OVERCOMING RACIAL FEAR AND VICTIMIZATION

Activist, spoken word poet, and viral internet personality Theo Wilson came to MHCC on Feb. 20 to speak on campus about a variety of topics: his life story, the current state of the country and being a black man in America.

All of it was fitting of Black History Month in February, but it was his introspective take on race that really drew the audience into his presentation, titled “Addressing Campus Hate Crimes.”  

Wilson’s life story is something that many in his personal background can relate to. He grew up in Denver, Colorado, and told the audience about finding himself between conflicts of gang violence and white nationalist groups. This led him to join the youth NAACP club (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), where he became the public spokesperson.

When, as an adolescent, a major hate crime happened in his area, Wilson said he thought, “My skin is now a gang color my mom can’t shop me out of, and I had to consider what the world looked like (in order) to navigate violent white supremacy.”

He described encounters in his young adult life in Florida where he was either a witness to, or a victim of, racially motivated attacks. One of these was a personal encounter with the police that traumatized him and left him with a survivor’s guilt for other victims of police brutality that ended in death, he said. 

Wilson re-capped his initial viral fame and the TED talk that brought his cause to the public: infiltrating online “alt-right” groups on YouTube and social media. He discussed the echo chambers of media – how all groups of people pay attention to things that self-affirm their world view – in this case, white nationalism.

He told the Mt. Hood audience of his epiphany at the time: “Beneath all of this hatred there is something else at work, and that something else is fear.” This came from his observation of the people he saw in the alt-right, people who were just normal compared to their more extreme political beliefs: Their “fear” was rooted in being cast by society as a bad guy for simply being the race they were born as, a form of racial guilt, he explained.

Wilson made the point that, in sum, all races have been traumatized by the past history of this country. This realization let him better understand and gave him a form of compassion that he wasn’t initially looking for, he said.

He closed out his Mt. Hood talk by reciting a poem he performed by heart, called “Impossible.” The poem was a culmination of all the broader topics he had talked about, and his life experiences that brought him here. It touched on overcoming odds, history, race and religion, and was met with applause by audience members.

Wilson then took audience questions. A couple significant ones were about on-campus hate crimes and how education handles “Black History.” He said that a campus should have a culture that humanizes all people and teaches history the right way to prevent any form of hate, and create better understanding. Regarding Black History, he said that it shouldn’t just be an elective course one can take in school and that more strides should be taken to incorporate it into the general curriculum: after all, black history is American history. 

Wilson has his own YouTube channel where he discusses current events and issues.

He is a founding member of a slam poetry team, Slam Nuba, based in Denver, and is the executive director of an organization called Shop Talk Live where he uses the community barbershop as a platform to discuss issues. In 2017, he published his first book, “The Law of Action: Master Key to the Universe We Actually Live In,” following his media success.