By Ben Jealous
When New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams spoke directly to Black boys at a recent inauguration, his words spread quickly. Clips ricocheted across phones and timelines far beyond City Hall.
Not because they were clever. But because they were rare.
“Little Black boy,” Williams said, “you were worth it, and you always were. Without any titles, you were enough. You were always enough. You deserve to accept love, and you deserve to be protected.”
No charts. No statistics. No list of disparities. Just a sentence we almost never hear spoken by people with power, in public, about Black boys.
It landed because it broke an unspoken rule most leaders follow without realizing it: the rule that says Black boys must always be spoken about in the conditional tense. If they behave. If they comply. If they survive. If they overcome.
Williams did none of that. He asserted worth. Full stop.
There is a name for that choice. Years ago, Trabian Shorters gave it one: asset framing.
Asset framing is not optimism. It is not denial. It does not pretend hardship is imaginary. It simply refuses to define people by their wounds. Deficit framing leads with problems. Asset framing leads with strengths, capacities, and humanity—without asking anyone to earn dignity first.
A decade ago, Trabian Shorters and I edited Reach, an anthology of forty first-person essays by Black men—famous and not—written to challenge deficit narratives and widen what America is willing to see. The book is still in print. That matters. It reminds us this is not a new insight reacting to a new crisis. It is a long-standing challenge to an old habit.
For years, asset framing lived mostly in movement spaces and philanthropic circles. It was a theory about language. A strategy for organizing. Something you might hear at a conference, not an inauguration.
What Williams did was different. He put that theory into motion, out loud, with authority.
That matters, especially when you understand how deeply the opposite framing is embedded in American life.
Nearly two decades ago, sociologist Devah Pager published a book that should be required reading for anyone who talks about work, crime, or merit in this country. It was called Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration.
Pager ran rigorous audit studies in the low-wage labor market. Young men with identical résumés applied for the same jobs. The only variables were race and criminal record.
What she found was devastating, and precise. White men with criminal records were more likely to receive callbacks than Black men with no criminal record at all.
In the low-wage economy, Blackness itself functioned as a criminal marker. Long before a police stop. Long before a courtroom. Long before a mistake could even be made.
Pager proved that deficit framing is not just cultural. It is economic. It is enforced by markets. It punishes people before they act.
That is the lie Williams was pushing back against—not rhetorically, but morally.
And his words did not come out of nowhere.
When Williams served on the New York City Council, his chief of staff was K. Bain, now the founder of Human Justice in New York City. Bain’s work is rooted in the same refusal to reduce people to their worst moments. The same insistence that safety and dignity are not opposites. The same belief that justice fails the moment it forgets the humanity of the people inside it.
Ideas shape institutions when they sit in the room long enough. Asset framing did not just live in a book. It did not just live in a nonprofit. It lived in a governing culture. And eventually, it surfaced at a microphone.
This is why the moment mattered.
We are living in a season of backlash politics, fear-based messaging, and calls to “get tough” that flatten entire communities into threats to be managed. Even well-meaning leaders often fall back on deficit language because it sounds serious. Responsible. Realistic.
But it is not neutral. It is corrosive.
When you repeatedly describe children as problems, do not be surprised when systems treat them that way.
Asset framing is not soft. It is countercultural. It undermines the moral logic of cruelty. It challenges the quiet assumption that some people must be broken before they can be seen.
What Williams did was remind us of something we once knew: public safety does not begin with suspicion. It begins with recognition.
If Black boys are “already enough,” as he said, then our policies, schools, labor markets, and justice systems have obligations they can no longer evade.
That is the real work asset framing demands. Not applause. Accountability.
And it starts with telling the truth about who our children are—before the world tries to mark them as something else.
Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former national president of the NAACP. He is the author of Never Forget Our People Were Always Free.
