Chapter 10 -
Managing Thriver’s Guilt
―“In every conceivable manner, the family is a link to our past, a bridge to our future.”
– Alex Haley
“Justin―do NOT fall asleep,” my brother Rick[1] screamed, with fear in his eyes as he squeezed my hand for dear life. “If you start to feel drowsy, let me know, but PLEASE, with all your strength, stay awake. You can’t fall asleep, okay? I need you to give this everything you’ve got, kid.”
I was strapped to a gurney in the back of an ambulance as it raced through Clinton Hill towards Downstate Medical Center, the hospital where I was born 15 years earlier.
My older brother Rick was at my side, frantically trying to make sure I wouldn’t fall into an eternal sleep. My little brother Max[2], sat on the opposite side of the gurney in stunned silence—with tears welling in his eyes. At this point in my young life, Rick and Max were the two people I was closest to.
It was Labor Day weekend in 1995 and a steamy Brooklyn summer was coming to a close. In the minutes before I found myself in that ambulance with my life hanging in the balance, I was chillin’ out on the block with a few homies and around-the-way girls. The sun was setting, and the streetlights had just come on, which meant it’d be time for me to get home soon.
The first day of school was the following week, and we were savoring our final days of freedom and warmth before the academic rat race began. It was the typical, boring August dog day, when suddenly all hell broke loose—which was always a risk back then during Brooklyn summers.
Where I’m from, warm weather and bored teenagers were a dangerous mix. And right before I was about to head home, our idyllic day nearly turned deadly.
For reasons that I still don’t understand, my “friend” Charlie and I started horsing around—playfighting as our homeboys and the girls looked on. Charlie had given me a little shove, and I shoved him back—and we suddenly found ourselves grappling the way WWE wrestlers do at the start of a match.
Our little playfight started innocently enough, no different than two young rams butting heads. But like hot water rising from a simmer to a slow boil, the tension and intensity of our grappling increased. We weren’t in an outright fight, but it was clear that we were both trying to get the better of each other in the exchange.
We were a pair of 15-year-old boys, powered by raging hormones and growing egos, and neither of us intended to be the dude who got physically bested by another guy in front of all those onlookers—especially with girls on the scene.
Natalie was there, looking on, and because of her presence, I decided to go all out in my little scuffle with Charlie. Natalie was a petite browned-skinned girl with long hair and pretty eyes, and I’d had a crush on her all summer.
I reached out to grab Charlie by the neck. My plan was to grab him and then quickly end our little bout by squeezing him into a submission hold. Since I was the larger guy, I figured that once I had Charlie in my grip it would be game over, and our little tussle would be finished.
But for some reason, Charlie happened to have a box cutter in his right hand. And just as I grabbed at his neck, Charlie slashed at my torso with that box cutter. I then felt a searing pain tear through my chest. The pain seemed to bore right through me. Like a drill through drywall. My hands immediately dropped from Charlie’s neck and pressed against this intense, white-hot pain as I fell to the ground, writhing in agony.
My 15-year-old self had no idea that a pain so awful could exist. And in that moment, I naively thought that Charlie only nicked me a little with the box cutter.
But to my horror, that blade took a slice out of the left side of my chest, ripping through the tissue in between my ribs, beneath the left pectoral muscle but just above my stomach. My hands were covered in dark red blood, and as I looked into the gaping hole in my chest, I saw my subcutaneous fat cells and muscles, pulsating with every rapid beat of my heart.
“I need y’all to get me to a hospital,” I screamed at the top of my lungs with my hands clutching my chest. I cried out: “I need to get stiches! Now!”
They say that God takes care of fools and babes, for which I am grateful, because in a stroke of good fortune my friend Lisa was one of the girls on the scene.
Lisa’s mom was a registered nurse, and so Lisa immediately sprang into action and took me up to their fourth-floor apartment. In another stroke of good fortune, Lisa’s mom just happened to be home, and she immediately began triaging my wound—keeping it clean and covered— as we waited for the ambulance to arrive. The EMTs seemed to take forever to get there, and my blood soaked through at least ten of Lisa’s mom’s towels as we waited.
As her mom tended to me, Lisa paged Rick,[3] with the code 911. Within minutes, both Rick and Max were at my side (like they always were in those days) just as the ambulance finally showed up. The EMTs placed an oxygen mask over my face, and the air from that mask felt like a blast of the purest, most refreshing air I’d ever breathed. It was a welcome relief from the humidity of that late August day, and I cherished every molecule of that delicious oxygen as the ambulance sped through the busy Brooklyn streets.
“Do you think I’m gonna need surgery,” I asked Rick, filled with fear.
“Kid—you have a HOLE in you,” he replied. “They gonna have to sew you up. But keep talking to me, man. We can’t have you fall asleep.”
The doctors didn’t put me under as they sewed me up, opting instead for local anesthesia as they went to work putting me back together. I watched as they sutured my torn body like someone sewing up a hole in fabric, and then winced as they closed my chest with more than 30 staples—plunging the metal, one by one, into my skin with a staple gun.
Despite the anesthetic, each shot of that staple gun pierced my skin with awesome ferocity, adding to my pain. When the procedure was finished, it looked like I had a zipper in my chest. I remember being surprised that I didn’t need a blood transfusion despite losing so much blood in the slashing.
“You’re lucky to be alive,” the lead doctor told me after they were finished patching me up. “He got you right between the spleen, heart and lungs. If that blade were just a centimeter higher or lower, you would be gone. You would have bled to death on that sidewalk. That kid is no friend of yours.”
Just one centimeter higher or lower. Although my memory of that doctor’s face faded away long ago, I can still hear the sound of his voice.
“If that blade were just a centimeter higher or lower…”
I carry a permanent scar on my chest, but I barely even see it these days when I look at myself, shirtless in the mirror. Yet every now and then, when life blesses me with a special moment in my career or personal life— I reflect on that fateful August day. I thought of it on my wedding day, and after the birth of each of my three children because they all came within a centimeter of not existing.
I thought of how close I’d come to dying nearly 30 years later, as I sat onstage with NBA legend Steph Curry, interviewing him one-on-one in front of hundreds of people about pay equity for women and creating opportunity for minority entrepreneurs.
And I thought of my near-tragedy a short while after that Curry talk, when I sat at a boardroom table directly next to former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as she discussed the Israel-Hamas War in a roomful of government leaders and corporate executives (with me being one of them. Little ‘ole me from the hood with a seat at the table next to all these important people, discussing a geopolitical crisis.) Just one centimeter higher or lower and none of it would have ever happened.
And then my mind inevitably turns towards Rick and Max, my brothers who were with me in that ambulance. My Day Ones. Because while I’ve been fortunate to soar towards higher heights in the years since— thanks to more than a few lucky breaks and help along the way— life hasn’t been as kind to them.
The three of us started off at the same, humble level, raised in the same family. Born into adversity. We came up in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn in the late 1980s and 1990s, long before the gentrifying invaders showed up.
This was the height of the crack era in New York, and in my mind, I can still see the empty crack vials littered on sidewalks, and beautiful tree-lined city blocks blighted by abandoned buildings, stray dogs and addicts breaking into cars to steal radios.
As the three of us came of age, our father wasn’t in the picture day-to-day, and our mom and grandmother did the very best they could to fill that gaping hole in our lives. But children need their father, and we were three boys who began to run wild during our adolescent years.
Rick, who is two years older than me, was my hero back then. He was one of the best basketball players in our neighborhood, a scoring point guard who earned the nickname Special K—in homage to his hero, the New York City legend Kenny Anderson. Rick was so nice with it on the basketball court that a young designer from Fila who lived in our hood once gifted him a pair of exclusive kicks to model as he went from park to park destroying dudes.
Rick had an effortless swagger about him, and he always looked out for me. He used to let me rock his sneakers and sweatshirts to school every now and then. I felt like I was the MAN whenever I wore Rick’s stuff. On days that I got to wear his sneakers, it was like my bookish nerdiness, and teenaged gawkiness disappeared, and were suddenly replaced by a cool, swaggering cockiness.
In my heart of hearts, I believe that if Rick had been born into a different family, with a father around every day to stick a foot in his ass, show him the right way of doing things and keep him on track—Rick would’ve made it to the NBA. That’s how good he was.
And then there’s my baby brother Max. Three years my junior, Max was blessed with our father’s good looks. He also had a fiery temper and routinely got into fights at school and around the neighborhood. Our father was the only person on earth that Max would listen to, but Dad was never around when we were growing up. So, Max ran wild. Always in trouble in school. Always giving Mom headaches with his incorrigible behavior. Max and I used to spar with each other damn near every other day, but because I was bigger than him, I used to get the best of him in those exchanges. During our battles I would imagine myself to be a pro wrestler like Brett Hart or the Ultimate Warrior, and I’d always end our bouts by putting him in the sharpshooter[4] submission hold or catching him with a belly-to-belly suplex.[5] My size was the only reason why I’d win those bouts back then. That changed when he got older and stronger though. When we weren’t fighting, Max was my shadow, following me everywhere I went.
When I was still in middle school, I’d bring Max along sometimes for my bike-riding adventures. It’d be me on my 10-speed and Max on the sweet orange BMX that Mom got him for Christmas one year. Max’s BMX was the envy of the neighborhood.
Back in the summer of ’94, Spike Lee was in our hood filming the movie Clockers, and we’d hopped on our bikes to go check out the movie set near the intersection of Fulton and Ashland Place. As we rode past Brooklyn Tech High School, an older thug—who was probably around 18 or so—sped towards us on his own bike and yelled out: “Ay, yo, shortie – gimme that muthafuckin bike.”
Like a lion chasing a gazelle on the African savanna, that thug chased after my brother, and I was powerless to defend him. And out of a sense of fear and survival, my instinct was to let the thug take my little brother’s bike. Mom could always get him another one, I figured.
I was unable to protect Max, then. And I wouldn’t be able to protect him from future traumas, either.
In the years after my slashing, Rick, Max and I began our slow drift apart, with life taking us in different directions—to the point where we’d one day have little to do with each other— going months, and sometimes even years, without speaking.
Despite his prodigious basketball talents, Rick never finished high school. Ever the resourceful hustler though, Rick always managed to keep some sort of job and was never without a little cash in his pocket.
Little Max started running with the wrong crowd and dropped out of school as well, although he was smart enough to get his GED at 17. Despite almost never setting foot in a high school classroom, Max passed that test on just one attempt.
As for me, nearly losing my life in the blink of an eye scared me into a stupor. I sleepwalked through the next year of high school, flunking off the basketball team and driving my poor mother to further worry and frustration with my aimlessness. (Twenty-five years later, a therapist told me I was probably suffering from post-traumatic stress at the time.)
But eventually I started to get it together. While my brothers were still finding their way, I was hitting the books, and two years after the slashing I was on track for an academic scholarship.
The burden of the Black bourgeoisie
“Then the LORD said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” “I don’t know,” he replied. “Am I my brother’s keeper?’” – Genesis 4:9
Let’s fast-forward 10 years after that near-tragedy on Washington Ave. in Brooklyn. My brothers and I used to be as thick as thieves, but now we have little in common and are no longer as close as we once were. There was no falling out, but we’re settling into the lives that we’ll live as grown men. Socially, we’re now moving in entirely different worlds. And economically, we’re on divergent paths.
I’m about to graduate from college and am wrapping up my second summer as an intern on the news desk at Bloomberg News. I’m a strong candidate for a job as a reporter at three of the top news agencies in the country by this time. I’m brimming with confidence, and I see a bright future laid out in front of me. And while I’m making some good ass money with that Bloomberg internship, there’s a huge raise from a competing news agency coming my way in the near future.
My social circle no longer includes my brothers or the neighborhood crew I used to run with. Instead, I’m hanging out these days with young men and women who are like me. All about to graduate from college and focused on taking over the world. Partying every other night to burn off steam but hustling like hell during the daytime to build the lives we’ve always dreamed of.
On the flip side, my older brother Rick is still trying to find his way. He gave a passing attempt at community college once but didn’t finish. He still hasn’t figured out how to make a steady living. He’s often short on cash now that he’s got to keep a roof over his head. Seeing the dude who used to be my hero starts to become a drag because whenever he’s around I know the inevitable is coming.
“Ay yo, Jus, can you do me a favor,” he’ll ask. And then there’ll be a request for money that he may or may not pay back. And out of a sense of obligation, I’ll give it to him.
Little Max is even worse off. Even though he’s got that GED, Max gravitated to the streets, and he’s now on a journey that will see him venture in and out of jail more times that I can count over the next fifteen years. When we all gathered around Mom’s Thanksgiving table the year I graduated, Max is spending his holiday in a jail cell on Riker’s Island over an assault charge. As everyone enjoys their meal, and wonders why Max isn’t there with us, I am secretly working with a bail bondsman to get him out. And like Rick, Max hits me up for cash damn near every time I see him, too.
Out of that same sense of obligation, I’ll give it to him, every single time. No questions asked.
My two brothers, the dudes who were once my best friends in another life, who were with me in that ambulance on the day my life nearly ended, are gradually becoming a burden. Because there’s now a financial and psychological cost to being related to them.
As my career gets underway, I’m getting a taste of the Black middle-class struggle— finding myself caught between two worlds. On one end, I’m trying to find my way in corporate spaces and figure out how to fit into a new social dynamic where I’m now a “lonely only.” And then on the other end, I have two brothers who are beginning to look to me as a financial safety net, which strains the close relationship we once had.
Deep down I know I’m no angel and that I’m no different that Rick and Max. I’ve been lucky more times than I can count. Like the time I nearly got kicked out of college during my freshman year for participating in an on-campus brawl. If it weren’t for the big check that Uncle Juan wrote to the school, there would be no Bloomberg internship. No career on the horizon. No prospects. I’d be assed out.
As I begin my professional ascent, Rick and Max become my own little version of the Black Tax.[6] Yes, I’ve grinded my way to the top, putting in all those countless hours studying, preparing and taking care of business. I put in that work alone.
And yet, I harbor a profound sense of sadness over my good fortune in climbing my way out, while my brothers remain caught in the riptide of the myriad systemic issues that throw so many young Black men off track. To ward off that sadness, I throw a few dollars my brothers’ way whenever they ask. And every time I see them, I wonder to myself, “How the hell did I make it while they didn’t?”
Although I am trying to start on a path towards growing wealth for myself and snagging my own little piece of the so-called American Dream, I’m also becoming like the many middle class Black Americans that Pew Research says are more likely than other groups to face the added burden of giving or lending to family members in need.[7]
The growing divide between my brothers and me mirrors the wealth divide that we see within Black America.
Removing sports and entertainment from the equation, Black people today are succeeding in finance, politics, public service and business like never before in American history. Black Americans are also seeing greater gains in wages, wealth and employment right now than at any point in recent memory.[8]
And on the absolute high end? We’re killing it. We’ve put a Black family in the White House (TWICE) and as of 2023 had eight Black CEOs running Fortune 500 companies, the highest total at any given time since that list was first published in 1955.
There’s no doubt that if you’ve got your proverbial shit together, plus the right resources and connections—there’s never been a better time than now to be young, talented and Black.
But in spite of these obvious bright spots, there are far too many of us still falling behind. Black children today are three times more likely than White children to live in poverty.[9] One out of every three Black boys born today can expect to go prison at some point during his lifetime.[10] (We lived out this data point in my family because there were three of us boys, and little Max was the one to spend time in prison.) Despite all the gains I just mentioned, the racial wealth gap continues to widen, and 20 percent of Black families have a negative net worth.[11] Black unemployment is also consistently twice that of White unemployment.[12]
My brothers and I are flesh and blood examples behind this data, with each of us living some version of it in our day-to-day lives.
Ten years after the slashing, I find myself afflicted with a mean case of psychological whiplash.
As I prepare to enter the corporate world full time as a freshly minted graduate, I’m getting a glimpse of what opportunity looks like, and just how beautiful life in this country can be when you’re making good money and can enjoy the material comfort that comes with success. But this light is shadowed by the reality that I am slowly leaving behind the two people who mean more to me than anyone in the world during this stage of life.
Many years would pass before I’d figure out how to manage this growing divide with my brothers in a way that preserves my mental health.
No man left behind
“Survivor guilt is a thief of joy – yet another secondary loss from death.” – Sheryl Sandberg
Survivor’s guilt is an affliction of the mind that affects people who’ve survived a tragic event or traumatic circumstances when others have not. It’s a condition that’s been seen in people who’ve survived Nazi concentration camps[13] and soldiers who’ve survived wars.[14] It’s afflicted AIDS sufferers[15] who survived the early years of the epidemic as their contemporaries died en masse, and students who miraculously walked away from school shootings unscathed.[16]
Within a corporate context, people who’ve escaped mass layoffs with their jobs intact have reported feelings of guilt and remorse after seeing colleagues let go.[17] And on a personal front, I’ve felt the sting of survivor’s guilt as I’ve advanced towards success in life while my brothers have struggled to find their way.
Stephen Joseph, a psychologist at the University of Warwick, has studied survivor’s guilt extensively. In a study of the 266 survivors of the 1987 capsizing of the MS Herald of Free Enterprise— a Belgian ferry—Joseph found 60 percent were afflicted with survivor’s guilt. In his study, Joseph notes there were three types of survivors from this ordeal, including:
1. Those who felt guilty about remaining alive while others died.
2. Those who felt guilty about the things they failed to do.
3. Those who felt guilty about what they did to survive.
Looking back on the circumstances we came of age in, I see parallels to being stuck aboard a sinking ship. We were three Black boys being raised in a single parent home, which meant that we were three-and-a half times more likely to be poor as adults.[18]
We are products of New York City’s failing public schools of that era, with only one out of the three of us graduating from high school. And we came of age in a mixed bag of a neighborhood, where some families were materially well off, while others subsisted just above the poverty line. (Research now confirms that the neighborhood where a child grows up has a profound impact on how their life turns out, [19] leaving me to wonder where little Max would be right now if he had the good fortune of being born and raised in a different environment.)
Looking beyond my own household and not counting my brothers, I did an informal survey of 10 Black males that I grew up with and spent significant time with over a 10-plus year period.
Three died before the age of 45, with two lost to violence and one to illness. Two served long, multi-year stints in prison. Two wound up living in poverty as adults, and three grew up to become reasonably successful by conventional standards. Just three successes out of 10 of us. And of the three Black boys who grew up in my home, only one emerged to the conventional definition of success.
Like the survivors of the capsized MS Herald of Free Enterprise, I struggled for a long time with the question of why I made it out while others didn’t. And while I didn’t feel the same sense of guilt that the survivors of that tragedy felt, I carried a burden of sadness at not being able to lift my brothers up.
Shaking off the burden of thriver’s guilt
“I want to thank me for believing in me. I want to thank me for doing all this hard work. I wanna thank me for having no days off.” – Snoop Dogg
Let’s fast-forward another 15 years.
Today, thanks to decades of hard work—and some fortuitous help along the way— my family and I are blessed to live in beautiful home in a bucolic suburb of New York City. We live in a diverse community that includes a bevy of high-achieving Black professionals, and enjoy a social circle that includes lawyers, doctors, bankers, entrepreneurs and leaders in the worlds of academia and public service.
My children are active participants in our local Jack and Jill[20] chapter and I find myself chuckling sometimes over how different their childhood is from mine. For example, the only wildlife that I saw growing up were lice-ridden swallows, pigeons, rats, stray dogs and city squirrels.
My kids, on the other hand, live near a nature preserve and see blue jays and cardinals flying around our spacious backyard. Deer and rabbits occasionally show up in our yard as well. (They’re beautiful, but a pain in the backside because they like to munch on the plants in my beloved garden.)
I make it habit to count our blessings, knowing full well where I came from and how precarious our position in the middle class truly is. Because even as I allow myself to exhale and accept what hard work has provided for my family, I must also prepare for the rainy days that life can throw your way at any given moment. I’ve got to make sure we have enough to withstand the unexpected. Job loss. Illness. Disasters. Or worse.
No, I am not morbid. But as a provider, I must be there as a safety net for my wife and three children. And, for my aging mother. This is my responsibility as a man. It is a responsibility that I embrace. But it is also a heavy weight to carry.
So, with all this in mind, I now feel zero guilt in allowing myself to enjoy the things I’ve worked for. I’ve also freed myself from the burden of believing that it’s my responsibility to carry others. Even my brothers, who rode with me in that ambulance long ago.
This freedom of conscience stems in large part from a hard lesson that I was forced to learn midway through my career about the difference between providing help to those in need versus becoming an enabler of bad habits and poor decision making.
Several years ago, I was under the gun at work in a big way. We were late in the fourth quarter of the fiscal year, and I was on the hook to deliver a major year-in-review presentation to a roomful of senior executives that included a CEO and several board members.
I blocked off my calendar the morning before the presentation to do a final review of my slides and rehearse my narrative, which included practicing answers to the tough questions I was expecting. There was a lot riding on this presentation, because a poor business review could derail the next year’s strategy, negatively impact my bonus and roadblock my path towards a promotion. But if I crushed it? The sky was the limit.
But instead of singularly focusing on the task at hand, I made the mistake of answering the phone that morning when one of my brothers called. [21]
Although my brother had a job, he was behind on his rent by three months, and if he didn’t pay it back in full by noon that day, he’d be evicted from his apartment with nowhere to go. Getting the money to him wouldn’t be simple either, because he didn’t have a bank account, which meant I couldn’t just send him the money quickly through Zelle or Venmo. (This was also in the days before those apps even existed.)
Allowing him to get evicted just wasn’t an option for me, so I took precious time that should’ve been spent focusing on work to hustle down to Western Union to wire him the funds.[22]
In addition to putting a massive dent in my family’s monthly budget (which I’d have to explain to my wife), this was a major distraction that could have derailed my immediate professional future. I knew that I couldn’t allow this to happen again.
These types of asks were a regular occurrence, and because of how I’d handled them earlier in my career, they persisted and happened so many times I lost count. Over the years, I also found myself wasting too much valuable time—and even my own peace of mind—on the affairs of others. And I recognized that this was too high of a price to pay.
Although I’ve got a limitless heart when it comes to generosity to loved ones, I’ve set boundaries around personal loans and bailouts. And today, I generally try to avoid mixing money and family because it’s damaged cherished relationships far too often for me.
I’ve also accepted the harsh truth that while every now and then everyone needs a helping hand, we’re also the products of our choices. I’ve made some good ones along the way, and I make no apologies for that.
[1] Name and details are changed to protect the person’s identity.
[2] Names and details are changed to protect the person’s identity.
[3] Pagers, also known as beepers, were communication devices popular from the 1970s through the 1990s. They were primarily used to receive short messages or alerts.
[4] The Sharpshooter is a professional wrestling submission hold, famously associated with Bret "The Hitman" Hart. It is one of the most iconic submission maneuvers in wrestling history.
[5] A belly-to-belly suplex is a professional wrestling move, particularly a type of suplex, where one wrestler throws their opponent over their head using a powerful, explosive motion. This move is known for its impressive display of strength and technique.
[6] In one context, the term "black tax" refers to the financial burden that some Black individuals, particularly in African and African diaspora communities, feel as a result of providing financial support to their extended family members. This practice is common in cultures where communal support and obligation to one’s family or community are strong. On the other hand, Shawn Rochester, author of The Black Tax: The Cost of Being Black in America, defines the "Black tax" as the financial cost imposed on Black Americans due to systemic racism and economic discrimination. According to Rochester, this "tax" manifests in various ways that significantly reduce the economic opportunities, income, wealth, and overall financial well-being of Black individuals and families.
[7] Source – Pew Research: “Extended Family Support and Household Balance Sheets.” March 2, 2016
[8] Sources - National Community Reinvestment Coalition: “A Strong Black Economy Still Mired In Inequality: Race, Jobs And The Economy Update For January 2024. Additionally, Brookings Institute: “Black wealth is increasing, but so is the racial wealth gap.” Jan. 9, 2024.
[9] Source – Center on Poverty & Social Policy at Columbia University: “The Black-White child poverty gap exists. Can we close it?” March 10, 2024
[10] Source: Tufts University Prison Divestment, 2024
[11] Source – US Department of the Treasury: “Racial Differences in Economic Security: The Racial Wealth Gap.” Sept. 15, 2022
[12] Source - Pew Research Center: “Black unemployment rate is consistently twice that of whites.” Aug. 21, 2013
[13] Source – United Nations: “I feel guilty I survived;’ youngest Schindler’s list Holocaust survivor tells United Nations her story.” Jan. 31, 2018
[14] Source – Focus Marines Foundation: “Survivor’s Guilt.” 2024
[15] Source – NBC News: “Forty years after first documented AIDS cases, survivors reckon with 'dichotomy of feelings.’” June 5, 2021
[16] Source – NBC Today.com ‘‘I’m sorry I let you die’: After a school shooting, children struggle with survivor’s guilt.’” Jan. 17, 2023
[17] Source – Career Minds: “How to Manage Layoff Survivor Guilt.” March 6, 2024
[18] Source – Instiute for Family Studies: “Less Poverty, Less Prison, More College: What Two Parents Mean For Black and White Children.” June 17, 2021
[19] Source – PublicSource: “How the neighborhood you grow up in affects your future.”
[20] Jack and Jill of America, Inc. is a national organization founded in 1938 by Marion Stubbs Thomas in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was established as a social organization for African American children, aiming to bring together children in a social and cultural environment. It focuses on leadership development, volunteer service, philanthropic giving, and educational programming. Jack and Jill is also made up of mothers who are committed to nurturing and strengthening children, ages 2 to 19. It has chapters across the country. I wish more Black children had access to it.
[21] I won’t say which brother here.
[22] This was prior to Western Union launching an app that would speed up this type of transaction.