Welcome to Words Matter with Katie Barlow and Joe Lockhart.

Welcome to Words Matter, I'm Katie Barlow.

Our goal is to promote objective reality.

As a wise man once said, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, not their own facts.

Have power and words have consequences.

Our guest today is a senior staff writer at L.com where he has written the Daily Pop Culture

and Politics Humor column since 2016. His opinion columns have also been published by The New York Times

among many others. As a playwright, he won the Barrymore Award and the Dramatist Guild Landford

Wilson Award and was a finalist for the Steinberg American Theater Critics Association

New Play Award. He's also the long-running host of the Moth Story Slams in Washington, DC

and Philadelphia. His first book, Here For It, will be published next month.

Our Eric Thomas, welcome to Words Matter.

Thank you so much, I'm so excited to be here.

So congratulations on your first book, Here For It, or How to Save Your Soul in America.

And since it's a memoir, let's start at the beginning.

I want to talk about something you write very early on and here's what you write.

Quote, I grew up a little ball of potential but oblivious, gay energy, and a Baptist family

from a black Baltimore neighborhood where there were more abandoned houses than lived in once.

My parents sent me to school in a rich suburb where most of my classmates were white.

Every moment from then on, I was an other capital O.

The thing is, I felt it but I didn't realize it.

So talk about that experience a little bit and how it shaped your worldview.

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