What inspired you to write your latest book, Letters to an Incarcerated Brother?
When my first book, Letters to a Young Brother, was released, a lot of juvenile judges were assigning my book to inmates and having them write book reports. The judges began to send me the reports and I began receiving letters from young inmates. When I dug deeper, I realized how much incarceration is affecting our community. If you come out of jail with a felony on your record, it’s almost impossible to get a job. There are so many hurdles. I felt this was an area where we can have an impact. It’s the most important book that I have written to date.
What do you tell the young person who is struggling in school or if they are looking for motivation for the future?
I’ve recently been talking about C words. Words that begin with C. Character is number one. If you live your life with a measure of character, you can almost think about every decision you make. “What would a high character person do?” So if you model your life after that, it becomes a huge deal. The other C that I’ve been talking about is creativity. We live in a world today that if you want to be dynamic and want to make a difference, you have to be creative. That means having a creative use of technology; creative use of ideas or design; a creative use of putting together different ideas. Being creative and bringing something new to the table is critical. Then the third C word is courage. It’s one of my favorite words. The etymology or the root of that word is coeur. In French, that means heart. The idea is to bring your heart to the table, bring your courage to the table.
If you could ask anything of the community as a whole, what would it be?
I feel like we’ve gotten caught up and part of it has to do with my business, which is the entertainment business. Part of the problem is that we’ve gotten caught up in the idea of false bravado, of labeling each other, calling each other the N-word or the B-word. All of these different things with everybody saying how much money they have or how cool they are, as if that’s actually a measure of a man or measure of a woman. I would ask for us all to be honest. Strip away all of that ego, all of that bravado, because it’s all false. Then let’s really take a look at how we can relate to each other and how we can support each other and help each other. If you look at music, the way that music used to be and what’s crazy is I hear myself saying these things and I don’t want to sound like some kind of old head who’s telling people “well back in my day, it was different.” It’s not like that. The music was about love. It wasn’t about being a h– or calling somebody a h–. The movies were like Uptown Saturday Night. It was about figuring out how to win together. It wasn’t about how to dog each other out and get over on somebody, and play them and sell drugs in the community. Art and entertainment, kind of lead the way, [they] kind of show us the future.
What does Black History Month mean to you?
Black History Month means to me a celebration in remembrance of those whose shoulders we stand upon. Our history is about individuals of courage, individuals of commitment who paved the way for us to have opportunity today. It’s up to us to celebrate that history, and then to move forward progressively and build upon it.
Story by A.R. Shaw
Images by Keith Major for Steed Media Service
