Shaka Senghor: Why your worst deeds don't define you | TED

178,389 views ・ 2014-06-23

TED


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Twenty-three years ago,
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at the age of 19,
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I shot and killed a man.
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I was a young drug dealer
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with a quick temper
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and a semi-automatic pistol.
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But that wasn't the end of my story.
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In fact, it was beginning,
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and the 23 years since
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is a story of acknowledgment,
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apology and atonement.
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But it didn't happen in the way
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that you might imagine or think.
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These things occurred in my life
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in a way that was surprising,
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especially to me.
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See, like many of you,
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growing up, I was an honor roll student,
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a scholarship student,
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with dreams of becoming a doctor.
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But things went dramatically wrong
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when my parents separated
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and eventually divorced.
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The actual events are pretty straightforward.
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At the age of 17,
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I got shot three times
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standing on the corner of my block in Detroit.
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My friend rushed me to the hospital.
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Doctors pulled the bullets out,
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patched me up,
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and sent me back to the same neighborhood where I got shot.
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Throughout this ordeal,
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no one hugged me,
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no one counseled me,
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no one told me I would be okay.
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No one told me that I would live in fear,
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that I would become paranoid,
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or that I would react hyper-violently
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to being shot.
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No one told me that one day,
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I would become the person behind the trigger.
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Fourteen months later,
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at 2 a.m.,
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I fired the shots
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that caused a man's death.
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When I entered prison,
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I was bitter, I was angry, I was hurt.
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I didn't want to take responsibility.
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I blamed everybody from my parents
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to the system.
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I rationalized my decision to shoot
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because in the hood where I come from,
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it's better to be the shooter
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than the person getting shot.
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As I sat in my cold cell,
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I felt helpless,
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unloved and abandoned.
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I felt like nobody cared,
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and I reacted
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with hostility to my confinement.
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And I found myself getting
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deeper and deeper into trouble.
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I ran black market stores,
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I loan sharked,
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and I sold drugs that were illegally smuggled
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into the prison.
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I had in fact become
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what the warden of the Michigan Reformatory called
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"the worst of the worst."
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And because of my activity,
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I landed in solitary confinement
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for seven and a half years
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out of my incarceration.
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Now as I see it, solitary confinement
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is one of the most inhumane and barbaric places
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you can find yourself,
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but find myself I did.
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One day, I was pacing my cell,
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when an officer came and delivered mail.
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I looked at a couple of letters
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before I looked at the letter
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that had my son's squiggly handwriting on it.
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And anytime I would get a letter from my son,
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it was like a ray of light
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in the darkest place you can imagine.
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And on this particular day, I opened this letter,
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and in capital letters, he wrote,
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"My mama told me why you was in prison:
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murder."
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He said, "Dad, don't kill.
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Jesus watches what you do. Pray to Him."
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Now, I wasn't religious at that time,
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nor am I religious now,
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but it was something so profound
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about my son's words.
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They made me examine things about my life
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that I hadn't considered.
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It was the first time in my life
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that I had actually thought about the fact
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that my son would see me as a murderer.
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I sat back on my bunk
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and I reflected on something I had read
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in [Plato],
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where Socrates stated in "Apology"
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that the unexamined life isn't worth living.
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At that point is when the transformation began.
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But it didn't come easy.
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One of the things I realized,
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which was part of the transformation,
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was that there were four key things.
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The first thing was,
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I had great mentors.
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Now, I know some of you all are probably thinking,
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how did you find a great mentor in prison?
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But in my case,
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some of my mentors
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who are serving life sentences
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were some of the best people to ever come into my life,
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because they forced me to look at my life honestly,
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and they forced me to challenge myself
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about my decision making.
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The second thing was literature.
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Prior to going to prison,
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I didn't know that there were so many brilliant
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black poets, authors and philosophers,
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and then I had the great fortune
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of encountering Malcolm X's autobiography,
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and it shattered every stereotype I had about myself.
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The third thing was family.
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For 19 years, my father stood by my side
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with an unshakable faith,
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because he believed that I had what it took
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to turn my life around.
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I also met an amazing woman
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who is now the mother of my two-year-old son Sekou,
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and she taught me how to love myself
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in a healthy way.
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The final thing was writing.
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When I got that letter from my son,
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I began to write a journal
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about things I had experienced in my childhood
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and in prison,
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and what it did is it opened up my mind to the idea
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of atonement.
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Earlier in my incarceration, I had received
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a letter from one of the relatives of my victim,
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and in that letter,
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she told me she forgave me,
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because she realized I was a young child
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who had been abused
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and had been through some hardships
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and just made a series of poor decisions.
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It was the first time in my life
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that I ever felt open to forgiving myself.
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One of the things that happened
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after that experience is that
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I thought about the other men who were incarcerated
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alongside of me,
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and how much I wanted to share this with them.
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And so I started talking to them about
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some of their experiences,
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and I was devastated to realize
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that most of them came from the same abusive environments,
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And most of them wanted help and they wanted to turn it around,
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but unfortunately the system
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that currently holds 2.5 million people in prison
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is designed to warehouse
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as opposed to rehabilitate or transform.
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So I made it up in my mind
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that if I was ever released from prison
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that I would do everything in my power
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to help change that.
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In 2010, I walked out of prison
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for the first time after two decades.
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Now imagine, if you will,
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Fred Flintstone walking into an episode
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of "The Jetsons."
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That was pretty much what my life was like.
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For the first time, I was exposed to the Internet,
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social media,
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cars that talk like KITT from "Knight Rider."
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But the thing that fascinated me the most
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was phone technology.
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See, when I went to prison,
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our car phones were this big
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and required two people to carry them.
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So imagine what it was like when I first grabbed
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my little Blackberry
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and I started learning how to text.
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But the thing is, the people around me,
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they didn't realize that I had no idea
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what all these abbreviated texts meant,
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like LOL, OMG, LMAO,
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until one day I was having a conversation
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with one of my friends via text,
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and I asked him to do something, and he responded back, "K."
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And I was like, "What is K?"
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And he was like, "K is okay."
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So in my head, I was like,
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"Well what the hell is wrong with K?"
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And so I text him a question mark.
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And he said, "K = okay."
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And so I tap back, "FU." (Laughter)
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And then he texts back, and he asks me
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why was I cussing him out.
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And I said, "LOL FU,"
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as in, I finally understand.
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(Laughter)
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And so fast forward three years,
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I'm doing relatively good.
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I have a fellowship at MIT Media Lab,
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I work for an amazing company called BMe,
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I teach at the University of Michigan,
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but it's been a struggle
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because I realize that there are more
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men and women coming home
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who are not going to be afforded those opportunities.
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I've been blessed to work with some amazing
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men and women,
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helping others reenter society,
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and one of them is my friend named Calvin Evans.
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He served 24 years for a crime he didn't commit.
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He's 45 years old. He's currently enrolled in college.
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And one of the things that we talked about
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is the three things that I found important
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in my personal transformation,
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the first being acknowledgment.
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I had to acknowledge that I had hurt others.
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I also had to acknowledge that I had been hurt.
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The second thing was apologizing.
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I had to apologize to the people I had hurt.
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Even though I had no expectations of them accepting it,
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it was important to do because it was the right thing.
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But I also had to apologize to myself.
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The third thing was atoning.
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For me, atoning meant
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going back into my community
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and working with at-risk youth
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who were on the same path,
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but also becoming at one with myself.
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Through my experience of being locked up,
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one of the things I discovered is this:
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the majority of men and women
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who are incarcerated are redeemable,
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and the fact is,
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90 percent of the men and women who are incarcerated
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will at some point return to the community,
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and we have a role in determining what kind
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of men and women return to our community.
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My wish today
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is that we will embrace
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a more empathetic approach
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toward how we deal with mass incarceration,
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that we will do away with
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the lock-them-up-and-throw-away-the-key mentality,
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because it's proven it doesn't work.
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My journey is a unique journey,
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but it doesn't have to be that way.
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Anybody can have a transformation
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if we create the space for that to happen.
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So what I'm asking today
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is that you envision
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a world where men and women
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aren't held hostage to their pasts,
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where misdeeds and mistakes
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don't define you for the rest of your life.
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I think collectively, we can create that reality,
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and I hope you do too.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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