I learned how to have empathy for different people early on in my life because as a Black person thrown into environments full of white people, Asian people, Latinx people, people that didn’t look like me and people that looked like me, I had to be able to pick up on social cues very fast and on what people liked and didn’t like, and what made them feel safe and what made them feel afraid very quickly because again, the stakes for a Black kid, if you don’t pick up on those things, are that someone could see you as unsafe and someone could cause you harm or call the police to cause harm to you in that way.