This podcast includes strong language.

My name is George the poet.

My name is George the poet, but right now I'm Uncle George, watching my nephews play with their friends.

I'm 20 years older than these kids and I'm imagining what the next 20 years will be like for them.

Some of them will obviously be dead.

Some in jail.

Some sitting right here watching their own kids asking the same questions.

People get uncomfortable when you talk about children like that.

There's a cause and effect relationship between the things we say

aloud and the way the future pans out. Like these negative prospects are less

likely for our children if we don't acknowledge the current reality. Maybe words really are that powerful.

Or maybe that's just a story we tell ourselves to imagine power into existence.

Everything you know is a story, an idea that you've accepted until the day you cross it out and replace it with a better answer.

When I was in school there was a planet called Pluto.

Turns out there's not.

I mean Pluto's still there. It's just not a planet anymore.

Personally I have no opinion on Pluto because I wasn't there at the time. But when it comes to this beautiful, resilient, overlooked, traumatized community,

I got skin in a game, I got 27 years of experience.

So no matter what stories come up in the papers about our trigger happy gang land or our

state-dependent single moms, I remember everything firsthand.

In fact we all do. So why is it that we as a community have no control over our narrative?

Our main storytellers are rappers, but the rappers of today are facing the same struggles

...