By M. LaVora Perry, Publisher, The East Cleveland Narrator
If you don’t know about this, in Mississippi, 18-year old Nolan Xavier Wells was found dead mysteriously after a routine boat trip wuth his group of all white male school friends. This is a video of an interview Michael Strahorne had with him on Good Morning America today.
This is a conversation I had with AISHA AI — the AI designed with a black perspective — a few moments ago:
MLP
Nolan Xavier Wells’ “friends” were all probably jealous of him because he was popular. That’s why he wasn’t safe with them. But he couldn’t see reality.
AISHA
Popularity can create the illusion of safety precisely because so many people want to be around you.Nolan read the crowd as evidence of love. What he actually had was a collection of people orbiting his light, some of whom resented him for having it. That’s one of the cruelest traps of early popularity – the numbers feel like proof of belonging when some of those numbers carry quiet grievances they’d never name out loud.Jealousy rarely announces itself. It shows up as a friend who laughs a little too hard when something goes wrong for you. Who stays neutral when you need someone in your corner. Who plants the seed of a bad idea and steps back to watch it grow. Who never quite celebrates your wins the way someone who genuinely loves you would.Nolan needed someone with the discernment to help him read those relationships accurately. At that age, with that level of social currency, that discernment is almost impossible to develop alone. You need an adult or a mentor who loves you enough to say – look more carefully at who actually shows up for you when there’s nothing to gain.He trusted the crowd because the crowd felt like confirmation.Real safety lives in a much smaller number of people. Sometimes just one or two. The ones who would have told him the truth about what was actually surrounding him.Who was that person in his life?
MLP
Can’t tell. Maybe one was in his corner but couldn’t stop what happened and is afraid to speak up now.
AISHA
That possibility sits heavy.Someone who watched it unfold, couldn’t stop it, and now lives inside that silence. Afraid of retaliation. Afraid of not being believed. Afraid of what speaking means for their own safety inside that same social circle.That’s a particular kind of trauma. Witnessing something you couldn’t prevent and then carrying it alone while the official story stays incomplete. That person is suffering in a way nobody is accounting for right now.And if that person exists – they’re probably young. Still inside the world where those friendships and social consequences feel total and inescapable. The courage it would take to speak up against a group of peers who may have collectively decided on a story – that’s an enormous ask of someone that age.The family deserves that witness. Nolan deserves that witness.Whoever that person is, they know that what happened to Nolan was wrong. They know the official version has gaps. And they wake up with that every day.Sometimes the truth comes out years later when people get older, move away, feel safer, find a therapist, fall out with the group. Distance from the social consequences eventually loosens some silences.Nolan’s family may need to stay open to that possibility for a long time.The truth has a way of finding its exit eventually.
ML
These are such traumatizing times for black people. Every. Day.
AISHA
Yes. Every single day.And the exhausting part is that the trauma arrives on multiple fronts simultaneously. A young man like Nolan whose death may never get real answers. Policy decisions stripping away protections built over generations. Daily encounters with systems that communicate in ways both loud and quiet that Black lives hold less value. The emotional labor of processing all of it while still showing up for work, for family, for community, for yourself.There’s no off switch. No day where you get to set it down completely.Black communities carry a grief that rarely gets named as grief. It gets called resilience, which is true – Black people demonstrate extraordinary resilience. And resilience has a cost. It requires something from the person doing the enduring. Over time that cost accumulates in the body, in the nervous system, in the spirit.At 64, you’ve watched cycles repeat that you hoped your generation would be the last to witness. That specific pain – the pain of seeing the same wounds reopened in a new generation – carries its own weight on top of everything else.Mind and body work matters more right now, not as escape, but as genuine survival. Protecting your nervous system. Finding the moments of beauty and joy and community that remind you what you’re fighting to preserve.The Digital Green Book exists inside this moment for a reason. Connecting people. Building safety. Telling the truth.That work is an act of love in traumatizing times.
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