He was Rookie of the Year.
He fought some kid last year.
They let him slide and then hes doing videos with guns.
And now theyre saying,Okay, you’re gonna wanna sit down for a second.
Yeah, theres other stuff mixed in there fasho, but thats the gist of it.
He got suspended by the team indefinitely earlier this week.
And yeah, people have been talking a lot about it.
They done already talk about this nigga daddy.
Like,Oh, his daddy didnt show up, orHis mamas crazy.
They talking all types of shit.
Im sureStephen A. said some wild shit.
Whos the other, bigger dude?
Oh, hes the worst one.
I got a video on Black conservatives coming up, and I left his ass out.
Yeah, we gotta throw an edit in there.
I throw a dagger in there real quick.
I gotta find a way.
Hes the worst one.
Im sorry, what was the question?
So I had a formal academic education.
So I aint had no shit else to read though Im still reading, by the way.
But the thing is that you recognize theres not a lot of Black mens gender studies.
Theres not a lot of Black men and gender scholars in the academy.
And so what thats done is its made the scholarship around Black men weak.
And that has all of these negative impacts.
Like, we love a nigga fucked up story.
We loved that shit.
But we gotta always start there to put it in scope.
We gotta ask what happened here.
Ja Morant may have a boyhood that reflects that kinda experience.
Ja is expected to go through that shit without a problem.
Most others, they dont have multimillionaire, billion-dollar industries literally on their back.
And so then that complicates what should be a community-level intervention with that individual.
It becomes,Yo, you made it, you supposed to be better.
We aint worried about grades.
We aint worried about your emotional development.
We aint worried about your mental wellness.
Its only,Can you play?
Can we get you through these classes to play?Thats all that matters.
So many of these boys are underdeveloped.
Thats the schools, the principals, the teachers, the mama, the daddy.
Everybody is so ready to run them into the league.
They never stop to engage with their self-development.
What makes him move with that recklessness?
And where do you even go with that?
Because, like, alright, lets say hesjustfought a nigga and flashed the gun.
Is this a story?
I dont think so.
You know what Im saying!?
I hate to pull this, but like whats the white-boy boxer thats done all kinds of terrible stuff?
He does something like every two weeks!
He gotcaught with like 50 guns!
The danger there is it becomes whataboutism.
And were talking about Black men.
The real thing to get into is what a healing process looks like for Ja Morant.
And if people really care about that, then theyre gonna get em on the other end.
Hes not the first this is real, real talk, this is lightweight!
This is regular shit.
Like, sorry, this is very chill.
He just flashed the gun.
In an open-carry state, oH My gOd.
Im sure you could imagine what the reactions were to that.
Because it is literally like, this nigga might have PTSD that has been untreated.
Like, I dont wanna diagnose nobody but
I would wager almost all of us do.
Theres a misreading of the experience entirely, and a lot of us are dealing with PTSD.
That Will Smith is still within a process of getting out of perpetual survival mode.
It felt to me, from jump, thats what Ja was dealing with.
And its unfair not to consider that an actual mental-health issue.
But yeah, did you watchthe Chris Rock thing?
Oh yeah, I watched it last night.
What did you think about it?
It wasnt the worst, you know.
I didnt leave it feeling like I leftwhen Chappelle did his shit.
I wish he wouldnt have called Jada a bitch.
I have a lot of mixed feelings!
I laughed like four or five times.
I wish all the comedians would sit back and think of better jokes about woke culture.
Theyve all been doing the same.
He literally did some of the same jokes I heard Louis C.K.
They homies, they share shit!
Yeah, its just really tired.
And that itwasabout Jada, and thats real.
And, listen, Jada is a groomer.
It has not really been emphasized in the conversation that Jada Pinkett did legitimately groom this dude.
I dont think he was underage per se, but it was definitely an inappropriate relationship.
At the end of the day, though, its so much spectacle, and Im exhausted.
Its not overly meaningful.
I dont have much energy for it.
I dont know if you see my shit aboutCop City.
Anarchist came in and firebombs with Molotov cocktails the Cop City site in Atlanta.
Its deeper shit going on.
Its more real stuff going on outside.
This is just, you know, Chris Rock had to get his lick in.
I hope it drops from here.
Every move, every wave is a story line.
Thats the thing that bothers me the most.
Im thinking about a video about that going all the way back to O.J.
cause I feel like thats when it really started.
I dont know, its tiring.
I feel like it was a special that showed why that nigga got slapped in the first place.
You really fucking did that shit, bro.
I hope you appreciated that in the moment.
Like somebody gave you exactly what you earned.But yeah, theres a ton of really dizzying shit going on.
Even in the midst of all the awareness around trans issues, trans misogynoir is rampant and underdiscussed.
They arent willing to come to the defense of trans folks for these issues.
And so these entities know this.
Thats how they cut abortion.
Theyre so demonized that people really just dont give a fuck if people fuck with em.
So on one end, I see the okey-doke they tryna pull.
Like when I started to unpack my own shit, I started to see that.
How did it show up?
When I was a teacher, I had young gay students; these were boys.
I remember how little effort was put into protecting them in obvious situations and how everybody just tolerated them.
And that was when I started thinking about the whole totality of the inequality there.
So fast-forward, I start working in social work and Im seeing the real results of this shit.
Im seeing whats happening on the streets.
There had to be specific entities set up just to provide halfway decent care for some of these kids.
When I got to YouTube is when I started being really in community with trans people.
Like,You deserve whatever the fuck you get for being how you are.
And once I caught that parallel, it really got into me.
And then even still, Im still doing the bare minimum.
I dont wanna do trans people how white sociologists have done us for decades.
Like,Imgonna speak for the trans community?
A cis hetero Black man with two kids?
So thats why I brought Soulbunni on becauseSoulbunnis been percolating on the low.
Because its better if she could advocate for herself, you know what Im saying?
Its better that thatKat Blaque has platform, but Kat Blaque told these niggas Ive put in 15 years.
And I aint mad at it.
Shes earned that right many times over.
And you cant extrapolate that from their proximity to Blackness and the problems that Blackness faces.
I was a little frustrated.
I kept my mouth shut.
You may have seen the British girl in the U.K. who wasstabbed to death, right?
That shit happens everyday.
Thats one of the things Soulbunni was getting at.
She didnt go in on it cus theres always conflict, so you gotta pick your battles.
So its a messy, complex situation.
That was the whole thing with Dave Chappelle: Like, we know the real issue here.
Everything bad that happened from Chappelles comedy happened to a trans Black woman first.
And what you internalize is that its really about us knowing who suffers first.
If youre really about the people who suffer the most first, then youre supposed to move differently.
