Are there issues in the Black community? Yes, of course. However, we shouldn’t take a disparaging approach to each other in identifying and fixing the problems, the approach, in my opinion, needs to come from a place of compassion. Nobody is going to respond well to that energy of being looked down upon by people who feel are better than them—that’s not a dialogue or support, that’s scolding. If we want to make real change happen for us we have to help and support and build together, which honestly doesn’t happen enough because those of us with the means and resources to support each other often distance ourselves from the “lower class” as soon as we get the chance. The reality is a lot of folks are chasing access to white spaces not in an effort to leverage and siphon the resources gained through those spaces back to Black folks but to hoard the resources and show off what they have to other Black folks (or white folks as well). Usually lost in these conversations is the impact of slavery, white supremacy and generations of the intentional disenfranchisement of Black people across the world. And while some may say yes let’s acknowledge those things but look at ourselves first, well to those people I say we need to talk about the racism and discrimination because of the traumatic impact those things have had on us. We all know significant trauma in an individual can lead people to be stuck or make self destructive decisions so it only makes sense that collective trauma would have collective impact on the collective—us. So if we gonna do this then we can’t just disparage our own, we need to heal each other and lift each other up. Otherwise we just gonna be fighting each other and creating division between us instead of building. That’s why I support a compassionate approach to each other, focused on support and healing, which will put us in a better socioemotional place to better our actions, which can hopefully lead to tangible gains and liberation from being under the foot of white supremacy. Yeah, we have issues, like an other community, but we have to solve them together.