A Hit-Piece Called My Work Harassment: When Black Activism Doesn’t Cater to White Fragility, they Gotta Call it a Scam

She Came Looking for Her Karen Moment

She walked up to me in the Fillmore with that strange, hostile energy Black people know immediately. Before she even really spoke, I could feel that she wasn’t there to understand anything. She was scanning me, scanning my binder, scanning my team, asking whom I worked for, as if she were collecting evidence instead of approaching a human being. I told her the truth: I work for myself. This is my business. And if she had two minutes, I’d be happy to explain what we do.

She didn’t want to listen. She just wanted information.

That told me everything I needed to know.

I have done this too long not to recognize that kind of energy. I have seen the damage white women can cause when they decide they do not like a Black man’s presence in public. So I told her plainly that I do not explain my work to hostile white people who are unwilling to listen, because that can be unsafe for Black organizers in the current political climate. She did not like that at all, and it started coming out of her. She started accusing us of harassing people, calling our work racist, saying she was a journalist, and then heckling us while we tried to keep working. She escalated the situation, started harassing my employees, bothered people we were trying to stop, and threatened to call the police. I pulled out my phone and recorded part of it for safety.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/da9615_9a0634a23b8c4597a8728a1d1ad2bbb7/720p/mp4/file.mp4

Later, I came across an article about my organization in the New York Post. I had never heard about it before. When I saw the photos—those crispy iPhone screenshots taken from that all-too-familiar mid-shot, Karen-cellphone-angle—I laughed. Not because I thought it was harmless. Because I immediately recognized the tone. It was the same coded kind of language that builds a story about you before it ever tries to understand you. And after fifteen years of organizing, I have learned something simple: nobody can work as hard trying to tear down what I’m building as I can work to build it. Especially journalists who can't even get the name of our job title right, I'll be bothered with basic journalistic integrity to look up the widely verifiable media and content that is out there proving what we do. In the initial version of the article, they even got the titles of our jobs wrong. Like we'd ever be in which neighborhoods and distributing

New York Post journalist Ari Zilber couldn't be bothered to do the basic journalistic work to even get our job titles right, let alone research the available Wiley content that shows we do what we say.

But the truth of my work does not happen in a newsroom. It happens on sidewalks. Often far from home. In communities where parents clutch their children a little tighter when they walk past me.

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Eight Hours, Thirty Conversations, and the Same Old Story

When I stand in the Fillmore—or in Danville, Lafayette, Palo Alto, Berkeley, or North Beach—holding a binder and asking mostly white strangers if they care about Black women dying in childbirth, almost everyone says yes. Then I ask the follow-up: Do you care enough to spend two minutes so we can actually stop it? That’s when the truth starts to show itself. Some people stop and listen. Some nod sympathetically and keep walking. Some pretend they didn’t hear me. I’ve seen parents pull their children closer, step into the street, cover their ears, or react with visible disgust at my speaking so plainly in front of a child the same age as my daughter, who already knows these realities. I’ve watched toddlers go into fight-or-flight mode in real time because a parent’s body language taught them that I am a threat. And sometimes people yell, accusing us of harassment, race-baiting, or worse, simply because we are telling the truth out loud and making white folks feel uncomfortable.

If you stand on that corner long enough, the veneer of liberalism fades fast.

A Wealth Redistribution Officer speaking about our work in San Francisco

Every canvassing shift we run is eight hours, from ten to six. Eight hours standing in public spaces, asking people to care enough to stop. Eight hours navigating curiosity, generosity, projection, fragility, fear, and sometimes real solidarity. Each worker costs the organization about $200 for that shift. If we do not raise more than that, we lose money. If we do it well, we fund public health outreach, education programs, local artists, jobs for people who need them, and free cultural events for our community.

That eight-hour window forces discipline. On an average day, only around thirty people out of hundreds will actually stop long enough to hear us out. So every interaction matters. Every second matters. Every ounce of emotional energy matters. If I spend ten minutes arguing with someone who is not listening, I have wasted precious time on a dead-end conversation while three actual supporters walked by.

That is why I have developed strategies that many people misunderstand. Sometimes I call out that I’m looking for “well-meaning white people.” People assume I do that because I get off on making white folks uncomfortable. I’m not going to lie and say there isn’t some joy in exposing fragility when it shows itself that quickly. But that’s not the point. The point is safety and efficiency. When I say that, and a white person smiles, loosens up, or says something warm back, I know immediately that they are probably safe to engage. I’ll say, “Oh, good, you seem cool—come talk to me about Black women dying in childbirth.” Those people often turn into supporters. But when someone stiffens up, acts like they didn’t hear me, gets angry about being called white, or tries to pretend they’re above the conversation, I already know something important before they’ve even reached me: they probably aren't safe, and they probably aren't worth the emotional investment.

This is not random. It is disciplined organizing.

A lot of people who think I’m doing this wrong fall along the same spectrum, even when their responses sound different. On one end are the paternalists. These are the people who think the mission is good, but the tone is wrong. They talk to me like I’m a talented but misguided employee they’ve decided to coach. I inevitably hear some version of, “You’ll catch more flies with honey.” When people say that, I tell them I don’t have any damn honey. Y’all took it all. And I should not have to feed people honey just to get them to care about Black folks going through genocide. Besides, we do not even like flies.

On the other end are the antagonists. These people skip the coaching and go straight to accusation. They call me a race-baiter. They say I hate white people. They say I’m racist for saying the word white. They say the work must be a scam because they cannot imagine a Black organizer standing on a sidewalk for eight hours a day asking strangers to support Black culture and public health unless he has some hidden angle. I have had people tell me I’ll never make money doing this, as if my financial survival is the central issue in a conversation about Black women dying. I have been called the n-word. I have been assaulted. I have had police called on me hundreds of times by people describing us as “aggressive Black men,” as if speaking plainly in white suburbs is a crime.

Khafre Jay speaking to an officer responding to a complaint

And here is the thing: the paternalists and the antagonists are often making the same mistake. Different emotions, same logic. They both invent a story about me that protects their comfort. One says I’m misguided, so they can correct me. The other says I’m malicious, so they can attack me. But both begin from the same false assumption—that the Black man standing in front of them could not possibly know exactly what he is doing.

I do.

That’s why I teach my staff to protect their time. If someone says they only have one minute, I tell them Black people are worth eight minutes, but I can do it in two. If they still do not have two minutes, I tell them I hope they care more next time I see them, and I’ll give them another chance then. This is not about being rude. It is about optimization, protection, and emotional rationing. If you spend five minutes talking to someone who isn’t listening, you are not just wasting time. You are draining yourself. You are validating performative allyship. You are teaching your nervous system to live in that nasty, hollow place so many Black people know too well from jobs where they have to code-switch and shrink themselves all day. I refuse to build an organization that runs on that feeling.

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The “Scam” Is What Built This

The deeper problem we’re trying to solve goes far beyond any one conversation on the street. Across the Bay Area, the displacement of Black communities has quietly erased much of the cultural infrastructure that once supported Hip Hop. Over my lifetime, I have watched the Black population here shrink dramatically, and with it the spaces where our culture could gather, evolve, and generate opportunity. The math for traditional businesses rooted in Black culture no longer works in many places because there simply are not enough of us left in the neighborhoods where the culture was born. That is why so many venues that once could have nurtured local artists now cater to safer, whiter, more profitable crowds.

So I had to figure out different math.

Khafre Jay on Fintech TV on the New York Stock Exchange

Part of that math means going into communities that are extremely segregated from us but have the resources to support the culture they already consume. It also means teaching people something many already know deep down but have never had put to them directly: they have mostly seen Hip Hop through white-controlled media, and white-controlled media has spent generations pushing an almost unbroken chain of stereotypes about Black culture. People like to pretend that today is different. But the same forces that profited from minstrel images have simply become more polished. Black communities have never had the economic leverage to force major media companies to represent us the way we want to be represented. Those companies follow the money, not the truth. So part of what we do is challenge that propaganda directly, then invite people to see the culture for themselves.

When people stop, some of them really stop. They come to events. They see DJs teaching kids. They see artists performing. They see graffiti artists working with young people. They see what Hip Hop looks like when it isn’t filtered through corporate distortion. And the support from those conversations allows us to keep doing the work. That is how we have produced nine public health events with the Pregnancy Village and seventy-three weekly open-mic and rap-writing contests without charging our community. That is how we create jobs. That is how we can forecast with real confidence. That is how the math works.

Grassroots organizing also does something else people from communities like mine rarely get access to: it creates relationships across worlds that normally never collide. I did not grow up knowing doctors, lawyers, CEOs, or people with spare resources and powerful networks. Those people were not just walking through my neighborhood when I was growing up. But when you spend years standing in public spaces speaking honestly about your work, you start shaking hands with people who can change what is possible. Teachers invite us into schools. Professionals connect us to services and partnerships. Artists get paid. Kids get inspired. Resources finally start moving through culture instead of around it.

New flyer for the SF Pregnancy Family Village

One of those people was Lisa. She stopped, listened, and later helped me clean up our tax books. When we reviewed everything, I realized that in a year when the organization raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and built programs that serve the community, I had paid myself only about $14,000. That is the part critics never see when they throw around the word scam.

At the beginning of last year, I had a decision to make. I could continue paying myself well, or I could take the opportunity to secure a free venue and begin building a weekly Hip Hop gathering from the ground up. That choice meant accepting a year of seven-day workweeks, sacrificing my own income, and betting that if I built something real, people would eventually support it on a monthly basis. I chose the harder road.

And I survived it.

Today, we have roughly $6,300 in monthly support helping sustain weekly gatherings in Berkeley and monthly public-health-centered events in Hunters Point. That support allows us to pay artists, employ staff, and create spaces for the community that they do not have to pay to enter. We are close, but not finished. I still need around two hundred more people willing to support this work monthly to fully stabilize what we’ve built and expand it where it needs to go.

So while people online speculate about scams because they saw me eating ramen with my coworkers after a long day on the street, I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing. I’ll keep standing outside for eight hours a day, asking people for two minutes at a time. Not because I enjoy confrontation or need to prove myself to critics, but because grassroots organizing is one of the few ways someone like me can build the connections, resources, and cultural infrastructure needed to create something lasting for the people I love.

And I am still standing here.

Eight hours a day.

Asking for two minutes.