BEST MOMENTS of Ep. 153 with Billy Council
Express Yourself Black Man
Kizzle
5.0 • 556 Ratings
🗓️ 30 March 2026
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In XYBM 153, we sit down with Billy Council, a dedicated advocate for social justice, equity, and community empowerment. Billy reflects on realizing he needed healing at 49 after losing a Harlem City Council race—an experience that resurfaced unprocessed trauma from childhood, his mother’s addiction, and surviving being shot six times at 19.
He also shares how coaching basketball became a pathway to mentorship and purpose, how becoming a father while losing his own father forced him to grow up, and offers insight on co-parenting, emotional presence, and the importance of creating meaningful traditions with your children.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | find a tradition that you have with just something. |
| 0:04.0 | Just you and him. |
| 0:06.0 | And that's probably the one thing that I regret, right? |
| 0:09.0 | Like, we don't have those traditions that him and I do this all the time. |
| 0:15.0 | Like, this is the one thing that we do, whether it's take a trip overseas, |
| 0:20.0 | whether it sit down, go to a beach and read the same book, and then come back and have that dialogue. Yeah. Right? We didn't, because I was so busy trying to provide and try to make sure I was doing the right thing that I didn't know what a tradition was. You know what? And here's the piece to that. Yeah. I never have a tradition with my dad. Right. So how would you know to develop that? How would I know to develop? Got to hear yourself grace. Right. But at that time, we don't. So now, even to this day, as a grown man, what my son is just like, okay, dog, we don't have a tradition. We don't have that one thing that just you and I do. Like, that's going to be |
| 0:55.3 | something that you passed down to your son. You can't hide nothing from people because people |
| 1:01.9 | can see it. No matter how you look at it, right, we can walk around like we got it all together. |
| 1:08.8 | But someone can really genuinely see like, hey, you're pretending. So i think the first thing that we have to do is just be authentic don't be afraid to say yo i am not good i'm not in a great place but i'm going to try to continue to move so i can get in a better place. Right? So I think that's the problem with men. |
| 1:28.7 | Like we, you know, we, and especially our generation, |
| 1:31.2 | we were taught to suppress everything, |
| 1:33.1 | not talk about things, not show feelings, |
| 1:35.6 | not show emotions, not show none of that. |
| 1:38.1 | We got to be able to say, |
| 1:39.9 | hey, this is bothering me. |
| 1:44.2 | And I want you to be able to express that same thing. |
| 1:46.6 | So now it's like putting a seed in somebody's head. |
| 1:49.8 | So if you have a young son, and this is for anyone who has a son that's young, |
| 1:54.6 | allow them to feel the way that they feel and let them know that it's okay. |
| 1:59.6 | Don't tell them now you can't feel that way. |
| 2:01.8 | Continue to let that person know, like, I love you. |
| 2:04.4 | If you need me, I'm here. |
... |
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