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

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.

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.

I'd probably have to leave home in order to become a basketball player of any note.

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.

I just wanted to fit in, so probably early on I knew, but it was... social life was such a distant part of my existence when I was in school that I didn't even think about it too much.

There are some people the gestation period is like an elephant's and it's just years and years before they're ready.