Top Highlights

• Even when you have every right to be angry, anger is never helpful. It blinds you. That’s what it did to me. On the football field, my anger became a form of self-sabotage. The smart thing to do would have been to be calculating about it: “Okay, these coaches are using me, so I’m going to use them right back to get what I want out of this deal. If ...
• As I write this, it’s been seventeen years since I made that promise to Rebecca, and it’s only now that I can look back and fully understand and articulate how I made the journey from there to here. This book is the story of that journey—my journey to true power.
• There were nights when I had visions of my father killing us all. He had a gun, a Smith & Wesson revolver. On New Year’s Eve he’d stumble out onto the porch, drunk, and fire it in the air as soon as it hit midnight. It was terrifying. All I could do was wonder, “Is he ever going to use it on us?” Because you’d hear stories about that sort of thing ...
• “We built the pyramids, boy!” he’d say, glowing with a feeling of black pride anytime he built or fixed something. “And that’s how you know we can build anything else, too.”
• The auto factories were like jail; they were run by racial cliques that all stuck together. Because my dad was so good at his job, he’d been elevated into a class of white men who never treated him as an equal. At the same time, the black workers on the floor treated him like a sellout because he was on the side of the white management. He wasn’t p...