“Most of you know me. Well, most of you think you know me. You look at my hair and you think I’m into hip-hop. Which I am. You see me with a basketball in gym class and you think I’ll be real good. Which I am not. You see me running cross-country and I’m real good at that and you think, ‘Well, he’s just a natural athlete. They’re all really good runners, aren’t they? They learn how to run dodging those bullets and running from the cops.’ You don’t see all the time I spend in practice, how hard I work at it. That I’ve never committed a crime in my life. Neither had my brother.” He paused. A deep breath, so that his voice truly carried as he spoke his next words. “You hear that my brother, Kofi, was shot and killed in the street a year and a half ago and you think that kind of thing happens all the time to guys like me. That all we do is sit in our ghettos and shoot each other.” There was a collective gasp at this, but Bryson continued undaunted. “You believe all this because you never look outside these walls. I know people like you. People like a lot of you. You think you’re so different. But you’re not. Your prison is fancier—you’ve got the cars, you’ve got the cash—but not wanting to hear about anything that’s gonna make you think? That’s the same. I’ve seen guys like that here. Some of them are students.” He paused and drew another deep breath. “Some of them are teachers. They might know all about the best bike or the best computer or some civilization that’s been dead for a thousand years. But they don’t know me. They think they do—but all they know is what is locked up in their own closed minds. That’s what I wanted to talk to you all about today. It’s time you all really got educated.”

He went on in this vein for the rest of his allotted time. He informed us that the school ought to be, by his reckoning, at least 40 percent “people of color” (ridiculous term—we might as well go back to “colored people”). He informed us that this world that was Chelsea was one that was nearly extinct, and good riddance to it. He and those like him were the wave of the future. He went on: “Change is going to come about. If you’re ready, you’ll get out of the way. If you’re not, it’s going to run you right over.”