I wrote this book because I wanted to create an opportunity to share that with the youth, because what I wrote in the book is not taught today. I learned many of these things as an adult, and I’m like, wow, if I had learned many of these things when I was a much younger child, maybe I could have even done bigger and greater things than I’m doing right now. And so this is what motivated me to write the book and how to be a successful black man, because in America also, black men have the worst numbers in terms of, whether you’re talking about incarceration, poverty, employment, graduation. And there are some systemic factors behind all of this historically, that I wanted to reveal and expose and explain. So those are the things I wanted to write in a book to help educate the younger generation, to better prepare themselves for success to overcome these things and be aware of the great history that they have.
Our history is labeled in black and white
Unfortunately, our society is heavily labeled and structured historically in black and white. And I remember on many times being asked growing up, are you white or are you black? Are you this? Are you that? And many of the forces and things that occur in the media, you see them in black and white. They always just say, oh, a black person committed this crime, or five black youth did this only reporting negative images but often nothing positive. This is despite the fact that more whites commit crimes than blacks due to the population numbers. And a lot of things are very negative. And so I wanted to change that.
Positive images can change perspectives
Even if you look at the cover, I have an image of a positive family. Its a very powerful image. And the book has a lot of powerful images in it, to inspire the youth and to have them be able to see themselves. Because growing up, you rarely see books that reflect black people in a positive way. I recall oftentimes in high school and middle school being talk about slavery, oh, blacks were slaves. And that’s the beginning of the black history that’s taught in this country, without really going back much further than that. And then we go back several thousand years to shoe how we contributed to the origin of civilization, and how civilization started in Africa, with black people. African contributed writing, education, science, spirituality, and engineering, to the world. The book also goes through what happened during the slave trade and shares pearls to excel and become successful.