We moved into the South Bronx because my mother had lost her job and that was what we could afford. It was one of the toughest places in New York City, and one of the first things that struck me was that all the children on that block had to learn how to fight.

I watched the impact that fear and anxiety had on so many of my peers growing up. I was sitting around depressed that no superheroes were coming to save us. Then out of nowhere here comes Mike, who was five years older, and he decided that he was going to save me. He got me through those very difficult years of growing up in a very dangerous and violent neighborhood.

Eventually, I began to think that if I ever made it out of the South Bronx, I would come back into a community just like the one I grew up in and I would be the Mike for other children.

I am really excited to be with you. And, I am already blown away by your audience from all over the world who are tuning in to engage with you on a regular basis. Congratulations to you.

My grandfather was a Baptist minister and my grandmother was an ordained minister. My mother was a minister, and my wife is currently a minister. These higher values have always been a part of my life, even as I was a young boy. Even as my father basically abandoned us and my mother was struggling with four boys, I had this presence in my life of folks saying there was a higher purpose to some of this, but none of it made any sense to me. I was a poor boy in the Bronx with no money and no stuff. My grandmother kept telling me that the meek will inherit the earth but that didn't make any sense either. I kept asking her why the good people seem to suffer when the folks that are exploiting them seem to be living a good life. I always tell people that my grandmother fought with me to save my soul because she realized what I was thinking.

When I went to vote, I was a dumb Christian and I said, "this is hypocritical, this is not the way Christians are supposed to act." I eventually took a course about the great religions in the world, and it taught us about the Big Three - Islam and Judaism and Christianity. The church seemed to be alright and yet there were devastatingly poor people all over the world. Those two forces drove me to reconcile this deep spiritual belief with the realities of what poor people are facing.

It's funny, because as I went on one of these journeys - college. I totally rejected all the Christian beliefs. I thought it was hypocritical and not real. A civil rights struggle is going on, and I am reading up and saying, here's a better way, Christianity is the opium of the people. I had a crisis of faith as a sophomore in 1992 when my older brother, one of first children (twin), and my grandmother died, all within six months. I was at home, and I was devastated. But this is kind of what changed me. My grandmother had cancer and she was sent home to die. While she was on her deathbed I went into her room and said, "oh, grandma you're the nicest person I've ever met, you've never cursed, you don't drink or smoke - You've been a Christian, you've done everything good. Why would God do this to you? This is a horrible death. You're in pain. You're suffering. Why would God do this? And do you still believe?" And she looked at me and she said, "Geoff, I believe more than ever."

At that moment, faith became real to me. It recenters me back on this thing about faith and how it is connected to the struggles we go through in life, which doesn't guarantee you anything. To be a good person doesn't guarantee you are not going to get cancer, that your kids are not going to die. It does not guarantee you anything. It is a choice that you can make to guide your own life. If you believe that value will guide you to a more perfect understanding of humanity, I think you just choose it. That is how I ended up where I am right now.

I believe right now that we have the potential as humans to do something about deciding the worth of life. Whether it's male or female, black or white, whether you wear head covers or if you don't, it is interesting that visual view leads us to think we understand what's in people's hearts and souls. I see a new movement in this country. Black Lives Matter is sort of the encapsulation of that, but I think it is bigger than that. I think this movement is saying that we need to stop using these visual cues to make decisions about the worth of human beings. I saw Black Lives Matter happening all over the world and I thought, yeah, people are starting to get this. But this is not just about black lives. It is about all of us who are considered different by some group with authority or power. We have to say to the larger world, don't judge us based on those characteristics. And, it is hard because we have all been trained to make snap judgments about who people are by how they look, where they live and what they wear. I think we have an opportunity to honestly take on those discussions which are complicated and difficult if we fight really hard.

I have created the William Julius Wilson Institute due to this very concern. William Julius Wilson is the foremost African-American sociology professor at Harvard. He has written two books that changed my life. One is about the truly disadvantaged, such as in the black community where there is concentrated poverty, the worst education system and the worst job opportunities. The other book talks about when work disappears. Here, he talked about the role that work and employment has on all the social ills that we associate with poverty. Both of those books showed me that so much of what we ascribe to a group can be understood through larger forces such as employment, migration and access to resources that allow persons and their families to develop. For example, before I went to college, Senator Moynihan noticed a trend in the African-American community that sees fathers disappearing from the lives of children. He began to write about what was happening in the black community and said, "I'm not in the black community but suddenly you are having all of these single parent families. Men are leaving; mothers are raising children on their own."

He began to try to understand this from the perspective of being black in America. Today, the rates of single mothers raising kids among whites in America are higher than what Moynihan saw in the black community in the late 1960s and early 1970s. What Moynihan saw was not a black problem, he saw an American problem that first occurred in the most vulnerable populations - discriminated black folks. You could have grown up thinking something is wrong with black folks, when instead you should be looking at the historical and economic forces that are influencing behaviors. I think that's where we have gone wrong. Until you are hungry or desperate, you will not know what you will do or not do. When you place people in those circumstances and then judge them as if they don't have the same moral principles as others, when we deny them any opportunity to care for themselves and their families, that is a false way of looking at behavior. However, when wealthy people break the law, we say maybe it's a moral challenge.

Yeah. I have run that thought experiment and I have seen it in real life. And I know I could not watch my kid go hungry if there was anything I could do about it. If you've never experienced that helplessness and hopelessness and you're watching your folks deteriorate literally in front of your eyes, I think that most of us would cross boundaries that we think were really permanent and clear. William Julius Wilson was writing about work and employment and what happens to the family when suddenly your role as a provider is stripped away and you see depression, alcoholism, substance abuse and domestic violence take its place. People feel valued and are judged based on what they do. For instance, I am an educator. Take that away from me and what I become. When you have lost that status, you can feel depressed or disconnected. You are more likely to stay home and not want to go outside and associate with anyone. You will turn to drugs and alcohol because you have lost who you are as a person. Most of us who have never experienced that have no idea how devastating that is.

We have failed to separate who we are from what we do. If you get laid off or are unemployed, you are not any different as a human being and as a person. But the world says you are, and most of us do not have the internal strength to fight that outward judgment of who we have now become once we have lost that status. Right now, unemployment numbers all over the world are rising, and the middle-class suddenly finds themselves on a food line. You are now judged about your ability to take care of your family, and you don't know how you're going to ever get your status back. That is going to have a huge impact. One of the failings of capitalism is that we have attached so much value to your ability to earn money that we have internalized that that's where we get our value from, instead of looking more internally to say we are valuable regardless to that job.

This is another of the experiences. I watched the South Bronx crumble and I watched the social fabric crumble. There was a time when you didn't need to lock your doors, and you helped the old ladies upstairs with their groceries, and that was all part of what it meant to be young. Once the community began to fall apart, there was so much suspicion. No one let anybody in their house. One lock was not enough, you needed two locks and then three locks and it became almost a self-perpetuating set of reality. The more fearful people became, the more that crime was talked about, and the more people thought they were living under siege. And I realized that you are not going to get a chance to focus on algebra or trigonometry when you are literally worried about going home from school or when in school.

If you seem like you want to be an intellectual, kids want to beat you up because they've been fed this false narrative of what it means to grow up in certain kinds of communities. I lived through this where the assumption was that most of these kids did not have the intellect to take college level classes and work and become middle class families. They were directed into careers that people thought would involve their hands, because their brains weren't able to handle this kind of higher order thinking. This has happened with certain groups of people in certain areas. And some of it is not accidental. Some of the history of the accomplishment of certain groups in our country and around the world have been suppressed. For example, if as kid growing up, I understood that black women were so good at mathematics that they helped put astronauts into space when no one else could, as depicted in the movie "Hidden Figures", that would have changed my view of my own intellect, and maybe hundreds of thousands of black girls who would now be doing well in math, probably having PhDs. But this part of our history was hidden from us, and I think it intentionally happened.

I think that there are these areas of human development that people think that you have to be some kind of super genius to be able to accomplish these kinds of things. Math is one of those areas that people have assumed cannot be mastered. It is not that there is necessarily anything different about the functioning of those brains, it has to do with access, mentoring and support. If all those things are missing, you have about zero chance unless you are truly a genius. Another area is that very few women of color are in finance. When I talked to folks about it, they began to explain to me why. We simply didn't give certain people the kind of opportunities at an early enough age for them to be able to master these set of skills. And if we understand that some knowledge is based on learning the building blocks that preceded and we deny people those building blocks when they are seven and twelve and fifteen, you are going to see these differences when you give them the test at 18. Then you say this group really cannot perform as well as this other group.

One of the most important things that we have done at the Harlem Children's Zone is that we have totally eliminated the achievement gap between black kids and white kids in state tests and the Common Core in our city and in our state. This gap has existed since slavery. There's nothing special about what we are doing. We are not some super geniuses. We suddenly decided that failure was not an option. And we had to do whatever it takes. It meant long days and Saturdays figuring it out and working on it. We proved that it could be done. And if we could do it, then why isn't everybody doing that? That is another example of how in other places we have allowed racial or sexual differences to exist when it comes to our performance. This is what worries me. As technology increases, smart machines are now doing many things that people used to do. If we do not develop a sense of confidence in young people about their own competence, and their ability to learn and to use their brains in a cooperative way, as this labor market continues to change, we are going to see a sliding backwards, instead of us being able to unleash the full potential of every human. It has never been fair in our country when it comes to certain groups, and it has been justified as a sense of entitlement. This has stopped certain groups from developing their best emotional, intellectual selves. We need to tackle that before it becomes even more calcified in a set of beliefs and behaviors.

We knew what to do. However, this is part of getting science confused with human beliefs and politics and other issues. I am going to do the opposite because I consider you to be the other. The biggest barrier that we faced in trying to set up the Harlem Children's Zone in Harlem was that people did not think these children were worth the investment to fix the problem. I went around the country for 15 years arguing that we are totally prepared to invest in these communities. And the three thousand dollars a year I was going to spend to save these kids and put them on a path to employment where they pay taxes and participated in our society, folks thought it was too expensive. In New York State, it costs sixty thousand dollars to lock one of these kids up for a year and no one was complaining about that cost. Someone comes up to say," I can solve this problem for three thousand dollars." But we can't afford to do that. This was what had stopped us.

We were able to do it with some businesspersons like my partner, Stan Druckenmiller, who decided that these poor black kids were worth it. After investigating, he gave us the money to do it. This is not saying that one group is any worse than another group. He just thought America should stand for everybody having equal opportunity and your talent should take you as far as possible. I am still fighting that battle today. These communities all over the country, are worth the investment for us to spend the money while they are children, to give them an opportunity to live a better life. This is simply where science is separated from emotion and a set of beliefs, which I think interferes with our ability to be our best selves in this country.

I think you hit on one of the secret sources of the Harlem Children's Zone talent right now. Everyone out there who is involved in a business, runs a business, engaged, knows talent. There's no substituting for talent because talent allows you to overcome some of the sort of inertia that we all face in trying to get something done. When you're doing something that no one has ever done such as going into a community, trying to rebuild that community and turn it into a middle-class community, you need folks who have faith. Folks had faith that it was possible even when everybody told us it was not, that no one had done it before. I had a small group of men and women who fundamentally believed that we could do it. One of the things that I am hoping from conversations like this, is that more talented, smart college students will say, maybe I don't need to go work at a Fortune 500 company. Maybe I can show how smart I am if I can go out and solve one of these social problems that exist.

The girl's mother said, "don't blame me. Her father left when she was three. I know she doesn't know her. Abby sees her one two threes. But I am poor and work hard, you see." You know this story. Don't blame me. The teacher shook her head and said, "Don't blame me. I know it's sad. He's ten but if the truth be told, he reads like he was six years old. And man, don't ask, it's sad. You see, I wish I could do more but it's after three. Blame the mom. Blame society, blame the system. Just don't blame me." The judge was angry, his expression cold. He scowled and said, "Son, you've been told to break the law you'll do time. You've been robbed with a gun. Have you lost your mind?" The young man opened his mouth to beg. "Save your breath." He heard instead, "your daddy left when you were two. Your mama didn't take care of you. Your school prepared you for this fall. Can't read, can't write, can't spell at all. But you did the crime for all to see. You're going to jail, son. Don't blame me."

If there is a God or a spirit, a final reckoning for the kind and the mean, and judgment is rendered on who passed the buck, who blamed the victim, or who proudly stood up. You'll say to the world, wow, I couldn't save all. I did not let these children fall by the thousands. I helped all. I could see no excuses. I took full responsibility, no matter if they were black or white or cursed, ignored, were wrong or right, were shunned, prejudged, were short or tall. I did my best to save them all. Then I will bear witness for eternity that you can state proudly. Don't blame me. Thank you very much.

You and I were talking earlier about our fundamental beliefs, and life and death. And I just feel connected. I feel connected to God. I feel connected to Dr. King. I feel connected to Frederick Douglas and Sojourner Truth and the folks who fought for suffrage. If you think it's just about you, and it is all about your life experience, you sometimes lose contact with what has happened before you were here. And as I think about the next stage of my life, I say to myself, "are we where we need to be?" And the answer is no. We are not where we need to be. Can I make some difference in some person's life or some group of people? Is there something I can still contribute? I think the answer to that is yes. I've lived through a lot of this, not knowing how this is going to be in the next month, the next six months, the next year, how many more folks will die and get sick around the world? I mean, this is a time when I worry about the souls of us all. Are we prepared even when threatened, even when fearful, to still believe that we have more to give, more to contribute, more to help? And I think some of us have to answer that call. And I want to be amongst that group. Now that I think we will make progress, we got a lot more to do. Well, pick up where we left off. I don't want to see us go 20 years back because this pandemic has so shaken our belief in the goodness of human beings and the purpose of life. So, I want to do more and I'm excited to be able to continue to do this work.

I often do commencement speeches for colleges, and I use part of Dr. King's last speech that he gave right before he was assassinated, when he more or less predicted his own assassination. And he talked about getting to the promised land and he said, I may not get there with you, but we as a people will get there, that mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. And, you know, he talks about not fearing any man. And Dr. King knew that there were all kinds of plots against them. And yet till the very end, he was doing the top thing. Every time I think about that, it makes my life seem simple. Who am I to complain? Look what these great people sacrificed. At the moment of their sacrifice, they had no idea the impact it would have on the entire world. And you can just see that connection between how King studied Gandhi and Gandhi didn't know he was going to have this impact on all of these African-Americans. So, this is the story of our lives and the interconnection of all of us. And I think that we all have to say we can do more. We can do better because there are people who have given the ultimate sacrifice. So, with that, I say to everybody listening, we can all do more. Do it until it hurts. And when it hurts, realize that our pain is not as deep as the pain of others that have prepared this road for us so that we could take advantage of the freedoms that we have today because of their sacrifices.

Thank you for taking time to be together. I really enjoyed it.