Tiktok 1: Okay, I get asked this question a lot. I get out in 2027. I got sentenced to 40 years for manslaughter. Before you judge me, just know that there is a story behind it.

Tiktok 2: Currently, I've been incarcerated for nine years. One thing I can to tell you for sure, this is not where you want to be.

Tiktok 3: The one thing that was the hardest adjustment was food practices, because I had been locked up for 21 years, so I'd only been eating prison food for that long. When I came home and people would take me to these different restaurants, and they would ask me what do I want, and it's like, "I really don't know what I want because it's like I don't know how anything tastes anymore."

Tiktok 4: Jail sucks, don't go to jail. Don't be doing stuff you're not supposed to. Now I'm trying to keep it legit.

[music]

Kai Wright: This is The United States of Anxiety. I'm Kai Wright and welcome to the show. Shaka Senghor is a bestselling author and speaker who's drawn a lot of attention for telling his life story. He's been with Oprah, he's been with Barack Obama, he's been on The Breakfast Club and Prime Time TV shows, and often the focus is on his story of redemption. Somebody who spent nearly 20 years in prison for a deadly violent crime, and somebody who's turned his life around as the saying goes.

We've wanted to talk to him on this show for a while, but I think that framing, that redemption story, it's a much too reductive way to understand the work Shaka Senghor is doing. His work is really about mental and emotional health for all of us, how we find what we need to be well, how we find it in our families, in our communities, how we find it in a society that's just not set up for that, and particularly for Shaka, how we find it as Black men and boys. Shaka, first off, thanks so much for coming on.

Shaka Senghor: I'm truly honored and looking forward to the conversation. It's been a long time coming, so yes, I'm excited to be here.

Kai Wright: Shaka started writing while he was incarcerated. He got locked up at 19 years old, so really, he came of age while he was inside. I asked him how, as a young man in there, he discovered his passion for writing and for storytelling,

Shaka Senghor: Prison is definitely one of the most dehumanizing experiences you can imagine, and especially when you go in as a kid. In the midst of that terrible environment, I met some of the most incredible mentors in the world. These men were sentenced to basically die in prison, and despite the finality of their sentence, they were a beacon of hope and light for many of us.

Initially, they tried to mentor me in an old-school way kind of like, "Straighten up, young man. One day you're going to get out of prison," but I was 19, I couldn't imagine 20 years down the line. At 19, you could barely think two weeks down the line.

Kai Wright: Indeed.

Shaka Senghor: They found a way in, and how they found their way in was through literature. People used to ask me the question of like, "What was the most important book you've ever read in your life? I would always go to The Autobiography of Malcolm X because it's one of the most transformative books that I've ever read, but it's not the most important. The most important is a book called Dopefiend by Donald Goines. Donald Goines was this writer who grew up in the streets of Detroit, grew up in the heroin trade, and eventually, he ended up in prison.

He wrote this series of books, maybe 13, or 14 books, but they were about the underbelly of society. They were about drug traffickers, prostitutes, police brutality, and all these different things that were going on during that era. The reason I say these men are so brilliant is because they knew that those books were limited. Once I ran out of those books, I'm like, "Okay, what else will I read?"

They was like, "Here's this is Malcolm X. Check this out." Back then, I didn't know anything about Malcolm X. As a kid in prison, I just began to devour these books. Years later, about maybe eight or nine years into my sentence, I began this journey as a writer. Even that didn't come across like, "Oh, I'ma sit-down and write a book." I actually started journaling because I really wanted to unpack what landed me in prison, and I started with an essential question I came across.

In Socrates' apology, he said, "Unexamined life isn't worth living," and when I read that, it just blew my mind because I was like, "Okay, how do you examine a life?" Then I challenged myself to write a book in 30 days, and so I wrote my first book in solitary confinement, no typewriter, no laptop, none of that stuff. It was the best thing I had ever experienced up to that point, like just the pride of completing something.

Kai Wright: Just making it to the end.

Shaka Senghor: Yes, just making it to the end. Then I was like, "Okay, a book isn't a book until somebody read it." I remember sharing it with a guy in a cell block. When I sent it to him, we had to use a fish line, which was a string, and a toothpaste tube that we put together to slide up under the door. I remember when he started pulling it in, I was like, "Man, that's my only copy." I'm hoping to get it back because we were in solitary at the time. There's nothing I can do if he doesn't.

Fortunately, he gives me the book back, but it was a couple of days later. He hadn't spoken up until then and he was like, "Man, this is one of the best books I've ever read." From there, I was like, "This is what I want to do. I want to write in a way that's accessible to people who come from where I come from, but also can elevate conversations that I think are important from a social standpoint." I started off writing fiction, and writing my wrongs didn't come along until years later when I was out of prison.

Kai Wright: For listeners who aren't familiar with your story, let's just start there a little bit from the first book, Writing My Wrongs: Life, Death, and Redemption in an American Prison, which was released in 2013. In that book, you share that at age 14, you ran away from home, and eventually an older guy in your neighborhood, he got you into dealing crack into that game. Can we just start with what made you run away?

Shaka Senghor: Yes. When I reflect back to leaving my household at around age late 13 or early 14, what I thought would happen didn't happen. I was a smart kid, I had all the potential in the world, I had a dream of being a doctor, and unfortunately, the circumstances in my household were such that I didn't want to be there any longer. What it looked like was that my mother was oftentimes physically abusive as well as emotionally and psychologically abusive.

In the city I grew up in during the height of the crack-cocaine era, kids were lured into this culture. I was homeless, basically for two weeks, sleeping in garages and basements of friends. This older guy in the neighborhood came along. He was like, "Hey, I see what your circumstances are. Come take a ride with me." I remember him taking me to get some Burger King, and then he was like, "I got somewhere where you can stay, but here's what you have to do. You just got to have to take care of these customers when they come through." He really laid it out for me, gave me the drugs, and within that first week just the amount of money I made was more than what I'm sure most parents were making at the time.

The first thing I did is I went to a grocery store down the street, and I bought every type of cereal you can imagine based on all the commercials I had seen as a kid. That's what happens to tons of kids, is one of the reasons that I decided to write the book because I really wanted people to understand that the young men and women who end up in prison, it isn't a result of one decision. It's a series of moments that transpire throughout their life that puts them in these very vulnerable situations within these very adult environments.

Kai Wright: You ultimately were arrested and incarcerated for shooting somebody. One of the things about it that struck me is you talk about how you experienced a sort of PTSD from a shooting that you had been involved in from when you had been shot earlier. Can you just revisit that for a minute for us?

Shaka Senghor: Thank you for asking that question. It's one of those things where I think this is so relevant to conversations we're having when we're talking about gun laws and we're seeing these mass shootings in schools across the nation. I'm encouraged that people are actually talking about how important it is to keep kids safe, but I'm also disturbed because as a kid who grew up in a highly violent school environment where kids get shot every day, nobody's thinking about our safety.

I grew up in an environment with high levels of gun trauma. In my family alone, eight of us have been shot. When I was 17 years old, I got shot multiple times down on the corner of my block, and at that point, I was the third of my mother's sons to get shot. That proximity to high levels of gun violence is something that I didn't have the language for. I didn't know what PTSD was.

What I did know is that when I went to the hospital, the doctor extracted two of the bullets, they left one bullet in, they patched me up, and they sent me back to my neighborhood. There was no therapist, there was no offer of a psychiatrist, a psychologist. There was no language to say that, "Hey, you're going to experience all of these different emotions as a result of what happened to you." When I went back to my neighborhood, I carried with me what I consider this volatile cocktail. This volatile cocktail was anger. It was paranoia. I was frustrated. I didn't feel valued.

I had to navigate that as a 17-year-old kid. I just began to carry a gun every day. I began to make up this narrative, as many of the young men I've talked to have made up in my mind is that if I find myself in a conflict again, I'm shooting first before I get shot. 16 months later, I got into a conflict at nearly two in the morning in the middle of a drug transaction that I refused to make. When that argument escalated, I fired multiple shots that tragically ended David's life. I was subsequently arrested. I was charged with open murder and I was sentenced to 17 to 40 years in prison for second-degree murder.

When I went to prison, I carried with me the guilt of knowing that I had devastated a family and I didn't have a way to communicate to them what was happening in my mind at the time. Everything was very robotic in terms of how I was processed through the courts, how I was processed through prison. It wasn't until years later when the woman who raised David reached out to me that I was able to really speak to her and let her know, all of who I was at that moment, and she's one of the first people I can say that actually gave me permission to acknowledge that I was a child. She was one of the first people to say, "Look, this series of things that transpired in your life, they contributed to the decision you made that night."

Now, it doesn't excuse the decision and I would never make an excuse for anything I did, whether I was 19 or whether I'm 90 but I think it's important for people to understand the how and the why these things happen and why they will continue to happen until we begin to address the mental health needs of innocent kids who are growing up in highly volatile environments. Unfortunately, I just didn't have that. What I'm trying to do at this point in my life is to use the terror and the horror of that experience to actually heal communities.

Kai Wright: Coming up, we'll talk about Shaka Senghor's latest effort to help our communities heal as a dad. We'll crack open his book Letters to the Sons of Society: A Father's Invitation to Love, Honesty, and Freedom.

Kousha Navidar: Hi, this is Kousha. I'm a producer. A few weeks ago, we did an episode about the culture of gun violence in our country and why that's got to change to make any political progress on gun control. You should check it out. We covered a lot, including what's driving folks across the political spectrum to purchase guns. Does it actually make you safer or is that a myth? We receive messages from you about the episode, including this one from Kevin in Connecticut.

Kevin: Hi, I'm a lifelong gun owner and a political mutt in deep blue America. I thought the point made in the podcast that people are buying more guns is based on a myth that they'll make you safer is more than a little condescending honestly. We've seen system after system fail us since COVID, from the judicial system to law enforcement, to public health. I can share that at the start of the pandemic, two of the smartest, most liberal friends I have reached out to me. One asked if she could borrow one of my guns if society collapsed and the answer was no. The other asked if I could go with him to a gun show to exploit the "gun show" loophole and was also a no.

These are not irrational people, but people seeing that the structures they've always trusted just may not be worthy of that trust anymore. I think that's a bigger factor than believing a myth.

Kousha Navidar: Thanks for that, Kevin. Thanks to all of you who are listening and talking to us. If you've got a message for us about anything you've heard, send us a voicemail. You can record yourself on your phone and email us. The address is anxiety@wnyc.org. That's anxiety@wnyc.org. All right, thanks. Talk to you soon.

Kai Wright: Welcome back. I'm Kai Wright. I'm talking this week with bestselling author, speaker, and activist, Shaka Senghor about how he's used his own life story to help others find the mental health resources they need. His most recent book is called Letters to the Sons of Society: A Father's Invitation to Love, Honesty, and Freedom. It's a series of letters to his two sons, Jay, and Sekou. We began our conversation about it by listening to him, read from one of the letters it's called The Freedom to Cry. Here's an excerpt.

Shaka Senghor: I want you both to be fully human, fully awake, fully in awe of how your tears can move our world forward, can release the pressure in yourself, in your community, a kind of sustaining reign. Don't ever apologize for your tears and don't just save them for the moments when the world loses a star, a hero, or someone else famous. Use your tears for good to show that you are gentle and soft and emotionally open to grief and joy and whatever else brings those tears to your eyes.

Kai Wright: I ask Shaka why this was an important lesson for him to give his sons.

Shaka Senghor: When I think about that letter, I actually get emotional thinking about it and thinking about the beauty and the gifts of my dad's tears. When my dad and my mom separated, I was about 11 years old and I never forgot the feeling of my dad and I being in the basement and we were packing up his albums. He just broke down in tears. I remember him hugging me and I could still feel the scrub of his beard mixed in with the wetness of his tears. It's one of the greatest gifts he's ever given me because what it showed me is that men have the duality of being tough, as well as soft. One of my friends, he describes it as you cultivate the lion so that you can be the lamb.

I think that that refinement of our propensity to be destructive, from the time I was a little boy, we were breaking things and throwing things and whatever drives that part-- I'm not a psychologist. I don't know what drives that part of our being but I know I loved it. I love football. I love basketball. I love all those things but also love love. I love the ability to expand myself emotionally and make sure that my sons have a model, not just someone who's telling this, but also modeling that for them.

After the book was written and done, I had two tragic incidents happen. One, my brother was murdered last summer in July.

Kai Wright: I'm sorry.

Shaka Senghor: I appreciate that. Then shortly after in October, our puppy was killed. I remember having to tell my son that our puppy had been killed and we just sat on the couch and we just cried. It was okay and it was a safe space for both of us. In those moments when he's reflecting on our puppy and the sadness that comes over him, I don't tell him that, "You got to be tough or you got to let it pass. "It's like, "No, sit in those feelings. Those feelings are important."

I think when fathers model for their children, what it means to be mostly available, what it means to be emotionally free, it does wonders for the world. It makes them feel safe. It makes the household feel stable. Let's talk about things other than just anger and stoicism. I can't tell you how many dads are like, "Man, my dad never said I love you. Never hugged me. I've never seen him smile or cry. He's always just a blank face as if everything is all right."

I have a 10-year-old son and I mentor tons of boys but also mentor young women as well. My focus is intentionally on an area where I know that these young boys are not getting the permission they need to be all of who they are emotionally. If I can model that for my sons and, and see him model that with his peers and other dads are starting to model it, it's beautiful. This awakening of dad emotional vulnerability, it's incredible.

Kai Wright: The right to be a fully human being.

Shaka Senghor: Absolutely.

Kai Wright: That's the right to be a full human being.

Shaka Senghor: Absolutely.

Kai Wright: In the first letter of the book, it's called A Trip to the Gas Station, and you tell the story of being triggered by your son after he physically threatens you. Just, can you take us back to that moment and what it was like to wrestle with that, to have your son triggering you with this conversation about violence?

Shaka Senghor: There were a ton of things that I learned from that moment. One is no one leaves prison without the deep penetrating scars of the prison experience. It's a very volatile environment. It's a very violent environment. What I didn't account for was that there were some things about that environment I had not quite fully unpacked. Then there was the reality of compounded PTSD, which I hadn't factored in given that I was shot shortly before I went to prison and never got therapy as a result of that traumatic event in my life.

I was caring a lot in my being. On the front end, where I come out, I'm so hopeful and optimistic and I can't wait to build this relationship with my son. What I didn't think about is that in reality, my son and I were strangers. My dad did an incredible job of keeping us writing letters to each other. He brought my oldest son, Jay up whenever he could to visit me. We would talk on the phone periodically throughout the 19 years. What happened is that, when you're in prison and you get one prison visit, that visit, the memories of that visit can last you for years.

I had an attachment to an idea that wasn't quite true. I thought I was being a great dad because I had these conversations on the phone and in a visiting room and through letters, but my son was experiencing life in a way different way than I could have possibly even imagined. The fact of the matter was, I just wasn't there. When I came home, I tried to really just inspire him. I came home as a mentor. I'm like, "Yo, here's how you do it. I know all this stuff and I can help you. Blah, blah, blah." I was trying to take him on a journey he didn't sign up for. It caused this friction.

In addition to it, I was overcompensating. I was giving him money and things of that nature to overcompensate for all the years I hadn't been there. Then it got to a point where it turned into a toxic dynamic between us two. It's very transactional. On that particular day, he had called me and he was asking about some more money because he needed to get a license. I had gave him some money prior to that for the same thing.

He just began to cuss me out and berate me which I was like, those are feelings. That's all fine. Then he threatened me. I was triggered. Because when I got shot I got threatened. When I saw men get stabbed in prison, it was because threats were exchanged. I got triggered and I basically told his mom that I'm going to take him and I'm going to dump him in his neighborhood. I was operating out of energy that at the time, I wasn't even aware of how angry I was or how potentially violent I was willing to be toward my son. Fortunately, I had great friends who were able to help diffuse that.

I think that chapter is so important not just for people who have loved ones incarcerated. I just think this is a father-son dynamic that exists in the world. I think when you add to the mix of that, high levels of gun violence and violent environments, we see that these outcomes can potentially be dangerous and deadly. That's what happened with my son.

Kai Wright: It's a letter to fathers as much as it is a letter to sons of the world at that point.

Shaka Senghor: Yes.

Kai Wright: I wonder what it's like to have to talk about this constantly. I mean, you've made this choice. [chuckles] You've written books and you're out here and you've said you've got a mission to try to bring your life experience and let us all learn from it. At the same time, when I think about the amount of really raw sharing [laughs] that you have to do to tell your story, I just wonder about that. Also about the way sometimes it feels like we are weird we as the society and the way we look at you and what we want from you. I just wonder what you think about that.

Shaka Senghor: I think the reality is we live in a very voyeuristic society. I think that is what the entry with these kind of stories is. We like to look into the face of fear. The reality is most people fear going to prison. They can't imagine the horror of being in that environment. There's something that brings people to the edge of it. If I can get close enough to it. Sometimes it's masked up under this, we want to do good and we want to end prison. In reality, it's like we're just curious about that world in a way.

For me, I'm balanced by the reality, my friends are in prison. I know that I have a skillset to speak the truth to these realities. I hate more than anything other people trying to tell our stories. It's one of the reasons that I feel fortunate and blessed to be able to write and articulate my experiences without them being interpreted through lenses that are oftentimes classes, racist, sexist.

I think it's important to be the owner of our own narratives. My life is much more than this experience. Even with the letters, I wasn't focused as much on my incarceration as I was on my life and my perspective as a dad. Because that's what's important to me at this point in my life. Because being a dad where I came from is not as significant to me as it is to others. I also do a ton of other things. I'm creative. I write outside of that space. I produce shows. I produce documentaries. I work in the world of tech.

One of the things I love about our company is the CEO was like, "I can't wait to see you blossom as a tech executive." When I earned that experience, he was like, "You're one of the most brilliant people I know." From a writing standpoint, I'm more like, "Did you like the writing? [chuckles] I don't care if you like the story or not. Did you actually like my writing?" That's what really matters to me from a writer's standpoint. Also, does a story resonate in a way that frees you from yourself? There's all type of prisons.

I can't tell you how many people is like, "Hey, that book helped me escape the own prison of my mind. The prison of my addiction. The prison of a toxic relationship." You can use it both literally and figuratively because I think it resonates in so many different ways.

Kai Wright: On the subject of your writing, let's say a little bit more of you reading from the audiobook one of your letters, this is part of the letter called Parenting.

Shaka Senghor: There's a trope in our culture of the absent father and the sainted single mother. The reality for so many of us is actually agony. Do you really think we want to be away from our children? Who would choose such a thing? Relationships end. The culture is adamant that the mother should take the lead in parenting and spending time with and nurturing. There are very few courts of judges who all things equal, land upon the father as the most appropriate parent. We have learned to take the second role. To acquiesce to the image of us as less than. As inadequate to the task of love.

We are not inadequate to it. We yearn for it, but so often we found ourselves out here in the garage of our lives, away from the main rooms, still in ourselves for either loss or reentry. I tell you this, stay cool with no bitterness. I just wish fathers could change their narrative a bit and be seen as equal to the love of mothers.

Kai Wright: You talked about this a little bit already, but can you say more about this idea of fathers as equal to the love of mothers?

Shaka Senghor: It's so interesting that when I think back to the narrative around specifically the absolute Black father and how this trope has been created to basically put on a pedestal this idea of a single mother as the soul backbone of the community. Then you go into the community and you see all these dads who are present in different ways. They may not be counted in the census because of governmental restrictions around who can inhabit a household if there's governmental assistance but it doesn't mean that they're not present. Then I just go through my personal experience. I have a family of incredible dads. We don't have a deadbeat in our family. It's unheard of. It doesn't mean that we fit this neat box model of a guy who goes home and does a 9:00 to 5:00.

He just comes home and puts the check on the table, disciplines the kid and he goes to bed. It's complex. My dad raised a total of nine children. Three of them biologically his and six stepchildren. We're all adults now and all of my siblings adore my dad. He wasn't a perfect father. He didn't have a perfect thing, but what he brought, that was special and sacred is his honesty and his ability to be emotionally vulnerable and available. The thing is that it is just a part of a narrative that conveniently gets excluded where we're talking about fatherhood.

I know some incredible mothers. I know some mothers who are so amazing. I mean, there's nothing that they wouldn't do to make their child, the community, and society better. I also know some mothers that aren't great at the role of motherhood. That is also true. It's this thing where we're tied to this idea of these extremes. It's like the extreme of great motherhood and the extreme of absent fatherhood. The reality is we exist in a way that we just don't talk about. We could be nurturers. It's like, If you want a soccer society, you want a more welcoming human society, we have to be included. All of who we are has to be included in our narratives. [crosstalk]

Kai Wright: Bring it to that human point. There are human beings who are good fathers and bad fathers. What is good changes and varies. I think about it a lot because I do-- [crosstalk]

Shaka Senghor: They are varied.

Kai Wright: It also forces us to think about the idea of family. Many Black family structures, and maybe it's other communities too, I know black families. So many Black family's structres challenge the definition of family as it's received. Then challenge how we then must show up in those with new definitions. That's what I hear in a lot of what you're saying.

Shaka Senghor: Yes, and I actually think he who controls the narrative controls the outcomes. When you think about who's been telling the story of the American family. Who's been telling the story is a predominantly White media. That's just the reality of television, music, all these entertainment outlets who control narratives.

I grew up with the Leave at The Beaver. All these stories and it went for years and years, a new iteration of that family dynamic, and meanwhile, this narrative of the broken Black family is being pushed. When you get to real life, I got sons of my White friends whose dads are not there and their stepdads had to step in. The divorce rates don't lie. The divorce rates are a real thing and they're not just one color.

When you start getting down into the truth of the thing, we're all experiencing this, it's just how we talk about it or how people talk about it as we raise to us. For me, I tell people I don't need to change the narrative, but we need to expand the narrative. Just include all of who we are and we good. I can deal with the deadbeat dad as long as you're including the fully present, nurturing, loving, caring dads that are always around, always stepping up, always filling in the gap. If you're including all of our story, then it's all good. This is why I write is we have to tell our own stories and that’s no knock to anybody else cause a lot of times there's just benefiting from the storytellers from their community and their culture. The reality is we have to tell our own stories.

Kai Wright: Shaka Senghor is a bestselling author, speaker, and mentor among many other things. His most recent book is called Letters to the Sons of Society: A Father's Invitation to Love, Honesty, and Freedom. The extracts we played of him reading from the audiobook version are courtesy of Penguin Random House Audio. Shaka, thanks so much for this time and for your work.

Shaka Senghor: Thank you so much for having me and for reading my work. I'm really looking forward to this work. Just standing the test of time and really impacting people and communities in an honest, real way.

Kai Wright: The United States of Anxiety is a production of WNYC studios. If you heard anything that sparks a thought in this conversation, please send it to us. Email a voice memo to anxiety@wnyc.org. We always want to hear from you and you never know, you might just spark an idea for a whole entire show. That's anxiety@wnyc.org. Our theme music is written by Hannis Brown and performed by the Outer Borough Brass Band, with mixing and sound design this week by Andrew Dunn.

Our team also includes Emily Botein, Regina de Heer, Karen Frillmann, Kousha Navidar, Rahima Nasa, and Jared Paul. I'm Kai Wright. You can find me on both Instagram and Twitter @Kai_Wright and you can catch the show live on Sundays at 6:00 PM Eastern by finding us on YouTube. Just go over to WNYC's YouTube channel and look for our show. That's also now where you can find whole entire episodes of each show if you prefer to listen that way instead of in separate segments. Anyway, however you listen, thanks for being in the community and I'll talk to you soon.

 

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