Demetrius Harvey Buried His Father at 20. He Wants the OGs to Finally Start Talking.

I went into that conversation ready to win an argument. I came out owning part of the problem.

The title we put on the episode was a dare: Black men, are we getting softer, or finally getting smarter? My generation has an answer loaded before anybody asks. Y’all soft. I’ve said it. Some of you reading this have said it at a cookout this summer.

Demetrius Harvey was born in 1996, the last year of the millennials. I was born in December 1967. He pointed out that I’ve been on this earth almost twice as long as he has. Then he said something I have not been able to shake.

“It’s a luxury to be able to get up and walk out the room.”

What we survived, and what we didn’t say

Let me give my generation its due, because we earned it. We came up through crack. We came up through HIV. We buried good people who should have been running things by now. Out of all that we built hip-hop and a language, and a hardness we wore like armor. We survived by being tough, disciplined and emotionally guarded. Those were my words on the show, and I stand on them.

But guarded is the problem. Guarded means the child never sees the math.

“It’s a luxury to be able to get up and walk out the room.”Demetrius Harvey

Demetrius put it plainly. “Mommy and daddy just made a way, but we never talked about the ways that were made.” Nobody sat him down and said the lights almost went off this month, and here is what we cut so they stayed on. So when it was his turn to make a way, he had no blueprint. He learned money from managing a bank, not from his kitchen table.

“It’s hard to talk about money when you don’t have it,” he said. I know that’s true. I also know the silence doesn’t save anybody. It just hands the next man the same problem with no instructions.

The weight nobody sees

Then he told me about his father.

He was 20 years old. He walked in and found his father on the floor, gone. He did not know his father had been struggling with drugs. Nobody told him. And because he was the one standing there, he did everything. He planned the funeral, signed the death certificate, called the insurance companies and told his grandfather. He made sure everybody at the service had a seat and a program.

It was months before he sat down in his own living room, looked at his father’s furniture and finally broke. After that came the drinking, the bottles in the bed, and naps on his father’s grave. He made it through. He’ll tell you it was by the grace of God. He’ll also tell you the lesson plainly: “I wish my father would have told me.”

That’s the part we don’t count when we call these young men soft. We send the first one in the family off to school with the whole family’s rescue plan in his bag. Go get it, come back and save us. Then we act surprised when he folds, or when he goes to Atlanta and never comes home. Demetrius asked me to think about the weight of that. You’re trying to figure out who you are at 18 while carrying everybody’s retirement.

Padded, not soft

So I asked him straight. Are Black men today softer?

He didn’t take the bait. He said padded. “We got a couple more airbags on us.” And then he turned it back on me. Isn’t that what we wanted? We fought to put our children in better neighborhoods with better schools, their own rooms and a car at 16. We can’t turn around and resent them for not coming up through the trenches we worked our whole lives to keep them out of.

He’s right, and it stings a little. Strength, to him, is being able to govern yourself: settle the noise inside, tell the truth when a lie is easier, hold weight without crumbling. He’ll defend therapy, but not therapy as a way out of accountability. “Application and information are two totally different things.” You can heal and still have to show up Monday.

Where I didn’t move

Here is where I held my ground. The “it’s not my fight” attitude scares me. I told him about Don Lemon getting arrested and journalists being hauled in for recording. What happens when it’s the young brother across the street with a camera? By the time minding your business stops working, it may be too late to do anything about it.

He didn’t argue. He said he’s concerned, and that he’s a little afraid to bring a child into this world as it is. Then he named the thing that has to change on both sides. Once upon a time we were our brother’s keeper. The elder’s job is to see the young man doing something good and say so out loud. The young man’s job is to listen and not throw the old man away.

So talk

This is on us, the OGs. Not all of it, but the first move is ours, because we’re the ones holding the information.

Tell them about the lights. Tell them what you cut to keep them on. Tell them what the drinking was really about, what the job cost you, and what you would do differently with the money. Tell them the bad along with the good, because a young man who only hears the good stories thinks life is supposed to be easy, and he breaks the first time it isn’t.

And young brothers, when the old head starts talking, don’t reach for the door. Demetrius said it best: walking out is a luxury. Staying at the table is the work.

Demetrius works alongside the Man Cave and the Pink and Black Honors, the initiatives Tenora Edwards founded to put Cleveland’s Black men and entrepreneurs in the same room. Go find him there. Bring somebody half your age.

Kenn Dowell is the founder and publisher of RealPower.TV and CEO of Strategic Resources Consulting. Join RealPower.TV to get every edition.