How Shaka Senghor’s Rebellious Childhood Sent Him To Jail | Super Soul Sunday | OWN

Leaving home. And I was around other broken, fragile young males that we banded together around our brokenness. And we just like, this is support, this is love. This is, I got your back no matter what.

Cause that's what gangs are, are they not? That's what gangs are, being banded together around your brokenness.

Yeah.

Beautiful way to put it.

And so I started getting into, like, minor trouble. Breaking in houses, stealing out stores, fights in school. And I'm always, like, shocked now when I look back that nobody saw the drop off. Like, you know, how does a kid go from honor roll scholarship to barely performing and not even wanting to do the work that.

Yeah. One of the things that struck me is that you say time and again in here that nobody ever asks you, what is wrong? Why are you behaving this way? Nobody ever stopped to say, maybe something's wrong, maybe he's not well, or maybe something's going on in his life. Nobody ever did that. People just beat you and kept moving. So time and again, I was thinking, where was the moral code? Because as a little boy who's in, you know, striving to do well in school and has these dreams of becoming a doctor, you had a sense of what was right and what was wrong. What happened to the moral code?

The environment, like, chipped away at that, you know, I was so naive.

Yeah. You were a crack dealer by 14.

Yes. Crack dealer and crack addict at 14.

Yeah. And that was also when you started to be sexualized and sexually abused. Women would sell their bodies to you for a piece of crack.

Crack.

Yeah.

Yeah. And in that space, the thing is, it's a normalized behavior for young men in that space, and it's seen as this twisted rites of passage.

Yeah. And one of the things that I think it's so important to understand, and you make it very clear in righting my wrongs, is that the culture, the entire environment, perpetuated this idea that your virility, your strength, your power was who had the most money, who had the most attention, and you got attention through being the bad guy.

Yeah. When I look back now, you can just see, like, that's what the quest was. Power.

Yeah.

And it became like your reputation becomes everything.

Yeah. One of my greatest lessons of the Oprah show all those years interviewing thousands of people, was that I could see that there was a common denominator in our experience. And more than power, what people are looking for is validation.

Validation. Yes.

They're looking to see that they matter.