Recently, two major judicial decisions involving young Black males have shaken the American cultural landscape. In Texas, a teenager was sentenced to 35 years for murder following a disputed claim of self-defense. In South Carolina, Rick Chow was found not guilty after fatally shooting Cyrus Carmack-Belton over an alleged shoplifting incident.
It is the latter incident I’ll be addressing here because predictably, this tragedy has once again widened the existing fault lines even further between the Black and Asian communities, culminating in widespread calls within the Black community for an all-out boycott of Asian establishments.
As a black man who was born and raised in the United States of America, I understand the grief, and I also understand the rage. As someone who lost his mom at the tender age of 18, and a year later had to witness my paternal grandmother mourn the death of her son, I can indirectly feel the pain of a parent that has to bury one of their children. As a father, the loss of a child is an unimaginable horror.
Growing up, both of my grandmothers would always tell me that through all the hardships they’d experienced in life, there was no pain ever felt like the pain that came from having to bury one of their own children. With that I offer my sincerest condolences to the family of Cyrus Carmack-Belton.
But as a strategist, I must look at the systemic architecture of our responses in the Black community.
For decades, leaders like Marcus Garvey, Noble Drew Ali, and Elijah Muhammad circulated a foundational message within the Black community: Stop depending on external systems. Build your own infrastructure.
Yet, historically, we have largely failed to deploy that code. Outside of dedicated enclaves like the Nation of Islam or the Five-Percent Nation, the call to build sustainable, self-contained infrastructure is rarely heard, much less heeded, except…. as a reactive mechanism in the wake of a tragedy.
Let’s keep it entirely real with ourselves here. When the brother in the bow tie peddling the Final Call newspaper or the sister in African garb talks about nation-building on a quiet Tuesday, they are routinely ignored or ridiculed. But the moment a cross-cultural tragedy occurs, the immediate, reactive patch is deployed: “Boycott them.”
My question is : How can an economic boycott be a coherent strategy today, when on all the days leading up to the verdict, there was no issue exporting capital outside of our community?
Being a survivor of the Crack Epidemic, my perspective on this isn’t just “purely academic.” There is a case to be made here that this perspective was forged in some of the harshest of testing environments known to mankind.
Decades ago, I made the conscious decision to stop selling poison to my own people. But when I pivoted and tried to offer the “Knowledge of Self,” I was met with mockery and ridicule. Ironically, when I slipped and stumbled back into the darkness, the market for the poison was waiting for me with open arms.
When I landed in federal prison, isolated by the system, the very people that I expected to hold me down are the ones who vanished. Instead, I was adopted by a community of Asian brothers on the yard.
At a time when I didn’t have, as my grandma was fond of saying, “a pot to piss in nor a window to throw it out”, it wasn’t my own demographic sharing resources from their lockers, it was my Asian brothers. In fact, they were able to see past the superficial data layer. My own people, on the other hand, ostracized me to the point of where I was eventually handed and branded with the nickname “Asian Loc” on the yard.
That environment, enmeshed with those cultural influences, propelled me towards the nurturing discipline of the Shaolin Way and the structured framework of Traditional Chinese Medicine, frameworks of internal cultivation and energetic balance that has revealed to me a new way of living. Today, those roots run deep into my personal life; my daughter is engaged to a man of Black and Filipino descent, and my closest childhood friend is married into a Vietnamese family.
So when social media influencers deploy a reactive, emotional algorithm demanding an absolute boycott of Asian culture and businesses, I look at the logic. And from my perspective, that script is severely flawed. It asks me to penalize the very community that provided me with systemic stability, when my own legacy network…. left me offline.
Systemic vulnerabilities cannot be solved with temporary patches. A boycott is a tactical reaction. But building sustainable, cross-cultural infrastructure is a strategic solution.
True resilience, whether we are talking about securing a technical enterprise, balancing the internal ecosystem of the human body, or fortifying a community, requires disciplined, long-term architecture, not emotional volatility.
I choose the path of the builder. I choose the discipline of self-mastery over the hype of the algorithm.
If we genuinely want to secure our future, it is imperative that we stop reacting to the exploits of the system, and start building our own.
Thank you for reading.
Amituofo!
Beautifully said. 💐🙏