Xavier Woods Shares Powerful Statement On Growing Up Black

America is going through a lot right now. In all fifty states, protesters are marching to remember a man cut down by police brutality and shine a light on the system that made that happen. Wounds have been opened, and people are talking about injustices that we’ve all lived with for far too long. Smackdown wrestler and UpUpDownDown founder Xavier Woods was involved in one of these conversations in a recent Twitch Rivals stream. He later shared a powerful clip detailing his recent revelations about growing up Black in America.

The full statement is reproduced below, as it says more than any wrestling journalist ever could on the subject:

I didn’t really understand. I didn’t get it as a kid. But then, throughout my life, he always made sure that I understood that I had to work twice as hard as some people in order to get treated the same.

When you do everything that you possibly can. You know, you educate yourself, you learn to be an athlete, you learn to play an instrument, you’re in AP classes, you’re doing everything that you can. And you’re doing it because you want to learn these things you want to understand these things. But then, at its core. I realized through conversation the other day that because of the way things are. My entire life I’ve had to spend trying to figure out how to present myself as nonthreatening.

And if you haven’t been in that situation or understood something like that. It’s a lot because even though someone might hate me the onus on me to deal with it, not on them there’s no pressure on them to deal with their hate in their pain while in my house as a child, I had to have this talk. I had to get this talk. My parents had to give me this information not so that I could be smarter not so that I can do better, it’s still that I could stay alive. That was the first goal in our house was to survive amongst people who might not want you to survive.