What if I told you about a young African American boy, with an immigrant father, who presented with a severe learning disability and was kicked out of kindergarten and labeled as “unteachable” by the largely white educational system?

What if I told you that that boy’s mother, who was an educator, quit her job in order to home school her son and guide him through this challenging period because she knew that her son was not “unteachable” and, that he, like other Black boys who also had been labeled as “problematic,” actually had potential and could indeed learn if given a chance?

What if I told you that after working with his mother, this boy would excel academically in high school, and go on to get undergraduate and law degrees from both Harvard and Stanford?

What if you heard that this young man and his family decided to create an educational company to support other young people who the system neglected, to excel in their studies?

What if I told you that this young man would go on to work at McKinsey & Co., become a well respected  broadcast journalist and television host?

What if I told you that that same young boy (who had been counted out when he was a child) would through the force of his ideas became a young man who would go on to create a multimedia information platform that combined all his interests in politics, entertainment, journalism and sports.

Wouldn’t you root for that young man and celebrate his trajectory as being another version of the proverbial American dream?

What if I told you that man is my friend Carlos Watson and the media company he created was OZY, a minority controlled company that had wonderful potential and experienced great success, but also struggled to obtain adequate financing.

What if I told you that when Carlos and OZY began to get funding, other people saw it a threat to the current media landscape and were determined to co-opt it's minority ownership, or gain funding for their own competing ventures?

What if I said that when it couldn't be co-opted, Carlos and OZY became the target of a well organized media campaign to destroy OZY's upward trajectory and raise questions about the integrity of Carlos' leadership?

What if I told you that this young man is now being railroaded and subjected to unfair treatment by the government?

What if I reminded you that we have seen this kind of attack on Black entrepreneurship before in the American story?

What if I warned you that the current voices in the mainstream media, which are engaged in salacious rumor and casual character assassination, want you to throw away what you know about Carlos' good character and integrity and seek to rewrite his story through an inverted lens? 

What if I could show you that some of the same risk taking behavior that has been lauded as savvy entrepreneurship when done by white entrepreneurs has been recast in the most negative light when it has allegedly been done by Carlos Watson?

What if we hold onto what we know about Carlos's character and commitment to the Black community and resist this coordinated effort to reframe his story?

What if we refuse to allow the same type of people who would never have given him a chance in the first place when they cast him out of the public school system as a child to punish him for the scope of his ambitions today? 

What if we resist the effort to label Carlos as a “con man”, and we instead decide to hold on to the truth, which is that Carlos Watson is a good man who deserves our support?

What if? What if he were your son, brother, uncle, or friend?

How would you feel about it then?