Sam Simmons

Ooh, you're long-suffering.

You're such an advocate.

We elevate the trauma to the point where

You know, I'm out there giving and people give me credit.

And then soon as I get healthy enough to start caring for myself, folks turn on me.

And that's, you know, because again, we're so conditioned to care for others and ourselves, we get credit for that.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

So, it's so funny.

Well, the conference is, this is our 17th year.

We call it Community Empowerment through Black Media.

That's the name of the conference, long name.

But that, we started the conference in 2009.

And the reason we started the conference is because

When there's things that happen in the Black community, you know, we talk about disparities, you know, we'll talk about maybe housing, drug use or whatever, whatever is going on in the community.

If we're not talking about how systems contribute to those issues, when we break it down, the next thing comes up is what Black men ain't doing.

Once you, when you set the system stuff aside, the next thing is what black men ain't doing.

And that's all out of that, you know, how we look at that whole masculinity idea, but what are black men not doing?

And so I thought about that is if after we stopped talking about, you know, what system, and it always ends up with about what black men ain't doing, maybe we should be talking about black men, right?

And what I realized with a colleague of mine, you know, his thing was, we got to, you know, hold this system accountable.