King Randall, the founder of the Life Preparatory School for Boys. (Photo: LinkedIn)
Black youth education advocate King Randall, the founder of the Life Preparatory School for Boys in Albany, Georgia, recently commented about victimology and structural racism, setting off a fiery Twitter debate.
Randall is a 24-year-old “community shifter,” according to his LinkedIn profile. The Life Preparatory School for Boys is a 501(c)3 charitable organization, whose mission it is to teach boys “the true meaning of manhood and to be protectors and providers for their communities, according to the school’s site. Randall launched the school in May 2022.
He recently tweeted, “I make no excuses for my generation being so far behind. We create so many problems in our mind. Our ancestors had ACTUAL hard lives. If they had the resources we do, they would’ve been unstoppable. All of the excuses we make are just a slap in the face to our ancestors and if…”
In an accompanying video of an interview he had conducted he says he asked a student “imagine a former slave having a better vocabulary than you….Makes you want to do better.”
Randall also tweeted that the push back he gets is due to his support base. He tweeted, “Their problem is that I have white support too. That’s literally it. All of their points are that since white people agree, I’m a scammer and white supremacist.”
Reparations advocate Yvette Carnell, president of the American Descendants of Slavery Advocacy Foundation, fired back, “Nope. You gave a whole fake Ted Talk designed to grow your following among whites who believe that Black pathology, not systematic racism, is the problem in our community. It’s a trope. It’s basically the Moynihan report w/ bad acting.”
She also tweeted in part, “What he’s getting from me is necessary discipline. Somebody has to set these young people on the right path when they’re going astray & auditioning to become the next Larry Elder. Nope, not on my watch.”
Author, speaker, and personal empowerment advocate tweeted support for Randall, posting, “The way Black people are coming after this man for actually DOING the work in his community is unreal.”
But filmmaker Tariq Nasheed had a different take. He slammed Randall by tweeting, “People are coming at him for denigrating Black society so that he can get brownie points and donations from white supremacists, while exploiting Black teens under the bad faith guise of ‘helping them,’ but really using them to push more anti-Black stereotypes.”
King Randall, the founder of the Life Preparatory School for Boys. (Photo: LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/king-randall/)
