Or as Ta-Nehisi Coates calls it, “The Seductive Dream Of Standing Your Ground“.  God, I love how he writes.  This is just beautiful:

The man in me knows how macho imaginings usually outstrip reality. He also knows that this may not have even been a threat. He further knows that kids, in general, do dumb shit. But that wasn’t the man in me talking. It wasn’t the father who knows he needs to be around for his child. It wasn’t the husband, who knows his wife is back in New York depending on him. It wasn’t the writer who hopes that his best words are still in front of him. It was some little boy who got jumped repeatedly more than two decades ago, back in West Baltimore, and his spent the rest of his days just “wishing a nigger would,” as my people say.

That boy is a damn fool. And part of any adults maturation must be keeping the idiot in them under wraps. But I can’t kill the boy. Nor should I. It’s that same boy who tells me not to punk out when I’m doing my miles, not to be a chump and take a day off from writing. The boy reinforces the man. But he needs guard-rails.

You don’t often see a man who made mistakes as a child and can both reflect on those mistakes and recognize how those mistakes still inform his adult life.  This requires a maturity that very few people possess.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, another man that I have a huge man-crush on.  That makes two.  Neil deGrasse Tyson being the other.  I guess the saying is true; once you go black, you never go back.