I was kicked out of John Burroughs Middle School in Los Angeles because of my behavior. It was a majority-white school, and though the system had me labeled as “gifted and bright,” it didn’t matter.
The same system that saw my potential also worked hard to push me out. I wasn’t just navigating adolescence—I was surviving in a world that didn’t expect me to succeed.
From a young age, I felt the weight of being misunderstood, misjudged, and mishandled. The pathway laid before me wasn’t college prep; it was confinement.
For many kids like me, especially Black boys, the schoolhouse to a jailhouse pipeline wasn’t a theory—it was reality. My half-brother went to prison for 18 years. That could have easily been me.
But then, something happened that shifted the trajectory of my life.
A Jewish man named Dan Hirsch found me—not in a headline, not in a test score, but in my humanity. He saw value where others saw trouble. He saw brilliance beneath the chaos. And with that belief, my life began to change.
Dan didn’t just mentor me. He reached into the margins and pulled me toward the light.
With his support—and the grace of many others, Black, White, Jewish, and beyond—I didn’t end up in a cell. I ended up at Cornell University, as a Telluride Scholar, an LBJ Congressional Intern, and eventually, a man on a mission to make sure no gifted kid is ever overlooked or thrown away.
You see, the system may have attacked me, but it didn’t break me. It was the coalition of people who refused to let my story end at 13 who gave me a future.
Whites, Jews, and others lifted me, and that lifting became a blueprint for how I would spend my life—lifting others.
My journey is a testimony to what’s possible when people cross lines of race, faith, and class to invest in one another. I am because we are. And I carry that legacy forward.