I never knew how much a fridge and basketball could shape my future. 

Before getting too carried away, no, I am not LeBron James, and basketball didn’t propel my life forward in that way. If you were looking for an NBA player memoir, sorry. Still, I’ll try to be entertaining and also informative because basketball really did change my life.

On a hot, western Kentucky day, five or six of us gathered at my friend Drew’s house to play basketball in the driveway. Around game four, with a heat index around 110 degrees, we were drenched in sweat and thirsty.

I am from the school of drinking water outside from the hose, if there is one, or suffering at the mercy of the sun. But not Drew. During a short time between games, Drew asked us to follow him into the garage and proceeded to grab individual bottles of Gatorade for each of us. Gatorade!

But it wasn’t just the Gatorade that was astounding. It was where he grabbed it from—a refrigerator IN HIS GARAGE.

I did not know this was a thing. The rest of us were all from the same neighborhood and background. We weren’t like Drew, we were all poor, Black, and struggling. We were not accustomed to stocked refrigerators outside of the first few days of the month when food stamps hit. But here we were in mid-July with not only a stocked fridge, but a secondary fridge more stocked than the one off-white and barren fridge in each of our kitchens.

Where they do that at?

Walking home from Drew’s house, we all talked about the full-sized Gatorade bottles we had just been handed. They weren’t the little baby ones you see on the sidelines of kids’ soccer games or the ones that conveniently go on sale because no one’s buying them. We got the real deal. I couldn’t remember the last time I had a full-sized one. 

Our normal practice was if we saved up twenty-five, and later thirty-nine (thanks inflation) cents, then we got a jungle juice from the neighborhood corner store. In our case, it was BP. That lemon drink (not juice apparently) with the giraffe on the side hit just right on a hot summer day, so it was cool. But it was not Gatorade. And they just hand those out for free at his house? I say again—where they do that at?

There in Drew’s garage I felt what would drive me for the years that followed. A spark that ultimately jump started my understanding of white supremacist-fueled racial disparities and outcomes. Even today, while 11% of US households face food insecurity overall, 21% of Black households are food insecure. There would be twists and turns in my quest to understanding this—and we will get there—but it started with a hot day and a garage refrigerator.

When I got home, I was hooked. Not on Gatorade, but on better understanding why he had a full fridge in the middle of the month, so far away from when the food stamps come. It never once occurred to me that in the words of Pulitzer Prize winner Kendrick Lamar, maybe “They not like us.”

I wanted to know why Drew’s family lived a life so different to my own and those of my immediate community—my friends and family I saw every day.

Fourth grade started a month later and my world continued to be shaped by this newfound curiosity. I had the fortune of being placed into the Gifted & Talented Program (GT) that year. This meant I was placed in the same classes with other gifted students. This “GT” designation followed me the rest of my academic career and resulted in me being in all the same classes with the same people in middle school. Those same GT classmates continued through high school in the form of AP classes.

Of that group, I was the only one who looked like me. And I was the only one consistently facing housing and food insecurity. In that time and through sports and school, these people were my community. They were the reality I saw everyday even though their realities seemed beyond my wildest dreams.

Sleepovers at these friends’ houses brought me back to the Gatorade and garage refrigerator. I still think often about staying with a friend, Matt, who had two fridges in his basement full of snacks. He even had a popcorn machine! Brock had a lake view from his living room and full-size candy bars. Will had a rotating kitchen, and another Matt had a movie theater, while Johnathon had a bowling alley and batting cages. I had come a long way from Gatorade—no shade to Drew.

But this drove me crazy. I loved the lives my friends had and never felt spite, but I was angry that the people I knew best, my family, didn’t have what they needed. I never asked for a bowling alley or a movie theater, just stable housing and food to eat. Why did my classmates deserve that, and we didn’t? I asked myself if there was a reason their lives turned out in that way, shaping them for a successful future, while my experience was simply trying to survive. 

It didn’t feel fair that some people were born to live, and some were born just trying to make it.

I often heard the tale of the American Dream; if you work hard, you succeed. But I saw my people—Black people—working HARD. We worked multiple jobs at a time, taking what was available just to survive. My grandma and mom cleaned some of those same houses I visited as a guest. But the opportunities were not there for us. 

For people like me, we may get to see a brighter future, but we for sure aren’t supposed to touch it. It isn’t made for us. And that just never felt right.

In seventh grade, I vowed to address poverty and racism when I got older. I wrote out a plan for a new economic system to challenge white-supremacy laden capitalism. My idea was simple: a tiered income system that provided everyone a living wage and negated the opportunity for disproportionate resource hoarding and über wealth. I wanted to study law and write policies that helped people like me who were crapped on by the world for no fault other than being born darker than the dominant class.

I was lucky to be able to bring my seventh-grade ambitions to fruition. I managed to become a first-generation college student and law school graduate of the University of Louisville. I worked on poverty issues at the state and local level and eventually led the state agency that adjudicated discrimination cases across the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

I never took my achievements as evidence of me being better or working harder. I recognize every day that getting out of poverty, going to college and law school, and working in government—all that is luck, because our current economic system is set up to support the already-wealthy white class, not the working class. 

There are plenty of people like me who didn’t get lucky enough, and who are right now seeing the Gatorade in a friend’s fridge and wondering why they go home to an empty fridge. This knowledge that there are so many people like me who are hamstrung by the disparities of the world, and in need of similar luck drives me to keep going. It drives me to push for equity and understanding because we have a long way to go. 

Leaving Drew’s house drenched in sweat to return to an existence where full-sized Gatorades were as common as gold bars left me dying to understand the world better. As the years progressed, with more days of empty fridges than not, I felt the weight of the world on me as I tried to address the pervasive racial disparities that leave many of us hungry to this day. So no, I’m not LeBron. But like LeBron, basketball played a large factor in my beating the odds.