What makes you stand out from the crowd?
I’ve always marched to the beat of my own drum. I pride myself on being different. Not just for the sake of being different but looking at what the norm is and what everybody else is doing, and analyzing whether or not that’s for me. A lot of people do what’s popular without thinking about it and end up perpetuating or supporting something they shouldn’t. I’ve always taken a step back to see if something’s the right fit for me.
What would you tell young, future BE Modern Men who hope to cultivate a successful career?
Believe in yourself. Pay attention to your strengths but work on your weaknesses. Be skeptical but learn to listen. A lot of people listen with the intent to answer as opposed to understand. If you just take that extra couple of seconds to process what someone is saying to you, you might just learn something.
Tell us about one of the most challenging things you’ve had to do, personally or professionally.
The most challenging thing I’ve had to do is figure out what it means to be a man without a father to help me out. And I’m still figuring it out today.
Do you think men of color are championed enough in the mainstream?
No, not at all. We look down at ourselves, which doesn’t make any sense. We don’t highlight the things that actually matter.
One example I love to use—you know there were a lot of shenanigans going on in the NBA when that tornado hit Oklahoma City. Kevin Durant and his foundation donated a million dollars to the city of Oklahoma and no one ever said anything about it. Instead we were talking about this one who punched his fiancée in the face, and this one with another domestic violence situation, and this one who was making it rain the club—a bunch of shit that doesn’t matter that paints us in a negative light. I don’t really care if there are outside forces that make that the case, we have a responsibility to look at ourselves a certain way. It’s hard to fight through the noise but it still has to be done.
What impact do you want to have on the community?
I was presented with a plaque in 2001-2002 that said I was an artist. I was an undergrad and had written a play called Untold Truths about the minority experience at predominantly white institutions of education. The subtitle was ‘Why we always sit together.’ If you enter a cafeteria [at a predominantly white college/university], you’re going to see a bunch of people who identify with each other in some way sitting together. And, typically, those people are brown.
So at the end of that production, I received this plaque—which hangs over my bathroom mirror to this day—that talks about the artist’s role in society. It says the role of an artist is to 1) put the ills of society on stage, 2) be a force for change in the community, and 3) spark dialogue where communication is blocked. So aside from making people smile and giving them a distraction, my aim is to fulfill the role of an artist. If you don’t leave the world better than when you came into it, you kind of didn’t do anything. I want to make an impact on the world one festival, one dance, one smile at a time. And show us that we have a lot more in common than we think we do.
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