Roland started life in a lower-income black neighborhood in Daytona Beach, Florida. Raised by his grandmother, his father was in prison and he didn't meet his mother until he was in his 20's. His extended family sold drugs in Florida.
He stayed away from drugs because he saw what happened to his cousins, and not one of his childhood friends is still alive. Always feeling like a misfit, he never bought into the idea that it was cool to be poor.
The first person to ever tell him he was smart was his economics teacher. He fell in love with economics, worked very hard as a student at Harvard, and became a professor. They were all trying to find the truth ("veritas") in their subjects, he naively thought.
That's what Roland was trying to do. Back in 2015-2016 he looked into the actual police statistics to find the data about policemen killing black men. He did the research and published his conclusion, and then his life changed.
(cont'd tomorrow)
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