Knowing yourself, knowing where you want to get, combining those things gives you the pragmatic steps.

Combining the lack of emotional literacy they may be imbued with, with the fact that if you're black you're not supposed to be that smart and if you... as a boy you're not even supposed to like school. All of the sudden you've got kids who are afraid, black kids and Latino kids who are afraid to be great, afraid to bask in the enjoyment of education, lest they be labeled less than black, less than Latino, less they be called the oreo.

In a country like America, there are places, many states here still where coming out means you lose your job, where coming out means division, where it means potentially abuse.

There was certainly nothing really sexual about my youth growing up, simply because the fact remains if you're the fat kid in a school and I was the only fat black kid in the school - in fact, I was the only black kid in the school - but if you are kind of ostracized on many different levels in your school the last thing you're worried about is sex.

We need to get past the point where being black and a male means that I am likely to mug you for your wallet, likely to have a minus 15 on my IQ, likely to not go to college and likely to wear my pants below my arse.

In my experience, it's only people who don't play sport at a professional level who think that there is anything remotely erotic about a locker room.

My particular interest area is working in issues of emotional literacy. What I see of the way that we educate boys and more than that, the way we socialize boys within their families and then in schools to me is tantamount to just removing any element of emotional intelligence from them.