Things That Make White People Uncomfortable

lived in different places and walked our own paths. Before that, we were always on the same team, whether it was football, basketball, or even dodgeball. There wasn’t a PE teacher in the state of Texas who was going to split up the Bennett brothers. Even now, when we play against each other, I say I only tackle him enough to get him down. He’s got a daughter, and I’m not trying to have to raise her. To this day, he tells me that he looks up to me because of the decisions I make, that he believes in me and I’m his role model. But the craziest part—and maybe he won’t even realize it until he reads this—is that, as much as he looks up to me, I look up to him. His creativity, the way he dreams, and his fearlessness about expressing himself. He’s my role model, too.

But it’s my dad who was, is, and always will be the most important figure in my life. In my mind he’s a superhero, but he’s also the real-life person who sacrificed for me to be who I am, never missing a game, always being there and doing what he needed to do. He was my football coach most of the time, but more than football, it was his approach to competition and manhood that made the greatest impact.

Once, after a game, the father of one of my friends yelled at another dad, “My son would beat your son up!”

The other dad yelled back, “No, my son would kick your son’s ass.”

They turned to my dad. “What about your son?”

And my dad just said, “No, no, we’re not going to do that. He’s going to walk away and live to fight another day.” One of the kids pushed forward by his father like a mini-gladiator ended up, years later, getting shot and needing a wheelchair.

My father kept us off the attitude that gets a lot of people in trouble: when, as Dave Chappelle puts it, “keeping it real goes wrong.” People try to keep up a persona, and it ends up coming back to bite them in the ass. My dad would point out our friends who had been shot or lost loved ones to violence and make clear that he didn’t want it to happen to us.

When we moved to Houston, my dad found a decent desk job at a company you might have heard of, called Enron. When Enron went belly up with all that corruption in 2001, I was fifteen. We were one of the many families of Enron employees who suffered because of the executives’ criminal lust for money. We had to move houses and switch schools, and everything got super tight as my dad looked for work. When I speak out on justice issues, I feel like I’m also speaking for everyone hurt by Enron. Corporate greed destroyed the lives of families. None of the company higher-ups asked themselves, “How much is enough?” Or, “Shouldn’t we care more about our employees than cheating people to increase our bottom line?” This is why I’ve never, ever, from day one, trusted the NFL fully, because I know that the bottom line is always the business. When people want the NFL to “lead” on issues like violence against women, or racism, or even head injuries, I roll my eyes. The NFL is just another corporation, and they’ll do what they have to do. Asking them to lead on social issues sometimes seems like asking a dog to meow.

I learned early on that I couldn’t count on kindly corporations or my teachers to show me morality or teach me my history, but I knew I could rely on my family—and also learned how quickly it could all disappear. I relearn that lesson every time I see myself with no shirt on. In the mirror, I’ve got my muscles all laid out and proportioned, and I look like what I am: an NFL player in prime shape. But then I’ve got a scar that runs across my stomach, just below my belly button, about as big and jagged as anything you can imagine. It looks like I escaped from the basement of those Saw movies.

The scar didn’t come from anything so dramatic, but it was a scenario just as deadly. I was ten years old, and my appendix burst. It almost killed me. I was getting ready for school and said to my mom, “I don’t feel so good.”

My mom, the teacher, cared about education above all else, so she said, “You’re going to school, no matter what. You’re going to school like it’s Walgreens, 24/7!”

I remember protesting, “But my stomach really doesn’t feel right.” She sent me off anyway. When I got to my classroom, I started throwing up like I was trying to empty my entire body onto the floor. It started with breakfast but then it was green liquid, like I was trying to vomit my stomach lining. I remember thinking, “I’m throwing up poison.”

The teacher sent me home, and my mom said to my dad, “Let’s just take him to the emergency room.” At the hospital, the doctor rushed me into surgery because my appendix had ruptured. That’s why I was throwing up so much: all the toxic fluid in my body needed to get out. I had surgery to remove the ruptured appendix, and they thought I was fixed. But I ended up having to go back two weeks later because I wasn’t getting better. That’s when they had to slice my whole belly open and clean out the infection.

I stayed in the hospital for a couple weeks, and that changed me. My bed was next to kids with burns all over their bodies and other kinds of life-changing injuries. I remember one kid who had been saved from a fire, and he had no skin on his face. I still see that when I close my eyes.

When they finally let me go home, I had